A cartoon depiction of the author, wearing a hoodie and smiling motd.co

March Media Report

Tunic, a game I've had on my radar for something like 5 years, is finally out, and I've been playing through it on PC. It's like Zelda but with combat that I guess people insist is inspired by Dark Souls (I guess I kind of see it, though I'm not sure that what it's doing wasn't already present in games before Dark Souls, so attributing those things to Dark Souls feels silly to me), and with a puzzle layer not unlike Fez, one of my favorite puzzle games of all time. The graphics are surprisingly gorgeous and the music is, well, it's basically "lofi" elevator music but it fits, honestly. It has a mechanic whereby in-game you discover pages to the instruction manual for the game itself, lovingly rendered in the style of early NES instruction manuals, and it gives you hints about how to use things and go places and such. I haven't finished it quite yet but I will say that while I think it's a really good game I also think it's an uneven one; difficulty spikes in weird ways all over the place (including the first 30 minutes or so, which is not great) and not just in boss battles. There is an "accessibility" option that stops you from being able to take damage and I've used it twice but not on boss battles-- on fights in frustratingly-shaped corridors where you're forced to fight large numbers of enemies who have a combat mechanic that I think sucks a lot of the fun out of the game. It's a shame, because I do think that overall it's a well-made game, but I would say to anyone playing to just turn that option on literally whenever you feel like it and don't feel bad about it. You can turn it back off whenever you want, which is interesting, and there's still plenty of compelling stuff to see and do in the game regardless.

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Hipster Runoff has been 'in the conversation' lately and I am finding that 'weird'. I don't really have much else to say about that right now. This Substack post by Meaghan Garvey was really good.

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Denzel Curry's new album Melt My Eyez See Your Future is a really great record. Curry is an interesting rapper, playing with style and (to my ear, at least) seemingly obsessed with the greats in his field-- he'll do an entire song in the style of DMX one year, then compare himself to Del tha Funkee Homosapien the next. He manages to carry his solo tracks well but collaborates well with T-Pain, then sounds at home a few tracks later with 6LACK, Rico Nasty, JID & Jasiah. I think this is going to be one of my most heavily-played albums of the year.

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I'm still playing Vampire Survivors whenever there's an update! It's really cool to be in that relationship with an early access game, where I eagerly look forward to its updates and when they come out I find some time to sit down with it for a few hours, explore what it has to offer, and then put the game back down. It's $3 on Steam! It's really easy to play while you listen to podcasts or music or listen to some commentary on Youtube or something! Check it out!

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I've been reevaluating my relationship with streaming music platforms recently and so instead of using Apple Music as much I've been using Plexamp to listen to music that I own digital copies of! It's a pretty good app, not perfect but still in active development. One cool feature that it has on its home screen is a little info box that pops up for milestone anniversaries of the release dates of albums in your collection. Which is something that's really great when you have a big collection; a lot of my listening is very intentional "I have this in mind and want to listen to it" but having little moments of serendipity is wonderful too.

So it's because of that feature that I discovered that this month is the 15-year anniversary of The Field's From Here We Go Sublime, in my opinion one of the most perfect electronic albums ever made, an album that just has an incredible amount of mood to every track and if you haven't heard it you really owe it to yourself to check it out.

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I've started reading A Little Devil in America, the 2021 book by Hanif Abdurraqib, a collection of essays about Black culture, music, dance, and life. As with his other books, it's really fantastically written, teaches me history about music and pop culture, and also has lots of really heavy stuff in it. I think Abdurraqib has become one of my favorite writers in just the last few years, and I'm really grateful to have more work from him to think through.

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Gretchen and I started watching the TV show Severance after I got back from visiting New York for work, during which it came up multiple times in conversation with people I was able to see while I was there. It's a pretty bleak show, even though we've only watched a couple episodes so far. I'm excited to watch the rest as quickly as possible; the whole first season will be out by the second week of April and then I'm sure we'll be stuck with some devastating cliffhanger that leaves us waiting the way shows like Lost did.

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Nia Archives released a new EP called Forbidden Feelingz which is a good groove and has some wonderful sound-collage qualities to it. There's even a Columbo sample. Columbo is so cool now, I guess, something I would not have predicted like two years ago.

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I'm finally playing Disco Elysium, a game I've been meaning to play for a long time. I'm doing it for my Saturday night stream, a private Discord stream with a group of some of my oldest friends, a COVID-era tradition that we've managed to keep up most weeks. We only tend to play for 3-4 hours each week and it's not a short game, so we've already been playing it for something like two months and we've got a ways to go, but I'm glad to have a group to keep me accountable for making steady progress in a game like this where I know I would like it but if left to my own devices would probably make a bunch of excuses for why I wanted to play some other shiny new distraction instead of dealing with all the narrative heaviness and sheer amount of reading involved in this game. But it's really good!

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For posterity, my Wordle routine right now stands at: