Another year of the plague behind us, another 365 days of solitude. It’s hardly Marquez, but it certainly feels like life has been chugging along in neutral after so many heady years in first gear. The year was mostly dominated by work, with little in the way of holiday breaks, social activities or other diversions to break up the monotony.

So joining the yearly roundups from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, here’s looking back over the second year of the plague, 2021.

Summary

Best PC games: Return of the Obra Dinn, The Witness, Zombie Army Trilogy, DOOM

Worst PC games: Heaven’s Vault

Board games played: 10

Best board games: Photosynthesis, My City

Worst board games: –

Films watched: 31

Best films: The Three/Four Musketeers, Psycho, Whiplash, One Hour Photo, Four Lions

Worst films: Train of Life, You Were Never Really Here, The Evil Dead

Books read: 34

Best books: The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken, Kleiner Mann – was nun?, Julian, Troubles

Worst books: Winnetou 1, The Marshmallow Test

A Year in Gaming

Continuing the theme of working from home and trying to avoid spending too much time in the office, 2021 wasn’t much of one for gaming, although I did upgrade my hardware for the first time in the better part of a decade.

There were a couple of solo adventure games which provided fair diversion. Return of the Obra Dinn definitely stands out as one of the more interesting games I’ve played in recent years. The basic premise for the player is that a ship has entered port in the late eighteenth century, and all the crew and passengers are either missing or dead. Tasked with finding out what happened, you get to see and hear the final moments of every corpse you discover, slowly piecing together bits of the puzzle through deduction, elimination and, certainly in my case, a good dollop of guesswork. I can’t say my efforts were particularly successful, but the unique flavour of the mystery, together with the beautiful pixelated sepia aesthetic, kept me coming back for more.

A technically more imposing puzzle game also worthy of mention is The Witness, written by the author of Braid, a game that had already battered my meagre brain into submission. As with Obra Dinn, I was likewise too stupid to unravel The Witness, and sadly didn’t see it through to the end (Edit: This changed in 2022.), but the mixture of puzzles and secrets, as well as the unique art style around the island itself definitely made the visits worthwhile.

My worst game of the year was unfortunately also the one which should have been most up my street: Heaven’s Vault purports to offer an adventure in which the player must decipher an ancient language. The premise was intriguing, but unfortunately I simply couldn’t get into the story for just how slow the game’s execution is. Everything just trudges along to such an extent that, only a few hours in, I still hadn’t seen more than a few words of the strange language, and haven’t been inclined to return.

Slow is a word which cannot be used to describe the DOOM reboot, which I’m still in the process of playing through, half an hour at a time. In comparison to the last outing in DOOM 3, this feels far more like the hi-octane classics of the 90s, and the developers and designers really put together a solid engine to drive the game forward, putting action right back at the heart of a classic shooter.

On the multiplayer front there wasn’t anything particularly new this year. In the spring we completed the surprise hit from last year, Gunfire Reborn, before heading back down the galaxy’s darkest mines in Deep Rock Galactic. Trying to avoid the cheatathon that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has become, we tried out a few alternatives like Splitgate (Slipgate?!) and Rogue Company, eventually returning to Overwatch as we were often five players. Why does no one make cooperative (or competitive) games for five players? Why do they always cap out at four? There are so many titles out there which just don’t suit our player count.

So perhaps the only positive surprise of the year was returning to the hordes in Zombie Army Trilogy as a two-player escapade, retreading old steps and exploring a few new haunts. The weird combo system they’ve added, which rather punishes the player for trying to use a sniper rifle rather than running around rocking a shotgun or even pistol, made for something of a strange bastard hybrid for a ‘Sniper Elite’ game, especially with the way the two-player game could easily have you shooting at freshly blown up targets and breaking that all important chain.

A Year in Boardgaming

Sadly, this year was about as sparse as it can get when it came to the table. Aside from a couple of coop escape room style games when we had the occasional guest, we managed all of two gaming evenings with our usual partners. We’ve made a promise to at least try to meet up once per month in future, so hopefully that will change for the better in 2022.

The two coop games we got through were both from series we had previously played. The first of these was the set of three Unlock!: Mythic Adventures. These are generally a pretty good series, neatly interweaving cards with a dedicated app which allows for more interesting solutions than mere card-based options (the Exit series in particular suffers at times from generally having to hunt for 3-digit solutions). The three adventures in this set are pretty varied, though the technology did fail us badly on two occasions: one puzzle required us to take photos of cards, which given us playing in poor lightning, meant we were sometimes led down the wrong path by the app not recognising our solution; the other problem was a minigame which should have been straightforward to complete, but actually took us upwards of 15 minutes on multiple devices trying to find one which would finally recognise our inputs. Those glitches aside, the puzzles themselves were fun to solve, fairly logical, with enough variety in difficulty levels.

The second game was 50 Clues: The Fate of Leopold, the conclusion to a three-part adventure which we started back in 2019. Game noire, in terms of mechanics the game doesn’t do anything too special, but the topic is that little bit darker, the solutions that little bit more visceral than any of the other offerings out there. Fairly recommendable purely on that basis.

In terms of bigger titles, there were literally only two to mention. Photosynthesis is a cute abstract about growing trees and harvesting sunlight. Players place seeds in the forest, evolving them from tiny saplings to mighty trees, before harvesting them for points; but the energy needed to do all these things comes from sunlight collected by the trees. It’s an interesting balancing act, and timing actions to maximise the energy harvested as the sun rotates around the board with the concomitant changes in shadows make for something of a brain-burner. Unfortunately the point-scoring seems a bit random, with big scores but small differences if everyone has played a similar game. Plus there’s a fairly counterintuitive way of paying for things which everyone fell for at least once.

The second biggy was Reiner Knizia’s legacy title My City. Basically a board game version of Tetris played over 24 rounds, with changing boards and rules. The basic game wouldn’t hold my attention held for long, but being a legacy-style game means it at least earns points for tickling your curiosity. Nevertheless, it still it feels more of a gimmick that will outstay its welcome before the final envelope.

A Year in Cinema

One series I revisited was the 1970s Musketeers films of Richard Lester. These brought to mind exactly the kind of thing King Solomon’s Mines was presumably aiming at, and which I so panned last year. The Three Musketeers and the simultaneously filmed The Four Musketeers brilliantly tell the well-known story, combining swashbuckling adventure and derring-do, with moments of high drama, and absolutely gallons of humour. It’s definitely towards the comedic end of the scale, but there’s something about that combination of Pythonesque quips from the extras, the roughshod and often slapstick swordfighting, and of course the characters played by the likes of Roy Kinnear and Spike Milligan, that keeps me revisiting these films. The simple ordinariness of so many of the settings, combined with the brilliant costume work, gives the films a charming authenticity; we’re watching ordinary people, in ordinary seventeenth century France, who are ordinarily funny, ordinarily clumsy, ordinarily charming. Damn good fun!

Continuing with films of an older vintage, one of the gaps I finally managed to plug was watching Hitchcock’s Psycho, a film which lived up to its expectations, despite being so famous and so often referenced, you’ve already seen it even if you haven’t. On the one hand, it reminded me very much of Hitchcock’s own Vertigo, in that the film is very much a film with two distinct acts, where the breathless crescendo of the first leaves you shocked there can even be a second. But it also reminded me of how a simple story can be told so magnificently, which is a failing of so many films which try to lay it on too thick: such as the modern retelling of that other Hitchcock classic Rear Window in Disturbia.

Watched as part of some research for a scriptwriting job, one surprise hit for the year was Whiplash, a film very much in the vein of Black Swan, but one which probably tells the story of an all-consuming passion in pursuit of one’s art even better. The film takes a few wrong turns in my opinion, but the final scene is a breathtaking catharsis for everything which went before, and passes without barely a line of dialogue.

Sticking with the one-man studies, One Hour Photo was probably my surprise treat of the year. A fantastic performance by the late Robin Williams, there’s something so effortlessly natural about this miscentred antihero, a likeable and yet worrisome main character who keeps the scars on his personality visibly hidden. Truly edifying.

Switching to the worst films of the year, there weren’t really any particular stinkers, but a few which were for one reason or another disappointing. The comedic story of a runaway train of Jews escaping the Holocaust, Train of Life was certainly an interesting film, but there are some subjects which simply don’t lend themselves well to satire, and unfortunately this one left something of a foul taste in the mouth. Which is a pity, because one of my absolute favourites of the year was Ianoucci’s The Death of Stalin; despite the very serious subject matter, I think it was the absolutely over-the-top performances and casting which allowed this film to work as well as it did, capturing the absurdity of reality in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The final two stinkers are there for different reasons. You Were Never Really Here ended up being a film I wanted to enjoy, but aside from a few interesting scenes left nothing in my neurons to reflect upon. I think it was a case of false expectations rather than any particularly bad filmcraft. But the final film of note enjoys a reputation beyond its years that frankly, I fail to understand. The Evil Dead is a cheap and drearful horror… comedy, I assume? Low-budget yadda yadda, maybe I was in the wrong frame of mind or the wrong company to enjoy it, but it had none of the visceral horror of Romero’s ilk, few of the real chills a Carpenter might produce, and honestly little in the way of laughs.

A Year in Books

A fairly typical year for books, about on a par with my reading habits for the past few years, there weren’t many titles that really jump out from the stack.

After following him on Twitter and catching the occasional snippet on television, I decided to give The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken a go. For someone not particularly well-versed in what ‘the Law’ really is, it provides a decent summary of how the British system came to be the way it is, and what years of austerity have done to break things. If I had the time, I ought really find a volume comparing that system to others.

Apparently I found more time for reading fiction this year, knocking off some shorter classics like Siddhartha or The Handmaid’s Tale, but there were three in particular which really stood out. Another of Hans Fallada’s oeuvre, Kleiner Mann – was nun? is simply amazing for its prescience, published as it was in 1932 and so poignantly describing the economic and social woes of the depression years on Weimar Germany, the daily grind and struggle to survive and maintain some semblance of dignity.

For slightly different reasons I found myself enchanted by J.G. Farrell’s Troubles, a book set in the brooding revolutionary period of immediate post-WWI Ireland, where the setting sun of the British Empire is epitomised in the form of a crumbling hotel. Humorous and melancholic, it’s interesting that this was written at the start of a fresh set of troubles, being published in 1970.

Going slightly further back historically, I ploughed through Gore Vidal’s Julian, which in contrast to I, Claudius or Memoirs of Hadrian (both read 2018), takes a look back over Julian’s record in the form of a series of letters between two scholars in how to deal with the matter of Julian’s diaries. Perhaps it was the anti-Christian flavour which attracted me the most.

Turning to the worst books of the year, and there weren’t really any terrible stinkers. Not particularly well known in the English-speaking world, Winnetou is a German institution, a collection of western stories that spawned whole series of films, festivals and an extremely successful spoof. But plodding through Winnetou 1, it was difficult to see how. The basic material of White Man and Indians is obviously fertile ground for any story, but the cardboard characters, plodding exposition and lack of dramatic merit makes you wonder how it became so popular with anyone in long trousers. Though I haven’t read James Fenimore Cooper either, so maybe my expectations are at fault.

Meanwhile, the biggest disappointment of the year was probably The Marshmallow Test. I’d certainly waited long enough to read it, probably having learned the gist of the argument sometime in primary school. But there’s basically nothing in this book that you don’t already know, nothing that isn’t already well trodden or implicit in what the test purports to tell us. Are the implications really that profound? Is the test really an indicator for the future or a reflection of the past?

This year has been anything if not interesting. At the start, a lot of people around me seemed to answering the call for change, with numerous friends choosing to up sticks, start new careers, move houses, or meet new partners.

While little changed for me beyond shifting to working from home, one difference was saying goodbye to a forum I’d been running for nearly two decades. As no one had posted anything in nearly twelve months, and its use had been dwindling for some years already, it seemed the time had come to save some computing cycles and lay the bits to rest.

Nevertheless, one tradition I wanted to continue from its pages was an annual post taking stock of a year’s media consumption. I’ve gone through the database dump and scavenged previous summaries from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. So for the first time in another seldom visited corner of the web, here’s looking back on 2020 in all its quarantined glory.

Summary

PC games played: numerous

Best PC games: Gunfire Reborn, Sniper Elite 4, What Remains of Edith Finch, Strange Brigade, Inside, Two Point Hospital, Catastronauts, DOOM 3: BFG Edition, Warhammer: The End Times – Vermintide, Pyre

Worst PC games: Californium, Unfortunate Spacemen, Crucible, Jet Set Radio, Killer Is Dead

Board games played: 39 (75 plays)

Best board games: Sail to India, Majesty, Short List, Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, Piepmatz

Worst board games: Chada & Thorn, Detective Stories: “Gattardo”, 5-Minute Dungeon, DOG Royal

Films watched: 38

Best films: Paddington 2, Blade Runner 2049, Full Metal Jacket, The History Boys, I, Daniel Blake, The Princess Bride, Stand By Me

Worst films: The Detonator, Empire State, King Solomon’s Mines, Mad Max

Books read: 32

Best books: The Last Resort, The Remains of the Day, Eine Frau in Berlin, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

Worst books: Ficciones, Lord of Light

A Year in Gaming

It’s actually been an interesting year, multiplayer gaming wise. Over last Christmas enough of my gaming group had finally had enough of the widespread cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Operations that we quit playing it altogether. The search was then on for a title to fill our weekly sessions. For a while, Valorant took the reins, though its extremely slow pace, focus on abilities, and the punishing gameplay for a team with a fairly wide range in skill levels, all meant that we soon tired of it.

In its stead, we shifted to a variety of lighter titles. Catastronauts was an entertaining take on the Overcooked genre, giving four furry astronauts plenty of headaches as they attempt to keep a ship patched and maintained in a series of confrontations in space. Playing the game over Steam’s in-built streaming service meant we could play it as a ‘couch coop’ on a couch several hundred miles long, with only occasional interruptions and lag spikes… the wonders of modern technology!

Later we switched over to the summer’s surprise smash hit Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, a digital jelly bean version of ninja warriors. Chaotic, random, frustrating and hilarious, I remain the only bean without a crown and will probably stay in that virgin state until I can take on a stage uncontested. But in the spirit of athletics, it’s the taking part that counts, and it can be just as much fun to fail your run, or spoil someone else’s!

Our latest squeeze is a rogue-lite from Hong Kong entitled Gunfire Reborn. It’s been a challenging endeavour so far, with us gradually getting stronger each week, unlocking new upgrades and weapons. Unfortunately, my current internet connection makes the game virtually unplayable, so not sure if I’ll see any real progress any time soon.

In the solo gaming department, I didn’t tackle any particularly long games. At the beginning of the lockdown, I felt like I should probably use the opportunity to try to work through some of my Steam backlog, finally playing through the DOOM 3: BFG Edition, including the original DOOM I/II. It was fun to explore those grandfathers of the genre some quarter of a century later, and amazing how the layouts of some of the levels were still so clear in my mind. While the basic shooting mechanics were child’s play with a mouse (had I really used arrow keys to turn back then?), one thing that I’d completely forgotten was just how convoluted the map design was, with scores of hidden rooms, secret buttons and special tricks. After completing the original pair, I finally succeeded in completed DOOM 3 at the third attempt, a good fifteen years after it first came out, but baulked at the idea of spending even more time playing through its expansion.

After slogging through the Martian hellholes, I only otherwise took in some shorter titles this year, not wanting to spend as much time in the office as what lockdown was already demanding. One of the titles which stuck out was What Remains of Edith Finch, a beautiful walking simulator exploring the biography of several generations of an eccentric family, with each member’s story told through its own separate vignette. It’s easy to see why the game won a BAFTA. I also ticked off the two Playdead adventures LIMBO and INSIDE, the second in particular being a delightful brain-tickler, a noire puzzle platformer lovingly rendered and brilliantly directed.

There weren’t any really major stinkers this year, though a few disappointments. In the multiplayer department, we tried out Amazon’s very short-lived Crucible on its beta release. While the basic premise and mechanics were sound, we were left feeling distinctly bored by what we’d tasted, and it wasn’t a surprise when the initial closed beta stage was withdrawn. Still, it certainly was a shock to hear some months later that they’d pulled the plug entirely. I guess the competition for free-to-play titles is so great that it was deemed unworthy of further funding, despite it having been in development since 2014.

On the solo front, there were two games which fell a little flat. Californium sounded like a fascinating concept, a small adventure set in a drug-addled and Philip K. Dick inspired multi-layered universe, where the player peels back the real world. I was expecting something in the vein of A Scanner Darkly, but what I got was something more like a hidden object game. Frankly the overarching gameplay is far too simplistic, and the world-bending effect soon gets boring. The second game which didn’t live up to expectations, though through no fault of its own, was Into the Breach. The basic gameplay boils down to an agonising game of 3-piece chess, with the player in full command of the information, barring a few statistical chances. A limited number of moves, yet with tons of different combinations, different pieces, different abilities, taking moves in different orders, and even the option to restart each scenario once, make each encounter a brain-burning conundrum. What’s not to like? For me the major detraction was the fact that the developer’s previous title – FTL – was frankly even more brilliant!

A Year in Boardgaming

It was a somewhat weird year in boardgaming. Overall we didn’t play as much as normal, though we started out the year meeting up with our friends extremely frequently, had a massive hiatus in the middle during the lockdown, and again picked up the pace in the autumn, before dropping it altogether in the winter again.

In terms of new games, the biggest surprise of the year was far and away The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine. A simple trick-taking game for four players, what absolutely flabbered my gast is that no one had come up with it before. A pretty standard set of cards, some basic objectives, and a very limited ability to communicate, this game had us entertained for hours on end over a long series of evenings. While I find the Kennerspiel des Jahres category rather ill-defined, it came as no surprise to hear it had won.

On the hunt for some smaller, more family-friendly board/card games, I bought a couple which resonated well. Piepmatz is a set collecting game I picked up after a recommendation from The Spiel podcast. We’ve only ever played it four-player, and I think it’s probably a bit too random for my tastes at that number, but otherwise it’s a cute little diversion which doesn’t overstay its welcome. The other game I found second-hand was Sail to India, which packs a surprising amount of gameplay in a little box (though requires a fairly large table once all spread out).

The only notable ‘larger’ title of the year was Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, earning a place as a very special mashup of two other games, being a semi-cooperative tile-laying game which is something of mix between Carcassonne and 7 Wonders. I’m not sure how much strategy is really involved, though there’s enough decision-making to keep you engaged, and the way that the game is played cooperatively yet competitively at the same time works well with the right group.

During the lockdowns, we didn’t get much gaming time in as we hadn’t found ourselves anything interesting for two players, and the only two games we already had around make it onto my list for worst games of the year. The first was Chada & Thorn, a small spin-off from The Legends of Andor series which Steffi had so devoured. It felt rather clunky and lifeless in comparison to its larger brother, with none of the depth of an LCG like Lord of the Rings, nor the interesting discussion a four-player game can bring.

The second flop this year was a rather odd acquisition Steffi found somewhere, actually being a demo for a series, called Detective Stories: Gattardo. We’ve played enough escape room games over the years, and this one relied more on open facts and clues rather than the gimmicks that many others use. However, we completely failed to read the signs in front of us on a number of occasions, eventually coming up with a solution to the case that was wrong in just about every single aspect… probably including even the identity of the victim! Maybe if we’d had some more sensible heads with us, the experience would’ve been less demoralising, but instead it felt like a wasted evening.

A Year in Cinema

Obviously, this year lent itself rather well to watching the box, and once lockdown started we stuck fairly religiously to our weekly film evening. Often overwhelmed with choice, Steffi tried a new tack this year, choosing to work her way through the alphabet of our backlog and what’s available to stream online, so while many of her choices were a far cry from her usual comic-centric tastes, there were as many pleasant as disappointing surprises in the mix!

Perhaps the two immediate stand-out films for me were both sequels. Paddington 2 managed the rather rare feat of actually being better than its predecessor, at least from what I can remember. Where the first was a sweet family film, the second seemed to inject even more humour, with an entertaining plot and the usual slew of jolly actors. Blade Runner 2049 meanwhile was a film I approached with some trepidation, as the original has stood the test of time well enough on its own. But the cinematography is just as delicious for this second outing, Ryan Gosling was perfectly cast as the new blade runner, and the film had a meaningful story of its own to tell, rather than just riding on the coattails of its ancestor. Guess that’s what can happen when Disney isn’t involved.

This year I also managed to plug a few of those gaps for films everyone has seen. Full Metal Jacket was a somewhat surprising war film in how seemingly aimless the script was constructed, although the first and second halves of the film stand fairly well on their own merit, the overarching message was muddy. But despite having never seen the film before, the scenes often felt familiar, having been parodied and quoted that often. The same could be said for The Princess Bride, which I felt like I’d seen vicariously often enough (was there a Simpsons parody?).

The most disappointing film of the year was probably a result of misfiring memories from childhood, but I expected Mad Max to be something more along the lines of a Kevin Costner dystopia, with less melodrama and stupidity. Probably I’m just remembering snippets from its sequels in my mind. However even this disappointment couldn’t beat the hands down the worst film of the year: King Solomon’s Mines. Honestly, how did they get Richard Chamberlain, Herbert Lom and John Rhys-Davies to star in this mess? It’s like someone had seen the success of Indiana Jones and thought: what this needs is less plot and more slapstick. It wouldn’t have been out of place in the Carry On series.

A Year in Books

I’d expected that in the year of the plague I’d have ploughed through a lot more pages than I managed of the previous 12 months, but I guess not having that daily commute cut a lot of my reading time.

Still, I managed to knock off a few of the books that have been on my wishlist for the longest. The Last Resort, for example, must’ve been on my list since about the time of its publication, being a sometime first-hand narrative about a small white homestead in Zimbabwe, and their attempts to keep going during Mugabe’s descent into populism, as the economy crashed around him and he resorted to whatever means necessary to stay in power. The crisis was broadcast often on British news, but this book brought home what it was like for people on the ground, trying to go about their lives despite the ever-present potential threat to life and limb. At times harrowing, but always a very human account.

In a similar vein I read the anonymously written Eine Frau in Berlin, the accounts of life in occupied Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when life was cheap, food scarce, and rape a daily visitation. Aside from how well written the accounts are, the memories from those two months are honest and matter-of-fact, leaving it to the reader to pass judgement. Only published after the author’s death, nearly 60 years later, the dairy makes for difficult reading, but an important one.

It seems I didn’t pick up much fiction this year, so the standalone favourite was Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Beautiful characters, beautiful prose, a subtle tale and extremely believably narrated, this is a slow-burner which is in turn amusing and poignant and arrives where you expected it to.

Two of my worst reads of the year were some which had also been in my to-read pile for the longest. I’d read about Borges somewhen and heard about these magical constructions and thought experiments all encapsulated into tiny vignettes, and figured they would be right up my street. Unfortunately I found plodding through Ficciones to be utterly mind-numbing, a style akin to reading a textbook on metaphysics, with pointless asides and deviations about nonsensical figures and oh god get to the bloody point. I see praise wash up on his shores like crates of whiskey after a propitious sinking, but mine is his style not.

The other disappointment from the to-read pile was Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, though I feel I was rather more to blame for it failing to land. The entire premise of the book was interesting enough for me to keep reading to the end, but too much of the content was lost on me for a lack of knowledge of Indian deities.

The final book which I’d have to say I really regret reading was the programming book Head First Design Patterns. The content is all solid, but the style in which it is presented just isn’t me. Instead of obtuse non-real-world examples it felt like they shoe-horned in some better non-real-world examples and then proceed to lay it on thick. So many asides and cutsey comics and conversations between non-existent people and not enough plain text. I don’t mind a few bullet point summaries and diagrams, but when that’s the main bulk of the text, it makes navigating what’s important to read only more difficult!