​I've been posting far less, basically everywhere, because Social Media Is A Peesoshit. Or maybe it's just the internet nowadays?

Since the 2010s, basically my school-to-college years, I used to post quite a lot online. I posted opinions on every political situation, fights in college, comic book movies and basically every other college-guy-brained topic with opinions that aged like milk. I used to shitpost, too, because shitposters hate being seen but need to be known, so I put up a thick wall of irony and made funny-ha-ha posts circled around a strong opinion.

There was Facebook, where I used to post so much that I keep getting On That Day flashback notifications every day about some shitpost or 500-word-long status I made back in 2015. There was Instagram, where I've got story highlights reminding me I used to genuinely brainstorm and think what to make each day. There was Tumblr, then this blog - I'm back by the way! - which I kept trying to post an article on every week, then every month, now every year(?). There was Reddit, where I usually used to post on r/patientgamer subreddit everytime I finished a game. There was Twitter too, and I ended up browsing Twitter basically every single day, but I never really posted much on it. Very vibrant community, too impenetrable for me.

Nowadays, though, these all feel like old memories, half-remembered daydreams of crumbling web architecture and dying communities.

I haven't posted to Facebook in years, the only reason I go there anymore is for the niche interest groups that still sustain its dying corpse. Facebook decided to push more avenues for revenue, a retinue of marketing ingenues that pushed pages to advertise themselves or get lost in the ballyhoo of the algorithm, where your field of view was obstructed by ads for underwear, coffee and barbecue. Who knows what my friends are up to? I open Facebook and have to browse through a mixture of 9 suggested pages and group posts before I'm able to see someone on my friend list. Mark Zuckerberg made a social network, then he rounded up all the people in that network and put a dozen ads in between each connection, then he tried convincing all the pages they needed to pivot-to-video, then used their content while destroying their streams of revenue. Worth the genocide in Myanmar? Evidently.

I haven't posted much to Instagram in years. I do post statuses there once in a while, but it's mainly bizarre memes I feel like posting out-of-context to confuse my followers a few times a week. I do feel it's a more palatable social network for me nowadays, but that mainly because

1. I unfollowed everyone who was a celebrity
2. I keep snoozing Suggested Posts every 30 days.

I do browse reels once in a while, but they're either pale imitations of TikTok (banned in India!) or reposts from there.

I haven't posted anything to Tumblr in years. I do like that they have clearly demarcated tabs to differentiate between people you follow and algorithm-pushed content Tumblr thinks you'd be interested in - something other social media networks are increasingly refusing to let users opt-out of - but the parent companies that keep buying and destroying it never seem to have understood its appeal. The disastrous adult-content ban keeps much of its old diverse and horny userbase away to this day (existing users can attest to the ban softening and those old creators still being afraid to return) and the new management has recently admitted its own confused pivot-to-video though something called "Tumblr Live" (for livestreaming, one of the strangest pivots Tumblr could have made) was a contractual obligation. These days? All the blogs I browse have like 50 posts combined in a day, enough for 15 dedicated minutes of scrolling to get rid of the FOMO. Maybe that's the future of how we treat social media.

Reddit's weird. There are subreddits I like for a while, then they seem to post about the same niche topics and niche internal drama and circlejerk themselves off a cliff, then they spawn circlejerk subreddits that make fun of the community and ends up being more self-aware, then they circlejerk themselves off a cliff too. With the US-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians, some of the default subreddits have revealed such an intense full-throttled racism that even other default subreddits have raised some alarm. The company's CEO also decided to take inspiration from Elon Musk and start to make ridiculous changes to the product, trying to force everyone to browse Reddit on their (horrible, poorly-designed, notification-forcing) default app, which has discouraged my own usage of it to a large extent.

And then there's Twitter, currently named X. The immense downfall of the platform driven by a megalomaniacal billionaire, hell-bent on proving to everyone that he never had any intelligence or talent, is well documented, but it's hard to overstate how much this feels like a true death-knell for the internet as we once knew it. Twitter shaped news, culture, even movies (to the point that modern movies often feel inspired by Twitter discourse some terminally online LA nepo baby saw), and it felt like an equalizing force where celebs and normal people alike all had a common platform and form of expression. It's not all gone, but the checkmark going from a mark of importance to a mark of support for rentierism definitely did damage. Even till recently, while I was pretty addicted to the site and spent close to 5 hours of screentime on it every day, I ditched it in disgust recently after seeing an Israeli crypto firm take advantage of the ethnic cleansing to hawk more snake oil.

​All the above have one thing in common, and it's something Cory Doctorrow, controviersially, coined as enshittification. Essentially, a web platform makes itself really enticing to users by giving them a great experience, then it makes itself really enticing to advertisers by giving them great reach at great prices (and making the experience worse for the users), and finally, it starts charging advertisers more money for less reach, hoping to trap both sides in a gradually worsening platform while siphoning off more money from either end. This mainly works if there are enough users that have naturally formed a large network of their own and find the platform indispensable for maintaining it, so you can make things worse for them while ensuring they can never bear to leave you.

Sounds very familiar, so why would it be controversial? Detractors argue (in posts I can't find right now, goddamn do search engines suck nowadays - oh wait, that's relevant to this case, and that's because) a corporate-owned social media platform will always obey the rules of capital and seek to expand profit margins every year, and capital always responds to diminishing returns by demanding new forms of rent-seeking. We can't buy movies or music these days because physical media is on the decline and we're expected to pay monthly for streaming platforms - unless you have expensive BluRay players or vinyl, desktops are on the decline, laptops refuse to bundle CD players nowadays, and you don't get normal CDs or DVDs very easily anymore. So how could we expect profit-seeking platforms to act any different, even if they're an internet-commons that would actively worsen in quality and reputation if companies would try to wring more money out of their users?

So is social media a peesoshit, or is it capitalism? As Karl Marx said, "idk".

It's been a year since a bunch of Twitter users migrated to Mastodon, a rival platform. The interesting thing about Mastodon, and the ActivityPub protocol it's based on, is that anyone with resources can essentially host their own version of Mastodon and make any changes to its source code if they'd like, and all the different websites running Mastodon can intercommunicate and essentially form a networked commons - a series of interlinked smaller town halls instead of a large village square. It's difficult to control its growth and direction if no one person or organization has control over all its users, so in theory, that solves the profit motive issue. I've spun off my own Mastodon server - Mast Insaan - and I've been having a good time so far. Definitely noisier than Tumblr, no algorithms being pushed on me, and a good way to cut fascist chuds and their networks off from ours.

And it's not just Mastodon either - there are multiple other platforms based on ActivityPub that aim to be a replacement for multiple social media sites - Facebook has Friendica, Instagram has PixelFed, YouTube has PeerTube, Reddit has Lemmy, Goodreads has Bookwym, and so on. The killer feature here, interestingly, is that you can share and follow any profile from within any of these, to within any of these - take this post, for example, which is a Bookwyrm post I've shared from my Mastodon account. This whole thing, all these sites interlinking together, is called the Fediverse.

So is this the future? I don't know. The interoperability is exciting, and Tumblr and Meta have shown interest in connecting to the Fediverse (Wordpress already has). But like all open-source alternatives, these sites are similar but not quite the same, their UI/UX is slightly worse, and most of the people you'll find at first are insufferable European FOSS nerds. Plus, is a distributed commons efficient or great? Divorced from the profit-motive, large-scale centralization does have a lot of advantages - it's more resource-efficient, professional administration and moderation is far more effective, and it's far easier for everyone to come to a single place and find each other. Having multiple platforms interlinked to form a network-of-networks can also lead to the whole thing feeling fragmented, with laypeople finding it difficult to figure out which community to join, and communities in general feeling much more insular.

I think that's the ultimate debate between federalism and centralism - do you prefer having multiple smaller communities with lesser resources all run by their own governing bodies, or do you trust a smaller group of people to govern the masses with more resources? I don't know yet, and that goes into politics, a subject I've never talked about.

In conclusion, social media is dying, and from the ashes it will be reborn. But what will emerge is unknowable and completely beyond me.

Here's a picture of my cats.

This is a little different from my other articles, it's mainly a personal post typed up at 11 PM.

The last time I wrote something here was around a year ago. I don't write too often here, and the articles I write are too ambitious, either being opinion pieces on some piece of media with some sort of personal story about my feelings on it, or writing large summary pieces with two to five paragraphs about every piece of media I experienced in a span of time. My last article was seven thousand words - I definitely need to rein this in somehow, especially if it helps me write more.

But yeah, this is a state of the blog - what's up with it? What's up with me? Well, this year's been pretty nice for me, I shifted to a new city and made new connections, lost quite a few but it's alright. I've been fairly busy this year, but I'm trying to get back into being more active in terms of writing and personal projects.

I made a Mastodon neighbourhood of my own, for example! My profile link's here, and I'll be updating here a whole bunch hopefully (I will singlehandledly make Mastodon a social media site worth being on just to spite Musk). I've also started trying my hand at art, though that's still a work-in-progress - hopefully someday I'm able to make art for these articles, that's my dream.

I'm going to be posting a bunch of articles in the upcoming weeks, going to pace myself for the same. It won't be all video games (though there will be a bunch, fair warning), and I will try my best to stick to a deadline of one article per weekend.

So hey, if you followed this blog earlier, thanks for sticking around! If you're new here, check out my old articles! And regardless of how you found this site, welcome. I hope you're having a great year.

For a blog that started off as a general media blog, where most of my articles used to be about movies and TV shows, a lot of people noticed that all my recent articles seemed to be about video games, and asked me why that was.

Was I disillusioned with the state of franchise cinema? (Yes, but there's plenty of other movies.)

Did I think video games were somehow better at accomplishing their artistic goals than movies? (God no, they're basically the same but I'm not the kind to go on screeds about Gaming As Art.)

Was I mentally burnt out because of the pandemic and my personal life and general loneliness and anhedonia, undergoing a general film and show and book slump as a result? (Uh... Yeah, that's basically it, but could you not be this specific in this article?)

Anyway, I was part of a chat group with people who choose and watch movies from Mubi™️ (the streaming service, not sponsoring this article) and discussing them at the end of the week. It had been a while since I joined, and it took some time before I actually started watching movies along with them. Once I did, though, I actually ended up enjoying the experience - Mubi™️ has a lot of movies from around the world, and many movies from other states in India as well, most of whose film canon I had no idea about.

So basically, I went from watching two movies in the span of eleven months (August 2020 - May 2021) to twenty-six movies (not all of them from Mubi™️) in the span of the next seven months (June-December 2021). And now that 2021 is coming to a close, I've got a lot of movies I watched that I want to write about, even if I don't think I can write a full fledged article on any of them.

So, here's a list of all the movies I watched on Mubi™️ this year.
​

​I've already watched this movie before, so I thought that rewatching it would help me get over my film slump. It didn't - I watched this in January of this year, and it took five months more before I finally watched another movie - but it was still a pretty good rewatch. 

Boyz N The Hood is a 1991 US movie about a bunch of young African-American adults navigating their lives in a low-income neighbourhood, with some having aspirations of stability and some being drawn into gangs and violence, and shines a light on the systemic and cultural factors that conspire to keep black people poor and fighting amongst each other. There are a ton of great actors here, from Laurence Fishburne to Cuba Gooding Jr to Angela Bassett, and even though it sometimes feel a touch unsubtle with its social critique, it's so earnest that it did win me over.

Beyond all the observations I had on this rewatch (one of which was that Laurence Fishburne is very, very hot in this movie), I noticed that the movie assumes a lot on behalf of the viewers - specifically, their knowledge about structural racism and the uniquely specific challenges faced by the African-American community. This is fine for US audiences, but won't necessarily be understood by foreigners who don't know about their specific societal issues. On one hand, I did know about that particular background; on the other, I realize how weird it is that I have so much information about the societal issues in a single country. 

Which led me to a depressing realization - I've watched too many US movies. 

Which led me to a depressing conclusion - I needed to actively expand my boundaries and explore movies from other cultures and countries.

Which led me to a lot of procrastination, right up until I watched another movie from Mubi™️, five months later.

...which was another US movie.
​

​Shiva Baby is a 2020 US movie about a college dropout attending the Jewish equivalent of a Shraadh (called a Shiva), who runs into her ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy in the same place, and has to navigate her complex feelings, the possibility of being exposed in a get-together, and general disaster bisexual stuff.

There's a genre of movies that I consider very specifically tied to US and British comedies, the cringe comedy, where the humour comes from seeing a protagonist be utterly, completely humiliated throughout their runtime (the Meet The Parents series is a great example of this weirdly specific genre). Shiva Baby belongs to this niche, and while I generally don't really like cringe comedies because I end up feeling embarrassed by proxy, I did end up enjoying this quite a lot. 

One specific reason for this was the protagonist, played by a brilliant Rachel Sennott, whose performance and writing treaded a fine line between being likeable and heavily flawed, so even while I rooted for her throughout the movie, all the embarrassing things that happened to her felt like they were pretty deserved. Those two feelings seem like they contradict each other, but I don't think they necessarily should - how many villains in the history of fiction have had more fans than their stories' protagonists? It's only fair that protagonists should be allowed to express that range as well, and Shiva Baby does an excellent job with this.

One final observation - like I mentioned, the film takes place in the Jewish equivalent of a Shraadh, and I did find the experience of being among irritating and nosy family members very relatable. That being said, I can't really keep watching US movies, and if I want to experience different cultures, I should watch movies that aren't solely from countries that western film critics blabber on about, like the US or the UK or France.
​

​The Double Life Of Veronique is a 1991 French-Polish movie by Krzysztof Kieslowski, most famous for Dekalog and the Three Colours trilogy. This was next in the series of movies the Mubi™️ chat group voted on, and another rewatch for me.

The movie revolves around two women who look identical to each other, but were born and raised in two different countries. More mood-oriented than plot-oriented, Veronique explores the protagonists' lives and feelings as they go through their lives and experience romance and tragedy, and how their connection eventually affects them.

It's a very abstract movie, so it's not going to be everyone's thing - in fact, most of the chat group that saw this didn't like it at all - but I still really like it. To understand why, I have to be a little snooty and don a makeshift film critic hat, and talk about film texture - the way the characters move, the way the colours saturate (or bleed out from) all the different shots, the way the characters speak, the way they stay silent and let their expressions alone convey volumes, all of it leads to a sort of texture, a way a movie feels to you, which might be something you really like - or something you don't. 

Thankfully, I really did like it. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it to everyone using concrete terms and points. If the description above sounds nice to you, though, you could always check it out.
​

​Tokyo Sonata is a 2008 Japanese movie directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the director of classic horror movies from the early 2000s like Cure and Pulse. Unlike those movies, Tokyo Sonata is a movie that's much more concerned with the mundanely heartbreaking.

The movie revolves around a family living in Tokyo, whose patriarch loses his job and decides to hide his unemployment from his family, which leads to their relationship worsening as they each feel an increasing dissatisfaction with each other, as well as themselves. There's a lot of tension, anger and sadness brewing beneath the surface, and there's a lot of dialogue where they explicitly talk about these emotions they're going through, and a lot of dialogue where they dance around the fact, and both work equally well in conveying a lot of these sentiments to us very effectively. It helps that the mother and younger son in the movie are very likeable, and that the movie is willing to punish the father in return for his own worst tendencies - the characters end up all feeling likeable as a result, and you do root for them to find some peace and happiness.

There's just one flaw in this movie, but it's one that I do have to point out - there's a scene late in the movie where a pathetic side character suddenly tries (and fails) in going through with a sexual assault, and then curses himself for his own cowardice and inability. I get why the scene's added and what it's trying to do, but the sudden tonal shift and escalation feels like it's coming out of nowhere, and the scene left a sour taste in my mouth as a result.

Ultimately, though, I'd still recommend it.
​

​Finally, a movie from a country whose films and culture I'm completely new to!

Air Conditioner is a 2020 Angolan movie about Matacedo, a security guard in the capital city of Luanda, where a strange phenomenon has started occurring - air conditioners, in every place in the city, have started to fall down. This being a city with hot weather, he's ordered by his boss to get a working air conditioner for him, and has to go around the city to find one - which is, ostensibly, the premise of the movie.

What the movie's really about, though, are the alleyways, the staircases, the cul-de-sacs behind the buildings - all liminal spaces, corridors and paths existing in-between, and Matacedo's fellow lower-class friends and acquaintances moving through and existing with him in the in-between. Matacedo comes up to a group of people in a shed behind the building, and they talk with dialogue, without having to open their mouths. The local mechanic is convinced that all the plants in the city are dying. There's a deliberate element of magic realism that suffuses the film, but it serves a purpose I've never seen before in other stories - where a piece of fiction might use magic realism to highlight some strange person, object or metaphor, Air Conditioner uses magic realism to fill these in-betweens with a sense of comfort and tiredness.

The poster of this movie shows a snapshot from a dream sequence featuring Matacedo, and this sequence summarizes what I mentioned above in a nutshell - Matacedo's fantasy is one of being able to move between spaces, in the backseat of a car, a cool breeze in his face, as he's able to lie down and just... relax.

Needless to say, I really liked this movie. Again, like Double Life Of Veronique, this is another movie works more as a textural experience, asking you to exist within it and feel it. If you're willing to give it a chance, I do think you'll like it.
​

​This was another rewatch for me - as a half-Bengali, I've seen plenty of Ray films since my childhood - and it was a nice, worthwhile rewatch.

Shatranj Ke Khiladi is a 1977 Indian movie, the only Hindi-language theatrical release Satyajit Ray ever directed. The movie takes place in British India and focuses on the final days of the Avadhi empire, where an ineffectual nawab cowers before the British colonial powers that keep taking his land and money, and two of his ministers fritter their time away in a game of chess.

My mother is the biggest Ray fan I know (to be fair, that's probably true of every person in a Bengali family) and it was a delight to discuss this movie with her. Her first few viewings (and my own, from long back) gave us the impression that Ray was interested in the aesthetics and politics of India in the time of British imperialism, and both our recent viewings gave us a new impression - one of a satirical movie where Ray indicts the aristocracy of essentially giving us away to the British. No trades in return (beyond a stipend for the landed gentry to live in a mansion in a city), no violence (beyond threatening us with their armies) necessary for most of us, our nobility owned us and our wealth, and then gave all of it away to be colonized.

I don't want to spend too much time focusing on the two leads of this movie, the ministers who play chess, but I do want to quickly mention that their friendship forms the focal point of the movie, and it's a very sweet and funny friendship that the actors and writing portray very well, making us sympathetic to them even as we fully understand how immature they are.

What I find fascinating about this movie is the fact that it exists at all in its current form - this is a very intelligent movie, where hand-painted drawings show caricatures to convey complex concepts and metaphors while laying the background of its story. Richard Attenborough and Tom Alter speak in unsubtitled English, which I can't imagine the majority of 1977's Indian audiences must have understood. There are scenes which trust the audience to understand the inherent ridiculousness of their premise, like one where the ineffectual nawab cries about how the British won't take his throne because they don't understand how his sensitive artistic side makes him a better person, and then starts singing his own composition in the middle of his throne room. These are great scenes, sure, but I don't think satire of this nature was the norm in India at the time.

So when you hear that Shatranj Ke Khiladi was a financial failure, it's pretty easy to understand why.

Still, it's a great movie, and absolutely worth a rewatch.
​

​Given that I'm using a streaming service that hosts movies for cinephiles from all around the world, it was basically inevitable that I'd watch a lot of French cinema.

Vagabond is a 1985 French movie by Agnes Varda, focusing on the final days of a vagabond woman who roamed the countryside. The protagonist is utterly fascinating - she's heavily flawed and makes no excuses for herself, she seems pathologically against all forms of authority (to the point where she'll self-sabotage and run away from situations where she has to answer to someone else), and she lies and manipulates people as necessary to her survival. She touches many lives as she passes through them, and some express disgust at her, while others admire her and wish they had the courage to escape and live life on their own terms. The movie itself takes no side on this matter, refusing to either condemn her choices or affirm her free-wheeling spirit - instead, Varda wisely understands that the actual core of the movie is about understanding and empathizing with the protagonist as she exists and lives, inviting us to understand her choices instead of making grand idealistic statements, and understanding all the good and bad that comes to her life, both as a result of her choices as well as the whims and fancies of a cold and uncaring world, most of which is hostile to a woman in her shoes.

Of the new movies I watched on Mubi™️ this year, this was easily the best of them - it's a tough but fascinating watch, an uncompromising work I haven't stopped thinking about since I watched it.

Maybe French cinema is alright.
​

​Or maybe not.

Jules and Jim is a 1962 French movie directed by Francois Truffaut, one of the most popular movies to come out of the French New Wave, and still considered a masterpiece by many, and I didn't like it. Let me explain why.

Jules and Jim revolves around the titular Jules and Jim, a Frenchman and a German living in the times before and after WW1. Jules and Jim also revolves around Catherine, a woman close to the duo who enters a relationship with Jules, and forms a love triangle among the three of them. The first half is fast-paced, exhilarating and funny, following them as they move through their lives and influence each other, and the second half slows down and becomes considerably darker, showing the fraying of their relationships and the mental toll those relationships take on all of them.

Only... Not really. That's what a lot of reviews mention, and I don't understand any of them, because the second half they saw seems to be completely different from the second half that I saw.

Before I explain why, I want to mention this - Jeanne Moreau, the actress who plays Catherine, is incredible, infusing complexity into her character through her performance. Her writing, too, seemed to be doing the same - in the second half, as their relationships degrade and tensions run high, Catherine does a lot of impulsively horrible things to hurt both Jules and Jim, and Catherine's performance is layered enough to make her likeable nearly all the way through to the end. Maybe there's an element of sympathy on my part as well - I've had friends who suffered from mental illnesses like Borderline Personality Disorder, and I've seen the kind of mental state they're in when they're self sabotaging and hurting everyone around them in the process of hurting themselves.

But by the end, when I'm looking at the movie as a whole, it doesn't actually give Catherine any complexity by itself - Catherine is written to be cruel through to the end, and there is no balance in the writing of the movie to understand and portray her side, or even show any of the others as being cruel on their own. In the end, all the seeming complexity is solely brought through by Jeanne Moreau's performance, with the story itself solely viewing her as a force of chaos and evil, whose only function is to destroy the nice friendship Jules and Jim shared.

God, this was so disappointing. Maybe I shouldn't have been so mean to US cinema.
​

​This is an interesting one, because in the Mubi™️ club meet, I was the only one who liked this movie - everyone else completely, utterly hated it, a sentiment I found baffling.

Princess Cyd is a 2017 US movie about a teen girl who goes to visit her aunt in a small sleepy neighbourhood in Chicago. It's near-completely conflict-free, with the few moments of tension being quickly resolved, and mainly revolves around how the niece and aunt influence each other during the former's stay, as well as what they learn from each other.

Like Veronique and Air Conditioner, this is more of a texture movie, inviting you to hang out and relax with the pair as they sunbathe in their lawns, or as the niece explores her sexuality with a barista as they romance each other on a sunny rooftop, or as the aunt organizes her cultural get-togethers as a way for people to hang out and express themselves with comfort. The element of sexuality remains a focal point through the movie in various other ways - the niece wears a suit to a party after discussing alternative gender expressions with her aunt, the aunt comes to terms with her own asexual and aromantic nature and expresses how she finds fulfilment in her own life.

There's nothing that especially amazing about it, but I did appreciate the vibes and went with it, and I'm glad I watched it. I hope Mubi™️ has more films that use sexuality in nice chill ways.
​

​Though this probably won't be one of those. This is another interesting one, because in the Mubi™️ club meet, I was the one of the few people who didn't like this movie.

Dona Flor And Her Two Husbands is a 1976 Brazilian movie about Dona Flor, a woman who gets married twice, and the contrasting nature of the two relationships and how they fulfil her in different ways, and how they leave her unfulfilled in the exact opposite. Sort of. 

After showing an introductory scene where Dona Flor's first husband collapses on the street and dies while being in the middle of a party procession at dawn, the movie flashes back and shows how the first husband was abusive and unfaithful towards the lead - he openly cheats on her and keeps going to the brothel, he gambles all their money away and beats her when she refuses to lend him any more, he refuses to take her to any of the parties he goes to. The sole positive in their relationship is their sex life - except not really? The movie wants to impart that idea to us, but Dona Flor and her first husband don't actually hook up more than a couple times onscreen during their marriage (which all seem to be pretty standard and tame, with nothing particularly uniquely exciting), and most of their relationship just shows Dona Flor feeling dissatisfied and angry with her husband.

The second half sees Dona Flor remarry, this time to a respected pharmacist, and this relationship apparently fulfils all the things she wanted from her previous relationship - except not really? Again, the movie wants to impart that idea to us, Dona Flor and her second husband seem to have a boring sex life, sure, but we didn't really see an exciting or active sex life in her previous relationship anyway, and while her second husband does invite her to his own parties, they're shown to be completely dry and boring to her. This is explicitly and deliberately shown as a counterpoint to her exciting first husband, but that guy never involved her in his parties or life anyway!

In the end, there's an interesting twist that takes the story somewhere nice, but it all revolves around the idea that Dona Flor can only gain a fulfilling relationship through a confluence of her previous two, and the film doesn't really give us any proof of that. So, sure, Sonia Braga is very engaging as Dona Flor, but the movie just ended up feeling very frustrating to me. And even as a racy fun movie, it doesn't do much to actually be fun.

At least, it didn't for me.
​

​This is the first time I've ever seen an Odiya film. 

Nirbachana is a 1994 Indian movie from Orissa, directed by Biplab Roy Chowdhury. 'Nirbachana' means elections, and the movie takes place in a poor village adjacent to a coal mine, whose landlord comes to them and promises to pay them in exchange for votes for him in the upcoming local elections.

Getting the negatives out of the way - the first thirty minutes of the movie may or may not be for you, acting more like a trance movie, setting mood and feel through the dust enveloping the village and its inhabitants and being very light on dialogue. There's also a relationship between a son from a family and a daughter from another, and the relationship was pretty confusing to me because there were two sons from the two families who looked very similar and ended up confusing me a lot (though, to be fair, the Mubi™️ print for this movie is atrocious, being low-resolution and poorly encoded, to the point that a lot of the facial details in the movie are unintelligible).

Now the positives - this movie is brilliant! Unlike some of the movies above that relied more on a textural experience of immersing the viewers in vibes, Nirbachana boasts strong writing and excellent thematic complexity to complement its own vibes throughout. As part of the central premise, the village chief takes a dying beggar into his house to collect the money on his behalf for his own son's dowry, and his family eventually grows to care for him. There's an interesting parallel through the beggar's relationship to the chief's family and the chief's relationship to the landlord - in both, the former is subservient and fervently faithful to the latter, and the latter maintains a sympathetic but distant and calculated relationship to the former, with the aim to ultimately use them for their own ends. 

All this culminates in a brilliant final scene, freezing on a singular image that encapsulates all of the above in a way that's a bit unsubtle but completely effective.

If you have an issue with the first thirty minutes, just stay on-and-off your phone throughout. But please do watch this movie, it's fantastic.
​

​I watched this movie long ago, when I was specifically looking for fucked up movies to watch - this was a nice rewatch nonetheless.

Dogtooth is a 2009 Greek movie by Yorgos Lanthimos, revolving around a family where the patriarch has kept his three children sheltered within their house and lies to them about how they can't ever leave because the outside world is too dangerous, redefining words like telephones to associate them with household objects like salt, essentially creating a micro-society where every part of their upbringing is solely dictated by them, with zero external cultural factors. 

Lanthimos is especially famous these days for his English-language movies that are similarly disturbing, but even back then, Dogtooth was famous enough to become a household name for many budding cinephiles. Lanthimos takes the concept to its extremes to explore all the ways in which this family would actually function, and the dysfunction that would develop in his children - the two daughters and single son in the family are all dressed up as young precocious children, but are all clearly in their late teens and undergoing puberty, and the ways the parents deal with their budding sexualities are all horrifically wrong and keep making things worse. The only movies they see are home movies of their own childhoods, seen so frequently that the children know all the lines by heart. Fish and cats are all shown to be horrific monsters so the children stay away from any that they find - and I could go on and on, but it's better that you watch it on your own.

There are a lot of interesting things in the movie, and if you haven't seen it yet and are in the mood to watch something like it, it's a great watch.
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​27 Down is a 1974 Indian movie that somehow feels very, very modern. It won the best Hindi Language film in the National Film Awards, but was tragically the only movie directed by Awtar Krishna Kaul, who died in an accident soon after the film was released. 

The movie is about a man, Sanjay, a train conductor who lives an empty, unfulfilling life controlled by his father, who lives and sleeps solely in train carriages, and who briefly finds love in a relationship with an insurance corporation employee, before even that is forcibly taken from him. It's about the corporation employee, Shalini, who briefly starts believing that she could find love in someone else, before life shows her how she should never trust anyone but herself ever again. It's about the single track their lives are set upon, where any deviation ends up punishing them, and they end up self-sabotaging and pulling away from everyone else to protect themselves.

It's a great movie, if not a happy one. It's a movie I ultimately recognize is really, really effective, but my viewing experience of it wasn't great - something I suspect wasn't the fault of the movie.

This is the only entry in the list I feel unsatisfied writing - I brought my own baggage to the movie, and it weighed me down to a point where I couldn't watch it properly. I'll have to watch it again in the future to appreciate it, I think - though I do recommend it if you're in the mood for something like this.
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​Thankfully, I was in a proper state of mind to watch this movie, and I'm thankful for it, because Mandabi is fantastic!

Mandabi is a 1968 Senegalese movie about a patriarch in a poor family living in Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, and a money order he receives from a cousin in France that he has difficulty encashing because of bureaucracies and greedy opportunists.

Some background on Senegal - like most African countries, it's a former colony kept in crushing debt to France, whose culture was near-completely replaced with French culture, to the point where its official language is still French, despite having a lot of native languages being used instead by its inhabitants. Mandabi was the first Senegalese movie to be shot in Wolof, a native language understood by most of the country, and it's quite telling how it chose to place its focus on communities kept in extreme poverty, surviving either through borrowing or stealing from each other.

This is another movie I really want more people to watch, so I won't spoil anything, but I do want to mention something specific about the movie summaries Mubi™️ keeps for many of the movies from lesser-known film industries from around the world - Mandabi's official Mubi™️ summary describes it as a movie about oppressive bureaucracy, when the movie itself is more concerned with the poverty faced by a post-colonialist country. I saw the same thing for Nirbachana, where the movie inaccurately stated something about the relationship between the chief and beggar in that movie.

This is not sponsored by Mubi™️, but if anyone from your website is reading this, take a look! Seriously!

​This is another rewatch for me, and I think most budding cinephiles always keep this in their must-watch horror movie lists anyway.

Night Of The Living Dead is a 1968 US movie that essentially serves as the prototypical zombie movie (at least, the zombie that exists in its modern cultural form). It's interesting to view it as such, sure - we've seen so many zombies in so many forms throughout the years - but it's far more interesting to see it as a movie about the cultural fears of the 60s, the societal mistrust it exacerbates and the state violence it enables. The zombies are described as ordinary looking people walking through the streets, as if caught in a trance, and attacking people in the streets - there's a scene mentioning radiation from some other planet as a possible cause, but it isn't that important overall. The choice of a black protagonist for this movie also underscores the social tensions by portraying a racial element to the mistrust within the survivors' house, as well as the final, devastating scene. Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead are such interesting cultural products that it sometimes feels wrong to solely see them through the lens of the zombie canon they essentially constructed, though that is still a valid lens to view them through.

Anyway, though, if it couldn't be clearer, I really like this movie!
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​I really wanted to like this movie!

Through The Olive Trees is a 1994 Iranian movie by Abbas Kiarostami, the third part in his Koker trilogy, a series of loosely connected movies that follow each other in increasingly more metafictional ways. The first movie in the series, Where Is The Friends Home, was a normal movie about a child searching for his friend's home, while the second, Life, And Nothing More... was more of a semi-fictional documentary piece about the director's own experiences (with an actor playing his part) while searching for the previous film's actors following the 1990 earthquake. Through The Olive Trees, the third part, takes it a step further, showing the events that took place during the filming of a single scene in Life, And Nothing More... (with two actors playing his part, one directing the scene and one within it), which revolved around a couple that married after the earthquake - except here, the behind-the-scenes look shows that the actors had a conflict between them, where the man demanded that the woman marry him, while the woman kept trying to avoid him and stayed silent between takes so he would stop talking to her.

Before I get into why I didn't like this movie, I have to talk a little bit about what I thought of its metafictional nature - there is a lot of analysis that could be made by analyzing the different layers of fiction-within-fiction within this movie, but I think it's simpler and more accurate to see this layering as representative of a blurring of the lines between reality and fiction. Did a pair like this exist in real life? I don't know, maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But the director within the film of the film was interested in their story, and the director one step above was interested in viewing and encouraging the unrequited entitled affections of the male lead, which leads me to believe that this story, whether real or not, was one the director specifically, personally wanted to tell.

And that's why I dislike it so much - the story of the male lead is extremely aggravating! This isn't a story focusing on a relationship between the male and female leads, or even the animosity between them, because the film doesn't really care about the female lead at all, shoving her to the sidelines and keeping her silent and distant from the camera. This is a story of the male lead, and as he talks about how he deserves the woman's hand in marriage (the woman has never spoken to him), talks about how the woman was clearly looking at him with affection (the camera rarely, if ever, focuses on the woman's face) and asserts that her family died as divine justice because they refused him for marriage. All of this is said to the director, who barely challenges or replies to any of this, and encourages him to follow her as she's rushing away from the set at the very end.

And, sure, you can write stories about flawed leads and unhealthy obsessions, but I don't see the film as seeing this lead as flawed or this obsession as unhealthy - the metafictional nature reinforces that this, specifically, is the story the director is interested in telling us. And that's irritating to the point where, even with hindsight, this movie just leaves me frustrated and angry.

This wasn't a popular opinion in the Mubi™️ club meet I attended, since all of them absolutely loved this movie, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, especially if you've already seen Kiarostami movies and like his stuff. Either way, though, this is the most beloved and acclaimed movie I neither liked, nor would recommend.
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​Also known as Poulet Au Vinaigre, this is a 1985 French crime drama about a small French village where a series of deaths leads to a violent cop coming in to investigate.

It's... fine. It's well made, it works well as a crime drama, I think there's some interesting stuff that could be said about the cop that was inexplicably famous in France and got spinoff movies and TV shows focusing on him, but there's really not much to say. As a masala movie, it's got some mild spice. As a mystery movie, you know the answer from the beginning, but there are a few interesting turns. The women are all surprisingly well-written and acted (and despite the reputations of this genre and of French cinema from last century, not written with any misogyny in mind).

It's fine, really! It's worth watching if you want to check out a popular masala movie from 80s French cinema, though I didn't really get anything else from it. As a Mubi™️ watch, it's good to watch something mainstream from a culture that's not your own too, so I'm happy I watched it once. It just isn't a movie you think about all that much once you're finished with it.
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Thankfully, this one is.

Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback (English title - The Death of Lekha: A Flashback) is 1983 Malayalam movie about a young actress who committed suicide while seemingly at her career peak. The film apparently draws parallels to a real-life Malayalam star named Shobha who went through similar events and committed suicide as well - actually, wait, let me talk about those specific events instead of putting them under that vague umbrella phrase.

Shobha joined the film industry at a comparatively young age, and the industry was already infamous among whisper circles for having casting couches and sexually exploiting young women who came to Chennai for work, so we can only imagine how she was able to survive and thrive - although her mother was a character actress herself, so that must have helped. By the age of 17, she had already starred in at least 70 movies (Wikipedia says 73, but some Malayali friends say there are some missing films in the list). By the age of 17, she was also in a two-year relationship with Balu Mahendra, a 41 year old director, who took her suicide as inspiration for his next movie, because our society allows old male directors to get away with anything.

Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback stays pretty close to this timeline of events, except for changing the mother figure to an ordinary housewife who becomes an entrepreneur and real estate investor through her daughter's earnings, pushing her further into her career and ignoring all the ways in which she's being exploited. Even the fictional director in this movie is clearly old and completely fine with sleeping with the titular Lekha, an extemely young woman even in the movie's text. It's a harrowing watch, but I'm ultimately glad to have watched it. Some caveats though - 

1. The Mubi™️ print for this movie is a little over two hours long, which is true for all the other prints for the movie I can find online, which is weird because many sources list it as being a little under three hours in runtime - even though it doesn't seem like anything was cut out.
2. The subtitle quality is atrocious, and while I liked what I understood, I can't shake off the impression that my viewing experience was flawed and incomplete as a result.
3. There is a documentary called 8½ intercuts- Life and films of KG George, focused on the director of this movie, that a member of the Mubi™️ club showed to us, where the director not only denies any similarity to Balu Mahendra's relationship with Shobha, but also asserts how thankful he is to the man for helping him out with his movies (nearly crying while recounting his gratitude), and calls the suicide an event that made Balu Mahendra better as a person, referring to it as "a transition in the character of the human being". This substantially reduced the movie in my personal estimation, and if my description led you to think that this was some fiercely feminist critique of the industry, I'm sorry to have had refuted your assumption.
4. If you still do want to watch it, there's a heavy content warning I need to give you for the final suicide scene, where the camera dramatically zooms in to the face of the dead actress in a way that can be distressing for people who either have suicidal ideation or have witnessed such situations.

​

This is an interesting movie, in part because it was divisive within the Mubi™️ club meet.

Beanpole is a 2019 Russian movie set in the post-WW2 period, where Russians were returning to their homes and having to adjust to their new lives, and focuses on two leads - Beanpole, a tall woman who suffers from occasional fits of paralysis due to wartime injuries, and Masha, a woman suffering from mental and physical trauma from her own service period. To say more would be spoiling the movie, but I will say this - it's a very good movie, but it's a very, very depressing movie, with an early scene depicting a shocking tragedy and the rest of the movie being suffused in a lot of anger and sadness.

The performances in this movie are also uniformly brilliant, but I want to give specific mention to Vasilisa Perelygina, the actor who plays Masha - she has to show frustration, anger, fatigue and depression, and she has to show them boiling and barely restrained underneath the surface, and she does so brilliantly, couching her emotions in a smile that somehow clearly and unambiguously portrays all the emotions she's hiding. It's a seemingly self-contradictory performance she has to engage in, and she's absolutely amazing.
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​The King Of Comedy is a 1982 movie directed by Scorsese. This was a rewatch for me, and while I loved the movie the first time I watched it, I now think it's a flat-out masterpiece.

The movie focuses on Rupert Pupkin, played by Robert De Niro in a performance that goes against type, a delusional stalker who aspires to be a comedy host on TV and is obsessed with Jerry Langford, a successful late night show host, eventually letting his delusions push him towards kidnapping Langford in a bid to finally get his big break.

All the performances in this movie are fantastic, but I have to mention De Niro, who is absolutely perfect in the role. Above all, though, I have to mention how good Scorsese is as a director here - the way he moves between Pupkin's delusions and reality to leave us slightly off-kilter, playing with our expectations at the perfect moments and balancing his viewpoint by letting his personality bounce off of others skeptical and hostile towards him, so even while we understand and are immersed in his viewpoint, we never feel like the movie is trying to make us side with him. Put simply, we empathize with him, even if we don't necessarily sympathize with him, and that's a staggering achievement that even its modern spiritual successors can't replicate.

You could say that Martin Scorsese... truly makes Cinéma.
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​Rojo is a 2018 Argentinian movie that focuses on mid-1980s Argentina, notable for avoiding showing the atrocities and political instability directly, choosing instead to keep them in the backgound and let them simmer and constantly threaten to boil over and destroy everything in the world of the movie.

The story foregrounds a lawyer with a shady past, making it day-by-day through tense neighbourhoods and vacating homes until his past catches up to him. Honestly, the plot itself doesn't matter all that much - if there's a thematic link to the political situation of the time, I don't see it, though to be fair, I'm an Indian who didn't know a lot about the country's history until very recently. For me, Rojo's plot seems to work more as texture, externalizing the underlying tension through pure vibes, with a lot of scenes and plotlines that seemingly go nowhere, but work in increasing our stress levels very quickly.

All this to say that I ultimately didn't care very much for Rojo. It started off very strongly for me, but by the end I didn't really are all that much about the story or the vibes. This may be a criticism of the movie, but this might also be a limitation on my end, and I wonder how Argentinians reacted to it.
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​Azor is a 2021 Argentinian movie that focuses on mid-1980s Argentina, notable for avoiding showing the atrocities and political instability directly, choosing instead to keep them in the backgound and let them simmer and constantly threaten to boil over and... wait, this again? Does Argentina have a history of unsubtle masala thrillers about the mid-80s already? Is it somehow gauche to actually show what happened? Or is there some political reason the directors can't show movies about it?

Anyway, this story foregrounds a private Swiss banker who comes to the country to take over from his partner and serve the rich. The movie mainly focuses on how these rich people dance around their actual intentions while talking business, letting us infer their support of the fascists from subtext alone. There is one moment where subtext becomes text for a while, and while it's very welcome to see, it comes very, very late in the movie, and frankly, my investment in it was long gone by then.

No more Argentinian movies for me. Argentina is banned from existence.
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​This wasn't actually voted on by any of the Mubi™️ club members, I just wanted to watch it after Azor because I wanted something taboo and interesting.

Demonlover is a 2002 French movie directed by Olivier Assayas, apparently part of the New French Extremity wave of movies, which showed extreme content and explored transgressive topics. The movie itself is about two rival hentai companies that are vying for foreign market control, and the espionage they conduct eventually erupting in violence and horror.

Demonlover explores commodified misogyny, pornography and torture in modern capitalism, and it does so in ways that are extremely interesting. The movie's protagonist is a morally bankrupt woman who does a lot of horrible things to climb up the ladder, but the more she climbs, the more she finds other people who've done worse things and are ready to punish her for flying too close to the sun, with the intent on subjecting her to the same misogyny she trafficks in.

Extremely heavy content warning for this one - explicit gore, lots of (typically pixelated) Japanese pornography, both animated and live-action, most of which is non-consensual, and lots of scenes of implied torture for sexual gratification. 
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​Nishant is a 1975 Indian movie directed by Shyam Benegal, taking place in a feudal village in 1975 ruled by a family of landlords that exploit and rob and rape their underlings with no consequences, where a newly arrived woman gets kidnapped by them in broad daylight and the entire village is unwilling to help her husband get justice through any official circles.

As that summary makes clear, this is a very dark movie. I was talking to my mom about it (she's seen all of Benegal's filmography) and she mentioned that the director was known for making depressing art films that won a ton of awards (including this one, which won the National Film Award for Best Hindi Feature Film). I haven't seen a whole lot from him, only having seen the movies he made during my lifetime, but her summary makes sense when looking at Nishant, which submerges its characters in despair and hopelessness, with the central villainous family showcasing multiple types of characters that express their entitlement and exploit others in different ways. 

And all of this leads to the final thirty minutes that are just incredible filmmaking, slowly building up the tension and leading to an incredible finale, one that goes from cathartic to uncompromisingly tragic.

No complaints, highly recommended.
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​That took a long time to write - I watched 27 movies this year? That's honestly unbelievable! This article ended up being extremely long as a result, so if you scrolled through it while looking for specific movies you recognize, don't worry about it. It can be our little secret.

Anyway, though, thanks for reading, and I hope I can write an even longer article next year!

​​(Author's Note: I've written about three of these games a few months ago in my last article, but I never got around to giving my thoughts on the rest. This will have some repeated paragraphs from the last article, but if you haven't read those, you can safely go ahead and read the rest of this one)

Back in 2004, my family used to go to this club in Kolkata called Dalhousie Institute, and there was a little place inside named Diagon, a small space with a library and a cyber cafe. Being a young voracious reader and gamer (back when the word "g*mer" didn't immediately put an image of shrieking unwashed manchildren in your head immediately), I used to frequent that place a lot, and on one of the PCs, I discovered and played this little-known blockbuster game called Halo: Combat Evolved.

The Halo series has been around for over twenty years now, with a massive franchise spanning multiple games and books, having a direct influence in the explosion of mainstream popularity in the once-major internet phenomenon of machinima, and generally being a massive influence on the FPS genre through its mechanics. Did I know all that would happen in 2003? Not at all. But I could feel that I was playing something new, exciting and important, and the future of video games felt infinite.

Now I'm a jaded cynic living in 2021, which means it's the perfect time to actually play the rest of the games on the PC - now that they're out, anyway. 

A little bit of history, first - the Halo series is an Xbox franchise, with the first Halo being credited as the reason the first Xbox started selling so much, and the second heralding the Xbox consoles as the best way to play multiplayer games. Because of this, for a very long time, only the first two games were available for the PC, with the rest being Xbox console exclusives - the first one had a PC port released two years after its original release, the second one got a PC port three years after its own release, and PC owners never got a chance to play the rest. It was only at the end of 2019 that people were able to play the other games, when The Master Chief Collection started to be ported over, one game at a time (with remastered versions of the first two Halos), until the end of 2020. It doesn't have all the games, though - Halo 5: Guardians, the latest entry in the franchise so far, doesn't seem to have any plans for porting, and it's most likely that PC players will never get to play it at all.

Either way, at least I had the rest to play through, and the experience was pretty interesting, sometimes surprising, something frustrating, but I'm ultimately glad to have played through the whole thing.

The first two Halo games have been released as Anniversary editions, with overhauled graphics and a remixed soundtrack coupled with the ability to seamlessly switch between the old 2000s experience and the new one. As remeastered re-releases go, this is a pretty interesting feature, so I decided to play both of them with the new graphics turned on.


The first Halo game was a childhood favourite of mine, and I've played it countless times. With fantastic gunplay, the regenerating shield system that felt so fresh at the time (a feature that became incredibly commonplace as a result of its influence), and great atmosphere and environment design, it stuck with me for a very long while. I have to give special mention to that last bit, actually - Halo: Combat Evolved does a great job evoking a sense of awe and wonder in the player, with beautiful architecture and environments that are just alien enough that they feel both advanced and ancient, and the game wisely gives you enough moments of calm so you can absorb the atmosphere even more. The effect is distinctive enough that its absence in Halo 2 frustrated me to no end - but more on that later.


Halo: Combat Evolved is an incredibly popular game and is already considered a classic, but if you've managed to avoid it so far, here's the premise - it's the far-off future, and humanity's embroiled in a war with an alien force called the Covenant. During a battle, some of their capital ships stumble upon a strange artificial ring-world, which the Covenant immediately seem to recognize as some sort of holy weapon, and both sides battle it out in an attempt to seize control of the ring - but all is not what it seems to be. You play the Master Chief, a cybernetically enhanced supersoldier, trying to gain control of the ring as you get to learn about its true nature.

It feels a bit weird to leave this space spoiler-free, what with it being a twenty year old game by now, but that's alright.
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As I said earlier, I played it throughout with the new graphics turned on, and while I still had fun, the visual overhaul seems to have missed the point of a lot of the game. Dark, foreboding corridors are now brightly lit; rooms bathed in ominous purple lighting now have the entire colour scheme changed to bright blues and greens, and a lot of the alien structures seem to be overdesigned, adding stereotypical sci-fi tubelights to blank walls and bottomless pits. The effect isn't great, honestly, and I'd rather just use the classic graphics next time.

This is the second time I've played this game, and it's been an extremely surprising experience.

Halo 2 was a highly anticipated sequel when it came out in 2004, and it eventually became the highest selling game on the platform. It was also a game marred by clear production issues, with narrative risks that threw people off for quite a while, and a sudden cliffhanger ending that people widely hated. Personally, I'd only beaten Halo 2 once, and the weird shift in the focus of the game from excitement and wonder to pure pulse-pounding action disappointed me.

I've just beaten it for the second time, and my opinion on it has done a complete 180.

The premise, for those who don't know - after the destruction of the Halo ringworld in the first game, the Covenant travel to Earth, whose location had been carefully kept secret to protect humanity's homeworld, and immediately get to invading a city in Africa, to the confusion of everyone involved - it seems that the Covenant didn't expect humanity's presence at all. As humanity and the alien forces battle it out again, we keep shifting to a different perspective - the leader of the Covenant forces in the first game becomes a playable character called the Arbiter, as we see that the Covenant is literally a covenant of different alien species held together by religious fundamentalism and a belief in the ringworlds leading them to salvation.

There's MUCH more worldbuilding this time when it comes to the Covenant, and the human protagonist's brightly lit swashbuckling adventure levels contrast with the alien protagonist's moodier levels with their strange vistas. When I played the game for the first time, the focus shift alienated me, because I wanted something that felt like the first game. As I've grown older (and hopefully a little wiser), I've changed my stance on sequels enough to realize that the game I should have played, if I wanted something that felt like Halo: Combat Evolved, was Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo 2 is trying to show a very different experience, and honestly? I now think it's incredibly successful, and even the rushed ending doesn't bother me much.

The gameplay has also aged extremely well - Halo 2 introduces a whole bunch of weapons and dual wielding, and all of it feels fantastic to play with. In the first game, I generally stuck to a few weapons for dispatching different types of enemies, while in this one, I keep switching weapons to try new things and play differently, and nearly all of them are fun to use.

Halo 2 has also received the same Anniversary treatment, and the new designs are substantially more well conceived than the first game. The art style and colour schemes are all respected well, with modern textures spicing up a lot of areas and characters that were previously very low-quality, and massively improved lighting and models that make a lot of levels feel even more atmospheric. This also improved level design for me - levels that were formerly visually repetitive now feel much better to play through, and the music levels are much more audible and add a lot to the experience for me.

Before this, if anyone said Halo 2 was one of their favourite games of all time, I used to be quietly dismissive. Now, I'm finding myself agreeing with them, and wondering if I actually like this better than the first game, which was already one of my favourite games ever. 

​​I remember when the Xbox 360 came out and I wanted it so badly, and a huge part of that was Halo 3. I went to Gamefaqs and read the whole script, I read a million online reviews that were near-unanimous with their praise, and I kept hoping to play it someday. And finally, after thirteen years, I've finally gotten to play it for the first time, and I can finally experience what all those other people had played all those years ago, and I finally get to say...

Yeah, it's pretty good. Bit short though.

Halo 3's premise is this - the Covenant and humanity are engaged in war over Earth, and the alien protagonist's species has allied with humans. Barring a few extra complications towards the end... Yeah, that's pretty much it. Most of the game focuses on finishing the fight (which was literally an advertising tagline for this game), and the focus is spent on giving the player a bunch of large levels with a lot of strong enemies, a bunch of tools you can use to fight them, and giving you the freedom to do whatever you want to do.

While I was a bit disappointed coming in from Halo 2, I did admire the sheer focus of the game's design, which easily lends itself to the presence of some of the best gameplay sections in the series so far. In fact, while the level quality has been a bit hit-or-miss in previous games, nearly all the levels here (with the exception of the second last level) range from good to brilliant.

I am at a bit of a loss for words, though - all these years since I've wanted to play it, and I've just had an immense reversal of my opinion on its predecessor, and in the end, Halo 3 just ends up feeling like a very good game. Like, I'd be open to replaying some of the levels sometime, but there's no radically new addition to the series that makes me interested enough to write about - in the single-player campaign, at least, since Halo 2 and 3 are some of the most popular multiplayer games of all time, and while I'm not really interested in these games beyond their single-player story campaigns, it would be unfair if I didn't mention that Halo 3's popular innovations were all entirely on the multiplayer side, with map creators people could design on their console and play through.

Anyway, yeah, it's pretty good. Bit short though.

​Continuing on, I decided to play Halo 3's spinoff entry set on Earth, Halo 3: ODST. Set within the original trilogy and starting sometime towards the middle of Halo 2, it tracks a group of human soldiers as they go through an abandoned African metropolis and try to survive.

This is a somewhat interesting entry in the franchise. As a spinoff, ODST is afforded some leeway to change some parts of the core Halo experience, and it does that by putting you in the shoes of a regular soldier for a change, making you feel weak and mortal in comparison to the Master Chief from the main entries. There's a sense of danger and loneliness that's unique to this entry, and the music and sense of atmosphere are also all excellent, and even though it's got the same graphics as Halo 3, the lighting system seems to have been improved by leaps and bounds.

For much of the game, while you keep shifting perspectives between different soldiers of a squad, your main protagonist is a mute soldier who spends a night roaming through the ruins of a recently destroyed city. The perspective shifts are an interesting change of pace, showing off different characters, but here's where my major complaint lies - I really, really wish I cared about any of those characters at all. Most of them are completely forgettable, and the most memorable character is basically Nathan Fillion playing a wisecracking Captain Mal-type and delivering lines that make him look like an annoying jilted ex. There's a nice side-story you can optionally find through the game by unlocking audio files through terminals, and I was honestly much more invested in that part of the game.

That being said, it's Halo. The level designs are great, and none of the games from this point onwards really have a bad level as such. The gameplay is great, and the differences highlighting the vulnerability (no shields) and reduced strength of the player characters (no dual wielding) forces you to play smart. It's a small campaign, too, smaller than Halo 3 (which was already pretty short), and it's worth checking out.

Halo: Reach, along with ODST, were the last games created by Bungie, the original game developers for Halo, after which they handed over the series to Microsoft and went off to make their own games independently. While ODST was a spinoff with the same engine, though, Halo: Reach was designed to be Bungie's last moment of triumph, with a new engine and visual style, new weapons, and lots of interesting missions. 

Reach is located at the very beginning of the game list in the Master Chief Collection, which makes a lot of sense if you think in terms of chronology, and zero sense when you think about how the gameplay has evolved through the series. The game is basically a prequel to the first Halo game, functioning like Rogue One did for the original trilogy of Star Wars. Thankfully, I like it substantially more than Rogue One.

The setting might be one of the most interesting so far - the first Halo was set in the aftermath of a fierce battle that ended in the destruction of a planet, and Reach tasks you with fending off that destruction, playing a character whose doom you can already infer. The sombre nature of the story does a lot of heavy lifting, and while the writing of the characters isn't great (with a few exceptions that all die relatively early), the game does succeed in conveying a sense of tragedy and futility.

The game engine has been overhauled, with new graphics complementing a new art style that will only be seen for this single game. There are also a bunch of new weapons, and some of them become immediate favourites, like the Designated Marksman Rifle. The gameplay changes here feel like the next big step after Halo 2, with the open level design inherited from Halo 3, all coming together to form an excellent game that feels great to play. The campaign still doesn't reach the heights of Halo 2 for me, but that's fine.

Halo 4 is the first game made by a completely different studio - after Bungie left Microsoft handed development to a new studio tasked exclusively with the responsibility to continue the Halo series. It massively reinvents the gamefeel after Reach, bringing a lot of modern FPS elements to the franchise. It's an interesting experience - this was the most frustrated I felt at a Halo story so far, but it's also got some of the most gripping story beats in the whole franchise.

We get back to Master Chief's perspective after all these years, after the ending of Halo 3, and it's kind of weird how there's a lot from the previous games that gets thrown out, like dual wielding and the truce with the Covenant Elites - that last part especially irked me, because there's no in-game explanation given for why they're back to being villains beyond a single "yeah it's been four years, anything could have happened" (although I did find later that there were some logs you could find in a level that would show them to be some sort of splinter group, though the main story isn't concerned with telling that directly). A lot of the modern elements added feel irritating as well - Halo 3 and all subsequent games generally kept combat setpieces out of cutscenes and gave you control of the situation, and there are a few cutscene setpieces with quick-time events in Halo 4 that feel extremely out-of-place whenever they occur.

There are some good additions though, like how the game has an added sprint function that's separate from the armour abilities, which makes the game feel much better when you have to traverse certain large areas without a vehicle. There are a few new vehicles you get to pilot, which all feel good to control and use. A huge addition to the Halo franchise is the setting - for the first time since the first Halo, the environments felt new and alien to me, and the level design is clean and clear enough that none of it felt overly visually busy (unlike the new enemy models for both new foes and old).

The biggest change, though, is the relationship between the Master Chief and Cortana, which influences basically everything in the game. For the first time, the Chief speaks regularly during gameplay, which serves the dual purpose of both humanizing him and making him feel like even more of a badass during the times where he spontaneously makes decisions on his own. For the first time, we see Cortana's face on screen when she speaks to the Chief, and what previously felt like dry mission info now feels like a conversation between two friends who've been through hell together. This is easily my favourite part of the game, and it's a pity that some of the other parts don't quite live up to it - the central mysteries of the game are revealed with a single cutscene stuffed with heavy-handed exposition, the antagonist isn't very compelling or interesting, and one particular human character feels like he's inconsistently written to advance the plot.

The level design is nice, though - it doesn't really hit the highs of Halo 3 or Reach, but while there are some mediocre levels, there are enough interesting levels that I wanted to keep playing. The new enemies are fine, and while I was frustrated with them towards the beginning, I eventually got how to efficiently and quickly beat them using strategies that are very different from equivalent types of Covenant enemies - though I wish their visual design highlighted their ranks clearly enough. The new weapons don't feel different or special enough for me to have new favourites, but they're good enough that I had fun playing with them.

In the end, I did really like the game, even with its shortcomings. Halo has never really boasted exemplary writing or deep characterization, and while there are a lot of risks the narrative takes that don't always work, the ones that do pay off in spades.

Masterchef Haloman and the Arbiter have unresolved sexual tension and they need to hook up.

All jokes aside, this has been an interesting experience - the Halo series is one I was always aware of since my childhood, but it was always out of reach (pun intended) for me, and being able to play past the first two entries in the series has been a fantastic experience. A new entry is on the horizon as well - Halo Infinite - and while I'm not on tenterhooks waiting for it, I will try it out nevertheless.

Anyway, as Masterchef Haloman once said:-

In 1995, Neon Genesis Evangelion, a Japanese animated show based on an original script and running for 26 episodes, represented a seismic shift in the form and format of storytelling not just in anime, but in multiple forms of media all over the world, to the extent that even modern US animated shows have multiple references to its imagery.

In 2021, the final Evangelion movie, Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon A Time, was released theatrically as the final piece of Evangelion storytelling. While it's possible that the studio might make spinoffs of varying quality and scope in the future, this is the final end of Evangelion (funnily enough) as a story told by a singular vision.

In 2010, I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion for the first time and felt five emotions all at once upon finishing it - disappointment, wonder, catharsis, anger and confusion - and all those intensified upon watching its followup theatrical movie, The End Of Evangelion. Since then, Eva has had a tight grip on my psyche and tastes, being the one piece of media I've always called my eternal obsession.
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Over twenty-two years later, I've watched the final Eva movie and I have a lot of thoughts, and I'm struggling to put all of them into words. But let's try anyway.

(Heavy spoilers for all of Evangelion follow here)

First, the boring history portion - Neon Genesis Evangelion was released at a time when adaptations of manga (Japanese comics) were the norm, and while anime original series were not unheard of, they were generally in the minority. NGE was a monster-of-the-week series that turned into a psychological mystery, and since there was no source material for viewers to read and know its direction, everyone was hooked. Some of the main characters of the show (the ones I mention in this article further down, anyway) were as follows:-

• Shinji - the protagonist and pilot of Eva Unit 01, a realistic look at how young children thrust into roles of massive responsibility would respond, and how the circumstances leading them to that situation would be full of neglect and trauma. As said by Anno, an explicit parallel to himself.
• Rei - the pilot of Eva Unit 00, a cipher with no history who's struggling to understand her reason for existence.
• Asuka - the pilot of Eva Unit 02, a hotheaded prodigy who defines herself by her successes, and takes failures equally hard.
• Kaworu - a pilot who only appears in a single episode but instantly became iconic, the only pilot seemingly without any trauma. Has a fondness for Shinji and encourages him.
• Gendo - Shinji's absentee father and the director of the Evangelion mecha project. Abusive, sociopathic and solely focuses towards a sinister goal.

Anno had been famously upfront about suffering from depression throughout the production of NGE, which he changed substantially to reflect his growing self-loathing and isolation. The TV series and End of Evangelion, therefore, exist as fascinating pieces of art that humiliatingly reflect the psyche of a single creator. That's why I find it so interesting that Evangelion spawned a trillion-yen franchise and became part of the cultural lexicon of Japan - for a point of comparison, Star Wars is a similar cultural touchstone for USA, but the movies that kickstarted the franchise are substantially safer and more universally beloved.

Ten years after End of Evangelion, Anno released the first in a series of films called Rebuild Of Evangelion, a new rebooted continuity for Evangelion that would take the story of the original series with updated animation, a new score and better mental health on the part of Anno himself. The first movie (Evangelion 1.0, released in 2007) covered the original series' first six episodes and made a few changes but was mostly faithful, then the second movie (Evangelion 2.0, released in 2009) loosely covered the next thirteen episodes and ended up being simultaneously more cheerful and more devastating, with a completely different direction taken for the ending. The third one (Evangelion 3.0, released in 2012) took that new direction and plunged the story back into gloom and isolation, and as the films reflected Anno's relapse into depression, the series went on hiatus for nine years before finally concluding with Evangelion 3.0+1.0, released in 2021.

And that's the history of Evangelion. Now that the boring historical context is out of the way, it's time for what this article is really about - MY history with Evangelion.

Back when I was a schoolkid and watching as many classic anime series as I was able to pirate, Evangelion stood out from the rest for how thoroughly it angered and confused me, made me want a different story that was more traditional and concluded in a more satisfying way for me, and never left my mind. I hated the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion, an abstract duo of episodes that refused to conclude the story and only concluded the emotional journey of its protagonist - a hatred I moved away from after a few years and many rewatches. I hated The End of Evangelion for being so misanthropic and contemptuous of its viewership - another hatred I moved away from after a few years and many rewatches. The twenty-six episodes and concluding movie of the original run of Evangelion stayed rent-free in my head and constantly challenged me, and my opinions on it kept changing and mutating. 

Now, I think the original run is a masterpiece, and Neon Genesis Evangelion is easily my favourite anime series ever, and (possibly) my favourite television series ever. I love how the series focuses on multiple characters and their internal emotional journeys, and while it still feels frustrating when these characters can't meaningfully form connections with each other because they're afraid of heartbreak, it still feels nakedly human.

The above stands as an interesting contrast to my thoughts on the Rebuild series. Eva 1.0 made a few changes while still largely being the same story, but Eva 2.0 had extended scenes where the characters DO end up forming emotional connections with each other, with heartfelt conversations, teenage crushes and explicit actions taken towards emotional fulfilment. The third movie dialled it all back, however, restricting its focus to Shinji and leaving him isolated and shattered - while End of Evangelion feels like the most emotionally raw movie in the franchise, Evangelion 3.0 feels like the most emotionally cold.

Eva 2.0 became my favourite story in the franchise upon my first watch, and Eva 3.0 left me unsatisfied. But of the first three Rebuild movies, Eva 2.0 was the movie I progressively felt more disappointed by, with time and more rewatches, and to explain why, I need to talk about Nagisa Kaworu.

The central three characters of the series are the Evangelion pilots Shinji, Rei and Asuka, with Shinji being the lead protagonist - much of the focus is on Shinji's personal journey through depression, self-acceptance, and psychosexual self-hatred - he has clear attraction towards Rei and Asuka, his two female co-pilots of the same age, and there are hints of them reciprocating to a certain extent, but none of the three are emotionally healthy enough to confide in each other or open themselves up enough for even a clear friendship. The hedgehog's dilemma, a philosophical metaphor brought up in the show itself, describes it best - these people want to be close to each other, but being close to someone means vulnerability and the risk of being hurt, which they're all afraid of. Rei and Asuka don't receive as much of a focus as Shinji, but their inner psyches, along with their conflicts and traumas, are still explored and interrogated to a large extent. Throughout the show, it's clear that the three would benefit from knowing someone who's emotionally open with them, expresses clear and explicit affection without fear, and shows them that they're worth being loved.

Enter Kaworu, another Evangelion pilot, a character with almost as much influence as each of the core three, despite only appearing in a single episode in the original run. For Shinji, Kaworu represents exactly the kind of person I described above - an external force of affection that makes someone feel loved and accepted, so they might feel safe enough to open themselves up and love someone in return. Kaworu doesn't need an internal arc or unresolved traumas by design - he's a person meant to show the protagonist what it feels like to be accepted and loved, and what it looks like to accept and love someone. His death is a tragedy specifically written for Shinji as well, to drive him inwards because of that loss. He returns in Eva 3.0 to fulfil the same role, and similarly acts as a simple character fulfilling Shinji's need for company and acceptance after being hated and isolated from everyone in his own life.

What I'm trying to say here is, Rei and Asuka can't be characters with the sole goal of driving Shinji's character development in the TV series, because they're fleshed out with their own internal arcs and wants and needs, so Kaworu can act as a singular force to accomplish that goal - this is why I actually like the focused simplicity of his raison d'etre.

So anyway, Rei and Asuka in Eva 2.0 are characters sketched with the sole goal of driving Shinji's character development.

Their personal traumas are acknowledged, sure, but their personal character arcs all revolve around Shinji. Even Eva 2.0's version of the iconic elevator scene with both of them highlights this change - in the original series, their conflict comes from Asuka's drive towards superiority as a need for personal fulfilment and her dismissal of Rei as a puppet, versus Rei's own personal motivation for satisfying the role placed on her conflicting with her increasing desire for increased personhood.

In Eva 2.0, the conflict is because both of them like Shinji, and he clearly prefers Rei.

This is the main reason why I had become increasingly sceptical of the Rebuild movies as a whole - while the series did majorly focus on Shinji, the first three Rebuild movies near-exclusively focus on him, to the detriment of all its other characters. This can be mainly attributed to Anno, since he explicitly sees Shinji as a stand-in for himself, identifying with him the most and giving him all his neuroses and fears - which becomes more interesting with the case of Eva 3.0+1.0, the fourth and final Eva Rebuild movie.

There's a nine year gap between the third and fourth Rebuild movies, and Anno gave the reason for it a few years ago - he had relapsed into heavy depression, and he felt like his viewpoint had changed so drastically over the years that he couldn't identify with Shinji anymore, relating more to Gendo, Shinji's abusive and aloof father. He had to go to the voice actors for the characters and ask them how to conclude the character arcs, and this has seemed to affect the movie pretty prominently - the myopia of the movie's perspective was one of the most frustrating things about the third Eva movie, which chose to solely focus on Shinji, and Eva 3.0+1.0 has a thirty minute portion focusing on characters other than Shinji, and depicting a pastoral settlement of survivors trying to do their best and live a good life in the ruins of the world. This REALLY helps in getting us invested in the fate of the world, especially since we've seen numerous apocalyptic events in Evangelion without really seeing the humdrum sweetness of ordinary life beyond our main cast, and we need an anchor point to make us care about not wanting the world to end again. And in the backdrop of it all, Shinji lies wordless and paralyzed, unable to eat or speak.

Eva 3.0+1.0 is laser-focused on providing character-arc conclusions for everyone in the cast, be it tragic or happy. We saw a Rei growing to be happy in the first two movies, then saw her removed from the story completely and replaced with a clone developed separately and receiving no character moments in the third movie, so seeing this Rei clone go through a fully developed tragic arc in that pastoral portion of the movie made me completely emotionally hooked. We saw Asuka in the first two movies, but I didn't like her character development in those movies revolving solely around her crush on Shinji, so seeing her acknowledge and explicitly resolve her feelings was really cathartic to watch.

A huge part of this fourth movie was the focus on emotional catharsis, actually. There's a third act that goes into full-blown phantasmagorical imagery, sights and sounds inspiring more spiritual horror, and a lot of new pseudoscientific terms being tossed at us like machine-gun fire, and yet the movie never loses sight of the fact that all it's doing is providing more space for emotional catharsis. And the moment it completely won me over was when it finally emotionally dissected Gendo Ikari, the primary antagonist of the entire series - while his motives and reasoning weren't really surprising, hearing him emotionally talk about how much he was in love with his wife (the enigmatic Yui Ikari), how empty and horrified he felt on losing his wife, and how much he overcompensated to supress his feelings and dump his self-loathing on to other people was extremely satisfying.

All this, and the ending leads to a reset - one for the entire universe, one where Evangelions never existed in the first place, and all its characters are seemingly happy and fulfilled. Time resets are a pretty old trope in stories, especially in anime (I can mention two massively popular anime series that use the same trope off the top of my head), and the fact that Eva uses such an old trope to end its story is slightly disappointing, but I don't mind all that much. This is Hideaki Anno's conclusion to the story, not just for us, but for himself. No more Evangelions, and no more trauma. Hopefully.

And that's also why, while I think this is the strongest Rebuild Of Evangelion movie so far, it's also no masterpiece. How could it be? Neon Genesis Evangelion and The End of Evangelion weren't just masterpieces, they were earth-shattering stories that disrupted everything in their path and influenced countless stories for years to come. The most the Rebuild movies could ever have done was exist in their shadow, and all Eva 3.0+1.0 could ever do was finish the franchise in a satisfying way.

And it did! It just feels strange - I've always told my friends that Eva is, and always will be, my eternal obsession, and it's not going to change. Now, there's a satisfying capper on a franchise that has resisted imparting any degree of satisfaction, and that's fine, but I still feel strange, and I can't put my finger on why.

Maybe it isn't even about Evangelion, in the end. Maybe it's the fact that an incomplete chapter from my teenage years came back, said "Miss me?" and proceeded to conclude itself with a satisfying paragraph. There's closure, not just for Evangelion, but for that chapter of my life.

Maybe, in the end, I should just get used to the concept of closure.

Well, it's been a full month since the CoVID lockdown started, and a year of me working from home. Not sure how I feel about that, honestly, so let's distract ourselves from the fact that this month was LOADED, with a whole bunch of great games I played and replayed.

Just in case you're new to this series, I generally write an article every month recording the new (and old) stuff I’m watching, playing or listening to, and I’m doing it in a series of monthly articles. I’ll write some quick notes about the old stuff I went back to in the first section (Repeat Value), before getting into the new stuff (...The New Stuff).

It's all games this month, because I'm still going through that goshdarned mental block. Hopefully I can turn that around sometime in April.
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​I've been subscribed to Xbox Game Pass for a while, and I've had my eye on Halo: The Master Chief Collection ever since it started being released around eight years ago.

The Halo series is a long-running, highly acclaimed series of first person shooters, and for a very long time, only the first two games were available for the PC, with the rest being Xbox console exclusives. It was only at the end of 2019 that people were able to play the other games, when The Master Chief Collection started to be ported over, one game at a time, until the end of 2020. The first two games have been released as Anniversary editions, being remastered with overhauled visuals and a rerecorded soundtrack, and the games give you the option to switch between the old classic experience and the new remastered experience anytime. I've got all the games installed right now, and I played Halo: Combat Evolved for what's probably the 20th time or so.

The first Halo game was a childhood favourite of mine, and I've played it countless times. With fantastic gunplay, the regenerating shield system that felt so fresh at the time (a feature that became incredibly commonplace as a result of its influence), and great atmosphere and environment design, it stuck with me for a very long while. I have to give special mention to that last bit, actually - Halo: Combat Evolved does a great job evoking a sense of awe and wonder in the player, with beautiful architecture and environments that are just alien enough that they feel both advanced and ancient, and the game wisely gives you enough moments of calm so you can absorb the atmosphere even more. The effect is distinctive enough that its absence in Halo 2 frustrated me to no end - but more on that later.

Halo: Combat Evolved is an incredibly popular game and is already considered a classic, but if you've managed to avoid it so far, here's the premise - it's the far-off future, and humanity's embroiled in a war with an alien force called the Covenant. During a battle, some of their capital ships stumble upon a strange artificial ring-world, which the Covenant immediately seem to recognize as some sort of holy weapon, and both sides battle it out in an attempt to seize control of the ring - but all is not what it seems to be. You play the Master Chief, a cybernetically enhanced supersoldier, trying to gain control of the ring as you get to learn about its true nature.

It feels a bit weird to leave this space spoiler-free, what with it being a twenty year old game by now, but that's alright.
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I played it throughout with the new graphics turned on, and while I still had fun, the visual overhaul seems to have missed the point of a lot of the game. Dark, foreboding corridors are now brightly lit; rooms bathed in ominous purple lighting now have the entire colour scheme changed to bright blues and greens, and a lot of the alien structures seem to be overdesigned, adding stereotypical sci-fi tubelights to blank walls and bottomless pits. The effect isn't great, honestly, and I'd rather just use the classic graphics next time.
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This is the second time I've played this game, and it's been an extremely surprising experience.

Halo 2 was a highly anticipated sequel when it came out in 2004, and it eventually became the highest selling game on the platform. It was also a game marred by clear production issues, with narrative risks that threw people off for quite a while, and a sudden cliffhanger ending that people widely hated. Personally, I'd only beaten Halo 2 once, and the weird shift in the focus of the game from excitement and wonder to pure pulse-pounding action disappointed me.

I've just beaten it for the second time, and my opinion on it has done a complete 180.

The premise, for those who don't know - after the destruction of the Halo ringworld in the first game, the Covenant travel to Earth, whose location had been carefully kept secret to protect humanity's homeworld, and immediately get to invading a city in Africa, to the confusion of everyone involved - it seems that the Covenant didn't expect humanity's presence at all. As humanity and the alien forces battle it out again, we keep shifting to a different perspective - the leader of the Covenant forces in the first game becomes a playable character called the Arbiter, as we see that the Covenant is literally a covenant of different alien species held together by religious fundamentalism and a belief in the ringworlds leading them to salvation.

There's MUCH more worldbuilding this time when it comes to the Covenant, and the human protagonist's brightly lit swashbuckling adventure levels contrast with the alien protagonist's moodier levels with their strange vistas. When I played the game for the first time, the focus shift alienated me, because I wanted something that felt like the first game. As I've grown older (and hopefully a little wiser), I've changed my stance on sequels enough to realize that the game I should have played, if I wanted something that felt like Halo: Combat Evolved, was Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo 2 is trying to show a very different experience, and honestly? I now think it's incredibly successful, and even the rushed ending doesn't bother me much.

The gameplay has also aged extremely well - Halo 2 introduces a whole bunch of weapons and dual wielding, and all of it feels fantastic to play with. In the first game, I generally stuck to a few weapons for dispatching different types of enemies, while in this one, I keep switching weapons to try new things and play differently, and nearly all of them are fun to use.

Halo 2 has also received the same Anniversary treatment, and the new designs are substantially more well conceived than the first game. The art style and colour schemes are all respected well, with modern textures spicing up a lot of areas and characters that were previously very low-quality, and massively improved lighting and models that make a lot of levels feel even more atmospheric. This also improved level design for me - levels that were formerly visually repetitive now feel much better to play through, and the music levels are much more audible and add a lot to the experience for me.

Before this, if anyone said Halo 2 was one of their favourite games of all time, I used to be quietly dismissive. Now, I'm finding myself agreeing with them, and wondering if I actually like this better than the first game, which was already one of my favourite games ever. 
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Neoverse is a Slay The Spire-like card rouguelike - I've described Slay The Spire here, and I've played other StS-like games before too. Slay The Spire has become an immensely successful game archetype, and plenty of games have adopted its approach to gameplay in a lot of different settings. It was only a while before an immensely anime-as-hell version was made and released.

Neoverse is a fun action game set in a vague future where humanity is under attack, and you go through different universes and different time periods (some futuristic, some vaguely medieval) to defeat a whole bunch of monsters. It's got good visuals and character design, and a trio of attractive "waifus" (women designed to be attractive to a hetero male audience) as player characters - that last part is very clearly the USP of the game, to the point where it's even got costume pack DLCs to dress them up in revealing clothes.

The gameplay is alright, it's suitably fun and varied with the types of enemies and cards you can play. There isn't much I can say about it, I played it a bit off-and-on because it was on Xbox Game Pass.
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​​I remember when the Xbox 360 came out and I wanted it so badly, and a huge part of that was Halo 3. I went to Gamefaqs and read the whole script, I read a million online reviews that were near-unanimous with their praise, and I kept hoping to play it someday. And finally, after thirteen years, I've finally gotten to play it for the first time, and I can finally experience what all those other people had played all those years ago, and I finally get to say...

Yeah, it's pretty good. Bit short though.

Halo 3's premise is this - the Covenant and humanity are engaged in war over Earth, and the alien protagonist's species has allied with humans. Barring a few extra complications towards the end... Yeah, that's pretty much it. Most of the game focuses on finishing the fight (which was literally an advertising tagline for this game), and the focus is spent on giving the player a bunch of large levels with a lot of strong enemies, a bunch of tools you can use to fight them, and giving you the freedom to do whatever you want to do.

While I was a bit disappointed coming in from Halo 2, I did admire the sheer focus of the game's design, which easily lends itself to the presence of some of the best gameplay sections in the series so far. In fact, while the level quality has been a bit hit-or-miss in previous games, nearly all the levels here (with the exception of the second last level) range from good to brilliant.

I am at a bit of a loss for words, though - all these years since I've wanted to play it, and I've just had an immense reversal of my opinion on its predecessor, and in the end, Halo 3 just ends up feeling like a very good game. Like, I'd be open to replaying some of the levels sometime, but there's no radically new addition to the series that makes me interested enough to write about - in the single-player campaign, at least, since Halo 2 and 3 are some of the most popular multiplayer games of all time, and while I'm not really interested in these games beyond their single-player story campaigns, it would be unfair if I didn't mention that Halo 3's popular innovations were all entirely on the multiplayer side, with map creators people could design on their console and play through.

Anyway, yeah, it's pretty good. Bit short though.
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​I was debating whether to put this in the number one position, and it was an immensely difficult decision. You'll understand why when you see the top pick of the month.

Nier: Automata is a genre-blending action-adventure game set in a small open-world map, in the far-off post-apocalyptic future, where  you play an android soldier serving humanity, trying to defeat machines that serve alien invaders that have already held the earth for millennia. Or, at least, that's what it starts off as.

The first time you play it all the way through to the end credits, Nier: Automata is a good game with some enjoyable bosses, some interesting themes that don't really get explored all that much, and some intriguing worldbuilding. Once you finish it, a post-credits message asks you to play it again to experience "different endings".

Start a second playthrough, and the experience completely changes. The story is the same, but the framing and perspectives start being shuffled around to explore the underlying themes even more, with new revelations about the plot and more focus on the difference and similarities between the androids and the machines.

Start a third playthrough, and the experience changes even more drastically - a lot of online playthroughs mention that the real Nier: Automata experience starts here, which isn't inaccurate, with storylines and themes getting fully resolved, often to devastating effect.

The music is beautiful and unique too, complemented by a great art style to create a fantastic package. The gameplay is just alright, though - Nier: Automata tries out a mix of different genres for its moment-to-moment action, and even though it's not necessarily difficult, I didn't really have much fun with it. 

One side-note - just like Neoverse, Nier: Automata is also a very horny game when it comes to its character designs, with the creator openly admitting that he's made the primary female android characters attractive because he likes attractive women (which, I dunno if it's a great reason, but it's honest at the very least, unlike Hideo Kojima's infamous reasoning for a similar case). A lot of people online complain about how Nier: Automata's merits get overshadowed by the internet's slobbering over 2B's character design, which isn't really fair, since the game itself chooses to have her dressed in a battle one-piece that exposes her butt (poorly covered up with with a destructible skirt), and camera movement that focuses on upskirt shots when you climb certain ladders. There's no story reason for such sexualization, either, it's basic fanservice - which, depending on you and your preferences, you either might be into, tolerate, or find it a turn-off.

That being said, this is still a brilliantly written and conceived game otherwise, and at the end of the day, I do feel comfortable considering adding it to my list of favourites.​
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​I've finally gotten to play a very different type of rouguelike for once, after all those StS-like rouguelikes recently.

Hades is a hack-and-slash roguelike with a Greek mythology setting, where you play Zagreus, the sole son of Hades, god and king of the underworld, who's had enough of staying there and decides to escape and make his way to the gods in Olympus. Each run is an escape attempt, and the game does a fantastic job of making sure each run feels substantial in terms of progress, and has lots and lots of story content that keeps continuing after every run.

As an indie game from the makers of Bastion, Transistor and Pyre, Hades is a pretty nice success story, receiving critical and audience acclaim ever since it was officially released last year, and even winning a BAFTA award for best game a few weeks ago. It isn't hard to see why - the game feels amazing to control and play, and it keeps rewarding you for going through new runs, even if you fail, either mechanically or with new story beats. You keep getting motivated to push past each failure and continue onwards, and it doesn't feel repetitive despite the inherent nature of roguelikes.

Great dialogue, great character interactions, and the narrative and gameplay come together to provide an addictive feeling, where you constantly start more runs to keep finding new playstyles, perfect your favourite builds, and find out more about the people you encounter.

A small tangent, though - I've been seeking short games to play, because I tend to get worn out after spending so much time with a single game, like Hollow Knight, which I played last month and was eventually burnt out from. Hades took me even to get to the end-credits, taking a little under 60 hours to finish the main story, and I did feel burnt out by the end, but it was still addictive enough to make me want to start another run and try some new gameplay styles. The weird thing is, sites like HowLongToBeat.com mention that the average time to finish the main story is around 40 hours, and I see a lot of comments talking about how players finished the game within 30-40 runs - so either I took too much time experimenting and failing, or lots of people are lying online, or they enabled God Mode, a prominent accessibility setting that reduces the damage you take after each death you face.

Either way, maybe I'm not as good at games as I thought I was, but I'm still proud of beating the game without having to lower the difficulty.
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​And that’s it for this month! Hope you have a great month ahead, and check back next month for more!

Welcome to State of Media Consumption: January + February edition! I missed out on writing the January edition last month because there were a lot of things going on and I had other articles I had wanted to write, and February was mostly spent playing a single game. 

Just in case you're new to this series, I generally write an article every month recording the new (and old) stuff I’m watching, playing or listening to, and I’m doing it in a series of monthly articles. I’ll write some quick notes about the old stuff I went back to in the first section (Repeat Value), before getting into the new stuff (...The New Stuff).

Because a lot of it ends up being games, I think I'll split the article by medium from now on, to avoid direct comparisons through ranking.
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​I haven't been watching movies for a very long while, and I had tried to keep myself motivated by joining a movie-watching group. Last month, the movie to watch was one I had already seen previously, which was a slightly easier task to do than watching something new. So, I rewatched Boys n The Hood.

Boys n The Hood is a coming-of-age story centered on a cast of characters in a black neighbourhood in the US, and is focused on the difficult circumstances they face while growing up, like gang violence, drug problems and poverty. A lot of the problems are implicitly mentioned as being because of institutional racism in the US, and I hadn't really understood that when I watched it a long while ago.

I still like it, but it got me thinking more about the type of movies I watch and the kind of communal dynamics I generally see in movies. There are only two peripheral characters in Boys n The Hood, and the causes of racism and gentrification aren't really explored much beyond a fantastic scene with Laurence Fishburne. Maybe I'm being unfair - it's probably extremely obvious to people in the US and they didn't really write a bunch of scenes informing foreigners about the dynamics of their societal issues, and I did understand it now because US media has tackled it in so many places.

And I don't really see many Indian movies that tackle our societal dynamics and problems in a way all these movies do. A lot of it is because of the people who are generally given the chance to write and direct movies, with all of them generally being rich and upper caste, and whatever the characters do end up being informed by those outlooks (like how we have an weirdly high amount of popular classic Hindi movies centered on extremely posh boarding schools).

Anyway, movie still good.
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​I wrote an article about the strange phenomenon of V-Tubers last month, and specifically talked about a V-Tuber named Haachama, who was doing a lot of chaotic experimentation through her streams. Two weeks after my article, she took the experimentation even further, creating a whole arc out of two personalities that might be long-lost twin sisters, split personalities, both or neither, resulting in one of the most interesting livestream storylines I've ever seen.

To recap what I had written previously, V-Tubers generally adopt some sort of personality, similar to wrestlers and their keyfabe, and Haachama was previously known as Akai Haato, a fairly pure high school idol personality who was written and performed as a Tsundere (a fairly popular anime trope referring to people who act prickly with affection but are secretly affectionate themselves). Towards the beginning of 2020, Haato drastically altered her own personality and started calling herself Haachama, with her content being bafflingly chaotic and unsettling. A lot of people jokingly referred to this new direction by saying that Haachama was a separate person from Haato altogether, and Haachama occasionally referenced this meme herself.

At the beginning of February, Haachama suddenly started a Minecraft stream without much prior notice, speaking in a much calmer tone, wearing her old schoolgirl outfit and hairstyle, referring to herself as Haato and using her old catchphrases. People were initially surprised and suspicious, and their suspicions were confirmed with an unarchived livestream karaoke that used a bunch of English songs (and interspersed visuals of Haato behind bars) to craft a narrative of Haachama and Haato being separate and distinct, with the former actively working to suppress her.

The story went on with further livestreams, with audience participation being extremely high and rocketing her towards a million subscribers, and she kept making stranger and bolder choices - at one controversial point, Haachama beheaded Haato onscreen, showing us the headless body drop and making us hear the sound of its fall. In another livestream, Haato beheaded Haachama and sewed her own head back onto the body, with the implication being that one couldn't die as long as the other was alive. The plot kept getting thicker and the tone kept veering further into cryptic horror, right up until a few days ago - Haachama addressed the audience out of character, expressed regret at having alienated many of her viewers, and said that she couldn't help but make strange content because this was simply what she loved making. She said she'd be pausing the arc for now, honing her skills, and get back to it at a future date, and asked the viewers to accept both parts of her.

While this was pretty sad, it's understandable - the person behind the character is apparently their youngest talent, and she was crafting all the horror skits and writing all the dialogue by herself, which would have burned anyone out. Hopefully, she's able to do more of what she wants in the future.
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​A Hand With Many Fingers is a game made by Colestia, an explicitly communist game developer. I've played free games by him previously (They Came From A Communist Planet and A Bewitching Revolution) and included him in some past articles, and this is the first paid game I've bought from him.

This is a detective game where you're given an archive office and a bunch of reference cabinets and given a suicide case to look up, which case quickly turns into a Cold War conspiracy involving multiple countries and shell companies. I did find the ending a bit underwhelming, especially because the underlying connections become obvious pretty quickly, so when you find the last piece of the puzzle, there's no major revelation as such, only a confirmation for what was pretty obvious from the very beginning.

Still, there's potential here, and I'm looking forward to whatever he makes next.
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​Pony Island is a pretty well-known indie game in online circles, and is usually included in many articles when they talk about games that work in a very metatextual way, deconstructing the way you play it and frequently breaking the fourth wall.

Ostensibly a simple platformer where you play as a pony, Pony Island gets more complicated later, with many twists changing how you perceive the game throughout. I'll avoid further spoilers (partially because I don't really have much more to say about how it works or what it made me think) and say this - if you have some money and time to spare, it's not a bad game to check out.
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Monster Train is a game that's very similar to Slay The Spire, a game I've talked about previously that I love, and it adds some unique twists of its own to the genre The basic gameplay is basically the same as Slay The Spire, but with an additional tower-defense mechanic - your train is inhabited by infernal creatures that want to make their way back to the underworld, and you have to travel on a sentient train and protect its heart while angelic beings try their best to destroy it and halt your progress.

The game is very well made and enjoyable, and a bit easier than Slay The Spire - I was able to finish a run fairly early, and was encouraged to play with multiple types of infernal species and unlock more monsters to play with.

I don't really have much else to say about this one, honestly - if you enjoy games like this, you'll probably enjoy Monster Train too.
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Mutazione is a nice little indie game I got for free off the Epic Games Store. It's partly a nice and calm garden simulator, and partly a soapy melodrama with melodramatic, memorable characters. There's a great soundtrack here, and the art style is visually appealing as well.

There's not a lot more I have to say about this one, honestly, but I really enjoyed my time with this.
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​Made by Dontnod Entertainment, the developers of the Life Is Strange series, Tell Me Why is about two siblings who were split apart in their childhood after a traumatic event and have reunited after ten years, and have to understand and reconcile their differing memories of the past.

The central conceit lies around the protagonists being able to telepathically communicate and relive their memories to look at the shared trauma in their past. There are various points in the game where their memories differ, and you're given the option to choose one version over the other. This doesn't change this past, only how the siblings perceive it, which informs how they learn to cope with the past and move on.

Tell Me Why is notable for being the first game by a major studio to explicitly feature a trans male protagonist, and Dontnod Entertainment did a lot of stuff to ensure that the story regarding him was well-told, even releasing a Frequently Asked Questions article solely related to content warnings regarding his storyline to make sure that trans gamers were well-informed regarding any content warnings beforehand.

The overall story, though, while well-told and portrayed, doesn't feel very daring. There are no major twists or heart-wrenching moments like in their previous games, which seems to be by design - Tell Me Why isn't about living through harsh times, it's about dealing with the harsh times that have already been relegated to a distant, fuzzy memory. Which is why I can recommend it as a generally well-made story, but I don't think it'll be a new favourite for most people.

Either way, it's on Game Pass, so it's worth a look.
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​Tales From Off-Peak: Vol. 1 is the latest game by Cosmo D and set in the continuity of his earlier games, Off-Peak and The Norwood Suite (both of which I mentioned in my last monthly roundup, with the latter being my favourite game of December).

Explaining the game's premise is a bit harder than its predecessors, but I'll try anyway - you're dropped off in a little secluded neighbourhood of a town that is being taken over by corporations and factories, and tasked with the goal of stealing a saxophone from a musician-turned-pizza maker by applying to work at his restaurant. Things quickly get complicated when he's shipped off in an ambulance and immediately bequeaths his restaurant to you, and the strange people and paranoia around the neighbourhood imply something sinister going on.

As expected, the game has a great soundtrack and some fantastic surreal imagery - one of the first people you meet is a talking building, for example - and it's interesting seeing a new game from this developer that's explicitly setting up a story through multiple chapters, with even the name indicating that it's part of a greater whole. This does mean that the story is left incomplete, though, and the ending wasn't as satisfying to me as a result. I guess that's to be expected, though, and my opinion might change with Vol. 2.

Either way, this is a two-hour experience at most and I highly recommend it if you're interested.
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​The Sexy Brutale is an interesting and fun litle adventure game where you, the guest in a masquerade ball in a casino, are stuck in a timeloop and have to relive the same day over and over, and your fellow guests are being systematically murdered by its servants.

The game's goal is to study all the guests and the servants, understand their movements and actions, and find a chance to save the former. The game throws an additional complication at you though - you can't be witnessed by any of the characters while doing any of it, be it a guest or a servant, so you have to stay out of sight of everyone and find indirect ways to plan out your rescues.

The only criticism I have for the game is that it takes a while for the plot to become compelling and interesting. The beginning is fine, if a little unmotivating, and it takes a while for the direction and tone of the game to become clear. Once it does, though, it's a great and memorable ride with a surprisingly emotional ending.
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Highly recommended.
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​Control is a game made by Remedy Entertainment, and before I talk about it, I want to briefly talk about the studio in general.

Remedy Entertainment is a Finnish studio that shot to fame in the early 2000s with their first two Max Payne games, later passing on the IP to Rockstar (which developed the third game) and entering a partnership with Microsoft to develop new game properties. They've made three games after their Max Payne duology - Alan Wake, Quantum Break and Control, and have mentioned that all three take place within the same continuity.

I've enjoyed Remedy Entertainment's style of gameplay and storytelling a lot since my childhood. The Max Payne series helped show off the type of stuff they like to put in their games - stylish action, a monologuing protagonist who straddles the line between goofy and self-serious, sections full of trippy imagery, sequences set to Poets Of The Fall songs, lots of references to 20th century film and literature, and a whole lot of medium blending between real-life, comics and animation. No matter how big their games get, you always get the sense that the experience you're having has been hand-crafted with lots of love.

Control is an action-adventure game with a setting inspired both by The X-Files (a US TV show centered on a governmental body looking into paranormal events) and the SCP Foundation (a collective Internet writing exercise initially similar to the X-Files where the organization seeks to contain various paranormal phenomena), with its story revolving around a breach of containment in a similarly inspired fictional US governmental body, the Federal Bureau Of Control, which is being held hostage by an eldritch paranormal power called the Hiss. There's a lot of fun, weird stuff it pulls off, and while I did feel that the experience felt a little safe and didn't take huge narrative risks with the kind of weird paranormal stuff it showed, the story was still very enjoyable overall.

The gameplay itself is a lot of fun too, and surveying the damage done to your surroundings after particularly hectic fights can be a lot of fun to witness. There are some weird difficulty spikes towards the end, but it's still generally very enjoyable. The graphics and art-style are also outstanding - there's a photo mode in this game (like in a lot of other modern games) and I've been compelled to take close to a hundred pictures in a single playthrough.
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​Hollow Knight is my favourite game that I've played in this article, and most of this month was spent solely playing this game. I'm also done with it for now, and don't want to return for a while.

Let me explain why.

Hollow Knight is a mixture of two popular game-like game genres, a Metroidvania and a Soulslike. A Metroidvania (whose name is taken from two popular franchises, Metroid and Castlevania) features a series of interconnected maps with inaccessible areas you'll usually be able to bypass after finding one of many items/powerups. A Soulslike (whose name is taken from the Demon's Souls/Dark Souls series by From Software) is characterized by difficult combat where you're expected to die multiple times before getting the hang of each encounter, and features resources you collect from enemies, lose upon death and have to find your own corpse at the previous point of death (before dying again) to retrieve them.

Hollow Knight is a 2D action-platformer game where you play an enigmatic little bug and go through the ruins of a vast insect empire, strewn about with the corpses of its former bug denizens, some of which are infected and return as zombies to attack you. The aesthetic is extremely interesting, striking a fine balance between cutesy and gloomy, with the music combining synths and strings to cultivate a melancholy atmosphere full of wonder and danger.

The main draw of Hollow Knight is its gameplay, though, and its challenging combat scenarios and responsive controls result in a game where you feel completely in control of your actions, which means you can only blame yourself when you die, and you feel especially accomplished when you succeed. This extends to its challenging and memorable boss fights as well, of which there are many, and the combat feels great and exciting enough for you to shrug off your many deaths and continue onwards, and you're consistently rewarded with powerups and items that you can use to explore the kingdom even further.

That being said, it's a very, very long game with multiple endings. I spent 35 hours before getting to the first ending, and there were a lot of extremely hard boss fights to get through before I got better endings. Like I said, I've been playing this game for over a month by now, and I've been completely worn out.

Maybe I'll get back to it sometime in the future, but for now, I've decided to call it quits and stop playing. I still recommend it, though - it's a great experience, and I've enjoyed a lot of my time spent here. I've just decided to move on for now.
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​And that’s it for this month! Hope you have a great month ahead, and check back next month for more!

​This is an article I've wanted to write for a very long while.

Outer Wilds is a 2019 video game that I finished in 2020, and towards the beginning of 2021, I was listening to a podcast episode specifically dedicated to the experience of finishing this game. Austin Walker, one of the hosts of Waypoint Radio, talked about how, once he finished it, he immediately has the thought of being sure that this was his favourite game of 2020. This thought continued, though, and he had to ask himself - was it more than just that?

I related to this sentiment a lot, and I had some thoughts of my own knocking about in my head since completing it. I had one specific experience I've never had with any other piece of media, and had never thought I'd feel after watching any movie, reading any book, or playing any game. I've tried to put this experience into words for a long while, and I've decided to finally write it out and release it as an article.

So, this is the story of how Outer Wilds, the space exploration adventure game, gave me an existential crisis. This isn't an article I could spin into anything positive, so apologies in advance.

Some major spoilers are present in the article, and while I won't mention anything in the endgame, I do spoil some mysteries that you might want to figure out by yourself if you were looking forward to playing this game sometime in the future. This is a game about discovery, so if you haven't played the game, I'd recommend you read this article only if you don't plan on playing it.
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​Outer Wilds puts you in the shoes of a fledgling astronaut belonging to an alien race in a solar system far, far away. You learn the ropes of navigation in zero-gravity, you learn how to operate your equipment and your ship, and when you go to retrieve the launch codes for your spaceship from a senior scientist, he asks you what you're going to do first. The developers have talked about this dialogue choice in multiple interviews, and how it was engineered to make the player feel like they were empowered to go anywhere and do anything. The first half-hour of the game is fully designed to stoke your curiosity and make you excited to explore space, and when you finally board your spaceship, you have a whole solar system to explore.

​Then, 22 minutes later, the sun suddenly goes supernova, and you have no option but to watch it change colour and expand, vaporizing every planet in its way until it reaches you. And then you die.

And then you wake up at the very beginning.

A couple of months ago, I was discussing nihilism with a couple of friends. I'm sure readers will know this, but I'll give a short primer just in case - nihilism, in the existential sense, refers to the theory that there is no meaning or purpose to life, the universe, or anything at all. There are two reactions one might have when they take this theory to heart and accept it. The first is pessimism, where one loses the will to do or believe in anything at all, because there is no inherent value in any action or thought or moral stance. The second is optimism, where one can still recognize the lack of inherent value in those things, but feel emboldened by it and impose their own value on the universe. In short, pessimistic nihilists believe life has no meaning and nothing is worth doing, optimistic nihilists believe that life has no meaning except what you give it, so you get to define the worth of your actions yourself.

A lot of people talk about the concept of anti-nihilism as a concept to contrast with nihilism, but any descriptions of the same invariably end up being that of optimistic nihilism. One of my friends were talking about a discord server they had joined, where people were circulating PDFs of a book talking about Friedrich Nietzsche and how he actually advocated for the opposite of nihilism, and I argued that Nietzsche never said that the absence of inherent meaning was a reason for pessimism. The idea that nothing has any inherent meaning can be taken in either a negative or positive way, and a lot of people automatically associate nihilism with pessimism, but that isn't really the case, I argued.

Here's the thing - I was wrong.

Outer Wilds is a game where you're stuck in a 22 minute time loop, and you have a whole solar system working in clockwork synchronization to provide a near-deterministic simulation of planets, their weather patterns, their orbits, etc. What this means, in simplified terms, is that every time you start the loop and go to any planet in the solar system, you will see the same movement in the planets, see falling columns of sand fill in caves in close to the exact same time, and walk on a crumbling world with black holes at its center that collapses inwards in mostly the same way. And as you go through this simulated solar system, you explore wondrous planets - twin planets in orbit with each other that periodically shift their sandy crust from one planet to the other (called the Hourglass Twins, for obvious reasons), the aforementioned black hole planet, a giant water planet with perpetually persistent cyclones, and a cracked, infected shell of a planet that twists and turns inwards into an abstract recursion of folded space.

And as you keep exploring, you find out more about the Nomai, a spacefaring species that lived in these planets millions of years ago, whose people all went extinct in some unknown event a long while ago. The more you find out about them, the deeper the mystery goes, and at one point, you realize that the time loop you're stuck in is a result of some powerful feat of technology they created. A long while ago, the Nomai sought to induce a supernova in the sun through an orbital station and harness its power, all in order to send the memories of certain people back in time before the station was activated.

The hubris of science, then - a classic trope in science fiction, where people too far removed from morality decide to perform scientific experiments without regard for its results, and unwittingly unleash a disaster. It's a familiar trope, and I naturally came to the conclusion that this was the central mystery's solution, after which the goal of the game became clear - stop the station, shut down the time loop machine, save the solar system.

Except it wasn't that simple.

The Nomai weren't a native part of the solar system - they were part of a giant spacefaring civilization with a cultural hunger for discovery, and they travelled through space searching for something they called the Eye of the Universe - something they believed to be a living, breathing core where everything in existence originated. A long time ago, the crew of one of their spaceships detected a frequency they quickly theorized were coming from the Eye, jumped through lightspeed, and immediately got caught in the folded innards of the infected planet in your solar system, with the survivors stranded across multiple other planets and isolated from the rest of their species.

As you go through the game and explore the solar system, you find giant structures, small homesteads and schools, and as you translate the writings you find across the system, you find out more about the people who inhabited them long ago. The Nomai rebuilt, carving out planets with no fauna and ethically avoiding planets with living microorganisms, and eventually found each other across planets and reunited. You find out about this through diary entries of lovers separated and worried for each other, siblings bickering and joking with each other, scientists discussing the wonders they've found in this solar system, and you find out about the hopes, dreams, and fears of these people and feel closer to them.

And you do it all while stepping over their skeletons and spacesuit-bound corpses.

There are a series of runes you can find and translate that were written by a Nomai woman named Solanum. Born and brought up in your solar system all those millions of years ago, she had never known anything but the hardship of surviving in a place that's not hers, and had to struggle with the optimism and joy of discovery her elders showed. The Eye, she wrote, might not exist at all, and the message frequency they discovered might have been wrong. Or they weren't, and the Eye purposefully stranded them there. "They say it brought us to this solar system," she writes, "but is that good? Dad told me lots of Nomai died when our clan came here. What if the Eye wanted that to happen? What if the Eye isn’t something good?"

Eventually, you make your way to the Sun Station. Armed with all the knowledge you've found, you reach its interiors and look for the controls to disable it, and you realize, with horror, that the Sun Station was a failure. The notes there indicate that the Nomai failed to make it work, and they were never able to get the time loop project up and running. A nearby display tells you the time left till the sun explodes in your current time loop, and notes that it's reached the end of its natural life cycle.

You, the protagonist, have been born into a species that has a natural thirst for discovery and a goal to explore all that your telescopes have found, and you have all reached this moment in your evolution at the exact time your solar system was about to end. You were always doomed, and there was nothing you could ever have done to stop the sun from going supernova. The only reason you were stuck in the dying breaths of your local sun's life was because its explosion accidentally activated the time loop project, and you happened to be accidentally paired to one of the machines they used to sync people to their earlier memories.

And this can be a moment you use to motivate yourself, find more about the technology the Nomai used and see if you can use it to change things somehow. Time travel, that was a thing they basically invented, right? What was that for?

Outer Wilds took me around 24 hours to complete, and a lot of it was spent exploring the wondrous planets in the system, using my knowledge of the time loop to access places I otherwise couldn't, use the machines of the Nomai and see what they did, and find notes and make discoveries I could use to access other parts of other planets I had found. The central allure of the game was the feeling I got when I solved the interconnected mysteries in front of me, and I never really gained any powers or upgrades - it's not really that kind of game. The only reward I got for my exploration was discovery, and the purpose of that discovery was to find new ways to explore inaccessible places, and this loop of exploration and discovery formed an immensely satisfying experience for me.

All that, and there was still this pit that kept forming at the bottom of my stomach, this fear that all I was doing was for nothing.

When you read philosophers and their works on nihilism, you'll find that they don't really make the distinction between optimistic and pessimistic nihilism the way I was making earlier - both are natural conclusions they draw from the concept. Nietzsche talks about how nihilism naturally brings about a destruction of the sacred precepts of life we hold dear, like the values we've always held as being morally righteous and correct, and the pessimism that comes about from that isn't a wrong conclusion - it's a necessary step to overcome if you want to accept the power you have over your life and value system, and it's an inevitable step. If someone hasn't experienced it, they haven't fully understood the sheer helplessness that existential nihilism makes people feel, and they haven't fully appreciated the power of the responsibility they must take on for their own self.

I've talked about a lot of the discoveries you can make in the game, but I have to switch to first-person for the rest of this account, for reasons that will hopefully become clear very soon. Before that, though, for this next part, I must ask you, the reader, for a favour - I've included one of the tracks from the game's soundtrack below, and I'd appreciate it if you could play it while you read the rest of the article.
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​As I explored the solar system, I eventually made my way through to Dark Bramble, the farthest planet from the sun, the infected planet where space folded into itself. I found small holes in the planet, entered them, and the space around expanded to a massive, foggy area with dangerous predators - it was literally, as Doctor Who fans would say, bigger on the inside. And it went further beyond - I found a gnarled network of roots and branches with small pods at certain junctures that you could enter, which expanded inwards even further, like a Matryoshka doll of extradimensional spaces, all with giant space anglerfish that roared and lunged towards your spaceship to devour and kill you.

And at the center of it all, I found the Nomai vessel, the spaceship that they had crash-landed on. The Nomai referred to this Vessel as being alive in certain entries they had kept, and mentioned that it was mortally wounded when it crashed. With all the corpses of the people I had found, I had lost count of the amount of dead people I had seen, all the diary entries I found belonging to people I saw lying on the ground, all their lives and aspirations cut short - this was just another corpse I was walking through, albeit a mechanical one, whose life I would never understand or be able to witness. And as I made my way to the central bridge, I found a signal from other Nomai in the universe. There were Nomai who were alive, people who were still exploring and travelling, people with spaceships that could feasibly transport us, I hoped, saving us from the clutches of the dying sun.

"To any Nomai clans whose Vessels can hear this message," the message said, "It’s clear the universe is dying... Any Vessels nearby, remember to be extremely cautious of potentially unstable stars (which is most of them, now)."

It wasn't enough that my player character took flight on the day the sun was destined to die - it wasn't just all of my species, it was everyone else, always doomed, because the heat death of the universe was already underway.

I took my spaceship out of Dark Bramble and into the relative safety of space. With very little time left before the next supernova, I decided to look at the distant stars, and saw a small fizzle in one of them, followed by darkness. Then, after a while, another one. Then another one. All of the stars were exploding, and the lights were going out, one by one. Nothing I did had any meaning. Nothing I could do was going to save anyone. Death is all there was, and I stayed there, helpless, powerless.

And then it wasn't just me in the game - I was acutely aware of myself and my place in the room, in the city, in the world, in a vast, exciting, mysterious, uncaring universe, and everything felt to me like it was worth nothing. Humankind will eventually die. The world will freeze over, then boil over, then be enveloped by the scorching heat of a dying sun. Life is an accident in the grand scheme of things, years feeling like seconds in the eternity of existence, and each of my successes felt like they had no meaning, each failure felt like it was fated, and I felt infinitesimally small.

And as these thoughts all came crashing down and made my head feel heavy, I saw the small laptop screen in front of me, the small simulation of the sun turning blue and expanding, devouring everything in its path, and it was only a matter of seconds until my screen was enveloped in whiteness, and another death passed.

And I finally understood the helplessness people experience in the face of nothingness.

Outer Wilds is a far more optimistic game than what I've shown in this article - and I haven't revealed so much about the mysteries in the game, so if you were on the fence about getting it, I highly encourage you do - but it doesn't promise you a happy ending. There is an eventual goal you discover by yourself that brings forth an immensely satisfying ending, but the story doesn't change the fact that you're doomed. The loop of discovery and exploration is all you have - but you're given the power to choose what you want to do, where you want to go, which wonder you want to experience next. Exploration, the game posits, is its own reward, and no matter what your fate might be, what matters is the here and now, and the free will you exercise in the choices you make. You alone can decide the value of your actions, and it's scary, and it's life-affirming - but I can't find much in the way of helping anyone go through their own moments of helplessness and feelings of insignificance.

It'll get better. You've got the power to make it better. Only you can make it better.