Reader of books and player of games. College professor and pokémon trainer. Writes about Japanese fiction, media, gender, and society. In love with monsters and magic.
https://digitalfantasydiary.com/
When calamity besets his home in the desert, the young prince Ganondorf is forced to journey abroad to seek answers in Hyrule’s ancient sanctuaries. Lost within the shadows of a temple deep in the forest, Ganondorf struggles with a burden he does not yet have the power to bear.
I wrote “A Legend of Shadows” for Hyrule Apocrypha, an illustrated storybook fanzine exploring the myths and lore of the Legend of Zelda series. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been be able to create a story illustration with Peregyr, whose green and magical art can be found on Twitter (here) and on DeviantArt (here). We had a great time imagining Ganondorf’s backstory as a failed hero. This is how the story opens…
What would you do if you weren’t the hero? What if the chosen one were someone else entirely? Would you curse the gods and lament your fate? Would you turn tail and go home? Would you try your luck elsewhere, in a distant land where no one knew your name? Or would you simply lay down your sword and give up? Ganondorf was beginning to suspect that he was no hero, but he was nothing if not stubborn. Giving up was not a choice he was willing to make.
You can read the full story on AO3 (here), and you can check out more of the work featured in the zine on Twitter (here) and on Tumblr (here). Leftover sales, which include some lovely Zelda-themed merch, are now open (here).
Norco is a cross between a visual novel and a point-and-click adventure game that takes seven hours to play. The game is set in a near-future version of New Orleans and its surrounding bayou. Despite its lowkey cyberpunk elements, the future envisioned by the game isn’t all that different from the present. Norco is gorgeously well-written and intriguingly grounded in the specificity of its setting, and the various small stories it encompasses are filled with fascinating characters and meaningful human drama.
I want to focus on what’s interesting about this game. That being said, Norco can be frustrating, so let me get this out of the way: most of the adventure game elements of Norco are bad. The puzzles (such as they are) are poorly executed and annoying. There’s at least one instance of turn-based combat per act, and it’s not great. Also, the game takes a weird turn toward cosmic horror in the third and final act; and, in order to unlock a slightly more satisfying ending, you have to do a minor random thing in the second act that’s extremely easy to miss.
None of this is a deal breaker. Rather, I think it’s good to set expectations. Specifically, you should expect to use a walkthrough at some point. I actually ended up using three walkthroughs, as I found some of the adventure game sequences to be difficult to piece together. They’re not complicated; they’re just opaque. Thankfully, the more frustrating puzzles are few and far between, and you can play the vast majority of the game just fine on your own.
You begin Norco as a woman named Kay who returns home after her mother dies of cancer and her brother Blake stops replying to texts. Although Blake is nowhere to be found in or around the house, Kay is greeted by the family robot Million, a fugitive from the skirmishes between armed militias that have broken out across the southwest. Million suggests that she and Kay talk to people in the neighborhood to figure out where Blake has run off to.
The search for Blake is interrupted by extended flashback sequences in which you play as Kay’s mother Catherine. While her cancer is in remission, Catherine takes odd jobs on a Fivver-like platform called Superduck in order to pay off loans so her kids can keep the house after she dies. These jobs take Catherine across New Orleans and eventually lead her to an abandoned mall colonized by the teenage disciples of an internet demagogue by the name of Kenner John.
We’re introduced to Catherine as she allows a blandly anonymous tech corporation to make a neural map of her brain. In theory, the experimental procedure is compensated by the generation of an AI personality intended to help Catherine’s family process her death. In reality, Catherine needs the money. Immediately after her brain imaging session, she’s out in the city after dark running errands via the Superduck app.
Oddly enough, Superduck ends up being a real “person,” a branch of an AI personality based on Catherine’s friend Duck. Based on a story Catherine once told Duck, Superduck has figured out that an alien entity resides in the estuary of Lake Pontchartrain, and that it was captured by Kenner John.
Although the cyberpunk elements of Norco’s plot are fun, they’re not the real story. As Catherine, you play as a tired and washed-up adult using a rideshare service to get around town while trying to gather information from other tired adults who are just trying to make a living. It’s through these conversations that the player gets a sense of what New Orleans is like as a city, as well as a sense of how not even wealthy people who seem to be major players have any control over the environment. There are going to be hurricanes, and there are going to be floods, and neither oil companies nor tech companies can do anything about it.
What I appreciate about Norco is how realistic and grounded it is. As someone dealing with cancer, Catherine gets winded climbing stairs during one of the adventure game segments, and she’s okay with telling people that no, actually, she’s not fine and she needs a minute. Kenner John’s cultists are dumb kids (affectionate) who just want to hang out in an abandoned mall and smoke weed while playing video games. Even the MAGA-style militia members who make a brief appearance in the last act are heroic in their own deranged way, and the poor harassed public official who stays late in City Hall dealing with paperwork delivers a monologue about how you can’t save everyone that’s worthy of Shakespeare.
Despite the gritty setting of a city on its last legs and Norco’s complete lack of sentimentality, all of the characters are intensely human and sympathetic. They’re also quite funny, even when they’re at their lowest and most morally dubious. There’s one story about a guy who eats a hotdog from a food cart in a downtown tourist area that made me laugh so hard I cried. Norco tackles challenging themes, but it also manages to be pitch-perfect comedy storytelling. I really can’t overemphasize how brilliant the writing is.
Also, this is worth saying: As someone who grew up in the Deep South, I’m truly and deeply grateful that the script of this game uses an accurate representation of Southern AAVE. My promise to myself about Norco was that I would put the game down and walk away the second anyone said “y’all” or pulled some sort of X-Men Gambit bullshit, but I didn’t need to worry. Everyone talks like a normal person.
The basic gameplay of Norco consists of conversation-based fetch quests. Someone will tell you to talk to someone else, and you have to go find them. You do this by driving (or ordering an off-brand Uber) to take you to a point on a map of New Orleans, and from there you’ll navigate between four or five screens by clicking on various points of interest. Your objective is always clear, but there’s a lot of non-essential content to interact with. And it’s good to talk with everyone! What you’ll get as a reward for being curious is some of the best stand-up comedy you’ll ever read.
The adventure game puzzles are so deeply embedded in the action of the story that they’re difficult to describe without extensive plot summary. What makes the worst of them annoying is that they expect you to leave the game and write something down in real life. One of the more obnoxious of these puzzles involves numerology. I understand that this is a play on the weird Christian-themed numerology cults that have sprung up on YouTube and Facebook – one of my aunts got really into this during the pandemic, true story, and it’s batshit insane – but it’s still a pain to put down the game and go get a piece of paper.
One of the interactive elements of the game that actually works well occupies a large portion of the third act. The Surprise Big Bad antagonist has gotten an offshoot of the Kenner John cult to build a spaceship on the bayou, and Kay needs to go out and find the site by navigating through the swamp in a small boat on a 4-bit pixelated sonar screen. There are all sorts of fun things to find out on the water, and this segment is enhanced by an atmospheric lead-up that includes an interesting lesson in natural history concerning why the topography of the bayou is so treacherous even though it looks like open water.
At the conclusion of the end credits, Norco provides a list of books and documentaries that the developers used as references. I was so drawn into the real-world history presented by Norco that I immediately screencapped this list. I got started on following up with these references by watching a documentary called Mossville: When the Great Trees Fall, and it’s almost painfully apparent that the creators of Norco were pulling inspiration from serious ongoing issues. It’s amazing that they were able to take such heavy material and transform it into something so gorgeously strange and entertaining.
Although Norco isn’t as mechanically robust as Disco Elysium, it’s easily in the same category of excellent writing and unique visual stylization. I somehow got the impression that this game would be all doom and gloom about poverty and injustice, but it’s actually a genuinely funny dark comedy about a cast of characters whom I grew to love despite (and often because of) their flaws and bad behavior.
I got to write my dream article for Sidequest about Ender Lilies, one of my favorite games! Here’s the opening paragraph:
In Binary Haze’s 2021 Soulslike Metroidvania Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights, a young girl named Lily navigates a hostile postapocalyptic world with the help of grotesquely mutated undead monsters. As the game progresses, Lily becomes increasingly reliant on her monstrous companions as she becomes more monstrous herself. Ender Lilies functions as an intriguing model of mutual aid, especially in relation to its gradual descent into fungal horror. As the world changes around us, Ender Lilies asks, is it really so horrific to develop radical new relationships with the environment?
Castaway is a tribute to Link’s Awakening whose story campaign takes about 35 minutes to play. This campaign functions as a tutorial to the game’s Death Tower, in which you have one life to climb fifty simple and static floors with very few health drops and no permanent upgrades. The Death Tower is not for me, but the story campaign was a pocket of pure and unadulterated joy.
You play as a young boy whose escape pod lands on a deserted island after his spaceship blows up. After the crash, pterodactyls steal the boy’s survival tools and his dog, so it’s up to him to unsheathe his trusty sword and explore the island to get everything back.
The island is very small, as are each of the three dungeons. There’s no one to talk to, and there are only four types of enemies. The only aspects of the environment you can interact with are two types of rocks, so all of the puzzles involve sokoban-style block pushing. The two tools you find in the first two dungeons are a pickaxe that allows you to break rocks and a hookshot that allows you to latch onto rocks to cross gaps. If you use your tools to backtrack, you can collect three additional hearts to bolster your health.
The overworld map and dungeons are all tight and precise. More than a true imitation of a Zelda game, Castaway’s story campaign seems to be a stage for speedrunning, and there’s a special Speedrun Mode that allows you to see the clock onscreen. I tend not to care about such things, but the Speedrun Mode was a nice excuse to give the game a second playthrough with a bit more challenge.
The music and sound effects of Castaway are forgettable, but the graphics manage to achieve the trick of using modern technology to reproduce what you thought Game Boy Color games looked like when you were younger. The pixel art of the opening and closing animations is gorgeous, and the interstitial illustrations are lovely as well.
Whether this tiny game is worth $8 is debatable, especially if you’re not interested in speedruns or gauntlet survival challenges. I love Link’s Awakening beyond all reason, so I was happy to put down the money to support indie developers while spending an hour in nostalgia heaven. Still, it would have been nice if Castaway had more substance.
If you’re interested in the concept of Castaway but don’t want to spend money on something that feels like it should be a free demo of a larger game, please consider the alternative of Ocean’s Heart, a beautiful and robust Zeldalike game that’s honestly better than most actual Zelda games. If you’re interested, you can check out my review of Ocean’s Heart (here).
Animal Well is a no-combat puzzle platformer with an open-world Metroidvania structure. You play as a small seed navigating a mossy system of underground tunnels. The game has no dialogue or diegetic text, nor does it need any. Your job is simply to explore.
Because this is a video game, however, the player needs objectives. Early on in the game, the little seed arrives in what appears to be a central hub with statues of four animals. Each animal’s flame is sealed in a themed quadrant of the map. Although your map is mostly blank at the beginning, the location of each flame is marked, giving you four goals to work toward. Navigation is anything but simple, however, and figuring out where you’re supposed to go is just as much of a puzzle as any of the one-room set pieces.
Since Animal Well gives you so many paths to choose from, the beginning can be confusing. In many ways, this game reminds me of Hollow Knight and Hyper Light Drifter, which are similarly cagey about where the critical path might lie. Thankfully, there’s no wrong way to play Animal Well, so you’ll be fine if you simply choose a direction and start walking. Once you make your way into a level proper, the path forward becomes much easier to follow.
As you might guess from the title, the vast underground well that serves as the setting of the game is filled with animals that theme the puzzles. In the dog level, for example, you’ll need to find a frisbee that you can throw to distract the dogs that chase after you. In the seahorse level, fish blow bubbles into the air that you can use to reach higher platforms. In the chameleon level, you’ll need to adjust the path of wall-climbing hedgehogs so that they hit otherwise inaccessible switches.
Animal Well offers the player a beautiful and evocative environment to get lost in, and it’s nice to see such a well-designed game that focuses on exploration instead of combat. Most of the platforming puzzles are relatively easy but still very clever, which I appreciate. The pixel art is gorgeous and atmospheric, and each area manages to express its theme while still maintaining a unified aesthetic that ties the various ecosystems together. There’s not much music, but the sound design is fantastic.
If I have one complaint about Animal Well, it’s that the map is riddled with secret passageways that are completely unmarked. In addition, you can only make it so far into each level without the aid of a tool from another level. In theory, this means that there are eight levels instead of four. In practice, it can be frustrating not to know whether you can’t proceed because you need a tool from a different level or whether you simply missed a hidden path. Unless you happen to be either very good (or very patient) with this sort of thing, I’d strongly recommend playing Animal Well with a walkthrough.
It’s impossible to say how long Animal Well takes to play. According to reviews, it has the potential to be a five-hour game, but I get the feeling that the majority of players aren’t going to have such a smooth experience. If I had to guess, I’d say that most first-time players should expect to spend at least six or seven hours getting to the end. After that, there’s potentially another ten hours of exploration enabled by the tools you find at the end of the final area.
Is the cleverness and charm of Animal Well worth the aggravation of getting lost and not knowing what you’re supposed to do? That depends on the player, of course, and it’s worth saying that this isn’t a casual game. Still, although I wish Animal Well were less opaque, I appreciate that it’s not actually difficult. Exploration is always rewarded, and I never stopped being surprised and amazed by each new bit of the game I managed to find. Every single screen in Animal Well is a work of art.
After finishing Animal Well, I read the TV Tropes page to see if there’s an actual story to the game. Perhaps you can unlock a different ending if you can manage to find all the collectables? From what I can tell, there’s no real story no matter what you do, but there are collectables underneath collectables underneath collectables. There’s also an ARG. None of that is any of my business, but it’s cool I guess. I always appreciate when the people who created a game were living their best lives, and I’m happy to have an excuse to spend more time poking around the beautiful mossy tunnels of Animal Well.
I’m proud to see my story “Ms. Weaver’s Halloween Candy” in the newest issue of Suburban Witchcraft.
“Ms. Weaver’s Halloween Candy” is a magical realist suburban gothic fantasy about love, creativity, and the (human) sacrifices necessary to survive as an outsider in academia. The piece begins as a Stephen King style story about a kid on a bike investigating a local legend in a small college town, but it gradually unravels into a veiled reworking of the Ariadne myth as the protagonist learns that the ambitions of her mother extend far beyond the confines of her family.
Suburban Witchcraft Magazine is a gorgeous digital repository of weird writing with a literary bent, and each issue is free to read online. You can check out the issue with my story here:
Mr. Saitou is an Undertale-style narrative adventure game (with music by Toby Fox) that takes about two hours to finish. You play as Saitou, a white-collar worker who finds himself in the hospital after a failed suicide attempt triggered by stress and overwork. While sleeping, Saitou dreams of himself as a llamaworm (a comically extended groundhog) who goes on an adventure with a cute pink flowerbud named Brandon, the dream persona of a young child Saitou meets in the hospital.
Mr. Saitou has something of slow start, during which the player’s sole job is mashing a button to advance text. Thankfully, the game becomes much more engaging after the first ten minutes, at which point Saitou enters the dream world.
After the introduction, Saitou spends about half an hour in an office of llamaworms that serves as a stage for a gentle comedy about workplace culture. After a ten-minute segment of mandatory afterwork socialization in an izakaya, Saitou returns home to his neighborhood of underground tunnels.
Saitou decides to skip work the next day. This gives him an opportunity to meet Bradon, who wants to visit the Flooded Gem Caverns deeper in the tunnels. The remainder of Mr. Saitou unfolds in a beautiful fantasy-themed underground space enhanced by lowkey elements of exploration and simple puzzles.
What I appreciate most about Mr. Saitou is its creativity, which is driven by cute but thoroughly original character designs and clever writing. Even though most of the gameplay consists of simple conversation-based fetch quests, I never got tired of seeing what was around the next corner, and I always enjoyed talking with each new character.
The game’s humor sits comfortably at the intersection between wholesome and quirky, and the writing subtly references internet culture without relying too heavily on these allusions. The simple spatial puzzles are easy and engaging without feeling as if they were phoned in, and the thematic background music is lovely from start to finish.
I love almost everything about Mr. Saitou, but I should probably mention that there’s an unskippable musical cutscene featuring about three minutes of unremittingly flashing strobe lights toward the end. If you (like me) are photosensitive, this may be worth taking into consideration.
In addition, the sentimentality of the ending may ring hollow for players searching for a more nuanced or complicated story, especially regarding the extent of an individual’s personal responsibility for ensuring their quality of life under late-stage capitalism. This is a valid criticism, of course, but Mr. Saitou is a game about a llamaworm and a talking flower having magical underground adventures. All things considered, I think it’s probably best to enjoy the game for what it is.
Mr. Saitou is a sweet but still surprising game that’s entertaining to read and engaging to play, and I feel that its story earns the right to state its final message clearly: The world is filled with interesting people and beautiful places, and there’s more to life than slowly killing yourself for your job. Good health is a blessing, so you might as well make the most of your time on this earth while you’re still young.
Deepwell is an Undertale-style narrative adventure game that takes about two hours to finish. You play as a blank slate character called “the Cartographer” who has recently arrived in the small forest town of Deepwell, which clings to the southern rim of a massive hole in the ground. Oddly enough, anyone who descends into the hole beyond a certain point gets “blipped,” meaning that they appear at the top of the hole as if nothing had happened. Generations of mystery hunters have sought the solution to this puzzle, but perhaps you might be the one to finally figure it out.
Deepwell is only about two dozen screens large, and there are five main characters to talk to. Most of the game involves engaging in long and meandering conversations with these characters in order to learn their stories. Sokolov manages the town library, and Evan runs the general store. Pierre has created something resembling an art gallery on one side of town, while Lily lives in a field of flowers on the other. At the intersection next to the highway, a robot named Bing helpfully provides information to visitors.
It stands to reason that everyone living in such an isolated town would be a little weird. Aside from Bing, who is essentially a tutorial robot, each character is a self-contained short story that gradually unfolds as you talk with them. Thankfully, there are no wrong conversation choices, nor is there any missable content. The player is free to walk where they like and talk with the characters as they wish while unlocking a few extra conversation topics by interacting with each character’s environment.
On the eastern edge of town is a waterfall that hides a secret cave. Glyphs drawn onto the wall of this cave indicate whether a character’s dialogue has been exhausted. Once the Cartographer has sufficiently spoken with each of the town’s residents, a new path will open deeper into the forest to reveal a sixth character, who tempts the player with the possibility of an alternate (and much darker) ending.
You can actually end the game any time you want by simply heading back to the highway and leaving town. You can also choose to wrap up the story at any point by taking a boat across the lake to see what’s on the north side of the giant hole. Although you’re given a choice in the final section of the game that affects the ending, I think Deepwell ties up its thematic threads quite nicely. This is a story about personal purpose and fulfillment, and about why we need art and mystery. How you approach these themes within the context of the game is up to you.
The graphics are primitive yet charming. I was put off by the crunchiness at first, but the lo-fi aesthetic grew on me. Deepwell contains a surprising number of insert illustrations and cutscenes, some of which are extremely well done. This is especially the case with Pierre, whose gallery of art installations closes with a remarkable set piece. I get the feeling that some players may find Pierre pretentious, but I appreciate his sincerity. And he’s not wrong about how visual glossiness is often a disguise for mediocrity.
Deepwell is akin to a short story anthology that’s easy to pick up for twenty minutes at a time, but I ended up being so fascinated by the overarching narrative that I played the whole game in one sitting. The writing is exceptionally good. It gives me immense joy to know that something like Deepwell exists in the world, and I honestly feel that I’m a better person for having spent time with it.
I had the pleasure of writing a fun article for Sidequest about how A Link Between Worlds is a perfect cozy horror game to play during the long summer evenings. It’s a dark twist on Legend of Zelda series traditions and one of my favorite adventure games.
By happy coincidence, the Gibdo attack on Gerudo Town grants the Gerudo archaeologist Rotana a breakthrough in her research on the Seven Heroines. Link’s assistance was invaluable in locating the first mystical orb of the Heroines, but Rotana has resolved to find the others on her own. As she speaks with the residents of Gerudo Town, Rotana becomes acquainted with the virtues espoused by the Heroines and learns that knowledge can be found in surprising places.
I love Rotana as a character, and it’s one of the highlights of Tears of the Kingdom to listen to her lectures. Also, as an academic, it’s a guilty pleasure for me to write about research and fieldwork and the hurdles on the way to publication. Still, what I really wanted to do with this piece was tell a story about everyday life in Hyrule. Because Link is the hero of a video game, everything seems to revolve around him, so it’s interesting to get an outside perspective.
In particular, I wanted to see the characters in Gerudo Town living their best lives and solving their own problems without Link’s help. I hope this story draws the reader into a beautiful setting where the everyday quests of regular people are just as meaningful as Link’s journey to rescue Zelda.
I’m honored to have contributed this piece to Residents of the Wild, a gorgeous digital fanzine celebrating the NPCs of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. The zine was published on August 3, and you can still order a digital copy during the Zeldathon charity event beginning on August 13.
I consider myself extremely lucky to have my story illustrated by the legendary Linktober veteran Taboonle, who created a radiant portrait of one of Hyrule’s premier scholars. Taboonle draws amazing character art as well as cute comics with a gentle sense of humor, and you can check out his work on Instagram (here) and on Tumblr (here).
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