Recent reviews by canmom

I can't write with any pretence of objectivity here - Charity's work pierced some kind of feelings sphincter over a decade ago and I was literally never the same. I'll surely be making screeching noises about pieces like Vesp, Cyberqueen, and With Those We Love Alive til the day I die. But this collection is a treasure - and with many of the works now offline, it's pretty much the only place where many of them can be found.

If you're mostly familiar with Charity's modern work, like Serious Weakness or the Torture Works collection, you should definitely check out these old-school pieces too. They're just as sharp and playful, just as ingenious at running their fingers over all the sticky facets of living in a body in the sadistic world we do and rendering them fascinating and enticing in the horrors. That goes all the way back to early pieces like Howling Dogs. In contrast to the later more character- and relationship-focused works, the ones in this collection are often much more experimental with structure: fragmentary ptsd-labyrinths, recursive knots, iterations and variations, juicy imagery to swim around in.

Back in the day, nobody was doing it like Charity. It's a record of evolution/incubation and yes, the echoes of terrible pain. It's horribly real ♥♥♥♥ and some of these pieces will have you staring at a wall, but it's also real fun ♥♥♥♥. It's life, in all extremes. It's a writer who knows what they're about and does it absolutely brilliantly.

Hold on to this.

I am writing after my first full playthrough of Slay the Princess. I will certainly be coming back for more.

It's necessary to be a little cagey when describing this game, so let's stick to broad themes. It is a game about self-definition, about the way we are shaped through our interactions with others, about the 'necessity' of death, about violence. It's a game that relies on the inclination to explore every route in an RPG or visual novel, to be a completionist and seek the best outcome. It doesn't give you everything upfront, but it's not really a 'twist' game. It's often funny (in a sardonic kind of way), but also very genuine. I might compare it to NieR and Disco Elysium, in different aspects.

It is a visual novel that involves going through the same scenario multiple times. Each route has at least two chapters. Your choices in the first chapter determine the scenario for the second chapter, but there are many more branch points after that. None of the routes I explored felt perfunctory - all of them bounce away into strange and interesting dimensions. It uses horror imagery liberally (it's got a little ero-guro DNA, more guro than ero), but I wouldn't really call it a horror game. The game tells you 'this is a love story', and I think this is true.

It's voiced by Johnny Sims of The Mechanisms and Magnus Archives fame, and he does an impressive array of different voices - some of them I would have sworn were other actors, but it seems he covered every male character's voice. It took me out of the game at first because I was like 'wait a minute this guy sounds a lot like Johnny From The Mechanisms' and what do you know, it was. But the voices end up being very apt. Nicole Goodnight equally does a splendid job covering all the different affects assumed by the Princess.

All in all, great game, can't wait to explore all the other branches and endings. If they're anything like as rich as the ones I've seen so far, I'm nowhere near done with this game.

If you've played any of Supergiant's games before, you'll know what to expect: effortlessly stylish presentation, amazing soundtrack, really great-feeling top-down action. My big concern before I played it was that the roguelite format would compromise their ability to tell a story, but the writing and characters are as strong as ever and the story wraps very nicely around each attempt at the game, with an enormous amount of responsiveness to your actions. It feels like a true sequel to Bastion. Definitely worth checking out.