Phrasing

Sometimes, you run into a game with a title that just doesn’t quite make sense. A lot of these are foreign games using English words, and maybe something got lost in translation. See: Infinite Undiscovery, Under Night In-Birth, or Chaos Zero Nightmare for a more recent example. But every so often you’ll get one from a Western developer where they clearly didn’t think things through. Such is the case with Tritryst, which is probably the least-sexy game you could imagine with a title that essentially could be read as meaning “menage a trois.” Which brings us to today’s word.

tryst, noun – a romantic encounter

Learned from: Tritryst (PC, Mac)

Developed by Cinematronics, LLC

Published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment, Inc. (1995)

Tritryst was a match-3 puzzle game. But despite the obtusely spicy title, you’re not matching up naughty bits or anything. Heck, it doesn’t even feature the fast-paced action of Columns, or even have a timer like Bejeweled, that might provide some excitement. Tritryst gives you a series of static, grid-based boards in various layouts, and gives you all the time you need to place pieces composed of three randomized colors so that you can match three in a line until you run out of room. You can rotate each piece in 90-degree increments, but that’s about it–I don’t even think they came in different shapes; I’m pretty sure they’re all straight lines.

You could almost classify Tritryst as a cozy game, since I suppose there is a certain calming appeal one could find in mulling over where to place each piece at their own pace. But honestly, I just remember it being kind of dull. I only ever played the demo, because even back then, I couldn’t see it being worth paying for. Good for winding down before going to bed at night, maybe, but nothing I could see most people playing for extended periods. And that title just had me perplexed, once I looked up what “tryst” actually meant.

Have I mentioned how much I miss the box art for old games though? Because, *man* I miss this kind of insanity!

Catching flak

I don’t normally give the word of the day away in the title of the post, but most of this story is going to be so convoluted, I thought at least some part of it should be straightforward.

So, Thanksgiving is a few days past at this point, and my cat has barely eaten since then. Like, she saw us preparing all these different and extravagant types of food in large quantities, looked at the food she had been eating–quite contentedly I might add–for awhile up until that point, and decided, “No. I also want something new and different. This plain old food simply will not do, human.”

At least, that’s the conclusion we eventually reached. Initially, we were worried that she was sick, or had swallowed something that was causing a blockage, or that she was depressed or something. But she would still eat treats–she caught and ate a spider, for that matter. And she’s eaten bits of the new food we’ve picked up for her. She was just throwing flak at us for having the audacity to celebrate a food-centric holiday without cutting her in on the deal. Which brings us to today’s word.

flak, noun – anti-aircraft fire, (or in the example above: harsh criticism)

Learned from: Mission X (Intellivision)

Developed by Data East

Published by Mattel Electronics (1983)

Mission X is a vertical-scrolling shooter, in the same style as the much better-known Xevious. And while its graphics are nowhere near as good, it actually brought a lot more to the table. You still had forward-facing guns, and could drop bombs, but you could also change the altitude of your plane, to be more accurate with your bombs, or fly above enemy planes or flak. There was also a day/night cycle, where it was significantly harder to see your targets during night missions, as well as a pretty decent variety of things to shoot at and bomb. The only thing Xevious had over Mission X aside from graphical fidelity (and market saturation), was the thematics: fighting sci-fi space aliens, instead of Axis powers in World War II…unless you were me, growing up.

See, despite having the manual for this game, I never really saw it as a WWII shmup. And that’s because I always conflated Mission X with the 1987 movie Project X that they played weirdly often on weekends for awhile. It starred Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt, and it was about a secret Air Force project designed to teach chimpanzees how to fly fighter jets. And my five-year-old brain latched onto that concept for dear life whenever I played Mission X, because the idea that I was an escaped, experimental chimp who stole a bomber and was wreaking havoc across the countryside was automatically a better, more fun idea than whatever dusty old nonsense the game was trying to be about.

There’s our floofy little tyrant, who, despite going on a hunger strike, has plenty of energy to climb up the spare mattress we haven’t gotten rid of yet, so she can judge us from on high.

Old faithful

It’s been a busy few weeks, between traveling, seeing old friends, and being short-staffed at work in between all that. But it’s finally a weekend where I don’t have anything going on, and we finally had our first snowfall of the year, so I figured this was a good opportunity to get another entry out.

I say “finally” about our first snowfall in early November, because according to people who grew up where I currently live, there used to be snow on the ground before Halloween. Consistently. But better late, than never–I still like winter, despite all the shoveling I have to do as an adult. The colder temperatures just sit well with me. I mean heck, my wife and I had our honeymoon in Iceland, where temps in the 60s (Fahrenheit) are positively balmy. And in a roundabout way, that brings us to today’s word.

geyser, noun – a hot spring which periodically boils over, sending a spray of water and steam into the air

Learned from: Space Quest (Apple IIGS, Mac, PC)

Developed by Sierra On-Line

Published by Sierra On-Line (1986)

The first game in a six-game series, Space Quest was sort of the adventure game version of Spaceballs: all ridiculous situations, jokes, and references to established sci-fi franchises. Star Wars was the main inspiration, but there’s some Star Trek, Dune, and other things sprinkled in there. You play as Roger Wilco, a space janitor who ends up embroiled in a nefarious plot that threatens the galaxy, and only he can foil the villain’s plans and save the day.

After escaping the exploding space station where he, until just recently, worked, Roger crash lands on a desert planet, and must survive the sweltering heat, deadly wildlife, a speeder bike action sequence, and unscrupulous used droid salesmen to get back to space and foil an evil alien plot. One sequence on the planet has you making your way through a cave system with a geyser that you need to plug up with a rock, so the pressure will open a secret door. Adventure game logic is really odd sometimes.

Fun fact about the word, “geyser,” though: It’s actually named after a region (and a town) in Iceland, famous for its various hot springs, mud pots, and yes, geysers. The most famous one (called Geysir–not sure why the spelling changed in English), is now largely inactive. Strokkur is the most vigorous geyser in the area, going off every couple minutes, and it is pretty spectacular.

Fun fact about Geysir, Iceland: Everywhere we went in Iceland, was multi-lingual. Street signs, restaurant menus, signs on businesses; all of them were in at least two languages. Sometimes more. In fact, during our time there, there was only one sign we ever saw that defied this rule; the sign was at Geysir, and it was written only in English. Basically, “Despite appearances, this water is incredibly hot. If you touch it, you WILL get burned. The nearest hospital is over 50km away.”

I have a photo of it somewhere, but it’s on an old laptop I haven’t used in awhile. But yeah, if you ever wonder what the rest of the world really thinks about the United States, this thinly veiled jab toward famously monolingual Americans pretty well sums it up.

Also not my photo. The laptop my Iceland photos are on is old enough that it’s not compatible with Windows 11, so it’s sat untouched for some time.

Who are you, again?

I recently attended a presentation by author, Sue Harrison, where she talked about her journey to becoming a writer. She genuinely seems like a delightful person, and her personal story was an uplifting one. But when she mentioned that she has difficulty remembering faces–to the extent that the first draft of one of her books had virtually no facial descriptions of the characters–I realized I knew the technical term for that. Which brings us to today’s word.

prosopagnosia, noun – face blindness

Learned from: Rogue Legacy (Playstation 4, Mac, mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 3, XBox One)

Developed by Cellar Door Games

Published by Cellar Door Games (2013)

Rogue Legacy is, as the title might suggest, a roguelike platformer. The gimmick in this one is that when your character dies, he or she is replaced by an heir you select from a few possible options. Some of the options are pretty straightforward, like the character’s class, but the cool part is that each one has a selection from a vast variety of traits they can be born with. From the innocuous (being bald), to the mildly inconvenient (colorblindness), to things like prosopagnosia, which made it so you couldn’t see any of the traits of the next generation. Not horrible, compared to something like schizophrenia (which I think showed enemies and platforms that aren’t there, while sometimes not showing ones that are), but it meant you’d have no idea what to expect on the next run.

And really, that’s what kept Rogue Legacy fun. The actual platforming and combat isn’t bad, but without the quirky results of genetic chance, the repetitive runs probably would have gotten boring before the end. It’s still a fun little game, easily worth the $15 it’ll set you back on most platforms.

Go, my balding, vampiric dwarf with ADHD! You are the hero we deserve!

My favorite time of year

Earlier today, my wife and I headed out to her folks’ place to spend part of the afternoon helping her father harvest grapes, which we will later also help him crush to turn into wine. Somewhere, there’s a photo of me grinning like a maniac, with my arms stained red damn near up to my elbows, like I just murdered somebody. Good times.

Anyway, for me, this is the official start of autumn: being out there with a cool breeze blowing over us, and a beautiful view of the changing colors of the trees on the far bank of the river, foraging through dense vines and leaves, looking for clusters of grapes hidden just out of sight. Again, good times. And that brings us to today’s word.

foliage, noun – plant leaves

Learned from: Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Apple II, Mac, PC)

Developed by Sierra On-Line

Published by Sierra On-Line (1987)

I have very fond memories of the Space Quest games, despite having only played the first two of them (3 and onward never came to the Apple IIGS). Comedies seemed a lot more popular when I was a kid, growing up watching movies like Naked Gun, and Police Academy. And some games got in on the action, too, particularly adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island, which was a spoof of pirate stories, and Space Quest, which was a spoof primarily of Star Wars, but sci-fi in general. Sort of like a Temu version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: not bad necessarily, but certainly not as polished as the name brand. I used to play these a lot with my father, laughing at the ridiculous situations Roger Wilco, janitor turned reluctant hero, would get into, and puzzling over how to get out of them.

As the title of the second game suggests, Sludge Vohaul, the series’ villain, is out for revenge against Roger for foiling his plans in the first game. He has goons kidnap you in the opening of the game, and instead of killing you, he has them take you to a remote location so you can be forced to watch the downfall of galactic society at the hands of the genetically-modified insurance salesmen he’s developed. Or something along those lines; it’s been decades since I played it.

Anyway, something goes wrong with the hovercraft the goons were transporting you on, and it crashes into the dense forest of an alien world. As you look around, the narrator comments on the lush foliage–foliage you need to hide within at least once to keep from being found by Vohaul’s reinforcements, as you try to find a way off-planet to foil his latest insane scheme.

It’s an incredibly goofy game, filled with the sort of absolute moon logic that was common to adventure games of the era (e.g., I think you have to discover and mail in an order form for some kind of space-Tazmanian devil thing at one point, to solve a certain puzzle, while making sure the creature doesn’t catch and kill you in the process). But that was part of the fun. And the days of sitting around that 8-inch screen with my dad, tossing ideas back and forth about “well, what if we tried this?” are memories I will forever cherish.

I forgot the sheer *Mystery Science Theater 3000* vibes, in this box art.

Standalone

Recently, Merriam Webster shared a post about words you almost always seem used in pairs. Hem and haw; hither and yon (or hither and thither); pomp and circumstance, etc. Granted, it often only applies to one of the pairing, like “thither,” or “pomp,” since it’s pretty easy to find standalone usages of “hither” and “circumstance.” One of the other pairings brings us to today’s word.

beck, noun – a stream or creek

Learned from: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow (PC, Mac)

Developed by Cloak and Dagger Games

Published by Wadjet Eye Games (2022)

Granted, the “beck” in “beck and call” has a different meaning, derived I would guess from “beckon,” but MW’s post reminded me of this other definition all the same.

The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is an extraordinarily slow burn horror adventure game, with a retro pixel art aesthetic, akin to something like The Last Door. You play as Thomasina Bateman, an archaeologist who receives a letter from an old man living in the remote English village of Bewlay, detailing a forgotten burial mound that she might be interested in…well, excavating. Exactly who he is, or how he learned Thomasina’s mailing address are only the first of the mysterious goings-on. Followed swiftly by his unexplained absence when Thomasina arrives, the fact that her luggage seems to have never made the trip, and the fact that everyone in Bewlay seems a little bit…off.

For being just a pixelated point & click adventure game, Hob’s Barrow does an incredible job of building atmosphere. There’s the little village, the nearby woods (complete with beck running through them), and the endless moors surrounding it all. That’s it. The game wastes no time in establishing a feeling of complete isolation and vulnerability, considering you barely have enough money on you when you arrive to pay for a room for a night at the local inn–the rest of your funds are with your luggage…wherever that is. There’s this feeling that everyone knows everyone else, and you’re constantly under scrutiny that culminates in a real sense of not knowing who to trust, what to say, when the villagers’ grudging goodwill is going to run out, or if you’re ever truly safe. Especially when I found myself stumbling across something valuable, lying to a villager and saying it’s mine so he’ll buy it so I can have enough money to keep staying at the inn until my supplies finally (hopefully) arrive–and then running into the item’s owner the next day, and the entire time worrying that these backwoods folks are going to discover what I’ve done and descend on me, Wicker Man style or something.

This is folk horror at its finest. Thomasina is very much an outsider, and throughout most of the play time, it’s an open question whether the weird things she catches glimpses of, and the deepening paranoia are all in her head, or if something truly nefarious really is going on. It’s not a very difficult game, as adventure games go, but damn does it tell a good story.

Have remote villages with hidden pasts *ever* been safe places to visit in fiction?

Right back where we started

Well, as everyone and their grandmother knows, Hollow Knight: Silksong finally dropped this week. I haven’t started playing it yet, because there are other games that had release dates set for around this time (before the big announcement overshadowed everything), and I feel they deserve attention too. Currently, I’m playing Cronos: The New Dawn, but before that came out, I was actually playing another metroidvania that also released this year. And even though I haven’t played Team Cherry’s latest offering yet, I’m confident in saying this game is no Silksong. Which brings us to today’s word.

oloid, noun – a three-dimensional shape made by connecting two perpendicular circles joined at the center, with a curved surface

Learned from: Shadow Labyrinth (Nintendo Switch 1/2, PC, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by Bandai Namco Studios

Published by Bandai Namco Entertainment (2025)

Around a year ago, Amazon decided to fund an anthology series based around video games, called Secret Level. The selection of games was…eclectic, to say the least, ranging from Mega Man, to Spelunky, to Unreal Tournament of all things, to some Chinese mobile game that was probably only on there because Tencent helped fund the show or something. And then there was the Pac-Man episode…

Certainly the most divisive (and arguably most interesting) of the offerings, this episode reimagined Pac-Man as a weird, grimdark, post-apocalyptic tale of manipulation and survival. It was truly bizarre, and to this day I still don’t know if I could call it a “good” episode or not, because it’s so definitively not Pac-Man. It’s like if they decided they wanted to make a gritty crime drama exploring the seedy underbelly of society focusing on prostitution and drug addiction, and decided to just call it Animal Crossing. So, imagine my surprise when I discovered this episode was actually a teaser for where Bandai Namco were planning to take the Pac-Man games, going forward.

Enter Shadow Labyrinth, which is somehow just as bizarre as the teaser, while simultaneously managing to be dull and unremarkable. The protagonist is still a nameless swordsman/clone(?); Pac-Man/Puck is still an untrustworthy little biomechanical horror; eating things to survive is still the focus…but it’s all wrapped up in a bland and at times nonsensical package.

It’s bland, because it really feels like a Flash game from the 2010s, with how the characters move (yet it somehow struggles to run on the Switch in handheld mode). Also, because some of the levels are way too long and same-y. Nobody needs to run through the same giant tree for that many hours, fighting the same unnamed tribesmen who rappel off of ropes from higher up over and over again.

It’s bizarre, because there’s some kind of interstellar war going on in the midst of all this, as told through epistolary format via “memories” you can collect of a character I don’t think I met during my time playing. Also, Shadow Labyrinth is I guess part of some kind of shared universe(?!) of games that Bandai Namco is trying to establish, what with a planet named Xevious, and references to other games later on. I stopped playing before I got beyond the Xevious part. Also before I got to any explanation of what the oloid is that shows up after you beat certain enemies. It seems important, and it probably gets explained later on, but the lore is so convoluted that I stopped caring. Maybe I’ll get back to it after I play Silksong, but I know it’ll feel even worse by comparison.

I figured it would probably be easier to show you one of these things, rather than try to describe it at length.

You zagged when you should have zigged

I’m reading a book right now about how a lot of the discoveries and inventions in math and science that are traditionally attributed to the ancient Greeks might very well have actually come from other parts of the world. It’s thought-provoking stuff, and the book’s called Lost Discoveries by Dick Teresi, if you’re curious. But I’m on a section about Mesopotamia right now which brought to mind today’s word.

ziggurat, noun – a stepped pyramid

Learned from: Quake (PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch, XBox One, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by id Software (Nightdive Studios for the PS4/5, Switch, and XBox One/ Series X/S)

Published by GT Interactive (1996, 2021 for modern consoles)

Quake was a game I took awhile to get any good at, namely because it was the first first-person shooter that let you look up and down. Doom and its clones never gave you that option, and at the time, I went through at least two different control schemes before landing on the now-standard keyboard & mouse. It was new territory, and I’d always played other FPSes with just a keyboard–were you supposed to bind a couple keys to look up and down? Or was there a way to somehow translate all the inputs to a joystick? (It worked for Descent.) It seems laughable to say it now, but using a mouse for looking around didn’t even seem intuitive at the time. And I barely had access to the Internet back then, so I couldn’t just Google (or Lycos, or Altavista) “how the hell do you aim in Quake?”.

As such, my early forays into Quake were…frustrating, to say the least. If you’re a PC gamer, and you think aiming on a controller is bad, imagine trying to do a rocket jump by hitting K to look down while in the air, then smacking Ctrl and the space bar at just the right time, to get it to work, and then adjusting your aim back up with I, and trying to see where you’d land. Now, imagine trying to do anything with that kind of control scheme in a secret level with about 1/4 gravity.

That was the Ziggurat Vertigo, a hidden level built around, you guessed it, a pyramid. Even a regular jump would send you soaring a good distance up the central structure, and having any idea where you’d come down using just a keyboard to look was damn near impossible. And when most of the area that isn’t pyramid is submerged in lava, well…you can guess how that went. I loved the idea of a level that messed with something as basic as gravity (Again, these were the early days of FPS games. I remember finding a fan patch later on that actually made water transparent, and it blew my mind!), but man was it an infuriating experience until I discovered the magic of mouse-aiming.

Okay, I swear this thing was taller when I played this as a teenager; a jump may have actually carried you all the way over the top. Also, the damn thing isn’t even stepped! False advertising!

Baby’s first dictatorship

It’s been a weird week when it comes to entertainment. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert got cancelled for “financial reasons,” which is a weird way of spelling “fear of retribution from a petty tyrant.” But then, mere days later, the same company renewed South Park for several seasons, and the first thing the creators did was spend an entire episode mercilessly mocking the toddler-king. It’s good to see Trey Parker and Matt Stone haven’t lost their edge, but it did make me nostalgic for simpler times when the show could just be silly jokes about anal probes and World of Warcraft; or even further back, to when I didn’t even know what fascism was. Which brings us to today’s word.

nazi, noun – a member of Germany’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party

Learned from: Into the Eagle’s Nest (Apple II, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, PC, ZX Spectrum)

Developed by Pandora

Published by Pandora, Mindscape, Atari Corporation (1987)

A note to kick things off: I know that the word is supposed to be capitalized, but I’m taking a page from the excellent tabletop RPG about vampires sent to kill Hitler, Eat the Reich, and refusing to give it that dignity.

With that out of the way, I was probably too young to really appreciate Into the Eagle’s Nest, when 7- or 8-year-old me plucked it off the shelf. I’d heard of WWII, at some point I’m sure, but that had been like, 40 years ago by that point, practically ancient history. Certainly something that was over and done with, and that couldn’t possibly end up being relevant in contemporary society. No, instead I saw screenshots on the back of the box that looked kinda like Gauntlet–but the guy on the front had a gun! And he was about to storm a castle, of all things! I didn’t really know what nazis were, but from the art, I went in expecting a weird fantasy/modern mashup, where a lone soldier had to save his squadmates from a Medieval castle crawling with enemy soldiers, sure–but also maybe monsters? It was a castle, after all.

Needless to say, young me was disappointed when, instead of the action-packed combat of Gauntlet, I instead found myself with my first introduction to the stealth genre. This was a slower, more methodical rescue mission that I…really didn’t know what to make of at the time. It didn’t help that the graphics on the Apple II left a lot of ambiguity as to just what it was you were looking at sometimes. Sure, long tables and crates of guns are pretty straightforward, but what about the featureless squares? Looking back after all these years, they might’ve been sandbags, but who knows. Or the green circles? Barrels, maybe? But while I seem to remember you could break them, I don’t think they exploded in classic video game fashion, so, who can say?

Suffice it to say, the presentation, and the gameplay style combined to make a frustrating and underwhelming experience that I never really went back to after I was old enough to possibly appreciate it. These days, I don’t even think it’s available on GoG, so it would be hard to revisit, even if I wanted to. And honestly? I think there’s enough wannabe-nazi bullshit going on in real life to make the prospect seem depressingly relevant.

I mean, look at this cover–dude looks like he’s about to kick down a drawbridge and shoot Dracula in the face or something!

Tragicomedy

2025 has been an absolutely incredible year for games so far, which makes for a nice high point to distract us from, well…everything else. But the year’s only half-over, and we’ve already had Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (my presumptive GOTY, unless something else really floors me), Look Outside (a fantastic pixel art cosmic horror game), Blue Prince (an architectural roguelike, of all things), and the very underrated The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (a visual novel/strategy RPG from some of the creators of Danganronpa and Zero Escape). That last one brings us to today’s word.

buskin, noun – a knee-length boot

Learned from: The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (Nintendo Switch, PC)

Developed by Too Kyo Games, Media.Vision

Published by Aniplex, Xseed Games (2025)

When you go into a game with this kind of pedigree, you know you’re in for something a bit weird. Danganronpa is built around high school students getting kidnapped by a three-foot-tall, psychotic bear mascot and being forced to kill one another without being caught. The Zero Escape games are essentially escape rooms set in exotic locations, and filled with math puzzles and eccentric characters who might not be who they claim to be. Hundred Line tasks a group of unwilling highschoolers with defending a school surrounded by eternal flames, from alien(?) invaders for 100 days, because something hidden inside could doom humanity. But despite how bonkers these concepts are, the narratives they weave usually end up being surprisingly engaging.

Hundred Line has the same pedigree of quirky characters as the earlier games I mentioned, from a mascot character who doesn’t seem quite as evil as Monokuma from the Danganronpa games; to an orphan who hates the world and doesn’t care if it burns; to a thug with a heart of gold; to…someone whose initial impression can only be summed up as “Japanese Harley Quinn.”

Darumi is a clearly depressed, possibly psychotic ball of chaos, who goes into this situation fully expecting it to be a game of death (hello, fourth wall), and disappointed when she’s not expected to kill her fellow students. She has a penchant for ultra-gory horror movies, flings herself into combat with wonton abandon, and claims to not be very smart, while periodically peppering her dialog with (sometimes jumbled) philosophical references, and ten-dollar words like “phonemic” and “buskin.” At least I think it was Darumi who made some reference to a “sock and a buskin,” which it turns out are actually also terms for the classic Comedy and Tragedy masks from ancient Greek theater, since the tragic characters would wear longer boots, while comedic characters would parade around in thin tights referred to as “socks.” For a game about cartoonish space aliens, and teens with superpowers, that’s a pretty deep cut, and part of what I love about the writing from these creators.