So Many Me

After my first short session with So Many Me, a game I received free for being an Xbox live subscriber, I figured I’d never play it again.

Why?

Well, it has a cutesy story that is neither cute nor funny and is trying a bit too hard. The gameplay gimmick, that you control an army of “ME’s” that turn into blocks you can then use as platforms didn’t seem enough to base a platformer around. And worst of all, the movement felt imprecise and floaty, which is sort of the death-knell for a good platformer — control is king. On top of all this, the graphic style reminded me of old newgrounds/flash games and just felt sort of cheap.

But I wasn’t really sure what game to play next (and it’s a mild tic for me to always have a book or game lined up to follow the next one or face mild panic), so I decided to give So Many Me another chance. It then completely absorbed me, was a joy to play, and over the next few days I 100% completed it.

Why?

Because, while So Many Me is ostensibly a platformer, what becomes clear after the first few levels is that is primarily a really inventive and well designed puzzle game. The game takes a few simple principles:

• ME’s can turn into blocks that can be used as platforms, hold down switches, block bullets.
• ME’s can eat special fruit to turn into trampolines, enemy attracting bait, or automatically rising platforms; these all have secondary puzzle-solving traits.
• You can only un-transform ME’s back to their normal state (to use again) in the reverse order you used them — so, last one first.
• ME’s die very easily (100% clocked me just shy of 3000 dead ME’s), but checkpoints are extremely lenient.

That’s it. There’s like 4 or 5 enemy types. But the game combines these features together again and again in novel, interesting, and challenging ways. The levels are not all that long but you will use their entire breadth to pull off a complicated solution to a puzzle — ME’s will be littered across several screens serving as platforms for you to jump across and holding down just the right switches for you to then rapidly dissemble into a new set of platforms before all the enemies you were keeping trapped with blocks and switches swarm you before you can reach the treasure you sought.

I became more forgiving of the controls, and eventually found the visual style charming (though never the story). Even then, when the game gets into full platformer-mode, it is not at its best. All of the bosses require rote memorization to manage the set of tasks and path you must form to defeat them. There’s precise platformer setups you must perform after you’ve carefully organized all your ME’s in a very specific pattern, and if the controls don’t stick the way you expected, it’s maddening to re-create the puzzle solution again.

But, all said: Great game.

Empire Ascendant by Kameron Hurley (Worldbreaker #2)

This is the second book in the Worldbreaker Saga. I reviewed part one, The Mirror Empire, last year. Reading my own review prior to starting part two turned out to be a boon. The world is complicated, the dramatis personae lengthy. According to my Kindle, the glossary at the end is 5% of the total mass of the book. Even after the refresher, I was a bit overwhelmed by the plethora of similar-sounding names for a good while.

The world is under assault from a relentless army from a mirror-world, an army comprised of phantom versions of the people of this one. They’ve already sacked an entire continent and are on their way to conquer the other two main countries. A hodgepodge group of characters all over the world stand to oppose them (and just as frequently: oppose each other). The pace, the headlong speed of the action, the scale continues to be Hurley’s strong suit. So many world(s)-spanning epic fantasies become lost in their own details and sputter on following millions of new threads introduced each book. The Worldbreaker Saga is speedy, despite the massive scope. Events happen quickly. The plot is spinning at a nice and compelling rate, while still remaining (mostly) comprehensible. When new threads are introduced, old ones are severed. Character bloat isn’t an issue when a writer is balancing the scales by brutally murdering many of the old ones (seriously brutal, not faux-brutal — trust me).

I complained of the world not feeling weird enough in The Mirror Empire, especially given how strange it was supposed to be. Empire Ascendant is more satisfactory in that regard, the strange attributes (killer plants, moon-based magic powers, world hopping) are better realized and many of the old tropes discarded. When we can base a major set piece on an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque tea party of disparate characters sitting down for a banquet right in between two different armies protected by magic air bubbles, and the scene works, we’re going places. I’m still a little nonplussed by the main continent/character set where the action is taking place (Dhai) but there was so much going on all over the damn place, that I wasn’t too displeased.

There’s a theme that runs through the novel about ‘monsters’. To fight a monster, you must become one. Gaze long into the abyss… etc. While it is of course credible that being exposed to constant violence would provoke violent tendencies in the person (or people) attempting to survive, it does not mean they would need to become monsters. I always balk when a character in a narrative thinks something along the lines of “If I do this [possibly bad thing], then I’ll be just as bad as them.” I am not sold by Empire Ascendant’s version of this; the villains have launched a sustained genocidal rampage on such an unimaginable scale, that the main characters killing a few people (in self defense) just cannot compare. Nor am I sold on the theme beyond the scope of the novel — that real life evil requires evil in return. It seems to be like Hurley is reaching for some of the moral heft of Oakley Hall’s Warlock but not quite grasping it.

Another reason maybe I’m not sold on it is because I do not find the characters to be truly believable people. I saw this as a detractor in the first book (and still feel like the universe has some strange-but-nostalgic affinity to video games) but I’ve come to terms with the characters being less realistic depictions of people and more like pulpy archetypes who speak modern english. I’ve read Kameron Hurley’s blog and she’s confessed her love of 80s action heroes and I can see the influence in Empire Ascendant. Several scenes in the book could be reinvented as death metal album covers. Picture a grim anti-hero bleeding out, reclining on a mountain of corpses, flipping off the camera. That’s honestly not that far from a description of one character’s demise in this book.

Empire Ascendant does everything the first book did well better, and minimizes on the things the first book did poorly. Not much more you can ask for from a sequel. I’m invested in the plot. It’s refreshing to feel like this is actually going to wrap up in three books. The board is set for book 3 and I look forward to the conclusion.

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China

Sometimes you don’t realize you miss something until it’s gone.

The Assassin’s Creed series has a notoriously goofy sci-fi framing story. It bends history to allow its protagonists to be the guiding hand/blade beyond all major events. From Ezio Auditore thwarting the Borgias and murdering their patriarch to Conner-Ratonhnhaké:ton sparking virtually all of the events in the American Revolution. It’s silly. I make fun of it. But it’s somehow charming and absorbing. Chronicles dispenses with the sci fi portion and barely interacts with the history, instead opting for the most phoned in revenge story of all time. Meet Shao-Jun, our nearly entirely character-less main character, as she mumblemumble  loses a magic box and mumblemumble must avenge her brothers and mumblemumblemumble-walking away from the TV now…

Assassin’s Creed’s most valuable and absorbing element is its ability to take you back to another time period, to gorgeously render the Holy Land of the crusades era, the rooftops of Renaissance Italy, or the cerulean waters of the Caribbean’s golden age of piracy. This is more or less impossible to achieve in 2d. Chronicles is pretty and nicely stylized, but it doesn’t feel much like China in the way the 3d games feel like their respective places. It’s an extra shame that the main series has devolved into Things White People Did, so more interesting and varying locales — Chronicles is set to be three games: China, India, and Russia — are shunted to 2d sidestories.

So all and all, this game does not feel like Assassin’s Creed. It’s a fun little timewaster though.

Shao-Jun moves across a 2d plane, with depth. She can run (or swing, with a blade attached to an elastic rope that would be swell to use in 3 dimensions…) into the background or foreground, occasionally several levels deep. Enemies patrol these areas; they have a field of vision displayed on the screen (seen in my screenshot above). If Shao wanders into these fields, the enemies spot her, call reinforcements and charge. Unlike the whirling dervish protagonists of the main series, this hero is extremely vulnerable and easy to kill. Open combat is always a last resort.

The game grades you on how you manage each segment of a level. It splits it up into Shadow (don’t get seen), Assassin (kill everyone without being seen), and Brawler (kill everyone in open combat and don’t get hit). Then there is Gold-Silver-Bronze for each of those types. Unfortunately, not all play styles are treated equally. Shadow means more points than Assassin which means more points than Brawler. It’s strange because Brawler is actually the most difficult and Assassin is the most fun. So if you’re chasing a high score, which you ought to be in this type of game, you have to ignore a large swathe of Shao-Jun’s abilities and learn how to navigate the entire game without ever being seen. It’s satisfying when you nail it, especially with enemy-dense later levels that require some real thought, but I do wish all styles were equally valued.

The game has the good sense to mix it up a bit — some levels dispense with the stealth and turn into a mad dash where you must outrun snaking tendrils of flames, and explosions, and in the most memorable and history-evoking, a Mongol attack on The Great Wall. They’re reminiscent-but-not-quite-as-good as the runner levels in Rayman Legends/Origins. In addition, Chronicles is short and does not overstay its welcome, with repetition or its somewhat shoddy controls. Just enough to get me to pick up Chronicles: India when it arrives.

Slade House by David Mitchell

A short review for a short book.

Slade House begins in 1977, in the first-person viewpoint of a thirteen year old autistic boy who stumbles into an unfortunate encounter with soul sucking vampires living in the eponymous house, which exists in a semi-magical bubble frozen at an exact moment some time around the second world war.

*breath*

The next chapter begins nine years later in 1986 following a different first person character, a crass copper this time, who also comes upon Slade House and… if you’re experiencing deja vu by this point it’s because Slade House follows a very similar tract to that of David Mitchell’s recently published novel: The Bone Clocks. Indeed, it takes place in the same universe. Mentally, I referred to the books as the same title. As in, ‘I need to put down The Bone Clocks and go to sleep’.

And really, if you want to know what I think of Slade House, you can just read my Bone Clocks review. It’s exactly the same thing, with the same successes and shortcomings, on a much smaller scale. The sci-fi-hocus-pocus technobabble is a maybe a little bit too much in Slade House: one entire chapter (of a total of five) is spent on the villain’s backstory and how they created Slade House and we honestly didn’t need to know more about them beyond ‘We eat souls!’. But this is countered by the otherwise swift pacing — with the shorter, twitter-inspired chapters, Mitchell has no choice but to jump right into the story and he does not waste a word.

And, more Bone Clocks? Great! Two David Mitchell novels in one year? Even better.

The Familiar: Volume 1 by Mark Z. Danielewski

 

how many raindrops?

 

One rainy day in May, 2014, a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated but absolutely absorbing events happen. A 13 year old girl with epilepsy tries not to lose herself contemplating how to count all the raindrops in the sky; a gangster initiates a strange new recruit; a hard-boiled detective contemplates his love affair with LA; in Singapore, weird shit is happening; in Texas, weird shit is happening; plus several other plotlines. By the end of this book, volume 1 of 27 (!!), very few of the stories connect in anything but general atmosphere, but like the engaging serial TV dramas it evokes, I can’t wait to figure out how to they all come together.

 

how many raindrops how many raindrops how many

 

Mark Danielewski of House of Leaves fame, occasionally accused of gimmickry, is known for breaking down the traditional novel format by altering typography and spacing to match the narrative content, inserting images, changing text axises (causing you to flip the book around at various angles), and literary-mathematical puzzles. House of Leaves example: Characters crawling in a tight space means the text itself shrinks and takes up dramatically less space on the page. For several pages. The Familiar example: Xanther, our epileptic and anxiety-ridden protagonist ponders how to plot the number of raindrops falling from the sky and the text itself is twisted into falling rain, puddles. As Xanther’s unease mounts, the image is rearranged to confuse the eyes and trigger her anxiety in the reader. It works!

Likewise, characters spend a lot of time thinking, especially Xanther’s parents, and their thoughts are distributed in nested parentheticals (It’s occasionally hard to read (but it’s more like people actually think (do you reflect in clear sentences all the time?)) that do a great job of revealing character’s desires and concerns (thus ends my example of nested parentheticals)).

 

how many raindrops

 

Sometimes you’re reading one sentence or one word per page. This arouses an immense and inexplicable amount of hostility from some readers/reviewers. Like challenging form is some kind of literary offense. Danielewski’s single word pages have delivered superior content to many five hundred word pages I’ve read. One thing I will allow: Danielewski is a skilled writer, but it is the style and composition of the novel that is his unique and lasting skill; the multi-plotted storyline of The Familiar is reminiscent of other authors (David Mitchell comes to mind immediately) and while it’s quite good, it wouldn’t stand up as well as a standalone vanilla text. But the style is not an affectation — it’s deeply rooted in the conception of the novel itself — wondering what The Familiar would be like without all the stylistic, typographic, and narrative quirks is missing the point.

 

how many

 

Danielewski is a nerd. All his books pull deeply from sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. Pulp detective stories. A plot line in the book involves Xanther’s dad, a video game dev, and there’s segments of his code on pages of the book, discussion of which physics engine to license. The Matrix is key. There’s a hilarious aside where the dog-fighting gangster character, Luther, compares his life to that of Michael Vick. Indeed, Danielewski does not shy from current events — the characters engage with modern smartphone tech: skype, instagram, etc. It shortens the gap for the made up social media apps in the novel, which will absolutely become more important in future volumes.

Future volumes I will assuredly read. I love this stuff.

 

raindrops?

Shovel Knight (Yacht Club Games, 2015)

Shovel Knight is a tribute, a homage, a loving paean to an age long past: the golden era of the 8 bit platformer.

Mario, Zelda, Megaman, Ducktales, Battletoads. They all have echoes throughout in Shovel Knight (and in the case of Battletoads, they’re actually in the game). But, most crucially, the creators of Shovel Knight deeply understood what made those games charming, delightful, and fun and utilizes those learnings to create a new game, not a shallow nostalgia trip. There’s a reason we moved on from punishing 8 bit platformers and Yacht Club Games comprehends this even while celebrating it.

Shovel Knight plays out in an overworld map with separate levels thematically tied to The Order of No Quarter (goons with names like King Knight and Propeller Knight and Plague Knight). The honorable Shovel Knight himself has set out to find the villainous Enchantress at whose hand his beloved Shield Knight has disappeared. There’s towns and shops filled with charming individuals/horse people and pun-spitting frogs. The game proves you can communicate quite a bit with nothing but 2d sprites, good level design, catchy music, smart excerpts of texts, and singing fish. The world of Shovel Knight is chock full of character.

Shovel Knight can swing his shovel, use it like a pogo stick (ala Scrooge McDuck in Nintendo’s Ducktales), and collect relics that do things like shoot fireballs and make him invulnerable. The controls are tight and your hero reacts like he ought to. The level design is similarly fine tuned. Concepts are introduced to you smartly before you have to use them in life or death situations (stuff like a platform that fires you into the ceiling appearing in an innocuous place before the next screen puts the same platform under 1-hit kill spikes). Even things like how far one platform is placed from another is designed thoughtfully. It’s the minutia and level flow that make this game so enjoyable — I can’t point out any specific level and think they missed the mark on that one. The art of 2d platformer design stopped progressing 20 years ago and Shovel Knight gobbled up everything we had learned until then and improved on it.

I conquered Shovel Knight. I beat it at least 4 times. Taking double damage with no checkpoints. In under 90 minutes. Using nothing but a shovel. Without dying. I did everything; I’m usually sick to death of a game by the time I reach that point, but I want more. Mastery of a simple concept can be greatly rewarding. Great platformers push that button for me.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Somewhere amidst humanity’s collective unconscious lies The Wasteland. Sand. Emptiness. Industrial collapse. An absence of life metaphored through lack of water or greenery. In the 80s, George Miller fashioned Mad Max’s desolate universe, surrounded by cold war paranoia and the potential for weaponized destruction of the earth, and it immediately lodged itself into the apocalyptic zeitgeist: other movies, books, video games are like to feature a variation of Miller’s wasteland. In 2015, the franchise inexplicably rejuvenated, we now fear environmental destruction instead of the atom bomb but the result is essentially the same. Neither nuclear winter nor catastrophic glacial melt creates the setting of Mad Max — but it’s how we envision a world dead, the unintended-but-obvious endgame of carelessness & greed.

Each of the Mad Max movies is tonally different. I know because I watched all three again in anticipation of Fury Road. The original (1979) has the captivating quality that all very early projects by talented directors have. Its vision is central and palpable. The apocalypse is background to an interpersonal tale that flangs outward to include a psychopathic biker gang. The violence is sparse and devastating, the aesthetic unmistakable. Road Warrior (1981) follows and Max has turned from family man to brooding, reluctant hero. Apocalypse has arrived. Gangs fight on the road for any scrap of gas to keep driving. The plot revolves around an enclave surrounding a tanker full of gas and their plan of escape, beyond the second coming of psycho biker gangs in bondage gear. Last comes Beyond Thunderdome (1985), which takes the series into extra campy, goofy territory. Mel Gibson’s Max is more of a grunting, disoriented non-hero. Tina Turner is resplendent as the villain. It’s kind of hilarious. Those four years changed a great deal.

So what is Fury Road? Non-stop action, that’s what. The main characters drive a weaponized, armored rig through the desert with an army of mad hooligans in hot pursuit. Then they turn around and do it again. There’s rare stoppages to breathe and they do not last long. The bondage attired goons of the 80s are replaced by white skinned bald guys who hunker and scrabble and leap like goblins & orcs (WETA workshop, masterminds behind Lord of the Rings costuming and imagery, were at work here). I missed the sexually deviant leather-clad-assless-chapped-codpieced cadre of the previous movies but there’s hints of weirdness and humor here and there. The action is tight & smart — not nonsensical blockbuster explosions and quick shots. Tension is engineered through unique situations: take for an example two racing vehicles, both with a passenger on the hood frantically siphoning gas and spitting it into the engine to stay ahead of the other. Or the Crouching Tiger-esque fight where Max engages Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa in fistfight while chained to a corpse he must keep navigating around/with.

It’s exhilarating. I haven’t seen a great action flick in years, it seems. I missed some of the small scale quirkiness of early Mad Max’s, but I am also glad this movie struck its own path and avoided a nostalgic Thunderdome rehash. The movie unapologetically blames everyone — the good guys, the bad guys, the in-betweens, the audience — for the destruction of the world. There’s a scene with some characters screaming “You killed the world!” at another character while he denies it. We exult in the action and violence of the movie, revel in our own projected destruction. It’s the villains people dress up as. Fury Road doesn’t so much warn us of a potential future; it shows us what we think it looks like and asks us to celebrate along with it.

Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories by China Mieville

Want to read about sinister icebergs appearing afloat in the skies of London? It’s here. Long ago sunk ships forging legs and shambling out of the ocean? Got that too. Socialist dust particles out to radicalize your world? Read all about it. People obsessed with wearing hollowed out, decaying animal heads? Yep.

China Mieville has mastered the weird, the bizarre, the monstrous joke. A story about a terror lurking in the depths of a remote lake is not going to turn out to be another Lovecraft pastiche, but instead finds its influence in an obscure byzantine torture ritual involving a sack, a dog, a cockerel, and an ape. Even when the premise is extra wacky — therapist-assassins out to assure their client’s happiness at all costs — the tone of the story remains deadly serious and only only occasionally falls into ha-ha it was all a joke!

Most of the short story collections I have read in recent years are short, a few interesting pieces that may have been published elsewhere. You finish in a day or two. It feels kind of cheap. Three Moments of an Explosion is hefty by comparison and I appreciate it. You can really sink into the depths of this man’s imagination. There’s recurrent themes and motifs. There’s a running gag with prose movie trailers appearing at a few different places in the book — speedy, crawling zombies that hunt regular zombies, people manufactured with metal poles protruding from their backs, and so on. It faintly reminded me of the eponymous interviews in David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. There’s a craft to the arrangement of stories!

If the collection has a weakness, it’s that a few of the longer stories start to get samey. They generally start with a character who has pre-existing knowledge of the weird happening that will be central to the story; we slowly gain context and can make sense of the earlier bits; The baffling horror takes shape; then the story wraps up without really giving a complete answer to the mystery. There is exceedingly low amounts of resolution in this collection, and this works better in some stories than others — you don’t always need a conclusion but sometimes the story feels unsatisfying without one. There’s a story about aliens discovered in a volcanic island that builds and then just… ends.

China Mieville is a singular voice in sci-fi/fantasy/horror. I think this is about seventy percent due to his imagination, which is both fresh and inviting. You don’t know what to expect, but you know it will be strange. The remaining thirty percent is craft — he’s a smart writer with a handle on prose that most genre writers either don’t have or don’t try to achieve. The language & tone are ambitious. The blockiness of language present in his early novels is greatly diminished. There’s occasional times where I had to reread a paragraph because it wasn’t quite clear what happened, but this is minor in comparison to the devilishly affected imagery sprinkled throughout each story, or the slowly emerging black humor. The man also has a prodigious vocabulary. I learned some oddly specific words. Take peristalsising on:

the involuntary constriction and relaxation of the muscles of the intestine or another canal, creating wavelike movements that push the contents of the canal forward.

Yum.

 

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for hooking me up early.

 

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (2015, From Software)

So I played Dark Souls II again.

Scholar of the First Sin is a re-release for current-generation consoles with several improvements, especially if like me you didn’t play any of the expansion content that was released as paid add-ons for the original. There’s marginal graphical upgrades that are barely noticeable since even improved it does not look like a new Xbox One game. The meaningful changes, I shall endeavor to classify below:

Lore-wise, the game offers some augments to the existing narrative. ‘Narrative’ is a loose term when referring to Dark Souls since it barely has a plot and its lore is driven on atmosphere, item descriptions, and creepy and mysterious happenstance. The titular Scholar follows suit, when he erupts out of a bonfire (checkpoint) partway through the game as a sort of fleshy-hairy-slimy thing that speaks/gurgles. Aldia, a personage briefly mentioned in the base game (there’s an estate named after him and you get the idea he was experimenting and conjuring up monstrosities) will pop up at various points and pontificate on the responsibilities of a true monarch, and the main character’s suitability as such. He also shows up as a final-final boss fight after the previous last boss. It’s an okay addition but not much to write home about.

The enemy and item placement has been rebalanced. Enemies appear where they did not before. Some are removed. Some behave differently (carry a torch and watch spiders skitter away in fear). This mostly succeeds — you get key items at smarter times, there’s a few zones like No Man’s Wharf which totally embrace the neglected torch-carrying mechanic of the base game to great effect. The newbie areas are made slightly less devastating. Others changes are dubious. Heide Knights were found in the base game in unique locations — for instance, sitting with their back against a tree, unstirring and contemplative. You had to attack them first. Now they’re just another enemy wandering a different area. There’s some baffling changes like removing nearly all of an enemy unique to the Shaded Ruins — armored lion knights — in favor of semi-transparent soldiers who are difficult to see and cannot be targeted with auto lock on.

But the real meat of the changes, which isn’t a change at all if you bought the downloadable content as it was released, is the three new areas of the game.

 

Brume Tower (Crown of the Old Iron King)

Adjoining the Iron Keep of the first game, a castle that literally sunk and collapsed into a volcano, is Brume Tower, which shares some of the architecture and look of the main structure. It’s an entirely vertical level, which is very cool. You’re generally climbing down, and once you turn on the ‘elevators’ (giant impressive stone statues that go up and down), you’re up-down-down-up-down-etc.

What you’ll find, other than new, more difficult enemies and environmental puzzles, is some kind of misshapen, imprisoned woman, huddled amidst her extra limbs. You’ll hear her moaning from a distance and she’ll be trying to kill you or lending your enemies her benefice (healing them, resurrecting them, powering them up). If you’re armed with a consumable item called a smelter wedge, you can drive it into her heart and pick up a fragment of the soul of ‘Nadalia, Bride of Ash’. All 12 gets you the full soul. This is key because all of the new areas involve a Queen and a King and a fallen Kingdom. All of the queens have names similar to the Queen of Drangleic and main-game last boss, Nashandra. As you play through each new area, you start to feel there is some kind of space-time hyjinx going on with the same story playing out in other lands with different-but-the-same players.

The bosses of Brume are difficult — potentially the hardest in the entire game. Not beasts or demons, just lone swordsmen with quick and complicated movements.

 

Shulva, the Sanctum City (Crown of the Sunken King)

I wanted to like trap-filled Shulva. You descend even further than the depths of The Gutter from the main game to an expansive, ancient mesoamerican-looking city. There’s a dragon flying around crashing into things and you just know you’re gonna have to do him in (you do). But mostly it just annoyed me.

All of the new areas crank up the difficulty. In base Dark Souls II, if you hit an enemy that doesn’t have a shield up, they have a decent chance to flinch (based on the strength of the attack) and have their attack or movement interrupted. Most enemies in Shulva do not have this feature. So what could have been tense fights on precarious stone bridges hanging over the abyss devolves into ‘get off the fucking bridge’ because the enemy has all the advantages.

For such a cool set piece on entry, you do not really interact with the Sanctum City much. Mostly you run around on its rooftops, or drop into a few upper rooms, all with the same drab blank-wall, square look. There’s switches you can activate to raise and lower buildings, but I found this quite humdrum. The place is loaded with traps too; maybe I’m just a gigantic baby but I just found these cheap and annoying. Yeah, I could have examined every brick in the floor to see the trigger for the killer spike-protruding walls that were about to instantly murder me on the next flight of stairs, but that’s just not the sort of patience I like to have to test. Wah wah.

The bosses are pretty cool though. I do like a good dragon.

 

Frozen Eleum Loyce (Crown of the Ivory King)

Last is the frozen fortress of Eleum Loyce. It wraps up the story, in part because it’s the only one with a friendly rather than antagonist queen, who explains via dialogue why Eleum Loyce is a frozen wasteland and where she came from. It’s cryptic, but it’s there!

This area is the best tuned, difficulty-wise. Enemies are dangerous but fair. The environmental hazard here is the poor visibility with snow-and-wind blowing in your face whenever you’re outside. Halfway-ish through, you can trigger the melting of much of the ice in the level, meaning you can return to areas frozen over before and open chests or access new areas. It’s kind of cool, but it’s really simple in design — it doesn’t completely change the level, just a few different paths which starts to make the repetition of going through areas you’ve already traversed a bit grating.

The level builds to the boss fight by asking you (just kidding; it doesn’t ask — you have to figure it for yourself) to recruit several Loyce Knights who stayed loyal to the king, to fight on your side in a showdown boss fight versus the knights who did not.

Anyway. More Dark Souls is always good.

Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer in the World by Amitava Kumar

Reading and writing are a major topic of exploration in these essays. Kumar is an advocate of writing as an expression of the real, a way to decipher and interpret the everyday — politics, identity, culture — the sacred role of fiction in making palpable these essential things. The well known strategy of the writer infusing their personal experiences and family character into the plot.

He also determines economy of language as required. Short, direct sentences. Avoidance of adverbs, overuse of adjectives, all flowery language whatsoever. Carver, Hemingway, Roth, Naipaul*. I enjoy most of the named writers and styles. Certainly I love many books determined to translate ‘the real’. Yet, I’m utterly baffled whenever anyone makes grandiose declarations of what literature should ultimately be.

I mean when I hear anyone anyone, not just this writer, say something along the lines of:

• Writing should be a translation of real life, serious in aim, and high in pursuit.
• Never write anything that doesn’t directly serve the story; no diversions.
• Vampires / magic / future technology should be done in this way. (it happens in all genres)
• Never use two words when one would do (and don’t tell Proust!).

To that I say: literature can be a million different things! Many of them good! Use ornate language even if it isn’t strictly necessary! Divert away, so long as it is interesting! Adverbs surely aren’t always so bad.

It’s this hardline notion more than anything else that makes me unlikely to read Amitava Kumar’s fiction, or of many lit critics who espouse similar. But what he does excel at is journalistic concerns — recording public events, interviewing ‘common’ people, conducting talks with filmmakers and writers. There’s some really insightful pieces here. I’ve added Indian films to my to-watch list that I would never have heard of otherwise.

Kumar does an excellent job of translating the presence and importance of great writers to the page. And also less known personages, like a muslim taxi driver who was assaulted after the Boston bombings. The words of the bigot of the title — a Hindu radical who hates and dehumanizes muslims — are chilling and well recorded, and show that extreme right wing rhetoric is basically the same everywhere, no matter how applied. And it is Arundhati Roy’s line, in an interview with Kumar, about using court injunctions as napkins that sticks with me after finishing this book.

*Kumar names some other Indian writers too, but having not read them, I can’t recite from memory. With a handful of exceptions, the vast majority of writers namedropped are men.