Supergiant Games, Yoon Ha Lee, and Nona the Ninth

Spoilers for Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre.

When literary historians look back on this era, I know they’re going to say that Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh described a lot of how it was, and that the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Pixar described how we wanted things to be. But I hope they know that Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series describes how it feels. To be alive right now feels brutal, insane, complicated, tragic, and hilarious, and we are all of us so acutely aware of everything falling to pieces around us.

-- Christina Ladd @ Strange Horizons

And sometimes I read books that are "mean, cynical, hopeless," dark, dystopian, books about awful things and awful people, because I am depressed. Certainly that's why I write books that are "mean, cynical, hopeless," that are full of extreme gore and slaughter, that have characters who paraglide past their moral event horizons. I read those books because when I am depressed and everything feels terrible, those books make me feel seen. I'm sure people vary, but when I am sunk in depression, the LAST thing I want to do is read hopepunk or cozy fantasy. It reminds me that I am failing to "just cheer up." This isn't a fault in those genres, and it doesn't mean those genres shouldn't exist; but when I'm depressed, those genres are not for me.

-- Yoon Ha Lee @ his personal newsletter

Both of these came to me the same week as The Hades II trailer, which is the first time I've been excited by a game trailer in a long time. Most of my focus over the last year has been on LGBTQ indie gaming and visual novels, and I feel like I'm aging out of twitchy stuff. Disclaimer: Unfortunately I've not finished Hades yet, but will probably go back and do the whole thing in God mode just for Jen Zee, Logan Cunningham, and Darren Korb.

In my view, Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre are all apocalyptic games. Bastion starts with The Boy waking up after the apocalypse with a handful of survivors. Transistor puts Red and her companion at the center of a digital zombie apocalypse. Pyre fits in with the theme with The Reader guiding events that result in a revolution where an old, corrupt civilization is changed.

There's a point in the Bastion and Transistor where I realize that things just can't be fixed, and the protagonist is faced with the choice to accept loss and break the cycle, or repeat dystopian events with an apocalyptic outcome. Transistor hits me the hardest, every single time. Pyre arguably has a "happy for now" ending, but you can't save everyone.

And sometimes you just need a game or novel where the best you can do is just one more day.