A Quiet Place: A Relevant and On-Time Film Review

 I’d like you to close your eyes and imagine, for a second, a beautiful, sustainable idyllic America. 

Think of mighty trees encasing a small valley, permanently just off the beaten track but always approachable. A harmony of nature and community that feels oddly visually specific to places like Virginia, maybe. The dirt tracks that connect the farmstead snake between the orderly rows of corn that you can run your hands through on a summers’ day; the softly groaning silos speak of a strong harvest and gentle winds in the green valley; the autumn-red family house - humble, but wildly larger than anything you are ever going to live in - is filled with soft Americana that evokes a simpler time through handmade textiles and stacks of glass jars housing home-made pickles. 

Mother is busy doing washing, her belly swelling with life, and your twenty other children cavort and play in what can only be described as a paradise on earth. Your paradise. You made it. You deserve it - and you built this all with hard work, sweat, and the money you embezzled from Dunder-Mifflin. 

I was not impressed with A Quiet Place at all. It is, to not tease out the joke any further, fetish content with a vague horror story that thrums in the background doing its absolute best to make the film work. This is a post-Rapture film, not a post-apocalyptic one, and the only thing it cares about is our characters moral purity - something it apparently believes is self-evidently interesting without any need for conflict or challenge. It sits so uncomfortably with me that one could make a horror film that relentlessly edifies an almost laughably artificial picture of an ideal type of life without trying to disrupt or criticise in any meaningful way, an absurd exercise in coddling and validating viewer who sees in this film a utopia (minus the monsters).

No shit this might actually be where they shot the opening.

So - in A Quiet Place, Office Jim, Emily Blunt, and their three children live in a world where they cannot make noise (and, while this is not the ‘fetish’ part of the film, cannot wear shoes! The camera really focuses on a lack of footwear in the first twenty minutes to a large extent, again - purity, returning to old values, returning to innocence etc.). They struggle to find medicine in an old-fashioned general store festooned with papyrus-font adverts located in a deserted town. What’s happened here, why is the place so quiet, why is no one wearing any shoes ever, all these questions and more interrupted by the sudden death of one of their children whose loud spaceship toy - large double-A batteries freshly reinstalled - calls forth a beast from the forest that promptly kills him. 

From here we are transported to life on the farm with Jim, Emily (who is revealed to be pregnant with a fourth child), and the kids. We watch them go through their daily quiet routines and enjoy their daily quiet lives as best as they can with the restrictions imposed upon them by the threat of these creatures that are attracted to noise, hijinks ensue, film ends.

This is undeniably a film written exclusively from the perspective of The Guys. Everything falls neatly in place to suit both the character and a fantasy of a universal Dad-ness: you’re telling me the world has changed and we can no longer communicate our feelings out loud? Oh man, and I have to be a hunter-gatherer as my wife mends clothes and cooks? And I can sacrifice myself for my children in a brave, selfless act that just about makes up for me being emotionally distant and unwilling to find other ways to communicate? Under the gaze of the great Camera Dad our characters are stripped of internality, their decisions and processes almost always guided by a belief in The Dad as his beard grows longer and his shoulders show no sign of wavering under the Dad Burden that he carries.

People have clowned on this, but this is exactly how/what I write when I'm pretending to work.

In A Quiet Place the American idyll setting lacks tension because it never means anything, it’s just a never-ending series of landscape paintings in a Dr.s office or on a racist twitter account. They can eat food here, they can fish here, they can walk through the forest here (barefoot), they can build things here, they can rig a light system here, they can farm here. They make crafts, they hand-sew mobiles, they make a soundproof cot, they have beds and boardgames, gaslamps, old cars, guns. It is an intolerably dull, comfortable place they live and within that place the monsters, the silence, is presented as an obstacle to live alongside and occasionally interact with.

The creatures are an existential threat, a force that removes the human voice, children’s laughter, cries of pain etc. but it never lands - the setting working hard to keep the threat of the monsters at bay, reducing them to random provenance. The world building is a huge issue here, again, too much time was clearly spent constructing the big RETVRN fetish farm of the 50s and not enough time was spent thinking about how that could possibly interact with the horror premise they created. No shoes is the rule, sure, that makes enough sense, but what about ambient noise? The noise of the characters walking up a ladder, of them sitting on a bed, splashing water, collecting food, cooking food, lighting fires - my partner chimed in with this while I was describing it to her, but what if you poop? Can you poop quietly enough? What if you fart? What about rain?
Of course on a perfect farmstead there is no rain - there can’t be; there’s never any rain in the paintings on the office walls - but is rain a massive threat or a soothing balm? Is rain the great equaliser? When it rains are there places you can’t go (say, massive, echoing metal silos) and places you can go and have a chat? 

The question the film continuously fails to ask is ‘how did our characters adapt (and the corollary - what does look like now that we’ve adapted)’, instead creating arbitrary rules and exceptions that creates the impression that the monsters are always just far enough away for us not to need to care about them, politely waiting until they need to show up for impact.

This 97 year old farm still makes dirt the traditional way.

This is the core of the issue I have with the film - the family isn’t trapped; they’re insulated, the horror around them that has brought down the rest of society just doesn’t quite interact with their farm or their lives. Their perfect snapshot of traditional America acts as a way to keep them alive, uncorrupted by the trials of the rest of the world, preserved like so many vegetables in so many jars. By the time the tension ratchets up and the creatures are visibly stalking around it is rendered boring and toothless because we understand thematically how little they mean to the outcome. 

They are not being hunted, they are not prey. They are immune and protected, and they’re about to welcome another child into the quiet hellworld, congratulations to the happy couple. 

The farmstead life is never challenged, it never acts as a challenge, their lives aren’t changed, and their circumstances aren’t altered in any way that is morally or philosophically significant. It wants us to focus on the idea of family, but why do we care when the family is (losing a kid aside, again not thaaaaat impactful in the film) perfectly fine. A Quiet Place is a truly ineffectual film in a uniquely American way, surrounding its characters with a boring, traditionalist wet-dream and then asking us to feel sorry for them without really working to win our sympathies. This is not a film to frighten or confront - it is a reassurance that if you are living the right way (praying, putting up dopey decorations, letting Mom do all the work while you fuck around on a radio) then there are no circumstances that you cannot prosper in.

TL;DR

Dull, bad movie; some phenomenal sound mixing; some really good unintentionally funny mis en scene like the massive garlic (famously loud vegetable to prepare!) that hangs behind Emily Blunt and like the Dad’s entire office/workshop; too much feet; too much time was spent recreating a gag from Home Alone; I went further on the sustainable farmhouse fetishistic stuff but it was getting too long and too boring because I was too annoyed at it; we’re not even gonna talk about the deaf girl character here - I think they really did that character a disservice; should’ve called it The Quiet Life so they could use the song from the band Japan.  

3/10, go watch literally anything else. Official frog rating.  

Did I intend to get this and like 5 other things out around Halloween? Absolutely. Did I succeed? No lmfao. 

Hollow Victories

I really like how the Elden Ring DLC ends, and I want to try and explain why. Or at least I want to write this down so that I can stop thinking about it for a while.

In the main game the overall attitude towards the ending (s, plural) were pretty negative on release.

Understandable - while I personally would be excited to sit in a big chair underneath a big tree, it didn’t make for the most thrilling of conclusions for (what could be) an 120+ hour experience full of trials, triumphs, and tears. If you look at responses from the time there’s a lot of “oh - first time doing a souls game?” shit - typical pithy videogame fandom stuff; patently untrue for a series that tends to leave you full of bittersweet emotions and no end of questions at the close*. Elden Ring’s endings stand out in the series for unsatisfying they are - the various threads of the game grabbed and woven back into the cyclical narrative without too much ceremony and a mostly identical voiceover. I was cool with it though, I was like, “ok look that’s fine - I’ll get further clarity and closure later when the DLC comes out”. 

This is truly where spoilers lie ahead, but I did not get clarity or closure in the DLC - but I did get a little depressed.

*I’m not going to link these because there are so many - but “uh first time much” is such an insane attitude to have when people have literally built youtube careers doing souls ending: explained videos.

The extra shades are for sharing

My favourite aspect of soulsborne DLC is how they tend to act as extensions of an argument within the main game that forces you to reinterpret the events and re-evaluate your relationship with the setting. At its simplest (and most explicitly ambitious) you have Dark Souls’s’s Artorias of the Abyss DLC, where you are thrown through time to actually do the shit people think Artorias did. This concludes in an epic, setting-defining fight against Manus but, significantly more importantly, it irrevocably changes your relationship to Sif (who even gains a new cutscene post-DLC) and to the dwindling age of fire and its habitual mythologising of (and deliberately lying about) history.

In Bloodborne’s The Old Hunters you are exposed to an escalating, uncomfortable truth: this shit sucks, everything you have been doing sucks, everyone you have ever known sucks, and that the web of seemingly conflicting interests that texture the main game are all united in a singular, defining, desperately hidden sin that super sucks. Wonderfully bleak, it makes explicit connections between the factions and forces you to look at the setting as a series of tragedies that were allowed to happen by the complicity and callousness of the powerful - as well as highlighting the audacity of Yahrnam society’s mythologising of (and deliberately lying about) horrific events and dangerously flawed people.

I won’t go through the rest, but I want to emphasise how thoughtful the additional content is, how clearly they are seeking to add interpretation rather than just “more stuff” to the main game. If you find yourself in a Fromsoft DLC you are doing yourself a disservice if you do not look at how it impacts your relationship with the core text - they are honest-to-god re-litigations of your actions and your relationships, and they often take really odd, interesting angles on the conflicts within the main game that tend to make the world you were in just a little darker and a little worse.

All of them do this, but this one broke the rules a little and has been on my mind a lot. Apologies if we get a bit ramble-y.

I have never been more embarrassed in my life than I was when I was making this image

In the Shadow of the Erdtree when we finally defeat Miquella we are left with a gate made of corpses and a single memory from what was once the kindly demigod. Nothing else. 

Our companions throughout this journey are now dead or missing, their lives burnt out as kindling for Miquella’s ascension, and the story has abruptly stopped; the last possible thing left for you to do is to collect a flower at the corpse of St Trina and return without ceremony to the Lands Between to go and finish what you need to finish - rise, Tarnished, and become the Elden Lord etc. etc. etc. 

I was pretty unsubtle in choosing to say ‘Miquella’ is the end fight, but he isn’t. We never fight Miquella, the closest we come to contacting Miquella at all is when he deigns to embrace us briefly and steals our heart, but I think a great question posed is: why would we even bother fighting Miquella? Miquella (at this point) is a completely empty existence, having carved away every bit of body and spirit to prepare himself for, what he believes to be, a truly selfless godhood. His existence is a parallel to Marika’s, and a prelude to the same great and catastrophic failure to shape the world to a singular will. 

Who we actually fight at the end is Radhan, the legendary general we fought in Caelid, but returned to his younger form to take the place of Miquella’s consort. But are we? This Radhan is a homunculus, the tired spirit of a deeply loved brother stuffed inside a fleshy prison of another, less cared-for demigod. Radhan was chosen for his “strength and kindness”, but here he is lifeless and devoid of personality, a tool of pure violence piloted by a now uncaring Miquella. 

But was Mohg, the vessel of Radhan, not also beloved? The most genial and wise character we encounter is an old vassal of Mohg, Annsbach - if we can’t bring ourselves to care for the Mohg dynasty or Mohg himself, then is this man’s love not enough for us to see value in the person Miquella used and desecrated? If the world Miquella wishes to create is one of compassion then why are the harms caused to these characters - and others - necessary, and the justification for causing those harms beyond any kind of reproach and isolated from any kind of question of reparative or restorative justice? 

The Miquella that we encounter doesn’t embody kindness or love or compassion, but detachment. The mortal struggles that happen on his doorstep and the corpses that pile up around him mean nothing, and in his abandonment of everything remotely human his ascension renders him as distant and inhospitable as the stars. We cannot ever really fight Miquella or get an ending from Miquella because he’s already long gone, and our journey up to this point has been one of grieving what he once was and what others thought he could have been*. 

So where does that leave us, the victor?

 

Miquella reframes and mirrors the player experience so that the desire of the character and the desire of the person playing are the same: what we do, how we feel, how we connect, and how we value and interpret the world is as important here as it is in real life. We cannot reduce our journey to ‘combat’ to ‘hitting things until they die’ to ‘Cool Boss Guide 27: Guaranteed Easiest Way To Beat’. Miquella did this - he’s a Power Gamer. He’s solved the lore. He’s a huge fan, piloting the sickest warrior to win. 

You are playing against a character who is just as cynical a reflection of the player as Slave Knight Gael was in Dark Souls 3’s Ringed City. We, the players, are under the microscope here in a way that we never were in the main game. It’s uncomfortable, and deeply lacking in catharsis because we can't really "win" - even if the game let us fight Miquella for real. 

*Poor Moore, man. That guy really deserved a fucking break.

 I love these stupid guys, fan since DAY 1 RIDE OR DIE FOR THE CURSE FROGS

Our power, our premium-brand player-controlled agency is clear in the fight against Leda: according to this world we are strong and we can affect it in ways the other characters we talk to and journey with can only dream about. We can dream in ways these characters cannot even comprehend, our ambitions greater than the gods themselves. Miquella shows us what the player-focused idea of power and agency looks like reified - the embodiment of the player who solved the game and all the elements in it, the player who put themselves above the scenery and the mechanics and the stories to become a god. So what we get from this ending is a pretty simple, personal message: enjoy the journey, you’ll have more fun if you do. 

We can see this theme played out by characters all throughout the DLC: Messmer is stuck prosecuting a genocide that will never end, Midra is stuck waiting for an ending he failed to bring around and no longer wants to strive for, Thiollier exists to die, his only drive a suicidal one that may bring him closer to St Trina (it is a weirdly beautiful touch that in Thiollier’s quest we're even able to die better than the characters around us), Igon’s entire world consisting of an impossible, doomed, obsessive hunt. 

We, the players, the people actually interacting with the game, need to be better than our endings and our eternal gods, we need to be able to enjoy our brief journeys through the Lands Between or Yharnam or our actual real lives - we need to embrace contexts, histories, people, what they care about, and how we can care for them. We need to learn the lessons shown and not get caught spending our whole lives chasing something that will always be out of reach. The souls games have always been hopeful, they've always been about a positive, affirming personal journey for the player even in an increasingly lost and terrible world, but in Shadow of the Erdtree we're left with a stunning snap back into our reality that threw me for a bit of a loop and forced me to confront a bunch of thoughts and feelings. It's weird, and well crafted, and it made me feel strangely empty.

Endings happen all the time in ways we can’t even comprehend until it happens to us. Miquella's last words are "I'll make the world a gentler place". I don't know if I can do that, but I know that I can pay attention to others, to be present for them, to care for them and to hope that the way I travelled through the world helped more than if I did or didn't reach my goal.

Maarten's Stairs

Ok, so a level designer who goes by Maarten Frooninckx posted an incredibly interesting conundrum on twitter about what to do with this particular set of stairs that he didn’t want the player to go up in a Counter Strike 2 map.

He got a lot of suggestions - I’ll try and illustrate them as we go - but some people had the same thought that I had for a Counter Strike-appropriate barrier: a child gate.

This picture is from an Amazon listing and it's completely insane I'm so sorry

Some had assisted living devices.

My personal favourite had a real-world example of an open-staircase saferoom, which I think was incredibly creative and grounded in the setting that he had established (a Spanish colonial mansion in the jungle).

But Maarten also got some interesting pushback from a game dev who goes by SarahJS, which led to this exchange:

I think this is incredibly fascinating regardless of what side of the discussion you fall on. For the record, I agree with Sarah one hundred percent, and I think Maarten’s response is incredibly telling about the attitude that is often brought to level design. 

For others this is a house with stairs that need to be blocked. For me, this is a situation where the reality of the asset - a multi-story house - sublimates the reality of the environment - that of a game. 

Here, as a functional part of a gameplay environment, the stairs and the second floor need to go. Like lmao look if I’m playing CS2 and I see stairs and a second floor, I’m looking up, because the existence of vertical space is a massive threat indicator in this kind of game. If we use the creative medium of Bright Red Circles, I can demonstrate where you are probably looking when you are interacting with this game as a combat environment.

I'm also not very good at FPS games but CORNERS and HIGH GROUND man come on

You can use as many lighting tricks as you want to drag my eyes away from here - unless you completely block my awareness of a potentially accessible high ground or remove it entirely I’m still going to look up at the flashing danger sign that says “look up”, and I don’t think this is a particularly controversial take.

But ok - Maarten might be using the CS2 engine to design a level rather than design levels specifically for CS2, that’s all good. So then we have stairs without purpose and a second floor without purpose; to me this means we still have a failure to imagine something that could exist beyond the multi-story house. Someone in this process has failed to acknowledge the creative corner that exists when you accept the reality of ‘a house’. You control the house: this house is exactly as real as a fucking Goomba, there is no inherent reason that this house couldn’t have a sunroof here instead of stairs, or be a one-story mansion that sprawls over hundreds of kilometers, or be tied to giant, stair-negating turbines that keep it suspended hundreds of meters in the air (the safest possible place for a Spanish colonial mansion to be).

In fact, if we are going to get a little freaky, there is no inherent reason to this house.

Battler, when I talk in RED it means the house is expanding 

I love this kind of stuff because I’ve dabbled in (UNDERPAID, NDA, I'M NOT MAD ACTUALLY DON'T PUT IN THE PAPER THAT I'M MAD) narrative design in video- and board-games and have encountered clashes in philosophy before: sometimes it benefits everyone for a writer to come up with a creative solution within the assets; sometimes it benefits the writer that the assets have been designed and fully exist to benefit the player experience; sometimes it benefits the level designer for the story to be fully fleshed out by the writer beforehand; sometimes it benefits the level designer that the assets make the level, where the story is clearly and plainly written for them by the self-evident existence of A Thing.

There are SO many answers to the question of 'why should this be here?' that come up constantly and in ever-changing circumstances during any kind of development - which makes Maarten’s reaction incredibly uncharitable by calling Sarah’s response nihilistic and boring! They’re right! The house is meaningless until you give it meaning! - but it is the kind of thing that asks a lot from the observer: where do your priorities lie? Do you want to benefit the player experience? Does it fit the narrative? Can it fit the narrative? Does the narrative fit what we have? Can I bend the player experience to fit what we have?

What’s important to point out here as well is that this situation isn’t just similar to being handed a piece of a level and being asked to narratively justify it - it’s… exactly that. This is crowdsourcing narrative - not level design - for a level that is in-development, using the responses as a way to fill in the gaps that the designer couldn’t (or didn’t want to) change. For the participating audience there is no difference between this house having stairs you can’t walk up or a big window you can’t smash or any immutable asset that is inconveniently getting in the way of playing the game. 

I would encourage you to look at your games as if every single piece of the environment was as up-for-debate as Maarten’s stairs. It’s so much more satisfying to look at how the technical and non-technical why’s of game- and level- design intersect than to just let yourself get bombarded with endless ‘correct’ decisions re; player guidance, map clarity, objective clarity, what houses are, what direction you run in a platformer etc. You are in an explicitly constructed environment!

Please, if nothing else, please question the nature of the construct!

Nothing exactly groundbreaking here from me honestly, I just thought it was interesting to think about lmao.

Repetition Part 1: One More Time

There’s a concept that I’ve been playing around with for a while called the ‘Forever Game’. Not the greatest name*, but the broad idea is that a Forever Game is something that takes up part of your time regularly for the foreseeable future. I think everyone at one point has had at least one ‘Forever Game’ or something equivalent depending on their stage in life, passions, or genre preferences - a game that they know they can and will keep on going back to whenever they feel like playing a game.

What a Forever Game is, especially, is yours. If you are of a certain age you will have extended deliberately limited experiences and transformed them with your friends, maybe if you had a couple of hours you’d boot up Starfox 64 again to play through the fastest route, or you’d give yourself a challenge to play a single type team in Gold and Silver and excitedly tell people on the playground about your progress. You curated these Forever Games for yourself and you willingly and joyfully let them take a near-permanent space in your life.

Games are these fascinating things because there really is no fixed ‘end’ for them. You interact with them in a way that is more dynamic than, say, with a book. I never like acknowledging that the player has any power (that’s what games are for!) but there really is no greater exertion of agency than making the choice to repeat a process in a slightly different way. There’s nothing the game can do but be forced to accommodate you for as long as you wish, even if you are forty hours deep into an eight hour game. That’s what I mean by no fixed end - there’s no way for a game to stop you, say, repeating the same level or the same jump or the same action until you are personally satisfied with it. To do that with listening to a bar of a song or reading a chapter of a book is to fight the medium and the intent behind it, to limit your experience as an audience by overstepping; to do that with a game is to explore the limits of the deliberately constructed interactive boundary.

You can, if you choose, take this to extremes that warp and distort the intended experience completely. In Pokemon the popular challenge run is the Nuzlocke, Resident Evil has trophies now for various player-driven challenges such as “x number of steps”, “No saves”, “Never acknowledge the merchant’s existence”, all of these are wonderful little self-contained ecosystems of player expression and community love so strong it fundamentally changes the way that millions interact with the game. I think this is kinda beautiful - the ability for the player to choose to play the game in a way that fundamentally shifts what the game is. Speedruns are a great example of this artistic transformation on a large scale; if you’ve been paying attention to games (and charity) for the last decade plus you will have witnessed Mario 64 change from a leisurely platformer to a high performance sport where the weight of twenty five years of repetition has created a version of the game that is expected to be finished in under ten minutes. Then finished again. And again.

The sharing of enthusiasm and love for a thing and the desire to continue to play it transforms your experience of it and can transform the experience for others; it doesn’t require a hypothetical suitable game but instead the endless poking, prodding, treasure hunting, and strategising of imaginative play - something that I should point out is significantly easier to do while being part of a community.

I think that’s really the key to why I find the Forever Game so appealing -  they show we naturally and individually create imaginative play spaces within play spaces.

Not the reason I started writing this, but I found my old copy of Pokemon Gold lmao. Shroomish is here to deter the weird used game market, don't worry about him. 

There’s no real way to manipulate a static experience, only re-interpret it. As an interactive experience, a video game has just enough room for you to do both, and I think our deeply personal libraries of Forever Games shows how incredible and unique that interaction can be. 

If you are into fighting games you will find people with whole libraries of Forever Games, stretching out into the increasingly obscure distance until you start to wonder if they ever play anything else at all. Speedrunning communities are filled with people who would have initially found the hobby by simply playing their Forever Games to the point of boredom or (depending on the medium) to actual physical destruction, introduced to like-minded people who love to just play these specific games in increasingly specific ways.

You only have a certain amount of Forever Games in your life, and as you gain more responsibilities that number will naturally reduce. I used to play through the old Dawn of War: Dark Crusade campaigns on multiple difficulties with multiple factions, I don’t anymore because I am older and have to “work” and “feed myself”; my capacity for sinking time into a mostly unchanging experience has been diminished, as has my capacity to change that experience. As I age the joy in re-exploring and putting time, energy, and effort into imaginative play inside these spaces has lessened, and I think the beauty of the ‘game’ and the promise of endless entertainment has significantly lost its luster now that I’m a bitter older weirdo.

But even then I’ve found an exception - fighting games! Fighting games are an incredibly diverse genre but the foundations are always the same: mind games, character placement, spacing, knowledge, timing etc. etc. etc. and each individual game will have its own tribe of sickos desperate to convert you to Sailor Moon S or Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game and it rules. To me fighting games represent the purest form of imaginative play - upon entering the game to compete against another person you are forced straight into that headspace play as you respond and adapt to what is directly in front of you using both fundamental genre ideas and hyper-game-specific arcane bullshit.

I'm dead serious: check out this fucking game it rocks so hard. If you see the term 'kusoge' used while researching this, remember: kusoge is the Japanese word for a 'wicked dope mondo cool videogame'. 

There really is (FORESHADOWING) no good way to replicate this feeling and no good parallel anywhere else in the wide world of media. For me to have found a genre that generates that meditative, engaged feeling that used to come from hours of repeating the same story or the same grind feels like a magic trick - like I’ve found the cheat code to enjoying what I play while still improving core aspects of comprehension and physical skill.

This cannot apply to everyone, of course. Fighting games are hell to some people, games where a loss state is an actual loss can cause people stress that locks them out of imaginative play and makes them miserable. The same repetition that brings me happiness cannot be so simply parlayed to the experience of someone else; similarly I cannot engage in the joy of a yearly playthrough of FFX - that isn’t fun to me, I can’t see where that would activate or stimulate the parts of my brain that buzz when I’m Fully Gaming, and I don’t understand how it works. What I can do is wave at them cheerfully from my repetitive fighting game archipelago and permit myself a tiny sense of awe at how varied and incomprehensibly layered our interactions with these funny little pieces of entertainment media are, and how incredible it is that we can stretch out our simple, repetitive actions inside simple, repetitive structures to such an overwhelmingly creative extent.

No matter our age we take our silly toys with us as long as we can until they stop bringing us joy, and the act of pushing that enjoyment, that refusal to put one toy down permanently because we know we can come back and find a sense of home inside of it, is, to me, a beautiful tribute to the games we have played and will play. It’s a comfort to me to look at Dark Crusade, knowing that I will never feel the same feelings or enjoyment that I had for it when it was my Forever Game, because it reminds of the capacity that I have to immerse myself in a world and transform it via play into one filled with my own little stories and my own little hopes.

What a pure and lovely note to end on, I’m so glad this blog won’t have a second part! (FORESHADOWING)

* The caveat is that the name Forever Game is like... not totally accurate on it's face. If I come up with a better name I'll go back and edit it in and pretend that I was using it this whole time.