Reviews by kaemi

So there’s an alien in Alien, right? Oh no there’s an alien in the spaceship I hate it when things try to kill me and there’s nowhere you can run so super scary to be in those dark maintenance tunnels when there’s an alien you know that scene where it’s like. In Aliens there’s more aliens, it’s plural. Whenever Alien gets repackaged, this is what you find inside, even though the reason the movie remains with us forty five years later is the sense of place so insettling we recognize its fluorescent hum, a precise industrial mix of technology and decay perpetually makeshifted in clangs and hollows, an overbearing corporate unliveability recycling compressed air through advanced life support systems. Space, not as the infinite expanse, but as the unreachable loneliness of all that darkness. Floating through the final frontier in an earthmax drybulk carrier while oozing out the will to repair. These indoor worlds to which we’ve been condemned ripped out of context and scattercasted into void. Comlessions of the dissociative hyperorganism, less hivemind than writhegrind, driving us ever further and more fried into winding wherewithals resplendull with “polymers and a lack of blemishes”, nigh platonic “an object without history.” Plastic by any other name would taste as sweet: “You have to choose between Coke and Pepsi”, the end result of distributed processes best described as “hostile” and “takeover”, a sumless totality managed at three to five percent constant currency growth rate by “an investment fund headquartered on an abandoned planet.”

In this vacuum environment of “Perfect logic, total control, stasis built on a flawed foundation,” you carry onwards and downwards through cycles redshifted to dimness: “no reign lasts forever, past momentum is not enough to coast on.” Caught in the flow of days through rooms divorced from the meaning of light, waking and sleeping as two poles of closing browser tabs, all lifeprocesses stale into echoes of shadows, like gardening not as a vibrant immersion with environmental entanglements painting time in slow motion but as sterilized mechanical reproduction: “You cut away a few dried leaves and change the water in the fluid tank. The nutritional synthesiser looks to be in reasonably good shape but there are a few spatters around the output nozzle which you wipe down.” Trapped in a procession where songs tick by 249 times without ever sounding familiar, where calendars fade from you with all the dates you’ve notionally lived, “how few of them hold any particular significance to you.” A vibe which bleeds out into the text as it prints, recycles, prints tropes similarly unresonant: dutifully, nutrient paste; but of course, RoboAtelier 3D printers; empty bottles, plastic bags, torn wrappers; why not, a series of unsettling dream fragments.

So how to push all this towards new intention? Metallic Red tries invoking materialist despair into the digital disrepair. Tarot readings, redolent murmurs of the cascades of meanings coursing towards you, succinctly defined by holographic overlays, mediation ordination generating a tension between the unfathomability of influence either astrological or astronomical, uncertain if spirits or circuits determine how little flows through you. Mysticism’s yearn for the invisible to convoke inexplicably, connections of coulds still promising more than these moorings, worlds alive with divine secretions “hard for any of us to understand after hundreds of years of materialist philosophy” demanded to actuate “as real and believable a science as any other.” So we pursue this permutation dynamism into an initiation into mysteries, no like literally the mysteries, with all the gods electrified: “Simultaneously the initiates surrounding you take a step forward and each blows out the candle nearest them. Total darkness descends. Your head begins to spin as your eyes fail to distinguish anything. The laser pattern and the ultrasonics fire up again. You know that there are other waves bombarding you, low dose x and radio waves. Several additional inputs gathered from the week you’ve been staying in the site are being studied and processed. DNA and gut biome measurements, a machine administered psychological analysis. All being fed into a compute engine somewhere.” That somewhereness as uncapturable by hypermodernity, the future as this but more and more until gravitation crushes dreams projected on it, an endstate “jerking inwards … curving further, encircling towards you … seeming to bend in half and then continue bending further”, whispers an escape route from the progressional ennui that surprises by suddenly pressing us out into another mode all together, one that’s… hmm… there’s a really involved sequence about making salad dressing? You have a few conversations about ideas not really shared with you, the reader, surely they’re interesting to everyone else. There’s a hierophant whose religion you leave, or sort of can’t leave, but the game ends before that tension means something. Your father is someone, it seems; they tend to be, for better and worse. You can walk around a map, but the sense of place is, well, not quite Alien. So it seems: “The beginning was nothing, the end must be nothing too, but a more complete nothing.” No no, that’s too harsh, actually it’s fairly pleasant whilst passing you by, perhaps more like: “The automated systems which allowed the ship to dock without human intervention mean that you’re completely alone.”

So as you know Edgar Allen Poe suddenly surfaced in Baltimore raving unto death, a mystery forever inexplicable, and this has thrilled generations of readers as apropos; we do so love a death apropos, it wreathes life with the faintest sense of poetry. Which proves enormously appealing to our everyman narrator slogging toward middleage to be born, so “tired of the day-in, day-out… of being overlooked and underappreciated. You deserve more.” A lot more more, it seems, wishing to swing the pendulum across the pit: “All you wanted was to publish a novel. Take it on tour. See your name on the bestseller lists. Was that so much to ask?” Cue Mephistopheles with bargain in tow, offering you either literary reverence or its opposite, monetizable fame. One does not write hundreds of thousands of words without the narcissistic insistence that the void should not be more eloquent, so I perused the literary option: “From a scan through the lengthy synopsis, you see it’s a multigenerational family saga of an American farming family that produces three children. The two sons become doctors and move to the city, while the daughter establishes a veterinary practice near the farm.” Needless to say I chose the famous option. This decision point layers in the game’s innovation on the tale, doubling the doublebind by binding you to whichever authorial attunement imbues your name with its resonances: “In the glass, your reflection stares back at you … you come to realize the glass wall permits you to see into another passageway… the path you did not take. It’s your split double, the one who chose to be literary.”

With the stage set for the artist’s struggle between their daily bread and their Last Supper, we promptly throw it out the window for a dizzying time travel caper involving three whole sets of Faustian twins sprawled across half a millennium, multiple explosions with a quantum of mechanics, and two separate attempts to come loose in time through legalese. If that all sounds complicated, then the thematic heft of these hijinks is more concise: the reward of success is the fulfillment of the attempt, otherwise you may as well drive a marathon, gets you to the same place. “The curse of mediocrity has returned. It’s like it was before that fateful day in Belyle’s office, when you desperately craved to write a novel. / No, you desperately craved publication - to be lauded and praised. The writing was always a means to an end. / Pen in hand, you stop waiting and start thinking. An idea peeks its nose up. One by one, you wrestle out the opening words of what might become a novel…” There is of course no point in having written a book if you haven’t written a book, so moral in hand we’re right back to where we started…

Where did we start again? Oh yes, Edgar Allen Poe. In celebration of his role in developing the detective genre, we’re donning a fedora as our “lips fidget with the toothpick”, ready to gumshoe nineteenth century Baltimore, gathering clues to uncover the circumstances of Poe’s death, which has gotten gnarled up with all the above. A few homages to Poe help settle the setdressing, with a lighthouse in line with his unfinished final story, a climactic confrontation with rival Rufus Griswold, a few lines of Annabel Lee lying around, and assuredly a raven, box ticked. What the story seems to miss most is the quality for which Poe was most famous, an overbearing pervasion of mood. The prose is frequently workman, even rather curt, only occasionally crafting up the effort expected of a work ardently enjoining us to our writerly duty of “Nurturing your dream with sweat and passion.” A shocking revelation withers on the line: “Belyle’s involvement is now confirmed. My suspicions about Poe’s ordeal have been justified. It sickens me to think Belyle may have played some part in Poe’s now-fragile condition." Ah yes, I see, it’s the demons; make a note of that, will you, Watson? When the writing does go grand, it can trip over itself by simply restating the previous sentence with gusto: “To your horror, the fountain pen’s ink is blood. The oily vermilion liquid congeals to a black crust across the dotted line.” This is a shame, because the author is quite clearly capable of arresting visuals like “knife-edged sleet” and “his now-crystallized froth made his mouth hairy with ice”, and maybe it’s a little silly but the sheer inventiveness makes it my favorite: “Blackened metal scraps lie about it like curled patisserie chocolate.” Honestly, I think the glue that keeps this juryrigged Poe/Faust/Jekyll/airport thriller hybrid humming along are these moments of gothic effusion, so I kept craving menace. With what we have, at least some humor makes a virtue of the dryness, with jokes ranging from the very broad ““And here’s your free whiskey,” the one nearest me says. She presses a voucher into my hands. / And so concludes my introduction to American Democracy.” to the little less broad “From the blast marks about the room, my powers of perception tell me this is the locus of the fire - it originated here.” I also laughed when, having read the literary precis, I thought gosh who other than Franzen is desperate to be Franzen, only for the game to namecheck him later as its caricature source.

Rather than mood, the game seems inspired instead by Poe’s most famous quality, high concept succinctness. It’s an enormous credit to the pace and focus of the work that the somewhat awkward mashup of ideas streamlines thrillerishly propulsive. While I would have liked more emphasis on the duality of lives debating the roads traveled, there is a satisfying dialogue between the doubles at the end which sculpts to a delightfully morose capstone: “You feel vaguely dirty signing your other’s book, cowardly claiming someone else’s compromises as your own.” Artworks are vitalities of another’s compromises comprising a destiny, so though this work’s are not the ones I might’ve made, I’ll still celebrate the ease in which it couches its furtive intensity, a stainless steel requiem for the individuality that dies with a writer, what strikes us in “the nurse frantically trying to explain something about a bombing victim’s last words.”

I’ve a bittersweet relationship with Penguin; the publisher, I should clarify, not the birds who can recognize the cry of their chicks among a colony of millions, who wouldn’t daydream being so precious? On one hand, they are indefatigable publishers of affordable translations of humanity’s deep heritage: they grab you in a dingy used bookshop like would you like to read a seventeenth century Korean fable highlighting an idealized Tang NeoConfucianism which directly enspheres Daoist and Buddhist interventions, only six dollars! And I go, it infuriates me it took this long for someone to ask. The problem is that the way they can afford to publish these works at scale is by maximizing their accessibility, which dilutes every other consideration which should feed into a translation. The Penguin house style features conversational prose compressing the alienations innate to voices of lost worlds into narrowband twenty first century convenience, and it’s like, if I wanted to hear ancestral modalities jpeged into crispcollapse, I’d read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.

Because isn’t the fantasy of reading The Epic of Gilgamesh summoning spirits from cuneiform carved into clay by our most ancient echo echoing their ancients’ most chthonic primordial hum, he who saw the deep, that faintest song over the abzu beneath the dunes? Instead this sandpapery shimmer of a surface you can’t delve below: “The rhyme scheme is off completely, and such a literal translation seems to have eliminated the beauty and meaning from the poem.” This fear animates Verses’ anxiety that you can’t taste the crying in the words. As a translator of artefacts, the game presents you with densities you try to click click uncover, pinning words’ butterfly wings to ekphrasis the noumenal horizon: from a Romanian starting point, a beauty outside our limited scope of worlding, we keep trying to wring out the juice to taste without desiccating: “If flowers: the tall grass” becomes “The flowers grow in tall grass”, literal into idiomatic, how much can we preserve through the distance between us? The fantasy that “I with my light enhance the secret world - / like the moon with its white rays / not diminishing, but trembling / multiplying the night’s mystery” as we enter alterior worlds, but the phantoms leap too high upon the cavern walls flickers of our dimming swallowed, myrrh murmurs crackle in our clenchfist strain: “You place your hands on the control board. Lines of text burst from the screen into your eyes. Your job is not to translate, but to make sense.” But we’re not a part of that world, are we a part of any world, how can we contain humanity, “and everything that is not understood / becomes even harder to understand / in front of our eyes-“ as the worlds unfurl without settling, kaleidoscopic unresolve in the overwhelming overflow of information cascading the contained through translation’s unstitching, words failing to live up to their signified as you dutifully drain them to safely flaskable: “lawn: sort of a misnomer; it’s mostly dirt packed from hundreds of years of walking. / tower: the shortest structure in the compound”, words like fences failing to imply the ranges within.

As the anxiety of translation overbursts its bounds into paranoia blossoms, the garland which vivifies Verses’ sinuous elusions, heady scifi extravagances literalize the looming losses to prevent collapse to mystic whispers. The more our translator disintegrates before failing to render the impossible otherness desired real, tangible, tastable, the more they’re forced into themselves, the less they imply any correlate otherness nonreal, nontangible, nontastable. Human vats gestating raw flesh, the bodily as humiliated into literal purpose metamorphosis of the translator failed, butcher’s twined together in increasingly medical language’s reductio ad abcessum: “Material composition: Human skin, fat, muscle, epidermal appendages incl. sebaceous and sudoriferous glands, as well as choristomatous lacrimal glands, connective tissue/cartilage, fragments of bone, vascular structures, and neurologic tissue.” Physiological insistence encaging all that happens within to a one to one correspondence with the overtaxing latination, words as caches of hyperdetermined technicalisms ready to be uncompressed into the fullness of reality, tangible and technical equally, a precision endpoint precluding our yearning ambition to be “a living thing inside of something dead, like the terminal, like the data.”

That we technologize word into data at the next layer of informational amphibology should unsurprise Riemer’s readers, and with a blink the impenetrable surface hardens to a screen: “Virtualities surface on the screen, each only briefly. Posthuman analogs flickering once before going out permanently.” Translation happens through intimate grappling with a terminal, with its visual overlay of an anterior phantastation: "After a moment of dark whirring, your terminal’s screen alights with green dotpricks that gradually cohere into a landscape.” The landscape as unreal to the touch as it is to your eye, standing there in a forest feeling like every decade you’ve endured this earth has been a waste because not one of these profusions you can name. No understanding of their uses, no memories of their presence, no distinctions to transubstantiate the host fleur de less, nothing but shape and color an infantile morass below object permanence. I see flowers; someone else understands “oxeye, yarrow, arrowhead”, colors beyond the yellow I beseech secondhand. “You stand before a strobing monitor. Cathode green on dead pixel gray.” I belong inside boxes, everything I love is in them, “Memories bathing in warm fluid the color of elemental iron”, and why should I be attached to an outside which is after all outside, placed there by the confines I have considered shelter, from who and what don’t ask, just bask, a quiet you can keep for yourself, ataraxic reduction to… “disaster: obliteration. Image fragmentation. The recording apparatus is destroyed, viscera spatters. The brain has become soup. All connections lost.”

These connections which keep reminding you of attachments, there is another end you can reach through them, become a part unapart. World resonous with so much more than your noise deviance can ever contain, though voracious you want to be filled, be more than “a mind in a box, ruined. / You eat until, finally, full.” Reduced once more mereness, the amness of your shambling purposeable, mere genetic continuity that cannot retain any ancestral electricity to live: “There is no space for understanding, for an idea to survive: everything is concrete, grotesque, without identity.” Gods wither to gold in the deemblematic embolisms: “altar: gold glints through the dust.” As apostates, could we just relent to the box, comfortably bound in some annex never appended to the text, not translation but ablation, steady okaystate to decompose: “The work happens in a wooden box. The product of the labor is removed, and the work continues. Where it goes is none of our concern; maybe it would hurt us to know. But it’s impossible not to wonder.” One day they will wake and find you corpse and nod.

The lifethirst outrage that reacts at this precise second to violent revulsion strikes Verses’ emotive match, the needing to exist in the problematic as potential to personhood, not to be cauterized from its coterminous cohabitation, two spirits in the oneness of the word: “Identity: there are still problems here, but the problems want to be solved; you can feel their desire to unravel.” Even in the absence of solution, the need to be seen concrete, more than digital figments blurring in and out of cataract impermeability as “only avatars whizzing past & extinguishing themselves on a black screen”, distressed fire to burn through the “tumor in the viewer’s eye” that remains “intact. Self-contained. A safe recording, until it rots” to reach beyond the vestige, impetus to break free from your isolation’s unpotential, resistance as violence against reality as inert opacity of the witness who cannot will into the seen, the seething outside yourself: “You rub your eyebrow with a fist. And against the inside of your eyelid, like the wall of a cave, play the bodies, the spray, neither solid nor quite liquid. Flesh still half-frozen. Transmuted slush. The rods, the cells, the void.” Actualizing the push beyond the pressed into print our arc evolves us from “A creature filled with ideas and nothing else” to someone “here to construct an understanding, not for yourself but for others. You are here to create a record from which you yourself will be struck.” Defined into the act, you overcharge the signification with its significance, whichever you choose outside your limitations, words as signposts to where a greater collective humanity lies in defiance of the anodyne fleshsufficience, flesh as suffusion of sense: “Light hits your eyelid and scatters, illuminating blood and skin. / You dream of a pink mist and awaken inside one.” Acquiescence of suffusing metadata as moral determinative of the datum we must determinate.

If translation allows us communion with need as continuity with the strivings of those who once spoke a reality you desire, then this rebellious urge derails against the limitors, box occluding the “overabundance of nearby metadata” that contextualizes words into a subjectivity superior to the overbearing abstractions of an objectivity which proposes you purely an object that could never include you, per our antagonists: “Context is poisonous, Eca. This remote laboratory, the clandestine nature of your work, is to prevent even a mote of extraneous information from seeping in. Cultural, ideological, linguistic poison. Your analysis must remain objective.” Analytical lattices which plug “directly into the terminal” to “suggest the sample’s placement” constrict us into a deposition decay that sees less and less outside its depository display, eyes increasingly indistinguishable from the holographic overlay imposed until we’re so inculcated to a calculated anneal that “externality comes apart like something wet. Then the truth reveals itself to be a nutrient or a poison. Then the message reveals itself to be something excreted from the speaker. Then the sun goes away and the rain comes and you and I freeze in it, the translucent bluishness of our skin. The rain falls and we are ever uglier.” Whatever was meant antecedents no me in it, only molder.

This tension against the inertness of ghosts a ruin resplends resolving into which resonation? I don’t know, the military entertainment complex? Dutifully, one ending has you rewield your monstrousness against the impending military “cleansing” of the zone. Aliens, at one point the game gestures, almost ironically. Here the game falters too slight, too ramshackled from myriads winked together to foster an inhabitance capable of generating genuinely internal antagonisms worth wrestling thematically through the metaphor of translation. Most passages hasten a jot or two, nodding towards where they might combine sublime, but quickly recede into the quickening pace of the game’s not so much descent as cocaine freefall into madness. As if in recognition of this race to outpace an internal metronome to cohere from fragments a fullness of focus, the few ideas of which it is very certain, like the eye as fragile membrane between the soul and source, are repeatedly emblazoned lest they not crest the waves, in case without this spine we might gelatin likewise gestation beasts: “Your eye has not ceased to function - it is transmitting non-energy to your brain, a signal expressing absence” we are told, “Your eye has not ceased to function - it is transmitting non-energy to your brain, a signal expressing absence” we are told, “You fall through the floor of material existence, of time. The speed of your descent makes your skin ripple. You feel it even in your dead limb, see it play across your dead eye’s retina.” The narrative thread heaping on the urgency, your devolution to a cessation beyond translation, never quite outshines the interstitial gestures, and it’s like, if I wanted to read about the uncanny unfulfillment of the moment to moment interpolation of influence as existential disclaimant crisis, I’d read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Precisely this yearning, though, to fall through the floor of material existence, and its contraposition of a lineage of material extrusion sanctified through poetry’s translucent filminess between image and immanence, pulses Verses past this impasse towards a haunting geschlossen superimposable on the supernal secret of the verses unvocal in “your tongue about your mouth, preparing to enunciate properly”, a certainty enclosure cataclysm in which you wake woundably unwithinable: “Long after everything had ended, there were still mechanisms without purpose, places without names, faces without features. The world was without conceit. All lingering ideas had been eaten from our heads. / Finally and blessedly all blood was lost and the wound of our existence emptied and putrefied. The traps we had fallen into, invisible, placed throughout our history and indistinguishable from the air around them, had sprung, and the atomic motion of everything slowed until there was an impermeable darkness.” In this wound of existence, its collectivity desiccation, “Ruin and death / exodus / and the path to / deliverance / closed”, we crawl close to the magnificent desolation which my favorite Romanian poet once consecrated: “Instants whose eyewink / no brightness sleeps. / Increate, in every place, / gather yourself, / stay.”

Perhaps this glittery despair overdetermines into an elsewise eclipse. “The samples you’re working with are dimensional; they can reveal one facet or another depending on how they’re approached. You have an opportunity here to impose your will on the analysis in a way that results in a more thorough experience.” So then I can ask you this: “For this initial calibration test, I’d like you to tell me anything you can about the object within the lattice without having seen it first. By eliminating preconceived notions, we can ensure the data is objective.” Is that where you’d rather wither? Which is your favorite translation of Beowulf?

What’s terrifying about babies is how terrified they scream. Beyond the voice’s breakingpoint and still the shrillhoarse shreaking. Listening to them, you just kind of wonder, is it this bad, this whole, you know? Not just that I’ve learned subtler ways to cope with being cold or hungry or alone in a darkness that I don’t know will ever be broken, but worried that it’s worse, that I’ve lost the intensity of these feelings through ineluctable repetition, the fullest misery of our damnation has been worn away, left with whatever ashes we adapt to adulthood: “You cry at the top of your lungs, the realization that you are alive and singular dawning on you for the very first time. It's okay, though. This thought will only haunt you for the rest of your life.” Belying the child crying for their mother is the reality she could not return, our coherence of any desire to live depends on flickering contingencies which do not take them with us, when they go, we are here to be alone inside ourselves, inflictable.

Tension between universality, the empathetic recognition of the baby’s suffering that accords with our own having traveled that road, and individuation, whatever eternal return condemns you it is you who must undergo everything incurred, deathmarches us through the pervasive we permutate: “the normal processions must be carried out. If this is somehow new information, congratulations: a lifetime of disappointment and pointless information awaits. How is it, being born? Do you feel ecstatic? Elastic? Life is something we must all come to terms with at some point in time.” In a rapidfire game of life, Conway’s or Milton Bradley’s, we are whisked through each progressive phase of the ineluctable, accumulating idiosyncrasies primarily in the flinches from them. From “Childhood is a process of aches, pains, and frequent misunderstanding” to “Now, time is slower and bare walls are more noticeable. Like that chip in the wall you forgot to note on your security deposit” we are swept along a sweatprocess that leathers us unrecognizably stretched over the brainbloat accumulated by decades of reasons and wouldbe answers, none of which trigger a transcendence to wrest us from the ungravitas gravity: “Life is a cascading, measureless list of somehows.”

Whoa, you say, that’s pretty deep dude, and the game makes the same snarky snidestep from its subject, with wacky asides like how many McDonalds does it take to make the best of all possible worlds or skateboard tricks you land in a fireball to obsequious applause or “The clown is an affront to God, a pitiful mortal unaware of what is good and just in the world. Clowns represent full depravity and unchecked hubris.” This flippancy deadpans the drama to dry out the soppy philosophizing, which works to the extent it keeps the tone amicable, but somewhere between the game installing updates midstream and interrupting you with zany lists and buckshots of cheap jokes and nonsequitor noneliners, the veering starts to feel Wink Wink Clever again, only in the other direction, and you’re like, okay, you clearly have something interesting to say, could you please just say it.

Which is a shame, because, when it does just say it, the writing radiates clarion certainty not worth shying from. The delicate balancing act between encapsulating universals like “Cinema is verite. Our needs are our mechanisms. Truth must be discovered in order to be truth. Discover the want and want the discovery. / We are gelatin like the Earth is clay. The fact that a question exists at all is beautiful.” and the heartbreaking simplicities that sufficiently fuel any given soul like “There is gestalt in survival” create generative confliction perfectly capable of carrying the game’s moue molting to a grin. Unexpected little ruby pops like “gentle fortress of claret and peel” or “Heat emanated like a broiler skillet spider” italicize a lived particularity that niches connections within the textbook infodumps and vague gestures at “capital-S Somethings”.

Zaniness undercutting the narrative also proves redundant, because this undercut is precisely the climactic fulcrum that poignancies the narrative’s switching tracks from the connaturalist aggrandizing of the psychological into the anthropological to the emotive underscore of the narrative’s soft pulse: “You stare at the conveyor belt. People need to do what they can to survive. Life has beaten us down so much. I want us to be okay.” Choosing not to resolve the tension between the universal condition and its lived particulars into a nihilistic hauteur but rather a gentle awareness of the fragile interstitially stitched together psyche, the one of one that is “here in spite of all my challenges, my choices, and my mistakes. I am human. I am real. I am necessary. / And yet, even by telling you all of this, even by including that preamble and this vast, quite-encompassing magnitude of a description, I am more than any of these binary truths or lies alone could ever hope to describe or contain: / I am multitudes. / I am complex, the in-between. / I am synthesis.” Compiling all your choices throughout your playthrough into a description of you, the specific player, that creates a surprisingly deep portrait of how you dwelled within overhaunted confines, the liberative immelman out of the inexorable to its inness and ability justifies the central conceit into a call to, if not action, then at least reaction, reagency at last: “Let’s hold on a little bit longer. Let’s change things. Let’s scar.”

I’ve visited Slovakia only briefly, and glancing up at Bratislava Castle, which I didn’t have time to visit, made me wistful for all the other wonders of Slovakia I hadn’t time to visit, dreaming of a someday to return, wandering the mountain forests between Banská Bystrica and Kosice, discovering along a river some quiet village untouched by time, watching the stars slowly seep into the sky…

As life often goes, I have never returned. Those mountain forests remain redolent in my heart’s trove of pleasant could bes. So I am thankful for the opportunity to explore those forests, guided by the creative young minds of Senica, each one eager to show me where their dreams wander. Of course, our energetic explorers aren’t satisfied with a sleepy Rick Steves holiday: “You are entering a dark place full of unpredictable twists and hostile creatures,” we are warned, so we must tread lightly, trusting in our guides.

If you start feeling tentative, no worries, David is quick to set you at ease. Immediately we’re welcomed into a warm log cabin celebrating a Christmas Eve feast, graciously invited to join the festivities. This social fleetness, a polite world where everyone is very keen to introduce themselves and assist you immediately, is as charming as it is chipper.

Should you wish a little thrill of the danger initially promised, the Baily sisters gather around you all the forest’s predators, or at least those sufficiently pettable: wolves, foxes, bears, ravenous dog doctors. If you’re now worried about being eaten, you must also worry about what’s being eaten, with poisoned coffee and cupcakes galore. Even if you avoid these comestible anxieties, you might still wake up dead, and what’s worse, hungry.

Before we break for lunch, though, Hailey and Milka take us on a Halloween scavenger hunt. A couple of clicks through and a cursed doll was biting my hand while I was drowning beneath a lake. I take it that I’m losing the hunt. When I just managed to sweat myself back to safety, our guides reassured my halfdead delirium, “Don’t worry about it :).” So, sharing their relentless optimism, I returned for another try at the trophy, only to end up stuck in a basement with my simulacrum mom forcedrinking me Coke for the rest of my days. What a frightening world our authors have conjured! Strangely, this ending awarded me Main Trophy Number One. Encouraged by this progress, I tried again, this time happening upon a penguin I mistook for a handsome boy, reminding me that I need to update my glasses prescription. In my defense, penguins look like they’re wearing tuxedos!

Desiring a bit more control over my fate, I was happy that Leontine offered me the opportunity to help craft the narrative of IXI, who makes friends with all the animals of the woods and meadows. In each of these choices, we get to decide what happens to IXI in the encounter. Some of these animals, like a surprisingly carnivorous doe, are dangerous, but most are friendly, if sometimes a little lazy. Which, when you get to spend your days relaxing with plushy bunnies, sounds entire reasonable.

Unfortunately, not all animals have happygolucky lives, and Natalie takes us through the frustrations of a frog undertaking that most froglike of tasks, budget management. We must go grocery shopping and avoid expensive trips to doctors and dentists, so that our frog is free to enjoy the finer things in life, including this adorable line about painting a selfportrait: “It turned out very pretty (because you were on it) and cute.” Even with one eye on our bank account, we must find ways to avoid the frog’s everpresent ennui and cherish adventuresome moments, like seeing a sea turtle flying around a palm tree, which would surely leave David Attenborough lost for words.

Also keen to avoid sad moments, the Unicorn sisters soften the blow of their horror story with little baubles of cheer, like this one that lightens the mood: “You decide to explore the cellar and find a monster there. You become the monster’s dinner :)” Well, always look on the bright side of death, just before you draw your terminal breath! With this attitude, our jaunt about a haunted mansion doesn’t seem so bad: “What seemed like a horror movie can now turn into a weekend party. You order pizza and prepare for an overnight, lighting a fire to dry out your wet socks.” Sure, you get chased around a bit, but it never hurts to get a little cardio, and a fun round of hide and seek sure makes the time pass quickly. Why not learn to stop worrying and love the beast? Worked for Belle, at least. “You go back to your hideout, eat the pizza while the monster finishes its own dinner and then, with stomachs full, it is much easier to make friends … You watch some films on Netflix together and become friends for the time being?” Ah, the Netflix algorithm, a modern Scheherazade.

We wait for the beast to fall asleep, then make our escape. Needing to find ourselves safely on our way home, our final guide, Mushroom, winds us back through the forest. Additional dangers await us, of course: mysterious berries, mysterious old women, mysterious dinosaurs. Our guide, solicitous of our success, gives us multiple chances to evade these threats, always emphasizing which route might turn out the better, although emphasis on might: “I didn’t know that you couldn’t swim. If you had told me before, you couldn’t swim, I might have watched out for the rivers around…”

With a little more caution, I do manage to find my way safely on my way home, edified by all the adventures I’ve been taken on. Ďakujem za všetko!

What a wondrous, sappy tradition, the breathless letter. The rawly overworked declarations, with their extraexclamatory raptures of emotion which the voice could not carry so ostentatiously: “No words could ever express how deeply I miss your presence!! / No words could ever express how grand is my anger!!” An operatic tenor that confettis its cliches: “Memories of that morning still haunt me — seeing you, standing on the other side of that damned glass, your emeralds glazed by your sobs, your lips quivering, bidding me farewells. The breeze danced with your chestnut curls, untangling and entangling your so lovely locks. Your flushed cheeks, on which I had laid my kisses only moments earlier, were now beaded with tears … What torture it was to hear the whistle announcing the train’s departure, and to see you disappear in a cloud of smoke!”

With each curl of that smoke cursives new lines in the fine tradition of George Sand, fiery testaments to eternity that are undone with each tempestuous new whim, where sudden breaks of recrimination revel in the unbridling joy of a bridge burning to replace the yearning to cross it: “Viper’s tongue, insidious hatred, I despise you! I curse your name! You, who have given me so much pain… you have found the demise of my heart! Your words have trampled my whole being to dust. I wish you all the Evils of the Earth!” The finality feels good, until, a night sobbing into the pillow later, the throat throbs with the aches that there might be more to say: “I lay my broken quill at your feel, bowing until my witch’s nose reaches your unsullied slippers. My body, my heart, my soul… all my being at your disposal, for eternity. Make me your puppet, your doll, your slave!” Rather than stumble seasick from the waves’ violent rocking, we’re meant to enjoy the conflictions as Proustian pleasures, lavish each lurch of the ship, savor in each totalizing emotion the intoxications of love, flaring them to hyperbole so that they might still be felt over the uncrossable distance.

The game, alas, follows our lovers’ affectuations, which gesture more than they commit. The tropes which pulse the narrative are left unexpounded, fashionably prima facie. Nods of Parisienne glamor ghost the fallenness into provincial mundanity, but the decadent sensibilities are left offscreen, the province of the unheard interlocutor. Indeed, much of the relationship to which the entirety of our text is addressed responds only between the lines, a sense of a depth that rarely bubbles up to the surface to edify the reader. The absence at the heart of the story tautologizes. Similarly, there is a feint to Rousseauvian picturesque as a potential counterbalance against the complications of city life as our narrator makes peace with the slower pace of life, with “all these good people, with rolled up sleeves, working hard, coming and going all day long to bring equipment”, and slowly, rather than wistfully recollect capital absorptions, our narrator relates obsessively the small town small talk of lost sheep and a mother’s difficult birth as if they were fresh from the gossip sheets. In this could burgeon a character arc, but the hyphae never enmeshes with any concept more than the conjuration, merely a series of asides to render the setting less abstract.

A setting for what, we wonder, until aha a mysterious Comtesse moves in, “Pale as snow, with bloody lips, and eyes shining like polished gold.” If your eyebrow raised, congratulations M. Maigret, you’ve intuited the remainder of the plot, which dutifully marches through missing children called out upon the moors and a strange plague of itchy necks. If perhaps we’re meant to indulge in the thrilling dangers of supernatural romance, sadly we also find this relationship more implied than experienced, merely a series of foreshadowy nudges to drumbeat the compiling of tropes with the same listless sense of self evidence as they lead into a dramatic confrontation that makes you rather wish you weren’t being told second hand: “At the eleventh hour, Mlle Bouchon called me in her apartments (at the Marquis’s, hence), so to confess her scheming and plots during this dreadful affair. Oh, my beautiful Olympia, what else can I say except that you were entirely scrupulous about her! And of the villagers’ suspicions, too! Alice was not only in the throes of this mystery… she was the entire mystery herself!” With the requisite revelation out of the way, nothing is left to drive the text onto new incidents, so though “There are still a few knots in this affair to untangle, and documents to fill, before finally closing this chapter forever”, we exeunt upon the declarative: “a great void has been felt throughout the village.”

If the epistolary exuberances lose their pleasurably pulp sentimentalism along the way, so that we must simply take the idea of the story at its word, sometimes it’s the thought that counts. With a little whimsy, we may as well enjoy ourselves, for who can argue with such summery sentiments: “I wish for you a wonderful life, filled with new loves, joy, and health. Pray to remember spending as much time as humanly possible in the sun and eating lots of garlic!” If in some perfumes there is more delight, still all love is a rarity to be cherished beyond comparison.

When I first learned what REM actually meant, I struggled to sleep for a week. I’d start to drift off, then I’d shiverfreak up to tense and subterrified. The thought of your body paralyzing as some writhing nocturnal regime hallucinated you at random through blendered consciousness while your heartrate slipped closer to the totality of that unable to rise…

You Can Only Turn Left nods, pats me on the back, wordlessly passes me a cigarette (it offers me a light, but I politely decline, just like, holding the cigarette in my mouth, naïve goodfaith belief in this talisman of the vibes). At one point it just verbatim describes sleep paralysis. But mostly it tries to capture that half semilucid half semidreamy state that emerges not so much from liminal overlap as from waves sinusoidal.

The rangebound nausea uses it propulsive repetition to create a dizzy bedsickness where “Your gaze focuses on the world around you as you snap back from your daydream. Your eyes are sore and the skin on your face feels heavy. / There’s a dull hum in the room that’s not quite silence. The physical sensations of being awake are sharper than those experienced while dozing.” Before these aches can congeal into coffeegrounds morning grittiness, the tactility oozes away until “The world around you is grey and blue and everything is the texture of construction paper.” Back and forth we spill, asked again and again if we are sleeping or waking, less and less able to distinguish.

Through this hazebounce flutters memory fragments. Some of these lean towards the specificity of real recalled events, even as they threaten phantasmagoric details: “In the third grade, you raised and released tadpoles in your class. You remember standing shoulder to shoulder with your classmates as you surrounded the fish tank that previously was an incubator for the frog eggs. When they developed in the egg, their spine grew fused together in a ‘C’ shape.” In the reverse oscillation, we get fantastical episodes that mutter in concrete details that threaten to resolve the dangers lucid: “Stumbling forward in the dark, you see a snake made of composite board. You walk around the snake and you see that you can climb it! / It’s white and mustard yellow. It glitches between being serpentine to pixellated. Blocks seamlessly transform to scales before your eyes.” This glitchy indeterminacy underpins the core flinch of the germinating fear, which is the uncertainty that what you see will not resolve into something other. “Is this real” begs a pixelflickering line; in some sleepunwalking state the narrator startles awake having fainted on their face, chipping teeth, spewing blood. Sleep’s silky non veils you from the scarring permanencies that plash against your cuddled ups, anxiety of are you asleep at the wheel as absolutes race towards you. Loss of control threatens deeply uncomfortable gulfs below your step, through an unsettling caress from a serpent, through “Your arms and legs are pinned to the surface beneath you and your neck and head are cradled by something warm.” Several times the story threatens this starkening twist to the depths, but each time it oscillates back into the easy grays of twilight terrain, butterfly stomach beneath a blank mind: “Lined up in front of you was your grandfather, your father, your ex, your uncle, your aunt. / They stood in silence, untouching, unmoving but not frozen. They still drew breath through petrified lips.” This image, so ready to morph into a memory and its mental fractures, remains for the moment merely a black and white photograph, expressions as quiet as the object of things lost. How to resolve? Is something horrible going to happen? You descend a staircase towards a strange figure, stake in hand. Is it just your mind playing tricks on you? A crash jumps you awake: “Your cat has knocked over your nightstand and the lamp on top of it had shattered on the wooden floor. She ran away fast enough that you were confident she didn’t hurt herself.”

Perhaps in the yanking yet away from an answer, the trickling malaise muddies, bones the harrow: “Your nights generally consist of laying motionless in bed watching strange shapes grow and morph on the insides of your eyelids. You doze mostly, and hallucinate often. During the quiet night your mind tangles your dreams and memories together. Familiar mundaneity is combined with the fantastic. Sometimes it is charming, and sometimes it is horrifying.” So it goes, hinting at horror you’re increasingly too tired to dread. Even this statement of fact, so literal of intent that it makes the smallness of the aesthetic even more claustrophobic, seems to have run out of the energy to make you intuit it, simply printing the recipe for you to make it at home. Whenceforth from the nadir? There are several endings that tepid out the requisite hallucinatory annihilates, but they’re harder to reach then perhaps they need to be, so you loop through, back into the yawn in lieu of a scream.

This is where You Can Only Turn Left demonstrates a lack of direction that undermines its effect. Being performatively exhausted rarely makes you lively company, and the few noire flourishes, like using a physics check to test the dream level as if we’re in some Inception caper, instigate little intrigue beyond the requisite sigh back to tone. “To get to your 6:30 a.m. shift, you’d have to wake up around 5:30 a.m.” the game gestures with furtive intensity, forgetting that most of us, speaking of mundanity, wake up early and hate it.

If the ambition runs aground, at least this is credit to its taste, which refuses to settle into the creepypasta copypastes it sometimes mucks through. At its best, the half awake phantasms clayclump into Yves Tanguy drabscapes, making dream enough from drubs of color: “You woke up in the upstairs bedroom of the house that you grew up in. / There was no furniture in the room, and you even noted that there was no bed. Only the cold orange floor.” In this teasing of pure sight, we discover the work’s best line: “Rolling your skin off of your body, you are hot pink. The dead skin suit becomes a pile on the floor. / Your entire body emanates hot pink light. / You are fabulous and you are infinite.” Perhaps, with a few more loops through the enchantments of the inchoate, the author may guide us to a vision so frameable.

The setting, in which you are a number-named drone for CORPOTech “requested to identify and fully purge any instance of poetry from the system. / This has come as a mandate from the Board Room. There is unfortunately no room for art of any kind in the Database of Subsumed Cultures”, lays it on so thick that I was buried for weeks, forced to learn the languages of the dark, burgeoning my pupils to cope until they covered each skullhalf and electrified my brain with every glint of silica or silver, crawling with the olm into underglows where the depths deepened into new understandings of themselves…

So though I did blinkrecoil reemerging into hypersurface aesthetics of “you are an efficient cog in the machinery of CORPO blight” versus a Shakespeare-quoting rogue AI promising to “bring the color back” through revolution, the allure here lies in the central mechanic of how you save the poetry from deletion. You’re given a chance to read a poem, peruse some data that thinly contextualizes the culture, then race to preserve individual words by clicking on them as the text is backspaced into oblivion. Holding the tatters, you’re given the chance to reweave the original meaning through remembrance of its impact upon you, painting with echoes to reimagine the song. These poems, themselves historical artworks which been crunchgrungled through several rounds of autotranslate, leave you grasping at their pixellated je ne sais quoi for almost the accident of meaning, syrupy saliences where “If the items don't match, search To destroy what God in his mercy saves, The struggle is equally futile and weak Rather than receding waves.” In that struggle between destroying and saving, your click click curations of buried empires capture epicene crepuscula, scintillas of the loss of the whole: “moon climate eternal beauty feel the deception rapture stylized reality”.

Although the game gives you the opportunity to reconstruct entire poems from the salvaged words, I actually rather preferred the fragmentary ellipsicals that form as you tear out the words you could not live without, a la the complete works of a Greek, some Sappho voice choppy through the void: “Sometimes I can not say. / immortal / Sometimes lilies / All Peaceful”. Prosper.0 shrugs the same conclusion, this mixture of reverence and resignation, when the narrator complains about the difficulty of the task of encapsulating everything that is being lost in just a few words felt together: “Do you think that, if you had an unlimited amount of time and skill, you could truly write a poem that faithfully captured the spirit of an entire race? / Do you think that these poems, created by the races themselves, truly encapsulate the entirety of the spirit of their own people? / We're all simply doing our best to reflect back the most miniscule portion of existence in a way that rings true, aren't we?” In this tender tension, making patchworks of works you don’t understand to enshrine something, anything, against the nothing, “a complex and twisting horror” elegances the interplay of reading and forgetting, ghost whispers which will one day no longer haunt us is the sleeplessing fear.

The game forces you to confront how little of a text you can preserve in just the words, each poem you create a testament to the ones you could not, so naturally there’s an arcade mode. If poetry tetris feels a little flippant, then it harmonizes with the whole, the game gesturing at a frustration but delighting in the pure freeplay of its kintsugi.

In Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, a director, mistresser of actresses, has a vision of some thespian Beatrice that will elevate his existence into a purified dedication to the Art she can safely symbolize for him, angelically neuter of her own content, so like an apparition, she comes to him from the night, offers him a ride home, and he explains an idea of a film, barely pretensed as fictional, of a man’s degraded existence melting like snow before the woman of the spring, a salvation, and she listens with 60s prettiness flair that curlicues the banter, considering whether such a person is capable of love, of redemption, of art, never failing the perfect smile and tone that mercifies the despair, except once, when the car comes to a stop, and he tells her to turn the headlights off: the tension, the stare, the pretending neither.

This tension typifies much of 60s/70s cinema’s aestheticized verselust, perhaps most explicitly in the giallo genre, with its sensuous dissociations starkening in lightning strikes an ultraviolence predation: "I love your work,” a fan enthuses, to which the actress ripostes: “You mean, you love to watch me die.” In the giallo, we drink in absinthe aesthetics, neon sharps equally of glamor and sleaze that pairs “the shadowy interior … a palette of brown wood, blue jeans and purple silk” with the “mingling with the cooing tones of the can-can girls on a break.” Although the game initially feints into a spaghetti western, a telegram summons us into a train chugging through the storm, where we hear the first whispery incantations of a Goblin soundtrack: “You open your hand, and let the storm claim the piece of red silk, as it disappears carried by the wind a second later. (Why? Was that in the script, or was it your idea?) / Outside the gates, rain falls on the canals in silvery splatters.” The police, languid cigarette smoke, credits in italics: “Starring Eva Chantry as Herself….”

As herself? Yes, asserts the giallo’s brazen delirium, oohing oozing into lurid voyeurism where the camera’s gaze surfeits nakedly male desire in its intrusive omnipresence, to entwine the reel with the reel: “Trembling, you peel off your soaked dress. If this was a scene, the camera would be sliding down as you do, catching the goosebumps in your soft skin to emphasize your vulnerability, and ending with the wet heap on the floor … You run a hot bath, waiting until it’s half full to slide in, with a sensual moan of pleasure. Again, if this was a scene, the camera would catch you from behind, lingering on your nakedness as you raise one leg, then the other, and ease into the steaming water. / Does it matter that it’s a scene or not? Only if you’re acting for the audience, as your old teacher used to use. If you’re doing it for yourself, then the camera is always on.” Luxuriating in the bath, but only insofar as the faceless yet ever more pressing audience insists, dictatorial demands flooding in, as whenever you struggle to know what to do next, the hint screen slips you the next bit of script (in)((sin)uating) sensuous headiness invoked into dreamspace: “You close your eyes and listen to the patter of the rain on the windows. Fury and violence without, softness and beauty within. A metaphor for something or the other…” This pane of glass, the barrier between you and the camera, the screen and the audience, is precisely the illusion the metafictional directness of the giallo threatens, suddenly breaking in a torrent of shards, inviting in peacock preens of patriarchal brutality as readily in the fictional layer, “You run anxiously, trying to find a hotel or shelter from the rain, cold and miserable in your sodden clothes. Suddenly, a flash of lighting stops your dead on your tracks. There’s someone right in front of you … Then the light is out, and so is the knife. You fall on your knees, looking at the blood flowing into the drenched cobblestones. The next stab is through your eye, and then you see no more” as in the metafictional layer: “You’re drifting off, when a noise awakens you. Someone is knocking on your door. Again. It’s a firm, masculine way of knocking. Here comes the outside world, wanting in. You get out of the bath and towel yourself dry quickly. Who the hell could it be?” Tension of the masculinized violence of desire latent in the camera’s slow pans equivocates the film, the filmmaker. The constant terror of the indeterminacy of the demon.

That this veers haphazardly into very uncomfortable spaces accords to the unsubtlety horrors of the giallo, where the stylized tropes run so blatantly rampant that the aesthetic judgment lies largely in whether the work’s directness rips its paperthin premise to reveal a certain grinning stupidity that fails to say anything but the obvious or, in the more successful exemplar Suspiria, the semisupernatural dizziness spins itself so wildly that it dissociates into a witches’ sabbath of suggestions that let light in like stained glass. Barcarolle in Yellow threatens both outcomes through its fracturing metafictional pane. In some scenes, like the confrontation with Leona in her apartment, the game revels in its stylish semantic porousness to achieve an apropos phantasmagoric slipperiness: “Before you can touch the door, it swings open by itself. Behind it is… nobody, and nothing. Taking a deep breath, you go in, and climb the spiral staircase, ascending as it coils upon itself, tighter, higher, until you reach the high place you seem to remember like a dream … Your ideas melt in Leona’s presence like wax in the sun. … “Tell me, Eva, how have you been feeling? Do you sometimes think… things are not quite real? As if you were reading a piece of fiction and suspending your disbelief for the sake of being a part of it… or, in other words, acting?”” In others, however, the unsubtleties run crude, which nauseates when handling such intense subject matter: “You open the door a crack, as you often do when you’re about to be murdered luridly. Or raped. Often both: occupational hazard. / Through the crack, dramatically lighted, you can see a vertical slice of face: that of the director! The slice includes a brown, intense eye, an aquiline nose, a bit of smiling lip and some seriously square jawline … His eyes go wide as they follow every curve of your naked body, his voice sounds a little raspier. “Oh my God, Eva… do you always open the door in the nude? You’re amazing. Let me in, baby, I can’t wait to have you…”” It’s hard to recover any of the tensed stylized mood in the wake of such winces, so we’ll simply slip out of the cinema into the pouring rain, where we might regain the shivery extravagance.

By the time an old servant slash formerly the imperial admiral patriarch’s mistress slash secret agent from some fractious Balkan manipulates an empire and its dissident into a war that culminates in a sniper duel between supersoldier aristocrat siblings who are potentially lovers in their crumbling mansion over a feud that consists as much of domestic relations as it does international relations, not much lies out of scope. At its core, Out of Scope wants to tell a suffocating story about how two siblings are torn apart by the different social expectations of gender, but in its attempt to amp the tension to world historical importance, it loses its message somewhere in its reams of political exposition.

With its guns blazing stagesetter, Out of Scope charges no holds barred to flourish a first impression with moody grandeur prose, where the “ceiling rises precipitously, all the way to the soffit of the second floor, letting in a huge amount of light and spiders” to narrow corridors haunted by “Statues. Family members, genuine and appropriated. All stained by a slightly ironic shade of soot.” The rich imagery glimmers in stained glass moonlight to echo through the space a moody nocturne, elegantly composing into phantasmagorical allure with its sudden piu forte into violence: “Bubbles in the glass pane swim before the scene … Seaweed rustles on the hillside and froth floats in the sky. / A gleam of treasure winks at you from a shipwreck … Her eyes are on you … You feel the collision in your memories, then in the constriction of your heart, then going through your side as the window shatters against you and you plunge down against its thick, gouging shards.” Although sometimes the opulence inelegances into the gaudiness of trying too hard, like when “You approach, unsteadily on the igneous plane”, the writing still crackles when the moody veneer is asserted selfsufficient.

But then the story balloons expository, bloating to explain who the Colibrians are and what treaties they’ve made and not upheld, thus this sharpness disappears into somewhat wooden banter, with aristocrats hmmph hmming how you might think they would, with soldiers more concerned with who hazes who than whether the war engulfs them, with your various relations being bores. To accompany this broadening, the cast of characters also widens, most of whom are hastily sketched in with broad strokes: “Uncle Graham, or Great Ham, as you call him, is inevitably at the long dining table, his mouth ingesting from a plate and his ears from the inexhaustible anecdote of Lavinia … Grandfather is accepting tribute from a fug of officers, while Aunt Marion, or Marry On, as you call her, is pointedly ignoring it all”. This flatness saps your investment in any of their subsequent shenanigans, and although there are attempts to provide twists, Aunt Marion is revealed as a skilled sculptor of previous lovers, none of these twists really broaden their remit beyond the eyeroll by which they are initially invoked.

Rather than complexifying the family dynamics through a wider canvas, the intermixing of the political with the personal proves artificial, rendering the latter vague through the interventions of the former. Take this dry bit of banter after Zoe’s mother, the editor of a national newspaper, approves of Zoe’s boyfriend: “”You’re the kingmaker,” you say, citing her nickname in this morning’s edition of Clarion Call, ostensibly in reference to your father’s conquests.” Turbulent emotions between family members loses intimate intensity when printed in the morning paper. Similarly, the supersoldier intrigue between the siblings simply dilutes their conflicted immediacy, as when a heated emotional exchange causes Zoe to remember her “psyops training” before responding. Naturlich, any successful family gathering requires a certain amount of psyops. Most frustratingly, the critical brother sister bond at the heart of Out of Scope zooms out too abstract as its spy thriller inclinations take over, leaving us with salacious descriptions of soldiery rather than their initial impactful solidarity. In the few breaths the story spares for the pair unimpacted by national security, we get more telling than showing, gesturing airily at letters rather than the roiling writings within, which is a shame, because perhaps some of its strongest sparkles exist in their tempestuous multifacets: “Remorse and the thrill of your own power electrifies you, and then together you burst into tears.” There’s a section in the sprawling labyrinths of the unfinished The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil where Ulrich and his sister Agathe dialogue into a heady and equally unsettling intimacy, and some echo of that would I think massively improve the reader’s engagement in the central themes of this work.

When it adheres to its fastest flowing currents, Out of Scope compels, especially with its excellently imperial diffidence to the moral difficulty of much of its subject matter, which allows its complications space to breathe. Indeed, there is a strong attention to preserving point of view, like a great line that translates its scenic lyricisms into a child’s voice with “fireflies playing freeze tag”. But the clean shot this style could take through the story blurs, and we get waylaid by brambling bumbles that add no hues to the bloom. Even the story’s presentation, a spatially exacting Prezi, overthinks the premise, adding little beyond Twine beyond dizzying clicksickness. The author displays much promise, but in this iteration, alas, the wayward breezes stray us from the target.