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.

The fury of a thousand suns

Part of what I love about this blog is that I occasionally still find new words to add to it in the present day. Coming home from an awful day at work and playing a good game is a welcome relief; discovering a new word in the process is even better. And believe me, the days at work lately have been truly abysmal. We aren’t operating with a skeleton crew so much as a stick figure drawn by a kid in the remedial class. Barebones would be an improvement, and it’s making me increasingly angry, especially since the closest end in sight is at least a month away. That’s a story for another time, but in a roundabout way, it brings us to today’s word.

sinter, verb – to heat a powder until it bonds into a solid

Learned from: Mina the Hollower (PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch 1&2, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by Yacht Club Games

Published by Yacht Club Games (2026)

Mina the Hollower is an interesting little game that’s a bit like old-school Zelda on steroids. You play as the eponymous Mina, a mouse engineer who’s tasked with repairing a group of generators you built some time ago, because they’re mysteriously breaking down. Along the way, you’ll die a lot, fight a wide variety of enemies, and occasionally throw their remains into the trusty bone sinterer in your hideout to use as resources for leveling up. You know, just like Zelda.

Actually, there’s quite a lot here that sets Mina apart, even in just the four or five hours I’ve spent with it so far. You still have the top-down open world, an array of secondary weapons that also sometimes have utility in traversing the map, and all that, but if you dig just a little under the surface, things get more interesting and complex.

Pun fully intended, because one of the game’s core mechanics involves burrowing underground. You can do this to dodge enemies, get more distance on your jumps, move faster, unearth buried items, and more. It takes some getting used to–especially learning what you can tunnel under safely, and which things will still hurt you–but it becomes a really fun and engaging gameplay mechanic after awhile. I’m not 100% sure the game is worth the hype it’s been getting yet, but it’s not bad by any stretch.

The game thoughtfully provided its own definition. Which is about the most generous thing it’ll offer you as a player; *Mina the Hollower* is hard!

You oughta know

As we progress further and further into a dystopian cyberpunk future, without most of the cool tech, I occasionally find myself looking back at what might’ve been. I mean, if we’re careening toward a megacorp-controlled future anyway, we should at least have the magic from Shadowrun, or the consciousness backups of Altered Carbon, or the the cybernetic limbs of…well, any of them. Instead, it’s just the growing social and economic inequality, AI threatening our jobs, and rising international tensions and violence. Which brings us to today’s word.

aught, noun – zero, nothing

Learned from: Deus Ex (PC, Macintosh, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 2, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by Ion Storm

Published by Eidos Interactive (2000)

Deus Ex was one of the first immersive sim games I played. You could call it an RPG. You could call it an action game. Or a stealth game. Any of those labels fit, depending on how you wanted to play it, and for the time, that was mind-blowing. Hell, you could even beat most of the bosses without directly fighting them, if you did the in-game research to find their weaknesses. You really could do anything.

Well…pretty much. The first mission or two is more or less set in stone–including the part where you’re handed a 30.06 (or thirty-aught-six) sniper rifle–because they had to set the stage somehow. Also, there’s no option to just stick with the organization you start off working for, after a certain point. Which is understandable, because the folks at Ion Storm would have had to make essentially an entire separate game if you could. And sure, the ending you get does ultimately boil down to a single choice you make in the final chapter, but everything in between is up to you.

Want to take the slow, careful, stealthy approach? Go for it. Do you desire to commit literal war crimes every time you run into an enemy? Go nuts, as long as you have enough white phosphorous rounds. Want to hack your way through every security system? Talk your way through things? A mix of any or all of the above? Just wander your way through the world, uncovering weird experiments, government coverups, maybe/possibly aliens, and more? The neon-lit world is your oyster. Deus Ex was remarkable when it released over a quarter of a century ago, and I’d wager it’s still worth visiting now. Just don’t let the blocky, low-res character models throw you off.

Somehow, a less grim future than the one we’re heading towards.

SSDD

So, I’m sure all of you are probably aware of, and perhaps sick of hearing about, this past weekend’s incident at the White House correspondents’ dinner, and the fact that the Internet doesn’t seem to be buying it. Because the other “assassination attempt” leading up to the 2024 election was fake (yes, people did die, but the loathsome dung eater was never in any danger–ears don’t grow back). And considering he used this most recent one to immediately springboard into how badly he needs his shiny gold ballroom, it’s no surprise people are assuming this one was staged, too. Which brings us to today’s word.

homology, noun – a similarity between multiple things, hinting at a common origin

Learned from: Neverness to Everness (PC, Mac, mobile, Playstation 5)

Developed by Hotta Studio

Published by Perfect World Games (2026)

In other, better news this week, one of my most anticipated games of the year came out. Neverness to Everness is like Control mixed with GTA and inFamous, taking place in a massive city full of strange anomalies, and people with superpowers who investigate and subdue/contain those anomalies. In between missions and the incredibly flashy combat, you can drive around, play minigames, sightsee with drones, get arrested, escape from prison, go fishing (because of course you can go fishing in an anime game), and more. I’m only a little way’s in, and already one of the cutscenes taught me this word, as one of the characters muses over the Homology Theory that suggests the anomalies and the people with powers might all stem from the same mysterious source.

Grand Theft Auto has never really appealed to me, largely because it’s a little too real-world. In fact, I may be one of the few gamers on the planet who legitimately could not care less about GTA6. But throw in extradimensional monsters, and characters who can run up walls, and stylish anime aesthetics to boot? Now you have my attention. Time will tell if this one has true staying power, but from my initial impressions, NTE is vibrant, charming, and just plain fun.

And as it stands, I would follow this slightly derpy catgirl who thinks my character smells like cocoa on whatever adventures her heart desires.

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.

Jackpot

Well, we’re coming up on the end of 2025, and what an ending it’s proving to be, on my end. My wife and I got back home yesterday, threading the needle between closures of the Mackinac Bridge: one due to an, er…incident that thankfully was resolved safely, and the other due to weather. The weather-related incident is ongoing; it rolled in a few hours after we got home, and dumped over two feet of snow in less than 24 hours, with high winds making for some pretty high drifts. As a result, neither of us had to go back to work today, since pretty much the entire city is shut down. All in all, I think we really lucked out. Which brings us to today’s word.

croupier, noun – a person who runs a gambling table

Learned from: Dispatch (PC, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Playstation 5)

Developed by AdHoc Studio

Published by AdHoc Studio (2025)

Dispatch is a title that grabbed my attention as soon as I saw the first trailer. Written by some of the talent from the old Telltale Studios (of The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us fame), Dispatch casts you as an Iron Man-equivalent character who loses his suit during a fight with his nemesis. Unlike Tony Stark, however, your guy isn’t rich, so he can’t just rebuild and start over. Dejected, and suddenly directionless, he gets recruited into a program for rehabilitating supervillains, acting as their dispatcher for jobs. The logic being, even if he doesn’t have the suit, he still has the tactical mind of a hero, and can still do some good.

What follows is something of an office comedy with metahumans, as you try to find a new purpose in life, and form relationships (both good and bad) with this band of misfits. One of them is a winged assassin named Coupé, which I understand is French for “to cut.” But there’s a scene where the team is all talking at one point about doing something after work, and someone (maybe Punch Up, the 3-foot-tall circus strongman with the strong Irish accent), says Coupé wouldn’t have much fun since she’d have to be manning the roulette table or something. Punch Up does not speak French. Though, as mix-ups go, even knowing what a croupier is (as Coupé herself angrily points out), is still kind of impressive.

Dispatch tells a great story, full of quirky humor, difficult choices, and oddball characters who end up strangely endearing by the end.

Even Coupé is less stoic and humorless than she seems at first. It isn’t all about the stabbing with her.

Can a metaphor be a single word?

A rhetorical question, really; the answer is yes, but it’s generally harder to accomplish. Today’s word feels like an apt descriptor of…well, a lot of what’s going on lately, if you stretch it a little.

purulent, adj. – filled with, or oozing pus

Learned from: Cronos: The New Dawn (PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch 2, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S)

Developed by Bloober Team

Published by Bloober Team (2025)

People sometimes ask me why I like horror games. “What do you find so appealing about being scared?” “Do you like watching terrible things happen to people?” Etc. and so on. Being scared can be thrilling, but I’d argue it’s the perseverance over terrible situations that’s more of a draw than witnessing them on their own. But the real answer is, in horror games (the good ones at least, that give you some agency aside from running and hiding), you can face the awful things in the world and beat them to death with a two-by-four. It’s a nice contrast to real life, where it feels like all we can do is watch powerlessly as everything just gets progressively worse. And if you have any doubts about the world ending, just look at the fact that Silksong finally came out, and we got a Silent Hill sequel that isn’t absolute dog water. We just need Valve to shadow drop Half-Life 3, and the final seal will be broken.

But today, I’m not here to talk about any of those games. Cronos: The New Dawn is a really weird, and surprisingly excellent psychological/body horror game from a studio I’d nearly given up on after the clunky and disappointing Layers of Fear, and the pretty-but-shallow The Medium. You play as a Traveler from some point in the future, diving backwards through time to…acquire certain individuals present during the outbreak of a horrible mutagenic plague that destroyed the world for…uh…reasons. I don’t want to spoil anything, because experiencing this bizarre, unsettling mindfuck of a story firsthand is actually a big part of the fun. It shouldn’t come as any surprise though, that this plague is of the icky, goopy, body-deforming variety, with early medical reports tactfully describing the horrors unfolding with terms like “purulent lesions.”

I know that Silksong stole pretty much all the thunder in the gaming scene as of the time of this writing, but there are other games that have come out recently which also deserve attention if the reviews are any indication. Looking forward to trying out Hell is Us and Silent Hill f after I finish Cronos. I’ll get to Silksong eventually, so long as the “highly unusual” meeting of hundreds of generals in Virginia next week doesn’t in fact usher in World War III….

I’d almost prefer an anomalous, reality-warping plague, personally.

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!

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.