Reviews by kaemi

Dead Sea sells itself immediately with aethereal wispiness echoing last night’s etude: “Rows upon rows of tombstones stretch endlessly. / White orbs float above them.” In softchill breezes such as these Dead Seas’ feathery couplets lift flittery with the wind, “You walk a sandy path dotted with soft grains. / Palm-like plants grow sparsely.” To keep this stimmung from dissipating upon any errant arpeggio, a surprising humor stays our focus in puzzles where you freeze JRPG slimes in mixing up a Fanta® to sate a thirsty gravedigger. Such competing uplifts and downdrafts catch us liminally in an otherworld with all the lightness of a dream. When the gravedigger says, “How do I leave? Walking. I live in that town”, the joke’s spark stagelights carefully the scene its halfdark implies.

What a shame that this sylph succinctness starts to smudge with the offwhite writing, watercolors you didn’t realize would run and mud, and sadly the sensuousness of the symbolist sparseness slabs mudbricked when we linger long enough allowing it to dry: “Before you lies an endless sea. / Lead-gray water flows sluggishly. / All seems melancholy under thick fog.” In the first sentence, place, but also perfectly a lack of place; in the second sentence, a resonant specific to paint the scene; then a third sentence to impasto out the pleasure. Even when we keep quick to the path, sometimes still the sparse offwhite doesn’t blur into mist, the simplicity simply stays simple: “A white lighthouse stands on the cliff, / signal light rotating with mechanical clanks. / Light struggles through fog, signaling ships home.” This has described a lighthouse to the benefit of those not in the know.

We do get imaginative imagist dabs of “Midway to the castle, / a hill rises from the calm sea” to Turneristically mark a whale that carry us through, but the weight that sags that finely first struck chord piles up, alas, as it always seems must, exposition. Somehow, in these lambent milds, we’re supposed to sustain all this: “That was before the God fell. / Humans stole fire, dominated the Necropolis, sought to rebuild Eden here. / This caused the Necropolis to expand, spreading Dirt. / Even angels fell because of it. / Humans became the Necropolis’s ‘Stake.’ / To remake the world, God first had to remove the ‘Stake,’ sparking a long war. / That era was called the ‘Dirt Epoch.’ / This lighthouse was built after the Dirt Epoch ended.” If that’s not enough, then I kid you not, the Mayflower.

This is intended to ballast the plot as the story’s symbolist purposing, but the plot already bobs on the surface: a Duke marries a medievally young bride, an illness nearly blesses her with death’s escape, but her soul’s then vesseled in a whale, so the Duke kills the whale to recapture her soul, which doesn’t work, we’re not sure why. Certainly, this works wonderfully as a watercolor expression, “He spreads his arms as if to embrace it, / but it floats skyward, unstoppable. / The Duke kneels silently on the whale’s back, watching it vanish”, but its effect doesn’t enjoin any of the machinery made to effectuate it.

More charming is the game’s ability to take the basic, plinth it, fog machine it, then gloom in the mood music, such that a saltshaker sings out “The whole land is brimstone and salt, a burning waste; nothing sown, nothing growing.” In its humor and its echoes, Dead Sea spirits our seeking more than the crumblings we collect from its scrolls.

In Haatti, furthest corner from the grace of Aratta, wanderers of the wastes without the light of Ashur, those Gutians driven back from Purattu by Shulmanu Ashared, a dog walks into a tavern and says, I can’t see a thing, let me fetch the visibility blessing from the stele. This turns out to be quite fun, with the game’s central mechanic allowing you to wander a teeming map sniffing out opportunities to precisely infuse spells to solve a tapestry of problems. In a wise design choice, you don’t need to solve all of them, and many of them can be solved variously, which rewards exploration by rendering it personal rather than rote.

What really makes these puzzles excel though is the lavishly textured historicity of the Hittite setting, which layers the spellplay inside an enchanting world. Almost every detail is drawn rigorously to evoke the Bronze Age in high fidelity. Rather than NPCs standing around a field doing farmerisms, we’re watching people busy on the last day of harvest reckoning with the payment of taxes as a complex logistical problem requiring significant labor, starting with how are we going to ship this: “Makeshift docks have been cobbled together at the edge of the river, planks and boards all lashed together to load the village’s taxes onto the barge.” This type of close inhabitance, with all the specificities of attention with which our ancestors would’ve solved the same problems, brings an ancient setting to life. We get an argument lyrically redolent with the timbres of these tensions uniquely, like two men arguing in a field about a missing sickle: “…you know what you’ve done, Zuwa? You’ve stolen the very moon out from my sky! Oh, my moon, my crescent moon, my beautiful harvest moon! How I used to wax and wane her through the fields—a whirlwind of bronze, a tempest! Barley, emmer, flax, wheat—no seed-head could withstand the golden glimmer of moonlight singing out from my hand.” Not only does this splash so much color on the canvas you can’t help but ricochet from detail to lovingly crafted detail in Boschian delight, but also it humanizes the puzzling to make it genuinely transportive: the taxman, easiest to lampoon, is instead “Gray-haired and sour-faced, Piseni has the final say on any village matters, which means he’s the first one the soldiers come for when taxes aren’t paid”, anxieties that lead to a rich internal train of thought about what his life could be like, what it was like for the hundreds of actual lives he condenses. We’re ripped from our frame of reference to grapple with taxes that were, yes the burden it is for us, but more than that, the key point of connection to the empire that enveloped your life, perhaps the one time a year you travelled to the capital to savor its sights and sounds, awed by connections with worlds unfathomed, the moment your work is experienced as integrated with emergent machineries of being far beyond the barley that builds it, like did you realize the Bronze Age had highly complex economies rich with the considerations we haughtily reserve for our own age, we wave away their societies like okay over thousands of years people learned to lend money to farmers and this created money, voila civilization, and it’s like I don’t think you understand, there was active finance brokered in similar sophistications, I mean like credit spreads in the Old Assyrian period could actually decrease during periods of political stress because terms would shorten to reduce risk exposure to debt amnesties associated with the start of a new reign but the agricultural season is fixed, right, so premiums would rise but because the competition for creditworthy borrowers and the lack of alternatives meant you had to transact anyway at the going rate, this meant lower risk adjusted returns for your silver since you’re forced to eat a lot of the additional risk, which is an effective reduction in silver’s purchasing power since you’re essentially buying a physical delivery commodity futures contract even if it’s structured as a loan, which means that, hey, where are you going, come back, I was about to circle this around into tax arbitrage, don’t you want to hear about tax arbitrage.

There you are, sit, now speaking of the historicity of tax arbitrage, the setting’s rich imaginings are augmented by ample historical footnotes studded into the text contextualizing this world as vivid as lived, full of the intricacies inset by our animating complexities: “Some scholars have argued that all taxes were paid in labor during this time period, but archaeological evidence from those silos shows that some farmers left large amounts of weeds in their tax grain to increase the weight.” Stop talking about taxes you’re crying into your screen, okay fine, the historicity excels beyond scholarly copypastes into a speculative tinkering that drives embedded meanings. The story takes place during a capitol shift to Tarhuntassa, which is imagined as upriver from a seaport in Ura, and lately up this route has come a Cypriot princess showing off her huge tracts of copper mines, and who, in an inspired bit of dot connection, is potentially the niece of Ramesses II, who is in fact at that moment on the verge of a great war with the Hittites, suddenly you have an entire geopolitical intrigue on the verge of a megahistorical shift that could very well exchange St. George for Tarhunt, all this seethes constantly just below the surface. There’s also, even more importantly, an Ea Nasir meme.

With such grounding, the puzzles breeze by, helped by painstaking polish that no doubt burned many a midnight candle. Indeed this game is at pains not to break, using the blessing of the wind on an object that gets whisked out of state resets the blessing to the stele for instance. It’s amazing how seamlessly so much of this works, given the enormous range of possible states and solutions. Quality of life features, like a “stash it” command that lets you put a spell into a stele then immediately return to where you are, or a clickable map with symbols that mark points of interest, lubricate any friction in the joins. Certainly, through all the backtracking and fetching, every nicety you’re given invites you to imagine more, you’re tapping your foot like why can’t there be some contrivance to connect spells stored in the separate steles so you don’t have to haul them back and forth, but the level of these complaints merely demonstrates how effortlessly we’ve risen from the base.

That said, as you whittle down the sequence of puzzles and are forced to fight with some of the wonkier ones, alas, humanity is glimpsed. The copper chimes sequence was so finicky that I couldn’t get it to work, which resulted in the chimes constantly going off to annoy both Kassu and me as I wandered the map. I looked up the walkthrough; this didn’t help; so I checked the walkthrough for another puzzle that was confusing me, the aqueduct, where apparently I need to get so heavy the aqueduct breaks, or something, it wasn’t entirely clear, so I took the curse of the earth and grabbed the chimes, well whoops the chimes got stolen in the process of exchanging curses, so grab the chimes again, well whoops the chimes still have amplification, so switch out amplification for earth, invert it to wind, used the wind to get into the aqueduct, invert it to earth, infuse it into the chimes, hold it on the right square, nothing, so fine, I went down to grab something else, the first object that came to mind was the lamp, so down to the caves, or I need visibility, so take earth out of the chimes, stash the chimes, switch earth out for invisibility, invert it to visibility, down to the caves, get lamp, back up to the stele, switch out to earth, invert it to wind, squiggle into the aqueducts, invert it to earth, imbue earth into the lamp, nothing, drop and hold just to see, nothing, you can see this gets frustrating. There’s a kind of postgame that invites further playful exploration which I wish I could be here praising, but it’s the tedium that clunks from these lesser puzzles that wanes the curiosity of even the historically minded.

All of which is to blame the limitations of time, as we all must. Obviously, The Wise-Woman’s Dog ought to be twenty times larger and taught in schools, but we must suffer waylaid by our inevitabilities, chief amongst them the need to pay taxes.

Kenji Eno is a person you can wiki if you want, but The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer’s not that interested either. Like many a rock biopic, the band and biographies are beside the point, we’re here to rock: “Okay, here’s what I’m leading up to. We don’t understand you. We never will. Just give us the code for Spy Lunch.” Swap in whichever songs you like, the four on the floor blow by blow of Eno’s career handwaves the artistry to center the frontman, an anticensorship rockstar ready to headline any publicity stunt: “Anyway, everyone knows this story by now. Kenji Eno does whatever the ★★★★ he wants. You swapped the publisher’s discs to avoid censorship like it was a walk in the park.” The label absolutely can’t handle him, but how could they ever let him go? “When the company board freaked out over what you did on stage … one of their executives just said … Musicians are like that. Kenji Eno is just what we need in the video game industry.” But Eno will never sell out, even if his albums do, like any good rockstar he’s equal parts authentic and selfdestructive: “So if some company ★★★★★★ you off, just renege on every aspect of the relationship that you’ve built up. Burn the bridges. Swap the logos. You see, this is why my company is so ★★★★★★ afraid of you.” Party up this blaze of glory, then, til when the sweat is seventy proof and you’re staggering sweatsoaked into fevercold sheets for the worst hangover of your life we can spiral out to the expected ending of nothing else left: “No. By D2, I had given up. If the publisher was going to censor it, they were going to censor it. When I look back at it, I can still feel the thick atmosphere of it all. Not just the game, but my own state of mind. I had such a difficult time coming up with anything but the opening chapter. I wasn’t fully there. It’s like when a band makes their last album before breaking up.” You had to be there nostalgia with all its absences implied.

To the extent anticensorial cool could coalesce some crystallizable thesis, the chaos throws us back to the clash. The two most summatory lines largely contradict: on one hand, Eno’s need to contravene imposed limits generates his creativity’s laterality, “You weren’t just avoiding censorship. I think you needed those limitations as an opposing force to evoke your creativity. Like a game of cat and mouse.” but on the other hand, censorship is incapable of moderating true transmission, “But you know what? I know censorship. It makes no ★★★★★★★ difference. Because even when everything’s ★★★★★★★ missing, even when everything is ★★★★ on by the censors and ★★★★★★ over by control-freak publishers — sometimes people will know exactly what the ★★★★ you mean.” The need to slip censorship through improvised release valves ventures the auteur’s inexpressible appeal, yet simultaneously this chase leads nowhere to leave us speaking as clearly as hidden. Is there some synthesis to achieve, perhaps censorship only supercharges the subervision jouissance? Maybe, but The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer conceives of censorship primarily as an interloping inconvenience: “There were a ton of annoying rules around blood and violence at the time. So I tried to avoid them. I thought of myself as a spaceman. I was on Planet A and my audience was on Planet C … There were annoying laws on Planet B … but if I was a spaceman, I could just warp through it.” So we don’t get any further than commercialist rules are annoying, we just want a copy when the directors cut out.

Rebel to say what for what reason? The game shrugs; Spy Lunch, the MacGuffin lost masterwork, is a blank slate that, in a climactic twist, stays blank. Turns out that nobody cares what the lyrics say so long as they can singalong, so it’s worth mentioning that The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer zanies up a few archbrow zingers: “Your handiwork in tying down such a gentle giant could be compared to Gulliver’s Travels. Kenji Eno doesn’t make the comparison because his mouth is duct taped. You don’t make the comparison because you’re not here for literary allusions.” The central censorship complaint is generously sidetracked by escapades into the wacky, with the primary game element being failing to keep an eye on an elusive turtle, introduced as a joke and culminating in an impactful punchline. Occasionally your wandering eeries into the psychedelically silly: “Your supple, Italian middle-aged body fat is coated with years of grease from maintenance work, allowing you to slide down the toilet drain with ease. / You told Marco you could do this. You could have entered and exited the building via the pipes all along. There was no reason to brave the horrors of the glass elevator, the gaping maw of the urban skyline, the terrible heights.” Rather than feel at odds, the oddness gives a goodnatured wiliness to the proceedings that, in its inventive interplay, supplies us with a feelgood chorus better than getting anywhere: “And despite all the heady thematic interpretations that have been circulated during the forced discussion, Marco thinks that’s all that Kenji Eno wanted. To surprise people and be surprised himself.”

What’s gone isn’t gone but radiates your negative space. The last little enclosure you’ve fortressed, the “scream” where “the silence and darkness vanish”, haunts the stranded your uninhabitable.

Our metaphor, then, a space station held at arms’ length from unreachable life, transcribes complex emotions with the swift immediacy of shorthand. The writing’s percussive simplicity carries the pulse to steady rhythm. “In this voyage through horizonless landscapes, / I reach out toward memories” imposes the central conundrum, you cannot escape what you cannot leave behind, in an efficiency which elicits the engineer’s expression of elegance. Tight designs demand minimum torque at each joint, a soft touch that trusts each piano echoes the awaiting of the room. The game achieves this simplicity at several points, softfocusing stars to snowflakes to scintillate the composing metaphor, spacestation to the hollows in the home, with a few fleet delights like a child’s wonder of astroneering clashing against the father’s architectural supersedence furnishing just enough justification to satisfy the sole puzzle.

Unfortunately, acceleration towards a climax tempts our author towards explanations. Initially, this merely flattens the affect, with the old man explaining everything we’ve intuited since scene one in prose that struggles to add anything by adding anything. Sadly, this frustration accelerates alike to the climax, with the grand revelation annihilating the accumulated artistry: “It’s a photo of a child — not me — with my father and a woman I don’t recognize. The child, whose features resemble those of the old man from the ship, is wearing a birthday hat. On the photo, there’s a date: February 12th, the second part of my father’s password. If the child is the old man, he ate this corpse and hid it in his secret room.” The first sentence hits the gas, and for a moment everything holds together, but the swerving of the second and third sentence, haphazardly hazarding what we could very well guess, crashes in the ridiculous fourth sentence to a fireball from which we may only hope to Romain Grosjean.

Like its spacestation, the purpose of The journey is to be suspended gracefully in negative space. We should resolve its central conundrum through affirmation of the tensions: “I had left empty spaces, and he says that every place in a spaceship must have a function.” The empty spaces have a function, Dad, not least that they must contain you.

The nuclear deterrent is frequently misunderstood as mutually assured destruction through glistening missile arrays just a trigger finger away from apocalypse. In reality, the nuclear deterrent disincentivizes proliferation primarily through the heartstarching inevitability of some undertrained overexcited gutreactor yaketysaxing cascading radioreactive incompetencies to chainreacted gigachernobyl grayouts. Did you know there are currently dozens of unexploded nuclear bombs lying on the seafloor? It just was kind of a routine thing during the Cold War, whoops, there goes another one.

Lockout’s nuclear submarine bears this rich legacy proudly. A desk in the engine controls has railings that “are useful to keep people from accidentally knocking things off the desk … one has to walk past the railing carefully because a piece came loose when Butterfingers wanted to show he could jump over it.” Perhaps we could have foreseen an issue when we entrusted our nuclear deterrent to Butterfingers, but then again, it seems we’ve not foreseen much of anything. The game’s setpiece puzzle is that the automated disaster response automatically seals off the engine room, stranding you, which raises several questions like, why would you do that, why do we even want to abandon our station in the engine room during an electrical incident, how is this the second time this has happened on this voyage, maybe we should just spend our tax dollars on roads or something. Moreover, an emergency red light strobes you blinded, so literally the first step in disaster response is shutting off the disaster response so you can respond to the disaster. More questions emerge as we do respond to the disaster, like why is the wheel that opens the tool cabinet impossible to open, why is there no battery in the door controls, how come almost everything we need to do was already covered in training and we’ve clearly learned none of it.

The answer is, as you’ve guessed, it’s an escape room, fiddly dependencies pushing you to seek out square one forms the throughline. Once you’ve opened the door, the rest is shrugged: “You make your way out of the door, and find your crewmates in tight concentration on the command deck. You work out a plan and manage to preserve the vessel and your lives.” The room itself, then, fine. There’s some reasonable text adventury finicking, and I generally enjoy the genre of patiently simulate a diegetic skill. The issue that shortfuses this fun is blurriness, a vague sense of uncontact with each system you manipulate. Interactions can struggle with the daunting of their implementation, as when you need to search through training logs, but the desk with the training logs awkwardly rebuffs you: “The papers from the desk seem to be notes from various training exercises. You arrange them neatly on the desk so you can read them if you want to, but they seem meaty, so you’d prefer knowing whether any of them are relevant before you read them.” You already have to know which ones you want to read, which you find out by reading all of them one by one in the logbook to find out which ones you want to read, which causes them somehow to show up in the desk, which you can’t search, but you can just read? Similarly, at several points you pull up a help screen on the smaller screen you need to disambiguate from the monitor, which awkwardly mutters that you can’t read the help screen on the help screen, “the best way to read this help file is as a printed book, not on screen”, so instead you need to bring it up on the screen after which you can read the help, except when you get the right help screen, which isn’t the help screen page mentioned in the training notes but is a page that is mentioned in the training notes you type into the help screen, which is read straight off the help screen text.

As you’ve probably guessed, the answer to these issues is “Lockout is the first parser game released by the author, and as such may contain all kinds of quirks and odd bits.” Let’s instead then celebrate the author’s promise! Underthrumming Lockout is genuine interest in intertwining die Mensch-Maschine in procedure, the way in which our exertions to torque mechanisms exert us into the mechanizing logic, as ever more exacting you learn your response role are you extended through this ingineering resonates the beauty of the emerging capability you radioperate, which emerges as a playerfriendliness in the metalayer as the parser extends conditionalities to symphony the elegant consistencies you input output mediate, infusing the interaction not with mystic extravagance but a grounded realism of trial and error, confusion and learning, which, after some trial and error, we can hope our beloved parser catalyzes.

Why is it that you, weak of will, consider a sudoku a puzzle, it requires no concentrated response of alignment, you cell by cell sculpt til the form is freed, voila, are you satisfied? No, in my arrogance, wise of ways, I demanded more than Eye offered, always the path to exhaustion. Initially Eye asks you, or not even really asks you, nudges you to color by numbers: “The old man says, “Another very useful word is known as the Sphinx, which tours the pyramids. The Sphinx has the head of a lion, the body of a rat, and the tail of a wolf.” / “But that’s not a real word,” says one student. / "You are correct. Not all words are real words.”” The solution here is LAF: the first letter is the first letter of lion, the second letter is the middle letter of rat, the third letter is the last letter of wolf. An arbitrary set of instructions formulating its answer for you to fill in, for what? If the initial lateral form of reading pleases you, then it quickly saps your soul in sudokus like: ““I have learned how to get in,” says one servant. / “Tell me!” / The servant looks around cautiously. “One, twelve, and three.”” The answer being, counting up letters, alc, voila, are you satisfied?

Quite quickly you’re tapping your foot in anticipation of the revelation. The suffusion of Egyptian imagery suggests hieroglyphics, which can encode multiple syllables into phonogrammatic signs, but actually the travel codes follow a simple 5-4-1 pattern of location name to code, e.g. library → arl, which is a rule instantiated, as far as I can tell, entirely for the satisfaction of pyramid → map. The words of power you unlock are all equally as arbitrary: the signposted goal, attaining the rose, requires you to solve three minigames, each of which provides a letter, which jumble together meaninglessly: “oxd - that word’s body for a head / cab - head of a viper for a tail / bed - tail of a skink for a body”, XVK xyzzys you the END.

So you attain the rose, much to the envy of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, so we attain the revelation: you have collected x out of y points, go back and pzl! Here then is when the puzzling truly begins, transliterating the number of days in a year to letters, transliterating prime numbers into letters, mirroring the count of letters from one code to another, implying letters missing in phrases, counting up animals into ciphers, all dizzied through a map to make you long for the precisions of pyramids.

Perhaps you vibe with the puzzling, in which case, let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. If you don’t, then there’s nothing else; here’s a room description spartan to its purpose: “This room is quite warm. Pots and utensils are scattered around the counters, and more hang from hooks. A fire is roaring underneath a wide stove.” What little details appear here are hints jammed in for your careering condensery. QED.

Suitable for a digital artifact, many layers of mediation await our excavation, but true historians, we leave all this clutter to the earth to claim the story which best fits the page. Why bother parsing who wrote what? Written by someone in the 80s based on tropes written endlessly since the 1880s to be written by someone else in the 80s to be translated by, depending upon which recension of the credits you credence, one person or another person or probably Google, what’s one to make of intent? Here, the best source is the bandits: you hunt down this murderous roving gang, so they politely tie you up next to your blanket and a fire and your horse, inviting you graciously to the puzzle, these “outlaws with no past and no future.”

Though rather than fog our way round warehouses, the salient quiddity to survive the muddling of intermediacies is an awe for Arizona’s austere beauty: we ride the vastness of deserts and grasslands, descend into crevasses and mines, and, most memorably, traipse along a rickety rope bridge over “the high rocky walls of the gorge” in which “a raging torrent rushes away”. The game’s insistence that we lead our horse to water, mount and dismount it, climb ropes, seek out summits, and blast our way through rock blazes a lively path through the scorching landscape.

This outdoorsy romping traverses the 80s terseness to reach us through the translation as a timeless appeal, a star to guide us through mostly perfunctory puzzling. Sometimes a hatchet lies a room over from a wooden door in need of hatcheting, other times there’s a blanket you should’ve picked up at the beginning or you’ll be going back to the beginning to get it. If the connection ever gets too complicated, the examine will helpfully explain, hey, this object is the solution to a puzzle, make sure to use this to solve this puzzle: “Some very high trees grow close to the edge of the chasm. Maybe cutting one down could help you to cross it.” When Tin Star does hazard up a more complex sequence, like a shootout with bandits or having to revive a dying man, the solution cuts straight through the complexity, go ahead and “>shoot”, what are you waiting for, hurry up and “>revive him”.

The premier exception to this is the centrepiece puzzle, requiring you to seek out a high point and make a smoke signal, which demands that you piece together everything you’ve picked up along the way and contemplate that way you’ve wandered in a satisfying grounding. Since the landscape is the strength, we ought to play to it.

Nothing I’ve said matters, of course, you’ve already agreed. At one time they recorded this game to magnetic tape as a series of square waves to be interpreted bit by bit into a ZX Spectrum. You had to encode magnetically an exact sequence of short, medium, or long vibrations to pulse binary into this inscrutable space obelisk engineered by Babelist hubris so it could summon unto you Sedona and its mesas. What a precious, innocent time that was, a world still yet unblemished by me.

The Duma was formed after a great massacre: the embittered Tsar wanted to see if we could do it better. Now that a catastrophic world war has annihilated our countrymen on an unprecedented scale, we’ve demonstrably proven we can do it better, so the Tsar is deposed.

Now the question of awkwardly reorganizing our state affairs, given that the Tsar can no longer be blamed for them. There are several areas of concern. First, of course, the catastrophic world war annihilating our countrymen on an unprecedented scale. The soldiers are complaining, which only shows they were not the soldiers who should have been complaining. We must give them something, I suppose, since we’re running out of rifles. What are the proposals? “There will be elected soldiers’ committees, which will control the distribution of weapons.” This will be a disaster. The army will collapse if the distribution of weapons is the charge of those who discharge them. Soon, they’ll be demanding control of the distribution of orders! What happened to the patriotic old days, when you told such and so a village, go forth into their main column and all of you die, so the cavalry can achieve a victory? These revolutionaries profess they believe in collective action, yet not one of them is willing to join the great unifying slaughter in No Man’s Land. “Soldiers can no longer be verbally abused by the officers, and they must be addressed by respectful terms.” This will be a disaster. The utter indignity of politely being asked your opinion regarding the upkeep of the latrine. Aleksander Ivanych, please dear heart, you know that by every hair of my moustache I am fond of your kisses, could you please beloved one crawl like a worm rooting round hell under mortars and machine guns through the mud and wire and corpses, and should you then still breathe, launch yourself into their nest with this grenade? “Soldiers will have the same rights as ordinary citizens when off-duty, including the right to participate in elections.” Yes, of course, this is fine. Soldiers ought to be guaranteed every right that should pertain to when they are no longer soldiers, we all take immense solace in the afterlife.

Now onto labor. The people are convinced they’ve seized power, so we must convince them of this. “Support the strikes rhetorically.” This will be a disaster. For workers to have rights, they must first become workers. We will never emancipate the proletariat if there is no lower class to emancipate. “The Soviet should support the workers’ demands for higher wages and improved working conditions.” This will be a disaster. The wages are fine, of course, every year we will raise everyone’s wages by precisely the increase in prices, so the Soviet will become a champion of economic progress, dramatically increasing the supply of rubles. It is rather the improved working conditions that are intolerable, because these cannot be increased universally, but only through individualist seizures of collectivist efficiencies into petit demesnes of production according to one’s own rights. Improving working conditions is a counterrevolutionary subversion of dialectical materialism, which states that material conditions can only improve by improvements to the material of conditions, and it is this material foundation which we must improve to improve conditions, which is in fact the Soviet, so that we must all expend our patriotic energies to the utmost to improve the Soviet, which is identical to the improvement in working conditions. “The Soviet should convince the workers to stop striking.” This will be a disaster. Any dialogue between the Soviet and the workers would imply a separation between the Soviet and the workers, which is not the case. It is the radical embodiment of the Soviet that is the strike as dialectic, such that we, as workers, must radically, through the power of our Soviet, collectively empower ourselves to proceed beyond the strike towards our goal, which has already been achieved, as indeed it is through our collectivization of the means of production that we’ve realized our greatest advancement in labor: “Give women equal legal rights to men.” Now we may all victoriously return to the factories.

Finally, the most pressing matter. Now that the Tsar is gone, who is to blame? The easiest answer: “The only enemies should be the Germans!” This will be a disaster. If our only enemies are the Germans, then we will have to win the war, which is impossible, then who do we blame for that? “The Kadets and other bourgeois parties.” This will be a disaster. If we declare the bourgeois to be the eternal enemy of our revolution, then yes, we can kill the Kadets and the like, but then we must blame the bourgeois, and who then is the bourgeois? Fine, they are all killed, but then who is the bourgeois? We must learn from Robespierre. “Counterrevolutionary forces, Black Hundreds, and the like.” This will be a disaster. These revolutionaries grow in the thousands, and they’re each compelled to some kind of creed. We’ll have to inquisitate every heresy every time, which will only expose the damned to options. We’ll allocate our precious resources endlessly explaining which revolution is the revolution that properly revolves, by the very thought I’ve become dizzy. “Bolsheviks and anarchists, who seek to subvert the revolution from within.” Excellent, only when we can blame the revolutionaries will the revolution truly go unquestioned.

The situation settles nicely. We flatly refuse to join the government: first the Provisional Government, then we storm out of the Soviet. We flatly refuse to allow any ideological resolution among the SRs. We allow conditions to develop naturally: a quarter of a million die in the latest offensive, the workers and peasants are in constant revolt, the economy is collapsing. The only effort we make in response to the prevailing distress is to organize among the peasants and crack down on all the black markets supplying the cities with food. The situation deteriorates. General Kornilov besieges Petrograd to stage a coup, we flatly refuse to assist in the defense. “The war continues unabated. / Over the course of the war and revolution, the problem of hunger has worsened.” Russia enters another civil war. Chaos reigns under heaven, the situation is excellent.

Selfaggressive collapse deferred, in Repeat the Ending, by metaslips layering baroque are beaten back flat by Portrait with Wolf’s drumbeat brutalizer, collapsuling your airless in ever yet “Another ending to repeat.” Every choice shunted into atomized dissonance returns you to the nowhere from whom you’ve carved shelter, darkness as “possibility. It is important to remain still so that you don’t trip over—or into—anything. / When the lights come up, you are left with the default.” Remain here screams the recoil from each sensation, sneering omnipresence of exposed nerves jittery to jumpstart sparks to blackout on the floor breathing nowhere, nowhere, “The less you look, the better it feels.” Analgesis craving for the less of lifeless, entomb bonecrisp of the cold a cavity’s cavein, but that only means “Your happiness: / held still / held by the earth”. You will, tomorrow, still be held by the earth? Yes? Yes? “The dark and the silence. They seem to go on forever. At any moment, you could become unmoored, just fall into it and fall forever. You could fall into the dark but never fall out. And it’s so quiet. If you couldn’t hear your own heart, would you even exist? Just imagine, falling forever, tumbling into nothing, just absence forever. / Something shifts: a different kind of nothing on the stairs.”

Panic from the nothing as it rears Nothing bursts us through anxious fragment fulminations against which the parser structure pressurizes back to selfcollapse with acerbs of “I hope you aren’t crying again.” These fragments sparkle, through splinter emotives, the totality we antagonize protistor. Between embers and their ashy windswipeds we mourn the lack of an inside burning: “Family consumed by a doom of rats, crashing in waves. Lattices of fungi rustling within a book lung.” We’re promised tomorrow will come, and maybe this is the only dream he has truly believed, even as whatever he imagines would happen doesn’t happen and this doesn’t happening becomes a habit, because tomorrow is still a promise, persisting in its delustory “untreated for a while, to get away with all that there was to get away with”, til it’s all away but we’re still here waiting: “Wait there, by the window. Wait. There’s no reaching the door, you know that. Wait. There is something large and hot on your chest, and your breath must squeeze through your cracked center. Wait there. Good. Wait.” Drowning jolt of, no, why would you not wait, where could you get going? “What do you see there, beyond the window? Other windows.” So you wait, tomorrow will come, and so “The problem of your thingness / goes unsolved”.

If, after all, “We give up on luck / the way we give up on love / long after it ends”, then how surprised we will be when tomorrow comes, with it its disasters. The voidaverse admit what we’ve become, diminish wisher, and the loves, the not so innocent and why the innocent, thrum with irreversibility guilt, even if you fight your way out of this hole you’ll never recover those abandoned on the surface: “While you were falling forever, your parents got old. The cat got old. You were preserved by the cold, not enough ox to oxidize, a cut apple forever fresh. Tart suspended in sweet. Damp noise behind a bite.” Freezing stasis of stored beneath time, you were not a shelter, at least not the one for the ones trusting, so abashed escape into the nulla, start the ending finally, you’re not so sure why a tomorrow should come, why run when the quicksand acts faster: “The ground is too soft to stand on, and it is too hard to get out of.” Enough of envy, let go of the sky, lower the lid and spasm wildly for air: “Even as panic crashed through you, the world sang blandly on: far away cars, birds, pine needles combing a light wind. / How long were you there? Fear is a dead star’s weight, pulling and flattening time, and even if it ends, it is never over.”

Because there is some body out there waiting for us to inhabit its instillations? Even if it’s not a tomorrow, a terminal in which to wait, savor, spool out an unthreaded trust of this needling: “Isn’t it time to move on, to forgive yourself and move on? There is so much joy in life: the park in late September, a fresh muffin from the corner bakery, the short week before the grievy vacancy of the hardwoods settles. / That belongs to somebody else. It isn’t yours. You will always be back, or on your way back. You only leave to come back.” Why should it belong to somebody else? What else would an else be but this choice otherwise? Even chthonic the catalepsis structures a defiance of will: “Anything—a car door, a faraway dog, a train whistle traveling far over still air—you are its only witness! These experiences belong to you, they are yours, and someone would have to tunnel through your organs to reach them.” Experiential espermutor of the echo, in here is an in here the pressures can contract but never counteract: “You are places in the earth. You are a place in the dark. / You are a hearing, and a sound is only its hearing.” Song of the lost voices is as sufficiency of the afterlife available to you, erasure is only temporary composure of a nothingness yet to give: “A room blanching in white light. The rest is fascination.” The lifechoice then to glorious whatsowhether.

“Is this it? Have you made it?” The fragments, as often they’re wont, don’t fully realize the feeling that follows. In this respect perhaps Repeat the Ending is, by virtue of a greater ambition, also a greater optimist. But what do you want, the world? “This city: a cool vividness, a printer’s tray of cherishments. A baffling insufficiency.”

The tone of Wayfarers, shall we say, jostles. It leads with war never changes graveliness, dumps into shockshallow war trauma, jumps to gamey zaniness, swerves to zonked zoomer memery, amps up to political polyangst, drops out into churning sincerity despair, then cybernetically accelerates the entire array into medicocosmic nihilism nihilations. At the base layer, violence’s endorphins voltoverloads visceral fragility to gamify mass trauma into war Baudrillard slash Land guerilla sneerery, nods at airmen strapped into headsets guiding Reaper drones over flickering white dots on a target screen, but overdosed thrashes of tone destabilizes the predetermined arc into pop cyberpunk. We get all of the same places: salvaged posthuman wardead one with the machine: “We’re turning the tide. Tran, Nelson, Olivieri, they went back already. And they’re stronger than ever. They’re not in a tank, they are the tank. You’re the only one missing. You’re the only one who hasn’t decided.” But the road there whips to your left and you’re like what: “I had wanted my tattoo to read kill kill kill in Arabic. I wanted to look hard, I wanted to feel scary, I wanted even my blown-off limbs to look threatening. But the guy who gave it to me was high and wrote mellon a bunch of times in Tengwar, a script invented by an English professor named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.” This is a silly joke which nearly overplays its fictional coherence to jim the camera, but writing out the full JRR is such an inspired omniincredulity that the missile glistens sleek.

The fundamental paradox of antiwar art is that war thrives on spectacle, cf. Baudrillard on Apocalypse Now and Vietnam. The uncanny juxtaposition between meaningless video game ultraviolence and the irrevocable atrocities of murder missionaries rings hollower than its selfsatisfied confrontive since nothing’s really been juxtaed, and when Wayfarers plays its purpose straight, we walk blithely into these landmines: “The start of each mission presented a fresh grudge and a fresh hatred. Any truce was brittle, shattering on the hard, hard land. I died, but so what? When I came back, I killed. I used my rifle, grenades, broken bottles, flamethrowers, my carbon steel knife. / Forever War let you get creative. I hacked up the bodies of the dead. I dragged them into the street. I let the Humvees from our convoy run them over. Jackson, Olivieri, Nelson, Tran. These were my dead, and I wanted revenge. And I got it, again and again, until I was bored.” But before you’re also bored by respawn cycle looping of animating tropes, Wayfarers hits you with something totally wild like “But my dad, despite being a descendant of border-crossers, used to follow around anyone speaking Spanish in the grocery store and yell, “ICE!” so he could broadcast their reactions on his prank stream.” Disorienting inward crunches recast the carbonsteel certainties of cybernetic wardread from massproduced materiel like “They found ways to mesh slivers of humanity with the new arsenal” to staticshock screams over the radio: “How small a scrap of human would I have needed to be, to be allowed to die?”

Thus the genius of the jostling tone, its frenetic signal switcher swamping quadrature pulses feverish dizzied into painkiller fuzz: “I felt a full-body throb, a phantom pain. / I wanted meds, painkillers, something to knock me out or put the pain away, to make me feel like I wasn’t dying. / Suddenly I could sense the muffled enclosure of the gauze and the pricks of this user interface against my scalp. I felt an ocean of things around me, liquids, plastics, an oozing and squishiness that was nothing like muscle or bone. I didn’t want to know or understand it. I didn’t want to know what had become of me.” Whenever we’re lockstepped into the moral charge of the militation subversion, odd splotches of humor hint at a dawdling humanity too oozily vulnerable to fit the suiting up to purpose: “And she was broken, too. On the way to our absent father’s study, we took a brief tour of our virtual home. She walked into walls, knocked into family portraits, and after she discovered a letter-opener on the desk, insisted on stabbing a locked drawer when we needed to find the key.” It’s funny, but also not quite, white noise bubbles the back of your skull, at any moment tragedy could electricate your morphine veins, tragedies less obvious, less opprobrially imperial: ““You should have stayed human,” my sister had begged, as if humanity had so much going for it. All I had known was fear and loss and helplessness.” Not really jokes jumpstart narrative gestures into awkward halters forward for jitters on the EKG punching the line through porous emotives: “Kaemi: why is this even a two-player game? / ADA: should i have died instead? / Kaemi: i didn’t say that”

Wayfarers never develops this coughkilter into subtlety, rather it speaks in highlighter: “There is a story about the Ship of Theseus. After he saved the children from a labyrinth not unlike the one in which we now find ourselves, the great hero gifted his ship to his people” paralleling the salvaged seeking freedom from ancestral legacies lingering like predestination in “Now, one-handed, I slit Ozymandias’s throat. Then I rolled onto him and held him down. He bled. And bled. His body thrashed beneath me like a ship breaking on the rocks. I held on instinctively.” You get it? No? Let’s try again! “The forever war was about revenge, but against who? All our enemies were dead. We were fighting their children’s children. We were fighting against our parents’ and grandparents’ decisions. We could never stand up against the people who raised us, so we droned the people across the sea.” You get it? No? Let’s try again! “Our ancestors fired the first bullets. They cut the first throats. / Then they handed that violence down to their children. / And to their grandchildren. / Now here I am, their legacy, trying to put their pieces, and mine, back together.” Cybernetic salvaging serves, well as for itself aesthetics sure, but also broadly as a metaphor for the sins we inherit seeding the values we reenact as circuitries of violence looping the electrical charge that orders us to the society we arise within mechanisms grinding and granding up in scale to the ravages wreaked like frequencies across the world by this complex industrialized. Oscillation between complicity with atrocity and escapisms that steadystate doses our complacencies: “Ada and I never turned down an adventure. We could not. We had learned there was nowhere else for us to go.” There’s of course truth here, but I’m not so sure it’s explicated in any enlightening way by “It was the first time I had seen red blood in this game. Up until now, our enemies had dissipated into coils of gray smoke.”

Instead, all the little pinpricks in this inevitability waked from the tonespikes shine in expressive hues to cherish here, tiny bright pops genuinely hopeful that ends don’t encapsulate the journey: “Even if it meant I only had one more play-through. One more chance to land on that beach under that star-studded dawn. Another chance to share a memory. If we could escape the war, even for a little while, that would be a victory.” Because any falseness of our agency doesn’t dissipate us, of any illusion a still experienced: “I reminded myself that we were characters. None of this was real. Even if it was beautiful. / She closed her eyes and smiled, as if she could feel the wind that carried us. / I wondered what was inside her head, who was falling into this world with me.” In the tenuousness of that experience, aren’t you alive, isn’t there every elsewhere intensity in where we are else? “Then she—it—the avatar—the game—reached for my hand, and a feeling came over me, as if we still had bodies to share.” Such a dream enlivens our resistance ohms, the charge instilled in our frictive to encircuit the fray, fuel through the destructive fires any plume that signals at least the grasping for transcendence, the trusting in where we cannot reach, “a future where life was precious, where every day was a series of cherished moments. How could such a place be possible? He had no further clues for us.” Perhaps we will find it, together, whomever we can encompass in the fragile word.