Wish upon a wall

Early in Hollow Knight: Silksong, someone asks for your help building a bridge.

The bug asking for aid is called Flick, the resident fixer of Bone Bottom, a town in the depths of Pharloom. A capable craftsman, he doesn’t require practical help from you, instead asking for raw materials—shell shards, mined from the environment or gathered from fallen bugs along your path.

In the kingdom of Pharloom, there’s a custom of posting requests like Flick’s to wishwalls. The bugs of this land, many of whom are on a pilgrimage to the sacred Citadel atop the realm, leave their wishes on the board and hold onto faith that someone else will come along and make them come true.

Flick’s wish is called “A Lifesaving Bridge.” He means to build this bridge across a pit near the edge of town, one that many a pilgrim has tumbled into. You too have run afoul of this fissure, plummeting into it at the game’s outset.

(I’ll keep the details vague, but there are some spoilers for the game in this post.)

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Sur l’art impossible

“Great art is both window and mirror… whether it’s your mask or theirs.”

– The Mask Keeper

Recto

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has me feeling conflicted.

Befitting its name, Sandfall Interactive’s debut title is a game of contrasts. There are many bright spots. There are also some not-so-bright spots. I want to quickly cover both sides, and I might touch on some mechanical specifics while doing so, but I’m not going in depth on the story other than to say…

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Gundam done quick

Summer Games Done Quick 2025 kicks off today. It’s a week-long charity marathon featuring speedruns and other video game showcases, the latest event in a biannual series that has been going for more than a decade. I want to talk briefly about why I make time to watch these events whenever they come up.

But first, I need to spoil all of Mobile Suit Gundam.

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Broken Silence

I have beef with Spotify Wrapped.

Not because it is naked engagement bait (though it is), nor because it has inspired an obnoxious plague of pretenders (though it has). No, my beef is because Wrapped does not understand me. It purports to summarize what I have listened to in a given year, yet the colorful lists it generates do not tell the whole story. Wrapped assumes I use Spotify to listen to music, and that’s just not true.

I use Spotify to play music, regardless of if I’m actually listening.

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Every Game I Played in 2024

After performing this ritual time and time again, I have come to understand the impracticality of cramming a year’s worth of blogging into a single blog post. It muddies the reflections, it delays the posting, it burdens the reader, and all of that pains me. A more sensible person would have realized this much sooner. Alas, you’re stuck with me.

Time to change it up. I didn’t write about every game this year. You’re still getting the full list—I can’t give up the convention of the title this far in—but only about half of the games on it have received the full treatment, such as it is. The rest are in a separate section, each with a brief comment.

Abridgment alone won’t make this a viable or worthwhile endeavor, so I have something more drastic in mind for the future. But I’ll get to that later.

Let’s talk about some games.

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The Trouble With Cowards

I gave up trying to write about this sort of thing years ago, but there’s a few thoughts that I have to get out.

This election felt uniquely terrible despite how similar it ended up feeling to 2016. For everything that was similar or the same—underestimating Trump’s cult of personality, acting like there are Republicans who would vote for a Democrat, watching the Democrats rely on surrogates, celebrities, and vibes instead of a platform—the thing that felt especially soul-destroying is that I was committed to voting for a candidate who supported genocide.

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Every Game I Played in 2023

I think this one was worth the wait.

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Every Game I Played in 2022

I have learned nothing.

“I will write the intro and conclusion tomorrow,” I said, on New Year’s Eve.

Imbecile. Buffoon. Fool.

It’s been established that these posts don’t need intros. I had already finished the body, which is what matters. And the conclusion, I might have done without prior to recent events. Instead, my fresh takes have sat withering, rotting in an open tab.

The good news is that I found something to say about every game on the list. The bad news is that the paragraphs are molded over and riddled with maggots.

Dig in.

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Every Game I Played in 2021

I’ve been on a quest to purge my tabs, and this one has been open since last December. Part of my mistake was trying to do another 2019-style list instead of going for brevity like I did with the 2020 list. Ambition exacts its toll on me yet again. But whatever. It’s time to actually finish this, no matter what.

So here’s how this is going to work. I’m gonna list the games I played. I don’t necessarily have something to say about everything I played, so I’m not going to force myself to do so. I will however spend a minute talking about the one game that I blame for this list being as late as it is.

Cool? Cool.

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Dear Neighboor

I’m sorry you’re unhappy.

Maybe not at this moment, but it is evident that whenever you have occasion to walk past my porch, you are unhappy. I make this inference based on the note you left taped to my door, coupled with the reasoning that someone of a neutral emotional state would not feel moved to post such a thesis.

Let me be clear: I admire your breathtaking display of passive-aggressiveness, and I want to return the thought in kind. Full disclosure, part of my motivation here is selfish. I’m planning to write another “Every Game I Played This Year” post, and I would hate for the 2021 and 2020 lists to be right next to each other on the blog roll.

But the remainder of my reason for writing this response is because I think you deserve it. So I hope that the energy contained within this blog post, which I don’t expect you to read, finds its way to you.

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