Weeknotes 195

Hello October! Best month. 🎃

On Wednesday I went back to the optician (Alice said “nestled deep in the socket of Big Eye” 🤢) and sweated like Blathers for twenty minutes while he made me try on a succession of different frames, all of which, yeah, looked like glasses. I eventually made a baseless decision out of sheer exasperation so I’m looking forward to living with the consequences of that for the next decade or so.

Afterwards I met James & Murray for lunch & lols, then in the evening I went to see Arthur in the first night of A Doll’s House. He was very good and it was an enjoyable night out at the theatre, like what a grown-up would do.

Beers with Chris on Thursday amid the Dalston crowds, putting the world to rights, then home through the dark and drizzle.

Three spooky-adjacent films this week. First M3GAN, which was silly and campy and barely a horror film at all, but I had a good time watching it so I have no real complaints.

Then No One Will Save You on Disney+. If Nope was a weak episode of The Outer Limits, this was a great episode of The X-Files. The conceit worked well and the sound design and music in particular were impressive. It’s not that sophisticated, just fun and well-executed. I think it’d make a good double feature with Men.

And finally Fresh, also on Disney+, which was tonally uneven but well-performed and satisfying. Much of the dialogue sounded like things that people actually say to each other. On the other hand: bit meaty.

I saw another couple of episodes of The Morning Show, where no character says anything that a real person would say and even the sassy banter is tortured. (“I wooed all morning, but okay. I will woo. I’ll keep wooing till the cows come home.”)

I’ve started feeling sorry for Reese Witherspoon because the show doesn’t appear to have anything for her to do. I’m not exactly hate-watching this, but I’m definitely not like-watching it either.

Having recently written off the entire medium of video games, I thought I’d buy Cocoon on the PS5 and see what I thought of it.

Well, erm, I finished it over the weekend and I really like it! It’s a lovely little puzzle game with all the immediacy and elegance I crave: from the title screen it goes straight into gameplay, with no instructions or tutorial or sprawling skill tree, and proceeds wordlessly from beginning to end.

The obvious first impression is that it looks and sounds beautiful. The amazing art style is accompanied by a lush, wistful electronic soundtrack that sounds like it’s about to burst into a Telephasic Workshop / Olson mashup at any moment.

The game has a clever design where irrelevant choices get automatically closed off to avoid overwhelming the player. For the first half I found this disempowering because the state space was so small that there was no need to think or experiment — there’s always only one thing you can do next, so you must do it. This railroading meant I often had no concept of what goal I was working towards because I didn’t need to understand anything to mindlessly perform the only action available to me.

But the complexity builds in the second half, combining everything you’ve learned so far, and I did find myself having to think about what I was trying to do and make a plan for how to pull it off. I never got stuck or frustrated but it did sometimes take a few minutes to work out what the hell was going on; one Witness-esque moment in particular made me laugh with satisfaction.

The slow start and occasional regrettable arcade bits are outweighed by the challenge and sheer visual beauty of what the game presents as it unfolds. It’s an impressive work of art and I commend it to you. Time to replay Inside, I think.

My hand’s basically fine now, my cough’s nearly gone, and I got a flu jab.

Bit dark out.