Strange Horticulture – wonderful game, deservedly celebrated since its release last year. You run a plant shop in a fantasy version of the Lake District (there are witches in the woods, cultists in the towns, rituals at ancient stone circles), and your plants have both herbal and magical properties. The atmosphere veers between gloomy (it is frequently raining) and downright creepy. As customers visit your shop, the gameplay consists of trying to identify the plant they need with the aid of your trusty herbal, of following clues to locate new plants in a map of the landscape, and distilling elixirs from plant combinations. The challenge is nicely balanced – not too easy, but soluble with careful thought – and the characters and storylines grow with each passing simulated day. It's lovely to see a really great game from a British developer, and I have the sequel Strange Antiquities on my wishlist.
Frauds – superior heist drama, elevated by the central performances of two of our greatest actors: Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker. They play old crime-mates Bert and Sam, reunited after many years when Bert is released from a Spanish prison early because she is dying of cancer. She persuades Sam to do one last job, an art theft, and they assemble a rickety team, but it gradually becomes clear that Bert is not telling Sam everything, and it turns out Sam has secrets from Bert too. By the final episode, when against all odds the job actually goes down successfully, we find out that pretty much everybody has been deceiving everybody else in some way. It doesn’t leave a good feeling, because you end up not liking anyone. But a clever tale and a wild ride.
Tenebrae – concert ‘A Prayer for Deliverance’ at Saffron Hall. How good to hear one of our top-rank chamber choirs in superb acoustics. The repertoire is similar to Polymnia’s – nearly half their pieces were ones which we’ve done at some time in the past – but of course they do them better, indeed to perfection. The major work, previously unknown to me, was a Requiem by Howells: not in the same league as the Fauré or the Duruflé, but a decent pocket requiem. Most pleasingly they finished with the William Harris ‘Bring Us O Lord God’, which is the perfect end to a concert meditating on sleep, death and transformation.
Pine: A Story of Loss – meditative adventure game, or possibly a visual novel, about a woodcutter grieving after the death of his young wife. (So “pine” refers both to the trees that he chops and to his state of mind.) A worthy effort to tell an emotionally engaged story, which didn’t quite come off for me. It created its atmospheres powerfully and wordlessly, but the emotional beats didn’t always strike me as true – or perhaps my experience was just different from the woodcutter’s – and one of the mini-games (carving logs into sculptures of his wife) I found technically difficult to operate on my computer set-up, so that instead of being serene and beautiful it was awkward and frustrating. I’m glad to have played it, but it’s not a patch on Last Day of June.
Edna and Harvey: The Breakout (anniversary edition) – updated version of classic surreal and punkish adventure game, about a stroppy teenage girl trying to escape from a mental hospital with the aid of her toy rabbit, whom only she can hear speak. The story and the script are great, and the other inmates of the mental hospital are wonderfully conceived (including a man who wants to be a bee and two boys who have a fantasy that they are conjoined twins). It is, however, very hard and even an optimal solution – let alone roaming around experimenting to discover how to solve the puzzles – requires going back and forth and repeating whole chunks of dialogue. At least that dialogue is sparkling and the voice acting superb, which makes it all worthwhile.
Human – vivid and informative 5-part survey of the current state of pre-history, presented by the wonderful Ella Al-Shamahi. (When she speaks Arabic with one of the anthropologists she’s interviewing, it is SO cool!) Yes, how did the world go from six (at current count) species of humans to just one, our own particular African-descended homo sapiens? More a matter of chance than our arrogance (and earlier accounts of human history) would have us think, and less to do with weapons and warfare (as in 2001: A Space Odyssey) and more about the technology to create warm clothing, enabling us to survive a cooling climate even more successfully than homo neanderthalensis, which was better adapted to the colder environment of Northern Europe. Moving and humbling.
Empire with David Olugosa – well, this is one way of telling the story of the British Empire: not the way I’d have done it, but (of course) powerful and excellent on its own terms. In the absence of advance information, I expected the three episodes to be chronological, but in fact, they’re thematic: the first on the plantations (initially, sugar in Barbados) and the slave labour which enabled them; the second on Empire-driven migrations (not only the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but Indians indentured in Africa and convicts sent to Australia); and the third on the end of Empire and the contested histories we're left with today (he has both colonisers and colonised in his family history). Each programme is powerful and excellent in its own terms, but this is hardly a complete history; there should have been other episodes, perhaps making this one of those thirteen-part blockbusters the BBC used to do so well. I wanted to know where Ireland fitted in. And how can you do a series on the British Empire without mentioning China and the Opium Wars at all?
The Birds and Other Stories, by Daphne du Maurier – a nice new edition of short stories by this fantastic writer, who's not so much read these days but jolly well should be, as the quality of her prose is far better than that of, say, Stephen King or Philip K. Dick (as examples of other authors frequently adapted for films). Somehow she manages to be creepy (“a sense of dread” if you’re being posh and literary) without showing any actual horror – except perhaps in ‘The Birds’, which is a really frightening tale. Reading it in 2025, in midst of climate emergency, it struck me as fundamentally about the natural world striking back against the human race, remorselessly, totally, for reasons unexplained and unknown and finally irrelevant. But the story it reminded me of most was Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, because of the ultra-narrow focus on a single family in the midst of global catastrophe, and the concrete detail of how they attempt to secure their home, which to its original readership will have brought back memories of second world war civil defence. Hitchcock’s film, though good in its own way, is really just about people being attacked by birds.
Tomb Raider (2018) – with Alicia Vikander in the Lara Croft role. She’s a good actor, and it struck me that they’d set out to make the character more credible and less computer-gamey. The film’s plot is ludicrous, of course, and repeats tropes wholesale from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but Lara herself is realistic, if extreme. In her establishing scenes, we see her at a boxing gym and working as a cycle courier in London, displaying the death-defying skills of racing, running and jumping we will see in fantasy settings. Above all, she is vulnerable; when hit, she cries out in pain, and though she’s physically formidable she’s not hard as nails. She brings a light touch and a cheeky tone, especially in her final scene when she visits a gun dealer to equip herself for the first time with a firearm. “In fact, I’ll take two!” she says with a grin, brandishing the guns in the classic Lara Croft pose. Classic!
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