• 🎮 Minami Lane (2024)
• 🎮 Pentiment (2022)
• 📺 The Apothecary Diaries (2023)
• 📺 Psycho (1960)
• 🎮 In Stars And Time (2022)
• 📺 I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
• 📺 The Dead Don't Die (2019)
• 🎮 Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail (2024)

Pentiment is an absolutely astounding achievement, a staggeringly beautiful reflection on community, family, and history. It drew me in with its charming and novel style, and every detail of it sings. I think Pentiment is a very "human" game, the way I'd say the same about Disco Elysium - a game that is very interested in, and very in love with, people. Gave me my first "accidentally played it til 4am and almost tried to keep going" night in many years. Left me crying, crying, crying - and warm and fulfilled in a way I can't quite describe.

In Stars And Time was a game I went into with a little hesitancy. I love a time loop, and I love a game that telegraphs an interesting dramatic turn - but the slightly "twee" sense of humour had me assuming I might not be taken in by the emotional arc when things got heavier. I love to be wrong! ISAT uses what cutesy cards it has to play to extremely good effect. The narrative is built and reinforced with its mechanics very deftly - and I was haunted by the relationships, realisations, and dread that it served up. Sobbed through the back three hours. What's better than this. If you're the sort of person that's sold when someone says "I can't say much about it, you should just check it out" - you should play In Stars And Time.

What fiction means to people, the way they carry it inside themselves, the way they are changed by it - this has been a galvinising force in my adult life, a critical aesthetic and philosophical interest. I think all I have to say about I Saw the TV Glow is that it hit me like a fucking truck.

Breaking the crying combo: I found Dawntrail's story rough around the edges, though it did have moments that worked for me. But saying it's my least favourite expansion, of one of my primary ways to spend time, is like saying it's my least favourite ice cream. FF14 is a game I play near-daily, and it's the primary social space I share with some of my dearest friends. Tural is a blast to explore and hang out in, and even if the story didn't 100% land for me, the environments and encounter design were some of the best in my opinion. I was laughing, delighted, through every boss in Arcadion so far. I am so excited for whatever's next.

Biggest Dawntrail goal I've done: caught all the Dawntrail fish

Is this how fisher mains feel so powerful

“Something on your mind?”

Fareena looked up. Fran. A single eyebrow raised, her usual stony look replaced with one of concern. Fareena shook her head, rising to her feet. “Just expected something more, that’s all.”

Fran looked as if she wanted to pry further, but chose instead to let sleeping hounds lie. One of the problems with living as long as they did was the regrets that lingered with them. While Fareena had a few decades on the other viera, they’d both lived long enough to understand.

And besides, the grave Fareena knelt beside gave no impression of who lay beneath it to anyone but the viera herself. Couldn’t live long enough to say you told me so, mother?

Dalmasca was silent as the dead. The 4th legion had vanished into the deserts before their arrival. Those few Dalmascans who remained told their story for them. Noah van Gabranth was dead, slain by the beast king Lyon. The castrum burned. The resistance’s work had been done for them. All that was left was to gather up those that remained and rebuild.

And all that was left for Fareena was to wander among the ashes of the home she never wanted. Ghosts surrounded her on all sides. The dead crowded the streets. The living wore masks of death. But all Fareena could feel, when she finally found the woman she was looking for, was relief. It was a bitter thing, to realise just how badly the old woman had clung to her back all these years. But she was gone now. Dead as the empire that burned her home to the ground.

Idly Fareena wondered how it had happened. Her mother wasn’t the type to take the annexation of her home lying down, but would she have been fool enough to join the resistance? Not likely. Her mother had been a coward. She had slung bitter words and hateful bile at her only daughter as she had left Dalmasca near a century ago, but she had done nothing to rebuild the bridge she had burned. She had sent nobody to find her wayward daughter. She had let Fareena become a ghost in her life.

Not that Fareena had wanted to be found, but it was the principle of the thing.

“The provisional government will be meeting shortly.” Fran’s words were clipped, neutral in tone. The sympathy in her eyes was carefully ignored by Fareena. “We’d like you to attend, as a representative of Bozja and the Eastern Alliance.” More politics. More pointless, empty posturing. Fareena would normally have turned Fran down, and none too gently at that. But something pulled on her. Something kept her here.

“Lead the way,” Fareena replied. She ignored the tug at her heart as she turned away from the grave. She ignored the yawning abyss as the reality of her mother’s death hit her. She ignored the way her eyes were suddenly stinging.

To her credit, Fran did too.

mlem 😺

cute commission of my and my s/o's chars from ROYALCLAWS!!