Luke Beeman

I haven't played Bananza but this is Tropical Freeze slander/erasure

very funny to me that there are two mermaid-based mystery game sequels this year (the other being the recently released PARANORMASIGHT: The Mermaid’s Curse)

Jack King-Spooner in front of a bunch of flickering colored stripes

Dujanah’s got that randomized opening cutscene of Jack King-Spooner telling you the theme of the game

Fascinating that I somehow ended up loosely in the vicinity of @skepticalmario.bsky.social, @godfeels.bsky.social, and @scanlinemedia.com but miles away from virtually everyone else I follow.

They were all recommendations from my brother. I asked him where *he* heard about them and he said from Reddit—the Link Click subreddit in To Be Hero X’s case since they share a director, one of the general anime subreddits for the others (despite them shutting down donghua discussions)

I feel like I’ve only dipped my toes in the donghua pool but I really enjoyed Scissor Seven, Link Click, and To Be Hero X. I haven’t seen Ne Zha 2 yet but it’s wild that it broke zillions of records and was the highest grossing movie of last year and yet it’s still basically unknown here.

I Close the Door Which I Have Opened 29 January, 2026 (Queeneater's Castle) I have pushed away the dreams and the red and the sacrifice. I have clawed my way back into my own skull. The face I feel when I reach up and touch it is my own: not hers. Mine. Mine alone. I can see beyond the mirrors now with mine own eyes. I see there is a breach open from the Stacks, in the chamber of the Rites of the Ruby. Dreams spill from it like blood from a strung-up bull. It wants me: I must get to it. It is here I am made and unmade: it is the source of the sanguine dreams; it is the call I must answer. It is the slab and I am the sacrifice, if I do not best it. The mirrors around the Palace make the Flaw: it keeps any from dreaming into this mind, into what leaks from the gate, the portal, the breach. And in sealing away those dreams, the flaw is recursive: All dream of the red castle as it stops any from dreaming their way into the castle. It is a cork placed in a bottle being shaken: it will not hold. I must unstop it. I must reach the breach and perform the Rites of the Ruby.

was idly scrolling back through my Fallen London journal of saved passages and this bit from the latest chapter where the usually 2nd-person narration switches to 1st-person rules. what a cool game.

YouTube video by Void_Chords a.k.a. Ryo Takahashi Void_Chords feat.MARU - The Other Side of the Wall (Princess Principal OP) [Music Video]

Gotta be Void_Chords’ The Other Side of the Wall for me

youtu.be/4m0_FpkfmVY

honestly the Nietzsche sword would be right at home in Gungeon. I don’t think you ever mentioned its name but obviously it’s the Annihilist

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/culture/q-an...

I’m currently watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya for the first time, and Endless Eight kind of rules? My cultural osmosis impression of it was that it was literally the same episode 8 times, when instead it’s 8 versions of the same script each making unique creative choices.

Grateful that I have an easy go-to answer for this: I spent 2 years living in Beijing, China with my family as a teenager

Author Spotlight: RPGLit Sci-Fi Author, eskay Meet debut author eskay (no pronouns/use eskay as pronoun/isn't offended by they/them!). eskay has a free novel on Itch, and discusses how eskay went from creative writing novice to finishing a whole novel. Read on to find out!

Author Spotlight: RPGLit Sci-Fi Author, eskay

Meet debut author eskay (no pronouns/use eskay as pronoun/isn't offended by they/them!). eskay has a free novel on Itch, and discusses how eskay went from creative writing novice to finishing a whole novel. Read on to find out!

I think it’s the only superhero show or movie where I was like “I’ve gotta check out these comics” after watching it. Ended up reading both Morrison’s and Rachel Pollack’s runs. (And then also read Morrison’s brilliant Animal Man run after it was brought up on Homestuck Made This World)

corru.observer ATTENTION::'mindspike logging active'

I’d probably say corru.observer, because I need more people to see how incredibly cool it is, though strictly speaking the RPG stuff is confined to one portion of the game. There’s quite a bit of mechanical evolution within it though, it crosses through a couple different subgenres of RPG.

a city where music is mandatory and you play unbeatable

If You Ask Nicely you think we should let people enjoy things? should we publish that? should we throw an ethically dubious press event event in las vegas? should we invite geoff keighley

what's highguard?

The Interface Drama Master List Interface dramas are an emergent genre of games that use software to tell interactive stories. This is a master list of all playable interface dramas on itch.io, Steam, and more.

Closest I can think of is the Interface Drama Master List, though that’s more focused on the interface as visual/narrative framing rather than whether there’s a puzzle to how you navigate it.

My Favorite Video Games of 2025 Hot take: video games are pretty good sometimes.

Took me longer than I'd like but I finally finished my GOTY 2025 writeup, please check it out!

medium.com/@LukeBeeman/...

except for Fallen London, which is books

They got off to a rough start with the Layton crossover game but yeah they’ve really been nailing the 3D models on everything since

I think he knows that much, he’s saying him taking Greenland from Denmark is actually somehow Norway’s fault for not giving him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yeah, I just noticed last night that someone had slapped RD onto the iOS app store. From the user reviews it looks like it completely breaks when it gets to the 2-X window dancing, and sadly it looks like none of the reviewers clocked that it wasn’t a legit port even after that.

My Favorite Video Games of 2025 Hot take: video games are pretty good sometimes.

Took me longer than I'd like but I finally finished my GOTY 2025 writeup, please check it out!

medium.com/@LukeBeeman/...

1. Pentiment
2. Inscryption
3. Hades
4. Baldur's Gate 3
5. The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild
6. Super Mario 64
7. Metroid Prime
8. Balatro
9. Half-Life 2
10. Papers, Please

“Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death,” an AO3 fic in which Isaac Chotiner interviews the guy who runs the lottery in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, is astounding. archiveofourown.org/works/73396436

This is pretty similar to me (except I finished all the Celeste C-sides and Farewell but never even beat the Radiance) and I 100% Silksong without ever needing more than a single-digit number of attempts on any boss or enemy gauntlet.

Doesn’t help the muddied waters that there’s such a strong tendency to anthropomorphize the technology (media reporting on Grok “apologizing” and so on).

Yeah, “AI” has always been a pretty loaded term (fictional machine sapience, video game NPC logic, machine learning and related fields of study), but it’s so much harder to work out the meaning from context now that genAI/LLMs are encroaching on everything.