At the time I mentioned I’d started Old Skies, their most recent release. It’s a couple of months later and I’ve finished the game — which gives you an idea of how long it takes me to play even a relatively concise game.

Structurally, Old Skies takes a familiar episodic approach of the sort found in the Blackwell games. You play Fia, a time travelling agent who works for a rather dystopian company known as ChronoZen. The timeline itself is up for grabs as long as you’ve got the cash: want to meet your hero? Change a critical decision from your past? Solve a cold case murder?

Each jaunt into the past is its own contained storyline, set in a specific time and with new characters. Sometimes there are before/after times you can hop between in order to solve puzzles: do something in the past to affect something later on.

Something Wadjet Eye are experts in is pitching the difficulty of the puzzles. Even the best point-and-click adventures are infamous for their absurdity, filled with puzzles that require reverse engineering the strange minds of the game creators rather than actual puzzle solving. In the 90s, solutions would require randomly trying every eventuality until something worked, or simply calling the phone tip line. Old Skies, like the Blackwell series and Unavowed, gets it just right, with puzzles that make sense logically and almost always are solvable without resorting to a walkthrough guide.

This might be because writer-creator Dave Gilbert specialises in crime fiction. His stories are almost always investigations, with varying amounts of science fiction and fantasy. By rooting the games in crime fiction, the rules have to be clear, the clues evident, and there’s a sensible route from crime > solution. Although only one of the episodes in Old Skies is overtly a crime investigation, the structure of each story fits into the procedural setup. It’s rare to be confused about what to do next.

There are story benefits to this, in that the drama isn’t being continually undermined by the puzzles. In Old Skies the two are largely in sync and driving one another, and there’s a steady stream of realisation that made me both feel clever and also admire the game itself for being clever. This is quite different to, say, Case of the Golden Idol, which became too convoluted for my brain in its final couple of scenarios: I was unable to solve the puzzles, which in turn left me unable to clearly follow the story.

Old Skies is an agile thing, switching tone with each of its episodic tales. Some are pure farce, others tragedies, some violent. Being time travel, there are stories which intersect with real world events in ways that are both unsettling and beautiful. It’s more than a series of isolated adventures, though, with an additional story running in the background and in the ‘present day’.

Fia spends so much time working to ‘fix’ the timeline for other people that she’s left with a hollow shell of a life. One of the more intriguing concepts is that of ‘chronoshift’: the timeline adapting when something is changed in the past. The butterfly effect. The twist is that employees of ChronoZen, like Fia, are artificially ‘chrono-locked’, and thus unaffected by the timeline rewriting itself. Practically, this means that there’s no point building friendships outside of the job, because those people could be chronoshifted out of existence at any time.

It’s a brilliant concept that I don’t recall seeing before. Paradoxes are often at the heart of time travel fiction, but here we have a story that directly embraces paradoxes and uses them to expose an empty life. Fia and her colleagues are static islands floating in the time stream.

All of this without even having space to talk about the commoditisation of time and reality, and how it’s been turned into a capitalist venture in Old Skies. That’s an entire essay right there.

I’ll say no more, because the story is worth discovering for yourself. There were occasional moments where there was a bit too much trudging about for my liking, and the pacing is a little uneven at times, but these are minor quibbles.

Go play Old Skies before it’s chronoshifted out of existence.

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The setup is clean: we have two struggling actors in Hollywood, desperately trying to find their way. Simon Williams is young, ambitious and actually quite obnoxious, and has never landed a major role. His brother thinks he’s a loser. Then there’s Trevor Slattery, a washed-up British actor who was so coked up a decade earlier that he accidentally got hired by actual terrorists then sent to prison (that was in Iron Man 3, but you don’t need to have seen it).

They end up meeting each other, making for a very unlikely pair, and set about trying to secure roles in the upcoming superhero movie ‘Wonder Man’.

Oh, and the catch is that Simon has actual superpowers, but is desperately trying to hide them because all he really wants to do is be an Actor.

This manages to be the most grown-up thing Marvel has ever done on screen, without shying away from anything that’s come before. It’s also ‘grown-up’ in a way that doesn’t mean “more violent”. The showrunners here manage to thread a needle whereby they have a prestige drama with an incredible cast and superb writing, but still unashamedly have all the Marvel Stuff happening in the periphery. This is absolutely a scifi/fantasy show, but the engine behind it all is those two leads: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley are an incredible double act, able to be hilarious and poignant and tragic and affirming all within a single scene.

The entire show exudes style. It apparently had the smallest budget of all of the Marvel TV shows, but that’s had the consequence of forcing the showrunners to focus on the writing. It’s exquisitely paced, breaking the mould of so much Disney+ stuff never knowing whether it’s a TV show or a movie. The cinematography feels real: these are real buildings, real streets. Looks like they actually shot in LA.

Out of intent or necessity, the show jettisons a lot of the more formulaic excesses of the Marvel/superhero genre, and ends up with something more exciting, more emotional, more engaging and less expected.

At times, Wonder Man feels more like a Twilight Zone episode, with a cool high concept to explore and an unpredictable plot. I’m pretty sure it could be enjoyed by someone who has never seen any of the Marvel movies.

Simon Williams is a tricky character, with a risky performance. He could be deeply unlikeable, and is deeply flawed, but from the beginning we understand what makes him tick, and why he is who he is. Wonder Man is a character piece with two phenomenally strong leads, which in some ways is a return to the character-led approach of the very earliest Marvel films. The original Iron Man, Thor and Captain America films captured the attention of audiences because they had strong casting and made them all about their title characters. Later films forgot that simple but effective approach.

Wonder Man remembers, with the key difference being that the acting and writing here is on a completely different level.

Games, though, kept me going. One particular game, in fact: Unavowed. I couldn’t handle anything requiring extreme reflexes or motor skills, while anything too brainless put me into Covid Sleep (by which I mean that awful, not-quite-sleep fever that leaves you more tired when you wake). Unavowed sat in the sweet spot.

It’s design could be traced back easily to the point-and-click adventures of the 90s, which I’d had to watch at from afar due to not owning an Amiga. The only point-and-click I played at the time was Simon the Sorcerer, only properly discovering Monkey Island in my 20s. Unavowed is a modern, streamlined version of that style of game, while still retaining a pixel art style. It has a great story, decent puzzles and helped me through Covid.

After emerging from the other side, I wanted to know what else Wadjet Eye Games had done. Turns out they have a long back catalogue, and I decided to dive in with the Blackwell series. There are five games in the series, telling an increasingly epic story.

The Blackwell Legacy kicked things off in 2006. It introduces the main characters of Rosengela Blackwell and her ghost companion Joey. Turns out Joey has been ‘in the family’ for several generations, and Rosangela can now see other ghosts that are being blocked from moving on to the afterlife.

The game is structured as a series of murder mysteries, which you have to solve in order to help the ghosts find rest. It’s an effective setup that would make for a good TV show. The first game keeps the story simple and focused. Interactions involve examining and using items, sometimes combining things together, and checking through your notes to figure out evidence. Gathering information leads to dialogue choices that can help solve the mystery and free the ghosts.

The series continued with Blackwell Unbound (2007), an unexpected 1970s prequel that features a different protagonist — although Joey links the two games together. The story becomes more elaborate, with hints that there is more going on that the first game made apparent. The Blackwell Convergence (2009) returns to Rosangela and features multiple cases to solve and deepens the overarching mystery yet further.

Everything it turned up a notch for The Blackwell Deception (2011) that has significantly higher stakes and is a larger game. The finale, The Blackwell Epiphany (2014), goes even bigger and delivers a much grander ending than I could have expected when playing through the first entry in the series.

The whole thing is decently voice acted, which I imagine would have been quite unusual for indie puzzle adventure games back in the day. Dialogue and story works really well — Wadjet clearly know what they’re doing in that department. The actual puzzles are a mix: I’d say I figured out perhaps 70% of what I needed to, and relied liberally on a Steam walkthrough guide for the rest. There are numerous puzzles that I would never have solved by myself, which has always been a bit of a problem with this genre of story-based puzzle game. I’m personally quite comfortable checking a guide if I get stuck for more than five minutes, and in the case of the Blackwell games the story is why I’m here.

I entirely missed these games on their original releases, despite having always liked point-and-click games. Perhaps I simply wasn’t looking in the right places at the time, or in the late-2000s I may have been focusing more on fancy RPGs and shooters. It’s a shame, as playing these sequentially as they came out would have been enormous fun. Individually, the games are solid, but as an overall series it really shines. I can only imagine the excitement at the time as each new entry appeared.

The good news is that Wadjet are still doing their thing. Their latest game is Lost Skies, a time travelling adventure that is their first foray into HD visuals. I’ve only played the opening hour-or-so but it’s a lovely thing:

Each of Wadjet’s games that I’ve played demonstrates a growing sophistication and elegance. The Blackwell Legacy still holds up, but the UX tweaks with each title are significant.

Incidentally, I played through all of these on a Steam Deck, which I highly recommend. The Deck’s trackpads are perfect for playing older adventure games that were originally designed for a mouse. It feels very natural.

The last decade has been a disaster for tech. Taken over by sociopathic weirdoes, we’ve had one over-hyped dead end after another. Blockchain. Crypto. NFTs. Metaverse. AI. All potentially interesting technology, utterly ruined by the horrendous people evangelising them.

Wrapping all of those hype cycles up is social media in general, which presents the platonic ideal of enshittification. What began as an easy way to keep in touch with friends and family has mutated into something awful that has wholly broken the brains of adults and children. Journalists and politicians especially.

It’s not a surprise, given the goons running the mega-companies. We have an odd charisma vacuum running the world’s biggest social platforms. Not only does Zuckerberg not understand how ‘socialising’ works, turns out he also doesn’t understand how games work, or VR, or anything else. He got lucky with one product, bought his way into everything else, and every new thing he’s tried since has been an embarrassing disaster.

We have a radicalised extremist buying Twitter and declaring it the global ‘town square’, despite him clearly not understanding how towns work, or how society works in general. Again, there’s the pattern of getting lucky with one thing and buying success subsequently.

Machine learning has been quietly doing cool things for decades, but generative AI is being run by a buffoon who doesn’t understand art or culture, yet seemingly wants to take control of both. His faulty technology is plugged into everything whether it makes sense or not, pushed into our lives by weird executive-level acolytes who seem to hate interacting with actual humans. While his product encourages teenagers to kill themselves, breaks software, deletes databases and just makes shit up, investors continue to plough so much cash into the circular AI industry that it will most likely annihilate the global economy when it goes pop.

I rather like this from James Archer over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

“I’d like to propose the usage of “AI Brain” to describe the phenomena of ostensibly intelligent technologists instantly abandoning any sense of responsibility, creativity, good product design, and in many cases, basic human decency the minute they have artificial intelligence in front of their face.”

James Archer, RPS

I’ve always loved computers. The ZX Spectrum, the Acorn Archimedes A3000 and Risc PC. The Amiga 500, which I never owned but still stared at lovingly in magazines. I read entire walkthroughs for The Secret of Monkey Island when I was 11 years old, and didn’t get to actually play the game until I was in my early 20s. I’ve built every PC I’ve owned since 2001. I’ve always been into this stuff.

Part of the reason I’m so irritated by the Zuckerberg/Musk/Altman idiocy is that it feels like one of my hobbies has been stolen away. I can’t be enthusiastic about tech, because it’s been hijacked by mad tech bros who want to break the world so that it fits into their own dysfunctions.

And yet. There remains hope.

Back in 2022, Valve released the Steam Deck. A PC crammed into a handheld, it was a remarkable gadget. Imagine the Nintendo Switch but vastly more powerful and with a library of games stretching back decades, plus the ability to use it as an actual desktop PC if you wanted. It was an exciting bit of tech! No weird gimmicks: just a well-executed product that did what it set out to do. It’s probably the best gadget I’ve ever owned.

Fast forward to earlier this month, when Valve announced three new hardware products: the Steam Machine, the Steam Frame and the Steam Controller. Again, all three are neatly designed gadgets designed for specific purposes. No random veneer of meaningless AI buzzwords. No icky data harvesting or weird advertising.

A controller, a gaming PC and a VR headset. Ta-da. See, that wasn’t hard, was it, tech industry?

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Valve and Steam aren’t perfect, of course. They have issues around community moderation, DRM and legacy OS support. They exert enormous force over PC gaming, which is problematic even if they have earned it by being good at what they do. But on the whole, they are doing a much better job of being custodians of PC gaming than Microsoft.

Much is still unknown. These devices haven’t been properly tested and benchmarked. Most annoyingly, prices have yet to be announced, which makes my enthusiasm rather temporary and theoretical. There’s a price range in which all three products are hugely exciting, and there’s a price range where they are largely irrelevant curiosities. We’ll see where they end up.

For now, though, they exist as cool bits of tech. Cool tech! Remember that? Uncompromised, unenshittified. It’s refreshing to be able to enthuse about something I’ve always loved: gaming, hardware, tech design. Being Valve, they don’t mind what you do with their tech: experimentation is encouraged.

Which brings me back to the point of this newsletter, and working through my Infinite Backlog. The Steam Deck helped with my gaming backlog, enabling me to grab 10 minutes here and there, rather than being chained to the PC in my office. When I was on the train back from London last week I fired up Ghost of Tsushima and time zipped by.

I mostly play indie and older games. The big AAA releases from Ubisoft and EA don’t tend to be of much interest, so it should all work rather nicely through the Steam Machine.

Anybody else keeping an eye on what Valve are up to?

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I enjoyed the demo back in the summer, and it was immediately evident that the game had unusually good writing and performances. Now that I’ve played through the first two episodes, I was clearly underestimating what AdHoc had in store for us.

First up, I’ll let you know when I get into spoilers.

Dispatch follows Robert Robertson, formerly known as Mecha Man, grounded since his Iron Man-style suit got destroyed. In need of a career shift, Robert ends up working in a superhero call centre, responding to emergency calls from across the city.

The game flips between loosely interactive conversations in which you choose the general direction of travel, and a more strategic mode in which you assign (dysfunctional) heroes to specific jobs based on their skillset. Crucially, the call centre management half of the game is actually fun, laced with comedy throughout.

It’s very knowing, very funny, with pin-sharp writing and a great cast. I wasn’t expecting the level of polish: the animation and general visual design is superb, often surpassing animated TV shows in terms of style and subtlety. Music is brilliant. It’s a hugely confident production from top to bottom.

AdHoc is staffed by people who used to work at Telltale Games, working on stuff like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us. Dispatch is a significantly stripped back evolution of those games: there’s no actual movement here, story events being highly authored and scripted (I’m not clear how much the story alters based on your decisions). The Walking Dead felt like it grew out of the 90s point-and-click genre, but Dispatch is pulling more from visual novels. We nudge the drama this way or that, but don’t have any real agency.

The hacking mini-game and the central call centre management aspect is much more of a solid game. Trying to figure out the best combination of heroes is fun, and often amusing even if you get it (deliberately) wrong: like sending a terrifying man-bat to retrieve a child’s balloon.

Less successful are the ‘quicktime events’ that take place during episode 1’s opening action sequence. As with almost all QTEs in the entire history of gaming, they’re awkward and feel a bit shoehorned in. Notably, the game gives you the option right form the start to simply turn them off, so you can sit back and enjoy the animation. It feels underdeveloped, though it doesn’t harm the overall impact.

It’s the characters, the writing, the performances which make Dispatch work so well. And yet, I don’t find myself thinking “I wish they’d just made a TV show.” Unlike other games made by frustrated film directors, where lengthy cutscenes get in the way of the game you’re supposed to be playing, Dispatch feels like something more unique. It’s not always ‘a game’, but it’s also not ‘a TV show’. It combines the two and finds an entirely fresh format. I can’t quite put my finger on how they’ve done it, but AdHoc have whipped up a special sauce here.

Back to that episodic release schedule, which has inevitably been ‘controversial’ in some quarters (judging from the Steam reviews, at least). They are releasing two episodes each week until the story is done, with eight in total. I’ve seen some grumblings about this, from people who don’t understand why they didn’t just release the entire game as a single thing.

For me, it’s been entirely a positive thing. Each episode is about an hour long, which contributes to Dispatch feeling more like a TV show than a traditional game. I’ve also been thoroughly enjoying Ghost of Tsushima, having been very late to that particular party, but it’s the exact opposite: a giant game that demands a vast amount of your time. I loved being able to hop into Dispatch and play the first episode in a single evening: it’s a satisfying story, with a proper beginning, middle and end.

It meant I couldn’t wait to get back to episode 2, which I played last night. Episodes 3 and 4 are out on Wednesday (my birthday!). That pacing of release creates an added tension and excitement, and builds in space to ruminate and cogitate. This is the first game I can recall having that water cooler element, in which everyone is playing along at the same time.

Something like Ghost of Tsushima is wonderful, but is also sprawling. It’s impossible to talk about it in anything other than vague terms with another player, because our experiences will be so different, and we’ll be at different points in the story. Most games have always been closer to the streaming model of TV, as I moaned about over here:

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Dispatch harkens back to the stories I loved in the 90s, when I’d rush into school to discuss the latest episode of Babylon 5 or Buffy. That’s not an experience we’ve often had in gaming.

Anyway, it’s very good. Go play it.

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Spoilers ahead:

So, in the spirit of the episodic release, some speculation:

1. We don’t know much about Shroud. We’ve not seen beneath the mask, so they could well be another character we’ve met and we’d have no idea.

2. Toxic as a villain who is literally and metaphorically toxic was brilliant. And the crotch shot rather sets the tone early on, in case anyone was going in expecting Marvel.

3. Loved the stuff with Invisi-girl in episode 2: specifically, that she dropped off a glazed donut as a surprise present after the botched gig, but then went back and smashed the donut up after the row in the kitchen. She’s fairly instantly become my favourite character. Also, only being able to go invisible while holding one’s breath is a great twist on the power.

4. Chase is, at some point, going to be forced to use his speed power to do something remarkable, like a save that nobody else can get to in time. As a consequence, he’ll age to a 90 year old, or potentially just die. I’m not looking forward to that, because he’s an incredibly funny character.

5. Pretty sure that Phenomaman is going to turn out to be a baddie. Or, at the very least, he’ll be massively ethically compromised in some way.

6. The SDN rebuilding the Mecha Man suit seems suspicious. Ulterior motives there, methinks.

7. Does the dog have powers?

This newsletter is called Infinite Backlog because I have a ridiculous list of games, movies, books and comics that has built up over the last 12-or-so years. Coincidentally, my son was born 12 years ago. 🙄 I try to buy as few games as possible, because the scale of the backlog there is frankly embarrassing. Each new game that is added to the pile makes the situation even more critical.

There are great games in that backlog, and I want to get to them. But at some point the jabber about 1000xResist hit some sort of pressure threshold, which then combined with a Steam sale, and there I was with a new game on the list. It’s telling that it’s the only game I’ve played since starting it: I’ve had little time for anything else.

Here’s a trailer:

I mean, it’s not Call of Duty.

Drawing comparisons to other games is tricky and probably a waste of time. The closest I can get, which is based primarily on mood, is iconic anime Evangelion. They share an ambiguity and a despair. They both deal in hopeless situations and refuse to adhere to typical storytelling structures and beats. There are some visual similarities, too, as you may have spotted in the trailer.

I won’t be spoiling anything here. The game is story-driven, and to go into too much detail about it would be to remove some of its mystery. Even the setup is vague, told in a non-linear manner with very little handholding. Clearly, the world has ended, although we’re not sure how or why. You’re a sister, living in an enclosed environment with an artificial sky. Your sisters are in fact clones, all with assigned roles.

You explore the present and the past, hopping through surreal visions known as ‘communions’. Think highly immersive VR. You are known as Watcher, and appropriately it is up to you to observe and try to figure out what is going on.

While the story is told non-linearly, the game itself is very authored, very strict and scripted in its storytelling. You move through the ten chapters, exploring the habitat and jumping into communions. Some communions include simple sort-of-platforming via sort of magical zip lines, while others incorporate a time hopping mechanic that enables you to switch the current location between multiple periods. If a route is blocked, for example, you can travel to an earlier time when the passage was not blocked, walk past, then hop back.

While the game dabbles with those mechanical quirks, the engine here is dialogue. Conversations with the other characters pulls the story along, with occasional opportunities to make a dialogue choice. The writing is good, and highly idiosyncratic. It has a flavour of poetry to it, and the patina almost of a religious text. Unusually for an indie game of this sort, the entire thing is voiced. The acting for me was decent, but variable in its delivery. Some scenes work brilliantly, others feel unintentionally stilted.

Although dialogue is the main mode of interaction, my memories of the game are in fact bound up with the visuals and the themes being explored. Both are hard to pin down, involving real world history and geography as well as wild explorations into science fiction territory. It’s as much about family and an immigrant experience as it is about the end of the world and cosmic horror. 1000xResist refuses to ever be pinned down.

Visually, the game is endlessly peculiar. This is where it is distinct from the usual visual novel, to become something more than text and backdrops. It employs a highly stylised lighting method which is unrealistic, shifting between dreamlike and looking like a render from the 2000s. I went back and forth on how much of this was deliberate production design, versus budgetary limitations. I’m still not entirely sure. Perhaps that’s the point: to be slippery, and to obfuscate the truth of reality. Everything is hyper unreal, which is often disturbing and unsettling, occasionally beautiful.

Having not played and finished it, I’m not surprised that I went in not knowing what to expect. It’s a fiendishly difficult game to describe. Even if I were to include spoilers, it still wouldn’t really do the job. The story being told is one that works on subtextual and metaphorical levels, and requires the mood and atmosphere as much as the dialogue and actions.

If you enjoyed the likes of Gone Home, Firewatch, Tacoma, Dear Esther and Proteus, you’ll likely find something to enjoy here. If the abstract horror of Evangelion connected, even with all of its refusal to clarify what it was saying, then you’ll be right at home.

1000xResist isn’t like much else. I’m very glad that it jumped to the top of my backlog.

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That all-in immersive viewing of films peaked with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’ve continued to love films, of course, but Return of the King is the last time I remember being fully committed, of the outside world disappearing entirely while I watched the Riders of Rohan storm across the plains of Gondor.

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There have been films to entirely suck me in, still, but not in the same way. Under the Skin, Civil War, The Banshees of Inisherin and Get Out (to pick four at random) are captivating to the point of not being able to look away, but I’m approaching them from a more intellectual, adult perspective. It’s a slightly different relationship with the material.

In my thirties I thoroughly enjoyed Marvel’s output, which peaked with Avengers: Endgame. Huge, ambitious entertainment. But I always felt that slight bit of distance. I was watching movies, rather than visiting places and living lives. Recapturing that glorious feeling of total surrender to storytelling has proved difficult.

All of which is a long-winded introduction to Fantastic Four: First Steps, a movie that transported me back to my teens in the 90s and the sensation of being pulled through the cinema screen and into the story’s world.

This wasn’t something I had expected. Thunderbolts was entertaining but was tonally all over the place. Captain America: Brave New World is an oddly timid film that establishes an interesting political thriller, then lacks all courage to actually explore the politics. I’ve found myself enjoying comic book movies as a fun way to hang out with my 12 year old son, and probably wouldn’t otherwise bother to see them at the cinema.

Anyway, off we went to see the new Fantastic Four. Not the best seats, being slightly too close to the front, and it turned out that our screen had a faulty speaker that rattled anytime something bassy happened in the soundtrack. Most distracting and not ideal for settling into a film. Which makes it all the more surprising just how much I was sucked in.

Right from the off, the film is a good time. The production design is gorgeous — as Mark Kermode says, even if you have no interest in the story, or Marvel, or comics, or blockbusters generally, it’s worth a watch just for the sets and costumes and props. The story starts quietly and confidently and is entirely comfortable hanging out with the family of Reed Richards and wife Sue Storm, her brother Johnny Storm and best friend Ben Grimm as they do Family Things. Despite the retro-futurist settings, the first half of the film takes its time and has the resolve to be quite mundane.

Despite their powers and elevated status, the film very much grounds the characters as being fairly normal people. The story celebrates science and discovery and demonstrates how powerful those factors can be when matched with kindness. It feels quietly subversive in 2025, which says more about 2025 than the film. It’s old fashioned, in the sense that it presents a bunch of superpowered beings and assumes that they will be good people. There’s no 1980s genre deconstruction going on here.

(I’m not going to get into spoilers in this post, beyond what’s already been in trailers)

Anyway, it was all jolly good fun, up until the halfway point. . There’s an extended sequence that significantly expands the scale of the film and deepens the stakes, in ways I hadn’t quite anticipated. I love it when a story, be it in a book, a movie, a game or anything else, lulls you into a false sense of security, of thinking I know what this is, and then does the unexpected, or takes the more ambitious route.

The sequence perfectly marries the intimate and personal with galactic threat. It’s being epic and huge, as well as small and relatable. It’s a cleverly constructed sequence that left me breathless. I was in. And I remained there until the end credits, entirely committed to the tale being told.

This is one of those films that knows precisely what it wants to do, and then goes and does it. That doesn’t require it to be the best film ever made, but it does give it the opportunity to be the best version of itself. I thought the rather overlooked Prey from a couple of years back was like that: perfectly poised to do exactly what it wanted to do.

Director Matt Shakman previously put together every episode of Marvel’s Wandavision, itself a masterclass in tone shifting and world building while never losing sight of the characters at the centre of it all.

Here’s a specific creative choice I adored: the film’s approach to visual effects is using Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim playbook, and not a little of Kubrick’s 2001 and Nolan’s Interstellar. The camera is grounded and exists physically, even when the film is full CG. Every shot is designed with purpose and as if a camera operator had to get the shot for real. Spaceships are filmed with cameras strapped to their hulls. Giant planet-killer Galactus is shot from street level, or from the rooftops of buildings. The camera only whizzes about more dramatically if it’s following Johnny Storm, as if there’s a superpowered camera operator following along.

It’s weird how rare this approach to VFX is, especially in high concept speculative fiction which really benefits from that grounding. James Cameron has always understood this: the cinematography in the Avatar films feels real, as if they filmed it on location, because most of it is rooted in virtual mocap (shame about the scripts).

Fantastic Four: First Steps is a film in which every single department is working at the top of their game. Costumes, set design, visual effects, Giacchino’s crazy score, the cast, the tight screenplay.

And it comes in under two hours. This on the heels of Superman also being a neat two hours. Are we returning to blockbuster filmmakers knowing how to tell efficient, concise stories? There’s no bloat here, and the film is all the better for it.

I’m still surprised how much I enjoyed Fantastic Four. I’m a sucker for stories about being a dad (or a mum), as long as it isn’t done in a saccharine way. For all its retro optimism, Fantastic Four is all about how difficult it is to be a parent, and how babies are quite annoying and challenging and frustrating. It’s about the fear of change, but going for it anyway.

If I was still 15 and it was the mid-90s, I’d be in cinema heaven. Fantastic Four took me back to that feeling, without simply being a greatest hits nostalgia-fest.

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There’s a common theme in criticism of the superhero genre which emerges every time a new movie is on the horizon, which is that there are too many characters. Too many villains, too many heroes. The trailers for SUPERMAN certainly gave that impression, and I couldn’t quite fathom how it was going to squeeze everything into its pleasantly disciplined two hour run time.

Turns out, the way you do this is to hire great filmmakers. James Gunn in particular knows what he’s doing, because he’s done it before. The Guardians of the Galaxy films are packed with characters and ensembles, but everyone gets their own little character arc. So it is with SUPERMAN, in which no character is extraneous. Except for a fun cameo near the end, nobody is showing up here solely to market future DC Studios ‘content’ — every character is woven into the story and serves to give the film extra layers.

Gunn again proves himself to be a remarkably versatile writer and director. I’d never have predicted that the creator of PG Porn and Slither would end up making a Superman film Even after Super, I wouldn’t have drawn a throughline. His earlier work was shot through with such grim cynicism, which would seem to be wholly incompatible with Superman. The Guardians films lean heavily on a weary sarcasm as a way in to their weirdness.

SUPERMAN is different again, fully embracing the warmth and cosy optimism of the character (Clark says things like ‘gosh’ and ‘golly’). Gunn’s edgier humour is dialled down. Unlike Snyder, who had to bend the Man of Steel to his own palette of grimdark, it is Gunn who adapts himself to the material.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t still super weird. There are visuals and characters in here that are deeply peculiar. The film doesn’t hold back and drops us right in at the deep end. Anyone who is more used to semi-realistic Batman films or the Christopher Reeve, Brandon Routh and Henry Cavill Superman films are going to have something of a shock at discovering how mad the DC universe can be.

Here’s the thing: Gunn gets that you have to remember the Normal Stuff when making something on this scale. He excelled at finding space for normality within the otherwise crazy Guardians films, and does so again here. We get Lois and Clark hanging out in her apartment, making dinner and having a chat. We have scenes in the Daily Bugle’s offices. A lot takes place at ‘street level’, showing Superman’s interactions with ordinary people. That grounds the film, anchors it with normalcy, and gives us something to cling to when caught in the storm of metahuman excess later.

David Corenswet is more-or-less note-perfect as Clark Kent/Superman. I’m not sure what else to say: it’s an iconic role that is really hard to nail, especially in the shadow of Christopher Reeve, but Corenswet and Gunn find a way to do it, feeling both classic and modern.

What’s really got everyone a-chatter is the film’s apparent prescience and its references to the real world. Here is a film that is about metahumans and monsters and aliens, yet engages with themes that are pertinent to 2025 and seem to be tackling real world issues. There’s an international border war, with an aggressor state attacking a smaller one, a conflict made more complex by the USA’s complicity and Lex Luthor’s corporate entanglements. The film addresses online trolling, rage bait and content farming (obviously a subject relevant to Gunn’s almost-derailed career).

And then there’s Lux Luthor. Nicholas Hoult is superb, perfectly capturing the genius of the comics, working in some exaggerated hysterics but refraining from tipping over into the theatricality of previous screen incarnations. It’s hard to tell how much is deliberate and how much we’re all projecting, but the inspiration seems to be Elon Musk, and tech bros of his ilk. The ‘move fast and break things’ arseholes who think they own the world (and, in some cases, do) and have a gaping moral black hole at their core.

There’s a detail in the film that feels bizarrely prescient: Luthor has surrounded himself with very young people. Sycophants and believers, geniuses and tech-heads who worship at Luthor’s throne. It’s such a perfect encapsulation of DOGE and everything wrong with the corporate-political mess in the US, yet this film was written and produced long before the current Trump administration.

None of this is overtly stated. The film doesn’t feel the need to make grand political points. It tells its own story, and the relevance emerges naturally. I found Luthor to be the most compelling character in the film: driven by abject jealousy and fear, but clearly a genius, alternating between extreme rationality and intense emotion. I’ve seen it noted elsewhere that the film resonates because we now live in an era of actual supervillains.

SUPERMAN shouldn’t really work. It certainly is stuffed with characters and wacky ideas, and it cares not for easing audiences into its world. Gunn’s key skill seems to be in balancing huge casts and complex worlds while connecting the plot to themes that matter. He makes it look easy.

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I’ve had a vague theory about 3D being necessary for certain types of exploration. 2D games tend to have a tighter, more authorial style, where every pixel is carefully placed. When the third dimension is added it’s a multiplier of possibilities.

This was most apparent to me when playing Return of the Obra Dinn and Case of the Golden Idol back to back. Both are mystery games in which you play a detective, gathering clues and piecing together the correct order of events. The solving of mysteries involves combining verbs and names in a particular order. The games are very similar structurally, but Golden Idol is presented in classic 2D point-and-click fashion, while Obra Dinn is in 3D.

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For me, Golden Idol felt more like I was hunting around the screen for clues and pixels left behind by the designers. Obra Dinn, with its 3D presentation, felt more like I was exploring a real space, with all the random possibilities within. This is an illusion, of course — they’re both as designed as each other, limited by the intentions of their cretaors. Three dimensional space, for detective games, adds an additional layer of puzzle which is navigation. There is no challenge in Golden Idol related to movement, whereas Obra Dinn combines observation with navigation to produce something fuzzier, despite their still only being a single ‘correct’ solution.

Outer Wilds is another good example. In theory there could be a 2D, point-and-click or platforming version of the game, with the story intact. But its strength lies in the mysteries of navigation as well as story. Simply getting from A to B is part of the investigation, as in Obra Dinn, and coming to an understanding of a space is as much of a joy as solving a puzzle. Golden Idol doesn’t have that: you flick through a handful of 2D screens and immediately understand the physical space, and all that is left is arranging the puzzle pieces.

To be clear, all of these games are excellent. I’m not saying that 3D is inherently better, as many of my favourite games are 2D. But I do think for exploration and discovery purposes, 3D brings a lot to the table.

Sable, then. That’s what I’m supposed to be writing about. This is Sable:

Sable is a game about space, and place. It’s architecture as exploration.

I went to a talk years ago — as in, probably two decades ago — with Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair, in which the latter talked about psychogeography. To quote from the Wikipedia page:

“…the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals." One of the key tactics for exploring psychogeography is the loosely defined urban walking practice known as the dérive. As a practice and theory, psychogeography has influenced a broad set of cultural actors, including artists, activists and academics.”

Clearly, my understanding of psychogeography doesn’t go much deeper than Wikipedia, but Sable reminded me of it. Even though it’s mostly rural, desert environments, rather than urban, it is full of its own history. The environment of the game reveals paths trodden and remnants of prior civilisation.

You’re not a stranger in a strange land, as in so many adventures and RPGs. This is your home, and always has been, but at the beginning of the game you go out into the world as an adult for the first time, exploring it by yourself and thereby seeing it anew.

It’s a layered game, told mostly through environmental details rather than direct exposition. There are quests, but they are generally lightweight and mostly excuses to visit interesting places.

Playing Sable feels like going on holiday, but a holiday in which you’re travelling and discovering a landscape, rather than sitting on a beach. The entire game hangs on the question of “I wonder what’s over that next dune?”

To get a bit more specific, this is perhaps best thought of as Breath of the Wild without any combat. There is no threat here, no need to learn how to do perfect parries. You run about in third person, hopping on your hoverbike to travel longer distances.

There’s a stamina wheel that counts down as you climb, turning traversal into mini-puzzles. You can increase your stamina, but even then the challenge is primarily in figuring out how to get from A to B. Considering it’s set in a series of deserts, the game manages to find ways to incorporate an impressive verticality.

The art style is very Moebius, very stripped back and stylised. Using the photo mode produces inevitably gorgeous images. Vistas are frequently breath-taking, as is the detail and sheer scale of the interiors. I’m avoiding spoilers here, because the game’s appeal is in how you stumble upon the world.

You can find new outfits, which are cosmetic and have no impact on what you can do (although cheeky descriptions note how clothing is better for hand-to-hand combat and similar — even though there is none). The bike designs are more versatile and do have a bigger impact on handling and speed, as well as being endlessly visually exciting.

It’s a delight to play a big, open world game that is a) not actually that big, b) can be played in under 10 hours and c) does not gate progress through combat.

I’ve got no problems with huge RPGs that have challenging combat. The Witcher 3 is probably my all-time favourite game. I recently loved Eternal Strands. But when every open world game requires a 100-hour commitment and the learning of an entirely new skillset, it can start to feel like homework. I haven’t bothered playing any Ubisoft games for over a decade, because they sound like too much work. Too big, too much random stuff on the to-do list.

Sable is the opposite of all of that, but without sacrificing the core appeal of a big, open world. It retains the exploration, but jettisons everything else, and it mostly pulls it off.

There is jank, which is perhaps inevitable for such a small team. The bikes are never as exciting to drive as it feels like they should be, and I inevitably went for the fastest bike and stuck with it, because I wanted to get about the place quickly. Bikes with better ‘handling’ didn’t seem to have a point, given that good handling is never really required.

Climbing is decent, but not as good as Breath of the Wild or Eternal Strands. It can feel awkward, and the camera frequently goes nuts and leaves you confused about where you are.

Quests are low-key, on purpose, but rarely give themselves the depth or time to dig into the characters. Combined with everyone wearing masks, and the personalities you encounter end up always feeling rather distant.

It’s a game primarily about place, for me. It’s people recede into the background, dwarfed by their surroundings. The landscape and its ruins are the main character, even before Sable herself. It sits in my memory as a place I visited, unique in all of gaming.

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Both Citizen Sleeper games are text-focused visual novels cleverly interwoven with roleplaying elements of chance and character advancement. It’s not purely a text experience, with the world presented in a stripped-down, minimalist 3D. You navigate around the locations — a space station in the first game, multiple asteroids and cobbled-together zero-g settlements in the sequel — visiting people and places and making decisions about where to put your time and effort.

That effort is represented by five d6 die, rolled at the start of each in-game cycle/day. Low dice make it difficult or dangerous to accomplish tasks, while high dice make it easy. Your chosen character and the way you develop them influences what they’re good at, and each character type has a missing skill. As a result, there are opportunities for multiple playthroughs depending on where you focus your attributes.

As well as the dice, there are also ‘clocks’. Each cycle you roll a new set of dice, as well as taking care of concerns such as where you’re getting your food and fuel. At the end of each cycle you have a rest, then begin again. Ending a cycle also advances various clocks in the world: timers ticking down to specific events. Sometimes you’ll be waiting for a crew member to finish running an experiment. Other times, an enemy will be tracing your position and you have to leave before they arrive.

If this is all sounding very mechanical and artificial, it’s not at all how the game feels to play. That’s the real genius here, which is that all of these systems combine to create something quite naturalistic. The clocks and dice recede into the background, and instead you simply feel the pressure of time marching on, and a good set of dice feels like you hopped out of bed after a good night’s sleep. Roll a bad set of dice and you woke up with a headache and feeling depressed.

There are additional twists: dice can break and glitch, instead of health you have an increasing level of stress. Resources are always scarce. The Citizen Sleeper games are as far from a power fantasy as you can get, with you playing a downtrodden, hunted and broke artificial human (a ‘sleeper’). Most of the game involves scrounging for scraps and never feeling like you have a secure foothold.

Going back to the mechanical structure, and how it interacts cleverly with the narrative, I’m most reminded of Signs of the Sojourner.

The systems are very different, with Signs of the Sojourner being a deck building card game and Citizen Sleeper built around dice. Connecting the two approaches is that they’re both using these established game elements as metaphors for character and social interaction.

To explain:

Signs of the Sojourner is all about communication and forming connections with people as you travel about the world. Some cards are compatible, some not. If you encounter someone with a wildly different deck of cards, you’ll have trouble understanding one another. The genius trick is that while having these card-based conversations you exchange cards; as a result, your own deck shifts towards being more compatible with that person. Implied here is that by talking with each other, you are exchanging ideas and points of view and context. Through conversation, you’re better able to communicate the next time you meet them. The game represents changing opinions and social dynamics, all through cards.

Hard to describe, but endlessly clever.

Citizen Sleeper uses dice to explore stress and scarcity. Glitching and broken dice represent injury and deteriorating mental health. The random dice you roll at the beginning of a cycle directly affect what you can do, and how ambitious you can be. It’s about coping with adversity. As the game progresses and you complete tasks, points can be used to upgrade your character’s skills — just like in any other RPG. In Citizen Sleeper this isn’t to make you more powerful or give you new combat skills. It’s more about competency and confidence: better able to cope with the demands of the day, even if you wake up and roll a bad set of dice.

It makes me think of how I am aged 44 compared to 22 or younger. Back in my student days, if I woke up feeling tired and like I couldn’t be bothered with the day, I’d just slob about. As a middle-aged parent, that’s not an option — I still have things to do, regardless of how energised I feel in the morning! But that’s OK, because over the years I’ve developed coping techniques and improved my competency and skills.

There’s another side to the game, outside of the metaphorical skill checks and actions, and that’s the written story. Citizen Sleeper 2 is a dense game with a lot of words to read. There are occasional choices to make, and the way you approach the wider challenges will significantly shift what happens in the prose sections, but make no mistake that this is a highly authored experience.

That’s a big part of what I love about the game. Citizen Sleeper 2 is a game with a point of view and something to say. There’s nothing anonymous or distant about the story being told.

It helps that the writing is good. The whole thing would fall apart if it weren’t, but Gareth Damian Martin’s words bind the experience together. This is science fiction, full of Big Ideas, but it leans into literary stylings rather than the more common pulp adventure of video games.

Playing on a Steam Deck especially, able to play the game anywhere in the house or outside, my lingering memory of Citizen Sleeper 2 is halfway between having read a book and played a game. It’s satisfying and clever mechanically, while the written parts easily hold their own against any of the books on my shelves.

Did I mention the gorgeous art and music? I should have, as both are top tier. It’s an elegantly crafted game from top to bottom.

One day, when I finish Tales from the Triverse, I’d love to have a go at making my own (very small) game. It would be narratively-driven, of course, and Citizen Sleeper has such a compelling model. In fact, I’d love to see other writers and developers be able to play with the game’s building blocks, the dice and resource systems to tell other stories.

Highly recommended, as is the first game. I’d suggest starting with the first game, as it’s simpler and introduces the setting in a more contained fashion.

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Updates from Gareth Damian Martin, developer of the Citizen Sleeper series and In Other Waters

My previous exposure to Japanese animated stories was very limited and I think fairly typical for someone my age growing up in the UK: I’d seen a couple of Ghibli films, had watched Akira and Ghost in the Shell, had watched in perplexment at university while housemates watched Urotsukidoji on late-night TV. I had a weird, badly edited ‘movie’ version of Robotech on VHS that made no sense.

My son’s growing interest in anime and manga began about four years ago, starting with Pokemon and the Legend of Zelda manga adaptations. At some point Naruto entered the scene, and as he was only 10 years old we thought we’d better watch the show with him to make sure it was suitable.

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There have been a handful of shows I’ve watched with my son that have become legit, unironic favourites of mine. The remakes of Voltron and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the latter of which was an influence on the development of my own Triverse series (and sent me down a very rewarding rabbit hole to discover ’s other fine work). The Star Wars Clone Wars and Rebels series, which are very uneven but have real high points. All of these I’d never have watched without having a small child.

As his interest in manga increased, so did mine. I binged read the entire Attack on Titan, and we embarked upon watching Naruto.

I wasn’t prepared for Naruto to end up being one of my top five shows of all time, yet here we are. Along the way, it taught me new approaches to writing serial fiction and upended all of my thoughts around story pacing and world building.

I’ll be avoiding any major spoilers in this piece.

Flashback storytelling

One aspect of the Naruto anime that I struggled with for most of the first season was its reliance on flashback storytelling Every other episode, seemingly, the narrative would fork into a retrospective on a particular character, often an antagonist. It’s a highly disruptive way of telling a story, in which it constantly interrupts itself.

In the middle of a tense fight? Let’s stop the action to spend an entire episode or two exploring events that took place a decade earlier. It takes show-not-tell to the extreme: what could be a single line of expository dialogue is expanded to entire scenes. The backstory for Haku and Zabuza, for example, in season 1.

I’ve always had the understanding that flashbacks are a lazy form of storytelling. Whether this is something I was actually taught in my student days or simply something I’ve picked up when observing it done poorly in UK/US stories, it took me quite some time to get over my preconception.

The flashbacks in Nartuo become ever more effective at recontextualising scenes and characters, building a puzzle box of a narrative that leans heavily on unreliable narrators and scarcity of information. Everything fits together, and we’re slowly given the pieces, but the whole picture only comes into focus late in the game.

Creator Masashi Kishimoto uses flashbacks as empathy engines, deployed especially effectively to add dimensions to villains. Over and over we’re privy to the origin stories of horrendous people, only to realise that they had clear motivations and possibly even noble intensions. The story of Sasori is a case in point, shifting the character from terrifying to tragic, without ever undermining his threat or corruption.

That’s why it works: the flashbacks are not there for exposition or plot (although they do that, too, of course), but to deepen understanding of character. The plot of Naruto is wide, but the character explorations are deep.

Of course, I’ve only seen the anime. Reading the manga is next on my list, and I’m intrigued to find out whether it employs the same overall narrative structure.

Verbose narration and time-warped dialogue

Another storytelling tool which I was always told was lazy and to be avoided was the voiceover. Sure, film noirs from the 40s and 50s could get away with it, but otherwise it was a narrative crutch borrowed from novels, a lazy shortcut to a character’s internal state that bypassed the unique characteristics of a visual medium like film.

Naruto is absolutely chock-full of voiceover, inner monologues and lengthy ponderings on the current situation. Again, it took me a while to get over my prejudices, stop judging and open myself up to new ways of telling a story. Entire episodes would be taken up with a character trying to figure their way out of a tricky situation, narrating their way through it, even while in the middle of a frenzied battle.

Baddies politely stand off to one side while characters held a meeting and discussed their predicament. A 20-minute episode can end up covering about 30 seconds of real-time action, filled with flashbacks and internal thoughts.

It all clicked into place once I realised that the action sequences were, in fact, puzzles.

Action-as-puzzles

There’s a rock-paper-scissors design to much of Naruto, such that even as the character become increasingly powerful, to the point of seeming to be plot-breaking, there’s always a counterpoint to keep things in check. There are limits to everything, even as the plot and character abilities take ever more fanciful and unprecedent leaps.

As each foe is faced, the question for the characters and the audience is how Naruto and his ninja pals are going to get out of this one. Somehow, despite the very loosely defined jutsu/magic system, it does tend to hold together in a logical, cohesive way. As each enemy is dispatched (or not), it feels earned and justified. While on the surface the power levels seem absurdly heightened, in fact everything has built-in checks and balances.

I kept expecting it to jump the shark or go entirely off-balance, but it never did. Through to the end, the show maintained its verisimilitude.

Mad but somehow coherent world building

Talking of which, can I take a moment to marvel at the freewheeling world building? This is a fictional alternate Japan (sort of?) in which it’s mostly a pre-industrialised society, except for when there are towering industrial factory cities, or occasional TV screens or computers, or advanced medical equipment.

There are stories all about travelling from one village to another, by foot, because there’s no mechanised transport. It’s a largely agrarian society, except for when it is suddenly not. Sometimes the intelligence shinobi don virtual reality headsets to telepathically communicate with one another. One character has rocket-powered grenade arms. Another wears a 20th century-style gas mask.

There’s a looseness to the world building that I found at first jarring, then shifted towards a grudging respect. There’s a boldness here, where the world building is entirely in service of the needs of the story at any given moment in time. Naruto is not slavish to its own lore. It plays with it, it has fun. Much of the technology makes no sense whatsoever, but it really doesn’t matter to the story that is being told.

It’s oddly refreshing, and really challenged my assumptions about how a story can maintain its own internal coherence. Creator Masashi Kishimoto I would say prioritises characters and thematic resonance over consistent world building: if it benefits the story to include modern hospital equipment in an otherwise pre-industrial society, fine. It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, but there’s a recognition that this particular story is not about those details.

I’m still surprised that it didn’t frustrate me more, though. Going back to the Harry Potter films, it drove me mad that magical tech and plot conveniences and world-changing powers would be introduced and forgotten with no regard for impact on the rest of the story.1 In Harry Potter it felt arbitrary and lazy; in Naruto it feels deliberate, possibly because the tech is usually an aesthetic choice rather than a plot solver. The story does not pivot around the technology on display. It’s flavour rather than formula.

Generational scope, enormous cast

The lead characters are children, beginning as pre-teens. Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura are thrust into a world in conflict, one that’s been repeatedly let down and corrupted by previous generations. The story of Naruto is one of generational disappointment, of how our parents and our parents’ parents have presided over a disintegrating civilisation.

Naruto and his classmates are forced to rebel against adults and strive to correct the mistakes of the past. None of what happens is their fault, but they shoulder the responsibility of doing something about it. It’s an inherently optimistic series, but one where the weight of action is placed upon children and teenagers.

The adults have messed up, and those able to recognise their own flaws — Kakashi, Juraiya, Tsunada — increasingly look to the younger generation for answers and salvation.

This works thanks to the length and depth of the series. Even discounting the ‘filler’ episodes, which bulk out the anime compared to the manga, it’s an epic tale. It finds time to explore the adults even while condemning their decisions. Crucially, we see all of them as children, back when they were as idealistic and hopeful as Naruto and his friends — again, the flashback structure is used here to expert effect, rather than as a crutch. The adults are not flawed simply because they are old: we see their mistakes and mis-steps, and understand how easy it is to lose sight of the dreams and hopes of youth. The challenge, especially for Naruto and Sasuke, is to not repeat those errors.

The story spans at least three generations. There’s a core cast of well over twenty characters. It’s epic in scale by every measurement. Every piece, though, every character, has a purpose and slots into the overall puzzle, becoming more than the sum of its parts as each piece connects.

I kept expecting the story to get tangled up in its own complexities, to become either nonsensical or contradictory, but it maintains its centre of gravity. Much like Attack on Titan, the impression is of an author who did indeed work everything out in advance. Whether that’s the case or not I don’t know — it’s entirely possible that they were making it up as they went. But as with other great serial storytellers, like J. Michael Straczynski with Babylon 5 back in the 90s, the seams disappear and the finished story feels like it was always supposed to be that way.

Astonishing tonal shifts

Many of my favourite writers are those who are able to hop between different tones and styles without any of them undermining the others. There’s a playfulness to it, to not being slavish to genre or audience expectations.

Naruto does this effortlessly, flipping between silly slapstick comedy, juvenile kids show, moving treatise on war, thrilling action, shades of horror, family drama…much as the world building remains loose and agile throughout, so does the plot and the tone. It’s happy to become whatever it needs to be, to best serve the story.

It’s breathtaking in its boldness, in its refusal to be nailed down to a particular style or formula.

Talking of which:

Entire episodes about grief

I was enjoying the show immensely fairly early on, but there’s a specific episode which made me realise that I was underestimating it. Episode 80, to be precise. Without getting into spoiler specifics, it’s an episode that focuses on grief and a funeral, and it sticks with that throughout, unapologetically, slowing the usual pace down to a crawl and exploring what death means to the different characters.

It’s about consequence, and regret, and sacrifice, and it’s not at all what I expected from ‘a show for kids’. It’s when I realised that the writing was better than I’d appreciated, and that the show was interested in doing more than I’d acknowledged. I’d taken it to be a really fun, inventive action-comedy series, and was enjoying watching it with my son immensely. It was episode 80 that shifted my relationship with the show: I was no longer watching it as a nice family activity, and to share something with my son, but I was watching it on its own merits.

Little did I know that Naruto had a lot more to say about life, parenting, death. I was not prepared for what was to come. Was not expecting the depth and sophistication of where the story was going to go.

Those character designs

A quick note about the character designs, which are brilliant across the board. And there are so many of them! It slightly breaks my brain to imagine so many unique and compelling characters coming from one creator’s brain (plus additional characters from the minds of the anime creators).

The cast is instantly iconic, and somehow straddles the gap between realism and stylised cartoon. For the most part there’s a physicality and a realistic depiction of anatomy, except for when there isn’t. Again, it’s that tonal flexibility: the show is a gymnast, flipping from one style to another without losing track of what makes it Naruto.

Ridiculous levelling up of power (without breaking the story)

Comics and cartoons and genre stories have always had a problem with endless scaling of threat and power. Marvel comics and movies escalate both the threat and the heroes’ abilities until the stories start falling over, and everything has to be reset. James Bond films get increasingly outlandish until they collapse beneath their own absurdity and have to be rebooted. Anime is often poked fun at for characters always having one more ‘levelling up’ ability in their back pocket.

Naruto should fall into that trap, but somehow sidesteps it. It’s that rock-paper-scissors puzzle aspect, I think. Powers always have limits, always have counters, and are rarely easy ‘get out of jail’ cards.

Much as with the world building and tonal shifting, it challenged my conception of what is possible with a story. As I approach the final arc of Tales from the Triverse, my own long-running, 4-year weekly serial, I’ve kept the extremes of Naruto in the back of my mind. Where I might have held back or resisted certain storylines or developments, I have a newfound confidence to go for the big swings.

My concept of the boundaries of stories have been fairly obliterated by the experience of watching Naruto. It’s a demonstration of how you can go big without losing the emotional heart and character of a story.

The manga is next on my list. Believe it.

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I entered this place and hunted down the only other creatures that lived there: the colossi. The land had been theirs for millennia, and they bothered no-one. I killed them nevertheless, never feeling good about it.

That was Shadow of the Colossus:

The PlayStation 2 could barely run it. Later, there was a PS3 version, which ran slightly better, and then a PS4 remaster. That remaster has never been released on PC, much to my chagrin.

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I’d not played anything even remotely like Shadow of the Colossus in the following twenty years. Two decades! The closest was Breath of the Wild, which had large beasts and a stamina-based climbing system, but it didn’t quite connect the dots.

Then the Eternal Strands demo came out, and this happened:

Someone, at last, had created a follow-up of sorts. Clinging on to that arkon in the demo, I was transported back twenty years. I was 24 years old again.

Eternal Strands is a very different game, of course. It doesn’t have the lonely melancholy of Shadow of the Colossus, instead going for a more traditional fantasy adventure vibe.

There’s a cosy hub area where you get to chat with your fantasy buddies, upgrade the outpost and fiddle with your gear. It’s very Bioware, which makes sense given one of the lead devs is ex-Bioware.

In Shadow of the Colossus you had your sword and bow and that was about it. Eternal Strands gifts you with a bunch of magic which works in a highly systemic fashion, mixing and matching with the environment to produce interesting effects. That giant arkon, for example: in the clip above you see me freeze his foot to the ground, giving me a brief moment during which I can climb up his leg.

Back in 2005, Shadow of the Colossus was doing stuff with its tech that went rather unnoticed. The animation system and the way the action unfolded in such unpredictable ways was highly unusual for that era of gaming. Eternal Strands is working its own magic tricks, delivering a more reactive environment than I’m used to in fantasy adventure. That freeze spell, for example, doesn’t simply freeze the entire creature, as in most games: if I freeze the arkon’s arm, it’ll have a different result than freezing its leg. The animation on the giant creature is responsive in a way that feels entirely natural, to the point that I don’t really think about it: until I realise I’ve not really seen it in games before.

There are hints of Monster Hunter, bits of Zelda, elements of Dragon Age. The combat is fun, though in the early stages not amazing. The world is gorgeous and intriguing. The story is immediately captivating, if a little rote. The dialogue and characters are an awful lot of fun, even if there’s a bit too much of it at times.1

It’s a game that respects your time, too. The way it’s designed encourages you to pick a quest and venture out on an expedition, rather than simply hoovering up map markers. Not got much time? Go and collect some resources. Fancy a challenge? Take down one of the giants. Got a bit more time to play? Explore a new area and open up the map. Only got ten minutes? Wander round camp, upgrade your stuff and talk to your friends. The hop-in, hop-out design works particularly well on a Steam Deck, where you can easily put the thing to sleep.

Eternal Strands is a game that is built from lots of component parts, and looking at any one of them in isolation is to miss the point. It’s when everything is working together, from the world building to the combat to the magic to the characters to the giant-clobbering, that it suddenly becomes something unique and special.

It has a cumulative charm, not unlike Shadow of the Colossus. It gets under your skin.

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Some of you might know me from , the weekly newsletter I’ve been writing since 2021. It’s where I put my fiction, as well as articles about writing serial fiction. It doesn’t leave much space for anything else. That’s what Infinite Backlog is all about — a place to stick my random thoughts about entertainment and popular culture.

So! Here’s a whistlestop tour through things I enjoyed in 2024. Note that a lot of these were released in previous years; hence this being the Infinite Backlog.

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In no particular order, then:

Movies

I didn’t see many films this year. Every time I go to the cinema I’m reminded of why seeing films with audiences in the UK is a bad idea. At home the streaming platforms have turned everything into content churn to the point that I choose instead to not watch anything.

If there’s one thing I want to do in 2025, it’s watch more movies and to be more intentional about what I pick. Perhaps I’ll take out a membership to a cinema, as a way of encouraging me to go.

Poor Things

Watched this while I was ill, which made for a suitably surreal and somewhat dazed experience. I didn’t get on with The Favourite at all, finding it to be a weird case of style entirely suppressing all substance, but Lanthimos’ all-in aesthetic matches far better with the general madness of Poor Things.

It’s a tricky film that raises lots of complex issues without being interested in directly commenting on any of them. It is ostensibly about female empowerment, but it is written and directed by a man and spends as much time as possible ogling Emma Stone’s naked body. Bella is presented as a child, as a literal baby’s brain transplanted into an adult body, which bumps into the rather icky question of whether age is determined by the mind or the body itself — pertinent given where the film goes, and Duncan’s (Mark Ruffalo) obsession with her.

Thematic muddiness aside, Stone is amazing, Ruffalo is absolutely hilarious and the film is visually startling and entirely unique.

Transformers One

This is unironically my favourite film I saw this year. For context, I was a child in the 1980s and loved Transformers from the off. Seeing the 1986 animated movie is my first cinema memory. I had the toys. I adored the UK comics by Simon Furman and the gang.

I loathed every single one of the Michael Bay live action films.

The further Bay has got from the director’s chair, the better the films have become. Bumblebee was a lovely 80s throwback that could have been directed by a younger Spielberg. Rise of the Beasts was a big blockbustery mess, but was good fun, had a great soundtrack and an interesting cast of characters.

Transformers One is a significant departure from all that. It’s directed by Josh Cooley of Pixar and tells something of an origin story. Crucially, it’s about characters rather than explosions. It has a good story, expertly told. It’s visually captivating. The cast is excellent. It knows when to be very funny, and it knows when to be very serious.

In other words, it’s a very good film. It’s probably the first time a Transformers movie has been something that a non-Transformers fan can enjoy. The trailers were all pretty bad, so ignore them and just go watch it.

Prey

This had been on my list for years. It was one of the many films that got dumped and lost to streaming menus during the Covid years. This is a film that sets out to do a very specific thing and then 100% nails it. It has a confidence throughout, a clear view of what it wants to be, and it never deviates. Exciting, hugely satisfying, with great audio design.

Honourable mentions: Deadpool & Wolverine for bringing back the ice-skating line, Bohemian Rhapsody for getting my son 110% into Queen.

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Games

Games are where I spend most of my entertainment time. I increasingly find them to contain the most innovative and unexpected storytelling experiments — not always as purely successful as novels or movies, but more raw and unpredictable.

Novels have been novels for centuries. We figured out what ‘a movie’ was decades back. There’s tons of space within the forms to try new things, of course, but games are in a slightly different position: creators and designers are still finding the edges of the form. It’s still really difficult to neatly define what ‘a game’ is, because it keeps mutating quite drastically.

Venba

This one is very short, and made me cry. It’s immediately captivating, with a tactile cooking hook around which it hangs a compelling and very ordinary family story. Deeply moving, and hard to describe.

Stories that span multiple generations always get me right in the feels.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Most likely my favourite game of the year, Tom Francis’ turn-based tactics game borrows liberally from X-Com, Invisible Inc. and Into the Breach while very much doing its own thing.

There are two aspects to TBW that make it work. First is the incredibly tight mechanics, which are endlessly fun while remaining simple to understand. You always have full information about what’s about to happen, like a game of chess, and it’s about figuring out a counter-strategy. You can rewind and try different approaches, and the game is determined to not waste your time.

The second big win is the writing. It is far, far better than it needs to be. Hilarious dialogue, exciting world building and genuinely thought-provoking ideas. It’s been a difficult year in the real world, and TBW’s attitude to death has lingered in my mind long after I completed its main campaign.

Balatro

Ugh. I hate poker, and thought I’d hate this, but it’s undeniably very clever. Riffing on poker hands, this actually has very little to do with poker and far more to do with games like Slay the Spire.

I’m not very good at Balatro, but I keep playing it.

The Messenger

My 2023 game of the year was Sea of Stars, also by Sabotage Studios. This year I went back to their first game, which is a very different thing. A side scrolling platformer that revels in nostalgia, this is all sorts of fun and has several fantastic twists in its tale. The second half rather lost me, primarily due to being too hard, but it was a great time nonetheless.

Phantom Liberty

I enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 from the off, despite all of its bugs and missteps. Seeing it slowly improve over the years since release was a joy, but I never expected the total overhaul that came with Phantom Liberty. The way the game’s entire design was rethought could have been kept for a full sequel, but CDP went and did it for free.

Phantom Liberty is their storytelling, world building and game design working at peak levels. It’s something special. Plus walking around with a digital Idris Elba is cool.

Baldur’s Gate 3

I’m slowly working my way through BG3. It is clearly very good and an incredible achievement. It’s also very long, with every battle seeming to take hours. I’ve dropped it down to easy mode, to make it less of a slog and a more directly enjoyable story. And what a story!

The recreation of D&D rules is remarkable, but also feels like the game’s biggest restriction. I’m very much looking forward to what Larian do next, without those shackles.

Planet of Lana

This snuck in right at the end, as I was gifted it by a friend only yesterday. But it’s very good, and very me. Riffing on the feel of 90s classics like Another World and Flashback, this is a zero-combat alternative that focuses on simple stealth and puzzles. Its visual design is gorgeous and evocative and the sound is stunning. The way it uses its side-on camera is very clever — so often that’s where these games fall down.

There’s also a cute cat thing. I haven’t been this immediately captivated by a game for a while, and can’t wait to see where it goes.

Honourable mentions: Death Stranding, Helldivers 2, Hades 2, Jedi Survivor, Beyond Good & Evil (remaster), The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood.

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Books & comics

I don’t read as much as I should. Especially being a writer. I mean, I’m constantly reading, but it’s a big melting pot of fiction, non-fiction, short form, long form, online, offline — the end result being that I don’t get through as many Proper Books as I’d like.

Still, here are the ones I really enjoyed this year:

Shadow of the Wolf

’s retelling of the Robin Hood legend was a revelation. Deeply weird, frequently disturbing, with a vein of heroic adventure running through it. It is a mysterious book that creates a palpable wildwood, fully enveloping you with its trees and dark canopies and moss and insects. Robin is there, and Marian, but not like you’ve seen or read them before. It’s a brutal fantasy tale that kept me absolutely gripped throughout.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

I think I heard about this book when it went semi-viral a couple of years back. It’s a unique specimen, its story told in epistolary fashion between its enigmatic lead characters. They’re caught in a war that traverses the entirety of existence. The scope of the setting is impossibly vast, but everything is rooted in character and personal stakes.

It’s a concise explosion of the imagination, and absolutely must be read.

On A Sunbeam

The cover of this graphic novel had been staring out at me from bookshelves for a while before I grabbed a copy. I knew nothing about it, other than I adored that cover. I mean, look at it:

It’s a curious fantasy set in a reality that the author stubbornly refuses to define. It operates in a space of magical realism and sublime vagueness. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I found it challenging, primarily in its art. While it’s always beautiful, it’s not easy to parse or follow what’s going on from a narrative point of view.

I’d much rather encounter something difficult and unusual than generic, though. On a Sunbeam tells a lovely story of friendship and young love that is more ordinary than its visual trappings would suggest.

At some point I’ll re-read it, which I expect will be an even better experience.

The Power Fantasy

Kieron Gillen is probably my favourite writer. Probably. I don’t like making declarations like that, as it’s so mood-dependent. But, I mean, everything he does is irritatingly excellent.

The Wicked and the Divine, DIE and Uber are all astonishing. I need to get round to reading Once and Future properly.

Kieron’s also worked on a lot of Marvel stuff, of course. His Avengers/X-Men/Eternals crossover from a couple of years ago was an immense achievement — a big Marvel cross-over event that actually meant something and had something to say and moved me.

The Power Fantasy takes a lot of the themes he’s explored previously and puts them into a new, hard-edged, take-no-prisoners moral puzzlebox. It’s a fairly devastating commentary on geopolitics, wrapped up in gorgeous art from Caspar Wijngaard.

Transformers & Energon Universe

What started as a guilty pleasure has turned into a genuine pleasure. Daniel Warren Johnson’s take on Transformers continues to be clever and enormous fun (giving character and motivation to many Decepticons for the first time!). It’s a great read with the 12 year old, and I tend to then re-read it for myself.

Accompanying it are all the other series in the Energon Universe orbit. Void Rivals is an excellent slice of science fiction space opera that is strong enough to stand on its own. Duke, Cobra Commander and Scarlett were fun. I’m less convinced by Destro and the new G.I. Joe, which feel a bit more old fashioned. I was never a G.I. Joe kid back in the 80s, so don’t have nostalgia to lean on there, and I’m still unsure what the appeal of the series and characters is. No matter how you reshuffle the pack, it’s still a bunch of heavily Americans going around shooting stuff, and that’s not terribly interesting.

Honorable mentions: Black Cloak, Saga, Spectators. All superb, obviously.

TV

Much like movies, I don’t find a huge amount of time for TV. As an aside, I’ve really noticed that the things I’m really enthusiastic about these days — comics and games — are the two which I curate and purchase individually. Where I have subscriptions to streaming services, as with movies and TV, I find myself watching less and less. It’s all just become content.

Anyway, despite all that I did enjoy this lot:

Reacher

Season 2 was great fun, primarily thanks to Alan Ritchson being absolutely perfect in the role. I love that the stylings of the show, from the cinematography to the editing, feel bound up in Reacher’s own abrupt personality.

Strange New Worlds

The one show on TV that remembers how to be episodic and serialised at the same time. Manages to feel old school and brand new at the same time.

Agatha All Along

I’ve been a big fan of the MCU from the very beginning, spinning out of my love of the comics. Up to and including Avengers Endgame I would staunchly defend the movies when people moaned about them being formulaic. I lived through the awful blockbusters of the 90s and 2000s, especially the terrible comic adaptations. Marvel got so good at it, we forgot just how bad this stuff can get.

I loved how they played with genres in each of the series, and kept everything rooted in character even while the big explosions were happening.

The multiverse stuff post-Endgame was always going to be a mess: unlimited multiverse scenarios have a built-in senescence, with each variant reality undermining all the others. When there are infinite possibilities, meaning is lost. They can bleat about the ‘sacred timeline’ all they want, but an infinite number of universes can only ever result in none of them actually mattering, from a story perspective. Unless you do something very clever, or apply strict limits.

Anyway! All of that is a long preamble to say that Agatha All Along was superb, a breath of fresh air, very clever and consistently fun. It told a serial story that was designed for the form, rather than simply being a very long and poorly paced movie. That it was put together by some of the same people who did Wandavision is no coincidence.

Wallace & Gromit

The Christmas special was glorious. How wonderful to have something as silly and fun and purely entertaining as this, which is simultaneously demonstrating artists at the absolute peak of their creative powers.

Arcane

I still don’t understand how this exists, but I’m glad it does. The game has never interested me, but Arcane is far denser and richer than it needs to be. As with Wallace & Gromit, this is a team of artists working on a completely different level to everyone else.

Skeleton Crew

As with Marvel, Star Wars has felt very peripheral for a while. Too lore-obsessed, preoccupied with filling in the gaps between the main stories. Skeleton Crew rejects all that and remembers to make their show about a bunch of compelling characters. It has great comic timing, a fun adventure vibe, excellent action and visual, and every episode takes me to a cool new location full of potential.

In other words, it feels more like Star Wars than anything has for a long while.

Oh, it also has some of the best creature work I’ve ever seen.

Physical 100

I have nothing intelligent to say about this, but I’m entirely obsessed.

Honourable mentions: Naruto Shippuden continues to be great (but we haven’t quite finished it yet), Fallout, The Boys, Only Murders in the Building.

This isn’t going to be a regular newsletter. I’ll ping something out as and when I have something vaguely interesting to say about something I’ve played/watched/read/etc.

Until then, thanks for reading.

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