Every Log a Memory

Somewhere, in the wilderness, you have built a log cabin. Much of your life has been spent here, whether you lived within it, or simply visited it for vacations, reunions, and other gatherings. Now, in your old age, you’ve come to visit the cabin for the last time.

Every log here is a memory.

Every Log a Memory is a journaling game where you look back over a character's life, through the memories they made in and around their cabin.

Politishit

Written for the 48-Word RPG Jam, POLITISHIT is a game for 1+ players where they take on the role of politicians in the fictional YUESAY, serving their constituents to the very best of their abilities as crises unfold.

The Corporate Catalogue

The Corporate Catalogue - or, to put it simply, a collection of 13 of the worst companies you could ever hope to cross the path of, let alone work for.

A couple rad folk and I wrote profiles for 13 awful corporations for use in your TTRPG sessions! We even made logos for em!

I’ve been struggling to get back into reading for a little while now, due to changes in my environment. More distractions. Less quiet. I needed something with a firm grip to take me by the throat and keep me engaged, My Heart is a Chainsaw was the right choice.

The premise is simple: a slasher-obsessed teen starts seeing what she believes is a real-life slasher movie starting to play out in her rural town.

The book is very genre savvy, it pays plenty of homage to slasher history, knows the notes to hit, and goes further— there’s a bit of deconstruction here. This goes beyond the basic bones, and starts deconstructing some of the typical racism that shows up in a fair number of slashers.

The protagonist is half indigenous, and the author is Blackfeet— a background that informs a lot of the novel’s perspective. There’s some pointed criticism, some fun inversions, and gripping character writing here.

It’s a fantastic novel I’d highly recommend to horror fans, one that got me to immediately start the sequel after finishing.

How funny YouTube man Mark I. Plier managed to write, direct, and star in one of the best cosmic horror films I’ve ever seen may be a cosmic mystery all its own. Perhaps not, comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin— and this would hardly be the first time a comedian made this flip.

Iron Lung is one of those rare “artists I love from different mediums all got together to make something amazing” projects. I’ve been a fan of David Szymanski’s games for years (DUSK was a large influence on GUTGUN), Andrew Hulshult’s music is fantastic, and I’ve been a fan of Mark Fischbach’s comedy shorts since I was in high school (back then, I also used to watch his let’s plays). When I first heard that there would be a film adaptation of a Szymanski game, directed by Markiplier, with a soundtrack by Hulshult, I thought it sounded too good to be true.

But it is true.

The film is a very well done one-room horror, that takes its time to ratchet up the tension over its 2-hour runtime. There’s a lot of tense, quiet dread, the sort that this subgenre is often so good at. It’s also great as cosmic horror— which, as someone who has written a lot of cosmic horror, I can tell you is one of the hardest types of horror to pull off.

And pull it off they do. As all good cosmic horror does, the audience leaves with more questions than answers— Iron Lung knows not to tell you too much, which is the exact skill that I believe makes cosmic horror so difficult for newcomers to write.

This is a must watch for fans of the genre.

Against the Storm is a roguelike city builder, and that was all I needed to pique my interest. It’s not only a fantastic blend of these genres, but it’s also a very well done city builder in its own right.

It’s the sort of game that has you losing track of time, promising you’ll just build one more settlement, then go to bed. It’s got many fantastic quality of life features, and one of the best UI designs I’ve seen in any city builder— roguelike or otherwise.

You get the fun of tackling new challenges, without the late-game lull many city builders hit, since you’re already moving on to the next by that point. Against the Storm is full of clever ideas, here, such as a startlingly unique difficulty system.

Rather than giving you a set of difficulty options with no impact beyond number adjustments, these are one of the game’s primary methods of progression. Sure, you could stay on the easiest difficulty forever and still enjoy the game, but you’ll never see some of the game’s most interesting mechanics.

At the end of every run, you can tackle the city-builder equivalent of “bosses”— settlements built near ancient seals. These seals, once beaten, extend the length of future runs, and get increasingly farther away from the starting location. Each new seal requires you to bump the difficulty setting up by one before you may face it.

Against the Storm’s difficulty settings, in turn, are not just simple number tweaks— they introduce full mechanics to the game. Extra complexity. In this way, you get accustomed to a particular difficulty, learn how to play with its new mechanic(s), then move up and repeat.

It’s a refreshing way to approach both difficulty and progression. There’s a lot more I could say about this game, but I’d encourage you check it out for yourself!

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