This month’s pick for the Dystopian Novels Book Club. I’ve read it before, but so long ago that I’d forgotten most of the details. In it, a group of boys crash land on a deserted island and attempt to build a society with each person filling different roles. Throughout the course of the book, this all falls apart, descending into arguing, fighting, and eventually murder.
The eleventh book in the Discworld series. In this one, Death is removed from his duties and made mortal by the auditors for developing a personality. I think this is the first appearance of the auditors, literally faceless bureaucrats of the universe. This is also the story that introduces the Death of Rats, since living creatures start creating new mythological beings to replace the missing Death.
I finished the Pixel Remaster version of Final Fantasy III. This was the only single-player mainline game in the series that I hadn’t already completed.
This month’s pick for the Dystopian Novels book club. It’s just been released on paperback after winning the 2023 Booker Prize. It tells the story of a family in the Republic of Ireland living through the rise of a totalitarian government.
A pixel-art platform game where you’re climbing a mountain. You can boost once in the air, similar to a double jump but in a straight direction rather than another arc. You can also hold onto walls for a short time and jump away from them. The controls are absolutely perfect, and they need to be as the game gets very difficult as it goes on. When you die, you are respawned onto the same screen, and there is no lives system so you can try as many times as you like. This is great, as it means that you can really experiment and get used to the limits of your character.
This is a first-person shooter where time only moves when you do. This means that you can plan out exactly how to take down each enemy and react to bullets flying at you. You die if you get hit a single time, but the levels are short and you can restart instantly. The game itself is short as well; it took me about two or three hours to complete.
This is the 2013 game by Crystal Dynamics rather than the 1996 original by Core Design. I loved the original game on the PS1, and although this one shares the same name, it’s not a remake. This is an origin story of Lara Croft that’s more focused on characters and feels more grounded in reality—although not too much, as it still has mythological creatures coming to life.
I got my copy from Standard Ebooks, which is a site making excellent ebooks of public domain books. I’m finding them to be better than anything I’d find on the Kobo store other than Penguin Classics.
An HTML5 game in which you’re head of research in a company that’s performing experiments on something only known as “Subject 219”. You’re not really given any description of it, or any background of what the company is or the products that get mentioned are.
Just finished Limbo, a very short black-and-white platformer. You play as a little child, and there’s barely any context. From the title, I’m guessing the child has died and is making their way to the afterlife. The game is heavy on trial and error, I was constantly getting killed.
I originally bought this on the PlayStation Vita in 2013, and had given up on actually completing it. I finally beat it on the Steam Deck today. The game is a platformer with sixteen levels over four areas, but apart from the final one each level is randomly generated. It is incredibly difficult, and is happy to kill you within seconds of starting. Each time you die you have to start again with freshly generated levels. You can unlock shortcuts to the later areas as you go by providing items to a man digging tunnels.
This may be the fifth time that I’ve gotten all 120 stars in this game, although it could be more. My brother bought this at release in the US as we happened to be there on holiday at the time. It was just unbelievable at the time, such a leap forward in video games. I really doubt we’ll ever see anything like it again. The last game I played Jumping Flash! only came out the year before and the difference in controls and depth is incredible.
I got the original PlayStation at launch in the UK by going halves with my brother. We got a memory card and Ridge Racer, which I finished the same day. It also came with a demo disk that had an interactive T-Rex, and a demo for Loaded among other games. I think there was a video for WipeOut maybe too.
This was this months pick for the Dystopian Novels Book Club. It is a science fiction novel set in a future where women have been stripped of all rights in the US. Humans have gained contact with multiple alien species, and only a subset of linguist families called The Lines are able to communicate with them. There are a group of women who are creating their own language centred around the female perspective in the hope of freeing themselves.
This is a game where you play as a border guard in 1982 for a fictional Soviet style country. Sat in your station, you call people in one by one and check all of their documents. The rules and requirements of these change quite regularly. You get paid for the amount of people you process, and get fined for mistakes.