The Necromancer's Tale

"This world's all wrong

So let's go where we belong

Pack up the stereo, meet at the burial ground

Contract malaria, meet at the burial ground"

 

The Decemberists - Burial Ground

_________________________________________ 

 

"Something in me recoiled at his expression of joy. How could a man be so happy while both my sleep and waking hours were tormented by whispers from the grave?"

 

It was a dark and stormy night.

No, really.

Hi-diddly-ho, neighbourinos. Don't mind me, just doing a bit of... uhh... gardening... at the witching hour of night, in a graveyard, guarded by a boiling cauldron of mind-altering brew. It's alright. I'm a professional.
 

Which is a weird way to start this, since despite overall enjoying the game I'll repeatedly be accusing its creator of amateurishness. The barrier of entry for garage projects in game design rose steeply to complete unfeasibility in the 2000s' 3D graphic arms race era, but has been gradually dropping again over the past decade as a "good enough" suite of generic engines and assets have become more widely accessible.* If credits are to be believed, The Necromancer's Tale is, more so than even Wildermyth, a mom-and-pop project authored/programmed largely or entirely by one writer and staffed in part by a suspicious repetition of that author's last name.

 

This time though, the strain really shows in some blatant project creep, straining to accommodate far more RPG stats, more NPC merchants, more items including cosmetics, than was healthy for its overall capacity. I would have rather seen more finessing at a smaller scale. The program has locked up a few times, the conversation interface resetting up and down is just visually distracting, oddball auto/quicksaves tied to manual saves themselves overwriting save titles, the mouse pointer is far too easily confused by nearby objects and requires frequent zooming and camera turning to select, pathing... gets you to where you clicked eventually but takes some weirdly unoptimized zig-zags, the repetitiveness of carrying and animating skeletons gets very grindy after a couple of chapters, the entire item system is littered with redundant or useless pickups. And while it's not really at the same level of flaws, it drives my inner librarian nuts that the town map is not aligned to North! Not all art assets are well applied to the setting, like a rather modern-looking indoor flush toilet in 1730. I suppose it's a gray area, as the nobility could've had early models... in London, not an Adriatic Ruritania.

No chamber-pots for our musketeers!

And while dialogue trees are laudably well fertilized, a one-man show simply lacked the means to address all possible interactions, yielding some comically oblivious NPCs.

Then she took an arrow in the knee

For all that, RPG fans (myself included) would gladly have sung the praises of The Necromancer's Tale for its handling of several long-standing lacks in cRPG design: avoiding a strict "chosen one" plot, making the player pay attention to his actions, and most importantly playing the dark side and smoothing out the all too facile power fantasy by a self-conscious stinginess toward spell slots and minions. In fact, the entire first chapter is an extended choose-your-own-adventure character creation device:

And if you're wondering, yes, I did end up answering precisely the right questions to yet again make myself an elf wizard. 

Hey, I gotta be me.

Even afterward, the second chapter is played in adventure game dialogue mode, the third is exploration of the town, you try your first tentative fight by chapter four and only really get into tactical combat by chapter six of sixteen. Overall I preferred Tides of Numenera's version of individual stat pools and investment in consumables (even if it was too easy to cover all bases) but stat investment strategy's still handled quite well here, never locking you out of progression yet definitely making you wary of wasting your four flex points needed to surpass a particularly obstructive skill check once a chapter. It all adds up to highly satisfying dramatic escalation paired with an equally well-considered build-up of your own occult power, from vague inklings to tentative toying and cooking experiments to fumbling first efforts to earning your place as a true force of un-nature. Nothing comes easy for our van Elstrik, but as a result each advance is far more meaningful.

 

Unfortunately, the worldbuilding's very hit-or-miss. The author did some reading, I'll grant (thematically apt literary references pepper your environs) but lacked a coherent feel for preindustrial mannerisms or speech or daily life. Incongruities crop up in every expository paragraph. There was no "pulp" fiction in 1730, books being still quite rare and scant literacy providing no market. Children would've been farm labor or at best shop apprentices. What grates most of all is the constant and absurd repetition of "okay" a quite modern Americanism which only spread to the rest of the world with 20th-century mass-media and cannot be waved away by the universal translation convention. DIY voicing lands all over the map, sometimes spot-on (the more casual anglophone characters) other times groaningly terrible (socialites or any "ethnic" accents like Slavs or Italians) to where it immediately breaks immersion.** Which brings us to the piles upon piles of gratuitous snowflakery, because there. are. a. lot. of those quaint ethnic extras serving absolutely no purpose but to stamp some "inclusivity" form in the writer's brain. It was odd from the start mixing Venice with an imaginary Ruritania, but then you pile on with Irish, German, Austrian, English, Senegalese, Chinese, Turkish, plus various nondescript middle-Easterners or East-Europeans, and the setting loses all coherence, grinding the narrative to a halt again and again and again in performative multiculturalism. With every new pointless character waxing poetic on the virtues of other cultures or voicing anachronistic pacifism and populism, I couldn't help wondering why they didn't simply set their game in such an exotic locale or go for a straight-up fantasy world.

 

The setting would have been served far better by a more coherent portrayal of peasant life and Enlightenment-era craft guilds, of noble privilege and the intrusive and abusive power of the Church, agrarian dependence on the seasons and the whims of nature. Blighting crops and killing livestock are conspicuously absent manifestations of the dark arts here. Instead much of the game is devoted to tediously and redundantly lining up all the standard "woke" saints and devils, be it kow-towing to Islam or Orientalism or homosexuality (seriously, in 1700s Europe?!? gay men were treated as only slightly less unnatural than necromancy!) or a half-black half-brutha noble of spirit, or of course, as always, the most pervasive historical/biological revisionism of all, the feminist variety.

 

Man bad; woman good. Repeat the mantra.

For just a partial taste:

- bad enough to pretend no segregation of the sexes existed, but female sailors? 'nuff said

- said female sailor openly bragging about her promiscuity and conquests? would've gotten run out of town as a harlot, possibly by the local whores for muscling in on their turf (and that would've made a better story)

- female gang leader who apparently needs no male muscle 

- a perfect, victimized mother and evil father

- industrious and matriarchal society of progress

- witch gets automatically redeemed to a peaceful, friendly herbalist by the end because all her negative traits were the fault of men 

- a woman broke a rib <breaking up a fight> on the docks not <fighting> and "Her intent did not seem rude, but rather, efficient."and she's conveniently juxtaposed to a male doctor whose male brother is caught up in shady business and her male superior won't let her investigate the case of the evil males

- when throwing dice, the woman "shows men how it's done"

- ghost story about a husband betraying his wife to her untimely demise; for a bonus, stick in some line about her being too strong-willed for him

- your childhood friends now dating are a sitcom-standard savvy attractive female and bumbling dopey fat male

- a farmer's wife bitching about her arranged marriage as cause for armed rebellion and you get punished with a relations penalty if you reply with a line about personal merit

- a wife that's all business because her husband would run said business into the ground

- a brilliant scientific/mathematical female wasting away in an unhappy marriage to a sleazy husband 

 

Man bad; woman good. Repeat the mantra. As in Disco Elysium, creativity and coherence die instantly on contact with feminism. Sad, because once again there is some evident core talent here. It's just wasted chasing performative, moral majority-approved pablum instead of building on the strengths of the plot. Beyond that, other elements were shoehorned in as industry or pulp fiction standards, like the plethora of sex/romance subplots. Son of a cocksucker, in a story about necromancy of all things? Why!? Dragging these out well into the second half when we should be focusing more on the supernatural also make the last few chapters drag a bit.

 

From a more practical angle, quest/chapter progression tends toward the idiosyncratic or outright nonsensical at times. The Necromancer's Tale sells itself as among other things an "exploration" game, but as I've tried to point out numerous times, beach-combing is not exploration. Repeatedly combing the same beach, even less so. NPCs flicker in and out of existence or utility from chapter to chapter and (per adventure game norm) you constantly have to run around individually checking each one to see if new dialogue options have become available because random schmuck #16 sitting around town just happens to have an "in" you need to exploit to complete your quest (oh, she's his maid? good thing nobody even hinted at her existence the previous eight chapters and fifty times I wandered this location asking everyone what they do for a living!) Actions become available or unavailable depending on chapter (e.g. lockpicking, or curing the beaten Venetian) doors and town gates open at arbitrary times, and there are entirely, entirely too many random "gotcha" moments where you lose faction rep for asking standard adventurer questions, e.g. asking the apothecary about your father's death or merely asking a guard who the fuck he is. Gotcha moments do not serve as a meaningful challenge, but only the author's need to feel superior to his audience.

 

Yet still, given that, given all of that, admitting all of that fumbling, bumbling stumbling so worthy of grumbling, amazingly The Necromancer's Tale still breaks slightly better than even and deserves a playthrough.

It is hard to sufficiently emphasize just how effectively it nails its core feature of a gradual slide toward darkness and imperceptibly waxing mystic puissance. The crafting system is just involved enough to make you work for your reagents. Not only do the florid descriptions of supernatural sensations lend a far more visceral appeal to what would usually be summarized as "cast magic missile" but these mesh with mechanics like your mana pool initially depending heavily on a randomized "winds of magic" bonus which becomes less and less relevant the more your own power puts you beyond the whims of fate. New discoveries chain into each other, like a mystery investigation netting you a tank mook that can pass a couple of strength checks letting you among other things acquire a wraith summon which makes it much easier to farm zombies from bandits trying to ambush you. The spirit world begins to impinge upon your perception, putting you in danger of revealing your powers by accident. Your humanity meter starts dropping... but then, is that a bad thing? Your progress toward the unnatural feels perfectly natural, beginning with the best of intentions, forced into desperate measures by economic circumstance, continuing with verifiable righteousness, overindulging under the moral umbrella of others' worse crimes, growing beyond the pettiness of human morality.
 

I've said that necromancy itself needs a more even-tempered treatment than the primitive, thoughtless disgust with which it's treated. I've praised movies like Maggie which return to the core, low-key terrors of zombification. This is the best RPG treatment of such themes I've seen in a very long time. My favorite moment in the whole game was stashing my swelling army in the farthest corner of the map, in a place of ancient magic, just leaving them to stand, silent and expectant, in the cold, secret, dark reaches of oblivion, their lurid shadows dacing on rock walls as I shuffled among them in my burial shroud grave-lit by my demonic wand, adding the latest two or three zombies to the throng, or picking my tank mook out to sneak him back into town for repairs.

 

For all its faults, there is a lot to be said for a game that can make so much of so simple and unscripted a moment.

 

_________________________________

 

 

* We shall not speak of RPGMaker or other chibified, pixelated retro junk.

** One of the voices sounds like the fishwife from the marketplace on Earth in Warframe?

 

P.S.: To me, there seemed only one logical way to end the story, but if achievement percentages are any indicator, most players did not go the route of eternal darkness, clinging to the more conventional morality of a redemption story instead. The author shows a lot of potential, but it will be wasted if that mass approval lodestone keeps skewing plots toward pablum.

The Prince-and-Page Matched Set

"I need attention from someone I don't care about to keep caring about those who don't care about me!" 

Sluggy Freelance 1998/03/28 

_____________________________________

"Real niggas do what they wanna do
Bitch niggas do what they can"

 

2Pac - Staring through My Rear-View

_____________________________________ 

"Mother, did it have to be so tall?"

Pink Floyd - Mother

_____________________________________ 

 

 

Disney's old 1940 Fantasia is mostly remembered these days for Mickey's brief stint as Sorcerer's Apprentice, but a longer and more elaborate of its segments set an ancient Greco-Roman mythscape to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Unicorns, pegasi and fauns caper through technicolor meadows, leading up to a ball of centaurs and centaurides, headed by Bacchus and crashed by Zeus. It's a marginally more sexualized affair than you'd expect from Disney, animation not being yet relegated to pure child's play in the interwar period. While deprived of visible nipples or genitalia, the horseyboys and horseygals were very clearly naked, and this being a bacchanal, there's zero doubt we're leading up to a whole mess o' horsey-humpin'! First though, the alluring quadrupedal, hexapodal debutantes must be attended in their primping.

A male for every occasion

Many were apparently scandalized in subsequent decades by a centaur with stereotypical exaggerated old-timey negroid features acting as servant brushing a centauride's tail and carrying her train. Okay. But most of the work is done by flights of Cupids/cherubs applying make-up, providing hats and garlands and choreographing dramatic stage entrances for the gals to look as regal as possible... to their intended mates, the far more butch centaurs. And that part has apparently not scandalized anyone in the past 86yrs.

 

So here's my question: did anyone ask the cherubic attendants if they'd like to fuck?

 

Considering that one little cupid peeks between the curtains he's just helped close on a centaur couple gettin' intimate, I'd call the answer quite obvious. But it's funny how even if we've become sensitized to the unfairness of dark-skinned servility, no-one has ever bothered questioning the females' entitlement to be served by flights of castrated, easily-dismissed males for the express purpose of then throwing themselves at higher-ranking males. Were such distinctions presented in any other context, if the centaurides were splitting the populace into worthies and serviles based on racial or national markers, well... let's say Disney's had some editing to do on such topics over its history. But fabricating a eunuch caste for the use of females is as wholesome, as natural, as righteous a proposition as we can imagine.

 

It's a regular feature among the entertainment of modern, polite society to decry and demonize the various pick-up artists conning desperate men with promises of no longer being in the loser category and getting laid, or the various hyper-masculine social media superstars surrounded by bimbo brigades as emblematic of success. But their critics conspicuously refuse to acknowledge that such snake-oil salesmen only promise transition between the categories of loser and fucker. The categories themselves predate our media figures, enforced as always since before the dawn of the species by females as part of their own reproductive instinct, along with the requisite conflict.

 

If you'd like a taste of just how unquestioningly this degradation pervades our species' social mores, try yet another of Bill Maher's semi-regular segments bashing men in service to the Democratic Party's habitual, overt misandry. This time he took a swing at young men still living with their mothers, giving up on starting families. I won't comb the segment phrase by phrase for the endless double standards placing all responsibility on men and all entitlement in the hands of women, but do note, first off, living with their mothers is something women themselves have always taken for granted, including going back if they leave their husbands. I could cite example from traditional village life, and "I'm going back to mother" was a pretty standard female threat by the Flintstones era of television. Only for men has the social safety net always been rescinded at puberty.

 

More importantly, reverse the polarity on the scenarios Maher describes. Imagine hordes of women living with their single fathers into adulthood and middle age, to the exclusion of other inter-gender relationships except for the father's circle of friends, waiting table at their gatherings and keeping house for the father. Even the more repressive Muslim societies where such behavior is directed toward the husband would raise an eyebrow at a father keeping his daughter an old maid for such purposes, especially an unmarried father. In the West, we would reflexively assume an abusive relationship.

 

But the sons in such a situation are themselves blamed as though harming others instead of being victims of a lifetime of psychological abuse from mothers who have had decades to torture them into dependency, who have retained direct and unitary control from infancy, uninterrupted and unscrutinized, propped up by a legal system which glorifies single motherhood as morally superior based on the unchallenged dogma of feminist lobbying. Somehow when discussing older women and younger men it's not the adult in the relationship that's at fault, ever. And even when we deign to glance at this dynamic, the men are not viewed as deprived of living their own lives, but condemned as insufficiently servile toward women at large. The question of the man's own independence is not even raised; only his presumed duty to provide for and protect a wife presumed slightly more entitled to him as a servant than a mother might be.

 

Moreover, make no mistake, this is among other things a form of sexual abuse suited to female instinct. Women who divorce their husbands and wrest solitary control over their sons then construct a sexless marriage to this dependent, obedient animal over whose psyche she has secured unchallenged gaslighting privileges. A mock-husband who will never dare step out of line. A castrated, darling little cherub perpetually flitting about her, helping her primp and choreograph her self-aggrandizement. A male to be denied to make herself feel superior and in illusory control over her own unanalyzed instincts.

 

For peak perversity, consider how much of this state of affairs follows economically from the generations-long practices of denying men university scholarships or social aid in favor of women, and throwing them out of education and work on women's accusations of <SOMETHING SEXUAL> automatically and without recourse. Only to then have media channels like HBO lambaste you as a loser for it by every invective and scatological sputtering they can imagine.

 

All this is normal, Disney-safe, wholesome. Does not every woman deserve both a prince to fuck and a neutered cherub to carry her train?

 

Marrying? It's a wonder men will have anything at all to do with you sadistic cunts.

Symbioting yer brainimals

"I will never understand this society
First they try to murder me, then they lie to me
Product of a dyin' breed, all my homies tryin' weed
Now the little babies crazed, raised off Hennessy"

 

2Pac - Staring Through My Rear View 

_____________________________________________

 

 

It occurs to me that mentioning Lynn Margulis in a fantasy TBS faction blurb might've seemed like a non-sequitur to most people. (I get very socially insightful like that sometimes after committing a Rain Man moment.) Or that most did not mark her name during bio class. 

 

During the nineties and until the mid-2000s she was everyone's praised and laureated science baby. Partly this was due to the usual feminist propaganda promoting any woman whatsoever as combating the evil of male existence. But her legitimate claim to fame promoting* the endosymbiotic theory for the origin of eukaryotic cells (read: your cells) has remained uncontested, and makes a fascinating bit of evolutionary history explaining a major step in how all multicellular life even became possible. And the topic found much more widespread applications after that. I did think it a bit ludicrous when doing a semester project around 2010 on freshwater ciliates that it was harder to find papers on algal symbionts from the preceding years which did not name-drop Margulis as last or next-to-last author for celebrity appeal. (Which probably means she contributed a grand total of one phone conversation; maybe fast-tracked a grant.) For a topic closer to the current news cycle, the massive coral die-offs, the worst of which was just last year, you might remember also involve endosymbionts and their loss.

 

But then, as such things do, the fame went to her head and she continued pushing her pet theory to absurd lengths, insisting that symbiosis and not natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, which is where my fantasy shadow-wolves' banter took a swipe. It's just too easy to demonstrate that symbiosis serves as a competitive advantage within the framework of natural selection (two teaming against various third parties) and mechanisms like parasitic reduction in complexity of genome and function take the wind out of the more hippie-friendly kumbaya view of cooperation above all. But I digress. Margulis went to fringier fringes by promoting the Gaia Hypothesis (that the whole damn planet is a gigantic superorganism) which you might remember made its way not only into SciFi (e.g. the Pandora books) but into video games in the nineties with titles like Sim Earth and Alpha Centauri. Though I absolutely love it as a classic Big Think, even its core claim that the Earth maintains homeostasis had been readily demonstrated by the early 2000s to have far more arguments against it than for.

 

But none of that quite killed Margulis' star power, until she threw in with the 9/11 Truth movement claiming the World Trade Center was demolished by the U.S. government. After which her name was quietly dropped from polite conversation. 

Umm... Why?

How does her belief in a ludicrous (and quite importantly, unrelated) conspiracy theory undo her work on one of the most important evolutionary topics?

 

This happened near or even shortly before the start of what we now call cancel culture, and biology (like all sciences) has other examples whose names' mere mention is now met with awkward, embarrassed silence despite their previously acknowledged accomplishments. Robert Trivers proudly took money from Jeffrey Epstein because Epstein didn't waste his time to make him debase himself and beg and scrape for every dime like grant committees do. "In order to get paid, forced to make crack sales." Julian Huxley was a leading eugenicist and humanist at the same time. Hell, Konrad Lorenz was a freakin' Nazi! Not neo-, not sympathizing or leaning, but full-bore original flavor Nazi. Sometimes they have shameful youths, sometimes they go a bit loopy in their old age, sometimes they just don't give a shit about wider society's morality except to play along just enough to follow their actual interests. There's a decent chance by the way that your surgeon might be a sociopath who enjoys cutting people up and has merely found a socially acceptable (and highly lucrative) way to do so. Do you want your appendix crammed back in, knowing that?

 

I find Margulis' example particularly informative for just when she began to be unpersoned. Everyone had known she held fringe interests for decades, but didn't mind so long as they could be spun into convenient leftist academic personal politics. Her balls-to-the-wall promotion of symbiosis as the be-all biological force was melded with feminist propaganda of supposedly higher-minded female cooperation as opposed to masculine head-butting competitiveness i.e. natural selection. The Gaia Hypothesis, obviously enough, is total hippie catnip. So it was all a case of oh, hah-hah, you know that Lynnie, she can be a nutty ol' gal sometimes, but she's still one of ours, one of us chickens... until the World Trade Center thing. Whatever its actual demographics 9/11 Truthism was fundamentally viewed as the domain of crazy gun-toting conspiracy uncles, as right-wing and masculine. Thus, though they would not admit to prioritizing this objectively minor detail of her views, academics gradually stopped bringing her up in conversation, got to shortening her mention in texts as footnote to endosymbiosis itself, where they had previously gone great lengths to voice admiration or beg her for a byline name drop.

 

But it was great while it lasted, wasn't it, glorifying her for putting men in their place, wasn't it? Wasn't it?

 

Look, this is not an issue with one idol, or with idolatry in general, or with academia alone. If anything, conservatives are far, far guiltier of getting their panties in a bunch over some public figure voicing the slightest support of environmentalism or socialism or heavens forfend, atheism! And, just like social justice claptrap, it ends up coloring those institutions in which conservative viewpoints prevail. If you think it's hard finding right-wing scientists, try left-wing bankers! Not a lotta hippies preaching up in the stock market temples. Moneyed, religious, meat-and-potatoes kinder/kuche/kirche culture's been cancelling speakers all throughout history. Usually by far more violent means than Hollywood and universities employ.

"True that

Only one life to lead, a fast life of greed
Criminally addicted, infested since a seed" 

 

But in particular the image of the milquetoast, deferential nerd scientist has never held up any better than the "mad" scientist stereotype at its antipode. Reality is weirder than our mundane monkey intuition, and those minds considering the weirdness of the natural world, from amino acids to quasars, will end up holding some weird attitudes, some quaint, some harmful, some intriguing, others flat-out insane. "Outcasts, left far and few like southpaws" Deal with it. If you had ever held any hope for human progress, it would have had to entail the mental fortitude to live with uncomfortable details, to admire a person for something you agree with while at the same time admitting a point of disagreement, and not allowing either to erase the other. If I can live with her feminist crap, you can live with the false flag operation nonsense.

 

Those thoughts can coexist in your skull.

Call it memetic symbiosis.

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________

 

 

* Not inventing; it had been proposed since the early 20th century years of the modern synthesis of biological thought but was ignored until molecular biology demonstrated ribosomal disparities and other confirming evidence.

Genealogy of The Royal "They"

"My bum is on your lips

My bum is on your lips

And if I'm lucky you might just give it a little kiss

And that's the message that we deliver to little kids

And expect them not to know what a woman's clitoris is"

 

Eminem - The Real Slim Shady

_________________________________________________________

"Listen closely, LotA: You need to step off the third-person high-horse. [...] If you want to be treated like a person, then don't correct people when they treat you like they treat each other."

 

Schlock Mercenary 2008/11/21

_________________________________________________________  

 

 

Though largely lost in our wider media circus (what with the nonsensical warring and the surrender of all society to robber barons and the primitive superstitious backsliding and suchlike) a court case popped up on the news here in the states as redundant proof that men should avoid women as much as possible. (At least they caught this one before she moved on to killing her children as well; just a man dead, no harm done.) Granted, the age-old 'bitch bites man' headline of a wife poisoning her husband for the cash would have raised no eyebrows if not for the very modern twist of her then going on to publish a (ghostwritten) children's book about suffering through the grief of his death. Now that's the 21st century we know and love! (And you're still whining about the Brothers Grimm being too gruesome for modern audiences? Let mommy soothe you with the tale of murdering daddy if he's not useful enough to her, then playing the victim.)

 

It's all about the sympathy.

 

On a completely unrelated topic I've been revisiting the webcomic Questionable Content, which  instead of regaining some perspective seems to be doubling and trebling down on its woke idiocy with not one but two storylines in the past year pushing, of all things, personalized pronouns. In the latest morality play, two teens start throwing stuff and putting another in a choke hold - for what offense, you ask? 'Misgendering' one of them, it being a 'they' of the male persuasion. We then proceed with a soulful heart-to-heart on the moral imperative to support and coddle tha pwecious fee-fees of the retarded trash physically beating their peers for nonexistent insults. Then the boy they choked out is made to return to beg forgiveness and voice admiration of his assured betters, only to be mocked with an eye-rolling "ugh, boys!" chorus behind his back. Ta-dah. The (apparently happy) end.

 

How do you deal with an entire 'left' wing turned self-justifying petty tyrants and champions of schoolyard bullies? It's been fifteen or so years since the politics of those posturing as progressive ceased resembling anything like equality and dove headlong into a mad gambit to fabricate a new aristocracy pervading our entire society, with its own hagiography and honorifics, entitled to claim offense at a whim and mete out arbitrary punishments. There's a difference between calling yourself a 'they' freely, without retribution, and forcing everyone else to play along with your delusion. There's a difference between getting called a 'faggot' by others as an insult and demanding to be called one as a mark of respect. It's the same insanity we were supposed to be combating by no longer forcing children to pledge allegiance to some magic sky-daddy in the clouds. (Which, oddly enough, we never got around to rectifying before new pledges to new allegiances were tacked on.) A right to live your own life is not the same as a right to dictate others'.

 

Of course, in QC's case, it hopped that crazy-train thirteen or more years ago, when it paired up its old main protagonist with a transsexual. One of their relationship upgrades, for instance, consisted of them sharing a hotel room, and the self-appointed female crawling into the theretofore straight male's bed during the night. Though the tranny was the one breaking social norms, when the other tells the story to his own friends, he's the one reflexively put on trial as a possible sexual predator. Well, that's how you market to an entire generation raised on the likes of Nimona. This is Dick Cheney shooting another man in the face then making him publicly apologize for getting shot. This is Saddam Hussein charging his victims' families for the bullets used in executions. This is every nobleman over the centuries caning a servant then docking his wages for breaking his cane. And it's now the official stance of every right-thinking leftist.

 

Best of all, you need no special qualities to join the ranks of such a superior breed. No analytical skill, intellectual integrity or creativity, no virtues except adherence to a quasi-articulated creed. But it's worth remembering where all this snowflakery started, the reason it has consistently fallen back on ginned up sympathy for the cute, for the easily offended, for the mentally infirm, for men claiming to be women, for those claiming intrinsic protections beyond those available to their fellow apes. Where does, where has rested the stronghold of weaponized, unquestioned victimhood all throughout history? Based on which social divide do we inherit a mentality splitting us innately into those who must provide and protect and those entitled to benefit from those efforts? Did not the damsel wail for violence to be committed on her behalf in every children's tale? Scratch just a few slogans beneath the mob's pentimentod placards and you will find this modern insanity hearkens back to women's primordial entitlement to exploit men, and to dispose of them if profit dictates, all while playing the victim.

Le Mot Justified Alignment

"An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks--it just confuses them--to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people. And one seemingly small but almighty important point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that you can win over folks to your point of view much better in the evening, when they are tired out from work and not so likely to resist you, than at any other time of day."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here (note, that's his villain speaking)

_____________________________________________ 

 

Hmm, where shall we start tonight's peripatetic prose on conning? Maybe with the prosaic conman-in-chief? Various Democrat-aligned American comedians have been pulling material in spades from Trump's decline into senility, but as usual, chasing momentary profit masks the more salient, wider point. This is not a 2026 issue. He was a laughing stock even in the '90s. Old or young, Donnie is, was, has always been an incoherent babbling buffoon. Even while he retained "the gift of gab" said gab contained zero substance. At his utmost cogent, he might verbalize a platitude or truism. In any decade, any rational mind listening to a couple of sentences of his verbal diarrhea could spot in him an overeducated moron, a spoiled rich brat never called out on his mistakes, a transparently obfuscating blowhard with a third-grade vocabulary and a three-year-old's grasp of causality. No animal which communicates in that chimpanzee swagger will ever be anything more than a troglodyte. But for that to matter you'd need a public capable of distinguishing the loftiest prose from chimp grunts, and it's not as though Obama's vapid "hope and change" mantra held more meaning than "make rabblerousing great again."

 

On a completely unrelated topic, it was trendy from the late '90s to the mid 2010s to proclaim that women speak twice or three times more than men, with a knowing wink intimating this merely confirms the mental inferiority of men as dumb animals incapable of verbalizing* and presumably communicating in nothing but primitive grunts like Tim the Tool Man. Studies both back then and last year have tended to deflate that otherwise unproven assumption, with, yes, okay, women speaking consistently more, but not by much. Ten percent? Twenty at most? So now if you look up the issue you run across feminist complaints that the trope of women verbalizing more was nothing but patriarchal propaganda to put down women as chatty... even though it was the feminists and daytime talk shows of 20y.a. who popularized it as superior communication. Their revisionism is likely prompted by another realization from the intervening years which appears to have been expunged from search engines in the interest of women's dignity: that their excess speech was not, in fact, communicating anything. It comes from an increase in mundane chatter, the hi-how-are-you-hi-I-am-fine-how-are-you-also-fine-great-bye-bye droning background radiation of social life. Women just feel a need to "touch base" more. Give a guy <A TOPIC> and he'll talk your ear off too.** But for a couple of decades nobody thought to question whether the speech in question was meaningful or not. Meaning is extraneous.

 

So. This is a post about chatbots.

 

I'm seeing more and more exasperated nerds and nerdettes trying to point out that even if a bot can instantly write you a ten-page commentary on any topic, that in no way implies it's logically constructing a coherent analysis. Well, sure, thinks I, what else is new? LLMs are cut-and-paste machines, working at stunningly finer pixel-scale grain than any such effort in history, but by necessity still just outputting a probabilistic extension of a sequence. Ask a bot's opinion on a movie and it will output strings of "cinematography" and "scintillating" and "emotive" and anything else you're accustomed to hear out of a critic's mouth, precisely because you, the asker, are accustomed to hearing them. Ask it to make a movie and it will paste predicted figures onto a standardized backdrop and animate them in accordance with the maximum likelihood of such arrangements. At no point is actual creation involved. At no point does the output reflect reality any more faithfully than the topic's match to existing content. The more a culture interacts via such automated output, the more it will, by necessity, both contract toward the lowest-common-denominator and lose its grounding.

 

But if you take issue with this, be intellectually honest enough to admit the problem is not the supply. It's the demand. The "reality" TV-watching public is too stupid to detect the gradual degradation of communication and cultural capital.

Not uneducated.

Not constrained. 

Not victims of circumstance.

Stupid.

Humanity appears to have achieved Orwell's versificator, a useful tool for placating the proles, the subhuman cattle comprising the overwhelming bulk of the species. Gabbing. Limitless, prompt and bountiful gabbing. Is that a bad thing? Yes, but not for any of the humanitarian reasons you'd like to boast as moral high ground. The people don't want your help. They want the platitudes. They'll never know the difference. They will likely live happier lives for it. So why is the versificator bad? And it is. Disastrous.

 

But admit to yourself where exactly your anger should be directed.

 

 

_______________________________________________________

 

 

 

* Seriously though, 1800 pages, do I look like I have trouble verbalizing my thoughts?

** I'm pretty sure that if you look closer at men's speech, you'll find the prosocial platitudes replaced with slogans, chants and catchphrases. Sorry, bros, but "wazzaaaaaap" is still very much not a word. All of this is, by-the-by, not getting into the issue of gossip, of the invasive personal/interpersonal nature of women's chatter, which I'm guessing is where the difference and the mis-perception of talking "more" actually lies.

+100 XP per fish knocked off bicycle

"They're gonna set you up
So they can take you down
They're gonna suck you dry
They've left the blood to be found
They're gonna rip you apart
You're gonna burn at the stake
Cause when it's time to collect
It's only heroes who pay"

 

Ministry - Hero

__________________________________________

"Men are more sentimental than women. It blurs their thinking."

from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

__________________________________________ 

 

 

My recent jaunt through Black Legend produced a mixed bag of somewhat creative quest voiceovers alongside a now extremely tired, overused old plot twist and stock characters like the manic 'killumall' bombmaker NPC. So, yes, per obligatory tropes you also meet Stella, the dashing young heroine off to avenge her mother's death because her father's useless.

 

Naturally, like every other 'strong woman' example you meet in every game, she explicitly tells you she "doesn't need your help" right before you of course have no choice in completing the quest but helping her anyway, you filthy presumably male chauvinist pig, how dare you not lay down your life for those declaring you worthless? At least this time the burgeoning abusive relationship is not designated as a love interest.

 

Whenever one of these almighty action girls tells me she doesn't need my help (since every single fictional female can vanquish twenty men-at-arms at once with both tits tied behind her back) and acts insulted at my very presence, I should have the option to reply:

 

"Great then, fuck off ya bipolar tsundere bitch, why am I even talking to you?"

 

Then let me watch her Leeroy in and get her idiot head chomped off by a dragon like she deserves. That should be worth more XP than running slavishly after her to help her, and yield an achievement reading:

"Turns out the bicycle didn't need the fish, either."

What grabs you by the pussy?

"I don't need you anymore

I can't use you anymore"

 

Garbage - Deadwood

_____________________________________________

"I love the enemy, my love is the enemy

They say they don't want fame but they get famous when we fuck"

 

Marilyn Manson - Slutgarden

________________________________________________

 

"I went to Mother and asked her, “What do they do in the boygroups?”
“Perform natural selection,” she said, not in my language but in hers, in a strained tone. I didn’t always understand Hainish any more and had no idea what she meant, but the tone of her voice upset me; and to my horror I saw she had begun to cry silently."

 

Ursula K. LeGuin - Solitude

_____________________________________________

"Another 'sister'? This is a jail, not a harem, Captain Butler." 

Gone with the Wind

_____________________________________________ 

 

 

Though Disco Elysium dutifully toed the "man bad, woman good" party line, it did insert a couple of easily ignored sotto voce counterpoints, like Measurehead's entourage.

Measurehead himself (the lummox on the extreme right*) is hired muscle for the mob, a pseudointellectual, devoted and all-consumed racist justifying his views (per the moniker) to a large extent by phrenology. It feels entirely natural for him to be supplied with an estrogen brigade puffing up his ego non-stop.

 

An article caught my attention a couple months ago, questioning the social impact of Russia's returning troops from its invasion of Ukraine, especially given its recruitment of prison inmates, illustrated by the case of a wife-murderer set loose by the authorities only to kill his new girlfriend after his glorious return from the front. But here's the thing: he had a wife. He had a girlfriend. Sadistic hired muscle has no trouble attracting mates. To me, such cases routinely recall that Andrea Dworkin, whose name may not be dropped much these days but whose bigoted demagoguery during the '80s and '90s became the mainstream, anti-sexual "all men are criminals" feminism of the past couple of decades (and became encoded into law via her co-conspirator MacKinnon) backed up her murderous screeching by the street cred of having been a battered wife herself in her youth. Except she wasn't some twelve-year-old child bride sold by her parents to a man she'd never met. Dworkin was an adult in her early twenties when she sought out and shacked up with a Dutch rebel as per female ape instinct to latch onto an overtly combative rising star who could challenge the system on her behalf and raise her through the social ranks by proxy. So the groupie act didn't work out for her. But that breed of violent, domineering male was her choice of mate and countless groupies breed ever more such males per their own choice, with every passing generation.

 

Of the many sound bites he's provided "grab 'em by the pussy" gets repeated by Trump's detractors more than most for the unquestioning shock value it elicits as "rapey" but it only takes two lines of context to realize the conversation was something slightly different.

 

Trump: "You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
Bush: "Whatever you want."
Trump: "Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything."

 

Yes, when you're a star they let you do anything. And much as I hate him, in that lowest-common-denominator assessment of human nature Trump was absolutely right. Was it supposed to be news to anyone that women throw themselves at high-ranking men? At dominant men? At men who fire others? At men who kill, abuse and enslave? At Measureheads? Moreover, why are we still treating as a shocking revelation the truism that dominance contests among men are enforced by women for their own sexual gratification?

 

I've gone over this before, but it's damn near impossible to think of any "romance" content aimed at women that does not hinge on displays of wealth and power and power-games, from softcore porn video series to romance novels to the more ridiculous Hammer Horror themed "romantasy" variety to stories written by and for heterosexual women about male characters dominating and raping each other. But even those who find themselves scandalized by such fads tend to treat them as... well, fads of the internet age, ignoring the underlying issue that only the explicitness of the sex is new. (edit: even the goofy romcom schlub who seems worthless next to the decoy love interest of higher rank must explicitly out-do his rival in some way by minute 80) It would be harder to find action/thrillers from past decades in which the hero is not required to gun down other men by the dozen before he is favored with a chaste little kiss of feminine approval ahead of the boss fight. The hallowed fields of folklore and myth and past centuries' literature were themselves replete with men butchering, dueling or buying and selling each other before the designated hero, at last victorious, is deemed worthy of the princess' attention. That they never porked was somewhat beside the point, as per female instinct watching men attack, abuse, demean and dismember each other IS sexual, being in fact the way animal females in general select their mates by relative fitness. At least now, after billions of reads on stories about Snape topping Harry or whatever, can you not admit that where there's that much smoke there might just be some underlying fire?

 

When women claim to want honest, decent men, they are flat-out lying. They want dictators. They want murderous thugs. They want avaricious robber barons, and the entire feminist movement has lied on their behalf for centuries by feigning innocence among the unfairer sex every time they're handed more and more political power yielding no decrease whatsoever in warmongering or social inequality, because the men overtly perpetrating such acts have themselves been women's obedient and carefully selected instruments from the dawn of time.

 

Yes, Ursula, those brutish men out there, tossed into the wild beyond the protective circle of women's community "perform natural selection" - for your damn benefit. So you don't have to, and so you can mate with a winner. And if you have any doubt about that, imagine how easily the reverse could be true: that if women decided today they prefer to fuck losers, by tomorrow men would be terrified of winning!

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________ 

 

 

* Ugh, and I just realized the anarchist graffiti artist and the proponent of neoliberal economics are situated at the extreme "left" of the same playable area, opposite Measurehead and the strikebreaker. Maybe that's accidental, but I wouldn't put it past them to have arranged the political wings on purpose.

Day 3 in Disco Elysium

"Du hasst mich"

 

On the third day he rose. Wearily. Achingly. On the third day he descended from on high to speak with the carpenters' guild, only to find two powers of his own distant principality enthroned among the hungry masses. Yet knowing them not and fearing they may have consumed more of the primordial fruit than himself, he spoke "no li me tangere" only and walked on, his sole apostle dutifully trailing. He stepped into the great emptiness of being, and the waters and air spoke to him of immensity:

"At least the world has the decency to rain today" *

Wolf: A pretty self-indulgence. Gonna save the world, are we?

Man: If it asks eloquently enough. But who am I to modulate these echoes?

W: Indeed. If it asks more eloquently than yourself, don't bother answering.

M: If these shadows have offended -

W: - admit that all was already mended, for offense is all you can offer in the shadow of your betters.

M: You paint with a broad brush. There's always room for a bit of detail work.

W: Detail? You? The grandiloquent do-nothing? Reflecting gods make poor acolytes of the machine. They've got you pegged, escapist, awakening into a new world from the stupor of self-destruction. Fine, then. Go on. Feed your head.

M: It's finally Wednesday. Across the pond.

W: High-speed chase!

M: Dead in the water. Anticlimactic.

W: The downward spiral is its own climax, apocalypse cop. Everything's blue in this world.

M: I want to stay here with the seagulls. Let me rust in peace.

W: But you'd disappoint Kim. He praised your police work.

M: Like you'd care.

W: Fine, he praised my unconventionality. Saw us coming a mile away. A little backhanded flattery will get you a good review.

M: Shacks. Corrugated asylum. I always knew the bidonville awaited me.

W: Don't get too cozy. They don't make 'em with matrix decks.

M: Why is it always fishermen though? Nobody grows barley in these alternate worlds. Nobody puts a scythe to its original use. Nobody picks grapes.

W: That can't be right. What sloshed your brain if not hops and half a yard's worth of vines? Besides, fishing and hunting offer a satisfying narrative opposition in microcosm. Man versus minnow. Hitting dirt with a stick just lacks that same tension.

M: Flagellating our dear mother?

W: You patriarchal brute. There, the wistful swords-dame'll teach ya some manners, boyo. Supplied as she is with untold suitors deserving of stabbing.

M: Oh, but she's a kind stabber she is, condescended to marry one of her victims.

W: Conveniently supplying her with a spouse she can look down on. All the way down to the bottom of the sea.

M: Lucky she wasn't actually relying on the fish he'd bring in for her sake -

W: - and lucky it was never her and her stabbing that drove him to drink, lucky it wasn't the fairness of love and war-wounds that lingered and needed dulling, lucky she never profited in his decline or she might've accidentally shared in a hint of guilt for their lifestyle and his demise. Luckier still as she could find no men in the world except a dumb pile of drunken muscle to marry, or we might've wondered at her own life choices.

M: All know such other men do not exist. All averred you cannot kill the bird that makes the windbags to blow. What a poor, lucky gal. So rich in pluck and pathos. 

W: Good thing he's not worth missing. We might've made the mistake of feeling sorry for the element in this equation who can no longer feel sorry.

M: The wrong element. And then we'd be an even sorrier drunk whose better half was right to leave him. The right half, the right element.

W: It's elementary, my dear what's-a-son. Never factored down by that other term, such evil multiplies only itself. Answers your question about the fishing, too. Harder for the requisite stupid brute of a husband to drown in barley -

M: - though some have tried -

W: - even female ones. At least in other worlds. Those worlds not amenable to detective skills. But hark! Another, and this one's old. How many stupid, useless, drunken, violent husbands can she boast, I wonder?

M: Oh, be nice. She called you a black hound, lathspell, which I are. Her babushka is her sword.

W: Lucky she had nothing to do with that man that killed another and had to be dragged away by the police. Twenty years ago. When she was younger and more attractive.

M: And she gives free lodging. Lucky she doesn't need those coins the men tried hiding from their women. From the rightful owners -

W: - of? ...

M: Don't go there. They'll take away your observation license. Just trust Isobel to tell you all the ne-er do wells.

W: Opt out of the free-meat-market mindset though. We bite other things than coins. They're never as real as those claiming them by right. Sniff out the next wrong factor by its ethanol fumes, threefold and... no, wait, beg the story, hear the saga. 'Tis you, the fourth drinksketeer! And now we know your crime. You dared complain about women. 

M: This is getting old.

W: As the man and the sea, and no mention of the women eating the fish brought in.

M: Kim and I both know the alphabet now. Tee is for totaling. See is for child. 'Kay is how the kids are. The twin little boys are useless and stupid and the littler girl is articulate and helps you on your quests.

W: That's how the world works. They'll tell you who you are, before you can talk back. No reason to start drinking. No reason to seek escapism. Just accept your designation, man of war, man of the low brow, man of the bottle. It's official. You can't fight city hall.

M: So let's go to church instead.

W: Where you meet an honest, polite, artistic girl whose boyfriend sold her property, left out in the cold by the three idiot boys wanting to start a drug lab.

M: Inside the church must be something better.

Worship the Great Mother

W: Worship the woman. And the wise woman who first worshiped the woman. So sayeth the bestial man worshiping women.

M: He must be right. He's the only male not stoned, drunk, stupid, murderous, thieving, corrupt, not a complete waste of oxygen.

W: Erasing his own personality, the better to worship at the feet of women. We've heard this song so many times before.

M: Never so eloquently.

W: Yet always so limited. Always so base. All about the political base. Do you have enough evidence, lieutenant?

M: The hanged man -

W: - was a rapist who got what he deserved from a bunch of undeserving brutes whose only good deed in life was championing a woman's honor. Why?

M: Because men are filthy pigs whose only worth lies in beating down other men in a woman's interest.

W: Good boy. Goooood boy. You're learning. How many lessons did it take? How many characters were *man* and *bad* and how many *woman* and *good*? Don't keep count. Awareness would be unseemly. Now what about yourself?

M: I must be a filthy pig who needs to crawl back to his mistress begging her forgiveness, no matter the circumstances, and serve her ever-after.

W: Good boy. You're not like those drunken fishermen, are you?

M: No, no, I'm a good boy.

W: You're not like those bad boys, are you?

M: No, the girl deserves the warm tent and I should work to provide it for her.

W: Gooood boyy, see, the lessons stick after a while. You're not like those men hiding money from women, are you?
M: No, all my money belongs to them.

W: See now, isn't that better, is that not ever the more eloquent?
M: Woof.

W: Poetry and imagination. Conceptualization and an increased pain threshold and the tiny detail of a sensual alien frisson over-riding your logic.

M: Why did they bother with the four winds, I wonder, why bother with a world and a history, with politics and economics, with hopes and dreams, when a simple rolling pin or frying pan upside the head would get their intended message across just as well.

W: Oh! We forgot to save the world.

M: Got a temple to rebuild. Be there any world outside the rusted swings, waves and shore cries, she can damn well save herself. 

Wolf: Are you ever going to look in that bathroom mirror?

Man: I can see you just fine. Anything else would be just what they make of me.

 

 

______________________________________________________

 

* In a depressing development, it seems one is no longer able to find the phrase "At least the world has the decency to rain today" through search engines. It's from the excellent first chapter of the never-to-be-completed webcomic Nowhere Girl from around Y2K. (Discussed here and here and here.)While we're at it, Acolytes of the Machine is a song by Mary Crowell and The Reflecting God is the Antichrist Superstar's finest work. I'll let you snipe other albatrosses yourself.

Slayers of Fear

"Stelllaaaaaaaa!"

- one of the most parodied moments in all theater, yet still more dignified than this

 

My recent disappointment with Metro 2033 as a Hollywood-envious cinematic adventure light on actual gameplay drew my mind to several years later when "walking simulator" became an unofficial, then semi-official genre unto itself. Layers of Fear was among the earliest titles I remember explicitly described (and not merely insulted) as one and thus thought it a fitting measure of the style's potential. As such, it offers few elements to even analyze. Scant puzzles rely too much on red herrings or an unforeshadowed memory test. Weirdly, the last act, instead of building toward a finale, mires you in the stupidest adventure game trope of pixel-hunting for checkers pieces. You can easily ask yourself:

A bit on the nose, don't you think?

After turning off the exagerrated head bob effect making my character seem drunk off his ass (perhaps not accidentally but still very annoyingly) abundant electricity but a lack of electronics places the action sometime during the mid-20th century. (On a personal note, the decor was sometimes eerily reminiscent of my godparents' apartment building.) I must admit I giggled a bit at the thought of GenZers boggling at sight of a rotary phone, but aside from that the timeframe lacks relevance. Literary merit: variable, but mostly absent. Suffice to say the script's written by art majors -

- who think the fedora era emoted missives like Facebook addicts, though they do put more effort into some of the more official correspondence. They fare far better on visuals, with many of the individual scenes and props meriting applause.

A little while later:

Scene by scene, if you were to cut the game into ten-second increments, they're even put to solid use. Interactivity may have its drawbacks, but it offers a major advantage over more passive media in making the user inherently complicit to the action. Your every click, after all, can open the door to the next scene, demolish a building, doom or save an NPC. On a small scale, Layers of Fear displays a thorough grasp of this principle. You have no guns to shoot, no spells to cast, cannot even jump. But reading a leaflet, taking a step, even just turning your camera, can warp and disfigure your environment.

Too bad it just doesn't hold up.

 

Such gimmicks were not new in 2016, but though they'd proven effective (e.g. The Secret World) here they sour through overuse and lack of contrast. I once pointed out that the goofiness of Bloodlines' Malkavian playthrough would grow monotonous had it been predictable and constant, if it did not mingle with the mundane for counterpoint. Layers of Fear proves me right.

 

For one, the imagery is too random to add up to anything. For another, it makes naive use of some pretty tired tropes. Paintings with bleeding eyes? Seen it. And yes, if there's an elevator in a horror show, of course it has to fall at some point. Jump scares and interface screw work well when the player is distracted by working on some other task; here, your only task is to keep walking in circles triggering the next jump scare, so there's no surprise, no tension, no stakes. Similarly, the environments and props melting into each other would feel disconcerting, if there was anything they were supposed to be in the first place, but when everything's surreal it does indeed induce what Robert Sheckley coined in Mindswap as Panzaism* - a blase acceptance of the new reality, seeing the fantastic as ordinary in reverse of Quixotism. By your first hour you begin anticipating the changes so reliably that it feels like clicking through a user license agreement, flipping pages as fast as you can to reach the "next" button instead of appreciating the content.**

First off, as you might guess, that pretty much kills the traditional boogeyman horror element. Briefly at the start, hints of some demonic, rodential force made it sound like an adaptation of Pickman's Model (couldn't've turned out worse than Netflix' maladaptation) but we soon focus entirely on the protagonist's personal life. So it might still have retained psychological horror, existential dread, guilt and penance and all that jazz, but once again Layers simply lays it on so damn thick as to veer into farce. There was a point, halfway through, when I dared hope it would do for delirium tremens what The Cat Lady did for for depression, but (and I will be spoiling a bit) it pins its hopes on a far more socially acceptable routine: bashing men.

 

From the start you know some terrible event happened, and the man has to be guilty so you probably caused it somehow. Of course you're a terrible husband, but it piles on so redundantly as to lose its effect. You're a drunk, you're a workaholic, you stood her up, you made false promises, you argued loudly with her, you bought the wrong housepet, you were late for your kid's birthday, you drew scary children's book illustrations, you no longer found her sexually attractive after her accident, you broke paintbrushes, you bought too many toy dolls, you insulted salesmen, you argued with the dog, you let the kid read the label on your liquor bottle, you forgot to shop for apples, etceteree, etceterah. Even the two brief moments showing the wife lashing out get framed exhaustively and explicitly as being driven to it by the evil, evil man. Honestly, whenever I walked into a bathroom I began expecting to be upbraided at leaving the toilet seat up, having exhausted most other reservoirs of marital vitriol. It quickly becomes obvious that the entire plot of a descent into madness was written around the pretextual need for the male to be wrong in as many ways as possible. Even the obsession with vermin goes nowhere, serving no purpose but to glob on more disgust by association.

 

I would be curious to test all the critics who gushed praise at Layers of Fear with a gender-swapped version of the same plot and see if they're as willing to overlook its odd feat of redundant incoherence, absent the misandrist conceit. Such repetitive and utterly one-sided characterization might have worked for half, maybe one hour at the outmost, but after four or five laser-focused non-stop hours? Boredom. Just... boredom.

 

Even if you like the notion of a walking simulator, you must admit there's not much point in one that only works for ten paces at a time.

 

 

_____________________________________________________

 

 

* Political commentary not intended... but acknowledged.

** Political commentary... well, yes, again

P.S.: There is one utterly brilliant moment, late in the game, when you walk past an open window and see your only glimpse of the outdoors, night-time, a small patch of greenery walled off between buildings, calm and sane... and the window slams shut in your face, excluding you from nature and sanity. A smidge more counterpoint like that would have done wonders.