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Natural Magic: This is an ambitious and multivalent book. It’s primarily an interleaved biography of both Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin, analyzing their lives and work and illuminating various subtle and oblique connections between them. At the same time, it traces nineteenth-century science’s evolving relationship to art, nature, aesthetics, and gender, complicating common modern-day understandings of who its two subjects really were. I was as impressed by the scope of the project as I was by the project itself. Recommended if you like basically any form of nonfiction!

Hello Kitty Island Adventure: Recently freed from its mobile prison and released on Switch and Steam, this is essentially an Animal Crossing-style game in a Sanrio wrapper. It reminds me most of Pocket Camp specifically—and emulates that game’s grind more than I’d like—but thanks to its Apple Arcade heritage it’s at least blessedly free of microtranscations. I’ll likely never disappear into one of these as with New Horizons during the height of the pandemic, but I’m happy to dip into one now and then on the side—at least until Animal Crossing inevitably comes roaring back on the Switch 2.

The Cat Returns: It probably doesn’t take an especially trenchant analysis to figure out why I might be retreating into simple, comfortable fare at the moment, but it’s doing the job. Not much to say about this one specifically, but it was a fun watch! I even thought the English dub was well done. Even though I’ve really enjoyed the dozen or so Studio Ghibli films I’ve seen, I watch so few movies overall that it’s still taking me forever to work through the rest. I expect I might pick off a couple more over the coming months, though I’ll probably continue to sidestep, say, Grave of the Fireflies for now.

Infinity Nikki: An elevator pitch for Infinity Nikki might be: a Genshin Impact-style open-world game with a focus on fashion and platforming. I was unprepared for how much it would hook me! It gradually reveals itself to have an interminable endgame grind, and it doesn’t approach the polish of something like Genshin yet—I’ve rarely seen a game with such frequent hotfixes—but I’ve been having a great time so far despite everything. If you’re not susceptible to predatory gacha mechanics, give it a whirl.

Dragon Quest XI: I finally caved and bought a Steam Deck, and for some reason this is the game I was most excited to play on it. I had played through nearly half of Dragon Quest XI on the PS4 years ago, tried a fresh start on PC once that fizzled out, and then restarted it again this month with the benefit of my new portable option. Turns out I can still get into a bog-standard turn-based RPG with no trouble! I’m really curious what’ll happen with the next iteration—there are vanishingly few series that still play this way.

Casual Viewing: This essay by Will Tavlin is the best thing I read all month. It’s about the rise of Netflix and the subsequent dissolution of its artistic ambitions, so its focus is film and television—though it’s easy to find parallels with any medium you’d care to name. Reading it gave me one of those anxious twinges as I thought about how rotten the entire creative sphere feels today, its stability and vitality endangered by its utter dependence on giant tech companies. Increasingly, the threat feels existential.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard: This is the best Dragon Age has played, after years of somewhat unsatisfying attempts to blend genres. Structurally it’s found an appealing combination of Dragon Age II and Mass Effect 2, and the production values are as impressive as they’ve ever been (I’m still floored by the hair). Unfortunately, the evidence of its troubled development cycle is pretty conspicuous. Everything from the characters to the factions to the romance subplots feels underdeveloped, with important beats either relegated to text boxes or glossed over entirely. Its attempts to build on past games in the series felt pretty threadbare as well. Veilguard constantly asked me to meet it more than halfway; I still enjoyed it overall, but with a decade since Inquisition it felt like a missed opportunity.

Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser: A college professor once told me he saw Monk spend an entire chorus hovering silently over the keys, staring and sweating as though he was playing. That’s been my mental image of Monk ever since, and now I feel like I’ve had it validated. This is my favorite kind of music documentary: plenty of live performances, some interesting behind-the-scenes footage, and just enough interviews to fill things out and give a sense of the subject as a person. (It also made me want to learn more about Pannonica de Koenigswarter, who only passed through as a secondary character here but seemed fascinating in her own right!) I would watch an entire movie of Monk’s bandmates trying to work out their parts while he just stands there, reticent.

Metaphor: ReFantazio: I’ve never really connected with the Persona or Shin Megami Tensei games, but Metaphor is really working for me despite its similarities. Maybe that’s thanks to the charmingly overwrought fantasy setting, which pairs well with the maximalist aesthetic; maybe they’ve just finally sanded off enough rough edges for me to find my way in. Whatever the reason, I’m hooked. (And while I usually don’t have the problem some game developers describe where they can’t turn off their work brain when playing games for fun, in Metaphor’s case I can’t stop thinking about how expensive that UI looks…)

Ys X: Nordics: The naval combat is not very good, the upgrade system is tedious, and the pacing is uneven. Most of the cast is two-dimensional at best, and after around thirty hours I can only hum one melody from the soundtrack. And yet, despite all of that, I’m really enjoying Nordics! The Ys sense of adventure is much stronger here than in the somewhat claustrophobic Monstrum Nox, and the two-character combat is a massive improvement over the recent games’ party system. If I look too closely at the individual elements they don’t always hold up, but it manages to be more than the sum of its parts.

The Wonder of Stevie: Hosted by New York Times critic Wesley Morris, this podcast covers the albums from Stevie Wonder’s so-called classic period: Music of My Mind through Songs in the Key of Life. There are interviews with collaborators, friends, and fans, from Janelle Monáe to the Obamas. With only one hour-ish episode per album the show has to be painfully selective, so some of your favorites will inevitably get short shrift, but I really liked what they did cover. (The show isn’t exclusive to Audible, incidentally, despite appearances—look for it wherever you get your podcasts, as they say.)

Celebrating 40 years of Dragon Slayer: In this month-long series of features, Retro XP writer Marc Normandin covers the history of the seminal and multifaceted action RPG franchise. There’s a lot to cover; games as diverse as Xanadu and Sorcerian and The Legend of Heroes all are or were grouped under the Dragon Slayer umbrella, and all get their due here. There are plenty of influences to trace as well, from internal titles like Ys to external ones like The Legend of Zelda. This was a fun read for a late-era Falcom fan like me!

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: After Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, it was oddly refreshing to return to a more modestly-scoped Zelda game. And Echoes of Wisdom is a great one! To be honest, I’m glad they’re still making space for smaller, weirder things like this and not attempting to build one enormous generational masterpiece after another. My two complaints: performance is pretty rough, and I wish they’d made a more thorough break from Link and eschewed the “swordfighter form” business.

Set!: “An inside look at the world of competitive table setting,” reads the subtitle, and that alone was enough to send my mind reeling. The competitions feature the meticulous utensil placement you’d expect, but they also have themes, and the entrants have big personalities. We meet a woman who wants her table to be a commentary on animal poaching in Africa, and a man who enters a cosplay competition in hopes of winning prize money to fund a Dr. Seuss homage. If this were a Christopher Guest mockumentary, I’d think they laid it on too thick.