Browsing: Steven’s Blog

About a year ago I decided to improve my fitness routine by combining it with intermittent fasting… And the card game, solitaire. Believe it or not, it’s been a great help. Why not? Suppoedly Napoleon found solace in playing solitaire during his exile at St. Helena. If the stories are true, Tolstoy played solitaire when he hit blockades in his writing process. He cleared his mind by playing solitaire, thereby opening himself up creatively once again. But it’s Madame Blavatsky I have to thank for introducing me to the card game as a simple and engaging way of occupying the…

Wytchwood is a masterpiece of a cozy game, though I didn’t realize it at first. Stardew Valley has spoiled me rotten as a farming sim and cozy game with all of its delightfully obsessive intricacies. I unfairly brought those expectations to a game that was not Stardew Valley, was not trying to be Stardew Valley, and did not want to be Stardew Valley. And once I stopped comparing the two and instead appreciated Wytchwood for what it wanted to be and not what I thought it should be, the game started to shine as something truly special. Wytchwood (Alientrap Games)…

All the way back in June 2015, I wrote a blog post titled “Bring Diablo To iOS: An Open Letter To Blizzard Entertainment,” in which I championed having all of the Diablo games ported to mobile like the Titan Quest series. I included Torchlight in my complaint, too, for good measure. It was my personal wishlist of great action RPGs I wanted to have in the palm of my hand. Well, I sort of got my wish, since I can now play Diablo 2 Resurrected on the Nintendo Switch. And I am already over it. Fond eMachine Memories I don’t…

Is “A Crack in the Slab” from Dishonored 2 modeled after Aleister Crowley and Boleskine House? If the mission is not an intentional nod to the ceremonial magician from the game’s writers, then it’s an eerie coincidence. The Dishonored franchise is no stranger to the occult. The series understands the connection between art and magic, personified by the Delilah Copperspoon character (who isn’t unlike Crowley). And the overall atmosphere of magic in the Dishonored games is shadowy and mysterious. As a player, you unlock your supernatural powers not by plainly leveling up and distributing automatically assigned skill points. Instead, you…

The Dishonored series has been my all-consuming obsession during lockdown when I’m not working or writing. And as I played through these games and their downloadable content, I started to notice similarities between the bleak world of Dishonored and our own amidst the coronavirus pandemic. For those unfamiliar, Dishonored is set in the wholly original fantasy world of the Empire of the Isles; the Empire’s seat of power is the city of Dunwall. Dunwall is dark and gray and smoky—think of the city as a mashup of King’s Landing from A Song of Ice and Fire, the steampunk Central from…

“Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought is a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing.” – Alan Moore, from Issue 32 of Promethea This quote from Alan Moore’s Promethea has stayed with me from the moment I read it well over a decade ago. I’ve never been able shake it, nor do I want to—it’s always had a particular meaning to me, though what that meaning is I can’t say. Perhaps it’s because I respect Alan Moore’s central philosophy that art is magic and magic…

A desk lamp provides Gavin Hurley with nothing when he’s at work. Only flickering candlelight is capable of supplying the light he needs while crafting his stories. Watched by Michael Myers from behind the glass of a framed Halloween poster and surrounded by the soft sound of eerie music, Mr. Hurley is at home with the right conditions he needs to realize the true nature of his craft. Mr. Hurley believes deeply in the dark genres of storytelling. Aside from the classic voices in haunted literature like Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and H.P. Lovecraft, he believes that contemporary voices…

There is a tipping point half way through the YouTube film, Marble Hornets, when Jay, the everyman protagonist, transitions from the role of passive observer to active participant. He meets with a college student named Tim and interviews him on video in order to ascertain the reasons why a student film went awry and to discover the fate of its director, Alex Kralie, three years after the events took place. “Speaking of Alex, he did move away after he ended this production—do you know what might have caused him or even where he might have moved to?” Jay asks Tim.…

1 2 3