ROMILY IN PARIS
Decided to document my trip to France in a little diary, here it is in full. Used it as an excuse to test-drive my upcoming funny-animal style (still figuring it out, but stay tuned). Scroll through to the bottom if you want to read about video games instead.
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I made it back alive, the book is launched, the reviews are good, and they even talked about me on Radio France. Moving on…
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Btw, I’m going to be back in San Francisco for work for a week Feb 26-Mar 3. I assume literally no one lives there anymore, but if you do, feel free to hit me up.
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Here’s the abovementioned interview, in French. If I look a bit off on the photo, remember that a couple of hours later I began to vomit and shit myself for the rest of the day and most of the night.
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For English speakers, I can offer you a lively chat I had with Michael Olivo for his new tradcath podcast. There’s even a haunting custom jingle for me. He also talked with Dory Bavarsky, who writes all the music for my animations—listen to that too, and you can finally learn the history of Full Color Sound Records. There’s also one with my old friend Niv, who is the other very talented Bavarsky, and the person who first introduced me to all these people.
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I gave up on Rain World after I got to memory vaults, looked up the next section on youtube and thought, ok, there’s no way I can do it (at least for the time being, will probably try again when the DLC is on switch). Still, that game is one of the most unique and ambitious things I’ve ever played, and a real change from the usual stuff of indie games. It may look like your average metroidvania experience, but the actual game is actually much closer to the Russian cult classic Vangers—deliberately obscure and punishing, but also far more rewarding than most games if you are willing to invest.
Even with an abridged experience, it’s a must-see for the first few areas alone. There are almost no clearly delineated enemies/friends—each species, sub-species, and even individual creatures have their own generated personality traits, and the scavengers’ social dynamics are remarkably complex, especially since everything is expressed only through actions and gestures. One of the few games I’ve seen that takes inspiration from Dark Souls and does something very different with it, instead of simply copying the style/mechanics. Most importantly, the game forces you to communicate with the world using the language of the world, instead of relying on text boxes (for the most part)—something you almost never see in modern games for some reason, even though it’s probably the strongest thing about the medium.
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For a more relaxed time, I can recommend the Case of the Golden Idol. It’s a lighter, sillier take on the Obra Dinn formula, and while the puzzles can be a bit of a mixed bag, the wonky artwork carries the whole thing through. The conbinatory system mostly works, being mostly impossibly to bruteforce, and building some of the inevitable guesswork into the mechanics. Deductive games like these can really benefit from a working AI parser that can allow for a semi-intelligent conversation that isn’t simply ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ state. Anyway, Golden Idol is quick and fun, reminds me of those deranged Sierra quests and makes me want to work on a game all over again, especially knowing that the whole thing was only made by two people, and in relatively short time.
So, if you’re a programmer (or know one) who’s into the sort of stuff I’m into (pathologic, dark souls, everything, minit, killer 7, full pipe, disco elysium, captn toad, katamari, control, etc), feel free to drop me a line (you can just reply to this). I only did one thing in a weekend game jam so far, but it was a good time.
LASTLY, LITERATURE
As for Gaito Gazdanov, I finished the book and it’s a mixed bag—definitely not his best (I’d recommend the Spectre of Alexander Wolf and the Buddha’s Return). His stories often feel cheap and pulpy (‘boulevard prose’ as snobby Russians tend to put it), but what always elevates them is his language—all those perfectly paced long Proustian sentences with piling clauses, digressions and asides. That, along with narrative jumps creates a very odd atmosphere, which is probably what earned him the Kafka comparisons. This book is more overtly auto-biographical than usual, and the narrator is quite a bit of a prick in that annoying wisecracking way—I find the cold detached omniscient narration of his other books much more appealing. Anyway, here’s a standout paragraph from Night Roads, translated by me.
“There was an inexplicable, almost electric charm about her, and I remember once, a stranger, completely drunk, telling me that when she starts to sing, it feels as if an electric current had been turned on. Later I learned that he was an electrical engineer, and on that day he wasn’t trying to find a perfect descriptor, and simply used the term that he was most familiar with.”
Thanks for reading, see you next month!