Initating Into 2022: SU&SD Newsletter #60

Matt: It’s been an exciting start to the year, even through the expected bumpiness of grey-sky brains and covid gymnastics - I hope you enjoyed our first two-person review of the year as much as we enjoyed making it!

It’s amazing to me that as humans we’re both creatures of habit,  but also so able to rapidly adapt - it wasn’t until I was filming with Tom the other week for The Initiative that I realised how much I’d been forced to compromise: It’s so much easier to find the right energy when not working alone, and having the wild flexibility of SOMEONE ELSE BEHIND THE CAMERA suddenly reopened so many locked doors - tapping into a creative energy that had been stuck  inside a dim cupboard since early 2020. Thanks again for supporting our work - especially through such difficult times.

And now it’s time for some CHUNKY GAMES - we’ve  been diving into a couple of meaty games over the past few months, keeping an eye on what’s new and hot whilst also not ignoring the great  stuff we’ve missed. Spirit Island is one of those much-beloved games  that never got the video treatment from us, and we’ve begun the task of exhaustingly dipping into everything that game & its expansions have to offer. Spoilers: it’s pretty good!

But just yesterday I played a game that led me down an interesting rabbit hole of introspection: the recent reprint of Battle of the Five  Armies; War for the Ring’s more hobbit-based cousin. Using a bunch of the same rules as the strange & enticing behemoth we fell in love  with in our video review, it’s a smaller war game that’s far less  demanding of your time and table-space, but lacks the atmospheric  backing provided by the excellent Peter Jackson films.

And faced with something less vibrant, less immediately imaginable,  it became clear the extent to which I really hadn’t noticed that War for the Ring wasn’t especially different from other traditional  historical war games - it was simply simulating a purely fictional history. So much of the excitement I found in War for the Ring came from  the moments which were in parallel to the events as depicted, those  that were abrasively mismatched - even those that were ALMOST the same but not quite.

And really, I came to realise, is this flavour of nerdery any  different across so many of our hobbies? This thrill of playing with the  hypothetical - whether it’s Operation Barbarossa panning out  differently, or Batman fighting Superman, or Gandalf getting biffed by  the Balrog and simply never coming back? How much of fan theories about  unfinished stories is about people wanting to get it right, and how much  of it is just an exercise in collective play?

And how much do the dice and the outcomes of fights in these war games actually matter, compared to the thrill of conceptually wrestling  with fictional unknowns?

I find myself thinking back to my first visit to a huge board game convention - I was struck by the hilarity of seeing Serious World War 2 Gamers a mere 15 feet away from a casual tournament for the My Little  Pony card game. At the time it seemed incongruous and silly, but today it’s a reminder that the core of why we all tinker and play, the ways we toy with the stories that we love - it’s all cut from the same cloth:  we really aren’t all that different. The only wall of division here, really, is fiction versus truth - but with history as unreliably told as  it often is? That wall frankly feels pretty crumbly to me. Are you sure it’s a wall, and not just a big erected biscuit? No further questions, your honour.

What are we roleplaying!🧙

Quinns: Oh god. I had a pretty chilling moment looking at a game yesterday. A while back Free League sent us the boxed  set of their RPG Twilight: 2000, which takes the ruleset popularised in Mutant: Year Zero and uses it in a setting they call “The World War 3 that never was”.

In a nutshell, Twilight: 2000 sees players as the scattered survivors of a land war where the Soviet Union invades Europe. Like everything Free League publish, it was a beautiful and thoughtfully-crafted thing, but it felt disturbing to be holding someone’s wacky thought experiment at a  time when Russia is massing forces on the border of Ukraine.

Talk about a crumbly wall between fiction and truth.

What are we video games!  🎮

Tom: Okay, I’m in this newsletter document super early to write words about OlliOlli World, Sifu and Returnal; before I get absolutely subsumed by Elden Ring.

Quinns very generously offered me a loan of his Playstation 5 to have a crack at Returnal, safe in the knowledge that it’s “my kind of  game” and he is one hundred percent correct. What a blast. The difficulty is perfectly pitched - absolutely damning of your mistakes whilst still giving you  tiny little bonuses each run to keep your forward momentum; though  admittedly it is diminishing returns after my first run got me all the way to the third major area, where my cockiness absolutely got the better of me.

OlliOlli World, whilst still pretty difficult, is a much more laid-back affair; all parts of the game trying their best to offset the rinse-and-repeat style gameplay with oodles of charm. I love this game.  The vibes are impeccable and the locomotion is just divine. I can’t  squeeze all my love into this tiny little box of text but… just play it.  It’s so great! Although maybe I’m just singing its praises so that I  have more pals to compare scores to.

And Sifu? Sifu just rips. I’m a sucker for anything with a razor-sharp melee system and this has it in spades, even if the  run-based upgrade system is a little esoteric at times. The main thing  that all these games have (and Sifu especially) is flow - where you just  enter a state of cohesion and everything lands with the most satisfying  pops and clicks and bells and whistles the game has to offer.  Delightful. The downside to this trio of high-action nonstop-perfection hard-as-nails games? My poor hands. I’ve minced them.  OlliOlli has given my a blister on my left thumb, Returnal has knackered  both my index fingers and Sifu is just the painful RSI cherry on top.

Matt: I’ve been playing a bit of Death’s Door, and as Tom suspected I would feel about it - I think it’s mostly just fine.  A very solid little thing with a Classically Award-Winning Aesthetic and superb animation - but I’m glad I’ve played it so far if only for getting to spend time in the Frog King’s kingdom, a perfectly still blue pond of pure calm that gels with the game’s soundtrack to create absolute bliss. I had exactly the same response in Hyper Light Drifter’s similarly wet zone - what is it about entirely still water in  videogames that causes my brain such immediate peace?

Quinns: I spent last Sunday captivated by a couple  of indie games. Far: Lone Sails is an utterly charming little adventure  that combines my two favourite things, “big vehicles” and “weather”,  while Astalon: Tears of the Earth is metroidvania game that’s rock solid  in every single aspect. PC Gamer were right to heap quite so much  praise on it.

What are we reading? 📖

Ava: After getting all excited about the DIE rpg, I’ve jumped back to the beginning of the comics, and am slowly working my way through. The art is stunning and the story brutal and clever and silly and very good. I never finished it the first time round, and I’ve  actually only got a little past where I left off, so I’m partly just putting this here to get some accountability, and convince myself to finish it. It’s a joy, but it’s clever enough that I want to make sure I pay attention, and with a load of life stuff happening right now, it’s hard to make the time for that. So actually, I’ve been reading the second Thursday Murder Club book ‘The man who died twice’. Richard Osman  remains a solidly comforting force in my life, with a level of kindness  and awareness that means he can safely explore quite melancholy issues  without shying away. It’s really surprisingly good, for a breezy bestseller.

What are we music!  🎵

Tom: I’ve been back listening to a bunch of Squid again after their recent KEXP session - well worth a watch. Their record, Bright Green Field,  accompanied me for a long walk out in the storm the other day - and listening to the climax of 'Pamphlets' whilst pacing it home in bracing wind and driving rain was really something. Also in the realm of  up-and-coming British Indie - the new Black Country, New Road album is  every bit as aching and bittersweet as I could hope for it to be - and  maybe a little too much for my poor old brain. It goes in the ‘respect  from a distance’ box - only to be opened in times where I really want to feel a bit (very) sad.

On the slightly more upbeat side of things, I’ve listened to loads of two great electronic albums recently - Floating Points’ Crush (which I might have talked about before?) and Lord of The Isles’ In Waves - very different records in their pace and tone but both well worth a  listen if you gotta get something done. The two singles from Destroyer that have come out recently are also getting me really excited for his  upcoming record too!

What are we watching? 📺

Matt: I’ve just caught up with the rest of the world and finished watching The Beatles: Get Back, an eight hour  documentary that’s as fascinating as it is mundane. I’m not a real fan of the band, but was absolutely enraptured - it’s so weirdly rare to get  an extended view into the nuts and bolts of someone else’s creative  processes, let alone some of the most talented people in the world at  their most capable and fractious. It’s top-tier people-watching, giving you a marvellous sense of why and how it worked, and why it eventually just didn’t.

I found it especially reaffirming to see just how much of their  process seemed to revolve around wasting time and being really silly - two things that I hold very close to my heart - but that also a huge amount of the magic came from hard work and annoying conversations. I’d never been a fan of the John Lennon of ‘Imagine’ - but I can now see the raw charisma of his hilarious, chaotic energy. Sadly like most  creatives I’m well aware that I’ll always resonate more closely with McCartney - a talent that comes with an insistence towards organisation that’s frankly just irritating. As I always say about Peep Show: Nobody who’s a Jeremy knows that they’re a Jeremy - everyone who’s a Mark knows  too well that they’re a Mark.

Quinns: I really enjoyed Archive 81 on Netflix. At  turns it felt like I was watching a deft, modern re-imagining of an  H.P. Lovecraft story, and then sometimes it felt like it owed everything  to modern creepypastas. I suppose everything any human has ever made is a remix of some sort.

Ava: I went back and watched the entirety of Veep. It’s been a while since I binge-watched something with such deeply reprehensible characters. It’s a mean sort of comedy that I think I’ve stepped away from in recent years, but it’s still very good quite a lot of the time.