Summer is when I come alive. Following what my mum calls “winter hibernation,” the sun comes out and so do we. Last few weeks I have been going on my runs round the recreation ground, and it’s better being there now than any other time of the year. Overhead, birds fly together in a big flock. This one black tomcat comes out of the street-side bush and toddles alongside me for a bit as I jog. Old men walk even older dogs in lazy laps. People sit in ones, twos, and threes on every bench, playing grime, drill, and afrobeats out loud, drinking from water bottles and cans of beer. One lady pushes a chow chow round in a trailer pram. On one day that I go for a run, there is a community music festival taking place, with bands playing in the stage near the skate park and barbecue vans parked up all along the grass. People are loving it—dancing and messing around. On another evening, a guy has set up a tripod to take pictures of the setting sun. Kids are swimming in the little concrete basin and it smells like chlorine and sweat. The dogs are panting. Everyone is happy—faces flushed, sun-kissed, and bright. I suppose it won’t feel like this anymore when it is always hot. But for now, I still can’t help enjoying it. England were winning, for a bit at least. My neighbours are cooking outdoors every night. The birds are going singsong berserk in the overgrown forest-garden next door. And people everywhere are looking unshackled and free, coming together to drink beers, ride bikes, have picnics, walk leisurely, or do whatever feels most fun and appropriate under the big red ball in the sky. Moving through the park and seeing everyone like this makes me feel like some kind of harbinger of summer, sprinkling a rainbow over the land, turning the grey city into this carnival-like place it becomes when the sun comes out. Heat death of the universe is coming, but for now, selfishly, it still isn’t quite centre of my mind.

PLAYING

I recently played two games that are barely games at all, in the sense that neither contains much in the way of “gameplay,” at least in any traditional sense. One was Island Off Outer Darkness, a game so obscure that, at the time of sending, it still has only 41 reviews on Steam. Most of those came after the game was praised effusively on an episode of Side Story, a podcast hosted by the video game critic and designer Austin Walker and his friends. That is also where I heard about it and what convinced me that it was something that I needed to play. The game is described by its solo developer creator as a “narrative delivery simulator,” and indeed it is structured entirely around making postal deliveries to residents of the game’s fictional island that serve to also deliver the game’s narrative in piecemeal. Each day, you wake up, receive several postal worker assignments, and, by completing them, flesh out of the game’s slowly building story through conversations with the various island inhabitants that you are tasked with walking items to. There is some very limited fishing and farming too, but this is mostly it: walking around.

You deliver things and talk to island residents, slowly gaining more intel about this place that you have landed: its politics, its climate, and its history and geography, as well as the relationships that connect and divide the small island’s relatively few residents. The game’s writing is great, as is the world-building that it establishes almost entirely through textual description and ‘choose-your-response’ dialogue exchange. Many inhabitants are spiky, and some are outright hostile. Each is distinct and idiosyncratic, but all are equally nuanced and complex. The game’s graphics are blocky and abstract, but beautifully expressionist, particularly in the skyboxes that change with the island’s seasonal weather system, relighting the surrounding terrain. And the soundtrack is great, anchoring everything in a very specific mood. Even though the game seems at first rudimentary in craft and simple in scope, it has many surprises to offer and a satisfying story to behold. Characters arrive to the island and depart from it. Some have breakdowns and revelations, while others remain in the kind of repetitive stasis that defines most of ordinary life. And, as the days pass, the island itself evolves and mutates, often in mysterious ways. I enjoyed seeing where this short, odd game went.

The other was Set Yourself On Fire, a visual novel of about two hours in length. It is a romance story of sorts, wherein a despondent and lonely teenager in a small town finds a friend who later becomes a lover, while in the background there is a war that her father has gone off to fight in. Through long talks with this person, she moves from being a depressed blank canvas to becoming a vibrant person who better understands who she is. It is a story told in quite broad strokes, with writing that is not afraid to be poetic and even pretentious, to stretch itself and try to be ambitious and interesting in a way that games are often not. The art is very nice, as is the music, and by the end I found it quite moving. Plus, it is totally free to play, and to progress the game’s story all you have to do is click the mouse.

LISTENING

Five recent favourites, with no particular connective theme. First up, a lovely new album from DJ Plead called Please. It is an album of warm and wistful electronic dance music that takes influence from Arabic musical traditions, with the producer sprinkling that rhythmic inspiration into each of this collection of instantly satisfying, enjoyably pleasant tracks. Less pleasant, Collapse of the Infinite is a melodic hardcore album by the Colorado band Eyes of Salt that provides a short, sharp burst of the best kind of earnest and righteous punk music assault. It opens so convincingly, is clever and consistent with its concept, messaging, and tone, and is just so much fun to listen to that I can’t help but love it, even though it is a little corny at times. I have liked what Ana Roxanne has made and released before, but I am liking her new album Poem 1 even more. This sort of low-key, confessional singer songwriter music can all sound a bit the same sometimes, but for whatever reason I find that this album rises above. It is lovely and minimal and heartfelt and stark. Jeff Parker, the jazz musician who is also a guitarist in the band Tortoise, is always good value. His excellent new album, Happy Today, was recorded live in session with his quartet. I like his statement on it, explaining why it has the title it has. “2025 was a very difficult year for me and my family. Dealing with being displaced from the Eaton fires for eight months, and the kind of toll that that instability took on my family’s mental health and general outlook, coupled with Donald Trump being back in office and basically making life miserable for everyone… There was a lot of sadness and despair. But feeling the sense of community that we created with our concert, and later hearing the recording, seeing the beautiful footage that had been shot and the photographs of such joy to be back in that space and to be making music again: It was a very happy moment. So I called the record Happy Today. It’s meant to be a statement of joy.” Saving the best for last, Give U Space is a dark and quite understated dub techno album from a (new?) artist called K Wata, put out by the trustworthy Short Span label that I have been enjoying the output of so much.