Haven: Love on the Run Beyond the Stars

There are a lot of indie games that I’ve been meaning to try and just putting on the backburner; there are just so many titles out there nowadays, and stuff will slip through the cracks, but I do make an effort to circle back around to things on occasion. Such was the case with The Game Bakers’ late 2020 release Haven; I had been curious about their previous game (2016’s Furi, a boss rush game) before deciding it wasn’t for me, and after seeing a lot of praise for Haven, decided it sounded more up my alley.

But I sort of forgot about it after that, until a few weeks ago when I was itching for something new to try, and it popped up in my feed thanks to a recent update. That seemed like as good an onboarding point as any, so I gave it a shot. And after that, I was so enthralled that I basically ended up shotgunning the game in under a week.



Haven is also a weird game, because it feels simultaneously very difficult and very easy to describe. On the one hand, at its core, it’s one of the oldest story archetypes in existence: that of the star-crossed lovers, just set in a far-off sci-fi world. Yu and Kay are the main pair here, young adults from some sort of interplanetary empire known as The Apiary, fleeing their arranged marriages to live together. The game opens with them having recently settled on Source, a far-off shattered world hopefully outside of The Apirary’s purview, following a daring escape from home.

While deciding what to do next, their new home, an RV-esque spaceship Yu fixed up called the Nest, sustains heavy damage from an earthquake, stranding them in place. And so begins the game proper; you guide Yu and Kay around the fragments of Source, searching for replacement parts, foraging for food, fending off wildlife, and dodging The Apiary’s search efforts. There’s constantly stuff to do to keep this loving couple up and functioning, and it gives the game’s story an almost episodic, cliffhanger-heavy approach that is well-executed and addicting.

Meet the Robinsons Is Two Clicks Off of Being a Disney Classic

I love Disney movies (that may have been obvious already, not sure), and I love time travel movies (may not be as obvious), so I figured it was long overdo for me to revisit what remains to this day the only film in the Disney Animated Canon to tackle time travel, 2007's Meet the Robinsons.

The movie has kind of been forgotten, which maybe isn't too surprising; it did come out at a rather low point in Disney's history, after all, on the heels of a string of failures in the first few years of the millennium.* But, it came right before the turnaround that lead to the re-invigoration of the studio, where we find it today once again something of a juggernaut, and appropriately enough, contains a lot of very strong points in what's otherwise a solid but occasionally uneven movie.

*I don't feel like getting too into the nitty-gritty of each movie, but I feel like it's pretty safe to say the only unqualified success for the studio in the early 2000s was Lilo and Stitch. And while there were some good movies in that stretch that underperformed, I don't think I'll run into too much resistance in saying that the three films immediately preceding Meet the Robinsons, namely Chicken Little, Home on the Range, and Brother Bear, are all among Disney's weakest feature films.

Event[0] Video Game Review & Analysis: Combining an Amazing Central Mechanic with a Neat Little Story

A while ago, I finished the video game Event[0], and I found it interesting enough that I want to write about it. I feel like I don’t write enough about video games*, despite playing them at least semi-frequently, and I’m interested enough in the medium that I’d like to change that. Apologies if this article winds up a little rough as a result, but I figure it’s better to try it and learn from the experience than never bother. But more over, I think there should be more in-depth analysis of video games, as there is in other mediums, and I’d like to chip in, so this seems like a good chance to try.

*I really, really wanted to write something last year about Undertale, but I could never get an angle to approach it from other than “this is just so good in every way, play it”. I still don’t have anything else to say other than this, but it’s still worth saying I think.

First, a general introduction to the game. Event[0] is a first-person/environmental narrative* science fiction game created by Parisian developers Ocelot Society**. Set in an alternate 2012 where commercial space travel has been going strong since the 1980s, you play as a space traveler who is forced to evacuate a doomed ship at the start, only to eventually drift to a mostly-abandoned decades-old ship.

*I’ve heard a bunch of names for this genre, and these two seemed the most common, so I split the difference.

**Also of note: the game was financed, in part, by the Indie Fund, a group that specializes in helping fund smaller video game projects. In under a decade, they’ve already built up a pretty good library of titles. And if you’ve seen the very-good Indie Game: The Movie, it’s worth noting that one of the founders is Jonathan Blow, one of that documentary’s focus, as well as notable creator in his own right of titles like Braid and The Witness.

The catch is, there’s one member of the crew left: the ship’s artificial intelligence, Kaizen-85. You have figure out how to work with Kaizen to repair the Nautilus to get it running again, all while determining what happened to the rest of the crew.

Having to butter up or coerce an in-game character into helping you isn’t anything radically new in a video game. What is new is the central system Ocelot Society has built the game around: Kaizen (and the rest of the ship as a whole, including things like doors) can only be interacted with through discussion. Specifically, by typing into various consoles scattered around the ship to “talk” with Kaizen. Not picking pre-set choices or anything like that that you might see in another game; you have free reign to converse with Kaizen in just about any way that you’d like. It’s really quite amazing.*

*For anyone curious how this works, the always-amazing Game Maker’s Toolkit has a fascinating video that digs into the nitty-gritty of this a little more.

With all that description out of the way, I want to discuss my thoughts on the game a bit more. There will be some spoilers eventually, so be warned, but if you find this interesting so far and want to discover things for yourself, I’d definitely recommend checking it out. It’s a little on the short side as a warning, so if you aren’t sure, maybe hold off until it’s on sale or something, but one way or another, it’s worth a look. Also, I’ll start on the game’s mechanics and design before moving on to story stuff, so if you’re more concerned about narrative spoilers, you can read a little further.

And with that…

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Review

I finally finished The First Fifteenth Lives of Harry August by Claire North (the pen name of Catherine Webb) and figured I would take a few moments to jot down my thoughts on it. Let’s break this down into three sections.

The shortest review: Yep, I liked it. Check it out if you get a chance!


The not-quite-as-short review: For those of you who need things like plot details or specific reasons a reviewer liked things, fine, I guess I’ll elaborate. As you might have been able to guess from the title, the titular Harry August is a special individual born in 1919, one who, upon dying, finds himself back at the moment of his birth with all of his memories from the life that he just died in. He meanders through life (er, lives) trying to figure out what this means and what to do about it before finally meeting a mysterious club of similar individuals. And after discovering this secret society, he learns something even more shocking: the end of the world is accelerating. Something has affected the future, and is drawing the apocalypse closer and closer to the modern day. And with this, we have our hook for the plot.

In actuality, the book drops this last bit of info immediately with no context before backtracking to explain, so the proper investigation into what’s destroying the Earth faster and faster comes sufficiently later in the story. A lot of time is spent explaining the nature of Harry’s ability and what he does with his many lives, followed by setting up the world and history of the Chronus Club.

A quick search online tells me that not everyone is fond of this fact, but I actually liked it quite a bit. It sets a nice, leisurely pace that gives you all the details necessary to feel immersed in this intriguing society. No part of it feels extraneous, and despite covering a lot of ground, it actually moves rather quickly, like a brisk but winding trek through beautiful and unexplored territory.

And the layout, which bounces between lives in a more thematic rather than chronological way, keeps you on your toes. Despite all the overlapping lives to keep track of, it’s actually pretty straightforward once you get a feel for things, and North does a good job of knowing right when the reader will have everything under their thumb and can take new, large developments on for consideration.

It helps that Harry makes for an interesting narrator, something of a curious philosopher who is forced into frequent deep introspection due to his condition; he’s too different to fit in with the “linears” (those who experience time once, then die), especially those of his era, but more inquisitive and restless than his peers. He takes on a wider range of experiences in his many lives than most of them, which gives each life a distinct feel. This has the interesting effect of giving a story with a very minimal main cast the feel of a more sprawling story with a wider, more spread-out cast. And each one being many of the same characters in different situations makes it feel like a series of “What If” stories. I’m a big fan of both things.

About halfway through the book, once the conflict proper has been brought to the forefront, the story shifts into something more chronological and driving, something of a multi-generational, science-fiction “Count of Monte Cristo”-esque revenge tale where we get to see a methodical and cunning protagonist slowly lay down the pieces to a large plan, which I am once again all for in a narrative.

If this still all sounds good to you, then you should definitely give it a shot. If you want to read any more, though, stick around for part three…


The even-longer-still-but-still-short review, this part of which contains plot spoilers, so maybe hold off if you want to keep it all a surprise: Some other stuff that I want to discuss about the novel:

Arrival is a Fantastic Movie, and a Wonderful Adaptation of Story of Your Life

Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve might be my favorite movie of the year. It’s definitely in the discussion, and probably the frontrunner at this point (which is no small feat, given that it’s up against movies like Sing Street and Swiss Army Man*). And on the one hand, that shouldn’t seem like too much of a surprise. The novella that it’s based on, Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, is one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing.

*I meant to write about each of these earlier in the year and never got around to it. Maybe I’ll circle back around if I have time.

But it’s not always that simple. When the adaptation was first announced, I was incredibly skeptical that such a project would work. After all, when you look at the story, it has approximately zero or even negative overlap with what you would traditionally associate with a blockbuster movie.

I mean, it’s a hard science fiction story that’s mainly about how linguists would handle a first contact situation, with long passages of exposition informing the reader about the mechanics of the process and an inverse amount of action. Meanwhile, it’s structurally non-linear with a major emotional twist that hinges on the medium being prose; the second that it would be displayed visually, it would give itself away. If any of that screams “$50 million blockbuster” to you, you’re lying to yourself.

And yet, they pulled it off. It may be the best adaptation of an already-incredible source material since…shoot, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World maybe? And much like Scott Pilgrim, it’s perfect in part because it realizes the key to making a great movie from a great book (/short story/series of graphic novels, in these cases) is not to make it a 1:1 adaptation of the source material, but instead to understand the different constraints of the different mediums and make changes to preserve the feel of the original in a way that works better for the screen.

What I’d like to do here is just dig in a little deeper to those changes, and pull apart what they are and why they were made. And I’m going to try and do it in a way that doesn’t spoil either Arrival or Story of Your Life because, seriously, they’re fantastic and everyone should check them out. However, if you have only seen the former or read the latter, that should be fine. The film is a faithful adaptation, know that the basic story beats are the same, and you already know where the other is headed*. Hopefully, I will be a good enough writer to explain the situation, whether you experience one, both, or neither.

*I mention this because I was concerned that the short story would be made unrecognizable to work as a movie script, but this was thankfully not the case.

First, to fit in with the demands for of modern blockbusters, Arrival needed the addition of some form of “excitement”. The original short story was much more exploratory in nature, with the conflict being driven more from a question of whether the aliens could be communicated with. Thankfully, screenwriter Eric Heisserer resisted the temptation to make that addition “action scenes”, like I feared might be the case based on advertisements. Instead, he expands the role of the military to add tension with the main characters over a difference in approach over how to deal with the aliens, a good way to underscore the themes of the piece without feeling out of place.

But the most masterful translation might be the successful preservation of the original story’s twist. As mentioned, in Story of Your Life, Chiang is able to conceal a major surprise by virtue of not having to visually portray something. It can shock you with the “what” of the story (what is going on, essentially). Villenueve and Heisserer thankfully decided they needed to find some way to translate this emotional gut-punch. But how does one do that?

Similar to the first problem, by extrapolating from the text. The book explained the “how” of the problem (how the language works, how language and perception overlap) so that it could shock you with the “what” (what it ultimately means. With that option out of the question, they instead lay all their cards on the table from the start. With that “what” out of the way, they manage the same emotion gut-punch that Ted Chiang pulled off instead using the “how” of the story; namely, how all the events fit together. They mimic the story’s non-linear style to obscure all of the implications of the events, while also developing their own connections to deepen the meaning of the reveal. And these new connective ideas, while not necessary in the original (one of them even explicitly changes a fundamental aspect of the original in fact, while the other is totally absent), do add a lot to the story, especially with regards to its theme of interconnectedness.

I’m simultaneously worried that I both didn’t explain myself well enough and gave away too much and any further explanation would certainly give everything away, so that’s probably a good sign to stop for the time being. They key take away from this should be that everyone should check out Arrival, as well as Story of Your Life even if they weren’t both fantastic on their own, comparing the two is highly instructive.

The Disappointing Case of Tomorrowland

If I were to boil down Tomorrowland to a single phrase, it would be “Meet the Robinsons’ dumb younger cousin”. I’ve long found Meet the Robinsons to be a solid movie, and an underrated entry in the Disney canon, but it took Tomorrowland for me to appreciate how the former does the concept of “optimism-powered, look how awesome the future is!” right. Spoilers ahead, although I’ll specifically mark big ones.

I think the biggest problem is that Tomorrowland is very self-assured that what it’s saying is intelligent without being able to back it up, instead offering up references to smarter things or pining for better times or attacking strawmen or just straight up not doing anything to cover up its problems. For instance, there’s a character named Hugo Gernsback (played by the extremely underutilized Keegan-Michael Key*). Like many things in Tomorrowland, I at first smiled when I discovered that the owner of the science fiction memorabilia store was named “Hugo”; it’s a cute little throwaway gag. Then it goes deeper and reveals that his last name is Gernsback, immediately becoming straight-up cheesy (and as if daring the audience to pick up on its reference-“are you one of the smart ones who will catch this?”). And then, it reveals that it really doesn’t have anything for Hugo to do, and he becomes a plot device before exiting the movie for good, no real impact on the story so to speak of.

 *Also underutilized is his partner Ursula, played by Kathryn Hahn. Based on the rest of the movie, I'm assuming they just didn't have the space to drop that her character's last name was "Le Guin".

The Contrasting Cases of Guardians of the Galaxy and John Carter

Over the course of Christmas Day, I was watching movies with my family. And by some chance, we decided to cover a double feature of two recent science fiction blockbusters, namely Guardian of the Galaxy and John Carter. I had seen both before (in fact, I wrote my thoughts about Guardians here), but watching them back-to-back gave me a reason to compare and contrast the two.

Obviously, the two films enjoyed vastly different levels of success. While Guardians just became the highest grossing film of the year, John Carter barely made back its budget, likely ending any chance at a franchise. What exactly caused such a

Well, there probably isn’t one simple answer. Or rather, there is: Guardians is just a better victory overall. But that’s not too helpful unless we break it down into the minutiae. And while there are several reasons that Guardians is better, I’d like to focus specifically on one specific storytelling aspect.

Some Belated Thoughts on Big Hero 6 and Interstellar

It took me a while to see these two movies, and even longer to write down my thoughts on them, but I may as well do it. I’ll mark spoilers when I get to them.

It seems weird to think of these two movies as related; they’re about as different as you can get. They were released on the same day, and that’s about it (unless you want to count the fact that I saw them close together as another relation, in case you think my viewing pattern makes them more similar in some way). But I feel like these movies are so different that they almost represent polar opposites in some way.

The Edge of Tomorrow, Deus Ex Machinas, and Death (Spoilers)

I’m still not totally positive what all I’m going to cover, subject-wise, with Out of Left Field, but I’ve been seeing movies lately, so it looks like we’re getting another movie post.

I saw Edge of Tomorrow this past weekend, and it reminded me a lot of Pacific Rim from last year. And I mean that in the best way, as I really liked Pacific Rim; both are rather dark yet exhilarating war films about alien foes with specials powers (time travel versus being absolutely ginormous) wishing to conquer earth, and the humans who match that power to fight them off. Or, you could go with the Groundhog Day if Punxsutawney was the site of first contact with hostile aliens. Either works.

But one thing I want to focus on was the ending. Despite the rather dark tone of the film, the ending seems especially “Hollywood”-esque. For those who haven’t seen it and don’t mind spoilers: