Reviews by kaemi

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.

Bram Stoker hits you with the hard sell on this hallucinatory Gothic extravaganza haunted by nightmare revenants of aristocracy undead, you’re reeled in like absolutely yes Dracula’s crawling on the wall like a salamander that’s awesome I love salamanders, then Stoker switches to his real focus, gadget bros breathlessly pledging to each other their sacred honor until their secretary does three seconds of work and goes guys you solved the mystery ages ago, they pause, gaze longingly at each other, I guess this means we must go into battle, to which the other is like, I pledge unto you my sacred honor that I shall fight by your side until death do us part, or persist indefinitely, depending on the whole, you know, vampire thing.

So we’re right on beat with a vampire named Lysander who “so longed to feel that fleeting warmth again. To drink deeply. To quicken his idle heart and bring color to stiff fingertips.” Par for contemporary aesthetics, we’ve flipped the moral matrix of the Victorian reference, softening the vampire by assuring readers that Lysander is primarily focused on “a drive to consume those already craving relief from suffering. / Acts of mercy that fueled him” and hardening his foes into brutal inquisitors, a litany of “Paladins and fiend-flayers and their growing hordes of frothing zealots” who “punished ever more obscure sins.” A refugee of church intolerance, Lysander is possessed of the “moral clarity” that eludes the wasteful hunters from whom he hides. Our vampire is merely misunderstood, in need of a little mercy; in a mood crumbling exuberance, Lysander even recalls his gig as a Ratatouille for the village cheesemonger: “At his most embraced, he worked as an affineur, attuning his supernatural sense of smell to divine the status of ripening cheese in exchange for safety from sunlight in the cellar, and regular access to blood.” Perhaps he’d be a better fit for the other side of the charcuterie board.

Don’t worry, though, a couple cackles from the organ can rescue the mood, from “Their nuptial bonfire lapped at the darkening sky” to “The heady scent had only grown, sublime iron gathering at the back of his throat.” As any good vampire knows, you can make up for so many sins with a sexy line: “Shall we scandalize the fireflies?” Alas, our trysts are always preempted by the Chaperones of Radiance Inviolate…

Wise to the creeping thinness of genre, there’s only so many times you can mention the moon, Radiance Inviolate holds together best when it travels swiftly from Neck A to Neck B, flittering through the flashback from mundane to the startling quickshift of tragedy, captured here charringly from the sobering distancing of others in “the opportune lover had vanished. What remained was a noble calculating an expedient solution for an inconvenient problem” to the abandonment in situation that surprises you when you are no longer a part of it: “The stream and its rocks. / The fireflies and the half-lit moon, too. / All of them proved indifferent to his suffering.” Where the precision evocation stumbles, like in this unsubtle unsubtlety, “Rene had rather unsubtly asked to be shown, “The cask from which poured nectar of such sweetness,” as he had so ostentatiously put it”, we recover immediately into the next pulse to tempo, caught in the clasp of a little lyric pull: “Through this cleft flowed sweet glows of green and gold whose heat took hold.” Glitches in our emanation engine indicate one too occasional trances under the genre allure, recapitulations of the obvious whyness sidetracking a reader who really would rather snap out of it to seek the next sensation. Take this meanderment, from which any inspired hunter would rescue the resonant second sentence: “In light of their relentless campaign to bring all accursed beings to face the sun’s vengeful brilliance, his caution amounted to nothing. The dorries were many, mighty, and meticulous in their takeover. They’d made it harder and harder for him to cross back into the city, withering his connections with the meager few who still cared for him. They’d made targets of anyone lending protection or support or sustenance. Vigilante smiting had intensified his fear, making him afraid to seek blood.” I rather suppose they hope so.

Still, as any up to no good demon knows, you can relish so many sins with a sexy line. Starting in Chapter IV, the story wobbles a little weird to the reader’s relief, carving some inventive mythifications of vampire tropes to sprinkle in room for grandiose gestures like “And what a beautiful thing it is, a fig, made delectable by the wasp that gave herself to its pollination, crawling inside to spread her brood.” And as much darkness and stars and sun and moon as we stargaze, genres transfixtures with our relentless lust for what once was more wondrously: “Death approached from above. / Her face sublime darkness he could not gaze into. / Her hair blue-bright fire that seared red streaks across sickled eyes. / Her vestments gossamer shawls whose edges wisped into smoke. Quicksilver pooled at his fingertips, braiding stars into her wrappings. / She bowed, unspooling tendrils of light that streamed all around him. / Uncanny faces writhed unfabric.” What else can you ask for? You chose to read a story about a vampire named Lysander. How bewitching.

Bearing a child. Love, they say, begets it, besets you. Life, they insist, begins with you; over a grave you cannot not wonder they’re wrong: “I wasn’t healed from bearing her before we buried her. That was when the seed of true sin, the one that haunts me, was planted. My hatred of my husband watered that seed. I couldn’t forgive him.” Fell pregnant, they nod, fallen for many things, only some of the times pushed; over the precipice they ask you, again through the grimace, to fall in love: “I stand and run and run, the hatred in my heart and the seed in my belly growing even now until he catches me, holds me down, carries me back, and I lie alone grieving my baby in the earth, and for the one growing in me now, growing in poisoned earth.” Emptiness in each fulfilment they bury you in, in the hollows you ask the mores, is this it, am I all they say? “Long you stand looking down this road as far as you can to where it bends into the undergrowth. You sigh-- what can you find at the end of it but your own doubt, the cavernous hole where God once lived in you? You find that hole at the end of every road now, and it’s deeper every time.”

One winter, you might realize when, you’ll hear the whispers without your name. When in the aloneness the aches overtake, they won’t send the doctor but the priest. The doctor, they explain, is attending a birth, and you’ll nod, a life so overfilled needs no more loss, love regrets it, resets you: “When things die, people or love or hope or hearts, they leave their broken bones in the objects around them. So many ghosts are here, their bones rattling." Rattled out of the decrescendo one last time to answer, to relate, to defer no longer your refusal to either, this at last is power, the refusal to. “That’s when the witch grew in me, started wearing my skin.” After life, beyond the cages clattering with prayer, soul only soul, the answers, this relation skein, to whom could the priest guide? Long since buried in its fulfilment: “The hole of doubt in you feels bigger yet shallower, as if something is there to believe in, but it’s monstrous” and over a grave you cannot not wonder they’re wrong. At peace, they stop trying to rebut you: “Warm winter woolens instead of traditional formal reverend’s clothing. They make you feel like just a man.” The claim to be something more than worldly, of course, you’ve heard it a thousand times, but “No one will miss such a man, who might leave a job at the slightest whim and go singing down the open road, who is always after an open door, an easy way out.” When you take them seriously, the pain and punishment at the moment nigh, stop their raging to debut you, let loose the hellfire: “You fling the door wide, the bones there in front of me. A moment they stand balancing with emotion, and all but lose themselves, nearly tumbling down again. A tongue of fire flashes out and licks along the upper teeth. Smoke rolls inside the sockets of his eyes.” Demons of a desire so coldering it collapses, cellar secrets pretensions that bearing all this life makes more than “Bones. So many of them, where they should be, where they were, where they are not. A life made of bones rattling and seeking, their fingers still clutching at me.”

The harrowing heaves with the repetitions, so the prose complies. Any image rendered redoubles, retriples migrainely: “Scrubby patches of ice-frosted weeds poke through the hard-packed dirt. Small patches of ice, little frozen puddles, gleam here and there where the dirt dimples.” Okay fine, I’ll put on a jacket. The imagery has a power that grips you, and certainly the mood deserves it relentless, simply that sometimes repetition merely repeats. In the best cases, the doubling downhills the momentum to the sudden jerk up, like this sentence tensionreleasing through its final phrase: “Snow falls in downy flakes from the darkening sky, frosting the frozen ground, landing on leaves no step has trodden black.” But any beauty so earned wilts with the once again without passion: “Fat, lazy snowflakes drift from the darkening sky as twilight deepens.” While often the additions don’t add anything other than the originating impulse, the repetition is by its relentlessness redeemed, as sometimes the repetition, like some Stewart Lee routine, breaksthrough to new, some secret centrality you’ve been circling the entire time: “The white web, the white spider, the white moth, all glowing softly in the dim of the barn, here when all these things should be dead or sleeping through the winter cold. They are as out of place as you are, the design of your life having brought you here despite your lack of fitness for the job, for any job, really. It seems in its unnatural presence a design of darkness clothed in white, appalling, inevitable.” Logic of the gravity of the given gives you the drawing perspective. In there, the core compels.

Briskness keeps the impasto from muddying, so perhaps blurry better describes the pained picture redoubling the forest in so many trees through which you terrorglimpse “a white figure flickering in the woods, keeping pace with you”. That this haunting bespeaks a strange hope testifies to the electricity that keeps sparking from the unsaid, a stronger current to wish be carried to the surface the salience of all these shocks.

They ought to enpipe a dizzyknotted sewerslide system in all apartments so you can slip out into the nothing as no one, which is all you still ask for. Infuriating this indignity lying liminally between your cavernous desolation and the anonymous crowd gauntlet of petty observability haunted by specters you semiknow. Awkwardly yes hahaing through how are yous mumbled for the sake of not having to explain any feeling, even the fact you feel. Creaking open the door late at late at night, having not been outside for long enough the shell has been swallowed, so nakedly desperately not to externalize, endure the humiliation of existing within the same space as those with whom you could never share it, communal redolence of lives merely adjacent: “Tables are scattered around the cavernous, curiously sterile space. / You don’t do much cooking yourself these days, but clearly other residents do. Every day you smell strong coffee, freshly baked bread and cookies, cheap instant noodles, mouthwatering blends of spices, and the eggs someone always feels the need to hard-boil into oblivion.” None of it yours, gray ghostness of an inaccessible present, presences as listlessly implicit in “Posters on the walls” surfacerefusing “the only real source of color in the room.” Drained of the persistence to withered, and of so increasingly embarrassed. Avoided everyone in the delusion you don’t have to appear. “You’re not sure exactly when, but you stopped looking in the mirror after a while. You avoid its gaze again today.” A dwelling, they called it, and you couldn’t help but laugh; on the bus home you cried a bit but in the moment it seemed godshakingly funny. Maybe one day it will be, you mutter to the dark corners. Surrendered the present but not yet a future, freedom of dreams deep into late afternoon: “Gray light hurts thirst for it burn for it / Too much in the posters all worlds at once like mirrors”.

Because that yearning still is youthfully convinced of a tomorrow, we brave the humiliations, engage with those nearest, enterprising the infinite distance between. Neighbors, not names, we beseech urgently to breakthrough to something, someone. Mostly they talk at you, usually at the vagueness of you, courier of their whims for some other satiation. Persisting you sweatingly manifesting the miracle: “It’s been a while since you’ve seen him so peaceful. No tear stains on his cheeks, no sign of a haunting in his eyes. You pull up a chair and watch the movie with him, share a couple of drinks. His laughter, when it comes, is surprising yet inevitable, a hot spring bubbling up from unseen depths. / When you get up to leave, his smiling face is as open as a child’s. “It’s been really nice meeting you. We should do this again.” / Of course, you think but don’t say, returning to the hall.” But tomorrow is not the next day but another day. Subjected to cycles stronger than your will to break them, encounters calcify, intimations never make their intimacy. Worlds presented at you as screens: “You know the notebook he’s talking about. He’s shown you before. He never seems to pay attention to the dates in the upper right-hand corners of the pages. / You can’t help him here. You leave him to his thoughts.” Every new domain opened to you is hollow because you are, that’s who you are. You wouldn’t be at home in fulfilment. The liminal is within you. “You know now that all worlds still open to you are here inside these walls … You could give yourself what you’re pretty sure you deserve, but you’d never stop resenting every grateful smile or beautiful strain of music that would still reach you, reminding you of what you could have allowed yourself.”

Suitable to the foggy lugubriations, sentences cataract: “The tile mosaic on the floor makes your head spin. The pattern is phosphenic, obscene.” Filmic, the mosaic of fragments forms superloaded representations that shadowlengthen the progressions to montage: “Sulfur and sex and azalea and antiseptic”, each quality suggestive of depths the direction doesn’t chase. A fragile illusion, though, not only because sometimes the superfluity tinks hollow, as in vague gestures to candles scented of “musk and ozone and something you can’t place”, but also because whenever the ambiguity persists past its aloofness, the allusion extrudes its unplace, as in this slight unsettlement that sloughs its sensuous uncertainty with a logical doorslam:“A pleasant breeze stirs the room and makes a bouquet on the table tremble. The window is closed. Maybe there’s a fan somewhere you don’t see.” Maybe, yes, but one doesn’t need fiction for their explicable shivers.

Reliance on fleetness to prevent the facades from graying out to the empty spaces implied serves the story its well enough, but it does make the nightmare shift somewhat unearned. “eyeseyeseyeseyes” it shrieks, and I’m like, sure. There are teases of a deeper tension which allure: “You fall on your knees, a supplicant, before the dispenser. Mouth open, tongue lolling, you paw at the lever. / How many times have you chosen to unknow like this, to turn away before facing the full truth? How many times have you seen it in its enormity?” But eager to know more, we must inquire it of the link to the credits. Vastness, its capacity to erase, offwhites the blankness bared.

For all its heavy metal silliness whereby “blasphemous pinnacles scrape against an eternally black and stormy sky” and its nods to weird scifi icons like Harlan Ellison, Like a Sky Full of Locusts is ultimately an even some more drunching of Veederlore, blusters of Balderstonia and mechanical rebakes of the Little Match Girl series overriding any pip of difference that might holler out of “what if Doomguy was a cowboy”.

Which isn’t to say that Veeder’s once-again-with-feeling approach to tropes doesn’t elicit some memorable mashup winks, like this Eastwood squint at the occult: “It was real angular and complicated, in all the wrong ways. I didn’t like the look of it, and I figured it was bad news for the kitchen in particular and Fort Hugh in general.” A japeous grinthrough enthuses the tone consistent enough to secure against any yes-and nausea, from the colonel’s amusing manifesto to gamey damage counters to action hero puns like when you kill a specter and “it gave up the ghost, so to speak.” Leaning into this silliness, Like a Sky Full of Locusts can overload its lightheartedness to deliver a few genuine sufficient-in-themselves jokes, such as “The Army didn’t tell us what to do with it, so we used it for doing whatever the Army didn’t tell us to do.”

This humor helps give purpose to a game which otherwise lacks it. The arcade shooter gameplay stales parodic when it consists merely of >shooting several times, spiced up occasionally with obviously inert drama: “It took one hundred eight damage, which I guess convinced it to take me seriously, because it started galloping across the hall on all fours, aiming to trample me—or else to rip me up like it’d ripped up all those tables. I got out of the way in the nick of time, and the thing stalked back to where it’d been pacing the floor earlier.” And to the extent that descriptiveness could give the affair animatronic themeride thrills, a delightfully Halloween restaging of Old West cardboard cutouts, the game instead lumbers on almost listless: pressing into the chapel, awaiting no doubt some sacrilegious archdemon inverting a rich array of traditions, there’s instead, uh, a giant lobster? You just like shoot a giant lobster. In fact, as often as not the game shrugs away the need to offer you enemies: “A monster like a giant bat was perched on the cannons. No, it wasn’t a bat, exactly. I don’t have the words.” Unfortunate for a text game, alas.

The resulting effect implies perhaps mass production out of a busy workshop, a game that exists to exist just in time for the holiday season. Even the strings of narrative poetry that thread the chief artistic grasps at mood are largely workmanlike. So we’re left voracious for the promise, fulfilled anon no doubt given our indefatigable author, of being “treated to a selection of nightmarish visions deemed too dangerous for public consumption.”

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!