Tunes? We Don' Need No Stinkin' Tunes!

Well, it had to end sometime. For once, I didn't forget. I just had too many other posts to write. But here we are again, a week late and, for wonder, no more to cull than ever. A couple of dozen in the bank. About half of them won't make it. Place your bets now.

I don't really like this part much. It's like... no it's not. Let's not get over-dramatic. It's like being offered a tray of cakes and only being allowed to choose one. Or in this case, a dozen. But who can eat a dozen cakes?

The real problem isn't the culling, it's that the longer I leave this each time, the harder it is to remember the tunes. This is supposed to be all about what I've been listening to - it's in the label ffs - but if I was going to be true to that brief, every post for the last eighteen months would have been ninety per cent of my own making. My own songs are almost all I listen to most days and most days I listen to plenty of them. I mean, I have enough now for at least twenty albums...

But no-one wants to hear that and my appetite for discovery is undiminished. I spend as much time as ever hunting down new tunes. It's more that, where I used to come to these posts with a folder of songs I'd heard at least two or three times, often more, now it's mostly only once, the time I found it and bookmarked it. 

My process now (Don't you just curl up inside and wither, any time you hear someone start to lay out their "process"?) is 

• look in the folder
• pick something 
• play it again on YouTube long enough to remember it 
• select or reject 
• repeat until empty.

Also programming, of course. Programming is always fun.  

It's a different process to how it used to be and maybe not as organic. Let me give a full disclosure notice: of this batch of twenty-three I can remember eight with some clarity. Of those seven, I can remember the actual tunes (The chorus, usually. Sometimes a riff.) of just three. 

Then again, to be scrupulously fair, quite a lot of them don't really have tunes, as you'll soon hear. Tunes seem to be increasingly optional in popular music. As does popularity. Or music...

Does all of this invalidate the feature? Not really. It's a discomfiting fact that all through the time I've been putting up these posts, I rarely could remember even a third of the tunes without reminding myself with a re-listen. If I leaf through my my back pages, as I quite often do, most of the music posts are filled with names I barely recognize, let alone the songs. 

But then, it's not about longevity, is it? And certainly not familiarity. Or not mostly. It's about excitement, discovery and novelty. The posts where my percentage recognition skyrockets are the ones stuffed with old faithfuls. I can remember the tunes of the Lanas and Sunday 1994s and Olivias and the rest of the regulars alright (I'd put Blondshell in there but as we all know, Sabrina doesn't really do tunes.) but it would be a sad old feature if I just went around and around my favorites twice a month. Wouldn't it?  

Anyway, enough about my process. Let's have some tunes. We can all discover them together.

JUST MONIKA: A DDLC song
[by Random Encounters] (feat. OR3O & Adriana Figueroa)

OMG! Thank you astryuuna! 

Provenance: Astryuuna posted a fourteen second clip of herself, under the title PSA, in which she appears out of the dark to ask "Hey! it's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?". She also linked to a four second clip of her in near-darkness, saying something indecipherable in Spanish. She was clearly in cosplay as someone, as she almost always is, and for once I thought it might be someone I'd seen but since I have no visual memory I couldn't work out who.

Luckily, everyone else in the comments could. Plus she'd typed JUST MONIKA three hundred and eighty-four times in the description. (Yes, I counted them.). So I typed JUST MONIKA into YouTube and this video came up.

Forty-seven million views it's got. In eight years. So much out there. It's been in my head ever since. Now it can be in yours. 

I might post the astryuuna videos for Halloween. Oh, wait... that's tomorrow! Well then, I guess this is my Halloween gift to you, a day early. 

And since it's Halloween...

 Halo Jelly - R. Missing

Every R. Missing song is Halloween-appropriate. She really knocks them out, too. I only post maybe one in five, if that. They all sound the same and none of them have tunes. Don't you love that? 

I love that.

 Dogs - Land of Talk

We had a cat so balance requires some dogs next. Not a cover of the Who classic, sadly. That one has a tune. 

Hey, I'm really leaning into the whole "no tunes" thing now, aren't I? It's like listening to the new music show on Radio 6!

 this will be the last time - if i was a pony

So, how did I find this lot? Well, they have "pony" in their name, which is one of my big signifiers, so I might well have stumbled across them organically but in fact I was following a breadcrumb trail that started with...

D'you know, I actually have already forgotten where it started. That is so awkward. I'm going to give credit to Chasing Fridays, which is where I read the article on laptop twee but I don't think that was where I first came across the name of this new sub-genre. Of course, now I'm primed to notice it, I'm seeing "laptop twee" all over the place.

Laptop twee itself isn't new. It's been around long enough to have a Wikipedia page. According to that, apparently I've been listening to it for a while without knowing: Feeble Little Horse, the Femcels, Bassvictim... all familiar names around here. 

Trending Raps, the Instagram page that Chasing Fridays piece links to for authority, calls laptop twee a "crossover between indie and electronic music". A fuller gloss goes "Blending the sweetness of twee pop and 2000s indie with glitchy electronic production, laptop twee brings together intimate vocals, homemade recordings, acoustic textures and digital experimentation." Sounds like a lot of stuff I've already been listening to, only I didn't know it had a name.

From those sources, I got a few examples, quite a few of them already known to me, but instead of link-hopping I went to YouTube and just typed in "laptop twee". Didn't get me as much as I expected but it got me the Laptop Twee Starter Pack, so I'm good for now. 

I've got more of this stuff that's not in those links, too, but how much do we want? 

Well, we want this one...

 gold teeth - horse laugh

Is that laptop twee? I don't fucking know! I mean, it might as well be and it was in with the rest but I can't remember how I even found it. It has, like, 150 views on YouTube. But then, Worldpeace DMT, who are close to the best-known act in the genre as far as I can mark it, only get a few thousand. Maybe no-one who cares uses YouTube any more. Is YouTube for old people now?

 

 Ivy - Worldpeace DMT

Genres are weird, anyway. I quite like Worldpeace DMT, as it goes, but I mean, this is just folk music, isn't it? And Ivy is singer-songwriter with occasional distortion. Great videos, though.

I seem to have screwed myself over with all this laptop twee musing. I knew it should have been a post all its own. Let's see if I can wrangle this pony back into the paddock.

 CATWOMAN - Doechii

I can see that one's gonna blow up...

Also, is that Al Pacino she's doing there?

 Where Is Gone? (with Rosalia) - Fontaines DC

Talking of songs with no tunes, that's the whole of the new Fontaines DC album, if you believe the internet. This is on it. Does it have a tune? Judge for yourself.

My friend has been plugging Rosalia to me for a while now. And to Mrs. Bhagpuss, who now has the latest album on her wishlist, I notice. I don't know what it is about female singers with just one name that begins with R but somehow I have an internal resistance to them. Rihanna, Rosalia, Robyn...

Oh, but look who's here!

 Popstar/Punkrocker - Robyn

Just need something by Rihanna now. Maybe next time.

I prefer that mashup to either of the originals, too. That lack of affect just does me. And that's a prime example of a super-catchy tune that isn't really a tune at all. It's damn near all on one note...

 Valery (Please don't be mad at me)

Caroline Rose

Absolutely the best title of the week.  As you'd expect from someone who names their album "Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall". Giving me strong Brenda Kahn vibes with a side order of Angel Corpus Christie. I just wishlisted the CD.

Hystérique  - yeule

Apparently this is yeule going mainstream. Well, pop, at least. Or so I read...

I'd bookmarked the official audio but as I was grabbing the YouTube link I saw someone had done a lyric video so that's what we got. It's a whole other song when you know what she's singing about. Although whether those are the right words is anyone's guess. I still can't pick them out past all that processing.

Two more for a Halloween Thirteen and I'm out.

 don't tell me we've grown apart - Grolth

Is this laptop twee? I thought we were done with that for today but, I mean, if it isn't, it might as well be. I can't remember how I found it now, anyway. 

Good though, isn't it?

 Ghost Rider - PARTY DOZEN

We've had PARTY DOZEN before I think. Pretty sure, actually. It's not like there are a lot of drums/sax duos out there and I've definitely posted at least one already. I had their new one bookmarked but this is a lot more seasonally appropriate.

And with that I shall leave you. Don't, as they say, have nightmares. 

 

The Glitched Call Is Coming From Inside The Game

 

The latest "Special Program" for Neverness To Everness's next big update is out. It's fifty-three minutes long although the first ten minutes of that is just a timer ticking down, so call it three-quarters of an hour. It's still a long watch, either way.

And for the first time I watched it all. Usually I just skim through to see the highlights or read a summary if I can find one but now I'm retired I have the time. 

I was hoping to find it informative. I wasn't expecting it to be entertaining too. But it was.

After those first ten minutes of counting down, which I did skip because I'm not that desperate for entertainment, the host comes on to introduce the two people joining him in the discussion. They're two designers going by the names Baggie and Naomi. 

At this point, I still had the video running as an embed on the MMO Bomb page where I'd heard about the update. I wasn't paying that much attention, waiting for the whole thing to get started, but I perked up at the thought of getting some insights from the team behind the game. I was a little surprised they both had Westernized nicknames but then I figured they'd have been cherry-picked for the English-language version for a reason.

And then they started talking. Baggie sounded odd but Naomi... Naomi sounded exactly like she was one of the many helium-voiced characters in the game itself. That got my full attention. What the hell...?

I opened the window to full screen and the mystery was instantly revealed. Baggie is a cardboard box. Naomi and the host are chibi figures. The whole vodcast is metafictional. These aren't the designers who work in some office building in Suzhou, China. They're... 

 

Well, it's hard to pin down what they are. The NTE YouTube channel says "It's real. It's fiction" which doesn't really help a lot. 

They might be representations of actual designers but they also might be notional designers who live and work in another layer of reality that lies between ours and the game itself. Or they might be in the game-world. I'm not sure there's a clear explanation.

As a conceit, though, it's delicious. I never normally sit through these things but I was transfixed. The three of them chatted away in a far more entertaining and professional manner than any game designers I can remember seeing. The whole thing comes across as the kind of thing you might watch and listen to for fun, not just because you wanted to dig out the few nuggets of useful information buried in the awkward banter, uncomfortable pauses and lame in-jokes that are all too familiar from promos featuring the people who make the games.

It's a good thing the format and the presentation were strong because the content they're plugging is less so. It's not terrible but on a first look it doesn't seem to be up to the standards of the better previous releases. Then again, the last one was so good it was always going to be hard follow.

If you were hoping we'd get to explore some more of Hethereau, like that huge district across the river they've just re-designed, you're in for a disappointment. The story element this time revolves around ETD-6, the security unit for which Linko and Chaos work. 

ETD-6 is responsible for dealing with Anomaly crime and also with Meme Anomalies. We've run into some of the team already but never the two people supposedly in charge of the division, Lieutenant Elyms and Captain Exe. I thought Chaos was in charge so it shows what I know.

The update is called Once Upon A Glitched Call and the action takes place in "...a vast stretch of cyerspace that's a blend of nostalgia core, dreamcore, and poolcore. ...A flooded city floating in a digital ocean". Another Anomalous Realm, then, as opposed to any part of Hethereau or the physical space it occupies.

The set-up is that an "Invalid Number" is being propagated through Bagel. Once people hear about it, they can't stop thinking about it, although what actual harm it does, other than being the telephonic equivalent of an annoying earworm, isn't immediately clear. Anyway, ETD-6 has been tasked with putting a stop to it, presumably because the most likely explanation is some kind of Meme Anomaly.

I'm confident it will be an interesting and enjoyable story. They all have been so far. And it is at least an active Anomaly investigation, for once. The whole narrative arc of the game still feels nebulous and ill-defined, though, and this doesn't, on the face of it, takes us any further towards a sense of overall purpose. Maybe there just isn't one and the whole game will be episodic, always. 

Which is fine on paper. I don't have a problem with it, conceptually. But the open world rpg gacha game market is highly competitive right now. Games need a strong storyline to keep players interested or they'll just wander off . NTE only has one more update after this one to get us all firmly hooked before Ananta arrives on January 15, which is where I'll be going.

And sometime after that there's another game I just heard about that sounds even more intriguing. That one's called Ordinary Oddness and I'm already pre-registered with the game wishlisted on Steam. 

But let's not get distracted. That's for a separate post.

 

The point is, good as all these games can be, even with a six-week cadence and huge content drops every time, it's still not guaranteed they'll hold an audience. There's just too much choice. I have absolutely no complaints at all about Wuthering Waves, for example. It may be the best of all these titles. And yet since I fell off it for a few weeks, through no fault of the game's, I've never been able to climb back on.  

For now, I'm committed to NTE. I play it virtually every day and really enjoy it. One update that doesn't quite grab me, though, and that could turn into a few weeks when I'm not really feeling it and then some other, no doubt very similar, game will take its opportunity to suck me in and that may very well be that for Hethereau.

Yeah, Hotta will be really gutted to lose the no money I was giving them, I bet So many great, free games, so many cheap, stingy players...

Even though the Special Program puts the story update front and center, the trailer doesn't make it look all that interesting. Or exciting. It's a lot of hanging telephones and shots of the digital city, and even there a warning along the bottom of the screen makes clear this isn't necessarily how the place might look in the game itself.

So, yeah, I was underwhelmed. What else is there? Quite a lot and none of it all that thrilling either, I'd say. 

The two banner characters are, of course, Elyms and Exe, who appear as pulls in that order. Having never met either of them, my interest, going in, is about as low as it could be and nothing I heard about them in the Program made me feel any more enthusiastic. Elyms is yet another bubbly, outgoing young woman, of whom I already have more than enough on my team. Exe sounds like a dull introvert with no social skills, which seems to be going too far in the other direction. 

 His name, by the way, is weirdly pronounced by all three presenters as if it were three separate letters, E-X-E, as opposed to the much more natural X. That also did not endear him to me.

Coming back, as the characters you can try for again if you missed them last time, are Shinku and Chaos. I opted out of pulling for both of them first time around and I can't imagine I'll feel any differently this time but at the moment I'd rather roll for either of them than Exe or Elyms.

There are two new vehicles, both of which are nuts. One's a toy lion. The other's a tank. The lion has the dubious USP of requiring Fons to go into overdrive, which is not what I'd call a winning feature. The tank, though, comes with a working cannon you can use when fighting anomalies and bandits on the streets of Hethereau and it also features in a new World of Tanksesque arena mode, where four players try to blow each other off the map. That does look like it might be fun.

Another major addition is a whole new business enterprise. You move from making your own deliveries to managing a team of drivers who'll make them for you. It's a full sub-game along the lines of the existing Cafe Origen one, with its own progression and rewards. You'll be able to meet job-seeking NPCs on the streets of Hethereau and choose which you want to hire. There are different vehicles and skins for them and all of that stuff.

 I am not interested in so many ways but also interested, too. I don't do deliveries because driving in NTE is not much fun, so in theory this would play to my weakness. But then, I also don't like business management games, so it might just be swapping one mode I don't enjoy for another. I do like talking to NPCs, though, and apparently the delivery business will open up some "factions" in Hethereau to interact with, including the criminal underground. That does intrigue me.

I'll probably at least try it but it's not really my kind of thing. Neither is combat and yet I paid full attention to the huge section of the program that goes into just how effective Exe and Elyms can be in a fight. It's not that I want to use them but it's interesting in how it really showcases just how complex combat in the game is, while making me wonder how that can somehow still matter so little that although I'm really, really bad at it and don't take any trouble to get any better, I can get through the fights just fine. 

Another addition I will not be bothering with is a new board game from the in-world company that gave us 999 Nights. Sadly, this isn't another RPG but some kind of city sim where you place businesses to try and get the maximum footfall. There's a long explanation in the video that bored the fekkin' backside off me in seconds. It was the only part I fast-forwarded. Hard pass on that.

 There are, of course, the usual new outfits, all of which are horrible. Seriously, who designs the male clothing for this game and why are they still in work? And why does everything have to be silver and black? The women deck themselves out like explosions in a paint factory and the men look like they've just walked off the set of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

The only good news about costumes is that some of the existing ones can now be worn by more than one character. I haven't got any of those though so...

There are a few tweaks and changes to some of the existing features and word of a visual upgrade for players on mobile and that, I think, is about it. I did all this from memory so I probably missed something important. Oh, yeah, there will be overflow storage for Stamina and Pixels, which would have been handy for me if it had come in months ago. Not so much now.

The update arrives on November 11. There's a five minute video with just the highlights if you need it. 

I'm looking forward to it all about as much as you can look forward to anything you're not much looking forward to, I guess. Let's hope I'm back here on the 12th to eat my words.

Time And Memory And Memory Of Time

I do wish now that, when I started watching Dr. Who on iPlayer, I'd a) gone right back to the beginning and b) reviewed each season here on the blog as I finished it. I didn't, mostly because I never thought of it but also because I was under the misapprehension that what I was doing was re-watching some old shows from my childhood for no better reason than that they were there and I felt like it.

As usual, it turns out my memory is less than accurate. But then, Dr. Who was always going to be difficult.

I grew up with the show as a default childhood standard. Everyone watched Dr. Who, just like everyone watched Blue Peter. It's not like you decided. You just did. That sort of exposure leads you to believe you've been more involved with something than you probably have. Or it did in my case, as I've been finding out.

If you'd asked me at any time in the last six decades or so, I'd have been clear: Back when they were originally broadcast, I'd have told you, I watched a lot of the first and second Doctor, all of the third and fourth, a little of the fifth and almost none of the sixth and seventh. Years after it was shown on TV, I watched all of the seventh Doctor, on VHS, in the nineties.

That's all based on a few very specific memories. Like half the children in the country, I started off watching much of the show from behind the sofa. Literally. I have reasonably clear memories of doing it. And of the sofa. 

I know I had nightmares after watching the show during the William Hartnell era. I can even remember one of them, with Daleks coming over a hill above my house, like Apaches in a Western. Because of that, I was made to stop watching it, which I was not happy about. I wasn't allowed to watch it again until I was quite a bit older.

I'd have been eight or nine by the time Patrick Troughton took over and that was considered old enough to handle the horror but that was also about when we went for a while without any TV at all. We didn't even have a set.

I know! Hard to believe, isn't it? Tantamount to child abuse, really. In my memory, that went on for years but I was a kid so it was probably more like a few months. However long it was, I definitely took an enforced break during the second Doctor's tenure.

Once Jon Pertwee arrived, though, I watched every episode. It was one of the unmoveable feasts. I was coming out of my tweens then and the Third Doctor should have been my doctor, based on age, but when Tom Baker took over I was still malleable enough to convert. He's always been my Doctor ever since.

Until this year, I was under the impression that, if I hadn't seen every one of Tom Baker's more than one hundred and seventy episodes, as they went out, it must have been damn close. I also remembered watching a significant number of Peter Davison's episodes and maybe just a handful of Colin Baker's, after he took over as the Sixth Doctor. Sylvester McCoy, the seventh and final Doctor in the original run, I was absolutely certain I never saw until I traded some comics with a work colleague for the whole run on video cassette.

I am now back up to the Seventh Doctor in what I can no longer strictly call my re-watch and I'm going to have to make some substantive revisions to that timeline. It's hard to say exactly how the record should be revised. It goes one of two ways: either I did watch everything I thought I did but since then I've completely forgotten almost all of it - or I didn't watch even half of what I thought I did. 

Yeah. It's that. 

Revisiting he first three Doctors played out much as I thought it would. Even though I haven't gone all the way back to watch the First Doctor this time, I did browse through the episode descriptions on iPlayer and I remember about as many of them as I expected. The Second Doctor's run was patchy as I thought it would be. Some I remembered quite well, others not at all. 

The Third Doctor's era played out exactly as I imagined. I could remember pretty much every storyline and damn near every episode. It was only when I got to the Fourth Doctor that it all started to fall apart. 

Tom Baker had the longest run of any Doctor. Seven years, from 1974 to 1981. I have the strongest memories of watching him on a Saturday night. He's always been my favorite Doctor, as he is for many people who were there at the time and plenty who weren't. He's just really, really good in the role.

The sheer power and presence of his performance is what, I think, must have led me to think I'd been present for the whole of his run. Logic - or just a glance at a calendar - should have told me how unlikely that was.

I was away at University from 1978 to 1981. In the first year I didn't watch any TV at all. No-one did. In the second and third year, I moved out of college to live in non-university accommodation with my then-girlfriend (Later wife.). We did have a small, black&white portable TV but we were rarely in to watch it and never on a Saturday evening. 

I guess I might have caught the odd episode, here and there, but most of Tom Baker's last few years, when I came to watch them recently, were completely new to me. Very good they were, too, although he's clearly lost a lot of his enthusiasm in the last season.

By the time Peter Davison arrived, I'd graduated and gotten married. We were living in a flat above an antiques shop and we watched more TV then, although on a Saturday evening the TV was often hooked up to the Atari 2600. 

I'd have said I hadn't seen much of the Fifth Doctor the first time around but apparently I saw a lot more than I remembered. Pretty much the whole of his run, really. I wrote about the first of his three seasons back in Blaugust and I wasn't at all complimentary. I'm happy to say the second and third were much better. So much so, in fact, that I've had to revise my opinion of Peter Davison in the role. He's pretty good.

I still think he's not quite up there with Doctors One through Four and I have a particular affection for number Seven, so in a ranking Davison is still going to miss out, but the distance between him and the pack is a lot smaller now than I thought. 

 

I should have realized I must have seen a lot of his episodes from the way I remembered Companions Adric and Tegan with such dislike. Then again, they were both introduced at the tail end of the Tom Baker era and that, I think, is where I developed my disaffection for the pair of them. You don't have to see a lot of either of them to start wishing you'd seen less.

Oh, Tegan isn't that bad. She whines a lot and that airline stewardess outfit she wears for so much of her time in the show is almost physically painful to look at but she has a lot to put up with, what with the awful Adric and the way the Doctor keeps letting her down. Adric, though... there's no excuse for Adric. 

Oh, and there's Nyssa. Nyssa is... quite nice? But no-one's as nice as Davison's Doctor. He is just so nice, it almost hurts. And so English, too. Both traits that gave me huge problems coming to terms with him back in the day. 

Still, it only took one episode of Colin Baker's Doctor this time around for me to completely re-assess Davison's. Better an overly-polite Doctor than a surly, aggressive, borderline-sociopathic one, any day.

Colin Baker is, by a wide margin, the least-popular of the first seven Doctors. It's really the other six, then a huge gap, then him. I've always known I didn't like his Doctor but until now I thought he'd been so much not to my taste that I'd only ever watched a few of his early episodes and ten decided not to bother with any more.

Watching them now, I'm fairly sure I never watched any of them at all. I don't remember anything about them, other than the ridiculous coat of many colors, which I've seen in countless photos. As I worked my way through his three seasons (Really two and a half.) there wasn't one single storyline that I remembered nor one episode that felt even vaguely familiar. I don't believe I ever watched him at all.

Looking back, I think I'd already stopped watching the show before the end of Davison's run. I must have decided not to bother with the new Doctor when he came. I remember the BBC experimenting a lot with the scheduling around then, moving the show from Saturday to mid-week and then doubling the length of each episode. I think I just got fed up of trying to fit it in around other things and gave up on it altogether. 

It was also around then that admitting to liking the show was starting to become a social embarrassment, even amongst comics fans. Dr. Who fans have a terrible reputation in this country or they did until the revival.

If the Sixth Doctor was the worst of the lot, did I miss much?  Hmm. That's harder to say than you might think.

The first of Colin Baker's seasons is really, really bad. It's extremely violent for a show of its kind, completely out of the range of every other era. Obviously, it's not violent by a modern standard but even now, to see the Doctor attempting to strangle one of his companions is really quite disturbing. So are the scenes of torture and murder, of which there are far too many.

The physical violence is nothing to the psychological, though. In the first season, Colin Baker's Doctor is either a blustering, shouting bully or a sniveling, whining coward. At one of many nadirs for the show in this season, he even grabs Peri and uses her as a human shield to save himself. 

He's also unbearably arrogant. It's wearing to sit through. The Doctor in all his incarnations has always been confident to the point of arrogance but then he goes on to be proved right. Baker starts at arrogant and ramps up from there, only to be wrong as often as not. 

It all makes him very unpleasant company and his unceasing verbal, psychological and, shockingly, physical abuse of his companion, Peri, a young woman still in her teens and just about to go to University when he meets her (As Peter Davison, significantly. There's some serious subtext going on with that bait&switch...), is genuinely hard to watch at times, particularly since the companions in Dr Who are partly there as analogs for the watching audience. The idea is that we'd all love to swap places with them and go adventuring through time and space with the lovably eccentric Time Lord. Yeah. Not with this sociopath.

I found the first Baker season so disturbing that, when I'd finished it, I went online to see what the critical opinion was. That was how I learned all the backstory; how the violence almost got the show cancelled; how there was meant to be some half-assed plan to start the Doctor off as a contrast to Peter Davison's nice guy and bring him back to equilibrium over several seasons, which never became clear because Baker got the push before it could happen; how there were battles going on within the creative team over the direction of the show; how production had been moved from the Children's Department to Drama, leading to a darker tone...

None of which excuses the poor writing and even poorer decision-making. The Sixth Doctor's first season is the low point of the show's run. 

The second is a bit better. The Doctor isn't quite so unpleasant. The stories aren't quite so ludicrous. It's still not very good but I enjoyed some of it. The Mark of the Rani was okay and I didn't hate Revelation of the Daleks as much as most people seem to have done. I even quite enjoyed The Two Doctors, in which Patrick Troughton makes an entirely unnecessary return. It's a total pantomime but at least it was entertaining. Apart from the cannibalism...

Colin Baker's third and final season is much better. It has a very unusual framing structure, with the Doctor on trial for his life in a Gallifreyan court and most of the action being seen in flash-back (Or flash-forward.) Baker is certainly not the most technically-gifted actor to play the role but he manages pretty well in this season. He doesn't have a great range of facial expressions but he does outrage quite well and it's always the appropriate reaction here.

He's also nowhere even close to being as nasty as he used to be, which is a huge relief. He's still not all that nice but then the Doctor doesn't need to be nice. He just needs to be fair. He was never fair to poor old Peri, who has to be one of the unluckiest of companions, and neither were the writers. She disappears mid-season to become, off-screen, the Warrior Queen to Brian Blessed's barbarian King and that's the last we see of her. 

The season does contain one of my favorite conceits in the whole run of the show. Before Peri's even officially gone, she's already been replaced by another companion, Mel, who just appears, in media res, as the Doctor calls up a recording of an adventure that hasn't yet happened at the time of the trial (Time Lords, eh?). 

I'm half way through Sylvester McCoy's first season now and there's still been absolutely no explanation of who Mel is or how she came to be traveling with the Doctor. I really love not knowing what's going on there. I'm sure it'll get explained eventually, probably in the revival years, but for now I'm just reveling in the randomness of it all.

Mel, played by Bonnie Langford, is a very good companion and a bit of a fan favorite which, if you knew what Bonnie Langford was known for at time of casting, would not have been a bet you'd have taken. Peri, I think, could have been good too, if she hadn't had to travel with the version of the Doctor she got. I bet even Brian Blessed looked like an improvement after that.

The season, for all its mild pleasures, ends poorly. The conclusion of the trial is unconvincing and silly. And it almost was the end of the show, too. A combination of a poor critical response, a dwindling audience and yet more internal politics at the BBC meant the show took an eighteen-month break before it returned for a swansong with the Seventh Doctor and an even smaller budget.

But that's another story. One I'll get to when I've seen it. Again

Of Mice And Cats

 Next Fest is over. There was a lot of talk about the event being ruined by a glut of vibe coded AI games but I can't say I saw any sign of it myself. I thought it was an above-average edition, if anything. I can remember writing about one a while back, where I could barely find half a dozen games I wanted to try and I know there were a couple where most of the demos I was interested in turned out to be nowhere near as interesting as I'd thought they were going to be. 

This time around, everything I picked was at least fully finished and functional. That has not always been the case in the past. Everything worked, nothing crashed and I didn't come across any bugs or glitches. I got stuck in a rock once but I managed to get out. That can happen in any game.

The three demos I have left to review don't really have that much in common but I want to get this finished so they're all going to have to share a post and like it. I'll start with the best of the three, which is also the one that looks like it's had the most time and money spent on it. Co-incidence? 

 

Hela: of Mice & Magic

The full game is coming in December. If you think that would mean a polished demo, you'd be right. Slick, even.

In what I'd consider something of a bravura move, the demo announces up front that there's no save option. You're expected to finish it in one session. I've played demos like that before but they've generally just not through the implications. This is entirely deliberate.

It's a developer that's confident their game is going to charm you so instantly and hook you so hard you won't even think of stopping 'til it's over. You're going to play a cute white mouse with a backpack and you're going to like it!

And I did. Not for want of trying not to, either. Despite having an animal protagonist and a woodland setting, Hela isn't really my kind of game. Or at least it isn't in this demo, which, as the promotional video tacked onto the end makes clear, shows only a very small subset of the kind of gameplay on offer in the full version.

The demo offers a "short adventure" that turns out to be mostly a tutorial. It's quest-based action with no combat and a lot of puzzle solving. Most of what you have to do relies on movement. It's not exactly a parkour game but there's a lot of climbing, gliding and web-swinging à la Spider-Man. Or Tarzan. Are there any Tarzan games any more? Were there ever?

 

That wouldn't be a fair description of the game itself, which seems to have a lot more crafting, interaction with people and animals and exploration, as well as a greater emphasis on co-op play. Speaking of co-op, even the demo has a puzzle that requires four people but in an excellent twist, there's a mechanic whereby your mouse can clone himself to group with himself. Mostly, though, the demo is an extended tutorial geared towards teaching you the basics, while also letting you have a good poke around the forest on your own.

Once I realized the degree of latitude it was allowing me, I had a much better time. Initially, the whole thing felt very much on rails as my mouse (Who doesn't even get a name, let alone any kind of characterization or cosmetic options.) was shepherded into a big cave, where it looked very much as though he (She?) was expected to do a lot of swinging about on ropes. 

I was not happy. I did not want to swing about on ropes. I have never played a Spider-Man game so I can't say if this is the same mechanic but I imagine swinging on one rope is much like swinging on any other. And I do not want to do it.

Since I'm on the subject of mechanics in the game, they're very solid. I can't fault them. Any negativity you're sensing (And you're not imagining it.) comes entirely from my innate dislike of the activities themselves, not the way they're implemented. If this is the sort of thing you like elsewhere, you'll almost certainly like it here, too.

Fortunately for me, it turned out the game did not want to tell me how to things at all. Just what it was I had to do. The demo comes with a set of goals to be completed before you can finish it (Other than just by giving up and logging out, of course. It's not cursed...). All you have to do is fix two Altars and collect forty-eight glimmers. 

 

That sounded like a lot to me but it was fine. There are way more than forty-eight of the glowing yellow motes the Witch calls "glimmers" (The Witch is the person who gives you your backpack and sends you out to fix the altars in the first place.) and fixing each altar just requires one simple task. 

For the first Altar you have to literally fix a broken horn back on (A careless moose knocked it off.), with sticky resin from a very tall pine tree. You could swing up there on your rope, which is what I think you're supposed to but I just climbed the tree. It was a lot simpler.

The second altar wants its lantern filled with fireflies so it won't be scared of the dark any more (Awww!). Again, you could chase all over the place, trying to catch the annoying insects, but I just stood in one place and waited for them to fly past, then snagged them with my rope. 

All of that plus a fair amount of exploring - it's a big area - took me an hour and twenty minutes. It didn't feel that long. It was good fun. There's a lot more to do in the demo area if you want to stick around (There's an excellent full walkthrough here, which I'm pleased to say I did not need while I was playing.) including a number of mini-games, which reward glimmer, so you have a choice there if exploring's not your thing . There are also half a dozen rituals to complete, all of which require a scavenger hunt if exploring is your thing.

 

Visually, the game is delightful. It's supposed to be representative the of Swedish countryside, which I'm sure it is. I've never been further north than Edinburgh so I wouldn't know. It looks lovely, anyway.

It also ran very comfortably on my onboard graphics. The minimum and recommended specs are really low for such a good-looking game. I did have to turn the mouse sensitivity to the lowest setting because on the default it was slewing around wildly enough to give me motion sickness but it was fine once I toned it down.

Very observant readers may have noticed I said yesterday that Hela could only be played with a controller. That is nonsense. A hallucination. More evidence I may, indeed, be an AI. 

Actually, I'm not going to take all the blame. What happens, when you press Play on Steam for the first time, is that a big window pops up with a picture of a controller on it, telling you that's the way to play the game. If you close that window with the X in the corner, like I did, the game stops running and throws you back to your Steam library.

I took that as more than a hint that a controller was required, not just preferred. It isn't. It's just a badly programmed window. You're supposed to press the button in the window to close it but I took that to mean "Yes, Sir! I have a controller, Sir! And I will use it, Sir!" when what it actually means is "Fine. I've read that. Now get out of my way and let me play the game however I want to play it.". It plays perfectly well with keyboard and mouse and it knows perfectly well that's what you're using. A lot of fuss about nothing. That I made.

Even though I did enjoy it, I haven't wishlisted the game because, as I said, it's not really my kind of thing. Eighty minutes was plenty. If the whole thing is as well-done as the demo, though, I think it could be quite a hit. Nimgimli picked it for the Fantasy Critic League. I think he's got picked a good one.

 

Et Le Grain Mourut

This is a visual novel. It took me just under half an hour to finish the demo, including all the possible variations. I did not enjoy any of them all that much.

I was bored, to tell the truth. The story, such as it is, didn't really seem to go anywhere, not in the demo, although I could see the seeds being planted for later. Who just reads the first chapter of a book and then stops, though?

From memory, the gist is that a bunch of teenagers are a week from their final exams, after which they'll all graduate high school. The place is Paris, the decade the 1920s. Meanwhile, they all hang out in a bar after school (With the full knowledge of their parents) and some of them get drunk. I don't know what the legal drinking age was in 1930s Paris, if there even was one, which now I think about it seems unlikely, but it would be pointless to try and pin down the historical accuracy anyway.

 

This is a game that looks old but feels modern. For example, one of the students is making a film in which the rest are acting and he's hearing-impaired so he uses sign language, which all his friends seem to know. One of the others doesn't like the script of the movie because of its very "heterosexual" nature. I have no real way of knowing how historically accurate those attitudes and behaviors might be for Paris in the 1920s but I do know the way they're expressed feels very 21st Century.

All off which would be absolutely fine if the game was entertaining. Unfortunately, I found it just a bit dull. I did read all the text, of which there's a lot, but after a few minutes I was skim-reading it at the fastest I can read, which is pretty fast.   

Nothing really happens and it doesn't help that the graphics, while very well-done, are also mostly static. Movement is limited to some nice two-dimensional models of the characters that slide on and off like the cardboard puppets in a model theater. Most of the backgrounds are sepia photographs of the period. It's done very cleverly but it's not to my taste.

It's also a long time before the player is required to do anything but read and watch. I thought there were never going to be any inflection points but eventually a couple of choices appeared.  

 

Normally, the way I play visual novels, I'd only ever have seen the choices I made but the game does have one mechanic I really liked and would love to see more widely used.

There's a somewhat misleadingly-labelled "Skip" button at the foot of the screen. I pressed it for some reason and instead of it skipping whatever I was doing at the time it flipped through the whole section of the game I'd just finished at extreme speed. Just a few seconds. 

I used it to retry all the options and there are some significant differences. You'd be able to cycle through every possible combination in a fraction of the time using that button. Seems like a great idea to me.

Other than that, I liked the art and design in the Portrait collection. As you talk to various characters (Or rather listen to them talk to you.) some of them become known to you and you get to add their portrait to  your journal. There appear to more features like that - there are tabs for several anyway - but I didn't see any of them in the demo.

Once again, Et le Grain Mourut seemed like a competently-made game that may well be a delight for someone. Just not for me. My loss, I'm sure. I didn't wishlist it, obviously.

 

The Brilliant Detective Milo

And finally, another perfectly good demo I didn't much enjoy. On paper, this one should have been my sort of thing but in practice it didn't do a lot for me. 

It's an investigation game featuring cartoon cats. The setting, which is confusingly explained, at first in a really quite badly-done comic strip and then, even more confusingly, in numerous cut-scenes featuring conversations between the cats, is a police station in Mew York. 

Yes, there are cat puns. A lot of cat puns.

In an entirely unbelievable set-up, you play a British private investigator, brought across the Atlantic to help catch a serial killer. Somehow, the not-Sherlock cat knows one of the detectives from way back and his pal invited him. I couldn't follow it and frankly I didn't try.

The gameplay consists of a series of interrogations. You read the crime report, witness statements and suspect dossiers and then you ask your questions. One of the suspects is always guilty. You just have to decide which. Once you pick, you then get an immediate verdict and your score is adjusted accordingly.

 

Every interrogation relies on you spotting certain clues. A very simple one would be that the crime report mentions the victim was struck by a right-pawed assailant and the dossiers note that one of the two suspects is a leftie. As the demo goes on, the number and complexity of clues you need to spot increases. It's a puzzle-matching game, effectively.

I found it reasonably easy to spot the clues but I didn't find it fun. Stressful, yes. My main problem was that although all the paperwork has the suspects' names clearly shown, those names don't appear on the interrogation screen. I could never remember which cartoon cat was which, leading me to condemn at least one innocent kitty because I couldn't remember which of the suspects was which. You can flip back during the investigation to check but would it really be so hard to put a name card on the desk in front of them?

It didn't help that the plot makes absolutely no sense. There's supposed to be a serial killer at work but every day Milo, if he gets it right, sends another killer to jail. And then the next day there's another killing That's not a serial killer - that's some kind of death cult! There is, inevitably, much talk of copycats...

I also found the game unexpectedly and unpleasantly graphic in its descriptions of the murders. Obviously, a game like this is always going to be inherently violent but the constant references to the victims having been "declawed" and the discussions over whether that happened before or after they were killed sat uncomfortably with the cartoonish art style and the generally humorous tone.

 

Visually, I also found The Brilliant Detective Milo somewhat aggressive. There are a lot of sharp angles and there's a good deal of chaos in the layouts. The colors aren't over-bright but the palette sits unrelentingly in the red zone. I found it tiring to look at after a while.

Not that long, though. I played the demo for a little less than forty minutes. I hadn't finished it by then. I'd just had enough.

Once again, I don't think it's in any way a bad game. It's well-made and everything works as it's supposed to. It's just that I didn't get much out of playing it other than some mild anxiety over making the wrong choices and a sense that I'd rather be playing something else.

I ought to try to remember, next time Next Fest rolls around: I don't like detective games nearly as much as I think I do, even if the detective is a cartoon cat. I didn't wishlist it, naturally.

In fact, I only wishlisted one demo this time, Kat Domino, and I very much doubt I'll buy that when it comes out. I mostly wishlisted it to give the developers that minimal push a tick on a Steam wishlist apparently provides.

It was literally the least I could do. 

Let's Talk Demos - And When I Say Talk...

 Next Fest ends today. Of the eight demos I selected, I've played six. The two I haven't tried yet are ArcheAge Chronicles, which is a 38GB download and which I never really meant to include as part of the official count and Hela: Of Mice & Magic, which can only be played with a controller. 

I do have a controller but when I went to look for it yesterday, I couldn't find it. I'll have another look today. That said, just knowing it's the only way the game can be played loses me most of whatever interest I had, so I might not look all that hard.

I wrote about two of the demos, World of Slime and Never Wither, on Thursday. I reviewed them together because they're both creature-catchers. They also have similarly open-ended demos with no specific end-point. I played each of them only for as long as I felt I needed to get a feel for what they were about. I haven't logged into either of them since, even though there's plenty left to do, so I doubt I'll be adding either to my wishlist.

Today, I'm going to lump the remaining four demos together, on the grounds that they're all Point&Clicks of some stripe or other. Apart from their broad genre, they aren't all that similar. Two are genuine, traditional Point&Click adventure games, one's a visual novel and the other's a police procedural focusing entirely on interrogation.

Taking them in the order I played them:

 

The Other Side of the Wall

This is one of the adventures. It's set in a single-sex (Male.) private school in the 1980s. The school is run entirely by Roman Catholic priests. You can guess where this is going, I bet.

Well, it's not. Or not in the demo, anyway. Not that the demo goes anywhere much. Very little happens at all. 

It took me just over forty minutes to finish and that included several minutes spent watching a YouTube video to figure out one of the puzzles. Here's the thing; I love Point&Click adventures but I'm really not very good at them, even after many decades playing the damn things. It's very rare for me to get all the way through one without having to consult a walk-through or watch a video of someone else who's better at it than me. In fact it's probably never happened. 

I don't mind that. It doesn't put me off. I like to get as far as I can on my own without becoming frustrated and then, when I start to run out of ideas on what to do next, ask for hints. Usually just a nudge is enough but if I still can't figure it out I'm fine with looking up the full solution. The fun for me is in watching it all play out more than it is in solving the puzzles on my own. It's like how magic tricks are always more interesting when you know how they're done. Or is that just me?

 

That said, I feel it can hardly be in a game's best interests, if someone who enjoys adventure games can't even get off the first screen without looking something up. I've played a couple of demos like that. Luckily, neither of the two I picked this time was quite that awkward but I still had some problems getting going. 

It wasn't clear in either of them how to get started. For this one I just wandered about aimlessly, waiting for something to happen. It was quite a while before anything did. I looked at everything and talked to everyone and it all felt a little bit aimless.

I had a pleasant chat about literature with the priest who teaches English in the school. It later turned out I needed him to point me towards a a certain poem someone had hinted I might do well to study but at the time I didn't know that, of course. I just stood there, chatting with him about literature for no apparent reason. It was odd.

 

As usual, with no other plan in mind, I just worked my way around every location, examining, interacting, picking things up and putting them in my pockets and talking to everyone who'd talk with me about anything they wanted to talk about. I also tried to use anything I had with anything I could use it on, which didn't take long because I only had three things.

It all felt even more aimless than usual with no overarching plot or mystery to give it shape. Eventually I found my way to the eponymous hole in the wall between the all-boys' school and the all-girls school next door, which none of the boys is allowed to visit. (Yeah. Go figure.) I had a very elliptical conversation through the hole with an unseen girl who wouldn't even tell me her name. 

To get it out of her, I made my way back, via another conversation with the literary priest, to my room-mate, who was paying another of the priests to get him cigarettes. He made me the middle-man in the transaction and that got me the book of poetry the first priest had told me would have the poem I was looking for, which would in turn tell me what I had to get next, so I could give whatever it was to the girl on the other side of the hole in the wall and she'd finally tell me her name.

Yeah, that's an adventure game alright. Can't fault the gameplay. Very traditional. 

 

Visually the game is functional rather than attractive. I thought it all looked a bit flat. The colors are muted and the environment feels a bit schematic but it does a job.

The writing is good, if oddly literary. The conversations with the English-teaching priest goes way beyond what's necessary for the plot. You get to know his thoughts on Maya Angelou, Henry Miller, J.D. Salinger and several other 20th Century authors. As for the book of poetry, you get to read two entire poems by Yeats...

He's chatty and so is the girl behind the wall and the room-mate. The voice acting is about as functional as the rest of the game. It does a decent job but it's not especially memorable. I enjoyed it well enough at the time but now, a few days later, I couldn't even remember if the game was voiced at all. I had to go to  YouTube to check.

I finished the demo without ever being entirely clear where the story might be headed. Or, really, what the story was. Usually there's some kind of threat in these things or at least a mystery but this felt more like a slice-of-life. Nothing wrong with that but it'd be unusual for an adventure game not to include... well... an adventure.

It didn't really feel all that eighties, either, mostly because the setting is both visually and thematically unconnected to that any decade. Institutional buildings, formal gardens, uniforms... none of it triggers much of a nostalgic response. Consequently, when the dialog mentions the names of bands or comments on behaviors that might be considered "of the time", it all feels a bit dropped-in.

Overall, I thought it was fine but it didn't make me want to play the full game. I haven't wishlisted it.

 

Kat Domino: Agent of S.H.E.L.L 

This was my favorite of all the demos this time. I liked the design, the aesthetic, the gameplay and the setting. I was less sure about the writing or at least one aspect of it.

It's not that the writing is poor in any way. It's not. It's pretty good. It's just very punny and extremely fond of pop culture references, most of which feel somewhat dated. There are a lot of Monty Python and X-Files gags, for a start.

I find a little of that kind of thing tends to go a long way, even when it's done well. When it's done badly, I find it embarrassing and hard to get past. This isn't anywhere near that awkward, thankfully, but it did sometimes make me cringe a little. 

 

The background lore is solid and engaging (You can read some of it on the Steam Store page.) but there are only a couple of hints about the plot in the demo. It looks as though Kat is going to find that her Scully-like cynicism about the paranormal is going to be put to the test. 

As for the actual storyline, there isn't a lot of that either. The demo opens with the eponymous central character in her office, where she (Eventually...)  gets a call from her boss, telling her she has to go to Reception to collect a new recruit to the organization. The demo ends the moment you step out of the elevator into the reception area. You never even get to see the person you're supposed to meet. 

It took me just under an hour to get to that point. Once again, it included a few minutes of watching someone else on YouTube solve a puzzle I was having trouble with. I'd missed an interactable, which is so easy to do when there's nothing you can press to make them all light up. I also spent a lot of time before that just going backwards and forwards, revisiting locations and re-examining things in the hope of spotting something new as I tried to figure the puzzle out for myself. 

But most of the fifty minutes went on examining things and talking to people for the first time. There's a lot of text to read and a lot of voiceover to listen to but that's just how good adventure games roll.

 

The gameplay and the mechanics will feel extremely familiar to anyone who's played a Point&Click adventure before. There's a surprising amount to click on for a demo, all with fulsome descriptions to read or to listen to Kat read out loud for you. 

[And that, I'm going to warn you right now, is going to lead to me falling down an entirely unnecessary rabbit hole in a few paragraphs' time. If the developer is reading this, something that's always a risk when reviewing Next Fest demos, I apologize in advance. Just trust that it's all going to turn out alright in the end.]

The building Kat works in is actually a deep silo or perhaps an under-sea structure of some sort. Reception, where she's headed, is on the top floor, at the surface. Everything else is buried or sunk or whatever it is  Judging by the portholes, I guess it's under the ocean. It certainly looks like the inside of a submarine, with all those metal walls.

The action, such as it is, consists entirely of getting a colleague of Kat's, Layla, to move out of the way so Kat can take down a poster on the noticeboard so she can get to the code for the elevator which is pinned behind it. That involves finding a rubber chicken, a walnut shell and a feather, which she has to paint blue. Once again, let me remind you, this is an adventure game.

 

All of that was good fun, even if I did have to look up one of the solutions. When you finally get to the end of the demo you receive a performance review. You, the player, that is, not Kat. You're rated on things like Sarcasm and Patience, which the game calculates from the responses you make and things like how often you skip dialog. That was a nice way to wrap the whole thing up.

And now we come to the voice acting. Talking about it ought to be worth another short paragraph or two at most. Somehow it's not. It's the rest of the post. 

Like The Other Side of the Wall,  Kat Domino is fully voice acted. I really liked the dry, sarcastic tone but I found myself spending too much time altogether, wondering whether the voice I was hearing was a real person or AI. 

I really wasn't sure and I was sufficiently curious that, after I'd finished, I checked to see if there was any indication of AI use on the game's Steam page. There was not, so I googled it and got a response (Ironically, generated by Google's AI, Gemini.) telling me with great confidence that although there was some minor use of AI in some of the background material, the actual voiceover in the game was done by human actors.

 

So far, so clear. Only when I came to write this post, I wanted to include the quote and link to the source that supported it. So I ran the same query again and guess what? I got a different answer.

Now Gemini told me, with equal confidence, "Yes, the developer has disclosed that the voice acting for the project utilizes AI." Except the link it gave me as evidence went to an Instagram post about a different game entirely!

Seriously, I didn't want to derail my own post, yet again, by talking about the inadequacies of AI search summaries but this just keeps happening. I thought for a while we were getting to the point where these summaries could be trusted but clearly not.  Perhaps it's just Gemini. Maybe I ought to switch to ChatGPT for this sort of inquiry in future.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of it all, I put quotations marks around the title in the query to try and force Gemini to look at the right game. That got me something close to the original summary Gemini gave me yesterday. It recanted the allegation that AI was used for the voices at all, going back to its original contention that 

No, the voice acting in the actual game demo for Kat Domino: Agent of S.H.E.L.L. is not AI-generated. According to community compilations of non-AI game demos featured in the October 2026 Steam Next Fest, the developers explicitly hired an actual human voice actress for the game's voiceover. While the developers have used AI voice synthesis for temporary social media promotional reels and background narration online, the core point-and-click adventure game itself relies on hand-drawn art and human voice talent.

This also turns out to be wishful thinking. Or hogwash, if you prefer. 

The game is listed in a community-sourced Reddit post about demos in Next Fest that don't use AI but I could find no source anywhere for any developer statement specifically on voice acting in Kat Domino. The developers have made such a statement about the art but not the voice.

 

Because I find this sort of thing interesting, I have just spent half an hour doing my own digging, using my findings to push Gemini into doing the job it should have done in the first place. It was made harder for me by the fact that the developer, Evil Axis Game Studio, which is actually two people in Granada, Spain, only seem to use Instagram and TikTok to promote their work, two platforms with which I have little familiarity and, in the case of Instagram, limited access. 

As is well-known, AIs are exceptionally bad at parsing social media, which seems to be the root of the confusion in this case. Honestly, I'm tempted to give Gemini a pass on that. It's a minefield, even for humans.

Eventually, I forced this revised summary out of Gemini, which I think is about as accurate as it's likely to get:

"There is currently no definitive, verifiable source confirming that the voice acting in the game is human. The truth is that the developers, Evil Axis Game Studio, have not officially published any cast list, voice actress credits, or a definitive statement confirming whether the dialogue in the game demo is fully human or assisted by AI voice synthesis"

In other words, Gemini doesn't know. And neither do we. Gemini did at this point provide several more paragraphs of explanations as to why it doesn't know, all of which appear to be accurate as far as I can tell. It's just a shame it didn't do that at the beginning. It would have saved me most of the morning.

The irony is, the reason I started all this in the first place is that I like the voice-over. Kat herself speaks with a timbre and resonance that I find aurally pleasing. The intonation and expression is characterful. Who or whatever is behind it is particularly good on sarcasm and irony. I don't actually care all that much whether it's a person or a machine. I'd just like to be sure. 

 

The voice-work does occasionally exhibit a slight lack of affect that gives it an interesting edge, particularly when Layla is talking, and there are some moments when the sonic texture becomes a little resonant. I was kind of hoping it was AI because that would explain those slight strangenesses. Which, again, were things I liked...

Whatever the provenance, I prefer the voiceovers in Kat Domino, by some distance, to the obviously human voice acting in The Other Side of the Wall. Not that there was anything wrong with it but I didn't find it quite as engaging, somehow. 

Maybe I'm really an AI and I don't realize. It happens all the time in Philip K. Dick stories...

The voiceover and the text do sometimes differ, too, which is a thing that often happens in games in development. Not that infrequently after release, too. I don't think that's evidence either way. And in the end, without a cast list or a definitive statement from the developer, it's only a subjective impression. For me, as a player, it's not even anything I'm particularly exercised about. I'm only bothered because I have to write about it and I know other people care a lot more than I do.

The real problem from my perspective is the distraction it causes. Instead of talking about whether the game is fun and worth playing, here I am, talking about whether it's "authentic" or "real" or "human" at some metaphysical level I can't entirely quantify or even confirm exists. Even though I find it interesting to consider these things on an academic level, and it's fun playing online detective, trying to find out the truth of it all, in the end what matters is whether the game, however it was made, is any good or not.

Based on the demo, I think Kat Domino is going to be a good game. Good enough for me to add it to my wishlist, anyway. Which I have now done.

And the other problem with all this AI talk is that it's made the post run so long, the other two demos are going to have to wait. I think I have a lot less to say about both of them but I may be wrong. I wasn't expecting to have so much to say about these two!