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!
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 notPac-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.
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!
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.
I might be wrong in attributing that reference to Darumi, but it seems like something that would come out of her mouth.
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.”
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.
We are certainly living through interesting times–in the Chinese curse sense of the term–here in the US. It’s barely been a week into the new administration, and from one day to the next, you can pick a random group of people, and there’s a good chance that the status of their employment, healthcare, liberty, etc. will be anything but certain. Entire swathes of our society are already being reworked, and by this time next year, our cars are probably going to be running on coal, and doctors are going to be relegated to diagnosing illnesses as imbalances of the four humours. Which brings us to today’s word.
splenetic, adj. – spiteful, ill-tempered, or melancholic
Learned from: Astrologaster (PC, Mac, mobile, Nintendo Switch)
Developed by Nyamyam
Published by Nyamyam (2019)
Astrologaster is an odd little adventure game, where you play as a freelance physician in Elizabethan England, who believes that superior medical treatment can be provided by consulting the stars. You go through the story meeting various (sometimes famous and powerful) clients, listening to their complaints and symptoms, and after consulting your star charts, offering what astrology claims is the proper diagnosis and cure, like prescribing cherries to a particularly splenetic individual…or warning them away from cherries; I don’t exactly remember what the stars said, but I remember cherries were involved in the consultation.
Along the way, you can lie and try to screw over clients you don’t like, have love affairs, dodge draconian regulations, try to get rich by nefarious means, and more. Your character isn’t a particularly good person, as you come to learn over time (spoilers), and my main gripe with the game is that you have very little say in this. As far as I can tell, certain events play out regardless of what you do, and whether you’d want your character to act in certain ways or not. Still, it’s an interesting, and quite different narrative adventure game, and worth a look if you can find it on sale.
If nothing else, it’s funny to diagnose someone with the plague, and tell them their only hope lies in daily enemas of honey and prune juice or whatever.
Recently, one of my coworkers was out, having surgery to remove a kidney stone. It’s a process I hope never to have to go through (though, surgery almost sounds better than passing one naturally), but it does bring us to today’s word.
ptyalolith, noun – the hard buildup of minerals inside the organs or ducts
Learned from: Vigil: The Longest Night (PC, Playstation 4, XBox One, Nintendo Switch)
Developed by Glass Heart Games
Published by Neon Doctrine (2020)
As the title would suggest, Vigil is a dark game. It’s a 2D platformer, with a heavy emphasis on exploration, that casts you as a member of the titular Vigil, tasked with fighting against an encroaching darkness that seems to have enveloped the world. It would seem you’re not terribly good at your job, but all you can do is your best. Even when your best includes consuming the kidney stones of a dark god to increase your abilities. The Ptyalolith from the Other God feels like an item that would be more at home in Bloodborne, or Blasphemous (both games I’m sure I’ll post more about in the future), but it’s far from the strangest item in the game–you can end up wearing a grapefruit rind on your head, while dressed in a nun’s habit and wielding a broom as a weapon. While it’s a beautiful game, there are times it really doesn’t know what tone it wants to have. Still, there’s a lot of equipment, and a variety of play styles (some of which are pretty broken for a lot of the game), so it’s worth checking out.
Even if the title card does make it look like one of those “find the hidden object” games from the mid-2000s.
Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, though man, this past year was a doozy. I must have spent 3/4 of it either working longer hours to train people in, or working longer hours because we flat-out just didn’t have enough people. This shortage seems like it might finally be behind us (for the moment, at least), so I wanted to finally get back to some creative projects. In all honesty, I probably could’ve picked this back up a few weeks ago, but well, bodies at rest and all that. Which brings us to today’s word.
skiving, verb – progressive tense of “skive,” to slack off or avoid one’s duty
Learned from: Xenoblade Chronicles (Nintendo Switch, New 3DS, Wii)
Developed by Monolith Soft
Published by Nintendo (2010)
The fact that I haven’t finished Xenoblade Chronicles yet makes this word even more fitting. It’s not that it’s a bad game, or anything–far from it. With its mix of sci-fi and fantasy, engaging combat, and unique setting (pretty much all land masses are on the backs of two dead titans), it’s actually a very enjoyable title…even if the antagonists were more menacing before they started talking in thick, Cockney accents. That just feels weird, coming out of a hulking, murderous machine. But I digress. Some other game came out that distracted me while I was playing it (maybe Shin Megami Tensei V), and I just haven’t gotten back to it yet. I’d like to, though.
Anyway, in one of the earlier parts of the game, the main character is getting berated for not pulling his weight. Admittedly, in a world under the constant threat of invasion by nigh-unstoppable, mechanical behemoths, skiving is a bit more egregious than neglecting a little Internet blog, but I can still identify somewhat. And while I won’t be saving the world from a looming danger, I’m still going to pick up the slack and get back to doing things that matter to me. Expect more updates soon!
When your only tool is a sword, all your problems become things that need stabbing. Like this looming embodiment of procrastination.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a post all about COVID. At least, not directly. Over the past few months, the company I work for has bled off no fewer than seven employees. We aren’t large, so this has really hurt. And because there’s a labor shortage in the US right now (the exact reasons why are a subject for another time), every place is hiring. That means we’ve had a ridiculously hard time getting people to apply–and if they do apply, most of them only stick around for a month or so before leaving to look for something less stressful. “Normal” this year has become an endless cycle of working extra hours because we’re so short-staffed, leading to a more stressful environment among those of us who have stuck around, and the new employees we do get pick up on that, and don’t want to stay, leading to more long hours, and more stress, and…
I miss the old normal. Which brings us to today’s word.
mundane, adj. – normal, ordinary, commonplace
Learned from: The Immortal (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST, Genesis, NES, PC, Nintendo Switch)
Developed by Will Harvey
Published by Electronic Arts (1990)
The Immortal was an odd, but memorable game. Part-adventure game, part-light RPG, it put you in the shoes of a rather old wizard, trying to find his mentor somewhere in a sprawling labyrinth. It sounds pretty straightforward (aside from the protagonist older than 30–how often do you see something like that, these days?), but the game was anything but. Your adventure was chock-full of clever puzzles to solve (or bash your head against), traps to avoid (or blunder into), monsters to fight (or sneak by, or even befriend), and spells to cast–even spells as “mundane” as fireballs, according to the manual.
The world usually felt threatening, sometimes alien (the will-o’-the-wisps stand out in my memory), and always lived-in. Even despite the clunky controls, and some would say unfair difficulty (how was I supposed to know that chest was full of spiders, ahead of time?!), I still have very fond recollections of my time with The Immortal. Despite the bland initial setup, the game is anything but mundane.
Believe it or not, EA publishing good, inventive games also used to be normal.
Brain Rot 