issue 4: small and weird
Hello and welcome back. This is Issue 4 of “a bit of bird words” and I am currently writing this while the sounds of Triple Triad fill the room. I won’t be talking about Final Fantasy VIII in this issue, but suffice it to say that upon re-appraisal, this game rules.
So what have I finished in November?
Game of the month: Castaway on a Weird Island
Captain Games, 2021 (Windows, macOS, iOS, Android)
I was supposed to be playing Dragon Quest this month, and while I did finish it, I mostly only want to think about its legacy and the vision of role-playing games it had. It’s a stunningly forward-thinking game for the 1980s and, quite honestly, trounces the original Final Fantasy in terms of style. It’s also an incredibly lonely game.
But I’m not here to talk about that. I want to talk about this funky puzzle game! Castaway on a Weird Island feels like playing Picross, except that walking onto the wrong box will kill you. You crash on a small island, most of which is obscured by fog. You are given a variety of hints to try to piece together where treasure can be found, where enemies are hiding, and where your ship—the goal square to move to the next island—is located.
I’m still neck-deep in my puzzle game era, so this game spoke directly to me. It took me some time to understand how all of the hints worked together to make logical deductions and I still regularly make mistakes and die, but it’s enjoyable the entire time.
This has been a month of me trying out a variety of much smaller games—Kura5, Atlyss, Solitomb, and Water Level b.l.u.e. EXPLORATION among those—and I’m really loving the process of exploring this side of games. My next task is to see if I can get Webfishing running.
You can get Castaway on a Weird Island on itch.io (link will take you right there). Do try it out!
Games finished this year: 44 (+5)
Book of the month: The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974
What an utterly fascinating book. I’m still trading off between reading fiction and nonfiction, but this particular book felt perfectly thematically situated within my nonfiction reading of late. Our main character, Shevek, is a physicist from Anarres, whereupon the people practice a kind of anarchism that, we are shown every other chapter, shows the strengths and weaknesses of collectivism and human solidarity.
But this is only every other chapter. Our primary story follows Shevek to Urras, the world from which the people of Anarres originate. Urras looks a lot like our current world, one ravaged by capitalism and patriarchy. It is, in moments, quite difficult to read the back half of this book, because it’s incredibly easy to forget that this isn’t our current world. The events that occur are events that happen right here, on Earth, on a regular basis. Whatever the faults of the system on Anarres—and Shevek learns to see them, in time—it all pales in comparison to the cruelty of Urras, and eventually Shevek can no longer remain within the gilded cage that has been presented to him.
Meanwhile, between the chapters of horrific behavior on Urras, we see how the people of Anarres struggled, together, through a terrible famine. We see what can happen when people choose themselves—but we also see what happens when people choose each other. This book shows, just as much as any of the nonfiction I’ve read, that there is a world of beautiful possibility when we choose each other. It is not a world without struggle—such a world does not exist—but it is beautiful all the same, in a way the individualized nightmare of our current hegemony can never be. It is the beauty we can see right now when we reach out our hand to another in need, when we stand together against injustice, when we make a meal for someone else, when we refuse to dehumanize others.
We can fight for and build a world where this is the core of our society, one of life rather than death.
Books finished this year: 78 (+4)
What else?
I launched version 2 of my website this month! I was quite fond of version 1, but I guess my old habits came back to haunt me. The new one has an almost space-ocean vibe to it that I really like, plus it has some cute graphics on the homepage! Some of the pages are still empty (since they’re brand-new) but you can check it out here if you feel so inclined. It Should™ work on mobile, but the fancy background stars are unfortunately desktop-only (for now?? maybe??). (Speaking of websites, I also have a blog that you can read.)
Outside of that, it’s been a very rough month in the realm of physical health, but I’m getting by. I finally got in an order for the vinyl release of A Long Vacation, so now I guess when it arrives, I will be “officially” collecting vinyls. (It will be my second; my first was the vinyl for The Stanley Parable.)
My recommendation for you is to do something for someone else. It can be someone you know or not, and it can be as simple as making them a cup of tea. Sometimes, caring for each other is the most radical thing we can do.
Thanks for reading. You can check out what games I’m playing on Backloggd and what books I’m reading on The Storygraph.