There’s a smattering of indie games this week to threaten the wallet, from a scene thriving, imaginative, and incredibly crowded. Let’s hope the gems get the attention they deserve. But most of the biggest wallet threats this time of year come with the winter sales that tempt us into games that will forever live in our backlogs. I’m personally tempted by Divinity: Original Sin 2, which Larian Studios shadow-dropped today for current-gen consoles. It’s a free upgrade if you already own the respective last-gen versions of the game. 

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I’d like to preface this by saying that my skating expertise is sorely lacking. I don’t really know my Ollie from my Nose Grab and I’ve barely played a skating game since Tony Hawk on the original Playstation. That being said, Skate Story is just too tantalizingly weird to be left solely to the skate park kids.

In Skate Story, you’re a demon made of glass and pain that has to eat the moon in order to catch a break from the devil. Cool, cool. I can dig it. We can all relate, am I right? That being said, does Skate Story pull off the trick of being more than trippy visuals and a cool soundtrack? Or does it fall flat on its face?

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Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying didn’t teach me how to become the Dark Lord. But it did teach me other things, such as how fantasy worlds are uniquely demanding, how comedy is hard to do, how not to write a female character, how action scenes are usually a waste of word count, how some writers need vigorous editors, and how some people play too many videogames. Although many of the lessons I’d already learned elsewhere, so I guess it would be more accurate to say How to Become the Dark Lord reminded me rather than taught me. 

Since I’m reviewing this at the behest of someone who enjoyed it and said he hoped I’d enjoy it, I feel bad confessing that no such thing happened. To elaborate feels pointless and even a little cruel. But I’ve been charged with a task — a quest, even! — and I intend to fulfill it. So I suppose maybe this book did teach me a little dark lordliness, in its own way. 

Let the pointless cruelty commence!

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Several ports caught my eye this week. An Owlcat RPG coming to the Switch 2 set in a universe almost incomprehensible to me. An amazing Flight Simulator that’s hopefully fixed now that it’s coming to PS5. A game about digging a hole that’s coming to Xbox and Game Pass. The critically acclaimed Thank Goodness You’re Here, whose humor is very British apparently, finally making its way to Xbox. A tower defense / exploration / mining hybrid coming to Xbox and Game Pass this week. Some Christmas themed horror games ported to Xbox that might or might not be terrible. Current gen upgrades of the Yakuza 0, 1 and 2.

But enough about the ports. How about those shiny new games? The delayed Terminator 2D: No Fate should finally make its way to literal shelves this week, since it was delayed to coincide with the physical release. Skate Story looks really trippy and weird and could be very cool. Unbeatable, a two-button rhythm game, finally makes its way to us after being a success on Kickstarter about five years ago. And hopefully Drywall Eating Simulator can bring some good comedy to us in a bite-sized adventure (their joke, not mine).

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Anemone establishes itself vividly, confidentally, and almost entirely non-verbally. A man prays and then leaves his family on an urgent mission. Another man waits alone in a remote cabin, clutching a nearby axe when he hears a noise at the door. The stakes seem high, the tension almost unbearable, the characters grimly determined. Something desperate is afoot. A suicide mission, a sleeper cell, a secret plot? Rain and violence are in the air in equal measure. Anemone is a movie about an approaching storm.

But when the clouds finally burst, part of the revelation is that this boldly directed movie is built on a facile script. The collapse is so disappointing that it’s hard to believe the writer is also the director. Ronan Day-Lewis shows a keen understanding of cinametic language, so why doesn’t he understand that his story is so pedestrian? How can someone so comfortable with sweeping grand imagery and bold symbolism resort to such threadbare melodrama? As Anemone gets down to the business of revealing its characters’ motivations and resolving their dramatic conflicts, it’s sense of ingenuity and daring falls away. What’s left is the stuff of workaday TV. The Day-Lewis heir has no clothes. 

What a terrible waste of Daniel Day-Lewis, our director and screenwriter’s father, returning to acting after nearly ten years away. To his credit, he throws himself into the maudlin monologues and pointless fisticuffs. He gamely rolls around in the narrative and the literal mud, bring the same ferocity he showed in There Will Be Blood, treating the material as seriously as if this were a Lincoln biopic, committing himself as madly as if he were wearing a tophat in a Martin Scorsese movie. And Sean Bean keeps pace with him faithfully, both men wearing their years proudly, looking every inch the grizzled veterans they are. Samantha Morton eats from a bag of crisps as well as either of them. There are also a couple of younger actors.

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It should be no surprise that Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl, which she co-wrote with Sean Baker, has the same energetic ebullience and aching empathy as Baker’s movies: Tangerine, Florida Project, Red Rocket, Anora. It’s also grounded in the same social realism, which again, is no surprise; Baker and Tsou have been collaborating for over 20 years. But whereas Baker’s movies explore Americana, Left-Handed Girl is the story of a plucky family moving to Taipei, the cramped bustling capital of Taiwan to escape…something. What seems at first like an Asian Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore turns out to be so much more.

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I wouldn’t normally play a game like Dispatch. I’ve had very little experience with the Telltale games (well, “games”) that set the stage, mostly because I have very little patience for games that don’t actually have much game. But then I fell in love with a lighthouse. After my reaction to Double Fine’s Keeper, whose lighthouse lumbers amiably between walking simulator and adventure game, I’ve nurtured a newfound curiosity to try adventure games. Just how much have my changing predilections changed? After a brief thrill, Dispatch offers a sobering answer.

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Originally announced at E3 2017, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, after changing developers, is finally coming to the Switch and Switch 2 this week. Will it be worth the wait? Will Retro Studios’ gamble of adding a chatty sidekick pay off? I’m keeping a keen eye out this week to see how this game turned out.

And if you think that’s a long time between announcement and release, wait until you hear about Routine. Originally announced back at Gamescom in 2012, it comes out this week on PC and Xbox. This one actually holds more appeal for me. Exploring a lunar base’s decline and interacting with the environment sounds a lot like the Metroid Prime games in theory, but this one seems to have more System Shock vibes than Metroid Prime vibes.

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I don’t see this week’s new releases as much of a wallet threat. If I had to pick one to play myself, it would likely be Project Motor Racing, though I continue to be perplexed that from the almost infinite possibilities of how to make a driving game, so many games seem to want to crowd into this very narrow niche of making games based on realistic race cars going around well known tracks.

On the other hand, I appreciate the break. It’s Thanksgiving week for those of us who celebrate it. I’m grateful and thankful that this community is here and we can talk about games, movies, TV shows, books, music, politics and the oxford comma.

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So this is a thing.

Terrifier: The ARTcade Game is out tomorrow on Steam, and even on the Nintendo Switch. It’s a sidescrolling beat-’em-up — I think that’s what you call them — where you play Art the Clown, the sadistic Chaplin-esque killer from Damien Leone’s Grand Guignol horror movies. Leone’s trilogy starts out disgustingly effective, but gets increasingly lore-obssessed and commercially successful as it progresses. For various reasons, I don’t recommend them to anyone but the serious horror aficianado. As for this ARTcade Game, the developer, Relovo, has a history of itch.io releases that implies they might actually know what they’re doing! Could this unseat indie darling Absolum and perhaps upstage the December 1st release of Marvel: Cosmic Invasion? Will we one day get an Art the Clown kart racer? And will Art the Clown plushies be all the rage this Christmas?

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Although I often think about going back to play Brian Reynold’s Alpha Centauri, lo, these many years later, I’m not sure I could. There are probably too many issues that would bother me. I probably wouldn’t be able to enjoy it the way I did way back in 1999. My rose-colored lenses might cloud over and fog up. Fortunately, I don’t need to replay Alpha Centauri because Proxy Studios has made Zephon. 

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A new Kirby Air Ride game arrives this week, along with a couple of exciting remasters, a few potentially cool indies, and some VR games.

Let’s start with the remasters.

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It’s not a formula that’s in vogue these days: a protagonist doing horrible things, forcing the viewer into the uncomfortable paradox of rooting for his comeuppance, but simultaneously dreading it because, after all, this is the main character. It reminds me of 70s cinema, and specifically something like French Connection, where Popeye Doyle does terrible things and is brought low by his choices. Or Sorcerer, where the men’s quiet desperation, a result of their misdeeds, turns explosive. Surely it’s no coincidence that the brothers in Black Rabbit are named Friedkin.

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Quite a busy week in the realm of AAA releases and ports. There’s a new Lumines release. A Sacred 2 Remaster. A Fallout 4 anniversary release. A new Anno game! (I’m still yet to actually play one of those myself, but I do still get excited about each one myself for some reason). Sega is porting Yakuza 1 and 2’s remasters to Switch 2. Square Enix is porting Monster Hunter Stories 1 and 2 to Xbox. A new Call of Duty is coming out! And one of those big action-adventure Chinese games we’ve been seeing trailers for is finally coming out: Where Winds Meet.

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It’s 2005 and it’s been 20 years since Christoper Reeve’s final Superman movie, the astonishingly cheap made-for-TV-quality Quest for Peace. Reeves’ fall from a horse and eventual death from complications has cast a sad shadow over Superman in the wider world beyond comics. The Man of Steel lived his final years as a ghastly near-cadaver, having to blow into a tube to trundle onstage and show us his resolve. He was an inspiration to people with disabilities and his gradual recovery was a miracle of modern medicine, but it seems he inadvertently humanized Superman in the public consciousness. It turns out the Man of Steel was only ever a man of flesh, no more steel than any of us.

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