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  • The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow

    The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Cloak and Dagger games and published in 2022 by Wadjet Eye Games. It’s a horror game, and one of the few video games that feels true to the genre’s literary origins.

    It’s set at an unspecified time in late Victorian England. The Player character is an upper-class woman with the delightfully Victorian name of Thomasina Bateman. She is what we today would call an archaeologist, but she calls herself an antiquarian and “barrow digger”. She arrives from London in the small and remote fictional village of Bewley, which lays isolated by the surrounding moors, to dig up a barrow upon the invitation of one of the residents.

    It’s a video game that understands that horror is best built up subtly and slowly. The villagers act in weird and unsettling ways. Yet their actions are not themselves clear evidence of some deep-rooted evil. It’s not obvious in the way some horror stories are. There is an ambiguity to the game’s attempts to scare you that are more scary than outright knowing, because it is fear of the unknown, “the oldest and strongest fear”.

    There are alternative explanations for almost anything that happens. When you first meet the local vicar he is ill, pukes and asks you to bloodlet him. It’s strange, it’s disturbing, but it can be explained as just him being ill and believing in bloodletting. Hob’s Barrow has been dubbed folk horror and compared to The Wicker Man and there is merit to the comparison, especially in how it builds a vague sense of unease about its village setting, without fully revealing its hand until the end.

    The game’s artstyle really works in tandem with the writing here. The actual gameplay of the game is depicted in retro 90s-style pixel-art. Yet there are brief cutscenes which are mainly close-ups of people’s faces. The cuts are jarring and the artstyle of these cutscenes feels disturbing in a way that is hard to put into words.

    The game’s supernatural elements are slowly introduced and with a similar ambiguity. It starts as visions during sleep that can be dismissed as nightmares. And then Thomasina starts to have strange experiences when she is awake, yet it’s isolated incidents that have a similarity to real-life stories of the supernatural. It slowly builds up to a greater supernatural weirdness. And even then there is ambiguity if it is real or not.

    Thomasina is the perfect main character for this kind of story. She is a convinced rationalist, sceptic and atheist, taught by her father to dismiss the supernatural as “hogwash”. And Thomasina is a headstrong and determined woman, more comfortable digging out barrows in trousers than in dresses. Her name of course is a feminine version of the male name Thomas, which in turn suggests “tomboy”, as well as being very Victorian British (the variation “Tamsin” has become more common over the years). So being a determined rationalist, she naturally continues ahead with trying to excavate Hob’s Barrow despite the dark portents and the villagers being against her. The signs are ambiguous and subtle, and she of course goes for the rational explanation of them. For the player, she is clearly in a horror story, and headed for a confrontation with dark forces, yet she dismisses any hint of the supernatural as “hogwash”. It builds a sense of dread and impending doom.

    The game has been called Lovecraftian, and indeed there is similarity to his stories (I quoted Creepy Howie earlier). Yet the game has a very English rural setting, with a village on the moors frequently drenched in rain and grey skies overhead. The game’s supernatural elements are rooted in English folklore, with stories of the fair folk and hobgoblins living in the hills. It reminds me more of Lovecraft’s English and Welsh inspirations such as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and M.R. James.

    The theme is one common to such horror stories. Thomasina is an examplar of Victorian belief in science, reason and progress, dismissive of the supernatural and superstition. A modern woman from London, she ignores the superstitions of the rural villagers. Yet those convictions means she is headed to a confrontation with dark and irrational supernatural forces beyond her understanding that can destroy her worldview, and her. It’s the modern rationalist worldview vs a primitive supernatural one. It’s a horror based in the fear of the modern person that the scientific rationalist worldview that our civilization is built upon is false and that a deeper irrational and chaotic reality lies beneath.

    The game’s ending is dark, yet it is heavily foreshadowed. Those heavy portents of doom throughout the game come true. What might be interpreted as a dark twist of the story doesn’t even feel like a twist, just a confirmation of the foreshadowing (which is not a bad thing). It’s bleak, but that is typical for the genre. This kind of horror story usually ends this way. Yet it feels daring for a video game, which usually likes to rewards the player’s efforts with a happy ending.

    The game has similarities to The Hound of the Baskervilles, but that was a subversion of the gothic. This game upholds those themes. This time the scientific reasoner from London coming to the moors has to actually confront supernatural evil out of local folklore, and it can’t be but destructive.

    The ambiguity about the supernatural actually continues into the game’s late stages, yet in a way that is bitterly ironic for Thomasina. She sees things that are clearly supernatural, yet by now there are hints that she is an unreliable narrator and has started to hallucinate. Even if her views about the world are correct, she has still lost the ability to see the world that way. The story retains our fear of the unknown by leaving a lot of things unexplained. And the answers we do get have this kind of ambiguity if they are even true or not.

    The gameplay relies on a similar build-up as the game’s story horror elements, and match them in intelligent ways. The puzzles feel relevant to story and theme. The puzzles for the bulk of the game are fairly mundane and are based in the village and its strange characters. A puzzle solution rests upon a debate between two villagers about the merits of the railway connecting the primitive rural village with the modern city of London. To progress, Thomasina has to go on a fetch quest to gather ingredients for a folk remedy. All relevant to the themes of modernity vs the past, scientific reason vs superstition.

    The finale of the game features exploring a strange supernatural location, and the puzzles change to match. The character-based puzzles are gone, replaced by having to figure out puzzles in order to progress and explore. It’s things like solving elaborate coded locks and solving puzzles to find keys. It’s unrealistic in a way that adventure games usually are, but here it is justified by the story, which at this point has moved into supernatural strangeness.

    It’s a game whose puzzles feel connected and relevant to the story. It’s well-done. The puzzles are on the easier side, I never had to use a guide. Yet I felt appropriately if moderately challenged at times. And not having to resort to a walkthrough for an adventure game is usually better than the alternative.

    The game’s presentation is great too, and is a vital part of why the story succeeds so well. The pixel art is impressive, and the cutscene art is appropriately unnerving. And the voice direction, done by Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games is excellent, with the actors creating a plausible rural Victorian England ambience. The music and sound effects create a sense of foreboding that fits the tone.

    The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is an excellent adventure game. It’s also one of the most successful attempts to translate literary horror fiction into a video game. It’s the rare horror game that is about slowly building a sense of dread and fear rather than shocking the player or frustrating them with overly tense, difficult gameplay. It makes much of the horror game genre look crude and cheap in comparison.

  • Beneath a Steel Sky

    Beneath a Steel Sky is a point-and-click adventure game, developed by Revolution software and released in 1994.

    It is set in a dystopian cyberpunk future, where cities are ruled by corporations and what lies in-between is a wasteland called The Gap. The player character is one Robert Foster, a child who lost his mother in a helicopter crash and was instead raised by an aboriginal tribe living in the wasteland. His adopted tribe is destroyed by security forces from the nearby Union City who kidnap Foster and bring him to the city.

    The world of Beneath A Steel Sky is a dark one, inspired by the then-popular cyberpunk genre. Union city is a polluted dystopia ruled by the eponymous corporation. The manual explains it has dispensed with things like “labour representation and social benefits”. Instead there is a severe class stratification, with people’s station determined by their “LINC status” (named after the supercomputer that controls the city) which is basically a social credit system. This status determines where you get access to the city’s three levels, with the poorest ironically living at the top level and the richest at the bottom. A low enough LINC status means you get to work near a nuclear reactor without a radiation suit.

    Yet the game doesn’t feel depressing, because the writing handles pretty much all of this with comedy. It is mostly a black comedy game, and a genuinely funny one, thanks to the excellent dialogue writing by Dave Cummins. The game’s criticism of corporations and capitalism don’t feel heavy-handed (even if they are obvious) because it is all delivered in the form of dark satire.

    This satire of corporate capitalism hasn’t dated at all, even if things in the rest of the game has. People still use VCRs in a future city controlled by an evil A.I, for example. The dark comedic tone helps in general smooth over the game’s use of what is now cyberpunk clichés. For example, the game has of course a psychedelic virtual reality, accessed via an ethernet port straight into your brain, called a Schriebmann port. It works because the game acknowledges that it is kinda silly. Foster jokes that he needs one of those ports like he needs a hole in his head, and the other character Anita answers that it is literally a hole in the head. He eventually gets one installed by a delightfully over-the-top surgeon, who wants Foster’s testicles in exchange, and is meanwhile casually doing open-chest surgery on a person who is still conscious. It’s all very funny and makes the game’s storytelling work in a way a straight take on this trope would not. And it furthers the story’s theme of humans being made into machine parts both figuratively and literally to serve some dubious greater purpose.

    It is just a fun and well-written game overall. I have to especially praise Foster’s sarcastic robot sidekick Joey. You carry around a motherboard with “his unique personality” on it, and can switch it from robot shell to robot shell, and Joey’s transformations are a large part of the game’s humour. He is a funny and loveable character, and a stand-out.

    The game does a serious plot-line too, and it is testament to the quality game’s writing that it manages to shift tone convincingly, partly because the comedy is rather black to begin with. The game’s gallows humour about its dystopian world is able to convincingly turn into horror. I won’t spoil the game’s finale, but it treats a theme that was earlier treated jokingly in a more dramatic fashion and it just works.

    And while I mostly described and praised the game’s writing so far, I think the gameplay is rather good too, and outstandingly kind to the player by early 90s adventure game standards. The puzzles generally make sense and are not that absurd, and while you can die easily there were no dead-ends that I could find. In fact the deaths are often rather funny, and it is from situations that a clever player can avoid. I especially love the death that comes from opening the door to a nuclear reactor without a radiation-shielding suit. It’s both funny and fair because it’s such an obviously stupid thing to do. I saved beforehand and did it only because I wanted to see what happened, and got rewarded with a particularly amusing death animation.

    The game used Revolution software’s virtual theatre engine, which enabled NPCs to move of their own accord across screens following a rudimentary AI. They actually move across screens even when the player character isn’t there. Characters and objects also occupy space, and the player characters and the NPCs can’t stand on the same spot. It was probably very impressive for the time period, and does still make the world feel a bit more alive. Granted, their simple walking patterns are sort of noticeable and in practice you have to sometimes wait for them to show up. For example, to get Foster’s robot sidekick Joey to go up or down an elevator with Foster, you have to wait until he enters that screen. His AI is programmed to make him follow Foster around from screen to screen, but he does so slowly in a meandering fashion. That means you can move Foster across multiple screens in a quick amount of time, leaving Joey a few screens behind, and you have to wait for him to catch up.

    The presentation is fine, especially for the time. The game’s art was done by comic book artist Dave Gibbons (of Watchmen fame), and while the game itself is pixelated, it’s rather nice pixel art. The animated cutscenes that introduce and end the game are granted kind of clunky, but Gibbons’ art is nice. I highly suggest you find a scan of the comic book version of the opening cutscene (it is included with the GOG version at least) to appreciate it in full.

    The comic book inspiration actually influenced the game’s subtitles in a weird way. These have random nouns written out in ALL-CAPS quite often, like anglo-american comics often have. The game was apparently meant to feel like an interactive comic book.

    I don’t know if Beneath A Steel Sky really suceeds at that, but it is damn fine adventure game, and one of the best cyberpunk games I’ve played. And recommending it today is easy, because it is nowadays completely free. The game and its source code was generously made freeware in 2003 by the developers. The release of the source code enabled it to run in emulation via SCUMMVM, enabling it to run easily on most modern systems. It can be downloaded along with SCUMMVM from their website, it is also available from GOG and Steam also for free. And since it is from 1994, even very low-end computers from today can run it easily.

    It’s a really good game, and you can easily play it for free, what more can you ask for?

  • Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

    Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned is as you might guess the follow-up to the original Gabriel Knight game and it’s sequel (My reviews can be found via the links). Like those it was written and designed by Jane Jensen and developed by Sierra.It moves the series into 3D, yet tries to retain point-and-click gameplay with this new dimension. The plot is again about our heroes Gabriel Knight and Grace Nakimura investigating a supernatural mystery. Yet plot and gameplay has been overshadowed by this game’s reception. So more on that later.It was both the last Gabriel Knight game and Sierra’s final adventure game overall. Their offices closed after developing this game, partly due to its lack of sales compared to its budget. This is very significant for this game’s reception. Sierra was the studio that practically invented the graphic adventure game with Roberta Williams’s Mystery House in 1980. They and Lucasarts dominated the mainstream adventure game market in the 90s. Gabriel Knight 3 and Escape from Monkey Island being the last adventure games from these successful studios was seen by American video game media as the “death of adventure games”.A famous article by game website Old Man Murray (whose writers would later write Valve’s Portal series) would use the now infamous cat hair moustache puzzle from the beginning of Gabriel Knight 3 as an argument for how “adventure games committed suicide” with illogical puzzles and blamed Jane Jensen. So Gabriel Knight 3 became the posterchild for “why adventure games died”, the game that was such a failure that it killed a genre.Of course reports of the adventure game genre’s death were greatly exaggerated. And reports of Gabriel Knight 3’s badness are greatly exaggerated.Gabriel Knight 3 is very much worthy of being played and enjoyed today. Not that it’s easy to do so with modern computers. I had major technical issues with lag and slowdown starting up my copy I got from GOG. The only way I could conquer those was through downloading DGVoodoo. You can find some instructions here for setting it up. That mostly got rid of my technical issues, but even then cinematics can be fucked up. The previous two games in this series can easily be played with Scummvm, and you realize what a valuable piece of software Scummvm really is during the efforts trying to get this game to run.About the story, the actual game and its intro movie drops you in media res and it’s very confusing. That’s because the intro cinematic is not the actual introduction to the story. A comic book that came in the game box was. And there are inexplicably no scans included of that comic with the GOG copy. And you need it to fully understand the story. It’s a good comic too that naturally has aged better than the 3D animated cinematics. So download it from other sources, like this one.Now that you done all that, you can finally enjoy the story of Gabriel Knight 3. Gabriel and Grace have been invited to the Parisian home to the leading heir of the once royal Stuart family, now called Stewart. His name is prince James and he wants Gabriel in his capacity of schattenjäger to protect the prince’s toddler son, Charlie, from the vampires that have haunted his family for ages. Despite Gabriel’s and Grace’s best efforts, the baby is kidnapped by mysterious figures. Gabriel follows the kidnappers to the Languedoc village of Rennes-Le-Chateau, where the game begins.Now GK3 is the first 3D game in the series, and it’s a technological leap that the point-and-click adventure game genre had difficulty with. The problem is that the gameplay of point-and-click games consisted of viewing a 2D image and clicking on interactable hotspots on that image. It’s hard to transition that type of gameplay into 3D, as the extra dimension doesn’t add much to that experience. The solution that most adventure games adopted was animating 3D characters but have them move on 2D backgrounds with fixed camera angles. So it’s not really 3D, as the image you are viewing and interacting with is still essentially 2D.Now Jane Jensen did something far more ambitious with Gabriel Knight 3. The idea here is what if you could explore a 3D environment just as freely as you could explore a 2D image in 2D adventure games?And the solution was to keep basic point-and-click controls, but with true 3D environments and allow you to explore those environments with a completely free camera. It’s the most free camera I’ve ever experienced in a video game, as it is not in any way tied to the player character (Gabriel or Grace) but can move independently anywhere you want to in the “room” that you are currently in. It can’t move through solid objects, or leave the space the character is in, but that’s the only restriction you have. You mainly control it with the keyboard. And then you make Gabriel/Grace interact with things by clicking on them with the mouse and bringing a verb menu. They have the ability to teleport when the camera isn’t looking at them, so you won’t have to wait too long if you left them far behind the camera and want them to interact with something.It’s a bit awkward and a very weird game engine/control system, but honestly, it’s not bad. Frankly being able to freely explore the environments with the camera and then clicking on the hotspots to interact with it is probably the most genuinely 3D translation of traditional 2d point-and-click adventure gameplay I’ve come across. Most 3D adventure games are fake 3D, this feels like the real 3D deal.

    There is some pixel hunting in this game, but that’s inherited from its 2D forebears, and isn’t that bad. Of course it’s 1999 3D, so it looks like shit today, and hasn’t aged as well as the original game’s pixel art. The free camera enables you to get close-up so you can really see how grainy and low-res the textures are. But again, that’s because it’s from 1999. And the art direction is good.

    There is still a points system, where successful actions and conversations get you points. Interestingly the amount of points you get is actually more variable than in previous games.

    The player can get more points for doing optional actions while investigating which sometimes reveal further minor plot points. Some of the actions are missable, and can only be done during a certain section of the game or are even timed. So there is missable content, but like in the first game, I don’t think there is any danger of making the game unwinnable in classic Sierra fashion.

    The sections are divided into “timeblocks” of certain hours of the day, so “Day 1, 10 Pm to 12 PM”, but they are not timed in any way beyond the optional missable content. The times are for the characters and plot, not the player. Instead you only progress to another timeblock, another set of hours, when you complete certain actions. This is how the day system in the first Gabriel Knight game worked and it works the same here.

    The puzzles vary in quality widely. But it’s far from as bad as you might expect. The bad reputation of GK3 is built on the infamous cat hair mustache puzzle. And while the game doesn’t deserve to be judged by its worst moment, the puzzle itself honestly deserves its reputation. It is truly bad. If it is good in any way, it is by being the perfect example of illogical adventure game puzzles. You literally create a fake moustache by getting some cat hair stuck to tape and glue it to Gabriel’s face with syrup. The solution is so unlikely to occur to a logical mind. And Gabriel Knight is not like Monkey island, it’s not a surreal comedy but a broadly serious supernatural mystery thriller, so it stands out even more.

    It’s the low-point both for the game and the series as a whole. It got its own wikipedia page, it’s that infamous.But it was not the creation of Jane Jensen, but actually the game’s producer Steven Hill. He devised the puzzle as a replacement for a puzzle developed by Jensen that wasn’t able to be implemented due to time and budget constraints. So while it’s understandable to blame Jensen, this insane puzzle was not her idea. So the rest of the game was developed by the actual creative mind behind the series. And while it’s far from a perfect game, the bulk of it is a lot better than that low-point.

    There are some other flawed puzzles in this game, but even those are far above the level of cat hair moustache. And there are some rather good ones too. The other famous puzzle from this game is the famous “Le Serpent Rouge” which is so well-regarded that it also earned its own wikipedia article. Gabriel Knight 3 is probably the only game where two of its puzzles got their own wikipedia articles, and for opposite reasons.

    I don’t know if “Le Serpent Rouge” is the best video game puzzle ever made, but it sure is a highlight of the game. It’s a treasure hunt where you have to solve a long poetically written riddle that hides the instructions to find the treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau, adapted from a real such riddle-poem. It’s a concept that I love, ever since I read The Musgrave Ritual. And the implementation of the idea into a video game puzzle is good too. It’s a very good example of how to design a long over-arching puzzle. It’s long, but it’s broken up into digestable segments, you solve one paragraph of the riddle at a time. It also has a good built-in hint system where Grace gives hints in dialogue on what to do. The method of solving it is original, where the bulk of it is Grace using an in-game computer to solve the riddle and apply it to a map.

    The mystery and treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau is probably obvious to the well-read player, since that small town in the Languedoc is famous for specifically one thing: it’s place in Jesus bloodline conspiracy theories. And unsurprisingly that turns out to be the secret of the town in this game too. Jesus had kids with Mary Magdalene, and his bloodline survives to the modern day. It’s all borrowed from the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. And it’s obvious. Why else would Gabriel and Grace be in this otherwise unremarkable small town if it wasn’t about that? Also part of the game’s title is Blood of the Sacred.

    GK3 predates the most commercially successful work of fiction to use Jesus bloodline ideas, The Da Vinci Code, but it’s far from the first work of fiction to borrow from it. It’s not even the first graphic adventure game to explore such ideas. Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars did not feature a Jesus bloodline but was clearly inspired by such templar conspiracy theories and alludes to it with character names like Lobineau and Plantard.

    Yet Jane Jensen does her best to make the theory interesting again. The theory is complete nonsense of course, but it’s useful raw material for fiction.The game’s plot mixes the idea of vampires with this Jesus bloodline theory in an original fashion and the game does some inventive worldbuilding with this. And the game is far better written than the likes of Dan Brown.

    There is clearly a great deal of effort gone into researching Rennes-le-Chateau and the other historical facts that is commonly brought into this theory. Out of idle curiosity I watched one of the factually dubious documentaries Henry Lincoln made about Rennes-le-Chateau in the 1970s before co-writing Holy Blood, and the town in the game does really look like the real deal.

    Jane Jensen must have been aware that players would guess. Grace finds out that holy grail is the Jesus bloodline thing not by doing some investigation into occult secrets, but by being given and reading a popular book that is clearly Holy Blood, Holy Grail in all but name. It’s advertised in the local bookshop aimed at tourists. It’s anti-climactic but funny and makes perfect sense. This theory is not some deep hermetic secret in our world, so why should it be this otherwise realistic world?

    On a character level, the game finally explores the Grace/Gabriel relationship that has been hinted at in the previous two games. It is treated more maturely in this game than ever before. The relationship is predictably a mess, but that actually feels intentional this time around. Gabriel’s faults as a person, how he has treated Grace and why a relationship would have problems is actually discussed by the characters for the first time. It feels more believable in this game than it was in previous games, as the problems are fully acknowledged.

    The voice acting is good too. Tim Curry is back as Gabriel. And there is no Mark Hamill as Mosely this time, yet there is plenty of major voice acting talent in the cast list, like Jennifer Hale, Billy West and Corey Burton and they do deliver. I loved the old movie star Samantha Eggar as the aging aristocratic lesbian Lady Howard, she is a lot of fun.

    Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned is far from a perfect game. No game with the cat hair moustache puzzle can claim perfection. Yet it’s highly unfair to judge it by its worst moment. The rest of the game is a solid adventure game. There are much better puzzles in this game, such as Le Serpent Rouge.The move to 3D is not entirely successful, but it shows a far greater imagination in adapting point-and-click adventure gameplay to a 3D environment than most other adventure games ever dared. Jane Jensen’s character writing is if anything more mature than in previous games in this series. And she manages to tell an inventive horror-fantasy story while still using old tropes and stories like the Jesus bloodline and vampires.

    Gabriel Knight 3 did not kill the adventure genre, the death of adventure games has been greatly exaggerated anyway. The market for it just grew smaller, especially in the US, but far from non-existent. And what remains is a flawed but very enjoyable adventure game. If you are able to overcome both the technical issues in getting to run on modern systems and design issues like the outdated graphics and The Bad Puzzle, you will find much to enjoy in it. Perhaps it can even be defined as a flawed gem.

  • Aliens (1986)

    Aliens from 1986 is a great sequel to the original Aliehttps://amidfusionsofwonder.wordpress.com/2022/11/30/alien-1979/n, despite great changes in cast and crew. The new filmmakers, led by director James Cameron just understood the original so well that it feels natural. Cw for spoilers, because I want to talk about the ending. I won’t even give you an introduction to the plot for that reason.

    It has been described as an action film compared to the tense horror of the original. And there is far more actual action in this movie, the humans get to face hordes of aliens and fight them with with guns here. No need to worry about the acid blood depressurizing the ship this time, we are on a planet. But Aliens takes its time to get to the action. And this seems to be director James Cameron’s intention, in his director’s cut it takes over an hour before the first alien fight. Not that I’m complaining. Similarly to the first film, it slowly builds tension before the nightmare is fully unleashed. There are relatively calm scenes between the alien encounters which are still tense because the aliens are still a lurking menace.

    When the action happens, it’s exciting, but more chaotic than triumphant. Even as the aliens are getting shot and killed, they still feel extremely threatening. Even a shot that kills them spills deadly acid blood that hurts the humans. The human heroes still feel extremely vulnerable and under threat.

    Aliens is one of the most important sources of the space marine trope. Not the first I don’t think, but it is the one most often imitated in for example video games (Doom and Halo for example) and military science fiction as a whole, to the point of becoming a cliché. And these portrayals are often positive, portraying the space marines as badasses protecting humanity from aliens and other inhuman threats. It ties into the pop cultural glorification of the real life US marine corps.

    Yet Aliens, one of the originators is far more ambivalent about its space marines. Their preparations for the mission on LV-426 make them look extremely badass, with their sci-fi guns and all. Gearing up with things like pulse rifles just looks cool. The marine named Hudson outright brags about how cool they are. “Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you” is literally a line from the film.

    Yet when they actually encounter the aliens, they quickly start dying, clearly outmatched. The space marines look cool, but they are out of their depth fighting aliens. The film has been viewed as expressing the doubt of American military prowess after its defeat in Vietnam. Hudson cracks and goes from bombastic pride in himself and his fellow marines to despair, resulting in the near-memetic “game over, man.” line. They do try their utmost to survive and kill a bunch of aliens, but only one of them survives the film, Hicks. He is the most capable and intelligent of the lot, and even he ends up seriously wounded.

    They are also shown to be ultimately tools of a corporatized-capitalist state, literally obeying orders from the Weyland-yutani corporation. The corporate influence is a weakening force, as it betrays them. 57 years have passed since Alien, but the corporation is just as insanely evil as ever. It still has the same goal, to collect a specimen of the aliens and exploit them for profit somehow, and it’s willing to sacrifice human lives for this goal.

    In the universe of Alien, capitalist corporations are evil, and corporations have taken control over and corrupted the state and military. So nothing is different from our own universe in that regard.

    As in the original film, it’s down to the working class woman Ripley to save the day. She survived in hypersleep together with the cat Jones over the film’s timeskip. I loved the character in the first film, but that film didn’t spend much time on character development. Aliens does, especially in the special edition, and it really develops Ripley’s character in interesting ways.

    She is traumatized by the events of the first film, and displays many of the signs of PTSD. It’s all the worse for her as the corporate people don’t believe her story (or at least pretend they don’t, as the film later suggests), and she becomes a kind of cassandra figure about the aliens.

    The film is her working through her trauma by confronting the source of it. She first rejects investigating LV-426 again, but eventually agrees. This leads to further confrontations with the alien species, far more numerous this time. But Ripley survives and decides to fight back, learning how to operate a gun. Her overcoming her trauma can be symbolized by her growing friendship with Bishop, the android. She is at first very distrustful of him because of her trauma with Ash in the first film, but he proves himself to her and she grows to accept him as a friend and ally by the end of the film.

    The film also reveals another side to Ripley, that she was a mother. One reason why I prefer the director’s cut is that it includes a scene where she learns her daughter lived to old age and died while Ripley was in cryosleep. It gives an emotional charge to her character spending so many years in stasis. In addition to her trauma, she has lost her family and become a woman out of time, a very lonely figure.

    This theme of motherhood in Ripley’s character is an important part of the film. She later comes across the destroyed LV-246 colony’s sole survivor, who is a little girl nicknamed Newt. Her family died in the alien onslaught, and Ripley becomes an adopted mother to Newt. The two characters have both lost their families, and create a new one together. It’s a touching part of the film, that gives it even more emotional charge than the original.

    It’s a kind of counterbalance to the themes of rape and forced pregnancy in the film series. Ripley is contrasted with the alien’s own mother figure, the alien queen who lays their eggs. By being kind to Newt, Ripley is able to make her accept Ripley as a mother figure. The alien queen just wants Newt so she can be forced to be an incubator for her own brood. It’s Ripley’s nurturing motherhood contrasted with the queen’s predatory one.

    This conflict comes to a head in the film’s climax, where Ripley has to save Newt from the alien hive. In the climax of Alien, Ripley was fighting mainly for her own survival. Here she deliberately puts her survival at risk to rescue Newt.

    She doesn’t run away from the aliens even if she has opportunity to do so, but instead ventures directly into their hive, despite being under time pressure from an impending nuclear explosion, all to save Newt. This shows how she has overcome her trauma from the first film, she no longer let’s her fears keep her from action.

    Ripley thus takes on both a traditionally masculine role, that of the movie action hero, and a feminine one, the role of the mother. In the film’s climax those roles are made inseparable, overcoming that gender binary, as Ridley charges in with guns to save her adopted daughter. She is both masculine and feminine in the same action. She is a single mother, who doesn’t need a father for her daughter, as she is capable of fulfilling the masculine role. There are strong hints that Hicks might be a love interest to Ripley and a father figure to Newt. But Hicks is incapacitated in the film’s climax, and Ripley proves she doesn’t need him to be a mother to Newt.

    Ripley has in the film’s ending overcome her trauma and loneliness. She has went from traumatized loner to a mother with her found family in the form of her daughter Newt, that she is fearless in protecting. This character development is what makes her heroic actions have so much emotional resonance and feel so triumphant, and be more than just the heroine defeating a monster. She is overcoming her own problems in doing so. Her telling the alien queen “Get away from her, you bitch” is much more than an action movie one-liner due to what it represents about Ripley’s character development.

    Aliens is a great sequel, that is pretty much on par with the original in my estimation. Perhaps it even surpasses it, but the film wouldn’t make much sense without the context of its predecessor, which remains great. Yet Aliens is such a great sequel that continues the themes and motifs of the original, but adds to them. The film adds action without truly losing the tension and horror of the previous film. Most importantly, the film has a greater focus on character development that make Ripley a truly compelling protagonist.

  • Alien (1979)

    Alien from 1979 is maybe the most scary film I have ever seen. This review has spoilers. I’m gonna presume you have seen the film or know its plot, so no plot summary, and also going to spoil things to discuss themes. There are also brief non-detailed discussions of rape, forced pregnancy and body horror.

    It is a film that is unusually good at building tension, in large part to the direction by Ridley Scott. You feel the crew members vulnerability at the eponymous alien, at all times. The film has jump scares, but uses them to build this atmosphere of tension. It has been described with good reason as a haunted house movie set in space, where the cast is confined to a closed-off environment and haunted and hunted by a non-human threat.

    Even before the film focuses on a specific alien creature threat, there is an ever present unease at the alien nature of the universe. The film is actually a good science-fiction film because of that, with shades of Lovecraftian themes (the film has some similarities with At the Mountains of Madness). It’s not just about making us fear a specific creature, but at making us fear a vast non-human universe. The sequence where the crew investigate the dead space ship is great at invoking this fear. The gigantic “space jockey” who has so creepily seem to be part of his pilot’s chair, the large scale architecture of the place that is clearly not built for humans, it’s a creepy encounter with the non-human, the alien as adjective, leading into the first encounter with the creature that makes Alien into a noun.

    The nature of the Alien plays on other human fears as well of course. It’s main theme is actually a sexual threat. It almost literally reproduces by raping and forcibly impregnating other forms of life, a forced pregnancy that is fatal. And this threat is not confined to those with a womb, but happens to a cis male character. The script by Dan O’Bannon deliberately put those associations in there. And the film’s art design by artist H.R. Giger was perfect to visually realize those themes, as disturbing and alienating sexual imagery was a major theme in his work. His alien designs in this movie are full of phallic and yonic imagery, and very visceral in a disgusting way. The end result is a truly disturbing appeal to human sexual fears, regardless of gender.

    The humans in this movie are also so realistic that it adds to the horror. They are ordinary working class people, space truckers operating a freighter. The casting of actors like Harry Dean Stanton, who are often middle-aged and doesn’t have the sterile conventional attractiveness of many movie stars makes this film feel so real.

    I have of course also point out Sigourney Weaver’s performance as Ellen Ripley. Ripley is a portrayal of a woman as an intelligent and competent hero, who in the end is the one to defeat the Alien, and the only one of the crew to survive (except the ship’s cat Jones that she saved). She was a major step forward for women characters in horror and science-fiction films for the time.

    The crew being ordinary working-class people is also important to another theme of the movie. In addition to the eponymous Alien, it adds another antagonist, which is human in origin but equally inhumane. It’s the Weyland-Yutani corporation, who employed the crew (named slightly differently in this film than in later franchise installments). The events of the film are revealed to be part of a conspiracy. The corporation knew about the Alien and wanted to bring it to Earth, in order to be used and studied as a bioweapon. It is a secret objective or protocol in the ship’s mission. Survival of the crew is secondary to this goal, and it’s enforced by the Ship’s science officer Ash, who is actually a robot. He leads the crew to the alien eggs, and then makes the crew break quarantine regulations and bring the Alien-infected Kane aboard, thus setting in motion the nightmare scenario that is the bulk of the film.

    Thus part of the horror is capitalism, who in the pursuit of further profits are willing to sacrifice ordinary working people like the crew of the Nostromo. It creates the conditions for the Alien’s rampage.

    I think that’s why Alien is one of the most scary horror films of all time. It’s made with such craft that the tension and threat is palpable at almost all times. The direction and acting, and even casting add to the film’s tense atmosphere. The film’s horror also intelligently appeals to our fear of the unknown and an alien universe. But the film’s themes also deals with exclusively human concerns, like our sexuality and the inhumane nature of our socio-economic system. It’s a horror science-fiction masterpiece.

  • Clive Barker’s Undying

    Clive Barker’s Undying is a 2001 horror first person shooter game developed by Electronic Arts (back when they made good single-player games). As the title suggests, the game’s story is written by author and film director Clive Barker.

    The main character is Irish WWI veteran Patrick Galloway who after an occult experience during the war investigates the supernatural. He gets asked by his old friend Jeremiah Covenant to investigate the strange goings on at Covenant’s coastal Irish estate. And the game follows that investigation.

    The game’s story and themes are archetypical gothic horror. The Covenant family meddled with the occult, and as a consequence called up an ancient evil lying beneath the grounds of their estate. The evil corrupted them, perverting their desires and eventually destroyed them, now the Covenant siblings are malevolent spirits and monsters.

    Yet despite the well-worn nature of the genre, it is very well-told, having the game’s story be written by an actual novelist helps a lot. A lot of the story is found in these journals you can find lying around if you explore carefully and they actually reward the player by being well-written prose. The undead Covenant siblings are the game’s bosses, but they are also actual distinct characters, and the game has you exploring who they were before you fight them.

    The game’s art design is excellent and helps with the atmosphere a lot, despite the 2001 graphics. The level design is also very well made. It’s definitely inspired by Half-Life in how it tries to convey a convincing depiction of its setting, yet progression is still linear. Except Undying’s Covenant Estate is more complex than Black Msesa. It genuinely does feel like sprawling and maze-like gothic mansion. Sometimes too maze-like, it can be hard to figure out where to go at times. There is no map or directional arrows, and only a terse and sparse objective list. The only thing that leads you in the right direction is that the game is programmed to lock doors you don’t need and unlock doors you do need, in a way the player has no control over. But the lack of almost all explicit hand-holding for where to go and what to do actually helps with the gothic atmosphere. There being literally no proper map of the place, doors mysteriously lock and unlock themselves and you can easily get slightly lost does convey the experience of being in the decaying manor house of a gothic novel.

    I have heard Undying described as “survival horror” but that’s not really true. It’s really a first person shooter/action game. It’s still a horror game, because the gothic atmosphere is so convincing and there are genuine scares and lots of gore. But you don’t need to run away from enemies to conserve ammunition, you can just take them on. Bullets are not that common by FPS standards and you actually only get four guns, with a second type of bullets for each of the two conventional ones, the revolver and the shotgun. But you’ll never run out of offensive means, because you have magic (and also a magical gun with infinite ammo), with mana that recharges over time. Yes, you have magic in this game, our hero Patrick is a wizard. He literally fires a gun with one hand and throws magic spells with the other. Other FPS protagonists wish they were this cool.

    And there is an interesting variety of magic. There are offensive spells such as throwing lightning or ectoplasma or explosive skulls (yes, really). You also get a shield spell for increased defense. There is a spell that can reanimate the dead to fight for you, so you get to be a necromancer (it also destroys otherwise invulnerable skeletons).

    The starting spell “scry” is not very useful in combat, but interesting in itself. It’s useful as a kind of flashlight, to enable you to see in the game’s many dark areas. But most importantly it enables Galloway to see the other hidden side of things. A mysterious diesmbodied voice tells Galloway and the player when to use it. Scrying reveals hidden things like ghostly visions of long-dead monks in a ruined monastery. A most effective use is on a portrait of the Covenant siblings. They look like normal humans viewed normally, but looking at the portrait with scrying reveals their monstrous forms. It sometimes gives hints about what to do, but mostly it’s there to reveal something to creep you out and reveal more of the game’s story. It’s an effective combination of gameplay tool and storytelling device.

    The addition of magic adds such strategical complexity to the action of the game. And the gunplay is good in itself. Both the revolver and shotgun feel satisfying to use, and their extra ammo types being rare adds another strategical layer. It’s a satisfying action FPS on top of being a good horror game.

    I’ve praised this game so far, but I have to admit it’s not entirely successful and is a bit uneven. The final parts of the game are probably the game at its worst. Most of it is spent in a magical realm called “Eternal Autumn”, it has a jungle-theme, complete with a kind of primitive crossbow/speargun wielding savage cavemen. It goes for too long and feels entirely out of place with the European gothic themes of the rest of the game. There is an earlier magical realm, Oneiros, but it’s actually a successful diversion into an imaginatively designed surreal realm that seems to fit thematically with the rest of the game.

    Eternal Autumn is followed by the final boss and he isn’t that well-designed. The boss battles in this game sometimes has the problem of not giving enough hints on how to defeat them, and the final boss is like the ultimate example of that. There is not enough information on where to hit them to actually do damage, and there is a specific sequence you have to follow. I had to look up a walkthrough. In fact I had to look up two walkthroughs, because the first one I found was flat out wrong. The game’s ends with a cutscene that is obviously set-up to sequel games, but they were never made so it falls flat.

    But the final section being weak doesn’t take away from how good Undying is. It’s one of the most compelling horror games I’ve played in terms of atmosphere and story. The fps gameplay is solid, with the addition of magic making it feel unique and fun. And the art and level design help create this immersive gothic horror atmosphere.

  • Bound (1996)

    The 1996 film Bound, directed and written by the Wachowski sisters, is a very interesting lesbian subversion of crime drama and film noir tropes.

    It sets up a very stock film noir plot. The femme fatale Violet is unhappily married to a man Ceasar and wants out, so she starts an affair with Corky, who is recently released from prison and now takes menial repair jobs to get by. Caesar works as a money launderer for the Mafia, and comes to store 2 million dollars in his apartment. So Violet suggests to Corky that they steal the money and run away to live happily together. It’s very much a classical film noir plot. The seductive femme fatale offering wealth and sex to a working class lover down on their luck, luring them into crime, and then things aren’t as simple as their plans. It’s James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman always rings Twice, the femme fatale’s husband being part of organized crime is straight out of Out of the Past.

    Except it’s not like those movies. Corky is a woman, a butch lesbian. The reason Violet hates her marriage to Caesar is that she is not into men, she only married him for money and stability. She is a femme fatale lesbian. This changes a lot of things, and makes this film feel fresh.

    It’s a movie about a pair of lesbians, and it actually takes their perspective in a way that is rare in mainstream films about them. Corky and Violet are unquestionably the protagonists, the ones the movie sympathizes with. Bound subverts the misogyny and anti-queerness of the film noir genre. Violet may be dangerous to some, but she is not evil, she doesn’t betray Corky. And the film ends happily for them.

    They are treated as sympathetic characters, as humans. There are sex scenes in the film’s beginning, they are sexy, but don’t feel exploitative. And then the movie creates a tense crime thriller in which these women are the protagonists. They suffer violence of course, but it doesn’t feel exploitative either, and they rescue each other from danger.

    It’s a movie that is thematically about the evils of the closet for lesbian women, which misogyny, the general vulnerable position of women in patriarchy, and lesbophobia force lesbian women into. It’s a film that treats its lesbian women characters as human.

    More so than the men actually. Most films create a male gaze or a male perspective by making the male characters the ones you sympathize with. The men are the ones whose perspective you are supposed to take. The male lead is often a character of masculine wish fulfilment.

    And Bound does not do that. The main male character is Caesar and he is a pathetic, disgusting loser. He is utterly devoid of any likeable characteristics, being in it only for himself. And he is so stupid that you can’t really admire him as a villain either. In fact, when Corky’s and Violet’s plan go wrong, it’s precisely because they underestimate his stupidity. His loveless marriage to Violet is an anti-advertisement for heterosexual marriage. You don’t want to relate to him or project unto him as wish fulfilment, and thus the male perspective is avoided. I have to give some praise to the actor playing him, Joe Pantoliano. It takes real acting chops to portray a character this unlikeable.

    The other male characters are mainly the other mobsters and they are not actually characters. In fact they are cartoonishly stereotypical italian-american mobsters, very flat. They are not even competent mobsters, as witnessed by the fact that they trust the ultimate idiot Caesar. The reason he has the money in his apartment is because their torturer/assassin decided to headshot a guy at the wrong place and time and spread his blood and brains over the 2 million dollars. So Caesar has to literally clean and launder the money. This is one of the dumbest mobsters in a crime thriller, and it’s great. They are too flat and unlikeable to deny the male perspective and wish-fulfilment that most mainstream movies assume. The movie is delightfully misandristic to further that goal.

    Instead the viewpoint characters are undisputably the two lesbian women in the lead, skillfully portrayed by Gina Gershon (Corky) and Jennifer Tilly (Violet).

    The Wachowskis are trans women, and even if they didn’t come out until years after this movie’s release, you can sense their trans womanhood in this film. This movie genuinely identifies with the lesbian main characters in a way most mainstream cinema made by men does not. It views the story from their perspective. And these women are clearly a vessel for a kind of wish-fufilment. The film assumes you want to be like this cool lesbian couple. Whereas the men are vile violent losers who you don’t want to be like. And if the Wachowskis were closeted at the time of making this film, a major theme is the horrors of the closet, of Violet being forced into heteronormativity.

    It is and feels like a movie by trans women, and that’s beautiful. It’s a great film that treats its lesbian characters as humans and not as objects for the male gaze. And it’s a well-made suspenseful noirish crime thriller. Bound is a modest film, without a high budget and the majority of it takes place in a single location, but it uses the small scope intelligently to create a genuine sense of tension and suspense. And it’s treatment of women and lesbians is genuinely sympathetic in a way that’s rare in the male-dominated film industry.

  • The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery

    The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery from 1995 is the second Gabriel Knight adventure game, developed by Sierra and written and designed by Jane Jensen. The first was Gabriel Knight: Sins of thehttps://amidfusionsofwonder.wordpress.com/2022/11/30/gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers/ Fathers

    The most obvious change from the first game is that the pixel art graphics style has been replaced with Full motion video using live action footage of actors against 3D backgrounds. Unlike pixel art graphic adventure games, this is not a style that has seen much of revival (partly because it’s expensive) and makes this game seem very much of its time. Many of the FMV games from the 90s craze for the medium are not beloved either.

    I won’t lie and say The Beast Within looks great today. The FMVs have a low resolution and are very grainy, as do the sprites of the characters outside of it. There is some dodgy CGI too. The end result looks like a 90s tv show uploaded to youtube in low quality.

    Yet The Beast Within is in my opinion one of the FMV games that stand the test of time. And that is both due to gameplay and story.

    For one thing, it’s actually a fairly traditional point-and-click adventure game, except the cutscenes and the character sprites are live action footage of actual actors, instead of animations. The FMV craze sometimes took the form of “interactive movies” in the mode of Dragon’s Lair, and didn’t have much actual gameplay. But The Beast Within is a fully fledged adventure game.

    And it’s a good one. There is some pixel-hunting, but much less so than the first game, because this time the cursor changes to indicate an interactable hotspot. There are no complex system of verb commands either. The puzzles felt largely fair and reasonable, and I didn’t have to rely on hints much. And as far as I can tell, there are no dead-ends. There are sequences where you can die, but you are given the option to retry them from a checkpoint with no penalty. As far as gameplay goes, this is a pretty good adventure game that cuts down on the bullshit that especially Sierra perpetuated in the genre’s earlier days.

    The story is the star in most adventure games, and this is no exception. I love the story of The Beast Within, despite its flaws.

    It helps that the acting in the FMVs is far above the general reputation of FMV games. These actors are overall legit good and I don’t feel they hinder the story being told. If the acting is arguably bad sometimes it’s the good kind of “bad” acting: overacting. And it’s a gothic werewolf horror story, such camp fits the tone.

    The game of course stars Gabriel Knight once again. He is now living in the castle of his ancestors, the Ritter family, in Bavaria. And he gets asked by the locals to investigate a series of murders, that seem to be committed by a werewolf. This being a horror game, it’s of course actually a werewolf. Once his friend Grace Nakimura learns about this, she decides to fly over to Bavaria from New Orleans to help, against Gabriel’s wishes. Grace is a playable character now, alternating with Gabriel. They conduct parallel investigations into the werewolf case.

    Gabriel tries to find the werewolf killer in the present, and investigates the murders to find the killer. While Grace investigates the past, doing mainly historical research that she hopes will help identify the present-day werewolf.

    It’s interesting how this game handles the idea of two American investigators working in a country in which they don’t entirely understand the language. Most of the game’s dialogue is in english, but there is a surprising amount of german. More than you expect from an American production. They got a translator to translate relevant dialogue by Jane Jensen into German, so it’s understandable. And especially with Gabriel, who barely knows any german (Grace has more basic knowledge and can form sentences), you get the sense of them being in a foreign country. They come across educated and/or younger people that speak fluent English, other german characters don’t and they’re stuck trying to figure it out. The pronunciation by the actors is however variable and heavily depends on the actor. Some are actual germans or have basic pronunciation knowledge, some clearly don’t. I appreciate the effort though, which does give some versmillitude to the game’s setting.

    The roles of Gabriel and Grace have been recast. A decision which I understand. The original Gabriel Knight voice, Tim Curry doesn’t look anything like Gabriel Knight, even if his voice is the definitive one. And Leah Remini is not Japanese-American, like Grace is.

    And the new actors give different takes, but ones which largely work. Dean Erickson plays a more awkward and less confident Gabriel than Curry’s in the first game. Perhaps he is humbled by his past experiences, and he is clearly not entirely comfortable in this new country in which he does not speak the language. It’s surprisingly endearing.

    Joanne Takahashi as Grace is also fine. She is more let down by the writing than her actual acting skills. She is likeable enough, Grace is still the charismatic character I loved in the first game. But there is some really awkward character writing for her in a vain attempt to further the Gabriel/Grace relationship. It’s meant to be bickering friends who secretly love each other. And she is this tsundere character who says she hates Gabriel but actually loves him, and proves it by going to great lengths to help him.

    But Gabriel and Grace don’t interact much in this game. Gabriel deliberately keeps her distant from his investigation and later justifies it with wanting to protect her, and it’s just annoying as she clearly could be very helpful to him. Grace on her part has this truly embarrassing bitchy jealousy drama with Gerde, a woman who Grace thinks is having sex with Gabriel but she actually isn’t. It’s pointless and the worst part of this game’s writing by far.

    Yet there are far more interesting parts of this game’s writing that make me actually love it.

    I’m gonna spoil the reveal of who the werewolf is, because it’s obvious from the moment the character enters the story. The story saves the reveal for the beginning of chapter 6, the game’s final chapter, but it’s obvious from the get-go. And I need to reveal it to discuss Gabriel’s storyline properly.

    It’s Friedrich von Glower, the leader of an aristocratic hunting club. He is very well played by actor Peter Lucas. He portrays him with both charm and menace, and his dark-haired features are perfect for the part. He is a charismatic presence that dominates the game. The performance does however make it very obvious that he is a werewolf. Yet he is a fascinating character, and a large part of what makes this game so appealing.

    Werewolves in this game are immortal. They can be killed, but can live on for centuries otherwise. Grace’s research reveals his extensive backstory stretching back to the 1700s. In the present day, Von Glower has used his experiences as a werewolf to develop a pseudo-darwinian philosophy about how humans will become stronger by getting in touch with their basic animal instincts that modern civilization suppresses. The members of his hunting club are all rich and basically use this philosophy to become better capitalists or lawyers by being ruthless in their actions. It’s a perfect ideology for these rich people, as it justifies them doing terrible things to earn more money.

    Yet that’s not the purpose of the philosophy for Von Glower. He is lonely as an immortal werewolf. He wants a companion to join him, and has tried throughout the centuries to find that person. It’s clearly not just friendship he is after, it is romantic and sexual companionship. He is also either gay or bi, and tries to find that companion in other men. The purpose of the club with its philosophy is to prepare a person to be turned by Von Glower and become his werewolf companion.

    Grace’s research into his past reveal that he once loved and turned the king of Bavaria Ludwig II. This lead to Ludwig’s suicide after over a decade of suffering.

    Once von Glower meets Gabriel, it is love at first sight. He is overly friendly to Gabriel considering they just met and is clearly flirtatious. It’s obvious that he has designs upon Gabriel. And Gabriel seems to genuinely return his affections in some way, even if it is not as openly erotic as it is from von Glower’s side. Gabriel at least is receptive to his flirting. It’s perhaps platonic, but he clearly quickly comes to trust von Glower. Von Glower is obviously a sinister werewolf from the minute he enters the story, yet Gabriel seems oblivious. Is he in love? Maybe.

    There is also Von Zell, who was the sole member of Von Glower’s hunting club that he choose to turn. Yet he was dumped by Von Glower after Von Zell’s turned out too violent and strange for Friedrich’s tastes. Now he plays the role of the bitter ex-boyfriend, fiercely jealous of Gabriel.

    The Gabriel/Friedrich love story speaks to the themes of the series very well. Gabriel’s story in the first game was about his struggle with his baser instincts. He starts as a lust-driven womanizer, and he has to develop into a “schattenjäger”, a brave fighter against supernatural evil. And now von Glower represents a new temptation for Gabriel to abandon his duty to fight against evil and fall back into his lust-driven ways. Werewolves is a good fit for that kind of themes. Except, the temptation is queer this time around.

    This type of story is of course homophobic on some level. The queer character is a villain who must die in the ending. Yet Von Glower is somewhat sympathetic in his loneliness and his feelings for Gabriel seem to be genuine. He is a complex villain, and the relationship between him and Gabriel is complex and engaging. It’s no more homophobic than your average queer monster horror story, and us queer folk often appreciate those despite their flaws.

    And this is a story that speaks to me beyond the queer themes. I love German history. And you get to dig into it in this game. In the first game, Grace’s function is that she would do research on Gabriel’s request and then present her findings the next day. And now that you get to play as her, you get to do that research yourself.

    I’ll grant that other people might find her parts of the game exposition-heavy. It’s literally reading book chapters at some points or interviewing people for more exposition. But I find werewolves and the Bavarian king Ludwig II to be fascinating subjects. So I was greatly entertained by all this. It’s part of why I found this game’s story so rich.

    Ludwig II was gay or bi in real life, and so it makes sense tying him into this game with a bisexual werewolf (who was Ludwig’s boyfriend and who turned the king), as silly as that sounds. It works. His struggles with being turned into a werewolf by von Glower ends up being mirrored by Gabriel’s relationship with von Glower in the present day.

    And the game includes the other fascinating bits of Ludwig’s life, such as his extravagant castles and his relations with Richard Wagner. The game lets you explore Neuschwanstein and try to find the score for a lost opera by Wagner concerning werewolves. It’s so fun if you are interested like I am. And you get to hear parts of that fictional opera and the composer Robert Holmes does do a decent Wagner imitation, albeit with a synthesized orchestra. The music overall is good, but it stands in the shadow of this fake Wagner opera. It’s so many interests of mine converging at once.

    That is why I love The Beast Within. It is not a perfect video game. The game’s writing and presentation is definitely flawed. Yet there are many virtues. It’s a solid point-and-click adventure that tells a campy but well-written queer werewolf story that takes on German history and culture in an intelligent way.

  • Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane

    Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane is an incredible fantasy novel.

    It’s an adaptation of Greek mythology, although it also touches on the myths of other cultures such as ancient Egyptian ones. But of course it’s most specifically an adaptation of the story of Achilles and the Trojan war. It reimagines Achilles as a trans woman. Achilles’ stay on Skyros as a woman becomes her finding refuge among a community of trans women priestesses of Aphrodite. Thetis becomes a human woman in this version who died giving birth to Achilles, but she was a vessel for the goddess Athena. Achilles of course gets recruited into the Trojan war like in the stories Deane draws inspiration from. But she also is magically transformed by her divine mother Athena, and gets the body she desires, with a womb.

    Yet it is not just a matter of replacing a cis male Achilles with a trans woman version of the character. Instead it’s a radical reimagining of Greek mythology, where the themes that a transfeminine Achilles brings up are brought front and center. Those who expect a “faithful” re-telling can look elsewhere. This is unfaithful to the point of being literally blasphemous. Greek myth was the product of a profoundly (trans)misogynistic patriarchal culture. And here it is reimagined in ways that center woman and specifically trans women. There are communities of trans woman in this version of the ancient world who are called the kallai, of which is that on Skyros is but one. Trans women are not just priestesses but also goddesses. Zeus is not the patriarchal king of the Gods, and goddesses are even more important than male gods. The changes are radical and I found Deane’s re-imagining into her own mythology and cosmology profoundly interesting. I won’t describe it in detail because finding out how she fashions a new mythology is a joyful act of discovery for an interested reader.

    It’s one that centers goddesses and women, but it’s not the ciscentric ones of various neopagan creepy vagina cults (pace Contrapoints). Instead it’s one where transfemininity is central, and where trans womanhood is revealed to be the birth of abstract thought and divinity. Achilles herself goes through what can only be described as an apotheosis.

    Not that gods and goddesses are good things necessarily. They are parasitic beings who feed on human sacrifice, both ritualistic and through war. Achilles is herself a violent and bloodthirsty person, perhaps because of her divine heritage. War is ultimately seen as a form of ritualistic human sacrifice in this novel. And that influences Achilles’s decision to stop fighting when the novel reaches the events of the Illiad. It’s such an interesting depiction of the gods. They feel both human and alien, going beyond the “humans with superpowers” they are often reduced to in pop culture. We get to see Athena as a weird birdmonster woman, and it’s great.

    At the center of the Trojan war is Helen, who is an immensely powerful goddess and sorceress. Her powers have been used by the gods to reshape the world before. But now she is done with being used, and wants to use the blood sacrifice of the Trojan war to destroy and re-shape the world herself.

    It’s a radical change to the rather characterless Helen of the myths, and I love it. She is not the prize passed around from man to man, never having her own agency. The original Helen was the patron saint of female characters that could be replaced with a sexy lamp. Here she is a delightful antagonist, who drives the plot and is immensely powerful. She has a fun evil personality as well, with this delightful homoerotic nemesis relationship to Achilles.

    Achilles is a wonderful main character in himself. Sure, she is a power fantasy for trans women, and that’s great actually, because that’s super-rare in fiction. That this novel has this bisexual trans woman character who is a great warrior and demigoddess for a heroine is part of why you should read it. Having macho man warrior king Agamemnon bottom for a trans woman is part of the fun.

    But she is also a great complex character with virtues as well as flaws. She is selfish, arrogant, brash, and bloodthirsty. But also capable of great kindness, love and self-sacrifice. There is for example a subplot where Achilles realizes her own privileges as a slave-owning warrior princess and grows to understand how cruel she has been to them. It leads to a kind of resolution near the end of the novel where she frees them and shares her wealth with them.

    The novel is full of great characters. Achilles’ relationship with Patroklos is not the m/m romance readers might expect. But the love is real, grounded in Patroklos being the only one in the family who recognizes Achilles as a trans girl during her childhood.

    Patroklos is married to an Egyptian woman named Meryapi. She is an intelligent cultured woman who has her own growth throughout the book, growing aware of her powers as a sorceress. Her close friendship with Achilles is one of the most beautiful friendships between women in fiction that I have read. It’s a depiction of actual, meaningful sisterhood, going far beyond the meaningless slogan.

    Briseis is another female character in the Illiad who could have been replaced with a sexy lamp. A slave who Achilles rapes and whose “theft” by Agamemnon drives the plot. Thankfully Deane’s version of the character is a massive improvement. Brisewos is a trans man Amazon, who becomes Achilles’ captive willingly to save his people from being destroyed by Achilles. He retains a considerable amount of agency in this situation, and actually willingly joins Agamemnon’s court, which Achilles accepts.

    Brisewos was at the center of the manufactured hate campaign against this novel for racism, started by a writer on twitter. It was a transmisogynistic and anti-semitic clusterfuck to be perfectly frank. It relied on doing a dishonest reading of Achilles as white and Brisewos as black, so it became “white heroine enslaves scary violent black man”. This was of course applying USAian concepts of ethnicity on the very different ancient Mediterranean world of the novel. It also left out a lot of context which revealed the agency Brisewos retained as a captive of Achilles. Claiming that he is depicted as being a violent savage black man also ignores that Achilles is depicted as more violent than he is. He is far from “savage” and is actually a voice of reason in most scenes where he appears. And Achilles clearly comes to the realization that her owning slaves is bad by the end of the novel and releases them. The controversy was ultimately built on lies.

    It’s telling how pervasive transmisogyny is because this kind of controversy based on nothing seems to occur literally everytime a trans woman publishes a book nowadays. Like people are suspicious of transfeminine people because they believe we are sexually perverted rapey men in dresses, so when they find a trans woman trying to have a career they will try to find some reason to ostracize her or end her career. And they will just outright manufacture a reason. It’s like that convo early on in Half-Life 2 about the Combine “They have no reason to come to our place. – Don’t worry, they’ll find one”.

    It happened last year to Torrey Peters and Dethttps://amidfusionsofwonder.wordpress.com/2022/11/30/detransition-baby-by-torrey-peters/ransition, Baby. Except I think the campaign against Deane and her novel while smaller in scope is more insidious. The hate campaign against Peters was lead by explicit TERFs, while the one against Wrath Goddess Sing came from supposedly trans-inclusive social justice spaces complaining about racism. They even accused Deane of transphobia for the sin of depicting transmisogyny against Achilles including violent bullying and using words like “faggot” in doing so, which is the height of chutzpah.

    It shows how transmisogyny is incredibly prevalent in supposedly trans-inclusive spaces, which are often more inclusive of TME trans people than anyone transfeminine. It’s more insidious because it’s cloaked beneath performative displays of how “trans women are women” and how it uses individual accusations against transfeminine people instead of open “trans women are not allowed” transmisogyny.

    Like the discourse wasn’t explicitly “Maya Deane shouldn’t have a writing career because she is transfeminine” (even though that was actually the reason for the campaign) but “Maya Deane shouldn’t have a writing career because she is racist (My source is that I made it the fuck up)”. Such discourse often obscures what is being done, like Deane was often described in vague terms as a “white queer” in order to hide the fact this hate campaign was actually against a Jewish trans woman.

    That kind of veiled transmisogyny harder to defend against than naked transmisogyny against transfems as a group, because you have to defend a supposed racist (or a rapist or a pedophile or whatever the accusation is) to even point it out. Otherwise the people doing the call-outs will just deflect with “I’m not a transmisogynist, because I’m not saying all transfems are evil, just this specific one (for reasons that I made up).” All to avoid a discussion of the systematic transmisogyny that causes mostly transfems to be targeted in this way.

    Of course the guy who manufactured the controversy had his own “queer” Greek mythology re-telling book to sell. So he might have just wanted to hurt the competition. The closest cinematic parallel is probably that scene in Amadeus where Salieri tries to sabotage Mozart’s career by lying about The Abduction from the Seraglio, claiming that a seraglio is a brothel.

    I have went on about this bullshit for long enough, and I’ll finish by linking to Dathomira’s excellent goodreads review. She is an Algerian trans woman and has clearly considerable historical and personal knowledge about the Mediterranean culturesphere that the novel deals with. The refrain in the hate campaign was “listen to people of color”, yet the opinions of transfeminine people of color was never asked for, despite them experiencing the intersection of oppressions that was most relevant to any discussion of this novel. And Dathomira supplies that perspective.

    And it’s a wonderful book. Wrath Goddess Sing is a really well-written book, with some beautiful lyrical prose. It’s an imaginative fantasy that adapts mythology in very interesting ways. It’s that rarest of novels, a transfeminine power fantasy. And it’s a novel with complex flawed and interesting characters, and develops engaging relationships between them. It’s a novel that talks about the folly of war, hierarchy and of worshipping gods that don’t care about you. It talks about the glory and tribulations of being transfeminine, what it means to be a woman and the beauty of female friendships.

    It’s a novel that takes some of the oldest stories in Western culture and subverts their patriarchal transmisogynistic ideology. It re-writes them to put women and especially trans women characters in its centre. It gives us a version of the stories of Achilles and the Trojan war and the greek gods where we exist and are allowed to affect the story. How important it is for trans people to find stories about people like them or creating them is actually a theme of the book. It’s a beautiful gift for such a skilled storyteller to give to her readers. It’s a gift that the transmisogynists did not want us to have, a lot of criticism against this book has been “how dare you change the myths?” and Maya Deane has braved a lot to give it to us.

  • Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

    Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters is an amazing novel.

    You might think that it being one of the first novels by a trans writer to be published by a major, mainstream publisher would mean it’s a safe and sanitized depiction of being transfeminine. But that’s not the case.

    Even if the premise is soap-operatic and may sound like the set-up to a silly comedy, albeit one dealing with provocative and heady themes. It’s set in contemporary New York. Ames is a detransitioned trans woman, who now lives as a man. Ames has an affair with Katrina, his manager at work and a recently divorced woman. Katrina gets pregnant, but Ames is not fully comfortable with assuming the masculine role of a father. So he contacts Reese, a trans woman who he had a years-long relationship with when he lived as Amy, but which fell apart. Reese really wants to be a mother, and Ames wants her to be another parent to Katrina’s and Ames’s child. It will create a queer family structure where Ames can feel more comfortable.

    It’s a ridiculous premise, both Reese and Katrina calls Ames a psychopath/sociopath for suggesting this. But they eventually agree to try it. And there is plenty of humour in the book, it’s a comedy in many ways.

    Still this is an emotionally affecting novel that deals with serious themes. It tells the story of these three women’s highly unusual attempt to build a family, with flashbacks to Amy’s and Reese’s past as it also tells the story of how their relationship formed and broke apart and Amy detransitioned into Ames.

    It’s so emotionally affecting because it dares to deal with trans people who are not perfect. They are not perfect feminist warriors for social justice, as inhuman in their perfectness as any idealized portrait of a saint. That might be what many readers, including many queers wants out of their media involving queer people. Escapism into a world where they don’t have to confront human flaws in their fiction.

    The two trans main characters in Detransition, Baby are instead very messyand flawed people. They don’t do trans womanhood right at all. Especially Amy/Ames who is a detransitioner, perhaps the ultimate failure for a trans person.

    Reese remains resolute in living as a woman, but she is a messy disaster queer. She deals with tons of internalized transmisogyny, which manifests in destructive relationships with terrible chaser men. She hides her faults behind a shell of a self-assured, witty, provocative and catty personality. But Reese also wants to be a mother, she wants a child to call her own.

    All these faults, this messyness in their personalities is what makes them so relatable, so human. I don’t want to go into detail with how I related to Amy and Reese, because I feel that would reveal too many of my vulnerabilities to the world. But the book is able to talk about the realities of being a woman and being trans, because its characters are not perfect.

    This book caused a controversy that centered around the depiction of Reese’s internalized transmisogyny, which she expresses in intentionally provocative ways. Of course, it was a transmisogynistic hate campaign from the start, started by Terfs and other transphobes, that used quotes from the book out of context to condemn Peters as a misogynist. The idea that Reese is not just a vehicle for the author’s opinions, that her abusive relationships with men are not some authorial ideal even if she deliberately seeks them out, seem to have never occurred to them.

    The treatment of the theme in the book itself is much more interesting. It talks about how living in a patriarchy shapes women’s psyches, both cis and trans, how it defines their very identities. Women define themselves by their oppression by men in the patriarchy, the pain and the abuse. That is true even for feminists, for whom women’s victimhood under the patriarchy is their defining characteristic. “Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do, which still places pain front and center”.

    And patriarchy also shapes our desires. Trans women are often accused of fetishising misogyny, but cis women do it as well. Many women have masochistic desires in their relationships with men, desires that are definitely connected to being raised in our patriarchal society It’s something that cis women writers, explicitly feminist or not have written about for ages. One of the most provocative statements in the book of how patriarchy and internalized misogyny shapes women’s desires, is “Every Woman adores a fascist”. I’ve seen it dragged out as proof of how much of a misogynist Peters is. But the sentence in italics in the book because it’s actually a famous quote from cis woman poet Sylvia Plath. It’s from her poem Daddy:”Every woman adores a Fascist,/The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you.”

    Peters’s novel continues this difficult depiction of how women’s identity and desires are shaped by patriarchy that earlier writers like Plath had explored. And it has no easy answers to this. It made me think really hard about these things, which is what good fiction should do. If our desires are shaped by internalized misogyny, it doesn’t make those desires non-valid. For of course there is no noble savage nature hidden in our mind beneath the layers of being socialized in a patriarchal society.

    But Peters has gotten so much criticism for her novel doing this, because she is a trans woman, and trans women are not allowed to have any internalized misogyny. That is a privilege reserved for cis women. We trans woman are expected even by our supposed allies to be perfect feminist role models, or else illegitimate. Our slightest failure in this regard is regarded as proof of our being misogynist men. The novel actually talks about this. The passage predicted and refuted the hate campaign against the book and Peters before it happened.

    “..liberal feminists – especially the transhating variety – would have a field day with her. She supposed that they would accuse her of misogyny, of being a secret man, a Trojan horse in slutty lingerie who sought to recapitulate under the guise of womanhood all the abusive tropes that they, in the second wave, had sought to put in the past. But you know what? She didn’t make the rules of womanhood; like any other girl, she had inherited them. Why should the burden be on her to uphold impeccable feminist politics that barely served her?”

    Reese is a depiction of a woman wanting to live up to some unattainable and unhealthy ideals of femininity. Her most tender desire is one that is pretty much impossible for a trans woman: she wants to be a mother. Her hope of fulfilling that in the weird and queer family structure that Ames tries to build is part of what gives the silly premise an emotional charge. Reese is a controversial and disagreeable character, and therefore so interesting and relatable.

    The story of Amy/Ames depicts a subject that we trans people are touchy about: detransition. That’s because it’s so often used against us. But it’s a thing that trans people sometimes do, trans people doing it is actually much more common than the mistaken cis people narrative pushed by the transphobic media.

    Amy’s story touches upon so much of the trans experience. She is a trans lesbian woman, and the book discusses how internalized transmisogyny and lesbophobia affects non-straight trans women. How they are stigmatized via concepts such as autogynephillia as perverted fetishists, and how they internalize this negative image.

    Her character also depicts how us trans people often experience dissociation living as our assigned gender at birth. Living as a man, Amy experiences a kind of dissociation from her feelings and her body. It’s such a common thing for trans people to experience, as we can’t truly identify with our AGAB persona that we are living as.

    It’s something that I experienced prior to transitioning, my own life, body and emotions felt distant to me, compared to my elaborate fantasy life and escapism through fictional media. That’s actually the one thing in this book I’m going to directly say related to my own feelings, because it’s something I’m pretty much over with my transition. In fact reading this book made me realize the extent of my own prior dissociation.

    This dissociation from one’s own feelings can however also be comfortable. Feeling emotions directly is hard when they are difficult, and even joy can be difficult to process. And for Amy it becomes too much. A traumatic experience breaks her. She experiences violence from a transphobic cis man as her relationship with Reese falls apart. She dons the armour against her emotions that is masculinity, escapes her own feelings into maleness and detransitions. She starts living as Ames.

    Detransition is something that trans people do. It’s driven by external pressures from living in a transphobic society most of the time. Living as a trans person, as a trans woman is made so difficult. It means living life as a freak, rejected by most people. Going back into repression is made so tempting. A detransition doesn’t mean that the person was never trans, or weak. It’s just that overwhelming forces are against trans people living their lives to the point that we sadly choose not to live them, either by suicide or detransition.

    Amy/Ames’s emotional dissociation as a man shows how a trans person could live such a life. The emotional armour of cis masculinity can feel safe and comfortable compared to the emotional vulnerability of being a trans woman. It’s why it can take a long time to realize you are trans.

    There is nothing simple about the novels depiction of these women’s lives, especially no easy answers. Accordingly the novel ends on an ambiguous note, with no resolution if the queer family of these three women will really work out.

    Detransition, Baby is truly a masterpiece. It might be one of my favourite books. It’s such a well-written character study. It made me think in new ways about both myself and wider societal issues. That’s the highest praise I can give a book. There is something refreshing about a novel that dares to depict the struggles of being transfeminine with such honesty and humour. That dares to be ambiguous and give no simple answers. It shows imperfect and messy transfeminine lives, where we struggle with more than just the acceptable struggles of external transphobia and dysphoria. I seldom related to the characters and story of a novel so much, in ways that I can’t comfortably explain.

    It’s more honesty than most TME people can take, dealing with difficult questions about being a woman and about being trans. Anyone who only wants art to be comfortably simple and escapist will be turned off. It’s not an obscurantist book, but the transfeminine perspective is so unwanted that it will be easily wilfully misunderstood by TME people. I’m happy this book made it into the mainstream and managed to get published by Penguin Random House. But that has gotten it attention from people that don’t have the capacity to understand it, and doesn’t want to. This is the cause of the transmisogynist campaign against this book that aims to destroy Torrey Peters’s writing career. The cis can’t accept a trans woman author. Yet I hope that Peters will keep on writing, we need her perspective so badly.

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