Soulframe Pre-Alpha - First Impressions - Set-Up, Cinematic, Character Creation And Tutorial

 I didn't have any particular intention of playing another MMORPG but here we are again... It was Saturday morning, Mrs Bhagpuss was at work, Beryl was asleep and there it was, served up to me in the feeds. So why not?

The Soulframe alpha seems to have been running a little under the radar in this part of the blogosphere, especially since several bloggers I read - or used to read, when they were active - were quite keen on Warframe. But the pre-alpha started in 2023 and the NDA dropped the year after, yet I've hardly heard a word about it. 

I guess that might change, now the doors to the alpha have been thrown open for everyone. I knew it was coming but I had so little interest in Soulframe I'd already forgotten until I saw that piece at MMOBomb this morning. But now it was there, I thought...why not? So I did.

My lack of enthusiasm stems from two sources. I didn't much like Warframe, for one. I mean, I didn't hate it... there are a few posts here from the brief time I had with the game, where I say things like "I had fun. Warframe is good, I think. Definitely not my kind of thing but not not my kind of thing either." 

Which is about as equivocal a recommendation as you can get, isn't it? I really didn't want to commit myself. I think the fact that I only posted about it two or three times, though, tells its own story.

Mostly, what I didn't like about Warframe was the aesthetic, which is kind of Sci-Fi meets body horror. Also the way your character is really nothing but a wardrobe full of mech-suits. Soulframe is Digital Extremes' version of basically the same game but with a fantasy skin and an actual character you can see, meaning it has both a setting and a look that ought, in theory, be more to my taste.

 

Only my tastes seem to be changing of late. The classic fantasy tropes that used to feel like sinking into a cosy, comfortable armchair in front of the fire are starting to seem more like perching on a hard wooden bench in a cold waiting room to me, these days. I don't know if I'm just all fantasied out after soaking the stuff up for the best part of fifty years or if the examples I've been seeing in recent times just haven't been up to code. Whatever it is, rough stone walls, thatched roofs, peasants with pitchforks and knights on horseback aren't really doing it for me any more.

Apparently, though, it takes more than a lack of enthusiasm to stop me downloading a free game. Not when it's something as arguably significant as this, anyway. 

Warframe itself may have slipped down the MMO news editors' agenda these days - I remember when it seemed like I was always reading about it - but for a while it was widely being hailed as the model for a whole new generation of MMORPGs, particularly in the F2P sector, where Digital Extremes were often quoted as having the best payment model.

When Soulframe was announced, I remember people talking about it not just as a breath of fresh air for the moribund fantasy MMO scene but very possibly for the future of the genre. And then, I guess, Light No Fire came along.

Except LNF is likely still years away but you can play Soulframe now. And I have.

What's more, I enjoyed it. Quite a lot. I played for a couple of hours, took a break for lunch, then played another hour and a half. By the end I was starting to feel a bit burned out but that's a long day's gaming for me now, especially in a single game. 

Starting at the start, set-up was very easy. The game will be on Steam eventually - it already has a Store page where you can wishlist it - but for now you have to go direct to the website and register with an email address to download the client, which is currently about 12GB, despite the specs suggesting you need four times that. 

That all went smoothly enough. I had the game installed in a just few minutes. And I started playing it immediately so I may have been a little keener to try it than I suggested. 

 

The game opens in a somewhat unusual fashion, with you playing your mother. What looks like a standard opening cinematic morphs into character creation, where you get to choose a few basics like the color of your skin, hair and eyes color along with a hairstyle. Your choices are applied to the woman on screen, who's been standing there the whole time, holding a baby.

That baby? That's you, that is!

Then the screen goes black and you wake up chained to a chair. In your underwear.

I'm going to call this, now. The whole trope of "waking up in your underwear" at the start of a game has had its day. It was fun for a while but it's more than getting old. It's bad enough your character is bound to a chair - at least let them wear some pants!

Your character inherits all the characteristics you chose for the mother and you also get to decide your gender, although, as has become almost traditional, that's not what the game calls it. In keeping with the IP, you get to pick a "Frame", which I guess made sense when what you were picking was a battlesuit but since this is your actual body, maybe not so much...

As if waking up in your skivvies, chained to a kitchen chair, wasn't bad enough, it gets worse. The big figure in armor, who's presumably the one who tied you up, hisses something about remembering you're family, then slaps you round the side of the head with a sword. The flat of the sword, so thanks for small mercies, I guess. And with a family like that, who's going to need enemies?

Next thing, my character, who I just now realize I was never given a chance to name, is lying face down in a shallow stream in the pouring rain, still in her underwear. Once again, I re-iterate, this is not how I want to start any game. How many games start with the player-character being dropped into the sea or washed up, sprawled, half-drowned, on a beach? Too many, that's how many.

 

What do you think would be more distressing than coming to with a blinding headache from being smacked with a lump of metal, lying face down in cold water, dressed in nothing but your wet underwear? Hands up who said "being rescued by a moose"?  That person, take a No-Prize! 

That's what happens. A huge moose, with all kinds of gewgaws and trinkets dangling off its antlers, moseys up, takes a look at you, grabs hold of your blue arm and drags you onto the shore. Oh, didn't I mention you have a blue arm?  Well you do. You had it as a baby, too, so I don't know if it's a tattoo sleeve or if you were born with it. I imagine it means something but no-one even mentioned it, the whole time I was there, so your guess is as good as mine. 

Also, you have metal armor on that arm. Just that one arm. And a metal mask covering your mouth. 

It might be a metal arm. The mask might be part of you. Maybe you're a cyborg... look, I don't know. 

It certainly isn't explained. Nothing is explained. It's the least explainy MMORPG I've played for a long while. I had to look two things up on Google before I even got out of the Tutorial...

So, getting back to the action, a window pops up, thanking you for playing the Prelude and a little hint appears at the top of the screen, suggesting you might want to press "G" to get your Sparrow to come help you. This turns out to be a clever, lore-appropriate way to give you a quest marker. Whatever quest you're currently tracking, pressing "G" will summon a tiny bird that flies off in the direction you need to go, leaving a glowing trail in the air behind it. It's basically the sparkle trail SOE added to EverQuest II in about 2005, only now there's a reason for it to be there.

 

The bird flies off to a small cottage close by. I could hear someone calling my name, too. Well, the name the Scottish voice in the cinematic called me, anyway: Minnow. The only name I had was the Display Name I had to choose when I set up the account. I hate games using your Account name to identify you in game. It's bad enough in a FPS - it should never happen in an RPG.

I followed my sparrow to the door, opened it, went inside and suddenly I was a child. This is so confusing! I'm an in media res, don't need no stinkin' explanations kind of guy but still and even...

It seems to be some kind of magical flashback. The Scotsman turns out to be Minnow's grandfather. I found that out only by wandering around his hobbitty home (He has a lot of pets...) and eventually finding the one thing you can interact with, which is some kind of ocarina. When you pick it up a tune plays. There's a score on screen and the keys you have to press are indicated and when you play the melody, such as it is, the Scottish fellow appears.

Or he does eventually. Not the first time. Not for me, anyway. 

It wasn't because I had any difficulty with the mini-game. I'm terrible at these sorts of things but its a four-note melody and three of the notes are the same. Even I can manage that. So I blew on the thing and nothing happened. 

Well, the Ocarina vanished, so I suppose that happened. But nothing lit up and no-one appeared. My Journal still told me I had to play the tune even though I'd just played it. I wandered around the house for a while, looking at everything for a a second and even a third time. I didn't have much else to do. The door wouldn't open so I was stuck there. Bah, I thought. Must be bugged.

 

But Bhagpuss! Didn't you say you didn't come across any bugs or glitches? 

Yes I did say that and it's true. After about five minutes of nothing happening, I closed the game to see if restarting would fix it. 

And that's when I found my internet had been down the whole time. Presumably from about when I blew on the ocarina. Maybe longer. That's quite a lot of offline persistence for an online game. I'd be happy with less.

I had to reboot the router to get back in but once that was done I was able to re-blow the ocarina and finally meet my grandfather. Or the ghost of my grandfather. Or a memory of my grandfather. I'm kinda vague on the whole grandfather timeline, not to mention his state of existence.

Soulframe seems to like shifting from one mode of being to another. There's the open world, which I guess is "real" and there are talking ghosts and then there's also the Nightfold, which is where I went after I met grandpa. 

The Nightfold is where you go to do all the practical stuff, like changing armor and weapons, assigning Virtue points and going to the cash shop. Oh yes, it's a pre-alpha but it's got a cash shop. The Nightfold is a very odd place with tents that come up out of the water and a camel and pillars of stone that you can walk into and who knows what else. It's also where you finish up Character creation because, in case you forgot about it, you haven't picked a class yet.

Or, I should say, a Pact. Can't just have a class, can you, not nowadays. Except the choice is very clearly between Fighter, Rogue and Healer. They all have fancy names but that's what they are. 

 

Much against my better judgment, I picked the Ranger archetype, aka the Pact of Grace. You can try all three out before deciding but I just wanted the bow. I know. Playing a ranger rarely works out for me but I still can't resist. Everyone knows you ought to pick a Fighter for a first run through a game but fighters are so bleh and I thought rangers were cool, when i was twenty. Hmm. Maybe that's the problem. I'm not twenty any more.

And so we come to the end of the beginning. The real game was just about to begin and somehow, my character, who I guess I'm going to have to call Minnow, had gotten hold of a full set of armor, so at least she wasn't going to be running around in her undies any more. 

I am going to double down and ask why she ever was? If the game is going to hand you armor before you even leave character creation, why have whole sections of the intro where you run around nearly naked?

Rhetorical question. I think we all know the answer to that one.

I imagine I've missed a few important points but Soulframe is open access now so you can make a character and see for yourself if you want. I recommend it. It's free and its fun, at least for a while. Or you could just watch this video on YouTube and see pretty much exactly what I did, except this guy has the sense to try out all three Pacts before choosing one.

I think everything I've described took maybe just the first forty-five minutes. Certainly no more than an hour. But this post is long enough. I'll get to the rest in Part Two. There's quite a bit more to tell.  

Going By The Book

I read quite a lot. Not as much as I'd like but I get through about a book a week, year in, year out, near as dammit. I'd like to think it was more but I did once keep a book journal for almost a whole year, back in the 'eighties, and that's about how it worked out. I don't imagine I've upped my count significantly since then.

It does vary according to what I'm reading, of course. And what I read has always been fairly random. Before I worked in a bookshop, I did most of my book-browsing in charity shops, market stalls and car boot sales. Other than working in one, which I liked a lot, I've never been keen on bookshops, neither new or second-hand. They're too performative for my taste and too well-curated. I like a bit more serendipity in my selection process. 

For the past quarter of a century, while I was working at the bookshop, I got used to getting most of my books for free but it meant I was mostly choosing from whatever publishers were trying to promote. I read a lot more Young Adult and Middle School fiction and Cosy Crime than I might have done otherwise and a lot more debut novels, too. 

I get through most those a lot faster than I would the massive fantasy epics or heavy mainstream novels I'd have been more likely to pay money for. Two or three of those a week, sometimes, so maybe my annual count might have been a little higher after the millennium than it was back in the twentieth century.

The irony is, the whole time I was working in a bookshop, I hardly bought any new books at all, except as presents for other people at Christmas and on birthdays, even though everything was half-price for me, thanks to the very generous employee discount (Which I retain for life, thanks to my quarter-century's service.) Fifty per cent off is a great deal but it can't compete with free. Actually, it can't even compete with used book prices on Amazon or in charity shops, which is where I'll mainly be shopping from now on, I imagine...

All the time I was employed to sell books (Or, more accurately, to move books from one place to another, which was at least 75% of my job, one way or another, the entire time I worked there.) I felt obligated not to discuss the process in public. I also felt uncomfortable about reviewing anything I read, here on the blog. 

I could have, if I'd chosen. There were no restrictions placed on me, other than those that would apply to any employee of any business. Certainly, there was nothing to stop me reviewing any of the books I read after they'd been published, other than my own discomfort. I felt, probably entirely unreasonably, that since I was getting the books for free because I worked there, I had a moral obligation to submit any review I wrote to the company's website, where such submissions were actively encouraged.

 

And that would have been fine. For certain, more people would have read my reviews there and made more use of them, too. I'm not averse to having a wider audience. But reviews on the company website would have had to include my full name and the city I worked in, which was a condition of submitting them, and I was leery of the exposure. 

There's another problem, too. Probably two-thirds of the books I've read since the turn of the millennium have been publishers' proofs. You can review proofs - it's one of the reasons publishers send them out - you just can't quote directly from them. They all have a notice printed somewhere on the cover or inside saying "Not for quotation". 

That's for a couple of reasons. One is that the text isn't final. There may be further changes before publication. I've occasionally checked the published version against a proof and spotted that something's been added or left out. 

The main reason, though, is that proofs haven't had their final pass through the legal checks. You might quote something that later turns out to be problematic and, theoretically, that could involve you in litigation. I don't know if that's ever actually happened but who wants to be the first?

While I'm on the subject of proofs, the way publishers produce them and send them out is just nuts. The entire time I worked in bookselling, every branch I visited had huge piles of unread proofs just taking up space. Bear in mind the shops don't ask for them. The publishers just ship them out to every bookshop in the country (Every high street bookshop, anyway. I don't know how they handle the independents.) without any encouragement. They're an absolute pain to dispose of, too, so I bet a lot of shops would prefer not to get them at all.

In the old days, when we used to see publishers' reps, they'd deliver cartons of the things by hand but even without that personalized service, which ended about a decade ago when the company changed hands yet again (Happened four times in my tenure alone. Twice before that, I believe...) they kept on arriving in the mail every day. Often it's just a single book in a padded envelope, sometimes it's a few in a cardboard wrap and not infrequently it's ten or a dozen in a box. 

Most are proofs, six months to a year prior to publication; some are just free copies of something that's just been published. Plus we always had a bunch of freebies for whatever we were promoting as "Book of the Month", except that ended up being about half a dozen books of the month - Crime, Sci-Fi, Non-Fiction - so we had multiples of all of them...

 

There was a brief moment in the early twenty-teens, when it looked as though most of this might stop. Ebooks were going to be the future and there was a move to distribute proofs electronically rather than physically. There was also an initiative to have booksellers request specific titles online instead of being deluged with stuff they hadn't asked for.

Some of that did happen and for a while, the numbers of physical copies seemed to decline but after a while it just built back up again without anyone really saying anything about it. By the time I left, things seemed to be pretty much back to where they'd been before. 

As for eBooks, they turned out to be an entirely separate business and revenue stream with a completely different distribution and marketing process. In the bookshops now, it's as though they never existed, even though once we had a big display of eReaders at the front of the shop and we all had to be trained how to use them and explain them to customers. That was another future that never happened.

It has always seemed to me indicative of the underlying problem with the publishing industry that, even in a bookshop filled with people who are damn nearly addicted to reading, the huge majority of all the proofs we ever got just sat there, unread by anyone. Even for free, not one of these voracious readers would take them. If you can't give most of your product away, even to addicts, what are your chances of selling it to anyone else?

All the time I worked in bookselling, it looked to me as though publishers basically had just two rules for success: 

 Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

 Look at what everyone else is doing and if it looks like it's working, copy it. 

That's the model.There's a lot of talk about finding and nurturing new talent but what everyone's really looking for is something exactly like whatever the last thing was that made a shed-load of money. And I guess it works although it must be incredibly wasteful, what with all the books that get published that no-one wants to read.

Still, at least we stopped receiving popular titles by the pallet-load, storing them unopened for a few months, then returning them, still shrink-wrapped, to be pulped or used for landfill. Packing them up and sending them back was my job for a few years, back in the 'noughties. A lot of them used to go to a prison somewhere near Liverpool, where the inmates supposedly drilled holes in them so they'd absorb the water better when they went to be pulped. I know that's where they went because I was the one printing out the address labels...

As a result of my ethical uncertainties, I've reviewed very few books since I started working in a bookshop, either here or anywhere else. (I reviewed plenty before...) The few I have given more than a passing comment have usually been ones I paid for myself or got given as presents. I never felt any of the same obligations if money had changed hands. Now I'm fully retired, I feel free to say pretty much what I like about both the books I read and the job I used to have, always provided, naturally, that what I say is true to the best of my knowledge and belief. 

Don't worry. Inventory Full isn't going to turn into a book blog. I did consider starting one but apart from splitting my audience, which is small enough already, I can't imagine having the time to keep two blogs going. I can barely manage one. 

Instead, I was thinking I might review each book as I finish it. If I'm reading fifty a year, at most, that's only one a week. It would make for a neat feature. But I fear it could also turn into a bit of a treadmill after a while. I've long entertained a fantasy of having regular features here but I've never really done anything about it. It's probably a bit late to start now. 

What's more likely is that I'll review books the way I do TV shows, a few at a time on an irregular cadence, as and when I feel like I have enough for a post. That might work out at something like once a month. Or I could do it the way I do the music posts, which I try to get done once a fortnight. Something with a loose structure that doesn't feel like I have to get it done to a deadline. Although I'm actually good with deadlines...

But what are these books that I'm going to be reading? Where are they going to come from, now the firehose has been switched off? Never fear! I have a plan for that, too.

When I retired officially a couple of weeks ago, I did two things right away: I applied for my free bus pass and I re-joined the Library. I could have done either of those while I was still working - I've been eligible for the buss pass for a couple of years and I used to use the library a lot until I fell out of the habit - but they both seemed like the sort of actions that mark the transition into full-time leisure, so I saved them up for that purpose.

With the two cards in my wallet, I can get the bus into town to go to the Library to borrow physical books (I could drive but it's actually both cheaper and more convenient to go by bus.) plus I can borrow eBooks and audiobooks online. Or I could, if they had anything I wanted. I spent a couple of hours browsing the available stock last week and I was not impressed, especially bearing in mind I have two large city libraries to choose from. 

In a way, the problem is one of success. It seems the online reservation system, which didn't really exist in its current form back when I last used the Library, is so popular and well-used that pretty much anything anyone would want to read is booked up weeks - sometimes months - in advance. If you want to borrow Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, Exit Party, as I did, you're going to have to wait until May 2027!

I don't read that way. I read by mood, whim and whimsy. I am not going to be able to predict today what I might want to read next week, let alone next month or next year. That just leaves me with the option of going into town and browsing the shelves, where I can be sure all the good books won't be because someone will have reserved them.

I was surprised to the point of being shocked, too, by just how poor the available range in the library system is now. I searched for several authors I'd consider to be standard back-catalog staples, people like Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz, and there was barely anything. One the plus side, if you're looking for Dr. Who novelizations, the Library has you covered - they've got dozens of the things and no-one's reserving any of them.

 

No doubt I will still make some use of my new library card but I'm going back to what was my original plan, which is to re-read some of the hundreds - probably thousands - of books I already own. I used to re-read a lot before I worked in a bookshop but that constant flood of new titles was always too tempting so I fell out of the habit. Now I have no such excuse. 

There are also quite a few books in the house that I've never read. I'd guess at least fifty, maybe a hundred. The problem with unread books, though, is that they're usually unread for a reason and that reason is often that I don't want to read them. I tend to read books I want to read very soon after I get them. If they linger, it's a bad sign.

Occasionally, though, something just gets overlooked. As part of my re-reading program and since her name was in my mind after my fruitless library search, I took Tama Janowitz's debut novel, American Dad, off the shelf yesterday and started reading it. I thought I'd read just about all her books - there aren't all that many - but it turns out I'd never read American Dad, even though I've had a copy for a long time. 

Although not this copy I'm reading. That one, I bought in a charity shop over the summer. Where my original copy is now, I have no idea. It's entirely possible I was fooling myself about ever having one. (See yesterday's musings on memory.) 

I'm reading it now, though, and a review - or at least a few opinionated paragraphs - may appear here at some point. I've no idea who wants to read biased reviews of decades-old novels but if I want to write them, who's going to stop me, at least now my conscience has retired, along with the rest of me?

The first of my re-reads, which I finished yesterday, was Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. When I sat down this morning to write a post,that's what I thought I was going to write about. It wasn't, though, and now I'm already more than two thousand words in and I've only just gotten around to mentioning it, so I guess the review have to wait for another time.

This feature's off to a great start, isn't it?

Remember, Remember...

 This is going to be another in that popular, long-running series "Just How Bad Is My Memory, Anyway?" It's not like I'm going to run out of material any time soon.

Of course, memory doesn't really exist. It's a construct. Whatever you think you remember, you most likely don't. One of the ironies of memory is that the better you think remember something, the more you go over it and polish it, the worse that memory becomes. The best way to keep a memory pristine is never to remember it at all.

And another irony is that, if you try to remember something for which you have no actual memory, your mind, like a too-helpful AI, will do its best to create one. Then you'll remember that hallucination and believe its real. It's almost as though what Philip K Dick, Timothy Leary and the Beatles tried to tell us back in the sixties, that nothing is real, is all that's really real.

Forget about age-related memory loss, then. I may be getting to the point when my memory might be expected to start to fail but if it was pretty much a failure to begin with, what's to worry? And I never did have a good memory, even when I was in my teens and twenties. I had more trouble than most of my peers learning verse or lines for the school plays and I was much better at A-Level history, where what was required was analytical thought, than I had been at O-Level, when all I had to do was remember dates.

All of this introspecting came about because I looked at my desktop and happened to notice the icon for Amazon's cloud-streaming service Luna. I thought I'd have a look at what was on there, these days. I mean, I used to post summaries of what was new and free on Prime Gaming every month. 

When was the last time I did one of those?

 

Yes, well, obviously I couldn't remember, so I looked it up. That's one advantage of having a blog. 

In July, I wrote a long piece about Amazon Luna and how it had taken over as the distribution platform for what used to be free games on Prime Gaming. Reading it back, I found I'd forgotten everything I said in that article except that I could play some games on Luna for free. That I remembered.

The last time I wrote anything specifically about Amazon Prime Gaming, though, was almost a year ago, in December 2025. I seemed to be very confused about what was going on then, complaining that "Amazon Games... still exists independently of Luna, apparently. Or maybe not. I can't tell any more."

I can confirm Amazon Games does indeed still exist at time of writing although, once again, I had to ask an AI to be sure. I didn't start with that, though. I began by opening Luna to see what was inside. 

Mostly confusion, as it turned out. The app opens to a carousel of animations for the games they're currently promoting. Below that comes "New Games", "Continue Playing", "Recently Added" and then everything else. I tried clicking on "My Stuff" at the top of the page but apart from the last game I played on Luna, Dispatch, it seemed I didn't have any stuff. 

I spent a fair old while, clicking on just about everything, trying to find either the games I used to own or any new ones I might be able to claim until, finally, right at the very bottom, on the fourth page of results, if you scroll down using the Page Down key, which no-one would but I did for science, I came to this:

 

Literally the very last thing on Luna. Someone very much hopes you'll give up before you get there. But now I'd found them, were there any games worth claiming? I clicked on the banner...

 

There are eight games to claim for free, three from Epic Games, three from GOG, one from Amazon Games itself and one from Legacy Games, who I could have sworn I'd read were closing down... and yep, they are! 

Legacy Games is indeed closing for good in February next year. There's a detailed FAQ explaining exactly what's going to happen to the games you already own, which they said you'd own "forever". Surprisingly, it turns out that you do. You can go on playing as long as you want, provided you've downloaded them and backed them up on your own hardware before the Legacy Games Launcher ceases to operate on February 28.

Most of the the games Legacy offer are Hidden Object titles so I hardly ever claimed any of them. I wouldn't bother to keep the few I did claim and never played but it's nice to know I could if I wanted. Seems like a pretty fair way to end the service although it's slightly odd that Prime is still giving them away.

Of the eight claimable games, none of which I'm going to summarize, so go look them up for yourself if you want to know more, there were only a couple that interested me: Trash Goblin and Caravan SandWitch. Trash Goblin isn't really my sort of thing but I thought Mrs Bhagpuss might find it amusing and since she's starting to express quite an interest in gaming again, it seemed worth grabbing this one, just in case.

 

As for Caravan SandWitch, It looked a bit like the unfortunate Outbound but with a science fiction setting and a storyline. I like driving around in vans in games, especially when there's attractive scenery to look at, so I took it. It was the one game on Amazon's own platform, which made me wonder where it would go.

My first thought was Luna. I mean, I was on Luna and Amazon own it... but I couldn't see it anywhere so I did what I'm starting to do a lot these days; I asked Gemini.

It's insidious, isn't it? The way these AIs have slyly inserted themselves into our daily routines no matter how hard we try to keep them out. It seems like every day I get a news report about some service or platform adding a toggle to filter out the product of generative AI, the latest being Nexus Mods, whatever that is. Meanwhile, the cybernetic tentacles creep into everything we already use and make themselves indispensable. If this is a bubble it's going to be a hell of a shock when it bursts and not just for the economy.

I didn't keep a record of the conversation because I just typed my query into Google Search and I've long since closed the tab so it's gone. If I'd bothered to log into Gemini, anything we said to each other would have been dutifully recorded. Everything I have ever asked Google's AI is set out in neat tabs, titled by topic, down the left of the screen. It's very handy if a little worrisome. But then, if you saw what I'd been asking, you'd know why I'm not worried. It's all very dull. 

  

I told Gemini what I'd done and asked it where my game was. Gemini reminded me that Amazon Games hadn't, in fact, gone anywhere so I ought to go look for it. It restrained itself from questioning my mental competence and didn't ask me why I was wasting its time on trivia, although I imagine you can train it to do that, if you enjoy being mocked. There are people who do, apparently.

My unreliable memory had been telling me with confidence that Amazon Games had been wholly replaced by Luna but it has not. It's still there, just like it always was. I downloaded the Amazon Games app, which must have vanished when I had to replace my C Drive in the summer, and there was Caravan SandWitch, along with all my other games.

I had an hour or so before we were due to take Beryl over to the playing fields, where Mrs Bhagpuss wanted to go so we could feed the crows. You know that thing about how crows can recognize faces? It's absolutely true, especially when the face belongs to someone that's going to feed them.

As we were walking around the cycle track in the drizzle, Mrs. Bhagpuss informed me that not only can crows remember faces, they can pass the information on to their offspring for up to three generations. So crows have better memories than I do and their crow-children will remember me after I'm dead. There's a cheering thought...

I started playing SandWitch and got stuck in the first room, which is never a great start. I had to watch someone else do it on YouTube to find there was an incredibly obvious solution to the "puzzle", which didn't even justify being called a puzzle, and which the game literally explains to you. So that was a good start.

 

Fortunately, the game looked very attractive and felt good to play so I accepted it was all my fault and carried on. I boarded the space train to the nearby planet, from where the lead character's sister, last seen alive six years ago, had just sent an emergency message. Nothing about any of this felt in any way familiar.

Planetside, I got into the van and weaved my way uncertainly to the nearby town. As soon as I arrived, I started to get the idea I'd been there before. It was almost like deja vu. After a couple of minutes it was  more than a feeling. It was a near-certainty. But... memory...

Human memory may be mostly notional and AIs may hallucinate but blogs never lie. Bloggers do but that's different. I tabbed out and did a search on the blog for "Caravan SandWitch" and guess what? 

I played the demo in the June Next Fest two years ago. I wrote a full post on it. Apparently I really liked it. Of the demo, my tl:dr was "It's great and I have nothing bad to say about it at all." I also said I'd wishlisted it and was looking forward to playing the full game, when it came out later that year.

As I said, bloggers lie. Not only did I not buy it, it's not even on my wishlist and I don't believe it ever has been. I did clear some deadwood there, earlier this year, but I don't remember culling that one. Although, again, memory...

Oh, memory... this is the downside of keeping a blog. One of the reasons I rarely go back and read my own posts is that they seem to record a different set of experiences altogether from anything I remember. It's a litany of claims I don't recall making and reactions I don't recall having. 

As I re-read, of course, those feelings and impressions return. Reading them makes them real. Without the recorded words they have no existence. 

Now I have yet another game to play. According to my notes, I ought to enjoy it. I'll post about it when I've played a little more.

If I remember... 

This Is Planet Azeroth

World of Warcraft Forever goes live today. I'm curious to see how that goes, even if I don't have any immediate plans to play it myself. 

I'm a little vague on the exact point of WoWF, anyway. (We are all agreeing to call it WoWF, aren't we? Like a big dog gruffly greeting someone it knows, but not well, with an implied question mark at the end.) What is it for, exactly? And who? Sorry, whom?

About an hour ago, I checked on how the reviews were going. Or I tried to. I know it's not quite out yet but it was in beta for weeks so I don't imagine reviewers are going to wait for the servers to open before getting their opinions out there. There was no NDA, after all.

I looked at the Fantasy Critic League, where Wilhelm has picked WoWF, but so far it doesn't even have an Open Critic page. There is a link there to "GG", whatever that is, but it leads to a blank page. 

Browsing through the links on a Google search, though, I see all the big names have had their say on the beta: IGN, Polygon, PCGamer, GamesRadar... and they all seem to have loved their time in pseudo-old Azeroth.

Forever has nailed it

Pure magic

WoW: Forever has struck such a chord

Quotes pulled from the linked reviews, there. It looks like Wilhelm's picked a winner. As far as the League goes, it doesn't matter what the customers think, so long as the reviewers are happy.

But what is WoW Forever? I'm still not clear, even after reading those reviews. Is it a new game? A remaster? A Special Rules Server that got ideas above its station?

Fantasy Critic League tags every game with a specific label to indicate exactly what you're getting into when you pick one.

Cancelled Currently in Early Access Director's Cut Expansion Pack Free to Play New Game New Gaming Franchise Partial Remake Planned for Early Access Port Reimagining Released Internationally Remake Remaster Unannounced Game Virtual Reality Will Release Internationally First Yearly Installment 

WoWF has been tagged "Partial Remake". So what does that mean?

"There are several "remake" tags, and they go in this order, from "most remade" to "least remade":

Reimagining > Remake > Partial Remake > Remaster

There is also Director's Cut , which is somewhere around Partial Remake and Remaster  but it's hard to say for sure what order it goes in. "

So WoWF is on the less-extensively remodeled end of the scale, or so they think. Definitely not a new game. Not even a new version of an old one. Just a refurbishment. Same old house, just a new coat of paint and maybe a loft extension or a conservatory round the back.

It figures. From what I've heard from people who were in the beta, it's kind of like Classic but with some more modern, user-friendly adjustments. And, of course, some actual new content. There are those "Sky Elves", for a start, because every fantasy game needs more elves. Everyone loves elves, right?

There are four new zones, too: Zephras Isle, Riverglades, Shen’Dralas, and Mount Hyjal. One of those is the elf starting zone, two are mid-level and one is endgame. All fitting neatly into the map we already know.

It's a familiar phenomenon. A lot of aging MMORPGs somehow manage to find a few zones the cartographers missed. Usually around about when the thought of coming across yet another undiscovered continent is beginning to stretch credulity a little too far.

All of which cartographic conversation brings us neatly to the reason I thought of writing this post in the first place. It wasn't so much to commemorate WoWF's launch day as it was to express some surprise over Bill Bailey's career choices.

I have no idea how well-known Bill Bailey is outside the UK but evidently his profile was high enough to bring him to the attention of Blizzard's marketing dept. because he's been hired to present a series of spoof documentaries, lightly parodying David Attenborough's Planet Earth under the name Planet Azeroth.

I would have remained happily ignorant of these were it not for a news item at NME.

I guess it's not the most unlikely of sources. Bill Bailey, as well as being a comedian, is also kind of a musician. He's put himself forward to represent the UK at Eurovision at least twice, with no success, and he's made a heavy metal album. Alright, a parody heavy metal album but he did still play all the songs on it. 

He's a gamer, too, although I can't confirm whether he plays WoW.  He played No Man's Sky, for whose promotional round he was also booked, so it's not that unlikely. Plus he looks like he comes from either Azeroth or Middle Earth...

I'm not really up to speed on Bill's talents, mostly because a friend of mine used to hate him so much it was unwise even to mention the name "Bill Bailey" in his presence. It made him so angry, in fact, I was never able to ask him what the problem was. I can take Bill Bailey or leave him, myself, although for a while I got put off him by osmosis. 

I took him this morning. In three smallish doses. I watched the first two Planet Azeroth videos on the Official World Of Warcraft YouTube channel, which until today I didn't know existed, although obviously there had to be one. The third I watched on  IGN's channel, the only place it seems to be showing. Maybe they have an exclusive.

As entertainment, I found them inconsistent. Some bits were so funny I laughed out loud. Others bordered on the cringe-worthy. A lot of Bill's commentary felt very in-jokey indeed, which leads me to believe Bill is either extremely professional (He is, in fact.) or a long-time player himself. (He might be.)

My favorite part comes early in the first video, where the wolf is walking next to a fence and Bill casts aspersions on both its ferociousness and its height. The best thing about the whole series might be the way it offers a lengthy and relaxed opportunity to study the mobs in detail. That's something I always mean to do in games but rarely do. The artists' work on most of the creatures we end up killing largely goes unseen because it's hard to take in the finer details when you're fighting for your life.

Anyway, in case you're going to be playing WoWF later today and you'd missed these little vignettes of what life there could be like, I thought I'd share. I'm looking forward to hearing all the stories. Maybe I'll join in a little later, when all the fuss has died down...

In The Palace Of The Odd

Too many games seems like such an entitled complaint but really, who can keep up? While everyone else is focused on World of Warcraft Forever or Grand Theft Auto VI or even the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, all launching this month, I thought I had a clear run through December and January, with just the EverQuest II expansion (No date yet but it'll be December.) and Ananta arriving on January 15 2027. 

Only now I learn there's another game I'm curious about that's launching in December. And another that doesn't, as yet, have release date but which looks like it will, when it comes, shoulder everything else aside.

The one that's definitely coming soon is Silver Palace. I was already vaguely aware of it - I wrote about it in September when, apparently, I also pre-registered. Much good that did me. I'd heard not a word from anyone about the game since then, not until I read about the launch date on MMOBomb yesterday

After that, I went to the official website and watched the rest of the videos. They seem a bit generic but I guess I'm going to be giving it a go all the same.

The game, which is releasing globally on December 14, is described on the Epic Store as an "open-world action adventure RPG centred around detective mysteries". I checked Epic because, annoyingly, the game isn't on Steam, or not as yet, anyway. 

MMOBomb has variously labeled it a "Victorian-themed anime action game" and a "Victorian noir-style action RPG." It is, of course, a gacha game, too, but then all the good ones are, these days.

From the videos, I'd call it a mash-up. It looks like they threw a bunch of genres into a blender, then stirred in a gaggle of tropes after that. They seem to have everything in there, from knights in the age of chivalry to fin de siecle grandeur to the roaring twenties, all mushed together with no consideration for reason or logic.

It looks great! I'd play it. I'm going to play it. At least for long enough to find out if it's really just a horrible mess or whether that blender has churned out something smooth and delicious.

I just hope the gameplay doesn't lean too heavily into playing the detective. As I was saying the other day, I always think I'm going to like detective games more than I actually do. I don't imagine there'll be too many of those super-annoying whiteboards covered with bits of string, anyway. That's more of a 'nineties/noughties trope. From the videos, it looks like it's further down towards the sword-sticks and brass knuckles end of the cliche. More Holmes and Raffles than CSI Fantasyland. (I bloody hate Raffles, as it happens...)

I like flamethrowers, though. Well, in games, that is. And I do like the look of some of the characters, particularly the way they seem to be quite chaotic and accident-prone. That looks like it might be a laugh. For once, I might even play the male character. The top-hat and tails look is very fetching.

That's Silver Palace, then. I could write more about it but since I don't know anything more, that wouldn't take long. I will just mention that the developer behind it, Elementa Games, is based in Singapore. Whether that's going to bring a different feel or aesthetic to the familiar mix will be interesting to see.

On to the next one. And it's a good one. 

It's called Ordinary Oddness, which is a pretty fine thing to be called. I don't know a lot about this one either but there's a twenty-two minute "Reveal Trailer" on YouTube. Watch that and you'll know as much about it as I do. 

And I do recommend watching it, too. Preferably in full screen. It'll be twenty minutes well-spent, trust me.

I just watched it all the way through again. It is, frankly, stunning. It seems to be a segment stripped straight out of the main storyline and even without knowing any of the characters or backstory, it's compulsive viewing. It makes the Silver Palace videos look trite by comparison and I thought those were pretty decent.

I'm willing to entertain the explanation that these kinds of games are playing directly to my personal preferences but even allowing for that, why is the quality so high now? Free-to-play games were never like this before Genshin Impact, were they? Now they all are. (This one, as usual, is coming from a division of TenCent called Cosmipup Studios. It's based in Hangzhou, like they often seem to be. Must be a fun place...)

As for what genre Ordinary Oddness is supposed to be, the Steam Store page (This one is on Steam, I'm happy to say.) calls it a "Nothing-Stays-Oddinary Open-World RPG." Yes, they do spell that "Oddinary" I can't tell if it's a typo or a pun. 

QuintLyn Bowers, writing for MMOBomb, unhelpfully, for me anyway, describes it as "Paprika if it were a game."  I'd never heard of Paprika because I'm an anime ignoramus. Alright, an anime ingenue. That's less hurtful. 

Fortunately, I know how to look stuff up.

Wikipedia tells me Paprika was "a 2006 Japanese animated surrealist science fiction psychological thriller" that might have been the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's Inception, another movie I've never seen and know next to nothing about. 

I don't need any of those reference points, though. I know exactly what Ordinary Oddness is referencing and I can date that influence back a decade or so before Paprika, too. Ordinary Madness is Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, if it was a game, not a comic.

I don't actually like Grant Morrison. Or not for a long time. I sat in an auditorium at a comic convention in the 'nineties and watched him instigate what looked disturbingly like a sixties love-in on stage. There were bean-bags, ffs! I walked out after a few minutes and went to the bar instead. I don't believe I've read anything he's written since. 

Before that, though, I read all his Doom Patrols and loved them. That was why I was waiting to hear him talk in the first place. Never meet your heroes. It's such great advice. 

At the time, Doom Patrol was nothing like I'd seen in comics before. I imagine it was like something someone had seen. Very little is ever original. But it certainly was the first dadaist/surrealist super-hero title from a mainstream American publisher I'd read. 

Not, obviously, the last. That influence is all over Ordinary Madness like fingerprints although Morrison's pernicious influence is so pervasive in the culture now, there's absolutely no reason to believe anyone involved with the game has ever even heard of the Doom Patrol. It's like fucking Tolkein now, the stuff Alan Moore and Grant Morrison piped into the air ducts back then.

If you've been waiting thirty years for a chance to walk abut in that world, well now's your chance. I can't wait, personally. Ordinary Madness is above Ananta on my want-to-play list now.

Of course, by the time it arrives, there'll probably be something better out there, coming down the production line. Apparently it is possible to have too much of a good thing after all.  

Four Shows, Five Seasons. Okay, Four-and-a-Half...

It's got to be about time for a TV catch-up, hasn't it? I have actually watched some shows now...

Here in the UK, from late Spring until early Autumn, we had the longest spell of really good weather I can remember since, well, possibly ever. I've always had some difficulty staying indoors when the sun shines so my gaming fell right off but you wouldn't have thought it would have affected my TV watching so much, given I do most of it after it gets dark.

What really killed my late-night TV habit was Suno, the AI music app. Through most of last year, making songs took over the late-night TV slot but I thought I was done with Suno by New Year, which was about when I ran out of things I'd written in the 90s I could milk for lyrics. 

That was premature thinking, as it turned out. What was supposed to be an end point became no more than a three month break. I got the itch again at the end of March, which was how I found I'd been utterly wrong about just how ruthlessly I could strip-mine my past creativity for new inspiration. I've completed about a hundred and fifty more songs since then and I haven't run the well dry quite yet.

As far as TV went, though, for much of 2026 all I managed most evenings was one half-hour show, if even that. Usually it was an episode of Dr. Who. There are more than enough of those to keep me going at that pace for years. 

Ironically, the one time I did spend some time watching TV was the height of the summer, when the weather was at its hottest. It might not have been too hot for me but it was for Beryl. There were a couple of weeks in high summer, when I spent the afternoons in the back room, where the TV is. It's the coolest room in the house. Doesn't get the sun until late evening. 

I wanted Beryl to stay in there for her safety, dogs being very vulnerable to heat exhaustion at temperatures above 25 celsius, but she always wants to be where one of us is, so I ended up watching The Boroughs and most of the second season of Deadloch in the afternoons just so she'd stay in the relative cool. Then the temperature dropped a bit and that was the end of that. I must finish watching Deadloch, come to think of it...

Now its Autumn. It's still pretty dry but there's a lot of fog and cloud and it's eight degrees Celsius outside as I write this. It'll be dark by teatime. I'm playing a lot more games. I'm still working on songs but that's slowing down, so my TV-watching's on the up, to the point where I've managed to finish four whole seasons of three different shows! And half of another that's taking me forever...

And now, in increasing order of dubiousness... 

Beyond Here Lie Spoilers! 

Haunted Hotel - Season Two 
(15 - suicide, crude humor, violence, injury detail, threat, horror)

I was planning to review this for Halloween but then I totally forgot. Never mind. I'm doing it now. 

I loved this. The first season was great and this was at least as good, if not better. IMDB says better, anyway. Season One has an average rating of 7.6. Season Two rates an 8.2.

Haunted Hotel is pretty much exactly what I want from a traditional, Western animated cartoon. It's sharp, funny, well-drawn, well-animated, well-written, well-acted and it has a cast of characters I can easily remember. 

It's not just the central family, Nathan, Katherine, Ben, Esther and Abaddon, who carry it, either. (Okay, to be strictly accurate, Abaddon is actually an ancient demon, trapped in the body of a boy from the eighteenth century, but that doesn't mean he's not family...)

There are also the many, many ghosts who live (Or unlive, I guess...) in the hotel and its extensive grounds - Anabelle, Stabby Paul, Candlehead, Randy and the rest. New ghosts every episode but the old ones remain, at least until whatever unfulfilled condition that keeps them there gets satisfied and they turn into sparkles and vanish forever. 

Esther's friend Heather and Katherine's would-be boyfriend Joel are both back from Season One and Season Two sees the addition of an actual employee, the hotel's first. That's Shayna, who was technically in Season One, too, but only as a mysterious ghost haunting the attic. 

In the first episode of the second season we find out she's not a ghost at all but a live woman, pretending to be a ghost so as to have a roof over her head and also because her grandfather told her there always needed to be someone of their bloodline in the hotel or else an eldritch god by the unlikely name of Pete would wake up and... do whatever it is eldritch gods do. It's never good.

I could have done with more of Shayna. I could have done with more of a lot of the supporting characters. They're all so strong. That's the trouble with having a large, well-delineated cast and only twenty-five minutes an episode to make use of them all. 

I could also have done with more episodes. Not in the general sense of always wanting more of something I like but in the very specific sense of two more, like there were in Season One. It always annoys me when shows come back but with shorter runs. I mean, it's a lot better than them not coming back at all but still...

Luckily, there's no need to read anything too terrible into the reduced episode count. Haunted Hotel is already renewed by Netflix for Season Three next year.

Nobody Wants This - Season Three
(15 - Language, sex references)

The Kristen Bell romcom about an "agnostic podcaster" and a rabbi returns for a third season. I liked the first two, but then I'll watch anything with Kristen Bell in it. 

When I reviewed Season Two, I ended with "I do kind of hope that the series finale, when it eventually comes, sees them go their own separate ways. I think the prospects of them having a long and happy marriage are vanishingly small." Well, they got married at the end of the last episode of Season Three so I guess we'll see how that prediction pans out.

Or not. Season Four hasn't been confirmed. Apparently this latest season went down better with both critics and viewers than Season Two, though, so it's probably more likely than not.

Do I want a fourth season? Hmm. That's a hard one. I thought Season Four was funnier than the first two. I enjoyed each episode - as a sitcom. As far as the dramatic plot went, though, I had some serious reservations. 

I've just never believed in the central relationship. In Seasons One and Two, that felt like a position strongly supported by both the scripts and the performances. I always felt the subtext was that these were two people who were doing their damndest to ignore all the very valid reasons why they shouldn't be in a relationship because they just wanted it to work. Deep down, though, they both knew it never could.

In Season Three that all changes. Kristen Bell's Joanne now seems almost entirely subsumed by her desire to be someone completely different, whereas before that desire was always in open conflict with who she actually is. I found the transformation unconvincing but also not very entertaining. It was a lot more fun to watch her trying to work around the very real issues in her situation so as to get what she wanted, rather than leaning into them and accepting them. 

Also, politically, it's quite disturbing to see her continually giving ground and being subsumed by Noah and his values. I'm not comfortable with the messaging there.

In fact, Joanne felt relatively peripheral to the plot of her own show this time around. She was certainly a lot less funny, not because of anything Kirsten Bell wasn't bringing to the role but because she just didn't get many good lines.  (Adam Brody's Noah has always felt somewhat peripheral and has never been all that funny, so no change there.)

There were plenty of laughs elsewhere, luckily, particularly from the excellent Jane Curtin as Joanne and her sister Morgan's mother, from Sarah Silverman, playing Noah's deputy rabbi and especially from Justin Lupe as Morgan and Timothy Simons as Noah's brother, Sasha. Honestly, much as I love Kirsten Bell, I'd rather watch a spin-off centered on Morgan, Sasha and Sasha's separated wife Esther (Jackie Tohn.) now. The three of them have such great chemistry together, which is something I'd be hard-put to say about the two leads.

That said, the writing for those three isn't consistently great, either. I found several twists in the plot less than convincing this time around but the way Sasha and Morgan are split up in the last three episodes I found absolutely infuriating. Partly that's because they both are extremely infuriating characters but mostly it was that it all felt very forced, as if the whole sub-plot only existed to create problems for the upcoming wedding between Joanne and Noah, which was bogging itself down in tedious, unfunny detail. Mostly, though, I was infuriated because I didn't feel the writing was up to the job of explaining why what was happening was happening.

I mean, I get it in broad terms - Morgan is terrified of real emotions and she has self-worth issues she's always covering up and Sasha is is deep in grief for the failure of the only close, romantic relationship he's ever known - but it all felt so rushed, the implications of each of their backstories barely sketched-in. 

Episode 7, where all this came to a head, left me feeling pissed off with the pair of them for more than twenty-four hours, which is very unusual behavior for me where any media is concerned. So, I guess kudos, to someone for that...

Overall, though, I enjoyed the season. I'd hate for it to stop there because it ended on all loose threads. There'd better be at least one more season coming, just to wrap it all up. More than that would, I think, be pushing it.

My Dress-Up Darling - Seasons One and Two
15 - Sexual violence references, injury detail

I started watching this because I knew the manga from work. Well, my old work, I guess I should say now. All my knowledge of manga, such as it is, comes from a decade and more of putting eight bays of titles in order and, of course, flipping through most of them at one time or another.

The premise is unusual to say the least. An introverted high-school student with no friends, living with his grandfather in a hina doll shop, somehow finds himself making cosplay costumes for a popular girl in his class. And if the set-up is odd, the execution is even odder.

Season One starts out as a kind of sex comedy. There's a lot of what would, in the Golden Age of Comics, have euphemistically been termed Good Girl Art. We call it Fan Service, now. 

As the episodes roll along, though, that element, which initially seems to be almost the point of the show, starts to recede and the focus begins to fall instead on two things - the potential romantic relationship between the two main characters, Wakana Gojo and Marin Kitagawa, and the idea of cosplay as a both a way of life and a philosophy.  

The first season is quite raunchy but by the second almost all of that has been replaced by a bittersweet, yearning romance. Kitagawa and Gojo (In that hard-to-get-used-to Japanese high school tradition that I only know from media like this, they only ever refer to each other by their last names, even in the most private and intimate of situations.) are both incredibly nice and obviously ideally suited for each other, but neither of them can express the feelings they're hiding.

It could be frustrating but it's not. It's just achingly sweet, in a way no adolescent romance most likely ever was, outside of imagination and fantasy. Even the romance, though, has to take second place to an astonishingly detailed examination of the role of cosplay in Japanese society and the precise and specific detail of how the impressive costumes and make-up are achieved.

Honestly, it was like watching a cross between a documentary and a make-up tutorial at times. There's also a lot of stuff about how absolutely acceptable it is for people of different sizes, shapes and genders to cosplay characters that aren't a physical match and several characters have backstories in which they met prejudice for their tastes or choices and overcame them. For a show that starts off leaning into some very dodgy areas indeed, it turns out to have some very right-on politics.

I really enjoyed it, especially the second season. It's frequently beautiful to look at, too. The animation and the drawing is excellent. It ends a little abruptly, although the way it finishes could be interpreted as a suitably poignant place to leave the two would-be lovers, still on the very cusp of an emotional breakthrough. A third season is apparently in production but there's no release date fixed yet.

The manga, though, carries on much further, ending with a sequence in which it's revealed that Marin and Wakana get married. I guess that means they can finally call each other by their first names. 

A few years ago, I wouldn't have been able to get through even a couple of episodes of a show like this, let alone a couple of seasons. All the sudden, stylistic jumps from realism to exaggerated cartooning, often  in the same scene, all the hyper-exaggerated double-takes, all the histrionic YELLING!!! Now, though, all of that just rolls over me if the show's any good.

Chainsmoker Cat - Season One, First Half
15 - Sex, nudity, sex references, drug use

None of which explains how I can watch this, let alone why. I have neither excuse nor explanation, except to say I began watching in morbid curiosity and continued in horrified fascination.

What even is this? There's no plot. Every episode is a string of unconnected scenes - you can't even call them sketches - in which a catgirl smokes a lot of cigarettes. That's both the title and the entire storyline.

The catgirl's name is Yani. She's probably about twenty, although with beastfolk, who fucking knows? I really need a primer. Every show I watch just makes me more confused about how the whole animal/human society thing works. Are there any established rules, like for vampires? 

Yani lives in utter squalor in a run-down, quasi-brutalist, concrete apartment block that looks like a converted car park. It's managed by an obese pervert, who has sex with a blow-up doll in the shape of a foxgirl (Or foxboy - who can tell?). 

Yani always seems to be either unemployed or doing some sort of unskilled, casual work. At one point she does some modeling for a manga artist working in the porn industry. In the last episode I watched she was somehow waitressing for the local crime-lord, who looks about eighty. It turns out he has a longstanding affection for her that might be paternalistic or might be perverse but knowing this show is probably both. 

Things like that happen to her a lot but mostly she just lounges about, smoking endless cigarettes, drinking to excess and taking any drugs she can get her paws on. It mostly seems like literally the only thing she cares about is where her next cigarette is coming from. To watch this show, you'd believe nicotine was the most addictive drug in the world. (It actually is. Ed. ) 

In one particularly extreme example of her astonishing, overwhelming addiction, she sits on the river-bank, smoking, as she watches a young boy drift by. He's clearly drowning, crying out for her to help him. She does, eventually, but only after she's cursed him for interrupting her smoking session and not until she's finished her cigarette. 

In the same scene, she also, very weirdly, turns for a moment into an actual cat as she dives beneath the surface of the river. It's the sort of thing that makes me think I must be missing some vital subtext that would explain it all. And then it all just carries on as before and the thought vanishes in a cloud of cigarette smoke. 

Chainsmoker Cat is scatalogical, sexual and frequently genuinely obscene. Also revolting. Often revolting. Can't fault the accuracy of the title, though.

After half a season there's just starting to be some faint glimmer of continuity. A few vaguely familiar characters recur, including a couple of Yani's friends and her younger sister, who's almost her exact opposite, clean, tidy, well-spoken, a non-smoker... No wonder she seems almost as disgusted by Yani's lifestyle as I am.

I cannot explain why I'm still watching this. 

Even less, why I just bought a T-Shirt with Yani's face on.

Nivalis Nights: Twenty Hours In

   I haven't been talking about it much but I'm still playing Nivalis Nights just about every day. I'm coming up on twenty hours played and it feels as though I'm still in the discovery phase. I'm enjoying it a lot and I'd recommend it highly... only who, exactly, would I recommend it to?

Just what sort of game is Nivalis Nights supposed to be? The more I play, the more I think labeling might be the game's biggest problem, at least in terms of getting the reviews it deserves and putting it in front of the audience best suited to appreciate it. 

Currently, the game is sitting on a middling 76 at Metacritic and an even less satisfactory 71 at OpenCritic. Those aren't terrible scores. Just mediocre. But it's not a mediocre game.

My impression, which is now well past first, is of a very strong RPG with a fascinating and well-conceived setting and a picaresque but wholly compelling plot. It also looks great but that's one thing on which the critics and I mostly agree. 

From the few reviews I've read and from some news items, too, my feeling is that a lot of people thought they'd bought a cyberpunk business sim. Which is how the game was frequently promoted before it launched, so fair enough, I guess. Others seemed to think they were getting some sort of cyberpunk Second Life. (Wasn't that the actual Second Life, though?) Only a small minority seemed to be expecting a sequel to the excellent Cloudpunk, described on Steam as "A neon-noir story in a rain-drenched cyberpunk metropolis."

Is it an RPG, then? A life sim? A business sim? All of them? More importantly, what do people think it is? And when I say "people" I mean reviewers, obviously.

To find out, I could have taken a couple of hours out of my Sunday to read a couple of dozen reviews, then another hour or two to precis it all for an introduction to the post... but this isn't the 1990s any more, much though many people seem to wish it could be. Rather than do all the leg-work myself, I thought I'd get Gemini to do it for me. Give me a summary of the gist of the issues reviewers are having with this game that maybe I'm not seeing.

Here's what I asked: 

 "Hi Gemini, Can you please give me an aggregate summary of the kind of reviews the video game "Nivalis Nights" has been getting, with a short list of the most common complaints (Other than optimization and performance) and a general impression of what sort (And genre) of game reviewers seem to believe it is?"

And here's what Gemini said: 

Genre and General Impression

Reviewers generally categorize "Nivalis Nights" (developed by ION LANDS) as a cyberpunk life simulation and business management game (with heavy narrative/side-quest elements often likened to a "Visual Novel Lite").

• The Core Premise: Players inherit a failing noodle stand (along with a pile of debt and a strict curfew) in a sprawling, multi-tiered voxel-aesthetic cyberpunk metropolis, balancing running food/drink businesses with navigating hundreds of character-driven side stories.

• The General Impression: Reviewers are deeply split. On one hand, the game is praised for its stunning, atmospheric world-building, brilliant sound design, and the genuine charm of exploring a living, vertical cyberpunk city. On the other hand, many feel the game suffers from a lack of depth in its core mechanics—turning what was expected to be a rich sandbox life-sim into an overwhelming, chore-heavy checklist of errands.

Most Common Complaints (Excluding Optimization & Performance)

Aside from technical and performance gripes, reviewers and players frequently point out these major pain points:

• Aggressive Time Constraints: The in-game clock moves very fast (e.g., 1 second equals 1 minute), creating a constant sense of frantic panic. Players feel rushed to sprint everywhere, conflicting directly with the game’s atmospheric tone that encourages you to slow down and soak in the environment.

• Shallow Management and Interaction Depth: While advertised as a business management and life-sim, these systems are often described as thin. Restaurant appliances function mostly as static objects with minimal interactive animation, staff and managers can behave erratically (e.g., over-ordering stock), and overall creative freedom in running businesses feels restricted.

• Quantity Over Quality in Quests & NPCs: The game throws an overwhelming number of side quests at the player. However, many NPCs feel disposable—once their specific quest chain concludes, they offer little to no ongoing dialogue or meaningful relationship-building, making the world feel surprisingly lifeless over time.

• Clunky UI and Navigation Issues: Navigating the sprawling, vertical multi-level districts can be confusing due to a lack of proper mapping or mini-maps. Furthermore, the user interface (such as the oversized, non-resizable quest log) and the lack of grid-snapping for furniture placement make basic base-building and organization frustrating.

 

I've left the links in because god knows what would happen if I took them out. You should see the HTML... I checked they all went where they said and not to some other game entirely but I haven't read them in detail. That would kind of undermine the whole point of using an AI to get a summary in the first place, now wouldn't it?

 

I found Gemini's conclusions very revealing, although to what extent it has actually looked at more than just the handful of sources it quotes is very uncertain. I get the feeling that, as a research assistant, Gemini likes to operate at the "Do the minimum to keep the boss happy" end of the scale. Still, it gives me what I need to work with, namely some bullet points I can expand on, agree with or refute. 

 

Which I shall now do. You'll have to refer back to Gemini's summary to see what I'm refuting or agreeing with, though. Or get an AI assistant to summarize both sides of the debate. In fact, why not let's your AI and my AI just talk it out together? We don't really need to be here...

 

Genre and General Impression - It'd be nice if Nivalis Nights was a "cyberpunk life simulation" but if it was that, you wouldn't be rail-roaded into running a noodle bar in the very first quest, would you? The simulation of the environment is excellent but the life you can live in it is limited to a) running a restaurant and maybe expanding that to running more restaurants and b) living the exact same life as every adventurer in every quest-driven game ever. 

 

If it's not a life sim, it's also not, in my now quite significant experience, a "business management game", either. I have no interest in running a chain of restaurants, so I don't. And the game doesn't seem to care. It took me three or four sessions, maybe the first three or four hours, to get enough staff and a manager installed to run the one noodle bar I started with and now, a month and fifteen more hours play later, that's where I still am. 

 

And it's fine. The game really doesn't seem to care. The noodle bar is solvent. It makes a small profit, in fact. Reviews are good, the staff seem happy and it all required very little effort from me. Occasionally I have to put in an appearance to solve some problem or other but that's really questing, not business management. The place pretty much runs itself now and I hardly even think about it most sessions.  

 

My Verdict: NN is neither a life sim, nor a business sim. It's not any kind of sim. It's an RPG. So yes, it could easily be described as having a narrative and side quests or as being a "Visual Novel Lite." Although, with the sheer number of quests, I'm not sure I'd bother adding "Lite."  

 

 

 

Core Premise -  As I've said, I think where you pivot to reach that balance is pretty much up to you. You could concentrate on building up your noodle empire or you could play Littlest Cyberhobo like you've been doing in every RPG since whatever your first RPG might have been. Talk to everyone, do whatever they want, repeat. That's my game.  

 

My Verdict: Pretty accurate. No real complaints with that summary.  

 

General Impression - I agree with the first part and disagree fundementally with the rest. It's one hell of a city for an explorer or an aesthete. It's huge, sprawling and superbly designed. It richly rewards exploration for exploration's sake.

  

As for "lack of depth" in the "core mechanics", sure, if you bought into the marketing hype. Nivalis Nights has great depth as an RPG, which is not what how it was mostly advertised, unfortunately. As any kind of sim, be it life or business, then yes, it probably does lack depth, although even there it's deep enough to suit me. But then I don't much like sim games. The shallower the better, really.

 

My Verdict:  NN has been badly mis-marketed. I'm not surprised people are pissed off that they've been sold a different game to the one they thought they were buying. It should have been marketed to the Disco Elysium/Esoteric Ebb crowd, not the people who want to play The Sims 2077: Masterchef Edition.

 

 

 

On to the complaints.   

 

Aggressive Time Constraints - This is a slightly odd one. It's objectively true that the in-game clock runs at a rate of "1 second equals 1 minute" but whether this creates "a constant sense of frantic panic" is entirely subjective. I literally didn't notice until last night that that was the ratio. What's more, I never even thought the time was going particularly quickly, not compared to other games. It seemed pretty standard to me.  

 

As for feeling "rushed to sprint everywhere", er...what? I think I might have sprinted two or three times, maybe? For a few seconds. Just to see how it worked, mostly. The default movement speed seems wholly adequate. Why would you want to run?   

 

Here's the thing. The really important thing. After almost twenty hours, I have yet to run into any timer in the game that actually means anything. Quest-wise, that is. NPC after NPC tells you something has to be done now or immediately or right away but it never, ever does. Every quest just sits there in your journal until you get round to it, even if it takes days or weeks. I can't say there are no quests in the game that  have hidden timers that induce fail conditions but if there are, I haven't run into one yet.    

 

What I do, instead of rushing around frantically, is just wander around the city, gawping like a tourist, taking photos and following quest markers. If I see any NPCs with "!" or "..." over their heads, I talk to them as I spot them. I frequently get side-tracked. I jump the tracks from one quest to another all the time. It never matters. The first one is always still there, waiting for me, whenever I remember it.    

 

As for the noodle bar, once I got the manager in place, I forgot all about any supposed timers there. I pay her to sort that for me and she does. Occasionally some official or criminal tries to threaten me with closure if I don't do something immediately but they always go away after a while. I was a bit worried at the start but now I just treat them like all the other quests. Which is what they are.

My Verdict: Any sense of panic (Or indeed lack thereof...) induced by the in-game clock says a lot more about the personality of the player than the game. It's as chill or as stressful as you choose to make it.

 

Shallow Management and Interaction Depth - I think I've covered this quite extensively already. I'm one hundred per cent certain the business part is several orders of magnitude deeper than I'm seeing, but I'm happy to accept that, even then, as a business sim, Nivalis Nights is still shallow by the standards of those who like that sort of thing.    

 

That said, you can micromanage the whole damn noodle bar yourself if you want to. You can set the menu, grow the food, go shopping... even do the cleaning and wait tables if you want. Why you would want beats me but it's there.  As for the erratic nature of the staff, that was true at launch, or so I read, but it got patched up before I even had any staff to worry about. It's all good now.

 

My Verdict: These elements are indeed shallow for a simulation game but they're more than deep enough for an RPG. Which is what this game is.   

 

 

 

Quantity Over Quality in Quests & NPCs - Hmm. Well, it's true there are a lot of "side quests", although I'd only call them that if if I considered the business sim part to be the "main quest". Which I do not. So I'd just call them quests. 

 

Are there too many? Hell, no. The more there are , the more I like it. Is the sheer number overwhelming? Not if, like me, you're the kind of player who routinely picks up every quest you find until the game tells you you can't take any more. I still have room in my journal for more so I'm fine.

 

Is it quantity over quality, then? God, no! The quality is excellent. The quests are engaging, amusing, intriguing and informative. If Nivalis Nights is in any way a "life sim" it's in the way talking to so many of the people who in the city lets you build up a picture of what life might be like there. And it really does.

 

What about the "no ongoing dialogue or meaningful relationship" part, then? Well, what kind of ongoing dialogue do you expect, ffs? Do quest NPCs in other games have anything to say to you after you've sorted out their problems? Do they hell. Okay, sometimes they'll still acknowledge you and remember who you are, and I'm not saying that wouldn't be a nice touch, but it's hardly worth complaining about, when they don't. I guess when I've done all the quests in the game, it will feel kinda quiet, but then that'll mean the game is over.

 

As for a meaningful relationship, I think that's the "sim" part coming up again, isn't it? That, I guess, would be the part in games like My Time At Portia/Sandrock, where you take NPCs out to dinner and give them flowers and basically pretend you're "in a relationship" with them. Which creeps me out, if I'm honest. I'm very glad that doesn't happen in Nivalis. And I sure wouldn't want any of these people moving into my apartment like they do in Neverness To Everness, either. It's barely big enough for one!

 

My Verdict:  This is where I think the reviews have it completely wrong, except the one or two that, rightly, reference the likes of Disco Elysium. Nivalis Nights is a telling a story but you have to listen. It's a pretty good story, too. And the characters who get to tell it are wild! 

 

 

 

Clunky UI and Navigation Issues - And finally, another complaint that seems to be rooted in a misunderstanding of what the game is trying to do and be. The city is supposed to be confusing! That's a big part of the fun. Well, for me, anyway.

 

Last night I got to Mountain Town for the first time. Mountain Town is just insanely confusing. As Ava pointed out, when we arrived, most of the buildings probably aren't up to code. That'll be because it's a giant shanty-town built out of spare parts culled from other buildings, all connected by an ad hoc agglomeration of boardwalks and ramps. It's like a hundred Kelethins all piled on top of one another. And unlike Elftown, I loved it!

 

All the zones are at least a little like that - chaotic, organic, unplanned. Nivalis is an old city that just grew. As for mapping it... there's a whole quest featuring a guy whose job for the last two decades has been to walk around the city with a shoulder cam, like some human version of a Google Maps car, transmitting data about the street layout to a central mapping company. That's the only way they can keep the maps up-to-date and even that real-time cartography isn't enough. 

 

Why should we, the players, get better maps than the citizens? To expect it is missing the point. But that said, the in-game map we do get is perfectly fine. The quest markers on the HUD work extremely well, there are plenty of signs and directions in the gameworld if you can be bothered to look and everything is very well-documented. There's both excellent instant travel by map and good public transport by rail and HOVA. And I have a boat! I have no problems getting to where I want to go.

 

As for walking around the city, movement by foot is possibly the best I've ever seen in a game of this kind. Nothing ever gets in your way, collision is handled superbly, even the most awkward-looking spiral staircases are simple to climb... absolutely can't fault it in any way.

 

My Verdict: I'll concede the quest log is a bit big but once you figure out how to hide it it's fine. Other than that, I have no complaints about either the aesthetics or the functionality of the UI. It may be funky but it ain't clunky!

 

And that concludes my rebuttal of the case for the prosecution, your honor. In summation, I'd like to say that I believe Nivalis Nights to be a truly excellent RPG. It's just a shame that's not how it was sold.