look, sing 2...

I notice I blog more often than not about problems i had with kids films.

I must precede everything here with the fact that, watching sing 2 at the cinema, I didnt find it unwatchable. It wasnt Sonic levels of bad. I watched it, and didnt wish I was outside in the foyer cafe. So, well done, crew! Now, onto what I hated about it:

bad hands
There have been strides taken towards realistic hand motions in cartoons in recent years, primarily by the dreaded Disney. Merida's incredible bow work in Brave is gorgeous, Coco features hands playing exquisite guitar rendered so well that watching it was as joyful as seeing it in the flesh. Movies have long struggled with actors miming playing an instrument badly, their hands all over the place in a mockery of musicianship. Even dubbing in real hands playing the instrument, as jarring as it can be, is better than the lack of any effort at all. 

So Sing 2 really dropped the ball here; the characters who played instruments did so with no regards for actual notes, chord positions, timing or anything, which was a real disappointment after the standard had been raised so high. Even if the mouse has the budgets to ensure those details are provided for and other studios don't, this should have been a priority.

Stupid song system
There seems to be an unwritten rule in this film - cant remember if it's true of the first one - that each song can only be used once. This made the end of the film absolutely stall because at once, songs they had already used to great effect - like the improvised chorus of 'streets have no name' - dont return to cap the arc of the film off, and all the songs in the show at the end have had no foreshadowing of their existence, making all the rehearsals seem really weird because what they ended up performing wasn't what you'd been watching them perform for the preceding hour.

Don’t mean to bring up Disney again but - honestly - one of the great things about Encanto is the repetition of motifs. Songs reference each other, you have set ups and payoffs and melodies intertwining. obviously you can't do that in a juke box musical, but you could have teased those other songs, played around with the melodies, maybe played a snippet of the first verse, showed how this one bit was tricky so they keep getting it wrong but it all goes ok on the night. 

Related to this, at the end, I had a problem with mummy pig singing the chorus from Taylor Swift's "look what you made me do".
Because that chorus is co-credited to Right Said Fred, as it bears a resemblance to their song "I'm too sexy"
And right said fred are anti-vaxxers
And therefore sing 2 is funding anti vaxxers
And I hate that I know this trivia
And i hate sing 2 even more for making me hate myself.

Jonny's dancing arc
Right so the arc that Jonny the piano player had in the first film was a bit billy elliot; he wanted to be an elton john, and his rough and tumble family of east end mobsters had to come to accept this. In this film, his arc is that the hare-brained scheme that's been hastily written has him not playing piano and singing, but instead performing a stage-combat-stick-dance, which he finds himself unable to cope with. Hes not a dancer! That's not his talent!
Now this sets up an arc that he's going to have to tell the boss that the idea was stupid, he's not playing to his strengths, and a dancer is not who he truly is. Hes being forced into becoming something that he's not.
But that doesnt happen. Jonny finds a street dancer who - in three weeks - sorts him out and makes him into a fantastic dancer, to the chagrin of his official teacher, who apparently enjoyed seeing him fail.
AND THEN
The dance teacher is so outraged at seeing him succeed, that he dance-attacks him during the performance; jonny comes back and dance-beats him; and floored, the teacher looks up and smiles at his student like that was his plan all along.
Ugh.

I suppose this is trying to be a sort-of-kid-friendly Whiplash athough I've not seen it so I dont know the details. I dont like that the message isn't play to your strengths, know yourself, and be true to yourself, but instead seems to contradict Jonny's arc in the first film. The message seems to be that anybody can be anything they're told to be; jonny acts puzzled when told he's going to dance in the show, it doesnt come from him. He spent the first film rebelling against peoples expectations  and the second film suppressing his talent and conforming to them.  And because of the 'only sing each song once 'rule,  when we get to the end he *does* perform a song on the piano, which there has been no sight or sound of him doing because the film doesn't allow songs to be used more than once.
Just by shifting this from a dance to an extraordinarily difficult piece to play - taking jonnys actual talents, and raising them to the next level - this whole section could have worked, as I aluded to earlier with the foreshadowing of songs that never happens in the film. They could still have had an antagonistic teacher whose methods didnt work, but the drive could have come from jonny himself. Or, they could have stuck with the dance, but could have found a way to incorporate Jenny's actual talents into the performance, rather than making him into something that hes not. But what we had was... muddled.

While i like the message that having a teacher who has a decent relationship with their students is important, the film then undermines this potentially good message with macho bullshit when the pupil defeats the teacher, seemingly proving his methods correct. Bad!

All the other characters seem to have a decent arc: mummy pig overcomes her fear of heights, elephant girl finds love and inspiration for her acting, porcupine woman emotionally connects with a reclusive star but not in a creepy way (tbh I'm not sure if this counts as an arc for herself, or it's just another case of women doing emotional labour for men - which is maybe quite realistically depicted?).  It’s just Jonny who’s arc is not really related to anything he wants to do. Oh, and the german pig, he’s just there. He doesn’t really achieve anything except ‘be wacky’.

re-iplementing an animal-based segration system that the muppets seemd to avoid
Sing - a bunch of animals putting on a song and dance revue - is obviously reminiscent of the muppets, and while I'm not going to accuse it of being a copy (it's not, it's more influenced by reality talent contests) it's a shame that species of animal in this film only seem to have relationships with their matching species, so much that when Meena sees another elephant, regardless of him being nice and stuff, the fact that he is just another elephant - implied that this is coded indian -  is enough for him to be a relationship tease. And that's really retrograde, isn't it? The connotations of that - that there is a right type/race for different people - are something totally ignored by The Muppets, where pigs love frogs and gonzos love chickens. and there's a surfeit of options for how this can work; The Great Muppet Caper has Fozzy and Kermit being brothers, with a frog-bear hybrid for a father; 

 

Muppet christmas carol has kermit and piggy's children being a mixture of male frogs and female pigs. So, why have this film be so segratated? what does that teach our children, especially if the animals are coded for ethnicities?

Absent Mothers
As with most of this type of film, there are several absent mothers. Mummy pig is the only mum in the film. There are several other dads in the film with entirely no mention of their mums - the wolf family and the gorilla family, off the top of my head. I bring this up all the time though, so I'm not going to dwell on it here.

BONO
right so, my biggest problem with this film is Bono, his character, and his songs.

During the audition that kicks the plot of the film off, the characters improvise an accapella rendition of 'the streets have no name', by popular rock band U2. It's a good (if simple) song from a good (if simple) album. absolutely cracking production team on that record (the joshua tree). two of the u2 songs from the film come from that record, and the other one is the 2000 song 'stuck in a moment' which suits the moment it's used for in the film quite well.

SO firstly, we hear that in-universe that song was written not by U2, but by someone called 'clay calloway'. now. Now now now. if you put a 'legendary' character in a film, about singing and dancing, and call them [something alliterative] Calloway, I'm going to assume that's a reference to Cab Calloway, the legendary song and dance man. if you call this character 'Clay', i'm going to hear assume that's a reference to Cassius Clay, who changed his name to muhammed ali, another alliteratve and legendary performer of the 20th century, praised for being the spiritual father of rap: he "played a role in the shaping of the black poetic tradition, paving the way for The Last Poets in 1968, Gil Scott-Heron in 1970, and the emergence of rap music in the 1970s."

Now you might have noticed that these legendary performers from the 20th century were both black men. Perhaps coincidentally, the character of Clay Calloway is a lion, an animal from Africa. and I was therefore surprised when the character turned out to be played by a white Irish man. NOW. maybe if you haven't heard of either of these real-life Americans, you might imagine that Clay Calloway sounds like a very Irishy kind of name, so I can forgive that; but that wasn’t my experience.

ok so anyway everyone's all over the idea of getting the reclusive Calloway out of retirement to play again. all the characters go on about how amazing his songs are. songs that he really wrote. I mean, songs that bono really wrote (or co-wrote, which according to Damon Albarn, is a totally different thing and much lesser, and something he would *never* do). Bonio plays a character who, in-universe, wrote all the U2 songs, and everyone in the film goes on about how great his actual songs are, how much they meant to everyone. No-one says 'eh, they're kind of ok I guess', like everyone I know's opinion of U2. Also Calloway wrote all his songs inspired by his long-dead lady lion, and he hasn't played or written since she died. I guess you could say he's "stuck in the moment and can't get out of it". Would have been great if his long-dead partner had been played by The Edge, and the reason why he didn't do music anymore was because he couldn't move on from their collaborations. would have been nice to have some sort of LGBT+ representation in either film in the series. It wouldn't be hard, given that Jonny is played by the actor who played Elton John in Rocket Man, and Jonny is obviously moddeled after Elton John; tvTropes has Jonny as 'ambiguously gay' but there's really nothing to hint this other than who he is modelled after and the fact that he's a bit gentle. [shrug emoticon]. That's sort of more cringe than just not doing anything at all, somehow. So maybe I’m wrong and they shouldn’t try after all.

Sing doesn't really seem to have dealt with the idea of songwriters before; songs just 'exist' as a free resource to be sung over - there are no bands in the films, just backing tracks. When Ash the porcupine is playing a show, it's just her and a drum machine, although she is an 'authentic' song writer. for a film about music and performance, the writing process of music is almost totally ignored - except here, where it's bowdlerised as an entirely solo, emotionally responsive activity. The composition of the music for this song in particular, according to wikipedia, didn’t just come from an emotional place; it came from hard work, experimentation, practice, and Brian Eno dicking around.

This feels very odd to me. It would be fine if Bono was playing a song-writer, but the songs they wrote in-universe were all written by other people; or if Calloway was played by an actor, but all of the songs were written by the same person/group. This is how the other characters work; Ash's songs weren't written by voice-actor Scarlett Johannsen (who is not even a porcupine). But what we have is Bono playing a fictional version of himself - because he did write (co-write) those songs - being lauded by all the other characters for his great songs. It just feels a bit incestuous, like a big advert for U2, it felt uncomfortable. like, we need to get the kids listening to U2 again, because all their fans are old, so let's stuff this kids movie full of old U2 songs and get mr U2 to act in it and all the characters keep talking about how great these songs are.
This goes beyond stunt casting; it feels like product placement. Actually, that’s exactly what it is, and maybe that’s why I find it difficult.

And yet again, I must come back to the way that Sing divorces the songs from any source of meaningful context. Because upon reading up on 'stuck in the moment', I find that Bono wrote the words about his late friend Michael Hutchence, of the band INXS.  It had meaning, once; "It's a row between mates. You're kinda trying to wake them up out of an idea. In my case it's a row I didn't have while he was alive. I feel the biggest respect I could pay to him was not to write some stupid soppy song, so I wrote a really tough, nasty little number, slapping him around the head. And I'm sorry, but that's how it came out of me."Well I really like that, and the self-effacing irony of 'this is what I should have said to you'. It's kind of an admission of his own failings and how much that hurt. It feels a shame then that the song is set to a very light piece of music, that really undermines the sentiment; or at least sugar-coats it, resulting in an easily-transmissable pop song that perhaps will help that sentiment be transmitted further (trying to do some brain maths now of how if you dilute a message, but it reaches more people, does it have more of a total impact?). It feels a bit Candle in the Wind to recycle one mourning for another.
 

Right, that does it, i’m off.

PS System of A Down are used diagetically in the film but don't appear on the soundtrack. booooo

Where did the blog go

 I've been busy. 

There's a couple of half-written posts I've not touched for ages that I might get around to at some point, including the one below that i've sat on and done nothing with.

but most of my writing time has gone onto a series i'm developing about album tryptichs and trilogies. I've got ideas for about thirty essays on this and I occassionaly find more.

the frame work looks like this

1. intro

1. Intro

2. Why is this a triptych?

3. Before

2. The triptych

1. Album 1

2. Album 2

3. Album 3

3. outro

1. After

2. How successful is the triptych?

3. Conclusion

content and form and that.

I've written most of the one about the bat out of hell trilogy, and I've started Blur's Life trilogy and Ephel Duath's Pain trilogy. as they're finished I'll post them here, but these are going to be potentially very long pieces; I see myself recording them, setting them to relevant images/music videos/footage of me flicking through cd packaging, and putting them up on the internet to be enjoyed at leisure.

so that's why i've not posted anything for ages.

The Exorcist is terrible and the VVitch is brilliant UNFINISHED

NB THIS IS UNFINISHED but I will never get around to it now so here's some thoughts that probably don't go anywhere.

 

I watched the exorcist a few years ago, ready to enjoy what is regarded as a great horror movie, and i hated it at a fairly deep level. It's become a stock rant for me to go on and on and on about whenever I get the chance, so here's an outline of my argument so I don't ever have to say it again.

It's worth remembering that I take against art pretty swiftly if I don't like it's politics, and that's what's happened here. A work can be as well-made as anything, and if I disagree with its core values, i'll hate on it, like Ex Machina. I think this is the converse of the argument about watching 'trash' movies, ones that are terribly made but stick around because they have some sort of redeemable core quality to them.

I really respect a lot of the people who say they like it - noteably Mark Kermode, who rates it as his all-time favourite film, and yet is unable to explain why. When John Peel can't explain why Teenage Kicks is his favourite song, I don't mind; it clearly just resonated him with a way that sometimes a song can do. However, Peel was a DJ, not a critic, and I wouldn't bug him for a detailed breakdown of why he liked what he liked; a curator might have their reasons, but should also Show Not Tell. 

I'm not bothered if the film isn't scary any more - I didn't find the Babadook scary, but I still loved it as a deep and rich horror movie with a great deal of subtext.

 

1. the battle with a foreign god 

The film opens with The Exorcist out in the Fertile Crescent doing battle with a local god; a statue of Pazuzu - an ancient Mesopotamian god of wind - thought to be a protective spirit.

The sight of an old white priest going out of his way to invade a foreign country and kill their gods doesn't have much surface to scratch below to expose an unexamined colonialist narrative. My hackles were already up at this point; the locals and dogs are meant to appear threatening I suppose - being for'n and all - but I instantly identified with them, rather than the religious extremist touring the world looking for trouble.

There's a link here to Paradise Lost, which paints all the pagan gods as 'devils', but in what I think is quite a sensitive and accurate way. The devils are of course just fallen angels; and the angels are just other local gods of the fertile crescent, as Yahweh was before being elevated above the many other gods. I think this has led to the canonisation of these other gods as devils, which of course could be used as a justification of racism and cololianism, and The Exorcist draws on this; and of course, reductively casting foreign gods as devils (without the sympathy and greyscale understanding of Paradise Lost) is very, very problematic.

So yeah, I found the opening to be a massive problem. 

Watching the film once, I don't recall any mention of  the name 'Pazuzu', so from here forwards I will refer to the possessor as 'the devil'.

2. the concerns of a conservative mother

So when Regan is possessed by the devil, what do they actually *do* that is so bad?

 

1) masturbate

2) swear at her mum

3) develop a skin condition

4) have nausea

So I think we can establish that Regan is transitioning into a teenager.

 

Probably the first thing that rankles me about this is that all of the 'bad' things she does is that they're all so anti-female; here's a nice quote from Peter Biskind, i found at https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/features/dcmovies/exorcist.htm:

"It is easy to see why people, especially women, detested the picture. It presents a male nightmare of female puberty. Emergent female sexuality is equated with demonic possession, and the men in the picture – almost all of them celibate priests – unite to abuse and torture Regan in their efforts to return her to a presexual innocence. Having Regan thrust a crucifix into her vagina is intended to be a fiendishly inventive bit of sacrilege, but it is also a powerful image of self-inflicted abortion, be it by crucifix or coat hanger. 'The Exorcist' is filled with disgust for female bodily functions; it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to see the famously gross scene in which Blair vomits pea soup as a Carrie-like metaphor for menstruation. Indeed, 'The Exorcist' is drenched in a kind of menstrual panic."

Although I'd associate the crucifix scene with masturbation rather than abortion,and I'm interested in what assumptions that says about me and about Biskind. I worry about the psychology here of this family without a father. Even read as a metaphor, the metaphor is that Regan is suffering because of her missing male parent. The unnatural strength she develops is a sure sign of evil - how dare a mere female be stronger than her (male, elder) betters!

 

Pazuzu, while fiendish, was thought to blow away plague and illness, and (I read) was considered a protective symbol for mothers:

This head was probably suspended close to a woman in labour, for protection against the female demon Lamashtu. A 'bronze Pazuzu', presumably an amulet much smaller than this, is prescribed to be worn for this purpose, and a stone Pazuzu is reported to have been part of a necklace found within a grave. When applied to clothes, bronze fibulae - brooch-like safety-pins - bearing the head of Pazuzu probably protected mother and baby. 

Wheras none of this is in the text, it feels jaw-droppingly ironic to pick this particular power to be the devil in a film already so anti-female. Furthermore, the original 'possession' that inspired the writing of the exorcist was of a teenage boy - so they've gone out of their way to make the film anti-female. It's like, the more reading around this film I do, the more I hate it.

3. exorcisms

Exorcisms kill people. They are a terrible form of abuse meted out on children and adults who have issues that their society doesn't understand; like autism, homoexuality, epilepsy. At the climax of the film, with no prayers left, Karras *literally beats the devil out of a child*. The Guardian collected a few stories a couple of years ago.

When I think of the abuse laid onto children by religious authorities, I cannot see how this scene is considered a victory. So many children have been harmed by misguided and panicked societies. Specifically, so many children have been harmed by catholic priests, who were shielded and covered-up by their wealthy, global organisation.

Philomena deals with a different form of systemic abuse in by the catholic church in Ireland. While I don't think there are many parallels between the films, I think there's an interesting comparison between the support for catholicism in the exorcist which comes from a scary anecdote, and the opposition to the church in Philomena, which comes from an investigation into the now well-documented systemic abuses carried out by the organisation. 40 years that separate the two films have seen an enlightenment take hold in popular consciousness, if this is the direction we have moved in: from trusting the church because our children could be possessed by minor Iranian dieties, to not trusting them because [I can't begin to summarise the horrors here and I'm too upset now to try to finish this].

4. catholic propaganda

I hate how anti-science this film is. Batteries of tests can't find anything wrong with Regan, because she is suffering from a made-up problem. It's a straw man argument, and argh, this hypothetical situation  where science doesn't have all the answers, but CATHOLICISM DOES!

Here's the thing though: Science *doesn't* have all the answers. Science is about uncertainty, and acting on evidence. Religions pretend to have answers, and to psycho-somatic problems, that can be enough.

When it came out, The Exorcist was banned in Turkey, as it was considered 'catholic propaganda'. While I would never support banning a film, they nailed it with that description. The set-up of the film is one that is designed to be a problem that only catholicism can solve, obviously catholicism can only solve fictional problems.

This is compounded because the dvd I watched of the film started with an address from the author (or the director, I can't remember). He said (iirc) that the viewer was free to take their own message from the film, but the intended message was on of a literal fight between god and the devil and the correctness of religion?). This obviously coloured my entire viewing of the film. No wonder I hated it, when it starts with the film-maker being so literal; if a film maker stands up and says 'this isn't a metaphor! this is what i literally believe!' before their work, and that work involves all of problems i've outlined above - then I'm not going to like it.

Ignoring the demonic possession plot line, the actual plot of the film is about the testing of Father Karras' faith in his fictious religion. Now, in any sensible realm, doubt is a healthy feeling, not a weakness. But in the Exorcist, Karras' doubt is framed as problematic and a hole that he needs to go through an arc to escape. Of course, his doubt is eventually demolished by being faced with a supernatural being who seems to know his secrets. Focusing the film on Karras and his very reasonable doubts about his entirely ficitonal beliefs, rather than anything else in the world, like the single mother coping with her teenage daughter's mood swings.

---------

So against this background, I came across the film The VVitch; I heard various comments in Kermode videos that it was authentic, that it was the best horror film in this century, that is wasn't a horror film at all... all of this led me to dig it out. I rented it from the internet; I watched it; I watched it again the night after; I recorded it off channel 4 and I've watched it several times again since then. I've read everything I can about it and have listened to parts of the commentary track (which I intended to do properly once I've bought a physical copy). 

Without giving plot points away, the set up has parallels to the exorcist, so if youve not seen it, correct that, and then come back here.

The VVitch is about a teenage girl who is growing into an adult in a repressively religious society, just like The Exorcist. However, this is 17th Century New World, her family has left the safety of the village and has ventured out on their own. Each family member is sinful in the impossibly-lofty standards of their religion and the plot can be read in several different ways:

1) it is a story about mass hallunication brought on by Argot, a fungus growing in corn, which may have been responsible for the mass hysteria of the Salem witch hunts;

2) it is a literal story about a family terrorised by a witch in the woods and the actual devil;

3) it is a folk tale, a contextual horror story of the type that New Englanders would tell to each other.

4) it is a metaphor for rejecting religion leading to female liberation.

I love the plularism of takes on this, each one correct in it's own way and not contradicting any of the others.

But of course take 4 is what makes this so resonant with me. Tomasin is essentially a slave to the family, and about to be married off. No-one in the story asks her anything, until she meets the devil who asks "would you like to live... deliciously?", and this is her first choice in the film. The ending is practically an advert for satanism; to me anyway. you're free to see it as a dark ending.

Manifold Garden and Recursion

 I don't *hate* Manifold Garden*.

My trajectory of emotions while playing Manifold Garden went like this:

-> delight, at the visuals the game provides;

-> disappointment, that the puzzles don't seem to use the USP of the game much;

-> dread and cosmic horror, at the monumentally meaningless world the game creates;

-> frustration, that some of the puzzles involve knowing what I want to do, but not seeing how I am able to do it;

-> tiredness, and just wanting the game to be over, to the point of relying on walkthroughs to get to the end.

So let's unpick that, because I think Manifold Garden is an interesting failiure; I don't think it's a great puzzle game, but I do think it's a decent experience, and much how I love playing games on tourism mode without any conflict, I wonder if MG would be better without the puzzles. I don't think it successfully changed me as a person, but it did make me feel something, and at least some of what I felt was intentional.

The game looks good. It's interesting that there are virtually no textures on the walls in the game - it is entirely told through wireframes and solid colours. The lack of textures is important for the way that walls change colour when the player changes direction of gravity - the players' way of interacting with the world - but also I imagine there's a processing reason. Sometimes, because of the looping nature of the game world, the number of panels the player can see is staggeringly huge, and having a wireframe world rather than a textured world is a good way to keep it running smoothly (I used to do the same trick whilst playing Ultima Underworld, which allowed you to switch off the texture mapping and play in an abstract VR rave). This lack of... implementation of the game world has allowed the studio to go in a very haunting direction with the design: firstly, it means that any architecture must be communicated only with shapes and outlines, leading to a world of austere columns, staircases, and pedastals; secondly, it creates a sterile, unheimlich atmosphere. That word of course conjures up memories of 'House of Leaves', which the architecture also reminds me of; HoL has whole sections dedicated to describing the absolute lack of architectural style that the interior of the house has, trying to drive home the lack-of by listing pages of things that the architure *isn't*.

Now, as an aside I want to talk about the maths of the game world. Game worlds that loop around themselves have existed before, largely in 2-dimensional retro titles, Astroids and Pac-man being the obvious examples. When you have a flat 2-D world that loops at each edge, the mathematical explanation of that would be a torus, the bagel or doughnut shape. You can't map a flat rectangle to a sphere without all sorts of nonsense happening at the poles, but mapping a rectangle to a torus preserves the both parallels and the areas. 

The thing is, a torus is a 3D shape with a 2D surface, so this is why the mapping works. MG seeems to be a 3D implementation of this same thing would necessarily involve the existence of a 4D torus for it to be happening on the surface of. This is a really neat idea! You can read Chyr's blogpost about this, It has really good visualisations of the maths involved. Reading up on blogs and design documents gives me a real sense of the creator that the game doesn't give me at all. I really like this design document too.

The game has two mechanics: change the direction of gravity, and looping 3D space. most of the puzzles take place in small closed enviroments, where you only have to worry about changing gravity. Each of the small worlds you inhabit has several of these, connected by abusing the open world's looping. Quite a few times, I found myself walking across these huge open spaces, looking for a jumping off point I could change gravity from. I like how the game progressed from large open environments, where the 'world' could be seen a few times across space, to loops there the 'world' extended through the loop, to worlds where the loop is small enough to be useful in the actual puzzle. However, for almost all of the game, the two systems don't really interact; The 3D looping world is dazzling, but is also mostly just used as a replacement of a 'jump' feature. When it gets more local, the looping universe ends up being used exactly like portals in Portal. So there's this disconnect between the 'hook' of the game (being the looping world) and the mechanics of the game (being the coloured-block puzzles) that I found quite disappointing. It's not Ludo-Narrative Dissonance, more Ludo-Environmental.. I dunno, they're not oppoite each other, they're more perpendicular to each other. Like, one is saying 'pizza' and the other is saying 'brick', and those aren't opposing, but they aren't linked either.

Playing Manifold Garden depressed me. It made me want to stop existing. The spaces are so grand, blank, and beyond comprehension, even before you get to the 3D world-wrapping, that it makes me feel despondant. Aside from the landscape being alienating, the lack of any conversation, any people, or any signs of life, left me numb. While this chimes in with some great authors, like Kafka, Borges, and PK Dick, who often look at the absurdity of reality and come away hollow and despairing, it lends a sense of pointlessness to the game. I felt nothing driving me to complete the game, whether an emotional draw or a hint system. Despite the fact that I relate to the alienation that those authors make me feel, I have grown away from it, and towards the writing of people like Vonnegut, who look at the meaningless universe and find humour and humanity in it. Glados in Portal does more than just act as an antagonist - It is a subtle reward system, each level completed granting one more small punchline, one more little reason to make progress in the game, as well as act as a companion (as well as the signs of earlier test subjects, even if they're not there *now*, act against the sense of being alone). Many games have other characters, that can be talked to for hints, or just to foster a sense of urgency in your quest; MG's lack of this is an interesting twist, but I found the experience actively unpleasant. 

As a design decision, there is not only no other beings, but also no character model - this avoids questions as to who 'you' are (a spider, according to my children), but also raises questions - at one point in the game, you can see the loop clearly enough to see a block you are carrying moving as if by itself. this tells us the loop is indeed a loop - and not infinity at all! - but also it hghlights the fact that the player is apparently invisible.

As I said, Dread and Cosmic Horror, that's quite an achievement in a video game. That was my take-away from the game about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way in. 

 

But as that drew away as I carried on playing the game, MG began to grow frustrating, as I would find myself getting lost and having to walk miles around really large structures - it reminded me of moments in Deus Ex, where you'd have to walk around the edge of a massive building that hadn't been fleshed out at all. Things began to get less enjoyable when I would reload a game, and have no idea where I was or what I was meant to be doing, and there was no way to know what direction to go off in, because everywhere looked the same. Then some of the puzzles began to rely on spotting tiny details in a massive noisy map - finding the right tree you needed began to feel like some sort of abstract tessellating 'where's wally?' game. There was one puzzle towards the end, where I couldn't find a yellow tree for a block I needed, so I back-tracked to the last puzzle I solved, becoming convinced that there was some clever way I could reuse one of the blocks from that puzzle; however,it turned out there was another yellow tree right where I needed it in the puzzle, rendered invisible by the amount of  detail on display. 

My point is, that wasn't fun. It was frustrating that I knew what I needed, but I couldn't find it; I felt that it wasn't my fault I was stuck, but the games'. By the time I'd got past that point, I just wanted it to be over. I didnt find the puzzles interesting to solve, and whenever I got stuck, I didn't feel it was because the game was difficult, but because it was obtuse.

So I'd like to compare it with a game that I've been stuck on more often than MG, but never at any point did I feel frustrated with. Recursed is about four years older than MG, but has only had 1/6 as many reviews on Steam, if that's anything to judge popularity by; both are rated 'very positive' in reviews.

I think Recursed is a good comparison, because MG is flagged as 'infinite' and 'recursive' a lot, and I don't think it's either of those things. MG has loops in it - but that's not the same as being infinite. A repeated loop from 0-9 is not the same as an endless string of increasingly large numbers, or a recursive pattern that contains itself. Recursed - which I discovered in an old RPS review and have played on and off since its release in 2016 - does contain true recursion, as eventually you start playing with levels that literally do contain themselves. And look - it's right there in the title! The concept *matches* the game mechanic!

Recursed does not contain a hint system or any other players, but there are rings lying around that talk to you, presumably having been dropped by an earlier player. I am about halfway through the game, I've been stuck on it loads - but never have I felt at fault for being stuck, and never have I felt frustrated at being stuck. Any time I've been stuck, it's usually because I've been too tired to play, I can't get my head in gear to deal with the puzzles - but when I come back in the morning, it works out just fine. A couple of times, I've gone to look on the internet for hints, and at no point have I kicked myself for not getting it. 

The game doesn't look fancy, it's a 2d retro-pixely platformer, but I think it's massively under-appreciated and stunningly well-designed, because it allows me to feel clever. I definitely felt things while playing MG - it had an impact - but I didn't feel clever. It was a really interesting experience (and I appreciate this - making me feel what the game did is a product of a great deal of effort on the studio's behalf), but I didn't enjoy it as a puzzle game.  

I think that's interesting because my assumption was they'd created an interesting world and needed to fill it with a puzzle mechanic, which hadn't really worked; but reading the design docs and stuff, it seems like the gravity stuff came first (inspired by Escher), and the bit that i really liked -  the 3d looping - seems to have been put on top. Maybe there were two separate games in here, trying to get out? Is this 'first novel' syndrome, where you try to pack too many ideas in? Maybe I'd have really liked the puzzle mechanic, if that was the whole game. 

I think I just talked myself into liking this game again. 

*I keep calling it Manifold Valley, partly because that's where my parents live, but also because it's reminiscant of  'Monument Valley', another puzzle game that deals with visual paradoxes. The two titles have the same rhythm and many of the same sounds; like how Supergrass' B-side 'Melanie Davis' fits with 'Eleanor Rigby'. Maybe the 'Three-Two Title' is a thing to explore in a future blogpost.

Burnt Ogre Kareoke lyric video

 

 

 

I had some difficulty deciding what to do with the vocal on Burnt Ogre. 

The poem is integral to the music, but having me read it over the top felt like it distracted from the music. On the other hand, the Karaoke version got rid of the poem all together.

So this might be my favourite way to experience the Burnt Ogre piece - the karaoke version, with karaoke text that is timed to the vocal version. It's a read along!