It's sometime in the middle of the night. The streets of the city are deserted, save for a few poor souls seeking shelter and, of course, all the debris strewn about. We look up at a street corner and notice that we're in front of a radio station, and the lights are on inside. My friend Yuki insists we go in. I'm very tired, and it seems like as good a place to rest as any.

When we get up to the studio on the 5th or 6th floor, we find about a dozen people, maybe a few more already here. There are some chairs set up in the studio itself, and a woman sits at a grand piano. I see a guy who looks like he might work here; I ask him what's going on. "Normally you'd have to pay, but a bunch of people didn't show up, so go on in," he says. Yuki and I go in and take a seat.

After a few moments, the woman at the piano speaks: "Welcome to our regular live broadcast of Midnight Sky Garden. With everything going on, we had decided to cancel tonight's performance, but then we saw the number of people who showed up anyway--people who, despite the danger outside, made the trek to our studio tonight to see me play. And we thought about it, and we thought that maybe, with all the anxiety and fear and uncertainty in our lives right now, the best thing we could do is let the show go on, give all of you out there a moment of respite in these trying times. So without further ado..."

She begins to play. It's sweet, slow, lovely. The other audience members are enraptured. I--as in Me, not the Me I am playing in this video game--start to cry, and I don't know why. But then...maybe I do know. After all, these are trying times in the real world too, aren't they? Can I really be blamed for finding resonance in the notion of people putting themselves in extreme danger to seek out some fleeting semblance of normalcy and comfort? Or that someone else is willing to put their own selves at risk to provide that comfort? Well. In any event, I sit, and the video game Me sits, and I and Yuki and the sparse studio audience and the woman at the piano share this sweet, sad, quiet moment, not thinking about anything else, in this tiny studio, in the middle of the night, somewhere in the world.

And then an Eva unit cuts the building in half.

A game with what I feel is like, a 2010s version of one of those screenplays every single film student in the 90s wrote after seeing Pulp Fiction, between the laughable attempts at tough-guy dialogue in the opening segment and the equally laughable attempts at profundity throughout. Its depictions of poverty, crime, and drug use all feel blaringly inauthentic ("a baggie of heroin" is an all-timer in the annals of bad video game dialogue). I have absolutely no clue why Devolver liked this enough to publish it.

Currently finishing up Violet and it's really driving home how boring and lifeless and uninspired this gen was. In retrospect it almost feels like they made the Wild Area as a proof of concept for what an open world Pokemon game could look like and then just decided to construct all of gen 8 around it as an afterthought. I missed Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald and Diamond/Pearl/Platinum because they came out when I was in high school and thought I was too mature for Pokemon but Sw/Sh is pretty easily the worst gen that I've played to date.

Felt overly familiar at the outset--an austere, borderline-minimalist exploratory indie platformer/adventure game of the sort that vacuums up critical acclaim and awards. Thankfully that's not actually the case; there's much more depth to its world than I expected, and it's often refreshingly irreverent about it too. It has personality and heart, which can go a very long way for me. The matching of this environment and these characters with a cute, realistically rendered cat is more inspired than I could have hoped for.

My roommate's cat Ellie is barely smart enough to function on a basic level, so I tried to show her the game to shame her into being less of a dipshit but she didn't even notice. Do better Ellie