cyphomandra

I started writing up my FFXV gaming update while I was in the open world first half, which was enjoyable in parts and aggravating in others (worldbuilding, gameplay, plot, inexplicable advertising placement by Cup Noodles etc etc) and not entirely working for me and then I hit the end of chapter 9/start of chapter 10/Episode Ignis and now I’m totally on-board, omg. I can always rely on a Final Fantasy game to rip my heart out D: but this time I also feel really bad about how I’ve/Noctis has (unavoidably!) contributed to this whole mess. I finished chapter 10 feeling awful, played chapter 11 and things got WORSE but then it was getting super late and I had work, so I have to wait to see if it can achieve even greater heights of excellence/depths of suffering etc.

Anyway. FFXV starts off as four guys on a road trip combined with the obligatory FF war, destruction, crystal magic, melodramatic villains with questionable fashion senses etc, and it has my favourite type of FF setting, which is cars, phones, trains and contemporary life smushed up right against magic and swords. This allows for such neat bits of worldbuilding as the potions, antidotes, elixirs etc that the characters use being canonically energy drinks and other gas station snacks that Noct, the protagonist, has enchanted with his special regal magic, magic which also allows him and his friends to stash/retrieve weapons in the Armiger and execute various feats in battle. Plotwise, there’s a brief flash forward to what is obviously a climatic battle and then you’re playing as Noctis, the prince and heir to the kingdom of Lucis, sent out from the city with his friends in the official royal car (the Regalia) to meet Noctis’ politically promised bride, Lunafreya, in Altissia (FF Venice) as part of a deal with the attacking evil empire. And you’ve barely started exploring when the empire attacks, taking Insomnia and killing King Regis along with many other friends/relatives of the characters - there’s this moment where Ignis comes into the hotel room the following morning, holding the newspaper, which is super moving despite the tiny but aggravating fact that all these characters have phones and yet this is the first they’ve heard of it.

The next 6 chapters or so are open-world with occasional and not entirely coherent plot. Insomnia has fallen, the countryside is full of imperial troops, and yet the other towns and outposts we visit seem almost completely unconcerned by this. Intermittently the crown marshal, Cor, shows up to provide Noctis with back up or some useful information and then disappears again - to do what? We don’t go back into Insomnia at all, Noctis keeps flinging himself into danger despite now being technically the king (yes, he has to collect the royal arms, but really. There’s a bit where the guys are asked to clear out demons from a power plant and immediately shove Noctis into the only PPE available where I did start to wonder if they were trying to kill him), every night demons attack everything that’s not illuminated, and sidequests proliferate to an excessive extent (including a crossover quest with FFXIV that was fun and a crossover with something called Terra Wars that did not work for me at all). In addition not only does no-one wear seatbelts in the car but occasionally Noct hops up and sits on the back when the top is down, omg. Technically we are collecting the royal arms and making covenants with the Astrals (six elemental gods) while the empire is killing the Astrals but there is a definite lack of momentum.

(I suspect readers will be wondering about all the names. They are very Latin. The four main characters are Noctis Lucis Caelum (prince, likes sleeping, hates vegetables, obsessed with fishing), Ignis Scientiae (prince’s advisor, glasses and impeccable tailoring, uptight and prone to terrible puns, cooks for everyone), Gladiolus Amicitia (prince’s shield/bodyguard, big, tattooed, and confident, reads historical fiction in the car, nicknamed Gladdy by his younger sister Iris and Gladio by everyone else, which I find endearing), and Prompto Argentum (prince’s best friend, blond, freckled and scrawny, photographs everything, has possibly the most angsty backstory of the four that I only know because I have read relevant fan fiction). And I do love that the crown city is Insomnia.)

The game was in development hell for a long time and went through a lot to make it out - (quote from relevant article) - “At some point during 2012, Tetsuya Nomura saw the movie Les Miserables and toyed with the idea of turning Versus XIII [working title at that time] into a musical.”, and so key events take place in DLC, not all of which were ultimately released. I’m playing the ones we do have in chronological order, so when Gladio disappears for a bit and comes back with a new scar I could pick up Episode Gladiolus and find out what happened (also a lot fun to play, I always enjoy fighting Gilgamesh). There are videos and animes as well, which I haven’t yet watched, and it’s a shame it didn’t all make it to release.

The gameplay took me a while and again bits of it are great! Noct can warp, that is teleport, but only to a thrown weapon, and then he can phase through enemy attacks. Warp striking is fantastic and so much fun, but phasing just doesn’t quite work for me and Noct is usually at least 50% potions & elixirs by the time I get through boss battles (although I’ve now unlocked the ability to fight as Gladiolus and that is helping a lot). You build up tech points that you can use to get your allies to do things, produce the royal arms from your Armiger for massive attacks, or even get a summon - there are hidden rules as to which ones show up but I am pretty sure I usually get the one who shows up after you nearly kill most of the characters. It is very hard to die completely and when I did it in a dungeon it took me back to the entrance before we’d gone in and I had to do everything again, so that is probably just as well.

There is a lot of banter. Much of it is great, some of it does not age well with repetition (do I need a panicked Prompto going “There in a jiffy!” yet again? No) , and then because demons attack at night, we either need to camp (this involves Ignis cooking from whatever recipe he’s managed to devise from game events or collect the relevant ingredients for) or stay in a motel/hotel etc, the latter of which means you can multiply XP gains but miss out on the buffs from food, and in both you get these little clips of the guys hanging out, playing cards, gaming etc, and occasionally unlock cut-scenes. Ignis levels up his cooking skills by cooking, Gladio does exploration, Prompto takes photographs (you go through them everytime you sleep and decide which to keep), and Noct fishes in what started off as an aggravating mini game almost more annoying than the Stardew Valley fishing mini game until I worked out I’d actually picked up a bunch of better rods and reels, and now it is at least better but if Gladio tells me one more time to turn the rod towards the fish when I am ALREADY DOING THAT I am going to shove him into the relevant body of water. But. With all this banter and togetherness, it is impossible not to fall for the characters at least a little bit.

Anyway. Eventually, I made it to Altissia, and after the usual bit of side questing around the streets and dining in quaint canal-side cafes (along with wondering why the only access to the city appears to be through canals that are precisely one-ship wide), I picked up the main story specific quest to ask the local head of government (under the empire) for permission to speak to Leviathan, one of the Astrals, and then everything totally fell apart. One of the things I’ve loved about FF games as far back as FFIII is how they can get you to revisit a place that was a thriving community and show you it in ruins, and now Noct is running through the wreckage of Altissia, all those quaint little cafes now rubble and flames, on his way to meet Leviathan, which might seem like his last hope - but it all goes horribly, devastatingly wrong.

When Noct ends up back with the others, Ignis is grievously injured and blind, Gladio is furious at Noct’s failures, and Prompto is trying but it’s all so awful. There’s a mission Ignis insists on going on (you can, as Noct, tell him no, but he’ll still come, and frankly I didn’t have the heart) and it’s an abandoned mineshaft, so the ground is uneven, there’s water everywhere, and Ignis is slow and keeps falling over (Prompto always helps him up), plus the computer won’t always get him to follow you - and if Noct moves too far ahead, Gladio verbally attacks him (“don’t you think you’ve hurt Iggy enough already?” was a particularly painful comment). I thought things might pick up when we got back to the train but then there was an absolutely gut wrenching interaction between Noct and Prompto, that ends with Prompto leaving, not voluntarily, the party to an uncertain fate .

It wouldn’t all work nearly so well (or upset me nearly as much) if I hadn’t spent so much time with these characters already, and so the bagginess of the open world sections, where I’ve spent hours tracking down bounty hunts or harvesting carrots or taking photos, suddenly become a feature rather than a bug. I do still wish the first half had a bit more tension or at least a sense of creeping doom, but I’ve just realised on hearing Gladio and Ignis talking on the train that while I thought I was misremembering the time the sun rises/sets (important for avoiding demons), the days have in fact been getting shorter as the Astrals die, and now I kind of want to go back and see when that happens. BUT FIRST. I have to find out what happens next.

I haven’t updated for a while, mainly because I’ve been kind of flitting between things rather than settling into any one game. I finished Tears of the Kingdom and thought it had a pretty good ending, actually, with a fun final battle boss sequence. I picked up all the shrines and all the light roots, spending a considerable amount of time zooming around the depths on a hover bike made of two fans and a steering stick, got significantly better at fighting esp flurry rushes, actually defeated a bunch of lynels, etc etc but still have quite a few side quests to find/complete (the game will not show you your percentage of completed side quests until you shift to new game +, which starts you over just before the final battle). I guess I could also try and upgrade all the armour (there are so many sets! And you have to defeat so many enemies to get all the stuff for them) or find all the bubul gems or discover all the koroks - this is a completionist’s dream/nightmare.

I have played a bit more of my attempt at Stardew perfection but I am strangely unmotivated when the only thing I need to do is get lots of money (I need 10 million gold for the clock). Maybe I should just sell everything I have? I keep getting the urge to start over again, which is unhelpful. And there will be another update, but there’s no time frame for it yet.

Eventually I picked up I was a Teenage Exocolonist again, a narrative RPG with deck-building and dating and a time-loop mechanic - I’ve probably mentioned it here before, but you’re one of a group who settle an alien planet, and the game takes you from age 10 to age 20, acquiring skills, making (or losing friends) and contributing to the colony’s survival or failure; when you die, you loop back to the beginning, but you retain your knowledge of events and can hopefully improve things next run. It took me a while but I finally managed a run in which I maxed out friendship with every character (so now they all appear on the title screen, which is nice), although I couldn’t quite manage to max all skills as well. It did make me significantly better at taking advantage of the buffs, which I really haven’t paid much attention to before - I was playing with help from a “Golden Path” guide that maxes everything, but I just wasn’t good enough to replicate it completely. I did manage to unlock quite a few new bits (Socks thriving! Vace finally going to therapy! Hooking up Nomi Nomi and Rex!) and I actually went for a different ending, in which there was more loss and struggle than what I suppose is the optimal ending, because that one felt almost unrealistically lacking in conflict. Still have a bunch of endings left, though, as well as numerous characters to romance (so far I have romanced Tang and Cal).

I then dithered again but am now working on three games:

A) Ocarina of Time (the original), which I am playing on my 3DS now that I’ve found it, because the controls are impossible on the Switch (they are better on the 3DS but I am still getting used to camera/target locking). I have not gotten very far at all and am only at the first boss battle, inside the Deku Tree) but it is good. It is also punishing in its refusal to have modern game QoL options like open save options and it will be interesting to see how the remake (which is out later this year!) will do it.

B) 1000 x Resist, which is basically an sf visual novel with a bit of gameplay and an engrossing & disturbing storyline. You play as Watcher, one of a group of clones who are distinguished only by their roles; only one clone can have each role at a time and the rest are waiting shells with a few personality traits. You live in a protected dome, safe - relatively - from a terrible disease that has wiped out much of humanity, as well as another enemy, and you have just enabled the termination of your friend/lover/fellow clone for treason. 
The story involves going back into the/your past, which starts with the protests in Hong Kong and then moves to a global pandemic, I am four chapters in and I am sure it’s going to break my heart.

C) FFXV. This is the third time I’ve had a go at this. Both previous attempts I haven’t gotten very far and it’s largely because a) the narrative hasn’t hooked me yet and b) I’ve not gotten the hang of the combat and kept dying, but I am generally getting better at console combat, I do want to do better at this, and hopefully now it’s been long enough since playing the FFVII remakes that I won’t get annoyed at the game for not really letting me switch between players (you can get the others to help but it is with set techniques and not the swapping/synergy that I loved with FFVII). I have also found a guide to what order to watch/play all the associated media with that will hopefully help with the narrative hookiness.

For the Summer of Horror exchange I picked up a pinch hit for Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Mr Quin short story collection, in which Mr Satterthwaite, a small elderly man who has spent his life observing others, gets to solve crimes with aid/inspiration from the mysterious and probably inhuman titular character. Satterthwaite also shows up in the Poirot Three Act Tragedy and there’s a few more short stories that aren’t in the main collection.

A Patchwork Masquerade (3332 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Mysterious Mr Quin - Agatha Christie
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Harley Quin (Mysterious Mr Quin) & Mr Satterthwaite (Agatha Christie)
Characters: Harley Quin (Mysterious Mr Quin), Mr Satterthwaite (Agatha Christie)
Additional Tags: Horror, House Party, Cosmic Horror, Costume Parties & Masquerades
Summary:

Mr Satterthwaite answers an invitation.

How to fake it in society, KJ Charles
We breed lions: confronting Canada’s troubled hockey culture, Rick Westhead
The husbands, Holly Gramazio
Evil under the sun, Agatha Christie (re-read)
The ark
The Sittaford mystery, Agatha Christie
Till we have faces, CS Lewis


How to Fake it In Society, KJ Charles. Titus is a humble shopkeeper who makes paints for artists, who ends up marrying a wealthy woman on her deathbed in order to ensure that her relative (who may well have had something to do with there being a deathbed the first place) is disinherited; struggling with his sudden elevation, he is thrilled when Nicolas-Marc, Comte de Valois de la Motte, a fashionable French escaped aristocrat with a Mysterious Past offers to help him make his way in society. But Nico is a con man barely a step ahead of some very nasty gangsters, and while he hoped to salvage himself with Titus’ money, his new feelings for Titus make it impossible to admit the truth… This is fine. It’s competently put together and I like the paint details but something about this pairing didn’t quite fire for me, the ending tipped a little too far into farce complete with one too many pantomime villains, and basically I think KJ likes con artists and scammers a lot more than I do.

We breed lions: confronting Canada’s troubled hockey culture, Rick Westhead. Solid, painful documentation of the casualties of Canada’s approach to (men’s) hockey, from juniors to professionals, emphasising the gate-keepers who could (but don’t) change their approach. Pretty awful subject material, with all the sexual assault, misogyny, bullying, homophobia and hazing that you’d expect; it’s about culture, and about those who enforce it, but also those who chose to look away or not look deeper, and how much damage reverberates through the system.

The husbands, Holly Gramazio. Lauren, single, is met one night at the door of her flat by her (previously unknown) husband Michael. When he pops up to the attic to change a lightbulb, another husband comes back down; and, every time Lauren gets one up into the attic, she gets another one back, while with each new husband her own life and those of her close friends also change. It’s a great set-up and it rattles along (what if one of the husbands is awful? What if they move away from the flat?) for the first half before running off the rails a bit in the second. Lauren meets a husband to whom the same thing is happening (also, unlike Lauren, he’s about 50:50 whether he ends up with husbands or wives), which was great, but then things go wrong with a husband Lauren loses whom she wanted to keep, and in response Lauren does some pretty terrible things and it’s hard to know how terrible the author thinks they are. I see the author is a game designer, but the book is pitched as “how to choose when there are so many options” dating app rom com rather than “if I treat other people as NPCs how can I do this ethically, especially if I can just reset everything”, which is what I would have liked her to explore more.


Evil under the sun, Agatha Christie
The Sittaford mystery, Agatha Christie

Evil is Poirot staying in a sunny seaside house in Devon when the alluring Arlena, who is having an affair with another woman’s husband, gets herself strangled, and Sittaford is a standalone murder in a snowstorm that took place at the exact time as a group of related people were having a seance and the table spelled out MURDER and the name of the victim. I liked the ideas behind the solution of Evil while not finding them entirely convincing; Sittaford is solider in that respect, but neither are top-tier.

The ark, Haruo Yuki (trans. Jim Rion, who does the Uketsu books). A group of friends exploring the wilderness find a strange abandoned bunker; when they go down into it, an earthquake traps them. The only way out would require one of them to stay behind and face certain death. Helpfully, someone then commits murder; if they can work out who it was, they can force that person to stay behind, although this assumes a) they cooperate and b) whoever it is stops killing more people…

I did like the atmosphere in this, although it could have done with more pace and a lot less “we’re being murdered so let’s split up and go to places individually”. The characters aren’t that well-developed, but there is at least depth to some of them, and the final twist is satisfyingly dark.

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis One of those books I’ve always meant to read but never got around to before (I think I first read about it in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, which means it’s been at least 30 years of good intentions. The Cupid and Psyche myth, retold from Orual’s (Psyche’s older half-sister) point of view, with and gosh Orual is a fascinating protagonist, flawed and believable, and a product of her society even when she breaks from it (I note that Joy Davidman was at the very least the first reader on this and at most a co-author). The way Orual’s realisation of how her (selfish) love for others has hurt them reverberates.

Hickory Dickory Dock, Agatha Christie (1955)
Third Girl, Agatha Christie (1966)
The Rowan, Anne McCaffrey (re-read)
After hours at Dooryard Books, Cat Sebastian
The face in the frost, John Bellairs
Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke
The unworthy, Agustina Bazterrica
Trial run, Dick Francis
Nine Goblins, T Kingfisher
The tournament, Matthew Reilly
Game Changer, Rachel Reid (re-read)
How to manage your home without losing your mind, Dana K White

Hickory Dickory Dock & Third Girl, Agatha Christie. Tidying up some Agathas. Hickory and Third Girl are definitely in Christie’s “modern times are rather poor stuff and the young people all wear terrible clothes” era, and while it is interesting to read her take on student hostels (Hickory) and flat sharing (Third Girl), Hickory has a lot of unexamined racial stereotypes and actual racism, and Third Girl (which I think was new to me) had a rather unbelievable denouement and a plot line in which a doctor marries his patient, which I never like.

After hours at Dooryard Books, Cat Sebastian. Patrick sells books in 1968 New York, sleeps with most of the gay male population of Greenwich Village in his spare time, and on his philanthropic landlady’s prompting offers a job at the bookshop and shelter there to Nathaniel, alone and obviously traumatised but reluctant to share his past, just before Nathaniel’s sister-in-law, a famous folk singer, shows up with a week-old baby and a “your husband just died in Vietnam” telegram. I thought I was going to like this more than any other Sebastian I’ve tried so far, and I probably do, but it runs on vibes and having all its sympathetic characters be terribly politically sound, and about two-thirds of the way through it was like someone pulled out the bath plug and all the remaining tension drained out of it. But I liked it and I’d probably re-read it once, although I’d set my expectations lower.

The Rowan,Anne McCaffrey (re-read). Why am I re-reading this when I never liked this series much in the first place and if I were going to re-read any of hers it should be Dragonflight? Weakness for psychic powers and a touch of contrariness, plus I still want to find my original paperbacks rather than use the library ebook. This has good bits (the psychic powers, the training, the way in which one trainer passes on their biases and unnecessarily traps all those training under her) and a lot of terrible, terrible romance and gender opinions, and from what I dimly remember this only amplifies in subsequent books. Maybe I should try and find my McGill Feighan books if I really want to read psychics working as shipping agents to the stars.

Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke. Tradwife influencer Natalie takes us, the readers/audience through a day on her idyllic farm in a way that highlights her hypocrisy (the unacknowledged/unfilmed staff, the financial backing by her right-wing in-laws, the uselessness of her husband at any farm chores means they constantly have to replace the cows, who all have the same names, etc, etc). The next day she wakes up, prepared to do it all over again - but there’s no power, no staff, no technology at all beyond the 1800s, and even her children are similar but not the same. It’s a great set-up and Natalie herself is a great, awful, character and, obviously, the true villain is the patriarchy. However I was only about 2/3rds convinced by the twist and I did think the ending moves the focus away from society to one individual’s choices in a way that lets society off a bit.

The face in the frost, John Bellairs. I’ve been meaning to read this for ages and while I enjoyed it (Bellairs is so great at making even the most mundane thing superlatively creepy in only a few sentences), I might have missed the window for loving it. I like both Prospero and Roger Bacon, I love the magic and the world-building and the horror, but I found the denouement a bit too ex machina and the characters not as compelling as the leads in his children’s books.

The unworthy, Agustina Bazterrica (trans. Sarah Moses). The nameless narrator is a nun in a convent of horrors that is nevertheless a sanctuary against the catastrophes that have devastated the outside world. She writes her memoirs in blood and dirt, documenting the daily torments inflicted on the nuns in the name of enlightenment, retelling her past, and, possibly, finding hope and love. I thought this overdid the tortures and horrors, but possibly I am just a hard sell on evil religious cults in post-collapse dystopias. I would probably read another by the same author but it looks like the other one currently out is industrial cannibalism, which is not really my thing.

Trial run, Dick Francis. One I have not previously read! Possibly there are others out there but I don’t really want to check in case there aren’t. Ex-steeplechaser Randall Drew (unable to compete now that he needs glasses) reluctantly travels to Moscow on behalf of the royal family, who want to ensure that one of the equestrian team about to compete in the Moscow Olympics will not be tainted by a rumoured scandal. The good bits in this are all the bits about Moscow - I can see Dick and Mary on their tour there with a bunch of notebooks and their cameras - but unfortunately the spy/conspiracy plot does creak rather and there is a surprising lack of horses, although there are classic Francis bits with a fall into a freezing Moscow river and a limited and insufficient supply of antidote to a fatal poison (and also the most doomed proposal sequence ever, even for Francis).

Nine Goblins, T Kingfisher. Reprint of previously self-published fantasy, with a goblin troop catapulted by magic out of a war and into a distant forest with an elf who is basically James Herriot and a mysteriously abandoned village. This is more Pratchetty than others of hers (as well as Herriotish) and it’s a fun read with a bit more going on underneath. The villain didn’t quite work for me but the magical creature vet problems are good.

The tournament, Matthew Reilly. Young Elizabeth I travels to Constantinople with her tutor, Roger Ascham, to watch a chess tournament between the representatives of the great and powerful; they are then caught up in investigating a murder. This is not Reilly’s natural territory (no clockwork building-sized traps with nifty diagrams) and although he flings himself into the research with enthusiasm, it’s not really his natural element. As with The Detective, Reilly also has a particular issue that he wants the reader to understand is Evil, and while with The Detective it was racism, here it’s pedophilia; there is an evil ring of Catholic priests exploiting children, yoked uneasily to a plot line in which Elizabeth’s companion, Elsie, describes her consensual sexual escapades in the pursuit of the local prince in a luridly detailed fashion to Elizabeth, only to have the prince dump Elsie in a brothel chained to a bed once he sleeps with her, thus making the young Elizabeth swear off sex forever. The detective bits are all right.

Game Changer, Rachel Reid (re-read). I was on a roll. The TV episode is more compelling than the book but I still find both fundamentally bland; possibly I am just too traumatised by fannish coffee shop AUs to ever enjoy sassy smoothie maker/customer convinced smoothie is game-winning good luck charm.

How to manage your home without losing your mind, Dana K White. Home organisation book that does not assume you want to be an inherently tidy and organised person; surprisingly useful. Focuses on making small changes and having you explicitly acknowledge the positive impact of these, thus creating virtual circles, rather than shaming you for failing to match up to their expectations.

Single Player, Tara Tai
Address Unknown, Kathrine Kressman Taylor
Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School, Elinor M Brent-Dyer (re-read)
You Probably Think This Song is About You, Kate Camp
Seven Points, Amy James
Dragonsdawn, Anne McCaffrey (re-read)
A stocking full of spies, Robin Stevens

Single Player, Tara Tai. Cat Li gets her chance in the video gaming industry by being brought on to add romance storylines to an upcoming big budget release; but Andi Zhang, her new non-binary boss, hates romance, is traumatised by a previous doxxing, and is being set up to take the fall for the game failing by evil managers. Obviously they fall in love. I liked bits of this while never being entirely convinced by either the logistics of the game design or the characters.

Address Unknown, Kathrine Kressman Taylor. Short, quietly devastating series of letters between a Jewish art dealer living in San Francisco (who has relatives in Germany) and his former close friend and business partner, who has returned to Germany in the early 1930s. Published in 1938, unfortunately not difficult to read as currently relevant.

Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School, Elinor M Brent-Dyer. Re-read. Lavender is spoilt, highly strung, and the star of her aunt’s series of geographical readers in which they visit various countries; WWII having cramped their style somewhat, she ends up at the Chalet School and after the usual series of mishaps, becomes a much better person. I do think this could have been much more interesting if told from the pov of Lilamani, Lavender’s friend from Kashmir, who shows up here briefly (and only gets two years at the Chalet School) but it’s perfectly adequate and I do like Brent-Dyer’s Peace League and her insistence (via the staff) that the pupils are not sheltered from news of the war.

You Probably Think This Song is About You, Kate Camp. Kate and I are contemporaries (her mother was my English teacher) but although I recognise a lot of her childhood we had wildly different teen experiences (Camp’s involve a lot of alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and violent unstable boyfriends; mine were more along the lines of some alcohol, complicated friendships, and a ridiculous amount of reading), although we intersect again in adulthood. I am, however, unsure how much of this is accurate and how much fiction; the opening chapter has this bit where the child Kate is obsessed with a few lines from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamboat, singing them over and over despite her family’s gentle mockery. But the lines Camp quotes (“always hoped that I’d be an apostle...” etc) are clearly from Jesus Christ Superstar, credited as such in the opening front matter, and I can’t quite decide if this is a genuine mistake or a signal that the author is not entirely to be trusted. However the writing is great and I liked the chance to get a different view on the same world and time.

Seven Points, Amy James. Novella sequel to Crash Test in which Jacob gets a chance to fill in as an F1 driver - but will doing this compromise his relationship with Travis? Not particularly tense and comes across as too much wish-fulfilment, plus I don’t like the pairing teased in the closer.

Dragonsdawn, Anne McCaffrey (re-read). I know I have read this before but the only bit that felt familiar was the bit when HNO3 is being described and starts sounding like the agenothree of the future books, because it annoyed me then and it annoys me now :D (not that it happens! But the description feels forced). First settlement of Pern, the discovery of fire lizards, surviving Thread, developing dragons, an impressively nasty female villain and her evil plot; this book has to get through a heck of a lot and sometimes logic and characterisation get jettisoned in the process. I find Sallah intriguing as a flawed (seriously) character, additionally hampered by McCaffrey’s always slightly disturbing takes on gender roles and romance initiation; I suspect last time around I was much more interested in Sorka (first to impress fire lizards, first Weyrwoman etc) but now I find her lacking in comparison to Menolly. I do not think I’ll re-read the other early ones but Dragonflight is still tempting me.

A stocking full of spies, Robin Stevens. Book 3 in the Ministry of Unladylike Activity series, and we’re at Bletchley Park, where Hazel is working and where May, Nuala, and Eric, can be usefully employed as runners and solve a murder while they’re at it, not so incidentally also clearing Daisy’s brother Bertie in the process. I do like the setting in this a lot and there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on, but I will always miss Daisy and Hazel as narrators (not that I don’t like the others - just not as much, and somehow splitting the narrative between three feels much more crowded than having Hazel write it all down).

Books read, March

The Listerdale Mystery, Agatha Christie.
Witness for the prosecution, Agatha Christie.
Strange buildings, Uketsu
The village beyond the mist ,Sachiko Kashiwaba.
Cat companions Maruru and Hachi v5, Yuri Sonoda.
A parade of horribles, Matt Dinniman.
Common goal, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Tough guy, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Role model, Rachel Reid (re-read)
He who whispers, John Dickson Carr.
Temple, Matthew Reilly.B
lood over Bright Haven, ML Wang.
The village beyond the mist ,Sachiko Kashiwaba.


The Listerdale Mystery, Agatha Christie.
Witness for the prosecution, Agatha Christie.

These are both short story collections and they overlap, which I hadn’t realised, so probably a book & a half in total. I like the one with the policeman confronting a serial poisoner, the one with a woman pretending to be a serial poisoner to escape her murderous husband and, for a change, Wireless, in which a relative is deceived into thinking their dead husband will soon return (contains no poison). I do prefer her novels but she can do a suitably creepy atmosphere well.

Strange buildings, Uketsu

The narrator brings the stories (and floorplans) of eleven strange buildings to his architect friend; initially these all appear unrelated, but as the book goes on, increasingly disturbing connections become apparent. This was not quite as satisfyingly bonkers as Strange Pictures, but better as a story than Strange Houses, and there are some genuinely unnerving moments.

Cat companions Maruru and Hachi v5, Yuri Sonoda. Now living in the shelter with a bunch of other strays, Maruru and Hachi discover that some of the shelter cats are allowed into a cat cafe set-up with contact with the public. I will read this if one of my children brings home a volume but the characters aren’t enough for me to seek any more out.

A parade of horribles, Matt Dinniman. I’m on his Patreon so I get these early; I read chapter by chapter for the first 25 or so and then waited until the end. I liked it a lot. Not the most of all his books, but a lot. He was in town last Friday for an author talk/signing that I went to, which was entertaining. The increasing commercialisation of the series and various tie-ins is getting a bit much, though (I say, while I wonder whether I should sell my now highly collectable self-published editions of books 4 through 7).

Common goal, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Tough guy, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Role model, Rachel Reid (re-read)

I was wondering why I couldn’t remember anything about Common Goal, and rapidly discovered it’s because it’s age-gap (25 & 40), a trope I dislike, between two characters who manage to be both irritating and bland, with a structure that doesn’t work, and the only tension is “I’m so old/young, how could he possibly have feelings for meeeeee”, urgh. I re-read the other two as well (Tough Guy - burly hockey enforcer Ryan (anxiety, erectile dysfunction) falls for androgynous musician Fabian, Role Model - Troy is kicked out of his hockey team after publicly believing the (many) women accusing his former teammate and best friend of rape, ends up with Ilya’s up-and-coming Canadian hockey team and falls for Harris, the openly gay social media person who likes bringing puppies to work). They’re better but still not great and basically the main enjoyment I get out of them is having Ilya show up every so often and organise everyone else's lives (and his increasingly gay team) for them.

He who whispers, John Dickson Carr. A detective author I have never read before! American, but this starts very firmly in England, in the immediate aftermath of WWII (how immediate? Published in 1946) and the war is a heavy presence. It starts at the dinner of a murder club, but the guest is late and the members are missing, and when the few people there do hear the story, it’s an apparently impossible crime involving a mysterious woman - good? Evil? Human? - whom, it turns out, has just been offered a job by one of the people listening to the story. Good on atmosphere and on tension, there’s a murder method in here that is genuinely terrifying, and the final chase sequence is great. I am less convinced by the detective but will certainly give this author another go.

Temple, Matthew Reilly. Linguistics professor Race is collected by US military investigating the disappearance of a mysterious manuscript that, it turns out, will reveal the location of a chunk of thyrium 261, an extra-solar substance that can fuel a super weapon that will destroy the Earth itself. There’s a parallel narrative with a Spanish monk who is appalled and repelled by the Spanish atrocities against the Incans, who is involved in the original concealment of the object and who wrote up all his notes about it, and because we’re in South America the bad guys are Nazis. I liked a number of the set pieces and I liked the monk’s story, but Race himself is pretty thin as a character and I can see why Reilly, who originally said he’d make this a series, didn’t go back to it.

Blood over Bright Haven, ML Wang. Sciona is determined to be the first woman accepted as a High Mage in the industrial utopia of Tiran, with its apparently limitless power that shields it against the horrific Blight, a deadly magical attack that shreds people, animals, and plants alike. Thomil is a Kwen, from one of the tribes who lived outside the barrier, forced to shelter in Tiran when almost everyone else he knew was destroyed by Blight; disregarded and persecuted, like the rest of the Kwen, he is a cleaner who is assigned to Sciona as her assistant as a cruel joke on both of them. Readable dark academia/dark fantasy where the twist is pretty much apparent from the set-up (gosh, where could the mages be sourcing their power from?) and it is not subtle on misogyny or colonialism (both bad, in case you were wondering). It also has the sort of world building it is hard not to poke at (no one ever leaves the city. My note for this book says “where farms?”). I do really like Carra (Thomil’s niece/adopted daughter), who manages to knock Sciona out of some of her comfortable assumptions, and I thought the ending was interesting but didn’t entirely work.

The village beyond the mist ,Sachiko Kashiwaba. Lina heads to a mysterious village for her summer holiday on her father’s instructions; she stays at an odd boarding house run by an irritable landlady who sends Lina to work at the shops on Absurd Avenue (the village’s only street) to pay for her board. Episodic light fantasy - I liked the parrot, who hoards the bookshop’s copy of Robinson Crusoe - that is lacking in bite. Marketed as inspiring Spirited Away, although there seems to be some argument about that and it may be more that Miyazaki was considering adapting it before deciding on the movie himself; there are some similar character types.

I have not written up an escape room for ages despite having done rather a lot of them - I think I'm up to ~65, including online ones, although those no longer count for TERPECA so I might have to list them separately. Anyway. This is my most recent, fitted into a flying visit to Sydney (fly over first flight of the morning, attend all day conference, check into wrong hotel, check into right hotel (same brand and area but with one crucial word different!), do escape room, sleep, attend all day conference, fly back on last flight of the evening).

Unstoppable!

You are a special forces group, code-name ‘Skyfall’ from the Australian National Security Agency and there is a highly classified mission for you:

You have received intelligence that a terrorist has placed bombs containing a mutated virus on a train soon to depart from Sydney.

With limited clues, you must discover which train it is, and defuse the bombs as soon as possible. You must act quickly to prevent a tragedy…

You're shown onto a station platform and given a credit card, and the first puzzle is to work out which train to catch and buy the right tickets. Eventually, you board the waiting train (an actual carriage) and, if you're successful in defusing the bombs, there's an extension to the room wherein you have to stop the train. The theming and the set were fantastic, the puzzles were good, and the whole thing was a lot of fun. My only negative was that the walkie talkie was unreliable - sometimes when you held down the button it transmitted your voice, sometimes it did nothing, and sometimes it did nothing and then beeped frantically for quite some time, arrgh. Lots of physical puzzles (I particularly enjoyed plotting a train route with multiple restrictions and working out a toilet flush code) and nifty details. It's an 80 minute room and I got out with just under 2 minutes to go.

I did ask for a couple of hints (two puzzles where I got stuck and then a third I was working on and got a voiceover telling me a bit more than I expected) and I did have to get a staff member to come in for the last puzzle, which was impossible to do alone. I have solo'd about ten escape rooms now and this is only the second one where I've had to get someone in, although there are certainly ones that would have been easier with someone else (I am thinking of the one where I had to do a DDR game with controls that were just slightly too wide apart for me to do anything other than lunge repeatedly, also the one in which the lights ran off a generator that had to be hand-cranked intermittently to avoid plunging everything into darkness). This one was similar, in that it had four controls that determined the movement of a point on a screen, each moving it in one direction, but there was no way I could reach more than two of them.

This is the first room I've done at Mission, although my sister's done one of theirs with a live actor (which I really want to try), and I liked it a lot. I am still on a UK escape room group and they recently advertised an escape room on an actual train, which sounded fantastic; this might not have actually been moving but it definitely had some of the same vibes.

I finished Burning Shores! I loved the LA archipelago and the new machines and I like Seyka a lot. I didn’t find Londra, the antagonist in this, as effective or as intriguing as Tilda, and gosh I really miss Sylens (isis - thanks for the pointer to the in-game shrine to him! It’s lovely). I may at some point go back and do a hard mode play through of HFW, because I do like the gameplay, but I think I’ll give it a break for now.

I went looking for new puzzle games and ended up playing through Is This Seat Taken?, a cheerful indie game in which you have to put anthropomorphic shapes in the exact places that satisfy their increasingly finicky requests (no noise, in direct sunlight, standing on the left but not adjacent to anyone who hasn’t showered, able to steal popcorn from a neighbour etc) in a series of city-based challenges. I like the aesthetic and I like the gameplay. The (thin) storyline, in which Nate the rhombus wants to be a movie star, could have been better, and I would have also liked more female major characters, but it was fun.

Then I started The Room 3 - the latest in a horror puzzle game series with intricate mechanics and foreboding settings, and I’ve previously played the first two. But those were on my iPad and although I’m enjoying it, my phone screen really is too small, so I am now dithering between pressing on regardless or replaying a good 2/3rds of the game on an iPad. Hmm. So instead I started TR-49, where you are searching through a WWII-era machine containing pieces of various writings, in search of an ultimate secret for as yet unspecified reasons; it’s intriguing and I need more time with it.

However. On the PS5 I have returned to FFVII Rebirth, and finally completed chapter 12 on hard mode after being stuck there for months. Fighting Corneo’s assorted brawlers was fine, and Rude & Elena weren’t too bad once I got used to their attacks, but then you go straight into a solo Cloud battle with Rufus, who is ridiculously fast, and also I was only at half health from all the preceding battles and could not face going back and doing them all over. Lots of dodging, lots of very precise timing required to hit back at all, and lots of staring contemplatively at the Game Over screen, but eventually I did it. I went on to chapter 13 but very rapidly this hits a no turn back point, so before that I have been attempting to complete all of FFVII Rebirth’s many, many mini games, in order to get the Johnnie’s Treasure Trove achievement. This requires 88 (!) mini-achievements. I have now won all the chocobo races at the Gold Saucer, done all the Fort Condor and Gears & Gambits hard mode tower defence games, shot targets in Costa Del Sol, sent Yuffie & Aerith out to clean up cactuars in Corel, etc, etc, etc, and currently I have managed to claw my way to 74.

It is definitely a journey. I prefer the mini games where they’re thematic (sure, the Glide de Chocobo rank III award was a navigational nightmare that nearly gave me tendonitis but you’re riding a chocobo!) or the gameplay ties back to the main game - getting Aerith through Cactuar Crush hard mode required me to upskill dramatically in using her Tempest attack, something I’d previously overlooked. In contrast, I dislike tower defence even when the polygons are cute and shooting targets is not my thing at all, but I am a) stubborn and b) capable of watching a YouTube video and managing to follow at least some of it after multiple attempts.

I have got one more mini game to get through that’s not at the Gold Saucer - it’s the hard mode frog challenge in Junon, in which your party is transformed into frogs (a common occurrence in FF games) and you have to stay on a series of moving platforms for as long as possible - and then I will be back at the Saucer, which has more Queen's Blood challenges, another terrible shooting game I suck at, and the sole remaining side quest, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, which requires me to beat the Shinra Middle Manager and all my own previous high scores on six minigames. Yay. And even if I get through all of those, plus Chadley’s Legendary Challenges, I still have to manage to play piano on the PS5 controller well enough to get an A grade on Two Legs D:

(FFVII Remake is now out on the Switch 2, and Rebirth will be out June. Released with these are patch updates that enable God Mode, which would make it much easier to get any of the fighting trophies - I’m not sure if they will affect the mini games. I don’t have a problem with this mode being available but I would like, if possible, to get the platinum before that).

I dropped the difficulty on Alan Wake II (just in time to get attacked by some exceedingly fast-moving wolves that I would have totally failed to deal with otherwise) and played for a bit more, long enough to switch POV character to Alan himself. This meant a shift from small rural town to big grimy city, and also brings into play the writing mechanic, where once you discover a piece of information you can rewrite an earlier scene and open up new possibilities. It had some neat moments, but it still wasn’t enough to keep me interested. It doesn’t help that I don’t like having to use a gun as my sole weapon (I do now have a crossbow, but with only three bolts and only in Saga’s POV) and I’m not thrilled by playing as an FBI agent, which is Saga’s job. I have therefore abandoned it for now.

As per last update I had started playing LEGO Horizons with my son, and I’m sure it will come as no surprise that after playing through two levels of that (Cauldrons! Thunderjaws! Varl!) I loaded Horizon Forbidden West back on to the Playstation. Originally I’d intended to only play the DLC, Burning Shores, but my only save was right before the final mission arc (on the beach at Singularity, where you’re about to call everyone in) and it felt wrong to start there, plus I would be completely out of practice with all the weapons. So obviously the only logical answer was to replay all of HFW, which, ahem, I have now done. I am now on to Burning Shores, and zipping round the half-drowned and occasionally erupting remnants of Los Angeles.

I think as a game in and of itself HZD still has the edge, but there’s a lot I love about HFW as well, including some amazing new characters, expanded weapons (I have finally gotten the hang of the shredder gauntlet, woo hoo), and new mounts. And I do like what they do with the story - the Far Zeniths, and especially Tilda, are good antagonists. I do not like Machine Strike (I have played the tutorial and the two games required to get the trophy, and no more) and I never bother with the face paint, although I do like that they’ve stuck a Pride option in to annoy all those gamer gate types complaining about having to play as a queer woman.