The Substatic Monthly: June

Meagre crumbs during what was probably the most important month of my life

July is here! The gay-for-pay corporations have stripped themselves bare of pride ephemera! NHS workers got a fat wad of extra cash in their pay packets, and I have…well, not really engaged with a whole lot this past month. Having been hyperfocused on a critical piece of accreditation that would determine the outcome of my career and in the interim playing Tears of the Kingdom every moment I can muster, I still managed to watch, read, play and listen to a number of interesting things. Let me tell you all about them:

Games

Chicory

A lovely send up of Zelda tropes set in an incredibly playful world, Chicory is all about navigating AND decorating a really cool environment, choosing the colors of the world around you as you go. It’s comprehensive in a way that few games are, where aesthetics, mechanics and narrative all form a potent rumination on the struggle new artists have contending with legacies, and how so often you are your own worst critic. Enticing creativity from the player without demanding expertise, it was a really joyous experience start to finish. I can’t recommend it enough.

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengeance of the Slayer

A roaringly funny parody of classic shooters with an incredibly niche kayfabe that will only really make sense if you’ve played Hypnospace Outlaw. What’s impressive about Slayers X is how good a version of this sort of thing it is. High octane action, impressively varied level design, convincingly cringe dialogue. There’s no knowing glances or trying to be clever here, it genuinely feels like it was made by ZANE_ROCKS_36 and that is so delicate an operation to undertake. I found it a bit frustrating in places, some of the later levels are quite fiddly and I’m stuck on the final boss but its hard to know whether this is a fault of the game or part of the act.

Dordogne

When people talk about a game evoking the essence of Studio Ghibli they’re often talking bollocks, creating in their heads a version of the animation studio’s incredible body of work that is reductive and crass. Dordogne, for me at least, is a game that really does feel like a Ghibli film come to life, in that it encapsulates a sense of importance to the feelings of its characters and the unfortunate sadness that pervades it’s colorful vistas. It has the brightness and solemnness of gems like My Neighbour Totoro and Only Yesterday, chasing heavy moments of intense character drama with lighter touches. You uncover a lost memory about a difficult relationship between mother and son, then you help make the dinner. It’s one of those games. I was expecting a sort of Boku no Nasuyatsumi style adventure where you get to choose where you explore each day but the game is a lot more linear than that, and probably all the better for it. A focused, quite intense story taking place in past and present, one that I definitely need to find the time to replay as there are certain aspects of its story that are uncovered through letters and I did not find them all.

Citizen Sleeper: Flux, Refuge and Purge

Returning to the world of Citizen Sleeper once again I found myself even more enthralled with its story and cast with the DLC episodes, which focus on helping a refugee flotilla that has come to the Eye and preparing for a potentially apocalyptic event to occur. Part of the magic of this game’s structure and writing is that every step forward feels like a victory, even when there is so much to do and the dice are not rolling in your favour. It’s a beautiful, haunting exploration of human kindness, the rot of beaurocracy and how we discover who we really are in times of crisis. I wept when it ended. I cannot wait for Citizen Sleeper 2.

Films

Bones and All

I’m not massively in love with Luca Guadagnino’s ouevre, although I have a warm fondness for Call Me By Your Name, but I have to admit that I found myself strangely fixated by this weird, quiet, gory supernatural drama. A young girl dissappears into the world to find herself, and to find others like her who have this powerful hunger. Its not for the faint of heart, and I didn’t particularly gel with the cast as much as I wanted. Chalamet gives a bit of a muted performance, Mark Rylance is wonderfully creepy and leading lady Taylor Russell is beautifully vulnerable. Its like a sort of less horny Interview with a Vampire, aiming to provide a more grounded lilt to this longstanding mythology.

Extraction 2

I’m a self confessed Extraction liker. It’s a strong action flick with some surprisingly emotional beats, narrative cohesion between the tragic and shameful past of its protagonist, the ludicrously named Tyler Rake, and the complications of trying to save the son of a categorical bad man. This sequel sort of flounders after a fashion, a strong sequence of set pieces falsely attributed as a one-take (its not one take at all, just very well edited together) at first do it a lot of favours but it unfortunately falls back on well trod tropes and has a very weak finale. It was fine. I think Chris Hemsworth should really be doing big shit-for-brains musclehead action flicks, he could be up there with Stallone and Schwarzenegger if he wanted.

Music

Social Lubrication - Dream Wife

Big, bombastic, chugging punk tunes, the right kind of screaming, incredible lyrics. Just a really fun album.

Good Lies - Overmono

My de-facto album of the summer. Absolutely incredible mix of dubstep and D&B tracks that make you feel invincible. Best listened to with sunglasses on and an ice lolly in your hand.

The Age of Pleasure - Janelle Monae

Another banger from the coolest R&B singer of all time. This one is increasingly horny, as Janelle has seemingly just discovered shagging, but the vocal talents are on point and the tunes are catchy as hell. I do miss the sort of prog-esque sci fi stuff she was doing in her early work, but its not like i’m complaining. ‘Titties out for the next 15 years’

Books

Death Note

I will be writing something more substantial about this at some point, but revisiting Death Note after nearly 15 years was a fascinating experience. There are bits of its dark, winding narrative that are absolutely breathtaking and there are also bits that feel like an utter chore to read. Its not great in its presentation of women, it loses interest in it’s supernatural cast members at the halfway point in favour of a procession of increasingly boring twinks, but in the end it does pick up for a devastatingly good finale. A mixed bag, but I don’t regret the time I put into reading it all again.

This is how you lose the time war - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

This is the Bigolas Dickolas meme book that was doing the rounds recently. A really strange, beautiful, conflicting love story set in a fantastical universe. So rare it is to find a work of science fiction so utterly uninterested in its science, but I suppose that's how it is with true love. Details scatter to the wind, you only catch glimpses of the bigger picture like light catching tree leaves. Told in brief snippets of chapters and mostly through gorgeously written letters tucked away in the pockets of time to be found, its unconventional, often powerful, and although I don’t think I was properly in love with it at any point I’m really glad I read it.

Taste - Stanley Tucci

The world’s biggest DILF wrote himself an autobiography/cookbook a few years back, and it’s a really fun read. Childhood memories cut with intensly rich recipes. It’s got me wanted to revisit Big Night again. I want to eat that Timpano. Really great read, highly reccomend it.

Now that the dust has settled in my day job, i’m hoping to get really stuck into some more stuff over the month of July. There’s a new Final Fantasy out, the endgame of Barbie vs Oppenheimer, a new entry in ‘Tom Cruise trys to get himself killed’ and I’m really determined to get my hands on a copy of House of Leaves.

Tata for now!