Reviews by mifga

Haunting, brutal, unflinching political essay that uses fiction to produce a very dark and telling portrait of our times. There’s plenty of media taking on the political midlife crisis happening across the world in more than one culture, but this one is not only well-sustained by the format, it is uniquely suited to this format. Like a Guy Debord film swallowed by a visual novel, and then adapted into a narrative game.

I covered this as one of the projects from the Videotome creative community I want every one to check out -- for Part 2 of my Videotome article series for ChoiceBeat Zine Issue 16 (soon to be published) here: https://choicebeat.wordpress.com/issues-2/

A superbrief listicle poem dispatched from a toxic friendship hellscape. Alternates between lines of a poem and short associated scenes, coded visually in a manner than makes the constant context adjustment effortless and clearly conveyed.

A couple of cool cats in the countryside increasingly losing their cool: where are all the mice? Where even is ANYBODY? Where will they get their next meal? Is this Wittgenstein's Mistress but cats?

“i heard all the mice moved to the city.”
“yeah…it’s a long walk”

Are you familiar with the author Philip K Dick, and his Valis trilogy? How about the series of Japanese “magic girl” Valis video games? (Bonus points if you have heard of the PC-88, but that’s for overachievers only.) Learning that these two Valis projects exist (now you know!) suffices to get you going – the piece takes care of the rest, and has a fun mechanism for doing so. I consider it wonderful that this strange project even exists, and love the execution!

I covered this as one of the projects from the Videotome creative community I want every one to check out -- for Part 2 of my Videotome article series for ChoiceBeat Zine Issue 16 (soon to be published) here: https://choicebeat.wordpress.com/issues-2/

KA Tan created Dream No More for the DiscMaster Game Jam, drawing heavily on media sourced from the Internet Archive via the pre-Internet data DiscMaster search engine. This moody end-of-the-world narrative repurposes a series of beautifully captured museum archive photos to transport us to a world after a global bonfire of the vanities has consumed all art and media from our civilization’s past. Only the dream architects have access to a last treasure trove, but their processes to produce transmittable dreams to send out to the populace also gradually depletes these scarce remaining works. They hate this, but if they stop, humanity will lose its mind.

I covered this as one of the projects from the Videotome creative community I want every one to check out -- for Part 2 of my Videotome article series for ChoiceBeat Zine Issue 16 (soon to be published) here: https://choicebeat.wordpress.com/issues-2/