Paddington In Peru (2024)

Very disappointing. All the charm and wit of the first two gone, replaced by an overly complicated adventure set-up and broad 'scary jungle' humour. A competent but unremarkable kids movie.

Strikes me that the Paddington series has so far followed the Wallace & Gromit pattern - first film is a quirky, idiosyncratic story that has an antagonist thrown in at the end but is mostly about British oddballs; second film keeps the idiosyncrasies but ramps everything up a bit for a clever caper; third film goes all in on the action and largely forgets the charm except to repeat bits from the first two occasionally.
So by the next one, I imagine Paddington will be stopping every two minutes to wave a book by JK Growling at the camera or whatever.

Rating: Not very good.

Black Mirror (2011 - )

(Note: For the first five seasons, these are posts from a group rewatch. After that, posts on a Discord as the episodes came out. Full spoilers throughout.)

S01E01 "THE NATIONAL ANTHEM"
A strong start, and I like the statement of starting out with one that barely has any sci-fi in it. I think it's all fairly well-pitched for satire. It is fairly unsubtle in getting its points across occasionally though, things get underlined heavily and the public are all working class sketches - less would have been more there, I think.
Mostly I find it interesting for the very 2011 point of view. I don't think Brooker would be making an episode today about the public's lust for humiliation and a semi-sympathetic PM!

S01E02 "FIFTEEN MILLION MERITS"
For me it's a little too on-the-nose, a little too clean, very 'I've read 1984 and Judge Dredd'. Daniel Kaluuya's great, but I almost find this one too comfortable a watch.

S01E03 "THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF YOU"
Still amazing. Quintessential Black Mirror - just a tweak of contemporary tech to show how it's having a massive effect on our lives and taking that to a logical extreme. It's a strong commentary on how having access to years of texts and emails and each other's social media has a massive effect on how we interact with each other and can lead to obsessive behaviour. Scrolling through an ex's Facebook, putting spyware on your kid's phone. Plus little notes thrown in of how employers and government have so much more access to our private lives (if we opt in). Really lean, a great eye for detail, and everyone's great in it but Kebbell is blisteringly good.

S02E01 "BE RIGHT BACK"
I really like it. It feels kind of like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind to me, in that it's not really a commentary on tech so much as a use of a sci-fi conceit to examine the loss of a loved one (via death or break-up). The first time I watched it, I was waiting for the 'evil AI' turn and was pleasantly surprised when it never happened. If the first season had been National Anthem, History Of You and this, it would have been an absolutely incredible opener.

S02E02 "WHITE BEAR"
I like this one but it's not in my favourites. I think generally the ones that are about the people affected by the tech rather than the tech (or situation, whatever) itself are the most effective. Also, this episode lets the wind out of its own sails with those inter-credit clips which just explain stuff we could have figured out ourselves and dilute that final moment.
It's interesting how much focus there was on the media and reality/competition shows in the early parts of this show, I'll be interested to see how long that goes on for. Obviously they're a point of interest at this time for Brooker, a tv writer and critic, who has already written Dead Set (people take refuge in the Big Brother house during a zombie outbreak), but it did feel like a prevalent issue as a viewer too. I can't imagine a current satire would bother focusing on Britain's Got Talent or Love Island (reprehensible as they are).

S02E03 "THE WALDO MOMENT"
I thought the characters were well-observed and portrayed but yeah all very light sketches. The story is well-told but also well-trodden ground (idealist worn down by the system, politician succeeds by telling the truth but slowly sells out). And yeah, that ending is a comically sudden escalation, it's like Brooker just wrote "and then dystopia" at the end. For all that I do still quite enjoy watching it, though, because it's well-crafted enough, it's just that I'm thinking "this could be a really good film if Brooker got Morris or Iannucci in to help him give it some meat". I do think Waldo being annoying is the point - not just in a 'the public are morons' way but also in a 'it didn't take a genuinely witty, clever, insightful person to shake up the system, a Sasha Baron Cohen or whoever, all it needed was this childish angry shouting unfunny cartoon because the politicians are that out of touch and fake and untrustworthy' way.
(One tiny nitpick, which I only make because I'm so surprised that Brooker and however many other telly people would write it and let it through - "speed up the autocue, please". That's not how it works, autocues have a human operator who adjusts the speed to match the speaker on the fly, they don't just set it to 8 and let it run. If the speaker wants the autocue to speed up, they just speak faster. I guess it's in there to tell the viewer 'this is a rehearsal for a live show', and they decided that was more important than it being accurate, but it's the kind of thing I would have imagined Brooker would demand get changed to something better!)

S02E04 "WHITE CHRISTMAS"
I really like this one, it's full of cool ideas and all the twists are signposted fairly (how I didn't originally get the snowglobe thing within the opening ten seconds of the episode I don't know!). The first section is the only one that has much social commentary to it, really - a deft jab at PUAs, incel culture and the like. The middle bit might be a warning about how we'll treat sapient AI if it ever happens and the latter about the criminal justice system, I guess? But then, the show doesn't necessarily always have to be saying something, it can just be effective tech noir. I love the neatness of the ending, how they're both punished by being isolated in a snowstorm in two very different ways. Probably my main criticism of it is that the cruelty shown to the 'cookies' is very close to the punishment of White Bear.

S03E01 "NOSEDIVE"
Incredible. Howard, Eve and Jones are great, and it's full of amazing character actors (I recognised Daisy Haggard at the time but not Susannah Fielding, Sope Dirisu or Michaela Coel). It's a brilliant look at another aspect of social media, the upvote whores. All those people who give so much of a shit about forum post numbers and Discord name colours and blue ticks, who carefully curate the online presentation of their life to look oh so perfect and adorable. And it gets time for the weirdness of rating Uber drivers, and for inspirational tv programming (via the letting agent holograms and adaptive billboards), exacerbation of body image issues and enforced gender roles. It looks and sounds great, and it reaches a perfect crescendo.
Apparently, Planes Trains & Automobiles was one of their influences - it definitely has that 'person who has it all together goes on a dogged cross-country trip as things get worse and worse' structure. Like Clockwise and stuff as well. It's a really smart choice, actually, to hang it all on a solid well-tested frame like that.
I was a bit worried when Black Mirror became a Netflix thing and all these American creative elements were introduced, but then I saw this and was relieved, excited and blown out of the water.

S03E02 "PLAYTEST"
Another awesome episode. I love how it builds really gradually and then snaps and just keeps going and going and going. I actually was expecting there to be another couple of flips before the end because I'd remembered it as being so relentless towards the end. I remember being very happy at the time because I'd thought during the episode "wow, this guy is great, it's a really Kurt Russell-y powerhouse performance" and then saw his name in the credits and confirmed it with a google. Dan Trachtenberg directing too, after Joe Wright last week - pulling in some big names.

S0303 "SHUT UP AND DANCE"
I really like this one. It's kind of a White Bear except with internet vigilantes like Anonymous - how people cheer if they dox and swat the 'right' people, how much of it is a game for them rather than any kind of coherent ethical motivation.
Funny how this stuff dates so quickly though - this felt so current at the time but groups like Anon seem to have just disappeared now, for some reason.

S03E04 "SAN JUNIPERO"
I know this one's very popular, but I'm not really that into it. It spends a full half hour just doing a standard girl-meets-girl, then it gets interesting in the second half but then just does a Waldo Moment style mid-credits sudden resolution. 'And then, happily ever after!' I like the shots of the storage facility that add a little bite to it, but overall it just compounds the feeling that there wasn't really much to the story. What is there is all really well done, though.

S03E05 "MEN AGAINST FIRE"
This one has an incredibly obvious twist that it takes ages to get to, and then hammers home its metaphor in the bluntest way possible. Cool idea, zero subtlety.

S03E06 "HATED IN THE NATION"
This is a fairly embarrassing entry in the series. It's trite and contrived, it barely has anything to say about technology or social media, and it doesn't justify the feature-length runtime. It feels like a cheesy weekly cop drama whose writers just happened to read about Twitter hate mobs that week or whatever.

S04E01 "USS CALLISTER"
I really enjoy this episode. Yes it's another 'digital clone in a virtual world' episode after White Christmas and San Junipero (plus some overlap with Playtest I guess), yes it doesn't have much to say, and yes that happy ending is reeeeally convenient, but it's really entertaining and well-made, loads of great performances, it looks and sounds great, and I love how for the climactic chase it actually turns into a space action movie with them all working as a team in their roles, and then the happy ending of being given an infinite MMO to play in getting undercut by the reminder that most online gamers are dicks is really funny.

S04E02 "ARKANGEL"
Arkangel is a little weak. Lots of story strands disappear (like the grandfather and the biker), I never got to know a version of the daughter for long enough to care about her, and the ending feels a bit tepid. The tech themes are interesting - parents putting trackers on their kids' phones and laptops, and parental content locks - but I think the latter muddies the water a bit, because what's a parent supposed to do, not put a content lock on YouTube or whatever for their eight year old? The problem only exists with this fictional version of the tech. There's maybe a discussion to be had about how kids used to have access to more adult stuff via libraries and what have you and are actually getting more sheltered now that their primary intake can be throttled so heavily, but I'm not really convinced and I don't think this episode really tackles that anyway.

S04E03 "CROCODILE"
Better than I remembered it. A nasty little thriller with a tech twist. Feels a bit like a spin-off of The Entire History Of You but with slightly different tech rules. I guess what I probably didn't like about it the first time round was that it feels very clinical, everything is there to keep the plot beats going and nothing else - all the characters are basically non-existent. I suspect you can see Brooker trying to fix that in the 'she eats peppermint sweets!' quirk.

S04E04 "HANG THE DJ"
I think I enjoyed this more the second time, knowing the twist and just being able to enjoy the story. Especially since it's another fucking digital clone one so the disappointment isn't quite so sharp. The romcom stuff is really good fun (that "ahhh" halfway through the cunnilingus is hilarious) but it really drags in the second half when it's just slowly moving towards the reveal. I do like the idea that this dating app is basically simulating a Black Mirror episode a 1000 times for something so frivolous, but the build-up is too long and too sincere. I think this would have worked a lot better as a half hour Inside No 9 episode taking the piss out of romcom 'race to the airport' tropes (or even a Richard Curtis movie if he had a good writer to balance out his huge flaws).
Also, had a 'ohh that person was in it, I didn't know them back then' moment with Joe Cole as I've now seen him in Gangs Of London (also Green Room apparently). Guy's got a lot of range!
Weirdly, the POC lead in this was in BBC drama "Murdered By My Boyfriend" and the POC lead in the last one was in BBC drama "Murdered By My Father". Well, maybe tellingly rather than weirdly...

S04E05 "METALHEAD"
Very good. It looks amazing, it's so taut, just no weak spots at all. I love that like all good movie monsters the dogs have got rules, stuff you can use to escape them, gives it a bit of a Tremors feel as well (but those also don't get clumsily explained, you just work out what's happening). The end twist is arguably a little unnecessary and blunt, but also I do think it works, it sticks the knife in a little more - the survivors still have enough humanity left that they're willing to risk their lives just to make a dying kid's last few hours a little more bearable.

S04E06 "BLACK MUSEUM"
Okay, I was wrong when I remembered this as 'maybe a good one'. It's another portmanteau episode like White Christmas, but not half as good. The first story is a cool idea that's rushed through and mostly told through voiceover, and the second two stories are 'digital clones get tortured' again! The framing story has promise but it has to rush through a bunch of exposition at the end just to set up and then execute the twist. Plus having only the one guy present in all three stories really limits them.

S05E01 "STRIKING VIPERS"
I think I liked this one a little more than the first time I watched it, as I could see what they were setting up at the start of the episode with the male bonding behaviour etc. I really like the themes of this and how it deals with them, about social constructs of gender roles and sexuality and how technology can break them down or get assimilated into them. It reminded me of the People Make Games video about VR Chat and how a lot of guys just enjoy being women on there in a non-creepy healthy way. Stuff like how male friends can be incredibly aware of each others' bodies and that be seen as non-sexual and therefore impervious to homophobia in certain specific contexts, or how Karl's younger-generation girlfriend seamlessly switches from sex to phone browsing or integrates the two, was really well observed and layered in. But after Danny and Karl have cyber-boinked a couple of times, the episode runs out of things to say and kinda flips to a romdram which also doesn't have any meat to it. I think with a runtime shorter by 10 mins or so this could have been a top episode.

S05E02 "SMITHEREENS"
Not much to this one, really. Much like the robot bees one, it feels more like a standard cop drama episode the writer of which read an article about addictive algorithms that week. As usual, strong performances, well-directed etc, and the script was a lot better than the bees one at least.

S05E03 "RACHEL, JACK AND ASHLEY TOO"
Boy, this is a disappointing episode. I don't mind them just going out-and-out action comedy, the show's strength is in its diversity. And I don't completely mind it being another digital clone ep as they do something a bit different with it (though really, Jesus, another one?). But it takes a good 40 minutes to actually get to be the thing it wants to be, and even when it gets there it has no bite, no dark satirical undercurrent. There are nods towards post-mortem digital likeness rights, mistreatment of child stars, celebrity personas, artists' estates milking all their half-baked recording demos for years etc, but it's all just there to set up this mild adventure story. I even liked the stuff about the inhibited Ashley Too actually being a bad presence in Rachel's life because she's full of mindless empowerment mantras and can't actually read subtle social cues or use life experience like a human can, but that got dropped along with the absent father thread. It reminds me of Dead Set, Brooker's 'zombies in the Big Brother house' miniseries - it had a couple of clever satirical elements but mostly it just grinded through the usual zombie apocalypse tropes instead. This really needed Ben Stiller to come in and give it that Cable Guy/Zoolander/Tropic Thunder touch.
(One other thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was those former Ashley fans fleeing the gig at the end, like the show is saying 'yeah, fuck off, how dare you enjoy pop music!' I would have much rather seen them at the back a little taken aback but maybe getting their minds opened to some other kinds of music by what is, let's be honest, a fairly accessible NIN cover.)

"BANDERSNATCH"
I haven't given Bandersnatch another go yet, but I really enjoyed it on release. The one thing I will say to people who haven't played it before is to approach it as a lightly interactive tv episode, a cool idea for a show about tech, not as the next Sam Barlow game. I saw a lot of people in the gaming community at the time treating it like it was the latter and judging it far too harshly as a result.
I had a really good experience with it; at a certain point I was replaying to try to get a bunch of different events and endings and just as I was thinking "I've exhausted this to the point of diminishing returns" I got sent down this new long ending strand which just wrapped the whole thing up perfectly. I don't think I'm going to try to hit that again this time, I'll probably just play for 40 minutes and put it down, but I'm really glad it went that way the first time.
...
Just did a new play through. I'm not going to go back and hunt down all the different routes like I did last time, but I really enjoyed it again. I'd forgotten how much they tie the interactive thing into the story, it's so good when you become part of it and you're basically a demon possessing people by the end of it. Also really smart how they repurposed the White Bear symbol. I also thought it was actually really impressive how it remembered lots of small stuff and previous paths and integrated them into complex edits seamlessly - I'd be really interested to see some behind the scenes stuff of how they did all that.

S06E01 "JOAN IS AWFUL"
Really enjoyed Joan Is Awful! Very funny and yet a horrible 'what would you do' set up as well. I felt a little bit ahead of it for a while in the middle there, but the chemistry of Murphy and Hayek pulled me through and then the Michael Cera twist totally got me. And yeah, it is basically the digital clone thing again, but it did feel different to what they'd done before with it, so I didn't mind too much - it had a bunch of different stuff going on in there as well, like the whole free will thing.

S06E02 "LOCH HENRY"
Wasn't a big fan of Loch Henry. Good performances but very predictable and didn't have anything to say about modern technology. Also a few weird contrivances - their decision to shoot everything on VHS rather than spend a day or two gathering some equipment that would actually be broadcast quality (maybe they were going for a retro vibe to match the old footage, but the stuff about getting tourists in with 4K footage openly contradicted that), getting John Hannah and the son into the hospital via two separate incidents, and then Pia making a bunch of silly slasher victim decisions at the end. It was a bit better than Hated In The Nation or Smithereens but it was another of those 'we're just going to try our hand at a bog standard thriller this week' episodes.
And the exploitative nature of documentaries has been a topic of conversation for, I dunno, a hundred years?
Oh, Pod from GoT was bloody brilliant though.

S06E03 "BEYOND THE SEA"
Didn't think much of it. An interesting set-up very quickly devolved into a very predictable and incredibly slow thriller. Anything it's saying about people valuing their digital lives over their physical ones is undercut by that plus the spaceship meta-setting. This is one of those episodes where you have to find out what Brooker was addressing via interviews etc after the fact because none of it is actually in the writing.
Also, I know that this is a digital avatar rather than digital clone episode and there are slightly fewer of those, but fucking hell another one. I saw an interview snippet from Brooker about this season and he said that when he started writing he looked back at the previous episodes and realised how many were about digital versions of people. What happened, Brooker?! 66% of the new episodes are that again!

S06E04 "MAZEY DAY"
Very much enjoyed the last 7 minutes, then it just ended.

S06E05 "DEMON 79"
Well, I didn't think much of that one. Fairly predictable and not massively funny or scary or gross. Weird selection of episodes this season.

S07E01 "COMMON PEOPLE"
I had a lot of reservations about this as I watched - is it a bit predictable, is it taking too long to get going, is the 'medication as live service' idea actually a shitty thing that already happens (I think I've read about stuff like pacemakers getting messed about by bad updates or something, but maybe that was just some other speculative fiction!), is it a bit tacky to complain about stream subscription services as if they were life or death, is the cyber-augment stuff off-target? But by the end of it, I appreciated it for its theme of predatory practices, looking at shitty stuff like Prime Video making you watch ads even though you're already paying for the service, or those awful 'pay poor people to do nasty stuff sites' that people like PewDiePie use, or drug dealers (getting you hooked on brief moments of euphoria) and drawing a line to national healthcare (UK/US specifically, I guess) and private pharmaceutical companies. So, while I think it probably could have been 5-10 mins shorter and it's fairly 'standard' Black Mirror, it's a solid entry.

S07E02 "BETE NOIRE"
Enjoyed this one, though it was a little predictable and it only really got to the fun stuff in the last 20 minutes or so. Still a cool idea, well acted and written.

S07E03 "HOTEL REVERIE"
Thought this was pretty terrible, clunky nonsense. I almost gave up on it halfway through. I don't mind suspending disbelief for 'advanced computer is magic', but just the basic real world logic of it all was so broken I was constantly bumping against it. Plus characters constantly telling each other stuff they know and the show telling me stuff I know, infuriating. It's too long, it's yet another digital avatar story (please for the love of god if there's a season 8 make a rule that not a single episode can involve this), it's another of their 'let's make a Hollywood thriller, or love story or teen caper' attempts which always fall flat. I wish I could appreciate the show trying different things more, but it never really works. There's a seed of a good idea here, trying to get a known story back on track, maybe they should have taken an old episode of the show and done it with that, like The Entire History Of You or something, so they don't have to constantly tell the audience what the non-existent original version was and they can play with expectations, give it a cheesy Hollywood happy ending, that kind of thing. BTTF 2, basically. I'm already enjoying an idea I came up with off the top of my head more than the episode they made!

S07E04 "PLAYTHING".
Arguably a bit self-indulgent (sequel to an existing episode, overt references to stuff in Brooker's life like PC Zone and CEX) and limited (it's essentially a 'what if?' story that takes its entire duration to unfurl that 'what if?' without actually answering) but it's all done really well, it's exciting and entertaining. And I'm a big Bandersnatch fan so I enjoyed the indulgence. Also, scanned the QR code in the credits, got sent to a version of the Thronglets game and got stuck playing it for almost two hours! 

S07E05 "EULOGY".
Loved this. Very Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind exploration of break-ups with tech as a facilitator rather than the focus of the story. Giamatti is great and Ferran is good too, the writing is great (another argument for more non-Brooker or co-written episodes!), all the imagery is perfect, rich with detail. Just a gorgeous story, straight into my faves.

S07E06 "USS CALLISTER: INTO INFINITY".
So, as with the first one, this is basically just a really sold, fun episode. Looks lovely, great Daniel Pemberton score, the tech thriller stuff all works and the rules are clear without hitting any big real-world-logic bumps. The pace is relaxed but never sluggish. Really the only issue with it is that the element of surprise is gone, but they bring a few new things in, and the return of Daly works great.

Skiplist: "The National Anthem", "The Entire History of You", "Be Right Back", "White Christmas", "Nosedive", "Playtest", "Shut Up And Dance", "USS Callister", "Metalhead", "Bandersnatch", "Joan Is Awful", "Eulogy", "USS Callister: Into Infinity"
[White Bear and Plaything are close but remain in the high end of 'good not great'. Joan Is Awful is a new addition some time after the fact, could get removed again on rewatches.]

Thelma (2024)

Really sweet funny comedy-drama. I hesitate to give it a genre label though because it's an oddball mix of very light drama and very gentle comedy, it feels quite European. Well acted and directed.

Rating: Very good.

Return To Monkey Island (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

I'll paste in what I wrote back when Dan and I played a bit of it shortly after release, with a few edits. This all still stands for me, unfortunately:

First the fairground thing - so all the games so far have been Guybrush's kid play-acting his own versions of his stories? And he hangs out with a kid who happens to be called Chucky? And then they just did a couple of things at the end that didn't really make any sense but would have acted well as a good cliffhanger for a video game? And actually it all looking like modern day (down to Chucky's heavy metal t-shirt) was misleading and this is still pirate times? And when Guybrush Jr saw his parents in the dream sequence in Revenge, he made them two randos from the park he'd seen earlier? And Chucky was, what, just watching Guybrush Jr play-act on his own for 95% of the time then stepping in for two minutes once an hour? But... this thing we're playing now is real? Or maybe not for all I know? Also, the fairground reveal and the 'previously on' scrapbook really clash - so Guybrush definitely did the stuff in the book? So he definitely pulled LeChuck's leg off with the voodoo doll? But we just will now never get to know how that story actually ended. Or maybe that is Guybrush Jr playing at being Guybrush Sr looking through an imaginary scrapbook about imaginary adventures and talking out loud about them. Maybe Guybrush Sr is actually an accountant and all the pirate stuff is stories he's wholly made up for his kids. Who knows, now? Very unsatisfying and messy and frankly a total cop-out. (Maybe they'll reveal more stuff later that turns it all around but doing a shit twist in order to set up a good twist later isn't the best idea.)

Regardless of whether it all technically makes sense somehow, I'm not really paying attention to the game, because I'm trying to juggle all this in my head. It's just a very inelegant way to handle it all and especially to start a game.

More general stuff. It's a very boring start even apart from the canon-wrangling - a drawn out tutorial that is inconsequential to the story, then Melee Island again except it's sliiiightly diiiifferent! Plus the Princess Bride 'kid interrupts adult telling the story' stuff is pretty tired now. I still don't like the art, or the animation. Guybrush looks like an anorexic homeless person with a dicknose, and the cheap animation makes everyone looks like they've got Parkinson's. It's just not funny so far. I have a sneaking suspicion they're going to do Pun Swordfighting, which if they do is just the laziest internet-addled shit ever. And that dated horse armour reference they did as promotion which actually infected the game was terrible. It's got a To Do list (with pop-ups) and 'new item' exclamation mark icons, and a Hint Guide (which they waste the Voodoo Lady's intro scene on giving to you and which glows and shakes in your inventory unlike any other item, as if encouraging you to just give up on playing the game properly) and some sort of collectibles thing, which UGH. The context-sensitive hover text is really irritating and pointless, and Guybrush on the map is now an icon bouncing around rather than actual Guybrush walking across an island.

The tutorial was ridiculously long and had zero subtlety, plus it feels really weird for an MI game to open with something like that anyway. Newcomers could just look at a controls screen or something. Along with the flat, child's doodle art style and the whole 'this is a kid just making shit up' thing being made completely explicit from the jump, the whole thing feels really patronising and cutesy and fake. Just completely the wrong mood for a Monkey Island game. Even if you take the twist ending of MI2 at face value, it's still done in a creepy way and it doesn't undo the tone of the first two games. 

So, yeah, not a fan of this at all so far, and it's really weird to see Gilbert go from 'purposefully retro, poking at the player's patience in just the right way' in TP to this smoothed out collection of bells and whistles.

Hopefully as I go on, more stuff will appeal to me and I'll be able to stop thinking about the bumpy start.

God, Dan mentioned this at the time, but I'd forgotten how hand-holdy these cuts back to storyteller Guybrush are. Explaining very basic concepts that you just heard literally ten seconds earlier, and reassuring you that doing adventure game puzzles isn't boring because it's leading to story beats. It's a Monkey Island game that is too caught up in its own lore and yet wants to be accessible to someone who's never played an adventure game before.

When I opened the game up again, I was like 'hmmm, actually this art isn't half as bad as I remembered from yesterday, it looks sorta nice', and then as soon as I walked somewhere and all the movement kicked in, it looked horrible again. It's the paper-puppets aesthetic, the characters just gliding through the world and printing on top of stuff they shouldn't, and the way everything is constantly in motion, not just the weird head shaking but the chandeliers violently swinging, the bouncing pot on the throbbing stove. It all feels like a cheap YouTube under-4s animation, or a very cheap knock off of Broken Age. They also put a bunch of background animation in, which I'd normally appreciate, but it's so in your face here it can sometimes feel like the same kind of over-compensation as the head warping. 

A lot of the time you have to examine stuff to unlock the interact option, sometimes you don't get an examine option at all, and when trying to use your inventory on stuff you get a big red no entry icon for most of it so you can't try anything out and get hints. It makes it all feel more on rails. Even a flat 'that doesn't work' response, while in effect the same as a pre-emptive no entry, makes you feel more involved (and also makes it less tempting to brute force stuff by just sweeping your inventory over all the hotspots until you get a sentence line).

Storywise, there's a recurring motif of Guybrush looking at broken down relics from the past and reminiscing on old times. Like, the sentence line is sometimes explicitly stuff like "remember happier times" while looking at Melee island stuff. So I think Gilbert is trying to do an Unforgiven style narrative here, with older Guybrush coming back to his old haunts and finding everything falling apart, taken over by more ruthlessly capitalist and cynical tastes, with an allegorical layer about his return to the series. This is really interesting and I wish he'd leaned into this rather than the meta stuff. Like, give Guybrush grey hair and a shaggy beard, make it the next step from MI2, have him and LeChuck get back on track to the secret of Monkey Island after getting distracted by other weird silly adventures. Frankly, lean a bit more into the 'this is how you should have done an MI3' thing that a lot of fans wanted (and that he himself blogged about many years earlier). But if this is what he's reaching for, it's massively compromised by the presentation (art style tone, UI etc). Also, it's a shame that Escape already did the return to Melee and the capitalist modernising thing, it has (had?) a lot more potential resonance here. 

Finished. It got a little more complicated towards the end, with five keys to collect, but I basically made my way through without having to stop to think, which is a weird experience for a Monkey Island game. Probably the paucity of verbs and dialogue trees played a big part in this. The only times I ever really slowed down were when I had to re-examine something in my inventory and when I missed a pathway because it blended in with the background.

Storywise, it's a very bog-standard Monkey Island set-up, going to Melee Island, LeChuck's ship and a few other island, taking part in contests and cheating to win, tracking down five of the same item, racing against LeChuck, all the same characters again.

And so, the ending. I've been posting spoilers all through this thread, but just a last warning: spoilers! So, just before the final section, there's a little conversation with Elaine where she lists some of the bad things you've done through the game. There have been multiple cutscenes setting this up where she finds out about the path of destruction you've been leaving behind you. Then she lists them and asks whether it was worth it just to chase down this secret, and Guybrush says he was just solving puzzles, there was no other way, to which she replies "wasn't there?" (No. No there wasn't.) And that's it. Loads of narrative weight all for this one sub-Bioshock 'gotcha' moment, the kind of clever clever video game post-modernism that we poke fun at in LOTCG with Ben's reaction to the Denial level. I have no idea what Gilbert and Grossman are trying to say here - are they questioning our willingness to do bad things via Guybrush, or the fanbase's fixation on "The Secret", or whether they should have bothered making this game? It's also a little hard to dissect it precisely, because they hedge their bets by giving Guybrush multiple reply options.

So, that over with and forgotten, you get through the last few puzzles. LeChuck has the secret of Monkey Island in a big chest, says it must be opened in the bowels of Monkey Island, and has gone through the last door to do that. So you solve the puzzle, walk through, and... you exit through the same "employees only" Melee Island door that you did in Monkey Island 2. You're back on the high street but everything is fake, it's a theme park that Stan maintains and regularly creates different stories for. Basically, it's an escape room/LARP type set up, that Guybrush occasionally plays in. Then it cuts back to Guybrush Jr complaining about the ending and demanding to know what the secret is, the player is given various options, and then Elaine heads off with Guybrush Jr and Guybrush is left sitting on the bench relaxing. It's all incredibly smug and meaningless and so fucking lazy. It's just the same 'it's all a story' thing from MI2 (and Thimbleweed Park) but with more muddled layers thrown on top. The message seems to be 'you played a fun game, right? Who cares what the ending of the story is, it's all fake anyway!' Which I find to be an incredibly flawed and uninteresting one.

G&G add a final note to the player at the end of the 'previously on' (bit annoying to have to click through to get to, but whatever), where they talk about how the game addressed Gilbert's career being largely defined by this one thing, and how successful they can be at revisiting the glory days as older people. But... the game doesn't really grapple with those themes in any meaningful way. It just replays some old hits, has a character ask "is it worth it" and then wraps up with a shrug. If the secret is so unimportant, why spend the whole story on it? Why not get it and Monkey Island out of the way early and do something new and exciting with the rest of the game?

A shallow ending to a shallow game.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (2022)

I have a sneaking suspicion I won't like Hob's Barrow half as much as reviewers did.

Okay, did the extended prologue, and so far am liking it! The voice acting and sound design is great, writing is solid to good so far, lots of forboding Wicker Man/Royston Vasey energy. Not much has happened except a dream about a slightly weird looking cat, so I hope this isn't an 'elevated horror' game where it's all build up except for the last five minutes!

Only negative so far really is that the art is very basic pixel art. Serviceable but bog-standard. The exception is the creepy close-ups, which have tones of character, but a downside to that is it makes the regular art feel all the more unremarkable. Shame they couldn't have gone a bit more in that direction in general.

Realised that I was possibly mingling this in my mind with Curse Of The Golden Idol, which I think is a lot more of a detective game, and that may have contributed to my pessimism!

Having said that, I've played a bit more now and my opinion has dipped. After the atmospheric opening section, I'm now wandering around feeling a little aimless and doing incongruously silly adventure game stuff like distracting NPCs so I can use a hairpin to pick a lock, or finding a random necklace to use as a deposit to open a tab at the bar. It's all a little boring and is putting a big dent in the atmosphere. I'm now having to check a walkthrough because the latest puzzle is getting some paraffin for my lantern and the blacksmith will trade me for some but when I ask him what he wants. he says "surprise me" and apparently he wouldn't want anything I have! What kind of puzzle is that?

Also, minor criticism is that this is another game that opts for fading to black rather than animate simple stuff like the character sitting down or picking a lock, and even weirder fading characters out of the scene rather than have them open a door and walk through it. It's a small thing but it does spoil the immersion a bit, and it's not the most complicated thing to include.

Okay, looked at a walkthrough and before I got all the way to the solution was reminded that the blacksmith likes fossils. There's one in a rock I've seen, plus I now have a chisel. So I suppose that's actually a reasonable puzzle and one that a bit of wandering around all the screens would probably have got me to after a few minutes - I was just so irritated by that "surprise me" line! Might have been good to get a bit more feedback on trying to give him tools, though, as that seems a fair route to take. But regardless, this all still feels more Monkey Island than Wicker Man. I think I'm about to get to the end of this bit and find Hob's Barrow, though, so hopefully it'll get back on track.

It's a shame because when the atmosphere is uninterrupted, it's really strong. Striding out across the moors, finding a barrow, getting sense memories from the damp peat, then walking back to the village as it gets dark and starts to rain (and the rain effect is great - not the standard AGS rain, it's thick near horizontal British rain) and getting out of the evening mist into the warm firelit tavern. Having a pint of ale and chatting to the locals, enjoying slowly getting to know them even though there's an ever-present underlying worry that as a posh unmarried woman you'll never be truly welcome and may be in some danger. And then you go to sleep and have eerie dreams of walking under purple skies, with creepy close-ups of fair folk. But then you get a little autosave or "acquired: lump of tree resin" message pop-up with an electronic ding, the game fades to black to cover a three second event, the cursor pops in and out, the music behind an interstitial card cuts out abruptly; it all just bumps you out of it a bit. Plus you have a great long conversation at a pub table but there are never any close-ups or anything, and go through all the generic puzzling from earlier, it all serves to remind you you're playing a video game. It's all the kind of little stuff I'd nag Dan about when playtesting and writing up massive lists of notes for him!

Anyway, have done the arrival and Day One now, am onto Day Two (of three, apparently), so I guess I'm almost halfway through...

Ughhhh, more aimless wandering around. I now have to try to convince the farmer to let me excavate the barrow (which I already failed at yesterday and have no reason to think I'll be any more successful today, plus I can't even find him so I'm doing less well than I was before) and 'find out about local folklore' which I suppose just entails walking through every screen and getting through any new dialogue options for every character. Not a propulsive narrative, to say the least.

The puzzle design in this game is truly terrible. I've reached the point where I'm checking a walkthrough every few minutes and I can't be bothered any more. Remember that episode of the Simpsons where the kids are stranded on a desert island and by the end of the episode they've resolved their Lord of the Flies style conflicts but they're still stuck there so a narrator starts speaking and finishes with "and they were rescued by, oh, let's say Moe"? This game is like that: "you need some workers but you can't hire any until, oh, let's say you get some milk for the maid ... the lord won't help you until you get him, oh, let's say some cakes from the church patron." Just laughably perfunctory. And the solutions to the puzzles tick off a bunch of bad adventure design boxes too, like having to walk around interacting with everything until you trigger a change, having to do the same action three times to get a result without any suggestion that will happen, cause and effect you couldn't possibly guess at. Like, you've been trying to get the farmer to let you excavate the barrow and he's resolutely refusing. The solution? Show him an old stone from the previous dig. Turns out his brother, who was on that dig, also had a stone like that and for some reason this convinces him to give in. I still don't understand that one. Or when you need a particular kind of flower, which you've been told grows on the moors. The solution is to go into the church where there is now suddenly someone inside despite it being consistently empty up to this very moment, ask them about the vicar and randomly be told he had a roof garden at the top of the church and he has a key which he keeps in an unknown location maybe the graveyard, and realise this means that actually he's hidden the key behind one of the plaques that aren't in the graveyard and which now your character mentions have crumbly plaster around them despite never having said that before and that it must be the plaque with the names Romeo and Juliet mentioned because the vicar quoted Shakespeare at you a few times. There are more of these, it's painful.

Again, a real shame, this would have been better off as an If On A Winter's Night... style interactive story. Even the flashbacks were starting to run out of steam though, to be honest, no new information or mystery to them, it was all starting to feel a bit perfunctory. too. So I'm going to watch a walkthrough because I do want to see all the supernatural stuff (assuming it turns out to be real) but I can't be bothered struggling through any more of it. Especially as I have a journal with a bunch of quoted passages with IMPORTANT highlighted WORDS in them and a bunch of drawings with stars in different positions and shit, and I definitely can't be bothered to go through a load of Fate Of Atlantis style dial-turning nonsense.

Watching the last third of the game on a playthrough video, and my god the puzzles got worse just after I quit. The lord will only let you use his workers if you get him that one villager's homemade cakes, so you go ask her, she says she just gave the last of them to the vicar and even though he's left town and the cakes will go off you can't have them, and she's too upset over the recent death of her husband to bake more (which doesn't make sense seeing as he's been buried since you got here, at which point she was going on at you about her latest batch), so you have to go look at his grave, then go back to her and mention it to her at which point she tells you she wants to put a certain kind of flower on it (the third 'get me some flowers' puzzle of the game, in fact) and will bake you some cakes if you get her some, but you can't get them because a grumpy housekeeper is guarding them, but the maid will distract her if you find her missing boyfriend so you go ask some bloke in the town square who tells you which road he comes in from and you go there, find he's been tied up, cut his ropes and take him back to the maid. It's the kind of stupid "Man I love spanners" puzzle chain that Dan and I would put in a game to take the piss, I can't believe the devs thought it was a good match for this game. And unless I missed some contrived detail while scanning through, it doesn't make sense that the lord would even demand this of you, because his secret scheme depends wholly on you excavating the barrow! Why would he refuse to facilitate you doing that unless you got him some cakes?!

The worst thing is, the egregious puzzle design means I stop giving the benefit of the doubt on other stuff: odd choices like a little text pop-up that says something like "acquired: lump of tree resin" whenever you pick something up, like you're a terminator. Or directing the goblin VO to sound completely human (and I know, goblins aren't real, there's no reason they couldn't just sound like some twenty-five year old bloke down the pub, but it just feels wrong). Or stopping the story to listen to a travelling musician (cool idea, nice bit of atmosphere) but writing and mixing it to sound like a 90s Radiohead B-side rather than some late 19th century folk music being played on an acoustic guitar in the corner of a tavern. Things that, when I read reviewers gushing about how they had to keep reminding themselves that this terrifying ordeal was just a game or that they spent hours after playing thinking about the deep socio-philosophical themes, make me want to shout "did you just not notice all the terrible bits, have you not played a game since the 80s?!"

Finished watching the video, and wow the last section is a purple Atlantis full of riddles and turning statue heads to face the right way, and sneering cartoon villains doing evil laughs together like it's an Austin Powers movie. All that opening atmosphere gone. It's like if the last twenty minutes of Wicker Man were Sergeant Howie finding the Wicker Man's secret underground lair and solving riddles to get past booby traps. I can see why one reviewer reported being initially disappointed after finishing the game but then spending hours talking themselves into liking it and thinking it was really clever actually. Maybe if you have to work that hard on maintaining cognitive dissonance, the game was actually just disappointing and you'll have to bring yourself to give a bad review to an adventure game despite it being one of those 'important serious ones with themes'.

This really does remind me so much of Fate of Atlantis in how frustrated I am at the devs for squandering so much promise with so much bullshit.

Dexter Stardust: Adventures In Outer Space (2022)

This looks a little cheap but got 'solid and charming' type reviews...

Okay, yeah, predictably from the name and the screenshots, this one is bland and clunky in every way. An idle-point-and-clicker with pop ups every time you pick something up or get a new objective and jokes aimed at six year olds who have played Monkey Island. A bit of a shame, I was hoping this would have a kind of 'Robert Rodriguez does Futurama' vibe, but despite the Hispanic voice actors having apparently "co-created" the characters, as far as I can tell from a quick google this game was written by a White American who fills it with Hispanic characters who love tacos and wear sombreros (and yet the lead is called Dexter!). As for the Futurama aspect, well it's got 'useless manchild' and 'scolding competent woman' as the leads, I guess.

I suppose one good thing I can say about it is that they put a lot of animation and cutscenes in there, which adds production value. 

Sidenote: it's funny how playing games over the past few years it's clear to see when Adventure Creator became popular - you can sniff out the standard AC set-ups just as easily as the AGS ones!

Rating: bland and clunky

Strangeland (2021)

A Giger-y adventure from the makers of Primordia, which I was very enthusiastic about at first and then cooled on to the point of giving up on it, so I'm moderately optimistic for it!

This turned out to be utter shit, what a shame. It's a metaphorical nightmarescape, where the metaphor is painfully obviously one for cancer and where just in case you didn't get it a talking crow tells you that things are metaphorical here and reflect on you. It's all the stuff we were taking the piss out of in LOTCG's Grief level: an evil floating black cloud thing that "got mostly burned away but a little bit remained and it grew back", floating platforms in a liminal space etc etc. Everyone talks in vague idioms so there are no interesting characters or dialogues. The design is bad, too: in one location there are three separate exits which are all unintentionally made hard to find in different ways; one puzzle required me to intentionally kill the character so I could go back to the opening screen which otherwise you can't walk back to, because there are some easy to miss small grey pebbles on the grey rocky ground to pick up there; I eventually got bottlenecked by a fucking shooting gallery minigame which apparently is possible to achieve with lightning fast reflexes but the other way to get past it is to break open the control box and... complete a spinning dial logic puzzle. AAGH. Worst of all - that logic puzzle doesn't fucking work. I solved it, I checked with walkthroughs that I solved it, and yet it didn't make the shooting game slower. So that's that game over, then. And I bought it too long ago to refund it.

Rating: terrible