Tag: impressions

Japanese Rural Life Adventure is exactly what it sounds like and more

Japanese Rural Life Adventure is what it says on the tin — it’s a 16-bit-style farming sim that takes place in the countryside, and it’s filled with hallmarks of the genre: You leave the city to arrive at a broken-down farm that you revitalize as you meet the townsfolk and become a part of their community. But this one doesn’t feel cramped or shortchanged on mobile. In fact, it’s designed for the medium.

Released on Apple Arcade on Sept. 15, 2023, Japanese Rural Life Adventure is not developer Game Start’s first foray into life sims nor pixel art — the studio is also responsible for Tiny Island Survival and Tiny Pixel Farm, both of which nail the nostalgic look.

“When developing a new game, we try to create pictures of various worlds using pixel art (for example, a deserted island, space, a museum, an amusement park, etc.),” Game Start founder Takeo Fujita said in an email interview. “When we drew ‘rural Japan,’ we thought ‘this will surely excite users,’ and uploaded the image to social media. The response was beyond our imagination, so we began full-scale development of a game with a ‘rural Japan’ motif.”

The original concept art for Japanese Rural Life Adventure.
Image: GameStart/Apple

And that motif is extremely successful in the game — so much so that I’ve found myself searching for images of a real-life place that evokes the town in the game. It’s hilly and filled with relics of the past, like abandoned shrines and overgrown stone walls, and I can almost smell the petrichor of the foggy mornings on the mountainside. But according to Fujita, finding somewhere like this in real life is no easy feat.

“There is no electricity or gas infrastructure, and water is drawn from wells and rivers. It may be difficult to find a place like this in modern-day Japan,” Fujita said, clarifying that despite the rural nature of it, the game is set in the modern day. “An old folk house deep in the mountains, quietly left behind by the current of modernity. This is the setting of the game.”

Your aim in the game is not to bring more modernity, though — it’s simply to make the place more livable for you and the other people who live there. You’ll fix up a shrine, at which you can worship every day. You’ll buff the scratches and dirt out of a grumpy neighbor’s old car. You’ll work on your farm, growing food to cook and feed to your various pets.

The game includes the expected elements, like energy that wanes as you do tasks and gifts that increase your relationship standings with others. But those aren’t the focus of the gameplay. The motivation to keep playing lies in opening up new areas of the map — including the mystical realm that was just added in Oct. 17’s game update — and celebrating as many cultural moments as you can, some of which take the better part of an in-game year to prepare for.

Those cultural elements — like the recipes and the gosekku — shine a light on traditions old and new, religious and secular. For instance, in spring, you’ll engage in ohanami, which simply means to admire the blooming flowers. In winter, you’ll do the “big clean,” where you wash down your home in preparation for the new year.

“We also selected a balanced selection of traditional Japanese events that are held in each period — spring, summer, autumn, and winter. We also wanted players to get to know ‘Japanese food,’ so we developed a cooking mini-game,” Fujita said.

Image: GameStart/Apple

The cooking minigame is a joy to play, and fills the entire screen so you don’t have to squint to click on the right pot or bowl. Each minigame is well thought out, including fishing — optimized for touchscreens with a tap-to-reel mechanic.

Overall, the game is a pared-down version of a farming sim, but that doesn’t mean it lacks depth — it just means that instead of 28 days per month, there are two, and instead of endless missions, there are pointed quests that arise as you progress.

The daily quests could use some work, though. You can grab one of these per 24 real-time hours, but there’s no mechanic that reminds you to do them, nor any notification that you’ve failed when the time is up. Nonetheless, the game doesn’t really need those daily quests, as you could spend anywhere from two minutes to several hours playing Japanese Rural Life Adventure.

The Oct. 17 update, which throws players into a “mysterious world where spirits live,” isn’t the last that Game Start has planned.

“This year, and even next year, we will be adding new areas where you can experience Japanese culture and that are depicted in pixel art. We also would like to add as many requests as possible from players,” Fujita said.
So if you’re looking for a mobile-friendly (that’s portrait mode and landscape mode, commuters) farming sim that you can play for weeks on end, Japanese Rural Life Adventure won’t disappoint. I’ve kept up with my farm on and off for the year since the game was released and haven’t run out of new discoveries.

Japanese Rural Life Adventure was released Sept. 15, 2023, on iOS and Mac. The game was reviewed on an iPhone using an Apple Arcade subscription provided by Apple. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

Zoë Hannah

Source link

October 20, 2024
We got a peek at the cozy Hobbit life sim game and it understands the damn brief

We’re living in the middle of a bounty of Middle-earth media. Last year’s wretched Gollum game, 2026’s apparent Gollum duology, The Rings of Power’s elven kings, War of the Rohirrim’s horse maidens, and more video games of various scope and subject reportedly still on the way.

And yet none of the above is giving the one thing I really want to see from a Tolkien adaptation: Something with a completely different aesthetic and tone from Peter Jackson’s 2001 film trilogy. Middle-earth contains more multitudes than fit in those three films, and it’s a shame that the setting has been boxed in by their success.

But this week I got to sit down with the best fresh take on a Lord of the Rings adaptation I’ve seen basically ever: Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game. ToTS is the inaugural project of Rings film veteran Wētā Workshop’s game studio, made in partnership with Private Division, and from what I was able to play of this long-awaited “cosy Hobbit life” simulator, the studio has a winner on its hands.

In April, the game’s first full trailer promised friendship mechanics, cooking, fishing, home decorating, farming, seasonal changes, and other standards of the life sim genre. The demo Polygon was able to play this week covered Tales of the Shire’s first few day/night cycles, putting the player in the role of a newcomer hobbit in the village of Bywater, which lies a few days’ walk from both Hobbiton (home of Bilbo and Frodo) and the human town of Bree (where the Prancing Pony inn is).

My three-ish hours with Tales of the Shire were played on PC, though I also experimented a bit by streaming it to my Steam Deck, where controls were even more intuitive than keyboard and mouse. After activating the demo on Steam, I opened up the achievement list for kicks. Right at the top was one for owning at least three waistcoats.

I considered this an immediate good omen.

Image: Wētā Workshop/Private Division

After a quick opening cutscene, I was presented with a delightfully robust character creator, featuring an unexpectedly forward-thinking five-point slider for gender (on one end, waists were small and cleavage was notable, and on the other, the reverse) as well as the utterly unique option of customizing my character’s foot hair.

Players can type in their own custom name and surname, but they also have the option to pick from two extensive lists of names seemingly cribbed directly from hobbits mentioned in Tolkien’s work. Which is to say: I didn’t check every one against the books, but I was able to scroll down the list and dub my hobbit with the exact canonical first name I was looking for: that of one of Bilbo’s uncles, Polo Baggins. This wasn’t just another good omen, it was a princely gift.

Tales of the Shire shows a clear and immediate insight into the duality of Tolkien’s hobbits — they have a great capacity to be loyal, forthright, brave, and hardy, which is made all the more surprising by their more observable capacity to be petty, conservative, and frivolous. One of the first things you learn from Orlo Proudfoot, the hobbit who welcomes you to Bywater, is that while big folk work out their differences with swords and arrows, hobbits do it by inviting people over for home-cooked meals. The on-first-reference likening of ToTS’ very chill cooking and meal mechanic to battle gave it a passive-aggressive frame that felt instantly of a piece with Tolkien’s hobbits.

Case in point: I cackled upon realizing that my first extensive quest line was to help a down-to-earth farmer win an argument with the snooty miller over a completely immaterial bit of local minutiae. On god, me and Farmer Cotton were going to rub it into the face of Sandyman the miller. His son’s a craven little collaborator anyway.

But, corroborating case in point: Though you didn’t know her, you inherit your house from a beloved old hobbit lady who recently passed on, and an early quest has you inviting two of her former students over for a meal, to give them fresh happy memories in a place that was so recently full of sorrow. There’s a pleasing sense of history to Bywater, delivered piece by piece in bits and bobs of conversations, and the game wants you to think about how you fit into it.

Image: Wētā Workshop/Private Division

In prepping the dishes for that meal, it was already apparent that this was going to be a satisfying loop. Invite your guests, wake up the day of the event, check what they’re craving in the game menu, choose your recipes, and gather your ingredients (options available in the demo included fishing, foraging, and gardening). Your pantry, by the way, visually fills up with the specific food you put in it. If you store a tomato, the basket for tomatoes fills up. If you store some mustard weed, the spot on the table where the mustard weed goes then has mustard weed on it. It’s incredibly charming.

Then you cook: Choice of ingredients will lock in stats like Flavors and Deliciousness, but the cooking minigame allows you to tweak for ideal texture, using whatever tools are available in your kitchen (in this demo, only the chopping board and the frying pan). Then you receive your guests, arrange the 3D objects of your finished dishes on the table, and rack up the rewards of “Fellowship” points, gifts, and story progression.

The few in-game days I spent with the demo were enough to get tantalizingly close to achieving my first major plot goal (hosting enough brunches with my neighbors to become accepted as a Bywater “local”) but not to attain it. And reader, I pine. I sent out invitations to lunch, and now I cannot make good on them.

I would say that the bulk of my time in the game was spent in pursuit of NPCs to talk to rather than gathering ingredients with intention, repairing/decorating my somewhat dilapidated home, or cooking; there were lots of tutorial quests to close out. And while the scenery is extremely charming, I could see all that walking around eventually becoming a little repetitive.

But on the other hand, my walks were punctuated by alertness: Keep an eye out for butterflies, because following them is how you find foragable meal ingredients. Check that pond for swirls on the water to stock up on fish. Watch for the blue birds with flared red tail feathers that serve as the game’s wayfinding system. That is, you mark a destination on your map, and instead of a glowing path in the UI, there’s just… helpful birds that fly down at every path junction and face the way you need to go. Effervescent.

Image: Wētā Workshop/Private Division

I did catch the odd visual bug here and there — hobbits sitting next to benches instead of on them, one odd young man scooting along on his seated legs instead of walking — but Wētā has six months to work out the kinks. Private Division and Wētā Workshop updated the game’s release window from 2024 to the date of March 25, 2025. “Ha ha, NERDS,” I cackled, nerdily, when I read that, because I happen to know off the top of my head that March 25 is the day, by the Shire Calendar reckoning, the One Ring was thrown into Mount Doom and destroyed.

As Gandalf once said of hobbits, “You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you at a pinch.” With how expertly Wētā appears to understand the cozy hobbit life sim brief, I expect there’s lots more to discover here.

Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game will be released March 25, 2025, on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox Series X, and Netflix Games.

Susana Polo

Source link

September 22, 2024
The Silent Hill 2 remake is at its best when it tries to be Silent Hill 2

Before sitting down to play three hours of the Silent Hill 2 remake at a recent Konami-led press event in London, we were shown a new trailer. Like the previous trailers, it left me skeptical. Although I’m not opposed to the project of remaking Silent Hill 2, I’m wary of any modernizing instinct that replaces the aged, the weird, and even the off-putting with the same glazed genericism of the 2020s AAA game.

After getting my hands on it, I think some of that skepticism is warranted. I also think that the original Silent Hill 2 is a very, very good video game.

In the opening section, James jogging around the streets could be any game with a multimillion-dollar budget that you can pick up on the PS5. Yes, it’s foggy, but other than that it is bland. The switch to an over-the-shoulder camera, the breaking windows to search through drawers for health items, and the white cloth marking places that are interactable all feel unspecific.

Image: Bloober Team/Konami

The latter two mechanics also point to the game being bigger, potentially significantly so. We were told the game is 12+ hours, while the original clocks in around eight. As an example, Neely’s Bar — once a small, flavorful spot with a clue marked on a map — becomes a quest location that involves visiting another new part of the town to pick up an item before running back to solve a puzzle. We were told that these new puzzles add to the lore of the franchise, a promise that will excite some — but I know I am not alone in being exhausted by them.

I don’t think this will do good things for the pacing. Konami PR recommended several times that we spend only an hour in the opening of the game before using a pre-set save point to jump ahead to the apartments section. I did that, so I can’t tell you what lore might have been buried in the Neely’s Bar puzzle. I also can’t tell you how it feels to have to spend a long stretch in the modern version of that town before getting to anything else, but the suggestion that we not do it speaks for itself, to some extent.

Image: Bloober Team/Konami

On the other hand, skipping ahead to the apartments wiped away the generic feeling. They’re claustrophobic, labyrinthine, and tense. Their design highlights some of what made Silent Hill 2 great in the first place but which isn’t common practice in modern AAA games. Gradually exploring with James’ scribbled-on map, for example, feels incomparably better than any game with a minimap or a tagged overhead compass.

This section also brings the remake’s improvements to the forefront. Watching a YouTube video of the original apartments segment after playing, I was taken aback by the difference in the sound design. The original James clunks with every footstep, but he hits enemies with a kind of silent disregard. In the remake, he sounded frightened and horrified when he swung into a mannequin creature. The combat changes aren’t anything stunning, but actor Luke Roberts deserves the credit for selling them.

Roberts and the other voice actors were apparently also key in finalizing the script for the remake, says Maciej Głomb, lead producer at Bloober Team. “These were all professionals,” he says. “So they often had ideas on how to sell a scene or a specific dialogue line. As long as they were in line with the tone we wanted, we usually [trusted] their experience and their proficiency.”

The script has also been reworked slightly to be more “understandable,” says Głomb, and edited with regard to how newer technology such as face motion capture has allowed the team to “show and not tell” certain aspects like emotional beats. But, while many of the mechanics have been updated for the remake, it’s the narrative that Bloober Team is trying to keep “as close as possible” to the original, says creative director Mateusz Lenart: “The characters of the original game, their specific arcs and endings, and what those characters are.”

Image: Bloober Team/Konami

There will, however, be additional endings. “I think that was one of the first requests from Konami, at the very beginning,” says Głomb. The original endings will all be present — “even the funny ones,” although “with our own twist for a little bit of an expansion.” But in new game plus runs, there will be the possibility to get other outcomes. Although Bloober Team wasn’t about to spoil anything directly, Głomb did say that the devs would be “adding something from the different worlds; from the different game,” presumably hinting at overlap with other Silent Hills.

In my last question for Głomb and Lenart, I ask whether they brought any outside inspirations to the remake. Silent Hill 2 is famous for drawing on film — Jacob’s Ladder and the work of David Lynch — and paintings by artists like Francis Bacon. I’m hard-pressed to think of another game with 2024 Silent Hill 2’s budget that reflects that kind of influence, and in particular I want to know if there’s anything in the last 20 years of art that’s contributed to the way the game has been updated.

The answer is mostly no. Lenart mentions the work of Italian painter Nicola Samori and French artist and performer Olivier de Sagazan as having ongoing impacts on his work, beginning as far back as Layers of Fear. But this project has mostly involved returning to the original game’s inspirations. “For the whole team, going back to those movies was the first thing that we wanted to do,” says Lenart. But “there was no need to look for much more,” he says. “We didn’t feel the need to look for modern references because the game is kind of stuck into that era.”

At the time, I was again skeptical of this. As I’ve said, the remade Silent Hill 2 is very much a product of its time in how it’s been modernized. It often looks and mostly plays like any other AAA game; it did not have to. But then I saw Pyramid Head for the first time.

Image: Bloober Team/Konami

Like in the original game, you first run into Pyramid Head lit up in ominous red behind a flimsily barred-off corridor in Wood Side apartments. Unlike in the original game, you already know who Pyramid Head is.

I cannot overstate the dread that I felt at seeing Pyramid Head for the first time. Despite not having played the game before, cultural osmosis had, unbeknownst to me until this exact moment, put a fear of being chased and killed by this creature deep in my bones. I stood there, looking at Pyramid Head through the bars, being looked at through the bars. And then the person next to me coughed, and I almost jumped out of my skin.At its best, Silent Hill 2 (2024)’s biggest inspiration is Silent Hill 2 (2001). And, again, Silent Hill 2 (2001) is a very, very good video game. It is, in the most crystalised sense of the word, iconic. Where the remake can make that iconism work, and draw on what made it that way, it will also be very, very good. That won’t be all the time, but it might be for enough of it.

Silent Hill 2 will be released Oct. 8 on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC.

Disclosure: This article is based on a preview event held by publisher Konami in London, England on Aug. 12. Konami provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

Jay Castello

Source link

August 19, 2024
Gourdlets is the laid-back building sim for people sick of grinding

Gourdlets is like the retirement stage of building sims.

The game tells you via a text tutorial at the beginning that any town you make in Gourdlets doesn’t have any money and the little anthropomorphized gourd creatures will be content no matter what you build them. “We tried explaining capitalism to the gourdlets but it made them feel too tired, so you don’t have to worry about managing currency or resources,” the text reads.

Learning to play is a breeze. I played on Windows PC and the tutorial introduces you to a column of buttons, each with its own function: The build menu pulls up a little catalog of objects you can use to build out your town; the “bulldoze objects & fences” lets you demolish stuff you’ve built. It probably took me five minutes to begin the game and get to work making a little town square for the little guys.

You play the game from an isometric view, which you can rotate by 90 degrees to see your pixelated creations from different angles. Little touches, like a toggle that allows you to draw straight lines with decorative tiles or the ability to edit the number of tiles you want to place when you make a path, make building the crunchy pixelated paths and objects super satisfying. Loads of items — like benches, buildings, and cobblestone paths — come in a variety of rainbow pastel colors right from the get-go with no grinding. I could build the Candy Land cottagecore town of my dreams.

True to its promise, you can really putz around and do whatever. The game uses a system where you invite gourdlets to town, seemingly as many times as you want. (The game didn’t stop me, but I imagine there’s a limit at some point.) You don’t manage the gourdlets, so you can sit back and build as the creatures play and grow up. Once you get more mature gourdlets, you can unlock more items.

I started with making a town square, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as designing some nature areas, so I switched to making forest campgrounds complete with glowing critters, mushrooms, and string-lit paths. I didn’t feel like the game incentivized either way of playing — regardless of whether I chose to make them a more formal town or focus on building nature areas.

According to the studio’s Steam page, this is the debut game from AuntyGames, and it’s an absolute gem. Whether it’s taking a moment to appreciate a gourdlet watering a garden or finding the perfect placement for a shell on the beach, I’m obsessed with this sleepy little sim.

Gourdlets was released Aug. 24 on Windows, Linux, and Mac. The game was reviewed on Windows using a pre-release download code provided by Future Friends Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

Ana Diaz

Source link

August 15, 2024
Isles of Sea and Sky taught me it’s okay to move on

Sometimes, turning a linear game into an open world just makes sense. Whether it’s Elden Ring or Breath of the Wild, plenty of franchises have found that their core gameplay loops map well to an open world iteration. With Elden Ring, you can disperse the intense FromSoft difficulty across a map that invites players to “git gud” at their own pace. With Breath of the Wild, the entire world is now a dungeon, every hill and valley a puzzle. Playing both, it almost feels as though each franchise and its mechanics were just waiting to be spread across a sprawling map. They just feel right.

By contrast, Isles of Sea and Sky, an open-world Sokoban game, isn’t quite as obvious a fit. But just because something isn’t immediately obvious doesn’t mean it won’t work.

Released in late May, Cicada Games’s Isles of Sea and Sky employs Game Boy Color-era Zelda aesthetics in pursuit of a genre mashup that produces harmony and dissonance in equal parts. The game makes a great first impression. It evokes that feeling of playing Link’s Awakening DX (pre-remake), to the point where you’d be forgiven for mistaking one of Isles’ beaches for Awakening’s. Moving from screen to screen is a nostalgic joy, with a Vocaloid-infused soundtrack that imbues the game with even more personality, which is good, because at its core, open world or no, this is a Sokoban-ass Sokoban game.

You will push blocks in Isles of Sea and Sky. You will push many, many standard-issue blocks into standard-issue holes, allowing you to cross over those holes in order to push more blocks. You will also push things that aren’t blocks, like little boulder dudes (definitely not Gorons) who roll as far as they can in the direction you push them, crushing any boxes they encounter. Or little water guys, who can extend riverways if you push them downstream. The puzzles start simply, easing you into the game’s increasing difficulty one screen at a time, until eventually you find yourself stumped. And, in being stumped, you will find yourself pushing up against the contradictions inherent to Isles’ mixture of freedom and linearity.

Image: Cicada Games

One of the pleasures of Sokoban games is the underlying conceit that, though you may feel frustrated by an individual puzzle, you always have the necessary abilities to get through the level. Each stage is then simply a matter of thinking and working through what things you have tried and not yet tried. You’re stuck, sure, but you’re not lacking anything you need to achieve the solution.

Not so in Isles of Sea and Sky. Early on, you will be presented with puzzles you are not yet able to complete until you unlock a new ability. While plenty of games include this kind of lock-and-key design, where you must first unlock an ability before you can access certain areas, this runs contrary to genre expectations for Sokoban titles. Going into Isles, the player might reasonably expect that, if they’re stuck, they just need to keep trying different solutions. Such a mentality will get you through similar games like Baba Is You or A Monster’s Expedition. The solution is there. You just need to keep at it. By contrast, in Isles, you are often meant to move on, to travel elsewhere in the game’s map and overworld. In short, you are meant to give up when you get frustrated.

At first, I found myself stymied by this dynamic. How am I meant to know when I am failing to understand a puzzle versus lacking the ability to solve it? When is my frustration an intended element of the solution and when is it futile? To its immense credit, Isles goes out of its way to reduce some of this frustration by allowing the player, at any point, to rewind their actions step-by-step, or to reset the entire puzzle, each with the press of a button. But you cannot rewind the real-life time you are putting into the game. You cannot undo the minutes spent bashing your head against the wall, stubbornly trying to solve something you are simply unable to solve. Encountering this, I found myself asking why anyone would design a game in this way, when they must know that players will get stuck like this.

That’s when it hit me. They know players will get stuck like this.

Full disclosure: I can be a bit stubborn. I like to think of myself as a creative problem-solver, but my general approach is to stick to something until it’s done. This can be a good trait (sticktoitiveness and all that), but it can also be a problem (see: my description above of bashing my head against the wall). Traditional Sokoban titles are designed with this kind of player in mind — someone like myself, who will spend hours trying out different things until finally they figure something out. The folks at Cicada Games clearly love this genre, as is evident by the sheer number and variety of puzzles they’ve crammed into Isles, but what they clearly don’t love is that feeling of being stuck without any recourse, of being unable to move on.

Isles of Sea and Sky challenged me to take a step back, to reassess, and to move on

Not to quote a meme, but to quote a meme: Isles of Sea and Sky is here to say “Just Walk Out. You Can Leave!!!” What began for me as a frustration with the game turned into a bit of self-reflection when I stopped to consider why, exactly, I felt the need to stay frustrated, when, at any point, I could simply leave, or, to quote our generation’s preeminent philosopher dasharez0ne, “hit da bricks!!!” Sure, there are some areas you cannot access before completing at least a certain number of puzzles, but in general, you can well and truly leave behind most anything that’s too frustrating in Isles and find something you’d rather be doing. The challenge, at least in my case, was in allowing myself to do so.

As I’ve argued, Sokoban games are not an obvious fit for an open world iteration. Their inherent linearity rubs up against a style of game best known for its variety and, well, openness. The focus required of the player feels categorically different than the desirable distraction of asking, “What’s over that hill?” With Isles of Sea and Sky, specifically, there’s an immediate dissonance between how you expect to play a block-pushing puzzle game and how you’re meant to play this block-pushing puzzle game. But dissonance can resolve into consonance, to harmony and stability, and in Isles’ case, you’re pushed not only toward accepting limitation, but toward the inclination to free yourself.

For me, it was difficult, at first, to see moving on as a valid strategy, having become so accustomed to the habit of pushing through mental blocks, both in Sokoban titles and in life. But once I did, I found that mentality extending beyond the game. Is stubbornness helping or hurting here? Do I have to sit in this feeling? Why do I think of moving on as giving up?

In the end, I was happy to play a game that inspired this kind of self-reflection. Isles of Sea and Sky challenged me to take a step back, to reassess, and to move on. Maybe it’ll do the same for you.

Isles of Sea and Sky was released May 22 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed with code provided by Cicada Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

Grayson Morley

Source link

July 28, 2024
Nintendo News and ‘Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree’ Impressions

Ben, Steve Ahlman, and Matt James discuss the biggest news from this week’s Nintendo Direct (including a Legend of Zelda with playable Zelda and proof of life for Metroid Prime 4), gaming’s suddenly stacked release schedule for the rest of 2024, and what the Switch 2’s launch lineup could look like. Then they reflect on the legacy of Elden Ring and share their spoiler-free early impressions of its acclaimed new expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree.

Host: Ben Lindbergh
Guests: Steve Ahlman and Matt James
Producer: Devon Renaldo
Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal

Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Ben Lindbergh

Source link

June 21, 2024
Doctor Who goes full Black Mirror only to set up its most shocking twist

At first “Dot and Bubble,” the latest episode of Doctor Who, seems to be borrowing from Black Mirror’s bag of tricks. It’s set on Finetime, a planet where everyone is accompanied by a small spherical AI assistant called a Dot, which projects a “Bubble” around their heads. Within their individual Bubbles, people live their entire lives — group chatting, watching funny videos or performances by pop stars — and they do not seem to leave except to sleep. Even walking is mediated by the Bubble, telling them how many paces to move in each direction, guiding them to the office, back home, and to meals. It’s a very “kids these days and their damn phones!” kind of premise, but again: only at first.

The initially blunt metaphor only gets blunter when the monster of the week is introduced: terrifying slug aliens that are eating the denizens of Finetime alive, as they obliviously walk into their gaping maws because they can’t see past their bubbles. Our heroine for the week, the hapless Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke), finds her Bubble’s feed intruded on by the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who spend the episode trying to remotely lead her to safety, in spite of her skepticism.

It’s a clever setup, one that hearkens back to fan-favorite Doctor Who stories like “Blink,” and tropes beloved by writers like Steven Moffat (who, surprisingly, did not write this episode): horrible things at the edge of one’s perception, a hard limit on the Doctor’s ability to intervene, and a world engineered for conformity, with safety dependent on characters’ ability to escape societal gravity. This canny structure clashes with the painfully patronizing metaphor at the heart of “Dot and Bubble” — which writer Russell T. Davies exploits to obscure what he’s really doing.

Image: Disney Plus

Because in between the seemingly lazy satire of the terminally online youth and the chilling thrills of its plot, Davies quietly drops pertinent details about Finetime and what is really happening here. Who are these people? What do they do? Why are they there? Each answer, delivered conversationally in an episode packed with a loud, candy-colored palette, louder social commentary, and one of the creepiest monsters of the season, barely registers. So when you finally get to the ending and the truth about Finetime is made clear, it’s like the floor opens out from underneath you, and “Dot and Bubble” immediately becomes one of the grimmest Doctor Who stories told in some time.

[Ed. note: This means spoilers for the very end of “Dot and Bubble.”]

In the end, there is no saving the people of Finetime. The first hint was in Lindy’s rapid dismissal of the Doctor’s warnings at the start of “Dot and Bubble,” and that she only began to listen when Ruby Sunday spoke to her. More hints piled up, leading to the answer of what brought the slug aliens to Finetime in the first place: the Dots. The Dots, in their algorithmic service to their users, learned too much about them, and grew to hate them. And it’s not because of their tech-addled brains blinding them to the real world; it’s because they’re fucking racist.

Lindy and the other Finetime survivors refuse to take the Doctor on his offer of safe passage away from Finetime, instead choosing to brave the wilds where they face certain death, just because of who the Doctor looks like. It’s here where the last tidbits fall into place: chilling glimpses of selfishness from Lindy, her lily-white friend group, the fact that Finetime is only inhabited by the young adult children of the 1%.

Image: Disney Plus

Up until now, Doctor Who has been pretty unconcerned with how the Doctor taking on the appearance of a Black man might change the dynamic of the show. On the one hand, this is understandable, desirable even — it would be crass and arguably retrograde to immediately subject the Doctor to racism the moment it became a possible story outcome. It also feels intellectually dishonest to act as if it would never matter. Davies, as the white showrunner who engineered this situation, chose neither trauma porn nor avoidance. Instead he chose specificity: This is how the Doctor’s job is harder now. There are some people who don’t want to be saved by him. There are some problems that cannot be solved by cosmically deep wells of compassion and empathy. There are some people with hearts so mean they will not even save themselves.

“Dot and Bubble” argues that its hero’s role is to stand in the gap and help even in the face of such shocking contempt, because life is precious above all, even hateful little ones — presumably because life can be redeemed, and death is final. It’s hard to accept this, and Gatwa’s performance suggests that maybe such idealism isn’t deserved here. He laughs at the insanity of the situation, and then screams in anguish. Who knows if it’s the right call, but he made one. He tried.

Joshua Rivera

Source link

May 31, 2024
Infection Free Zone’s early access bugs weigh down its intriguing premise

Infection Free Zone, now in Steam Early Access, has a basic premise: Zombies have taken over the world, driving humanity into underground bunkers to wait the plague out. Eventually, the radio fires up, and a message goes out that the disease is fading. While the surface is still dangerous, it’s time to step up and make an attempt to build a new society.

This isn’t my first rodeo with a game like this, where you have to build a post-apocalyptic society that’s constantly under attack by hordes of zombies. However, this is the first time I’ve done so from the comfort and safety of my own real-world block. Instead of a fictional setting or a careful diorama based on an actual city, Infection Free Zone pulls from map data to create a one-to-one re-creation of cities and towns, using that information to create places for looting and building up a base of operations.

An Infection Free Zone run starts with the player choosing where to begin. The game offers my own region as a starting location, and I even found my own apartment. The map also draws on real-world data to categorize each building. For instance, the walk-in clinic across from my apartment is recognized as a hospital, which made it an ideal starting HQ. My apartment building lacked medical supplies, and its size meant it would be difficult to defend. Meanwhile, I could lock down the clinic easily, and help myself to all that free medicine left behind.

Image: Jutsu Games/Games Operators

The real-world function of each building factors into how it’s interpreted in Infection Free Zone. Learning about the perks — and downsides — of each building in my area would be necessary if I wanted to survive. From there, I started organizing my population into small squads for scavenging the homes in the area for canned food. We found other survivors and started planting food and building infrastructure.

Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out yet how to escape one of two inevitable fates: turtling until I starve to death, or attracting so many infected to my fledgling settlement that we’re overwhelmed. Perhaps it’s because I live in a humble Canadian neighborhood where guns wouldn’t spawn frequently, but I couldn’t find enough firearms to fend off the endless hordes. You can play anywhere in theory, but in practice you’re going to need to pick a major city for more resources.

There are also other little early access issues that are all individually annoying, but build up to make challenges feel insurmountable. Do you want to renovate a building? You’ll need to clear everyone out first. Want to dedicate time to research? The advancement tree has disappointingly few options, so that doesn’t feel very satisfying. I managed to plant lots of crops in the park near my place, but they stopped producing food. By the time I realized they needed fertilizer, my colony was already on the brink of starvation. Many of these problems aren’t broadcast or explained by the game in any way; I figured them out as I went, and usually died for the trouble. These annoyances go beyond the typical faults of zombie games or base builders; they seem much more related to the game’s early access state.

Plus, seemingly everything requires an endless amount of wood to build, upgrade, or advance. At first, I thought that the easiest way to get wood would be to chop down trees, but found it’s actually more productive to break down buildings in order to also get other materials, such as bricks. However, that turns what seems like an impossible barrier into merely a deeply boring and irritating grind. All those extra materials also fill up my storage, requiring lots of micromanagement. It’s all very awkward, and the threat of the roving undead means I didn’t have much time to focus on solving these issues. Add in constant transmissions and radio chatter, and I walked away from Infection Free Zone irritated.

Image: Jutsu Games/Games Operators

Instead of fighting against the zombies and feeling them emerge as a natural threat, I felt like the real enemy was the game itself. A base builder zombie survival game like State of Decay 2 can be difficult and terrifying, but I always felt as though my fate was in my own hands. I’d like more agency as an overseer, and more ways for the game to evolve. Right now, my settlement seems doomed to perish from hunger or get overrun by the inevitable hordes.

There’s a lot to iron out, but this is an early access release, and Infection Free Zone has a lot of potential. The ability to choose a real-world neighborhood or rebuild society literally from the comfort of your own home is very cool. I’m intrigued to see if Jutsu Games can turn things around and clean up all the UI issues, early access bugs, and janky systems. There’s something special about surviving the post-apocalypse in my own neighborhood and using my local knowledge to benefit my community of survivors. Alternatively, it’s neat to start a game at the base of a famous landmark and enjoy a little post-apocalyptic tourism. It’s just a shame the rest of the ride is currently so rough.

Cass Marshall

Source link

April 21, 2024
Manhunt’s greatest strength is letting Abraham Lincoln just be a bro

There is a moment that looms large over everything else in the pilot of Apple TV’s post-Civil War drama, Manhunt, a conversation that will haunt Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies) for the rest of his life. He’s hard at work in his office, putting together the plans for Reconstruction, when Abraham Lincoln (Midnight Mass’ Hamish Linklater) comes in tossing a baseball and invites him to the theater tonight (Ulysses S. Grant flaked to hang with his wife). Stanton is intrigued, drawn in by his friend’s easy charm, but ultimately backs out — he also owes his wife a night together. And so Lincoln strolls out, bemoaning that he’ll just be hanging out with Mary’s friends as he sees Our American Cousin.

The rest is history: That night, Lincoln would be assassinated at the theater. Andrew Johnson would take the oath of office the following day. And Stanton — as Manhunt depicts — would spend the next 12 days hunting down Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth, and the rest of his life wondering what would’ve happened if he said yes to an evening at the theater.

It’s no surprise that Stanton might forever ponder the road not taken, even though he made sure someone was guarding Lincoln that night. It’s a thought that’s incredibly compelling as Manhunt turns Stanton’s survivor’s guilt over and over. His connection to Lincoln makes it all the more provocative: Losing a friend like this is a tragedy. But when you’re also secretary of war to one of the most important presidents in United States history, trusted with his security and that of the nation, your actions have larger consequences. Every choice Johnson makes (or doesn’t make) in the postwar panic, every new vector point for the country, hangs on Stanton’s soul, a constant reminder of his failures and what we could’ve had.

As a period drama, Manhunt is tasked with reading viewers in on a lot of vernacular and specific historical context. Too often its script cuts corners, making things as simple as possible, eschewing ambiguity in favor of a tidy narrative. The show grinds to a halt every time someone is forced to underline the point of the scene you just saw. It can be clumsy about working in exposition, or tackling Lincoln as a Great Man™, and big moments often come with the desire to be seen as big moments, rather than feeling like them. It’s hard for there to be enough scenery to chew on when most everyone in Manhunt feels like they have to stop and tell you how it tastes.

Image: Apple TV Plus

But it’s Menzies’ performance that grounds the show even when its dialogue can’t fully connect those dots. Every scene post-assassination has a heaviness to it, even when Stanton is energized on the hunt for Booth. Menzies brings in a sort of lightly manic energy, a ferocity of offense to mask the deeply rooted guilt already taking hold in his soul. It’s his performance that best ensures Lincoln’s loss is felt even when it’s unspoken, or when the show gets too busy. It’s this angle that gives Manhunt its juice, a reminder that Lincoln the myth was Lincoln the man first and foremost, and that he was mourned as not just a compatriot but also a companion.

So it’s no surprise that the moment in Stanton’s office looms large in Manhunt’s narrative. It’s the first scene we get to see Lincoln as just a dude. He comes into his friend’s office, plops his feet up on his desk, jokes around, and bemoans his bud’s need to put in the time. It’s a distinctly casual feel, Abraham Lincoln: The Legend, only in the accurate (if distracting) makeup and costuming the show layers Linklater behind. This is more than a man who could rouse a room and change how we see ourselves as a nation; he was also a pal you could look up to. That’s the loss that Manhunt makes us feel, and what makes the stakes for Stanton’s mission feel so incredibly high.

The first two episodes of Manhunt are now streaming on Apple TV Plus. New episodes drop every Friday.

Zosha Millman

Source link

March 17, 2024
The Halo TV show making the humans the villains completely misses the point

It’s become increasingly clear that the Halo TV show has a villain problem. This may seem impossible for a series that’s supposed to be about a hostile race of aliens led by liars who exploit religious fanaticism, but instead the show can’t stop focusing on human bickering, bizarrely relegating the galaxy-conquering aliens to an afterthought for both the characters in the show and the audience.

I could talk about how Halo’s centering of humans as the bad guys behind every plot cheapens one of the few fascinating moral complexities of the Halo games and books — that the Spartans were built for fundamentally inhumane treatment of rebel fighters and then accidentally found justification in a surprise alien invasion. But it’s more fair and even more damning to talk about all of this on the Halo TV show’s own terms. And on those terms, I simply have no fucking idea why there are even aliens in this show to begin with.

In an effort to underline the badness of humanity, Halo has completely sidelined the Covenant, throwing the entire show off course and spinning wildly into space. Even the Covenant’s grand invasion of Reach in the show is just another human plot, one of a thousand ways the TV show wants to prove that the human bureaucrats are evil, something we’ve known since the earliest moments of the show’s first season.

But all this emphasis on humanity’s sins begs a critical question: Almost two full seasons into Halo, what point is it trying to make, exactly? Season 2’s seventh episode, “Thermopylae,” seems to offer some attempt at answering that question, when Makee (Charlie Murphy) pleads with Chief to stop helping humanity so that the two of them can settle Halo on their own and make it a paradise, rather than letting either side use it as a civilization-destroying weapon. Setting aside the silliness that is this version of Halo being so constantly tempted to recast Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) as the lead of a domestic drama, Makee’s statement still leaves a gap in our understanding of what this show is doing. If the point is “war makes monsters of us all,” then shouldn’t we see that equally in both the human and Covenant factions? And even more pressingly, why won’t anyone acknowledge that the Covenant are the ones who threatened extinction first and based their whole galactic conquest on the Prophets’ lie about a Great Journey that would take them from the galaxy?

Photo: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount Plus

We’re subjected to half a dozen scenes each episode of humanity’s reckless and evil leaders making civilization-shaping choices — particularly the ongoing machinations of Admiral Margaret Parangosky (Shabana Azmi), one of the worst and least compelling characters in recent TV memory, thanks to her consistently baffling decisions and seemingly lack of strategy and communication. (Put simply: She’s here to antagonize every other character, with no real character of her own.) Meanwhile we only get to see the Covenant’s side from the point of view of Makee and the criminally underdeveloped Arbiter. Sure, we hear them say that the Prophets might be full of shit and that the Great Journey might be a lie, but it remains a complete mystery why the alien’s genuinely compelling similarity to Earth’s own corrupt and lying authorities is drawn with such a faint line. Perhaps drawing those connections more clearly would help us make sense of why Master Chief has fought more humans in Halo season 2 than he has Covenant.

Despite the moment-to-moment conflict rarely making sense, or seeming to lead anywhere, it hasn’t stopped the show from introducing more plot threads or drip-feeding longtime series fans with new bits of recognizable lore. For instance, this latest episode gave us our most meaningful look yet at the Forerunners, though they haven’t been named quite yet. It also hinted at yet another alien faction that could soon arrive, but we’ll have to wait and see if that thread goes anywhere.

All these new introductions do little to lessen the feeling of narrative cheapness that surrounds Halo, however. As more ideas and plots get introduced, it only serves to underline how little sense any of this really makes. Sure, we know the Covenant are knocking on humanity’s front door, but the sudden diversion of every character in the show now converging on a need to capture “the Halo,” as they keep calling it, feels like it came out of nowhere. Which is a pretty astounding feat of messy storytelling considering it’s the object the entire franchise is named after.

Halo season 2 is now streaming on Paramount Plus. The season finale will be released on Thursday, March 21.

Austen Goslin

Source link

March 14, 2024
Adult Swim’s Ninja Kamui is a brutal, fast-paced revenge thriller

Ninja Kamui doesn’t waste any time getting from zero to 100. Within five minutes of its first episode, a bespectacled salaryman is ambushed by a flurry of projectile needles and attacks thrown by a dozen or so armored assailants, bobbing and weaving with uncanny precision as he counters each of their strikes before being viciously beheaded by a sneering brute with dreadlocks. It’s a strong first impression for the first original series from director Sunghoo Park following his work on Jujutsu Kaisen, one that boldly spells out Ninja Kamui’s declaration of intent with bloody and balletic finesse. In an anime season packed with strong premieres, Ninja Kamui positions itself as an action anime worth keeping an eye on.

Image: E&H production/Adult Swim

[Ed. note: Minor spoilers for Ninja Kamui episodes 1 through 2.]

Produced in collaboration with Sola Entertainment, the first original anime production from Park’s studio E&H Production follows the story of Higan, a former ninja who flees with his wife and infant child to build a new life in America after escaping from his clan on threat of death. Assuming new identities and making their living as farmers, Joe and his family live an idyllic and quiet life — that is, until Higan’s clan finally catches up to him, massacring his wife and child and leaving him a hair’s breadth from death himself. Surviving the attack on his home, Higan embarks on a single-minded quest for revenge as he attempts to hunt down his former masters and avenge his family’s murder.

There isn’t a whole lot in the way of subtlety in these initial episodes, though there are some cool minor details that convey the scrupulous lengths Higan was willing to go to protect his family, such as covertly wiping their fingerprints after leaving a supermarket or setting up an elaborate multi-camera surveillance system to spot potential threats. While the primary focus of the series is on Higan bashing and slashing anonymous baddies, there are still notable supporting characters, such as FBI agent Mike Morris and his partner Emma Samanda, an eccentric cat-loving doctor who previously worked with Higan before defecting from his clan, and the as-of-yet unnamed CEO of Auza, a ubiquitous mega corporation heavily implied to be in league with Higan’s former employers.

Image: E&H production/Adult Swim

Not much time is spent focusing on these characters though in these first two episodes, but that’s fine, because those details are all in service of the real draw of Ninja Kamui: the action. Park earned significant acclaim for his work on the first season of Jujutsu Kaisen and its 2021 feature-length prequel Jujutsu Kaisen 0, both of which featured fast-paced and creative fight sequences with memorable choreography and editing. Fans of Jujutsu Kaisen won’t be disappointed here, as the action in Ninja Kamui is easily on par with JJK’s, albeit far more gratuitous in the amount of blood and viscera. Character designs by Takashi Okazaki, the creator of Afro Samurai, also add to the appeal of the Ninja Kamui, as fans of 2007 anime and its 2009 sequel film Afro Samurai: Resurrection will also feel right at home with the level of violence and action choreography on display here.

There’s no especially grandiose or bold ambitions on display when it comes to Ninja Kamui’s opening episodes. The series knows what it is: A hyper violent revenge thriller with expertly calibrated action sequences and uniformly dark and somber tone. With that in mind, Ninja Kamui thoroughly succeeds as an engaging and entertaining action anime. With a confirmed total of 12 episodes, only time will tell how this initial premise will evolve and change over the course of the season. But what I know something for certain, which is that Ninja Kamui is a stunning addition to Adult Swim’s catalog of anime programming, and no matter where this story goes, one thing is certain: There will be blood.

Ninja Kamui airs Saturdays on Adult Swim and is available to stream on Max.

Toussaint Egan

Source link

February 10, 2024
True Detective: Night Country’s dead are screaming louder than the living

This week’s episode of True Detective: Night Country opens with a clever bit of sound editing, as the signature white noise of HBO’s logo blends seamlessly in with Police Chief Liz Danvers’ (Jodie Foster) white noise machine, at her bedside, failing to relax her. She can’t stop obsessing over the video she and Navarro (Kali Reis) found of Anne Kowtok’s last moments, looking for more clues. It’s Christmas Eve, and Anne’s cries for help are about to be joined by a chorus.

“Part 4” of Night Country is the season’s most haunted hour, the ghosts in the periphery of the show taking center stage, even as its protagonists continue to deny them. The emotional crux of the episode rests on Navarro’s sister Julia (Aka Niviâna), whom Danvers finds wandering in the snow without a coat, shivering through some kind of episode. Navarro checks Julia into a facility for extended care, but it’s already too late: She sees the dead everywhere. And so she walks out onto the ice and joins them.

Night Country’s protagonists have been speeding toward the brick wall of their own denial, and Julia’s death is the collision. The injustices and tragedies that haunt Ennis and intersect with each other are boiling over, and neither Navarro nor Danvers can ignore them much longer.

That doesn’t mean they don’t try: Navarro, grieving, starts a fight and gets her ass kicked. Danvers, who has been slowly revealed to be a woman broken down and shoddily rebuilt like a work of jagged kintsugi, becomes so hostile and toxic that she can’t hit up her fuckbuddy Captain Connelly (Christopher Eccleston) for a drunken hookup without browbeating him, and ends up spending the holiday wasted and alone. This would be a quiet, sad episode if it weren’t for the growing choir of the dead.

Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO

The thin membrane between the living and dead in Ennis is one of Night Country’s richest thematic veins, and showrunner Issa López never turns down an opportunity to remind us of it. Sometimes it is in casual juxtaposition, staging mundane conversations in front of a horrific “corpsicle”. Other times it’s in the ways the planet’s history is engraved on its surface too deeply for us to scrub out, like the ancient whale bones frozen in the background of the ice cavern where Anne Kowtok died. And finally, it is in the angry shades of dead women who scream in Navarro’s ear.

We’re past Night Country’s midpoint, and the assorted hauntings of “Part 4” form a ghostly mosaic of the show’s many concerns about our past, and how we work hard to ignore it. The eerie secrets locked away in ice, Navarro’s distance from her Indigenous culture, the toxic entitlement of men that causes women’s opportunities to curdle — if it doesn’t snuff them out outright. History can suffocate us if we pay it no mind. We can forget the dead but the dead may not forget us.

Danvers has her own haunting to contend with, a monstrous one-eyed polar bear that causes her to drive into a snowbank — a bear that Night Country suggests is not real. It’s another haunting, the shape of Danvers’ lost son Holden’s favorite stuffed animal. It’s one of the few things of his she keeps around, one of the only signs that she’s never stopped grieving, never did the work of moving on.

“The dead are gone,” she insists to Navarro. “Fucking gone.”

Navarro says that if Danvers believed that, she wouldn’t keep that stuffed bear. And perhaps, the viewer can infer, she wouldn’t throw herself into this job, seeking justice for Anne Kowtok, working her way through the spirals hidden across Ennis, staring at horrors others look away from. The ghosts surrounding Ennis will not be ignored. The white noise isn’t tuning them out anymore.

Joshua Rivera

Source link

February 5, 2024
True Detective: Night Country is messing with us in episode 3

It seems relatively routine — some “hillbillies” scuffling in the waiting room of a hospital, calling Danvers (Jodie Foster) away from an interrogation. Navarro (Kali Reis), left behind to monitor the bedridden victim, pokes her head around the corner, craning to see the commotion. And then, behind her, the man in the hospital bed suddenly sits up.

The scene is spooky enough on its own, a casual startle like a bag rustling in Audition. But the sound design makes it even more hair-raising: first a gasp on the audio track; now the man’s voice is different, gravelly and growling. “Hello, Evangeline. Your mother says hello. She’s waiting for you.” Then he points, lies back, seizes, and codes out. True Detective is on some shit with this one.

This seems as strong a case for the supernatural hanging over the town of Ennis as any, in an episode littered with unreal details like this. Heck, even at the beginning of the interview, Navarro was on edge, after the victim muttered the spectral phrase she previously heard in her car: She’s awake. But episode 3 is also concerned with the practical matter at hand, the murder of Annie K., giving us our best glimpse yet at the woman and whatever happened to her. The hour spends a lot of time tracking Annie’s movements — an Ariana Grande sweatshirt marking the start of a relationship, blue hair dye leading to someone who knew about Annie and her secret scientist boyfriend, the impact she had as a midwife and the vacuum she left behind.

Ultimately, the best piece of evidence so far comes out of last week’s cliffhanger, Annie’s phone containing the chilling final video she recorded somewhere in the ice, the screams of which play the episode out. It’s stomach-turning (Prior can’t even bring himself to watch it again), and just as chilling as the moment between Navarro and the surviving scientist. Something about this mystery feels beyond our comprehension, and paranormal explanations are increasingly looking like the easiest reason why. But there again, episode 3 is careful to remind us that not all is as it seems: As Danvers recounts the case that drove her and Navarro apart, we get her voice-over laid on top of a memory of the pair raiding a home the last time they worked together. There’s a weariness to Foster’s voice here, on all sides. She seems tired of the dead man’s excuses, of her inability to help a 19-year-old girl out of an obviously bad situation, of her own limitations. And as she relays the story, everything went to hell there: An abusive asshole killed his 19-year-old girlfriend, “then he shot himself.”

Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO

Two different huts, two very different interrogations for Navarro (Kali Reis) in True Detective: Night Country episode 3.
Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO

Only that’s not what we see; right after that line from Danvers, the man in the flashback turns, with a ghoulish look on his face, and begins whistling. It makes sense that Prior isn’t getting the full story from Danvers, and in the same way, that the audience isn’t getting all the gory details from Night Country (yet — hopefully). We can’t make sense yet of Annie K.’s murder, or what that damned orange is doing on the ice (and again in the opening credits, peeled and spiraling out as “Bury a Friend” plays over flashes of important scene-setting). One sympathizes with Navarro trying to cut through Danvers’ Socratic method — fuck your games — and still following up on the demand: Ask the question.

In this way, True Detective: Night Country is making a strong case for itself as the best season yet, making the journey along the way feel just as important as who killed Annie, or whether Navarro really saw a man get possessed. When the show tells us to look one way over another, it feels worth it, even when it might seem like a distraction from the matter — whatever matter — is at hand.

At the end of each Night Country credits sequence, there’s a new image. In episode 3, it’s a small fishing hut, isolated and lonely on the ice. What happens there is a breakthrough for the case, sure — Navarro finds the location of a former Tsalal researcher — but it’s more a personal breakthrough for Navarro, recounting some of her life story for one of the few people she trusts, who breaks a small smile when she huffs back into the hut to fulfill his ask. The conversation she has there goes beyond merely the case, and Night Country is smart to linger there. True Detective isn’t telling us everything, but that doesn’t mean it’s telling us nothing.

Zosha Millman

Source link

January 28, 2024
True Detective: Night Country is slowly starting to thaw its icy mystery

The central mystery in True Detective: Night Country seems easy when the credits roll on episode 1. It’s not that viewers already have the answer, but it at least feels like we can see all the puzzle pieces in front of us. That is, until episode 2. The second, even better episode of Night Country deepens the season’s central mystery with clever world-building and the most disgusting and disturbing ice sculpture on television.

If True Detective: Night Country is about anything so far, it’s about Ennis. More than a little town in Alaska with the nighttime that lasts days, Ennis is a place that’s simultaneously peaceful and terrifying. Rose’s (Fiona Shaw) description of the town to Navarro (Kali Reis) seems close to perfect: a place where the universe comes apart at the seams. It’s a description that takes the strangeness of this world head-on but hints at the softer side of the town, too: The dead find their way back in Ennis (sometimes because they want you to join them). But Ennis is also the kind of town that feels careful and handmade; the seams are wearing like a well-loved toy, not tearing like cheap stitching from a factory.

It’s a beautiful and layered description, but it’s also one that clues us in to what the show is doing. Things here are supernatural, sure; something’s clearly afoot. But that doesn’t mean that zombies roam Ennis or that a quick seance will clear this whole mess up. The dead in Ennis are like the ice: It’s always there, but sometimes it shifts a little, so you’ll notice it. And neither one is giving up its secrets easily.

Episode 2 opens by unveiling the season’s central mystery: a frozen pile of the corpses of the Tsalal scientists, an introduction that comes with some pitch-black comedy involving a grisly hand-breaking that you have to laugh at just to break the tension. True Detective has a grand history of gruesome crime scenes that are gorgeous in their own dark-hearted way, but this is easily the series’ masterpiece so far. The frozen corpsicle is as grotesque as it is beautiful. It’s disfigured and horrible, each body with its own bizarre self-inflicted wounds, equally inexplicable and begging for some detailed reveal that might show us how any of this could have happened. The whole thing, sitting in the middle of an ice rink, a triumph of set dressing and design, looks like it could contain an infinite number of secrets and details, if only you had the misfortune to look at it for too long.

Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO

One of the show’s most brilliant and subtle strokes, though, is one that comes outside of the newly forever-cursed ice rink when Danvers (Jodie Foster) interrupts a classroom to ask her former booty call what exactly it is that Tsalal does. For the deaths of these scientists to merit something as extreme and seemingly otherworldly as their frozen remains would indicate, it seems perfect that their investigation was into something as utopian as the description Danvers gets. A cure-all, hidden away under millions of years of ice. A perfectly solvable puzzle, if only the ice would reveal its mysteries. The explanation makes perfect sense to Danvers; it’s her new burden too, after all.

And fittingly, she too turns to science to sort out her frozen puzzle. She and Pete (Finn Bennett) trot out all the classics that scientists have used for the Dyatlov Pass incident: paradoxical undressing, wild animals, some kind of invisible but natural force like gas or radiation. Not a single one sticks.

But the show’s too smart to let not having an answer defeat Danvers. She’s stubborn enough to stick to the case, and fight for it, but she’s not too stubborn to admit she needs Navarro’s help to figure it out. And with mysterious tattoos of spirals older than the ice, and a trailer full of creepy dolls, the show finally lets its two main detectives team up.

Technically, True Detective: Night Country’s second episode is mostly just table setting, getting our detectives together, laying out the facts and their complications, the oddities and their halfhearted explanations. But the show plays all this setup like Ennis finally boiling over. It’s a town at the edge of both the spiritual and physical worlds, and now it’s breaking open, little by little, under the weight of poison water and mine protests. And True Detective: Night Country is clearly eager to show us the secrets under the fragile ice of Ennis.

Austen Goslin

Source link

January 22, 2024
A Disturbance in the Force finally reveals how The Star Wars Holiday Special went so wrong

This breakdown of the documentary A Disturbance in the Force was originally published when the movie debuted at the 2023 SXSW Conference. It has been updated for the movie’s digital release.

For a couple of decades after its one-time-only broadcast on Nov. 17, 1978, The Star Wars Holiday Special was a secret handshake among nerds. “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “White & Nerdy” video contains a scene where Al buys a bootleg VHS of the special in an alley next to a dumpster, winking at how much currency this infamous televised fiasco had among fans in the days before YouTube. Now, a quick search on that particular site will pull up multiple full-length uploads of the special — much to the presumed angst of George Lucas, who has publicly expressed his desire to destroy every copy of Star Wars’ first big misstep himself.

Just because The Star Wars Holiday Special is easier to find in 2023 doesn’t make it any less baffling, however. Once a fan discovers its existence and watches it, however they’re able to access it — Lucasfilm has never officially released The Star Wars Holiday Special, and probably never will — a series of questions inevitably follow. “What?!” comes first, followed by “Why?” and “How?” The documentary A Disturbance in the Force seeks to answer these queries.

The film kicks off with the “WTF?” of it all, in a montage that includes sound bites from pop culture talking heads like Seth Green and Kevin Smith, both of whom have inextricably tied their personas to their love of Star Wars. These are intercut with legacy clips of Star Wars actors, including Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, refusing to discuss the special, setting it up as a holy grail and appealing mystery: “The Star Wars oddity they don’t want you to see!”

This part of the film is fine. It’s fun and it’s lively, but it doesn’t really add anything to the legend. Then the film brings in people who can answer the questions raised by the special, rather than simply restating them in colorful ways, and A Disturbance in the Force becomes something far richer and more interesting.

Photo: Lucasfilm

The most surprising thing A Disturbance in the Force reveals about The Star Wars Holiday Special is the caliber of talent involved. The crew was the best 1978 television had to offer, and CBS called in its top stars to make appearances on the show. And yet, somewhere, somehow, everything went to hell. Here are a few questions that are actually addressed in A Disturbance in the Force:

Why does The Star Wars Holiday Special exist?

In short, because of a combination of conventional wisdom about movie promotion in the late ’70s and George Lucas’ spite toward 20th Century Fox. At the time, Star Wars was not embedded in our cultural consciousness the way it is now, and studio executives thought the enthusiasm about the movie would be temporary, in spite of its box-office success. An executive told Lucas that in a meeting in the summer of 1977, and Lucas began pushing to get Star Wars characters on TV as much as possible, to prove that exec wrong. (The fact that Star Wars toys were still being rolled out a year after the movie first hit theaters, and that Lucas had a personal financial stake in the sales of those toys, didn’t hurt.)

Why the song and dance numbers, though?

At the time, variety specials were TV staples — more common than rollicking sci-fi adventures told in the style of old-fashioned serials, which meant that Lucas’ new movie model got stuffed in an old box to sell it to the masses. A Disturbance in the Force argues that The Star Wars Holiday Special was not the worst of Star Wars’ late-’70s TV appearances: That honor goes to a 1977 episode of Donny & Marie in which Donny Osmond played Luke, Marie Osmond played Leia (who was, at the time, still Luke’s love interest, not his sister), and Kris Kristofferson played Han. The clips shown in the doc support this thesis.

Why does The Star Wars Holiday Special feel so disjointed?

A combination of factors comes into play here. First, the original director, David Acomba, was fired after three days for spending most of the show’s budget within those 72 hours. Steve Binder, a pro who had also directed the Elvis ’68 comeback special, stepped in to finish the job. But Binder had another commitment that prevented him from being involved with the editing of the special, so that job fell to a pair of producers named Ken and Mitzie Welch, who had made plenty of variety shows, but knew nothing about editing, Star Wars, or sci-fi in general.

Who designed all those wild costumes?

Bob Mackie, who was RuPaul’s and Whitney Houston’s favorite fashion designer, and the premiere costumer for film and TV in the late 1970s. Mackie, now 84, has a great sense of humor about the whole thing, and his interviews are a highlight of the film.

Photo: Lucasfilm

Why does Bea Arthur nuzzle up with a rat in the cantina?

Like the rest of the masks used in The Star Wars Holiday Special’s cantina scene — and the original Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars, for that matter — the rat was a leftover from another production that effects artist Rick Baker had worked on in the past. The rat was also featured in the 1976 creature feature The Food of the Gods.

Why do Chewbacca and his family speak in unsubtitled Shyriiwook for nine minutes?

More misguided conventional wisdom: CBS executives thought viewers would change the channel if they saw subtitles.

Why is Jefferson Starship in The Star Wars Holiday Special?

Because they had a song called “Hyperdrive,” and the band had “Starship” in its name. Really.

Was Lucasfilm embarrassed by the special after it aired?

Not really. TV was more ephemeral in the days before VCRs became commonplace, and interviewees in the doc who saw The Star Wars Holiday Special as kids say that they and their peers thought it was awesome — mostly because of its Boba Fett cartoon, which marks Fett’s first official appearance in the universe. Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni were two of those kids, which is why Mando’s rifle on The Mandalorian is modeled after Fett’s on the holiday special.

Is Disney embarrassed by the special now?

The company has started selling Life Day merchandise, and has declared Nov. 17 — the day the special aired on CBS — as an official Star Wars holiday in its theme parks. So, as always with Disney: It’s fine with any ancillary product, so long as the company can make money off of it.

Why does Chewie’s dad Itchy celebrate Life Day by watching Wookiee porn?

Some mysteries are best left unsolved. All we know is that Cher was supposed to play the Diahann Carroll role, but dropped out at the last minute.

A Disturbance in the Force is now available for digital rental via Amazon, Vudu, and Apple.

Sign up for the

newsletter

Patch Notes

A weekly roundup of the best things from Polygon

Katie Rife

Source link

January 18, 2024
Night Country gets True Detective’s vibe better than True Detective ever has

True Detective is the rare show that was much more exciting and complicated after seven episodes than it is after three seasons. What started out as a brooding series about detectives looking into the dark heart of senseless, seemingly occult killings eventually transformed into a detective show mostly about men being sad. What is remarkable about the show’s newest season, True Detective: Night Country, is that in just one episode, new showrunner Issa López has managed to bring back the creeping, supernatural horror vibe that gave the first season so much promise.

The new season is set in the small town of Ennis, Alaska, and this first episode is mostly concerned with setting up the peculiarities of the town and the bones of this season’s mystery, along with getting to know our latest true detectives, of course. The show’s opening, and its central mystery, is classic cold-weather horror: A group of researchers in a secluded winter base suddenly disappear, only to be found far from their base, frozen deep in the ice.

Where the first season of the show hinted at the supernatural and the ways it sometimes may (or may not) peek through into our world, Night Country leaves no room for doubt. By the end of this episode, more than one character has had visions, and the condition the scientists are found in seems impossible to imagine happening naturally. But the true underline that makes the supernatural elements of the story undeniable is that local weirdo Rose (Fiona Shaw) is the one who finds the frozen scientists for the police, and the only reason she knew where to look is because some long-dead friend showed her the way.

López doesn’t let the supernatural overwhelm the rest of the world in Night Country’s first episode, but she’s unambiguous about its existence. This feels like a pointed response to the True Detective stories that have come before. Not combative, per se, but direct. While the previous seasons, particularly the first, led its characters from the natural and explainable world of crime toward something more supernatural, Night Country’s mystery is starting at unexplainable and working its way back.

Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO

But for all the ways that López seems to be responding to True Detective’s past in the first episode of her season, she makes her love for the series clear, too. When it comes to the cops looking into this case, López revels in characterizing them as every bit the same kind of broken bastards that original series creator Nic Pizzolatto placed at the center of his three seasons writing the show. Leading the investigation in Night Country is Liz Danvers (played marvelously by Jodie Foster), a brilliant cop with a mile-long record of pushing people away by being an absolute asshole. Then there’s Liz’s old partner Evangeline Navarro (boxer turned actor Kali Reis), a self-destructive hothead who let one case get stuck in her craw and consume her whole career.

The two cops don’t share the same dynamic as Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle and Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart, exactly, but it’s clear that López was after the same crackle the two had between them, and through just one episode she’s already seemed to nail it. The two only share brief scenes in episode 1, but the chemistry they have is instant and the bickering is pitch-perfect for cluing us in to the fact that they’re sure to work together again eventually.

Through just one episode, True Detective: Night Country feels like what True Detective was always supposed to be. Impossibly, it captures the vibes of the series’ best episodes better than anything in the second or third seasons ever achieved. López feels at war with the series’ history, not because she hates it, but because she loves it enough to want its best version. What Issa López wants is the twisty, supernatural, pitch-black mystery show that had the internet in an eight-week chokehold in 2014. And so far, she’s off to a great start.

Austen Goslin

Source link

January 14, 2024
In roguelite city builder Against the Storm, failure is part of the process

I love city-building sims during every step of play — from laying down the foundations to planning a city grid, upgrading the complexity of buildings, and handling the bureaucratic elements of the late game. I’ve spent late nights playing Frostpunk and Timberborn, sucked into the fine balance of evading total town collapse. That said, if you had told me a week ago, “You’re going to spend about an hour making a settlement — and then you’re going to start over, again and again,” I’d have balked. But Against the Storm, the roguelite city builder that just came out of early access on Dec. 8, proves this formula is not only sensible, it’s fantastic.

To be clear, there are other games with this unconventional genre pairing. In Cult of the Lamb, there’s a home base that functions like a sim game where cultists work, worship, and obviously make live sacrifices. You can leave this base in order to partake in roguelike dungeon crawls. But Against the Storm doesn’t have that separation of mechanics. They’re perfectly married in a way that keeps things fresh while also empowering you to add complexity in each subsequent run. Fifteen hours in, I can hardly peel myself away.

In Against the Storm, you’re the queen’s viceroy in a land with cataclysmic weather events — you’ve been tasked with building settlements out from the capital, Smoldering City, toward a series of mysterious seals. You begin each “run” by selecting a tile on the game’s broody overworld map. You then pick your starting population out of a delightful fantasy lineup of lizards, beavers, humans, harpies, and more. Finally, you gather some basic supplies — stone, some edible mushrooms perhaps — before heading into the settlement site. Then it’s off to the races: At the site, you build shelters and basic structures, like a woodcutter to cut down trees, or sometimes even giant orchids. There’s a dark fantasy flavor to it all. Each site is full of hidden glades; reveal them and you might just find a poisonous flower that makes your food rot, or a cemetery that strikes fear in the hearts of your villagers.

Image: Eremite Games/Hooded Horse

From there the game turns into a resource puzzle. Each scenario gives you different choices for a series of “orders” to fulfill. You might need to deliver bags of crops, or enter a certain number of “dangerous glades” in a set amount of time. Completing these awards you with Reputation points. You typically need 14 points to win a scenario. All the while, you’re battling a capricious queen. The “Queen’s Impatience” meter only fills over time, and if it maxes out before reputation does, then you’ve lost the settlement.

This is the challenge and joy of the game: Creating a successful strategy as you go, before knowing what tools you’ll even have. Think of it like Hades, where Zagreus is presented with various boons from the gods — while all the options are fun, some can create awesome and unexpected synergies when fighting enemies. But in Against the Storm, you get options for building types, global perks, glades to discover, and orders to fulfill. You constantly have to finesse resource allocation: Your wood will be used for keeping the hearth warm, building new key buildings, and fulfilling a barrel order. And oh, by the way, don’t forget to make some food for your villagers. It’s so easy to screw yourself over at any step in Against the Storm.

Suffice it to say this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s worker “resolve” and “hostility” — each citizen excels at different work and simply must have certain luxuries. These are delightfully silly: Lizards love to eat jerky and work in cookhouses (they’re coldblooded and love warmth); beavers enjoy biscuits and are very good at cutting wood. There’s also a weather cycle that dictates the timing of the harvest and how angry all the workers get. It’s called Against the Storm, so I’ll let you guess how much these dudes like rain. (Spoiler: They hate it.)

Image: Eremite Games/Hooded Horse

It sounds complicated, but it’s actually very digestible. The game effectively drip feeds its complexities, which helps curb the overwhelming feeling that can come with these sorts of management sims that have a dozen menus and mechanics at play. There’s a perk tree you can unlock over the course of the game, which introduces new gameplay mechanics — win or lose, you’ll be able to buy some of these upgrades. You don’t really need to worry about trading early on, for example, but as you unlock more perks, it becomes a major force.

Against the Storm always has a new trick up its sleeve, and like any great roguelite, it’s encouraged me to make unusual, gutsy plays that I would never try in a more typical city builder. Knowing each run has a finite end means I can always start over if things don’t work out. And when they do — it’s even sweeter.

Against the Storm was released on Dec. 8 on Windows PC. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

Sign up for the

newsletter

Patch Notes

A weekly roundup of the best things from Polygon

Nicole Clark

Source link

December 23, 2023
Rogue Trader’s role-playing embraces the brutality and freedom of Warhammer 40K

“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” That’s the tagline of Warhammer 40,000, one of the most over-the-top and brutal sci-fi settings around. But even in a merciless, brutal dystopia that grinds its people into dust, some get to enjoy being on the top of the food chain. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is about the perils and pleasures of being atop that particular hierarchy.

Rogue Traders in 40K are freelance explorers, scouting the far frontiers of the Imperium of Man. It’s a risky career, but it comes with luxurious rewards: agency, freedom, power, and a giant flagship. As the player, I explore a system of the Imperium with a loyal crew of companions, making impactful choices and determining the fate of those around me.

Rogue Trader is a computer role-playing game in the vein of Baldur’s Gate 3 or Pillars of Eternity. I create my custom protagonist, determining stats and bonuses based on my backstory, home world, and so on. I’m then thrust into a high-pressure job interview as a potential heir to a Rogue Trader aboard her flagship. Little do we know that there’s a coup in the works, and traitors aboard the ship. After a deadly struggle against heretics and demons, I ascend to the position of Rogue Trader. I’m the captain now, and I get to decide how to run my ship.

Image: Owlcat Games

This is a vast game, with tons of features you’d expect from a CRPG — companions (each with their own narrative paths and conversation trees), top-down strategic combat, and branching choices that impact the world around you. I get to make choices all day — in fact, that’s part of the gig of a Rogue Trader. Some are more important than others; whenever I get to specific points in the story, I can choose from one of three major paths. Dogmatic choices exult the God-Emperor and loathe the mutant and the witch, the Heretical options pursue corruptive power, and the Ionoclast path is the closest thing we have to modern-day “good guy” morality.

After the events of the tutorial, my beautiful voidship is run down and my staff is struggling. As the newly anointed Rogue Trader, I have to trek around the various planets of the Koronus Expanse to get a new Navigator, fix my ship up, and avoid any major diplomatic incidents with the locals. My voidship is the size of a modern city; I’m as much a governor as a captain, and I have to manage the ship, its cargo, and its many occupants.

In the process of getting back on my feet, I uncover a nefarious cult and a deep conspiracy. It’s not an easy job, but I’m blessed with a handful of companions from the Imperium to help me out. I can call on them to unlock doors or perform other environmental checks, but they come most in handy in combat.

When I meet opposition, it’s deeply satisfying to control my troops in a turn-based battle. Each fight takes place on a grid; it’s very similar to Baldur’s Gate 3 or even XCOM 2. Some positions provide cover, while others are out in the open. Friendly fire is also a very real concern. An arc of auto-fire from a bolter, or a Navigator’s third eye opening, can harm friend as well as foe. My Rogue Trader is a sniper, and she would be lost without her Senechal taking the front lines. There’s a lot of firepower at my disposal, and it’s mostly quite satisfying to use — even if I occasionally shred my poor Senechal with a devastating AOE.

Image: Owlcat Games

I can chat with the companions between battles, learning more about their pasts. Most of them have deep and dark secrets I can uncover with a little time or patience, and they have fascinating stories to tell. Abelard, my Senechal, is a guy who sucks morally but will back me to the absolute hilt. I grew to love hearing about his days in the Imperial Navy, and he was the one guy I felt like I could trust. Augusta, a Sister of Battle, starts as a one-note zealot, but cracks form in that facade when I learn about her past and doubts. Cassia and Pasqal both represent two sub-factions in 40K, and they have lots to share about the Navigators and Tech-Priests.

My absolute favorite companion is Marazhai Aezyrraesh, a dark space elf who feeds off the suffering of sentient beings. He’s cruel, depraved, and an absolute hoot. Yes, he may flay a few too many people for my tastes, but he’s the best companion to bring to a party.

In the grand scheme of things, this is one of the most complete and detailed explorations of the 40K universe you can find. The game is an homage to the Warhammer 40K RPGs from Fantasy Flight Games, including Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy. I spent years as a teenager and young adult poring over these sourcebooks (which Rogue Trader is inspired by), learning more about the tiny details of life in the Imperium. Developer Owlcat Games has paid the same attention to every detail of the Koronus Expanse. I delve into ancient facilities staffed by tech-priests of the Machine God, the hostile xenos city of Commorragh, or massive cities built to honor the God-Emperor of Mankind.

I love the characters, the environments, the writing, the lore, and the flow of battles. But I have concerns with the game’s pacing. By the end of the first chapter, I had leveled up 16 times. Each level offered marginal rewards, like being able to move slightly farther during the character’s turn in combat or having a higher parry chance when being attacked. A slow drip-feed system means each level feels less important, and even though I’m growing stronger, I don’t get that sense of long-term satisfaction.

Image: Owlcat Games

It’s especially frustrating to hit a roadblock like the one at the end of Act 1, where an incredibly tough boss rolls out of nowhere and spanks my crew — and I can’t leave to go grind experience somewhere else. I eventually found out a way to cheese the fight by focusing on my melee fighters’ positioning, but it took far too long banging my head against the wall. The victory tasted like ash in my mouth after all that frustration.

Voidship combat is another aspect that feels clunky and frustrating. Like the squad-based skirmishes, naval encounters are also turn-based, where positioning is ultra important. Space naval battles should feel tense, but instead, I’m mostly annoyed at having to continually rotate my ship and set up my zones of attack. I wish I could delegate these annoyances to my Senechal — to delegate the duties of character leveling and ship combat, the better to appreciate all of the things Rogue Trader is doing so well.

Rogue Trader is a dense, vast game, and much of it has clearly been crafted with love for the expansive lore of the 40K canon. While there are small annoyances and clunky features along the way, the political intrigue, cast of characters, and moral choices have me hooked. For 40K fans, this is a rare treat — a game that digs past the heroic facade of bolters and battles and taps into the grimdark dystopia that makes this particular sci-fi setting so damn compelling.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader will be released on Dec. 7 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed using a pre-release download code provided by Owlcat Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

Sign up for the

newsletter

Patch Notes

A weekly roundup of the best things from Polygon

Cass Marshall

Source link

December 6, 2023
Doctor Who time traveled back to 2008 to save the show in 2023

The hero of BBC’s long-running sci-fi series Doctor Who is, famously, not a real medical doctor, but they have been a bit ill. What should have been a promising changing of the guard in 2018 — with new showrunner Chris Chibnall and the first woman cast as The Doctor since the series’ 1963 debut — only served to accelerate a gradual downward slide that began in the latter half of previous showrunner Steven Moffat’s seven-year tenure.

In response, the BBC has decided the cure to The Doctor’s ails lies with the man who revived the show from a 15-year coma in 2005: Russell T. Davies. And with his first episode, last weekend’s hour-long special “The Star Beast,” Davies has delivered the goods. “The Star Beast” isn’t quite the reboot Davies is here to deliver — that’ll come in 2024 when Ncuti Gatwa takes over as The Fifteenth Doctor. Instead, “The Star Beast” is meant as catnip for lapsed and disappointed fans that were introduced during Davies’ first Who revival. It’s a blatant nostalgia play that, hilariously, carries on as if nothing has happened since Davies left the show in 2008. And you know what? It kills.

Loosely based on “Doctor Who and The Star Beast,” a comics serial by Pat Mills and Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons, the new special pulls triple duty: delivering a snappy, classic Doctor Who adventure, introducing an overarching mystery that will tie “The Star Beast” to two more specials coming in following weeks, and briefly introducing the Doctor to newcomers. It excels at its first two tasks, and stumbles pretty extravagantly at the third. Luckily, there’s so much charm here that “The Star Beast” never feels anything other than delightful, even at its clumsiest.

That charm is essential, because Davies’ first Doctor Who episode in 15 years is lampshading what, in most circumstances, would read as desperation. The mystery at the center of “The Star Beast” and the specials that follow is why — and how — did The Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Comer) regenerate back into the same body she had as the Tenth Doctor (fan-favorite David Tennant). For a show built around a time-traveling humanoid alien who never dies but instead “regenerates” into a new body with a new personality so the show can explain away recasting its lead, “continuity” has always been more a suggestion than a rule. But Davies bringing back Tennant as the newly-christened Fourteenth Doctor and also Catherine Tate as beloved companion Donna Noble is extravagantly cheeky, even for this show.

Image: Disney Plus

What reunites them is the eponymous Star Beast, a giant Furby-lookin’ guy called The Meep, who crashes on Earth and befriends Donna’s daughter, Rose. The Meep is being hunted by insectoid soldiers who look like Power Rangers villains, catching Donna and her family in the crossfire and bringing The Doctor back into their lives again.

It’s all very silly, and an astonishing display from two actors who do not seem to have missed a beat since they last played these roles in 2008. Even with its messy exposition and open, lavish courtship of fans that grew to love the show during the first Davies era, “The Star Beast” is a good reminder that Donna and The Tenth Doctor were popular for a very good reason. Doctor Who has never had the biggest budget or the slickest sensibilities; it was and remains a childrens’ show that fans happily carried into adulthood. The most beloved of Doctors — Tom Baker, Matt Smith, David Tennant, and a few wild card picks — made this text, imbuing the character with a childlike whimsy, playing a very old man who never stopped believing there was magic to be found in the universe.

David Tennant is still remarkably good at this, and “The Star Beast” makes as good a case for The Doctor as any. He’s endlessly curious, always a little odd, and trusts that kindness and intelligence will win the day over violent antagonists. Tennant’s Doctor is not afraid to treat every square inch of ground as a stage from which he will play to the back of the room. There is no line too silly for him to bellow with conviction. There is no creature too strange for him to care about.

Image: Disney Plus

“The Star Beast” takes a little bit longer to recapture what makes Donna Noble such a great presence, but when she finally gets going, Catherine Tate is a force of nature: Never that impressed with The Doctor, happy to argue with him even with armageddon on the line, and fully capable of steamrolling anyone who looks askance at her or her loved ones.

It is hard not to love these two characters, to not want to travel all of time and space with them again. In a way we have, from 2008 to 2023, in a transition so seamless it’s shocking. Perhaps this shouldn’t be such a surprise. When Doctor Who is at its best, it’s like The Doctor has always been there: an old imaginary friend that still charms you as an adult. The earnest wonder and curiosity the character represents never really gets old. This is why the show endures: You don’t need a season of Doctor Who to be won over, you just need a moment. Those moments can come at any time, during runs both maligned and excellent. The Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble were incredibly good at making those moments in their time together. Here’s to a few more, before it’s someone else’s turn.

The Doctor Who 60th Anniversary specials are on Disney Plus, with the first now streaming and two more premiering weekly. Previous seasons of Doctor Who are available to stream on Max.

Joshua Rivera

Source link

November 28, 2023
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters takes the Watchmen approach to a Godzilla show

The rise of franchise-first pop culture has made what was previously a genre stumbling block into everyone’s problem: Exposition. Specifically, the stuff we call “lore.” When every big show or movie has to connect to something else, those connections aren’t always graceful. Especially when you need to work in how your villain was in the Amazon with your mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Apple TV Plus’ extremely good mystery-thriller based on Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse, deftly dances around every major pitfall modern mega-franchises happily dive into. The series packs the frame with fascinating little details that unobtrusively build out the world of the show without having characters explain much of anything. It’s thoughtful in its visual design in a way that recalls HBO’s Watchmen, another show full of extensive references to a prior work, carefully building out a story that stood on its own.

The similarity is more than superficial. Both shows are very interested in the background construction of a political and cultural apparatus predicated on one massive, divergent event in history. Both shows have clearly had writers do a ton of mapping out the ways in which their fictional worlds were similar and the ways in which they diverged, and instead of having characters recite endless factoids better served by a wiki, they merely depict the characters living in that world. It’s for the viewer to notice the ways in which it is different.

Image: Apple TV Plus

The early episodes of Monarch are filled with details like this. Passengers on a commercial flight are sprayed down by men in hazmat suits after an international trip, airline corridors have clearly marked Godzilla evacuation routes, and installations of military weaponry stand ready for another Titan appearance.

This, coupled with the show’s noteworthy focus on human drama about two siblings whose father kept them from each other, gives Monarch a thematic richness that surprises and delights. If the big, cacophonous MonsterVerse movies use their kaiju as a metaphor for humanity’s disregard for the planet on a grand scale, then Monarch personalizes that devastation. Not just by showing what it’s like to try and adhere to normalcy after surviving a spectacular catastrophe, but in showing how the men and women who chased these monsters over generations shattered their families to pursue their reckless work — work that would in turn shatter the planet.

Monarch is less openly about thorny, difficult topics than Watchmen was. You won’t find, for example, provocative explorations of race in America. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a show for these times. Much like Watchmen found new relevance in its revisitation of a comic book from 1986, Monarch finds depths to plumb in the haphazard cinematic universe that was jury-rigged around Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla remake. In it, we can see a consideration of humanity’s struggles to navigate a collective disaster, a casual reflection of our inability to solve great crises without militarism, and the way institutions warp fear of collapse into an excuse to control more of our lives. The story may be set in 2015, but few genre shows feel more 2023.

Joshua Rivera

Source link

November 18, 2023