Syberia: The World Before – Oh how frustrating. I was able to play just enough of this third-sequel adventure game to confirm that it was just as great as the reviews suggested (sumptuous graphics, great voice acting, heart-rending plot moments) before it gave out on me. Turns out it’s not fully compatible with my laptop (a graphics card issue: needs to be NVidia or AMD, mine is Intel). I suppose this one will have to wait until I get my next laptop, which I wouldn’t expect to be for another five years or so.
Your Money Or Your Life – famous (apparently) American self-help guide “to transforming your relationship with money and achieving financial independence”. The basic idea is to treat money as the equivalent of time - the life energy you expend to earn it - and then track your outgoings, evaluating everything against the criteria of whether it gives sufficient fulfilment and satisfaction for the life energy it costs and whether the expenditure of life energy is in alignment with your values. Not so relevant to me now, surviving on a pension during a cost of living crisis and having already pretty much pared expenditure back to what gives fulfilment and satisfaction, but a decent system (if itself demanding of time to make the calculations) and a corrective to consumerism.
Worlds Apart: An Experiment – Interesting short (4’25”) film, posing the question of what happens if you take pairs of people with violently opposing views and build a connection between them before you reveal their disagreement. It turns out to be an advertisement for Heineken beer, but I can forgive them that for the hopeful message.
Kentucky Route Zero – sad and melancholy (though not depressing) game – if game is the right word, because there’s no challenge, no puzzles, not even any goal. Your choices make no difference at all to the story; what you choose are characters’ reactions. Once you adjust your expectations, it’s quite beautiful. Over five episodes, released between 2013 and 2020, you follow Conway, an old lorry driver, making one final delivery for a failing antiques business. His search for the elusive 5 Dogwood Drive takes him onto the mythical Route Zero and into a world of people damaged by debt, unemployment and corporate control. Along the way, he meets Shannon, whose hobby is repairing old television sets; Lula, a clerk in a government bureaucracy who has a sideline as a conceptual artist; a small boy either orphaned or abandoned (his parents went out one day and never came back), who seems to have a brother who is an eagle; the singer Junebug and keyboardist companion Jimmy. Many of these characters travel along with Conway, the viewpoint shifting from person to person. In the final episode, the remaining characters – without Conway, who has started drinking again and been forced to become a wage slave to a distillery company – emerge into the daylight (all previous episodes having taken place at night or underground) and find themselves in a dying company town, wrecked by storm and flood. The future for them, and the town’s inhabitants, is left open. You can suggest that they abandon the town and seek a living somewhere else, or that they stay and try to rebuild. But at the very end, you discover the newly-built and empty 5 Dogwood Drive, the perfect home for Conway’s antique furniture, which is a hopeful sign. (See reviews of Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, Act 4 and Act 5, and discussion of the story and discussion of the ending.)
Lucy Dreaming – fun, witty and well-made indie adventure game, which I helped to Kickstart. Lucy is a small girl, with big specs and unfeasibly large pigtails, and a no-nonsense attitude. When she suffers from nightmares, she determines to get to their cause: first by detective investigation of the ten-year-old events which may have traumatised her, and second by taking control of her dreams (the title is a pun on "lucid dreaming") to obtain tools to deal with her nightmares. (A key game mechanic is that objects acquired in one dream are retained in her inventory for use in all other dreams.) I liked Lucy; she's a brassy northern lass with a keen eye and a blunt way of talking. (Example, when trying to check her email: "I'm buggered if I can remember me password.") I also found it nice to see a thoroughly British game, down to the village fete where it is permanently raining (everywhere else is dry), the grimy pub, and the charity shop selling worthless tat. I wonder what Americans make of it. (Here's one example; see also the developer interview.)
Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson – very readable survey of the effects of “cognitive dissonance”: the way we all tend to minimise the effect of incompatible beliefs, in particular those that contradict our own sense of pride and self-worth. They call cognitive dissonance “the engine of self-justification”, and in numerous case studies they show how this works with prophets predicting the end of the world, business people involved in corruption and bribery, people expressing racist views while denying that they are racist, psychologists who recover memories of child abuse and who will not admit they might have constructed them, police officers and prosecutors who refuse to accept that they might have got the wrong guy, and partners, organisations and countries which put other parties down to justify their own anger and hurt. There’s a final chapter on how to get out of the psychological trap (“Letting go and owning up”), but it’s too brief.
The Secret Genius of Modern Life – very enjoyable BBC TV series with Hannah Fry, in which she has great fun taking apart pieces of high technology (a bank card, a fitness tracker, an electric car, a pair of trainers, a virtual assistant) to explain how they work and how and why the various components were developed. She really lets herself go in this series, and the production team indulge her wild and waky ways; I wonder if having survived her cervical cancer (see her Horizon documentary) she’s come to the conclusion that life is too short to waste.
If You Knew, poem by Ellen Bass – short, simple, powerful meditation on mortality.
The Soldier's Tale – great TV film of the Stravinsky pocket ballet, with Mark Elder conducting musicians of the Hallé Orchestra, in a zippy English translation by Jeremy Sams. A pity that the soldier and the devil aren’t dancing characters, though they act their way around contemporary Manchester locations very persuasively, but the sole remaining dancing character – the Princess – more than makes up for that with her one stupendous dance.
Masie Dobbs / Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear – well-written detective novels, set in the 1920s, our heroine being a bright independent woman with an East End ex-soldier sidekick and a formidable sense and understanding of psychology. Recommended by both Mary Beard and Hilary Clinton (when the former interviewed the latter, see partial transcript), these books make great reading - and we still have 15 more to go!
Br Herbert Kaden OSB: Some Memories of My Life – autobiography of Turvey Monastery’s venerable monk, who died in October aged 101. Fascinating details of his escape from Nazi Germany, internment as an “enemy alien” during the War, working as a gardener at St Edmund’s House in Cambridge, and becoming a monk first at Prinknash and then Turvey. All outward details, though, and not much about his inner life or how he became the great soul we knew and loved (as testified in his obituary by Br John Mayhead).
Rusty Lake: Cube Escape – excellent but creepy sequence of puzzle games, each effectively a single escape room. Extraordinary how much challenge can be delivered through a very simple design and touch interface. I badly needed a walkthrough, until I got the hang of the puzzle-setter's thinking.
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