Reviews January 2022

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Books:
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

Games:
I Love You!
One Shot
A Garden On The Sea
Doreamon Story of Seasons


Books:

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers: This is the loose sequel to "A Long Way To A Small And Angry Planet", which I found kinda annoying (here's my review), but people kept saying this one was much better, and it is! It has an actual plot, even! Also the protagonist is a lady robot figuring out her sense of self while forming a close quasi-romantic bond with a non-binary alien, which is so completely my jam I was willing to forgive a lot. The deuteragonist is her engineer friend who I remember finding irritating in the previous book but she's basically fine here, and I really enjoyed the flashbacks to her learning to be a person despite a Scifi Dystopia upbringing. There's still some of the same smug, didactic, claustrophobically cuddly tone, but toned down enough that it mostly worked for me. There's still the same DEEPLY UNCOMFORTABLE tendency for all the sympathetic characters to be All About Consent And Communication... except for when they lie to/coerce someone for their own good, which the narrative always 100% supports. It's less egregious here, I might not have even noticed if I hadn't been primed by the previous book, but still. It feels like she is trying to be less biologically deterministic, and there's an attempt at trans inclusion, but there's still some weird subtext sometimes.


Games:

I Love You!: A short but very cute indie f/m femdomm-y Japanese dating sim which genderflips a bunch of highschool romance tropes. The protagonist gets few lines but is protective, physically strong, and a little pushy, and the three male love interests are blushingly into it. She's fairly short but that doesn't stop her picking them up when they twist their ankle etc. I adored this but there's not a lot to it beyond the premise.

One Shot (Windows Only): A fun, interesting little exploration/puzzle/narrative game about helping a little kid, Niko, help save the world. You play yourself, the person whose computer the game is running on, offering Niko advice and occasionally having to poke around your own file system to figure things out. The characters and pixel art are endearing, especially Niko, and the meta aspect works pretty well. I took FOREVER to finish it and eventually had to rely a bunch on a walkthrough, but this was partly because this kind of game does NOT suit being streamed to a different computer, and for some reason the (really not very complex!) controls and maps kept hurting my brain. I had mixed feelings on the initial ending, but then discovered they added a second ending you can get on a replay, which I liked a lot more. Has no timing/reaction based parts as I recall.

A Garden On The Sea (Browser): a cute, short, free, pretty and rather janky browser game about making a garden after the end of the world. I liked it well enough.

Doreamon Story of Seasons (Windows, consoles): Story of Seasons is the farming sim series that inspired Stardew Valley, and this one involves the characters from the popular Japanese kid's show Doreamon. I have never seen/read Doreamon which I suspect vastly undermines my enjoyment, but the characters are likeable enough even if there's more tween boys and gender essentialism than suits my tastes. On the plus side the aesthetic is really cute. I haven't played a lot of it yet, but it's enjoyable enough as long as I play with a controller: The keyboard controls for PC are so bad the game was practically unplayable, because it never selected the spot I wanted. Using a playstation controller is much better, but still kinda annoying because all the instructions are for X-Box. I get the feeling there is a LOT of content, so it's good to know I can poke at it whenever the farming sim bug hits and not run out of content for a while. There's no romance, just friendship, since the protagonist is a kid.