Tag: reviews

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So tasty, but so much I am probably mispronouncing on the menu.

So, yesterday was one of those holidays.

You know the ones – the ones that you feel a little conflicted about honoring even if you enjoy a little party every now and then, the ones where it just seems a little too much like you can feel the grinning specter of corporate profit looming over everything.

But it IS nice to have an excuse to celebrate something, especially now, and so I bought a box of chocolates and around lunchtime we realized we’d need to do SOMEthing for dinner but didn’t yet have a plan. After a brief Google search revealed that some places were doing prix fixe meals in honor of the occasion, we rolled the dice and tried shooting an email to a place to see if we could arrange some last-minute takeout from a place we’d never tried before.

To my very great surprise, the answer was “No, sorry, we’re not accepting takeout orders for tonight – but we’ve just had a couple of cancellations. Want to dine in instead?”

Well. I mean. Why not?

And so it was that we found ourselves heading down to St. Clair to try some Filipino food at Lamesa. No sooner had we pulled into the public parking space when a departing driver offered us their parking ticket, which was fortuitously paid through to the next morning. Serendipity was really with us, I suppose!

As to the dinner itself: I am by no means an authority on this particular cuisine – I think I have sampled it a grand total of once – but this was excellent in my opinion. I had:

  • An amuse-bouche of crisp wontons with a sausage filling
  • Ukoy, a kind of shrimp-and-vegetable fritter
  • A main of chicken adobo with rice
  • Mango tiramisu for dessert

All of the courses were tasty, with an interesting balance of textures and of sweet/sour/salt/acid that I think is characteristic of Filipino cuisine in general. These are big, bright, powerful flavors that are easy to linger over with a cocktail. The service was great, too, and the space is charming and cozy – in non-pandemic times I can easily imagine it being a vibrant little neighborhood spot. I’d be interested in going back in order to try some of their other offerings!

…I’d be interested in going anywhere, really. Going out now – being out in the world – really drives home how limited our environments have been during the pandemic. How little there is to do, and how much of what there IS is mediated by screens. It’s been both kind of exciting and kind of exhausting to get out and about in the World these days (I certainly find myself wanting to curl up and not engage with anyone when I get home.) I wonder how long that will take to go away? If it will go away?

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WIBTA if I gave a guy a potion to make him forget his girlfriend and fall in love with me? (Gotterdammerung, part 1)

A lot of people who write tales of grand, mythic, sweeping epic things seem to feel compelled to end them with the disintegration of all of the things that make them grand and epic and sweeping. Magic fades; the legendary folk go into the west; the world is left a safer place for the Ordinary Folk who remain, perhaps, but without any of the things that made it so marvelous a place to get lost in for a series of books or films or what have you.

I’ve never understood why this is, really; adult me figures it must have something to do with the way that people who are old enough to write things have had some time to internalize the concept of entropy, and perhaps that if one is telling a just-so story about how things came to be the way they are one must eventually come to the point where…well, things become the way they are, which is almost invariably less vivid and exciting than the way they were.

Kid me, on the other hand, was regularly driven insane by this. Why on earth would you conjure such wonders only to kill them all off? (Or worse, pull off the mask and reveal that, surprise, you’ve been reading about Jesus all along, like some sort of hyper-sanctimonious episode of Scooby-Doo. I have never quite forgiven C.S. Lewis for that.)

Why did everyone seem to think that the right and proper way for the world to be was a place without any magic in it, where all there was to look forward to was laundry and paperwork and grocery shopping every week forever? It was maddening.

Is maddening, I guess; a good part of me still feels that way, and believe me, if I ever found a door into Somewhere Else I would be off like a shot, especially the way things are now.

All of which is sort of a roundabout response to having started Gotterdammerung, which we did last night. I say “started” because it’s a Project – this one’s long, guys. And it’s very much of the “and now the mythic world crumbles” school, beginning as it does with the three Norns first prophesying an end to it all before losing their gifts of prophecy forever in the first scene. (They also imply that the world tree, Yggdrasil, is dying – and, moreover, that the reason for that death may be in part because of that spear Odin crafted out of it. You know, the one that got shattered last opera. Nice job breaking it, Odin – again.)

Notably, from that point forth there is almost nobody onstage representing the powerful, legendary forces that have driven literally everything else up to this point: the vast majority of the cast are assorted mortals. We’ve got Siegfried and Brunnhilde, of course, who spend WAY longer than is strictly necessary seeing each other off before he, inexplicably, leaves her on her mountain to go questing, leaving her the Ring as a token of his love.

We’ve got three scions of the Gibichung clan, descended from a king local to…wherever this is. Gunther, oldest son, is advised by his half-brother Hagen that really, it’s about time he and his sister Gutrune got married. Problem: How to find partners for them both that will increase their prestige? No worries, Hagen’s got an answer: see, there’s this legendarily amazing woman named Brunnhilde who’d be perfect, and this hero named Siegfried who’d make a great partner for Gutrune.

The part where the proposed partners for these folks are already in a relationship with each other doesn’t seem to matter a bit to anyone, so this rapidly turns into a breathtakingly awful plan straight from Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” wherein Hagen reveals that he’s got a potion that will wipe all of Siegfried’s memories of Brunnhilde and make him fall in love with her instead. She is…a lot more fine with this than I would be.

(Reddit verdict: Everyone sucks here.)

Anyway, this being the Ring Cycle the plan is put into play immediately and goes off without a hitch. Siegfried shows up, trustingly drinks the potion, forgets all about Brunnhilde and goes absolutely wild for Gutrune, so he’s all about it when Gunther proposes they head to this mountain and pick up this Brunnhilde chick, whoever SHE is.

So…yeah. Brunnhilde gets a visitation from her sister Waltraute, one of the very few representatives of the mythic folk in this part of the story. She gets to tell us all what’s going on with the gods: Odin has apparently just straight given up (which may I guess explain why we haven’t seen him on stage at all). He’s ordered what remains of the now weak and fading Yggdrasil chopped down and piled all around Valhalla, ready to burn, and is now just sitting on his throne brooding about the impending end of everything. All he has said on the matter is that if only the ring were returned to the Rhinemaidens, all would be well and Valhalla could yet be saved.

But of course Brunnhilde cannot bring herself to part with Siegfried’s love token, so she tells Waltraute in no uncertain terms to fuck off – and then is promptly given cause to regret it when someone who sure looks a lot like Gunther (actually Siegfried, wearing the Tarnhelm) shows up, claims her as his bride, and rips the ring right off her finger.

Back at the Gibichung hall, we learn that the probable force behind this asshole plan is…Alberich, who apparently swore off love but not sex: he’s Hagen’s father, and there’s some manipulation going on behind the scenes to get that pesky ring back. There will certainly be plenty of distraction going on, what with the double wedding and all – Siegfried to Gutrune, and Gunther to an extremely depressed Brunnhilde.

…Well, an extremely depressed and enraged Brunnhilde, once she spots Siegfried and realizes he seems not to know her and is apparently totally willing to just let her be married off to some asshole – and, moreover, is still wearing the ring that was taken from her. (Siegfried may be ensorcelled but he’s still not very quick on the uptake.)

Well, Hagen needs that ring back, and Brunnhilde’s feeling pretty vengeful, so when he proposes a little old fashioned murder she’s into it, revealing that although she did cast a number of protections on him before sending him out into the world, she didn’t cover his back. All righty then, no problem: arrange a convenient hunting accident and vengeance will be hers (and the ring, doubtless, Hagen’s.)

I’m sure everyone can see where this is going, though we left off there last night.

It occurs to me that the Ring hasn’t actually DONE much here besides be a MacGuffin – at least, not onstage. Sure, we hear that it’s supposed to grant world-dominating power, but it couldn’t even let Brunnhilde keep herself from being violated when push came to shove. Shouldn’t it be seen to…do…something, before all of this is over?

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Recently played: Moonglow Bay

I’ll just begin by dropping the trailer here. If this looks at all like your jam, why are you still here? Go play this.

The launch trailer.

For anyone who might like a bit more detail before jumping in, here’s the elevator pitch:

Somewhere in the Maritime provinces of Canada, a couple is preparing to embark on the launch of a new business: the kitting-out of a small fishing boat that will bring in the essentials for a tasty array of street foods. Unfortunately…something goes wrong.

Cut to three years later. One half of the couple has been missing since then, and the worst is assumed by all, attributed to some superstitious minds as being part of a curse upon any who dare to fish these waters. The remaining partner is shaken out of a depressive funk by the sudden arrival of her daughter from Quebec, and the two of them decide to at least give the business a try.

What follows is a surprisingly cozy little adventure with RPGish undertones in which the hero/ine (depending on which character model you choose to play) sets about exploring the seas near the town of Moonglow Bay, fishing up all manner of curious creatures, cooking piles of cute little voxel seafood, and gradually rehabilitating the initially faded and run-down little town.

The voxel art style may take some getting used to for some audiences, but I find it rather charming in its simplicity, and it lends a rather charming toy-like quality to the environments; everything is lovingly rendered from the models of new fish to the flag of Nova Scotia flapping at the stern of your little trawler to the cute little beds of vegetables in the community garden you (eventually) help to install.

Maybe this toylike quality lends to the relaxing vibes of the game, or perhaps there’s just something inherently soothing about the loop of going out onto the seas, fishing things up, then bringing them home to perfect another recipe in a series of little minigames reflecting your various cooking techniques. The core mechanics are generally pleasing and low-stress, making this a good choice for unwinding on a lazy weekend afternoon.

Or maybe there’s just something fun about doing it all with a friend or partner – there’s two-player couch co-op in this one, with player 1 taking on the role of the main character and player 2 their daughter River. While only player 1 can progress quests, both characters can team up in both fishing and cooking (in more complex recipes), making the process of stocking the aquarium with all of those rare and curious fish that much quicker.

Fair warning for those who prefer their experiences be highly grounded in reality: There are definitely some fantasical elements present in this little story – mainly regarding some of the more improbable sea creatures you meet. (Unless there is something going on in the Maritimes that they’re not telling us further west, I am fairly confident we’ve got some imaginary fish happening.) There’s also a little janky-ness, but nothing too out of the norm for an indie title; we haven’t experienced any showstopping bugs to speak of.

Also, you have a dog named Waffles, who has an annoying habit of parking himself in the middle of the deck when you’re fishing – but he is still a very good boy, and you can pet him, which sort of balances out in my opinion. 😉

Anyway. Overall, this is a charming little chill-out game with easy drop in/drop out co-op – great for those lazy Sundays when someone just needs to take a minute to flip a load of laundry or stir the soup or whatever. Easy recommendation for anyone who enjoyed Stardew Valley, especially if they enjoy the fishing angles of such games!

Maybe make that soup a chowder or something, though, because you WILL crave seafood something fierce.

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Recently played: Lacuna

If you go and look at Lacuna’s page on Steam, it will tell you right up front what it is. “A sci-fi noir adventure.”

And what we get is exactly what it says on the tin. Our hero lives on the planet Ghara, the big dog in its solar system, working for this universe’s equivalent of the FBI. One evening, you’re preparing to do protection detail for a diplomat…except that he gets shot before you have the chance to so much as say hello, and then we are off to the proverbial races.

What follows is indeed an extremely noir-ish story, both in presentation and content. We have the protagonist with the estranged family and the brooding voice-overs (the only fully-voiced lines in the game). We have the murder plot that leads, in a roundabout way, to something complicated and infrastructural. We have a little blackmail, even, for that extra frisson.

We navigate all this in a very point-and-click sort of way, roaming from grandiose hotels for VIPs to the rough-but-colorful neighborhoods of the lower layers, always taking the train. (And yes, I do mean literally “lower layers” – the stratification of society in this universe means that your only shot at regular doses of direct sunlight is to be wealthy.) At each locale, we meet a character or two, chat with them, and gather clues from the environment. So far, so normal.

And then we get to the tricky bit for any detective-themed video game: How do you gamify detection? How do you make a process that is so very essentially internal to the player’s brain manifest on the screen? How do you try to guide them through working out the right answers to key questions, rather than brute-forcing it with guesses?

Lacuna’s answer to this is…homework.

No, really; when there’s a problem that needs to be worked out you receive a “sheet” to complete with a series of multiple-choice questions, and when the game determines you’ve advanced far enough that you ought to have the clues, you’re invited to submit it. These are typically not incredibly complicated – two or three questions – but in order to identify the right answers, you must first have asked the right questions of the NPCs you interact with, found all the clues in the environments, and then trawled back through your chat logs, etc., to work out what you ought to submit.

I have mixed feelings about this as the major detecting process. On one hand, assembling the pieces into a confident answer can be quite satisfying. On the other, one thing that Lacuna seems to really enjoy doing is obfuscating information. In one early case, you are told very explicitly by the NPCs at one location exactly what the answers to some crucial questions are – except that those NPCs are wrong, and the only way you can possibly know that is to correctly deduce a different set of answers, open up a different location, and then complete a mostly-unrelated side task that will eventually lead to a single casual mention of the right answer you need.

Here’s the wrinkle that makes this especially important: Lacuna does not allow you to manually save. Ever. All choices you make are permanent, so it’s very easy (presumably by design) to lock yourself into a kind of cascading failure state. We did not do this, for the record; both of us have fairly well-honed detective-game instincts, but it seems remarkably simple to end up on a path to doom from pretty early on without knowing it. (A post-playthrough review of the game’s discussion boards on Steam suggests a number of people had this kind of experience.)

There’s also a feature that will add an additional layer of pressure to this by putting a timer on all of your answers to questions. We somehow managed to disable this without ever knowing it was there – or perhaps it defaults to “off” and is only enabled if you want an extra challenge? Some of the choices were plenty difficult even with time to think them through, so I can only imagine how much easier it would be to miss a key piece of information, or accidentally piss off an important NPC with that timer bar ticking down.

I appreciate the commitment to the “choices matter” approach to storytelling here, but I’m not sure I am completely behind these design decisions myself; at the very least, an option to go back and replay some scenes to make different choices without having to start the entire game over again from the beginning would have been welcome.

Oddly, despite the massive difference your choices can make in terms of story outcomes, your actual progress feels somewhat “on rails”; there are a number of occasions where we were barred from trying out something or following up with an NPC rather arbitrarily (usually by someone attempting to move or carry something very large and heavy. The effect is a bit more Marx Brothers than perhaps the designers intended.)

All of this sounds a bit like I didn’t care for the game, doesn’t it? Not quite; whatever I might think of some of the design choices, the story itself is enjoyable and nicely told, and the art – of the “pixels + dynamic lighting” variety that seems popular lately – is evocative and has a lot of fun little background detail that I wish we could have interacted with a bit more for additional flavor.

If any of this has piqued your interest, perhaps it might also be helpful to know that the game is quite short, even for thorough players like ourselves – perhaps 5-6 hours if you’re taking it slowly, and easily complete-able in a session or two. (The ending we got was pretty satisfying, but if you ended up with one you didn’t care for I expect a second playthrough would go even faster.)

If you find yourself with a few hours and the inclination, give it a shot; perhaps you’ll have different feelings about the detective system than I do, and then we can discuss it.

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My new culinary hero

I bought the household a cookbook for Christmas.

This was (is) part of the household’s new year’s resolutions, which include eating better and other nerdier ones which we’ll get to later.

The cookbook is Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything, and two months out I think I can safely say it’s been a great purchase.  In that time, I have learned from this book:

  • How to make chicken stock.  This alone is an invaluable piece of information, and Bittman is correct – it’s totally addictive once you learn how much better homemade stock is than canned.
  • How to wash and prepare a leek.  Who knew that the best way to really get them clean was to slice them almost in half lengthwise and fan them out?  (Well, he did, obviously.)
  • How to core a cabbage.
  • How to make popcorn on the stove.
  • How to prepare risotto.
  • How to roast your own red peppers.
  • And probably a lot of other things I am forgetting about.

It’s light on pictures, except for the informative line drawings used to demonstrate the various cooking techniques – but you know what?  I’m fine with that, and this is coming from someone who typically prefers her cookbooks liberally laced with nigh-pornographic food photography.  This is a practical book that is full of practical advice, and while it may not have as many pretty pictures as other cookbooks I have known, it DOES have a heaping helping of useful tables, ideas and suggestions for modifying recipes, and (most important of all) a good index in the back.

Bittman’s writing style is breezy, easy to follow, and has just a touch of humor in it that makes recipes for even food that scares most people (like risotto) seem less intimidating.  When an instruction comes up that might seem bizarre to a novice chef like myself, he actually tends to take the time to explain why it is that, for example, you don’t bother to peel the onion you’re putting in your chicken stock.  It’s like having a kitchen mentor that hangs about comfortably within range if you need to ask a question without being dogmatic or intrusive.

And with two thousand recipes, if you can’t find something to add to your repertoire in here, you’re probably not trying hard enough.

This one’s a winner, folks.  Consider it next time you’re hitting up the cookbook section.

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Character-driven storytelling with Primetime Adventures

Some time ago, because I am a very bad girl, I picked up a copy of the .pdf of the roleplaying game Primetime Adventures.  Today, I finally got around to reading it.

The Elevator Pitch

Primetime Adventures is a game where you and your friends work together to create a story in the style of a prime time TV show.

The Assessment

I like it.  Don’t know if I’ll ever play it, but even if I don’t, there is high-quality material to be mined from it no matter what system I’m playing in.

The Details

PTA is a pretty easy system to like.  It requires very little in the way of materials, setup, or prep time for the game master – odds are excellent that aside from the PTA rulebook you already have everything you need lying about in your house.  It’s also pretty much entirely genre-independent and will support any sort of story you care to dream up, provided that:

  • The story you want to tell includes strong character-driven elements and
  • You have the right group.

Having the right group is of course important for any game – and certainly reams of paper and piles of pixels have been devoted to the subject – but more than almost any other system I’ve ever looked at, PTA relies on your group’s ability to work together and compromise.   This begins at the very instant you make the decision to use the system – the first session of any campaign is always devoted to the pitch session, where the players work together to decide what genre and tone they would prefer and establish the length of your imaginary television show’s “season.”

After that, the players work together to create the ensemble cast that will populate the show, and work out what their character’s central issues and defining traits will be.   These traits can be called on to gain advantages and extra cards when the time comes to negotiate conflicts – but more on that in a moment.

Each session of PTA is an “episode,” naturally, and each episode proceeds in a very democratic sort of way.  A scene is proposed, the players work out the outlines of what the central conflicts will be, and these conflicts are played out as other players (and audience members if any) look on.  Conflict resolution is diceless, and relies on a standard deck of playing cards to determine both who will get the result they desire and who wins the right to narrate the scene.  The narrator will describe what happens, and you’re off to the races.  New scene, everyone!

Some of you might be thinking that this sounds like you spend a lot of time sitting around listening, and you would be right; in this sense PTA is probably not a game for impatient folks.  On the other hand, literally every moment of the game encourages contributions from other players to the action: players who are not participating in a scene can even spend some of their resources to tip the balance of a conflict they are watching in a direction they think is most interesting.  It’s not hard to imagine how some players would be put off having their story so heavily impacted by the peanut gallery – again, the key here is getting together a group of folks who don’t mind that sort of thing.

Whether you mean to actually play the game or not, however, the rulebook is well worth reading just for the very sound advice it gives on getting quickly to the core of how a character can contribute to dramatic situations (via his or her Issues) and how to identify and employ well-placed, satisfying narrative scenes in a collaborative medium.  This stuff is gold – no matter what system you’re playing, attention to details like these can very simply just make your game better.

Let’s pretend, for example, that you’re playing D&D.  D&D tends to be much more action-heavy than PTA, and tends to rely on the whims of the dice, rather than the metagame-level agreement of the players, to produce its narrative.   Sure, you’re not going to be plotting out your scenarios months in advance, but what if you’re planning a session that will really let one of your PCs shine?

You could do this overtly, by choreographing a grand set-piece battle – but you can also play some subtler tricks using the guidelines offered in PTA for characters in supporting roles and emphasize your featured PC’s conflicts and troubles by setting them in counterpoint to scenes or subplots involving other PCs.  You’re setting your rogue up for a confrontation with his father, poised even now to betray him?  You could play up the need to take care whom you trust by having your unworldly paladin encounter a devious con man – or really drive the knife home by setting your warlord up to depend on his former mentor in a time of desperate need.  When the mentor comes through and the father lets down the side, the contrast should make the drama of the situation all the more poignant.

This is the sort of thing PTA is designed to enable – using the conventions of well-told TV tales to punch up the character dramas that keep audiences tuning in every week.  It may not matter to the folks on the couch all that much what happens in the overarching Villain-of-the-Week plot…it’s the characters and the interactions between them that really keep the audience coming back.  And there is room for more of that in almost any game, regardless of genre or degree of rulesy crunch.

If You Only Read One Thing

Read the explanations of “Issue” and “Screen Presence” (pages 12-14), which will explain the basic mechanics of how a character-driven story arc works.  For bonus points, add in the basics of scene creation on pages 26-31.  Players and GMs alike can benefit from asking themselves what the scene they’re engaged in is really “about” and what it’s meant to play up.

If anyone out there has actually tried PTA, I’d be happy to know what they think.

Happy gaming, everybody.