Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage

I have a few days off from work coming up, and I’m not wholly sure how the place is going to function in my absence. I also don’t think I care. I put in for this PTO before various circumstances led up to be operating with literally half the staff we’re supposed to have. At the time I put in the request, it was largely just because I didn’t want to deal with people and political talk for a few days around voting in the primaries (I put in for time off in early November for a similar reason). But now? We’ve been barely a skeleton crew for over two months, and it turns out this brief respite from work is more for my mental health than anything else. Which brings us to today’s word.

zoochosis, noun – a condition arising in captive animals presenting as repetitive and/or harmful behaviors, believed to be caused from the stress of captivity

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

Developed by Clapperheads

Published by Clapperheads, Storymode (2024)

Full disclosure: I have never actually played Zoochosis. It landed on my radar because the initial trailers looked creepy and different: You play as an overnight zookeeper who discovers that some of the animals in your care are infected with alien parasite things that cause them to mutate into Resident Evil-style abominations under certain conditions. It was a neat concept, and the trailers made it seem like once one of these animals transformed, you’d either have to chase it, or be chased yourself, potentially through the entire zoo, until you managed to escape or subdue it.

Then the game came out, the reviews were decidedly lukewarm at best, and I decided to watch a bit of gameplay before I decided to buy it.

I’m glad I did, because most of what the early trailers put forth was misleading at best. The basic setting is the same, but you don’t discover these horrors for yourself–you’re straight-up told about them, because the zoo administration is aware and actively cultivating these parasites for…reasons. The zoo is also significantly more compartmentalized than it initially seemed, meaning you have to deal with each set of animals/mutants in a pretty small area. Add in bad voice acting, dodgy animations, and gameplay that seemed much more tedious than expected, and I’m glad I didn’t pull the trigger on this one. That’s not even touching on the laundry list of bugs that, judging from the comments on Steam, have largely gone unfixed.

I actually didn’t know zoochosis was a real word until just recently; I figured it was just something the developers made up as a cool-sounding title. So, for as much of a mess as the final product turned out to be, at least I got something out of the disappointment.

I wanted to run from mutant giraffe monsters through a dimly-lit zoo, not play a first-person farming sim sprinkled with glitchy, half-baked, small-scale combat.

Can’t touch this

I was talking to a coworker today about the recent holiday weekend. Neither of us went to the fireworks, because we don’t really like crowds–especially post-COVID. And I mentioned how it’s kind of amazing that I actually went to a convention as big as Dragon Con about ten years ago, considering people were packed into the hallways like sardines. Simpler times, and I guess being in costume helped. But that brings us to today’s word.

aphenphosmphobia, noun – the fear of being touched

Learned from: Death Stranding (PC, Mac, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by Kojima Productions

Published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, 505 Games (2019)

If you know me personally, you know I am not a fan of Hideo Kojima. At all. I think his games are bloated and pretentious, and the man really should just start making movies. But Death Stranding was free on the Epic Games Store at one point, and for that price, I figured it was worth a try. I still want my money back.

In the future, a cataclysmic event has fractured the United States, and inexplicably caused what remains to look an awful lot like Iceland. Invisible monsters roam the land which can only be detected by weird test tube babies, and if someone dies they explode for some reason, unless their bodies are properly dealt with. And we’re expected to take all this seriously, when the game is populated by characters with names like “Die-Hardman.”

I hate Hideo Kojima so much.

Anyway, our hero, Sam Porter Bridges, is tasked with delivering cargo from one isolated settlement to another, to try and reestablish connections between people. And in case the “joke” in his name flew over your head, I’m pretty sure the game explains to you how fitting it is, considering he’s porting things to people to build bridges. Oh, and Sam has aphenphosmphobia. The irony!

Most of the “gameplay” involves you guiding Sam across vast expanses of empty, bizarrely treeless wilderness (because again, post-apocalyptic America looks like Iceland, I guess), listening to mellow music and trying to avoid any slopes that are too steep–because Sam might fall and hurt himself or damage his cargo. And honestly, the implied threat of having to make the long, boring trek back to base after making a misstep was enough to keep me meticulously navigating him through the first mission. Then I got to the second task, and encountered roving gangs of people who are just so keen on making deliveries, that they attack any couriers they see to try and steal their cargo, and I just couldn’t anymore.

I don’t care how cool the boss fights look. They aren’t worth suffering through the rest of the game.

A war crime by any other name

Well, it’s TACO Tuesday, and I for one have never been more glad. If you’ve been paying attention to…well, anything lately, you know that the United States was just hours away from committing premeditated genocide, before our witless leader agreed to a two-week ceasefire. But still, threatening to “end a civilization” is tantamount to inciting genocide, which is forbidden under the Genocide Convention of 1948, under Article 3(c). Which, in a way that is simultaneously depressing and absurd, brings us to today’s word.

flagitious, adj. – criminal, villainous

Learned from: Monark (PC, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Playstation 5)

Developed by Lancarse

Published by FuRyu, NIS America (2022)

Before the chances of WWIII breaking out at any given moment became increasingly non-zero, I had quite a few games coming out in spring that I was looking forward to. I guess I still am, but the growing anxiety over whether I’ll be alive to play, let alone enjoy many of them is dampening my enthusiasm. Still, I recently finished Resident Evil: Requiem (which was fantastic), and I wanted to try and hack away at a bit of my backlog before Pragmata comes out. I got through the rather short, and disappointing horror title The Chant, and I wanted something a little different, so I landed on a divisive JRPG from former Shin Megami Tensei developers, called Monark. It’s not necessarily bad so far (I’m about 6 hours in), but I’m already wondering how much the personality test gimmick really affects things beyond what equipment some characters can use. We’ll see as time goes on, since this isn’t the only word it’s taught me, in those 6 hours.

You can thank Vanitas for that. He’s this floating, black, stuffed rabbit thing that is the source of your powers, and claims to be a daemon–their spelling, not mine. He makes a pact with your character so you can better-withstand the sanity-draining mist that’s fallen over your school for reasons that are so far unexplained. The consequences of this pact are also unexplained at this point in the story, but eventually he has to get something out of it, being evil and all.

Until the answers start coming in, he assists you here and there, with cryptic advice and the aforementioned powers. He also has an affinity for alliteration, along with rhyming at every occasion. I learned today’s word when my character’s little sister glommed onto Vanitas, and I refused to help free him–leading him to call me a “foul, flagitious fiend,” if memory serves.

I unironically like this guy a lot. He’s a weird, goofy-yet-creepy mascot character, but he’s clever, erudite, and at times doesn’t seem as menacing as his daemonic nature would have you believe. No idea what his endgame is yet, but right now, he’s my second-favorite character, after Ryotaro, the delinquent heir to a wealthy family who doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him.

They apparently made plushies of him, even! Which is a…bold choice for a game that I don’t believe was financially successful.

Why do I live up here?

It’s a question I get asked on occasion. My area is pretty far removed from…a lot of things, really; it’s at least a four-hour drive to get to any sort of truly large city. The local economy isn’t exactly great, property values are absurdly high, when you look at how little there is to do around here, and while there is nice scenery, it tends to be buried under multiple feet of snow for a third to half of the year. (Sometimes, multiple feet of snow fall all at once, as is the case now in Snowpocalypse, Part 9: This Time There Are Sharks for Some Reason.) And if you’re new to the region–or if you’ve never been to my neck of the woods–I can see why those things would drive you away. But if you actually spend some time in upper Michigan, and develop a feel for the place, you might find the solitude and the slower pace of life to your liking. Which brings us to today’s word.

callow, adj. – inexperienced, young, immature

Learned from: Jack Move (PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, XBox One)

Developed by So Romantic

Published by HypeTrain Digital (2022)

Jack Move is a short, sweet cyberpunk RPG about Noa, a hacker who gets wrapped up in a web of corporate intrigue while just trying to get by in a dystopian world ruled by megacorporations. Fairly bog standard stuff, but there are some emotional beats thrown in here and there, along with some fantastic pixel art. One of the more interesting bits of background plot involves a complicated history between Noa’s mother (who is dead), her father (who she feels abandoned her), and her uncle (who largely raised her).

Her uncle, Guin, is a bit of a dandy. Indulgent and permissive toward Noa, he does have his limits, and at one point where she’s getting in his face about something, Guin verbally slaps her down, calling her a “callow hypocrite.” And really, he’s not off base. Noa is young, and when you’re that age, you think you know everything. And to be fair, sometimes a teenager might know quite a bit; but sometimes, they might be in over their heads without realizing it.

That’s really what the story of Jack Move is about, at its core. Beneath all the evil corporate trappings, and cyberpunk lingo, there’s a story about a girl just trying to find her footing, discover what’s truly important, and figure herself out. Again, the game is nothing revolutionary, but it’s colorful, fun, and has a lot of heart.

That’s Noa, front and center, her dad to the far right, and the suave bastard in the upper right is Guin.

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!

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!

Hindsight

We’re currently undergoing a remodel where I work, and it’s…not really going as planned. They just got all of the offices usable again, a week and a half behind schedule, the new desks they put in take up like 75% of the floor space, and one–and only one–of the offices has carpet that looks like dirty, bare concrete. It’s not mine, but I really have to wonder if the CEO just doesn’t like that particular person or something. But beyond being behind schedule, this whole project is seeming like a worse and worse idea as time goes on: We’re losing workspace on the teller line (I work in a financial institution) that we really kinda need during shift changes. No one seems to know where we’re putting the printers, since we’re losing counter space. Actually, no one seems to know what the final product is going to look like–but somehow we’re putting in a waiting area for our members…that’s going to be in the same general vicinity as the entrance to the vault. Is there going to be any sort of wall or dividing barrier between the general public and the vault door (not to mention our bathroom)?

It’s almost like nobody stopped to think this through. But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. Which brings us to today’s word.

vigesimal, adj. – base-20, as in a numeric system

Learned from: Subject 13 (Playstation 4, Mac, PC, XBox One)

Developed by Microids

Published by Microids (2015)

Subject 13 is an adventure game that came out during a time when that particular genre seemed to largely be dead, or at least forgotten. Thankfully, the genre is experiencing something of a renaissance these days, but there was a span of a good 20 years when any adventure game that actually got released was worth checking out, just for the novelty of it.

At a glance, Subject 13 paints a decent picture of itself: attractive, pre-rendered environments; a mysterious sci-fi setting; varied and creative puzzles. Seeing it in motion is…less impressive, as the animations leave something to be desired. Hearing it also doesn’t do it any favors; the sound effects feel almost public domain, and the voice acting is flat-out bad (though, I understand the developer is French, so English dubbing might’ve been lower on their budget list than the rest of it. Not every small French game studio can have the production values of the folks at Sandfall). But again, pickings were slim in those days, so any port in a storm. Speaking of…

The real issues I had with the game though, are with the console port. I played this on PS4, and in converting it for that console (and presumably the XBone), Microids made some of the most baffling decisions I’ve ever seen. Some of it’s understandable: There’s no mouse interface (and nobody programmed for that touchpad thing on the PS4 controllers). So rather than just clicking where you want your character to go, you have to stumble around the not-as-big-as-they-look pre-rendered backdrops like a drunken orangutan, trying to get your guy to go up a flight of stairs or whatever. That’s…acceptable. The baffling part is pretty much everything else.

See, a lot of the puzzles require you to manipulate objects in ways that, again, would’ve been intuitive with a mouse. But for the console release, virtually everything requires you to hold down a trigger, and then rotate a thumbstick, regardless of whether it makes any sense or not. Turning a dial? Rotate the thumbstick. Sliding a panel? Rotate the thumbstick. Trying to enter a number into a device? Rotate the damn thumbstick! And it’s even worse, because the sensitivity on this interface is all over the damn map. You could be trying to move some device one notch to the left, but have to rotate the thumbstick in the opposite direction you’d expect, only to have it whip past half a dozen notches before you can stop. It is legitimately one of the worst control schemes I’ve ever come across, and when you combine it with the awful navigation to get your guy from point A to point B, it made some of the otherwise inventive puzzles almost unplayable.

I realize I haven’t talked about the story yet, and while it’s also a bit of a mess, I should at least do broad strokes. You play as Franklin Fargo, a professor who’s tried to end his own life by driving his car off a bridge, for reasons that become clearer as the game goes on. But your plan is foiled when you find yourself waking up in a futuristic pod, with no idea of where you are, how you got there, or if you can trust the disembodied voice that starts talking to you. But the voice eventually leads you, GLADoS-style, through an abandoned research facility and into a bizarre plot involving the nature of consciousness, multiverse theory, and Mayan prophecies (heavily leaning into puzzles based on their vigesimal number system). It’s…weird. Nowhere near as unhinged as, say, Indigo Prophecy, but it really does try to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. And in an adventure this short, that’s a pretty tall order.

All in all, Subject 13 isn’t a bad game, per se, but it’s certainly rough around the edges–even without the limitations of the console versions. If you’re curious, I can only in good conscience tell you to pick it up on Steam, and avoid the awful PS4/XBox ports.

Speaking of awful, just *look* at this, and tell me you see anything but the concrete floor of a steel mill that’s been abandoned for years. The other carpeting jobs are nowhere near this bad.

Upside down

As I write this, it’s May 2nd, 2025. If you’re in the United States, that means it’s 5/2/25: a number that looks the same if you flip it upside down, at least in certain typefaces, and so long as you ignore the slashes and the first two digits of the year. If you’re in other, saner parts of the world that list the date in a more sensible day/month/year order, then this happened back in February. Sorry, we Americans do a lot of things in the stupidest way possible. Anyway, this brings us to today’s word.

strobogrammatic, adj. – something, as a number, that appears the same upside down as it does right-side up

Learned from: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch)

Developed by Simogo

Published by Annapurna Interactive (2024)

I’d always thought that numbers that looked the same upside down were neat–I mean, who didn’t spell out “BOOBIES” on a calculator at some point as a kid? Though in that case, it’s not a true strobogrammatic number, since the result isn’t identical to how it looks right-side up. Or like when we got a verification key fob for one of the stations at work, and I inadvertently read it upside down and got us locked out of the system.

Anyway, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes pulls a lot from real-life escape rooms, being full of number and word puzzles, some of which are strobogrammatic. The game, itself, is…weird. It’s like if you threw Twin Peaks, The Twilight Zone, Clue, and an international film festival into a blender, and topped it with a dash of The King in Yellow. It casts you as an artist(?) called to a remote mansion at the behest of an eccentric filmmaker, who wants to use your talents to create a truly transcendental work of art that may unmake reality itself…maybe.

Or maybe not. It’s a very surreal game that’s open to interpretation nearly every step of the way. I don’t want to say much else, because it’s very much worth playing. It’s a very unique, memorable narrative that stands out among…pretty much anything else out there.

It works with words sometimes, too! Turn this upside down, and it spells “abpa.”

Everything old is new again

Pixel graphics! ’80s references across all of popular media! The stock market crashing! Retro is in, baby, and it’s only a matter of time before 3D glasses make a comeback in movie theaters again…assuming theaters survive the streaming wars. But hey, paying way too much to go see a movie in dirty room full of loud people is totally retro too, so maybe there’s hope! Anyway, this all does lead us to today’s word.

anaglyph, noun – an image printed in two different colors overlayed across each other, to give the illusion of being in three dimensions when viewed through special glasses

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

Developed by LocalThunk

Published by Playstack (2024)

Balatro, if you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, or you’re reading this in the future, is a deconstruction of the roguelike deckbuilding genre, where there are no monsters, no dungeons, no trips across the stars–just poker. Your cards are literal playing cards that can be modified in various ways to give more points, generate more money, trigger multiple times, generate other cards, etc. It’s a game that you really have to play to understand its appeal, but it’s simple, addictive, and worth every penny.

As you play and learn winning combos, Balatro offers you ways to up the challenge, from decks that are missing cards, to higher stakes runs that impose restrictions on what you can do. But the further you go, the more you unlock, and beating the game on the “black chip” difficulty unlocks the Anaglyph Deck, which gives you a free double tag whenever you beat the boss blind at the end of an ante. That probably doesn’t mean much if you haven’t played it, but it can be a useful bonus. If you’re lucky.

Once upon a time, these were *the* coolest thing. I swear.

Not quite eating crow…

In my neck of the woods, there’s a restaurant chain called Culver’s, famous for their “concrete mixers” (custard shakes), and burgers billed as “butter burgers.” Delicious, but probably even more horrible for you than your average fast food burger, which is saying something. That said, I always assumed that the chain was just named after someone–and it is. But it turns out “culver” is also an actual word, and now that I know what it means, I’ll never be able to look at the restaurant the same way again…

culver, noun – a dove or pigeon

Learned from: Elden Ring (PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, XBox One, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by FromSoftware

Published by Bandai Namco Entertainment (2022)

FromSoftware games are known for being punishingly difficult, but also pretty dang weird sometimes. Case in point: Rennala, one of the main bosses of Elden Ring. When you first face her, she’s floating in the air, surrounded by a horde of half-formed…daughters, I guess? And she’s cradling something in her arms, cooing at it and calling it her “little culver.” It’s hard to really make out just what it is at first, but the whole situation is a bit creepy.

Regardless, I now have the irrevocable connotation that there’s a fast food chain that’s essentially called “Pigeon’s.” And I want to note, I in no way mean this to imply that Culver’s serves burgers made from pigeon meat (AKA: squab, so you’re getting a two-fer, today!). It’s just an unfortunate, and kind of amusing coincidence that their name happens to have another meaning.