Don’t get me wrong, I love the stained edges trend, but I’m not sure that I love that I can find this image but not a straight image of the book cover like I’ve been using for years.
You have seen Michelle Jabès Corpora’s (not, fuck you autocorrect, Michelle Babes Corporation) name around here before; I read her His Face is the Sun almost exactly a year ago and loved it, and it ended up twelfth on my end of the year list. An interesting phenomenon: I said in my piece about it in December that I’d have ranked it higher, but a hundred books after first picking it up, I didn’t remember it very well other than that it was set in not-Egypt and I really liked it, and I resolved that I was going to reread it before the sequel, which I already knew was coming in May.
Well, I didn’t reread His Face is the Sun before picking up She Knows All the Names, and I’m pleased and more than a little fascinated to report that once I had the sequel in my hands I had no problems with recalling the events of the first book at all. I almost didn’t review this, to be honest, as what I have to say about it is nearly identical to what I had to say about Sun (go read that review); Corpora’s worldbuilding and characters are fantastic, the plot is twisty-turny and resolves a major plot element from the first book, clearing the way for a different antagonist to take center stage for the final book of the trilogy. I loved the first book, and the second is nearly a perfect sequel, and one of the best middle-book-in-the-trilogy volumes I’ve read in a very long time. I actually, genuinely do want to reread both books before the third volume comes out– not, this time, because I think I’ll need to, but because I think the series will deserve it.
Oh, and the cat’s back. I was a little worried at first; this book uses an animal as a framing device the same way that the first book did, but it’s an ibis and not the cat. No worries! The cat is back, it’s just not a POV character. Maybe the POV animal in the third book will be a crocodile. We can hope, right?
I wasn’t expecting to actually beat Enotria: The Last Song last night when I posted about needing to play video games, but beat it I did; I had beaten a late-game pair of bosses before putting the controller down the last time I had played, and the game made it clear quickly that the next place I was headed was going to be the game’s last destination. I’m going to jump straight to the chase and say this is a solid 7/10 as a game, with the caveat that a couple of the problems I had with it are potentially fixable.
The basics: Enotria is a Soulslike, which remains my current favorite genre of video game; these types of games are apparently never going to get old for me. The conceits with this one are as follows: 1) It’s sunny sometimes, and in fact one of the first things you’ll do is wander through a field of sunflowers, so it’s not quite as bleak as the genre usually gets; and 2) your builds are controlled by wearing different masks; the whole game is built around acting, and you’ll collect masks from boss enemies and mask shards from basic enemies that can eventually be built into masks. They basically take the place of your armor; if you put on a particular mask you take on the entire appearance of whatever you’re wearing the mask of. It’s pretty, there’s a lot of different weapons and magic to play with, the combat is solid; no complaints of any kind there, really.
Here’s the problem: the game starts by asking you to pick a difficulty level, which is the least-Soulslikey part of the whole thing– these games pick a difficulty, usually “brutal,” and you learn to adapt to it or you don’t. The two difficulty levels are “Story” and “Soulslike,” which … okay, “Story” difficulty is usually a shorthand for baby mode, but “Soulslike” sounds like hard mode, and the game doesn’t really give you any details, but a quick Google search made me think that “Story” was the base difficulty, so I went with that.(*)
Y’all, Story difficulty is crazy easy. There is a particular bridge at about the 2/3 part of the game that is broken in two places, and the jump is just a little bit harder than it looks like it should be– in a game with really no platforming to speak of, I almost wonder if the devs just missed how on-point you had to be to make the jump. I died more on those two bits of bridge than the entire rest of the game put together. No boss beat me more than twice, and I never once in the entire game died before recovering my stuff. I beat the final boss on my first try. There were bosses that I ran into by accident and low on heals and beat on my first try. Now, an easy Soulslike isn’t automatically a bad thing! The game’s still fun; there’s something to say about being a badass, obviously, and not every game has to involve beating your head against a wall. But I’d suggest if you’re used to these games, go with Soulslike mode to start.
Second, the game has a sort of paper-rock-scissors thing going with the elements. Enemies can be linked with certain elements, and if they are, they’re supposed to be immune to their element and weak to another. I say supposed to be because I never once found myself unable to hurt an enemy, no matter what weapons I was using. The elements all have Italian names and each element can proc a different effect if you get hit with enough of it, and those have different names too. Unlike most games, where, just for example, poison might slowly kill you and freeze might slow you down, the elemental effects have positive and negative side effects that, to be honest, I never bothered to memorize. The paper-rock-scissors thing is on the screen at all times and I never paid any attention to it. The game goes so far as to provide you with three different roles– effectively different builds that you can hot-swap between at will– with the idea that you might use each one to specialize in different elements. I never kept more than one active. There was no reason to.
It is, of course, entirely possible that this was because of Story mode, but … are you really gonna take out this big of a part of your gameplay for the kiddo mode in your game? Because it really seems like that’s what they did unless the whole thing is just broken from the jump. All I know is, I never paid attention to half of the subsystems the game uses. The game does have a New Game + mode, but I don’t know if that bumps you up to Soulslike difficulty or is just Story with spongier enemies or what. I might do a second run at some point to see what the other difficulty is like. I’d like to eventually platinum this, and I missed a bunch of story-related trophies on the first pass.
It’s probably worth pointing out that this is currently free through Playstation Plus, and it’s definitely worth recommending as a free game. Just start it at Soulslike, and hope that it forces you to learn the game’s systems a little bit better and doesn’t let you just go Big Hammer Goes Bonk or Fast Sword Goes Brrrrrr through the whole game. Or do that! Like I said, easy is fun sometimes.
(*) Do not allow yourself to be fooled; just because they called the difficulty “Story” does not mean that the story is going to make any sense(**). But you’re not playing these games for the story, are you? I hope not.
(**) Another missed opportunity; the game has a ton of little lore things you pick up all over the place, but unless you decide to invest the time to stop playing the game and read them– and I mean it when I say there are a ton of them– you’re not going to have any idea at all what the hell is going on.
I am taking today off both from blogging and the World Cup, and I’m going to play video games instead. There are a bunch of matches tomorrow I want to watch, and I will legitimately have to stay up late if I want to see the US play, but there’s really nothing going on today that I feel like I absolutely need to see. My PS5 misses me, and Enotria: The Last Song has been quite fun so far. I think I’m a bit away from beating it, though, so I gotta put some time in. Holler at me if Scotland-Brazil gets super interesting in the next half hour or so, will ya?
I mentioned on Saturday that we had bought some new art at the Leeper Park Art Fair, an annual event that has claimed a fair amount of my money over the years. Promila Kumar’s booth was right by the entrance to the Fair, and I think we both knew immediately that we were buying something from her as soon as we’d had the chance to wander through the rest of the displays. If you look through her website you’ll see that some of her work is more concrete and representational than this, but the movement and use of color was what grabbed us– I love the blues, and the golds sparkle nicely with the light in our bedroom.
This specific piece, as far as I know, doesn’t have a name, and Promila was nice enough to let us know that she didn’t care if we displayed it horizontally or vertically, and even asked which way we were thinking of hanging it before signing it. This conversation entertained both of us, as we’d just had a conversation, out of her earshot, about whether that precise situation would offend an artist who worked in abstract colors and shapes like she does– we needed something with some horizontality to it to fit this particular spot in our bedroom, and she had a few pieces with similar dimensions that she’d displayed vertically. I mean, on one hand, she’s never going to be in our house, so who cares, but there’s something to be said for respecting the artist’s vision, y’know?
So, yeah, I gotta appreciate an artist who basically says “My vision for this piece is whatever makes you more likely to buy it.”
This was the first text I received from my son upon his joining the land of the living this morning afternoon:
It’s been that kind of day today. School went fine– I’d love to provide everyone with entertaining anecdotes from my summer school experience, but everything’s just been completely chill the entire time and there really hasn’t been anything to say. My biggest concern is that the curriculum they’ve provided us with simply isn’t enough material to fill three hours, but no one appears to care that my kids are getting lots of break time in between tasks. I’ll supplement if I have to, but we hit the halfway point through this thing tomorrow and at this point I’m pretty sure no one is going to make me. I generally have between five and nine kids and they’re all really nice kids. I was super worried about it going in and it turned out to be the easiest gig ever.
No, it’s everything else that’s weighing on me, and even there I’m becoming insanely repetitive; how much longer can literally everything continue to get dumber every single day before something breaks? Apparently the fuckwit had a press conference today and he said so many objectively insane things– apparently Barack Obama sent some invisible terrorists to cut 350-foot slashes in the reflecting pool, which is not only surrounded by cops but is literally under constant video surveillance– that I’m still seeing new clips on Bluesky five or six hours later. And nothing will change.
I’m exhausted. Everything is exhausting. A few minutes ago I did a quick search to find out the score of the France-Iraq match (it got rain delayed, and I’m watching Norway-Senegal instead) and one part of the screen told me the game wasn’t over yet and the score was 3-0 and another part of the screen told me the game was over and the final score was 1-0. AI is the dumbest fucking thing since the last dumbest fucking thing, and will be the dumbest fucking thing for about another three months when another dumbest fucking thing will take over. Mediocrity no longer occasionally gets rewarded; mediocrity is required for success nowadays. Earth has its first trillionaire since Mansa Musa and he is somehow still an unbearable loser. I hate this timeline and I want out of it.
Woke up at 6:30 in the morning, not because I wanted to.
Laid in bed and screwed around on my phone for a while, because to hell with getting out of bed that early on a Saturday.
Finished Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic, which was fine, I suppose, but I don’t have a lot to say about it. I’ve read two of Baker’s books now and I feel like I bounce off of her a little bit for some reason that I can’t quite explain.
Finished a not-Lego build.
Watched the Netherlands absolutely demolish Sweden.
Did a really poor job at several online games that I’ve been playing lately.
And now I’m watching Ecuador play Curaçao, which just went into halftime tied.
Tomorrow my brother and his family are coming into town, so I need to spend the morning cleaning. A sensible person would have started today; I am not sensible.
