Legendsofanus

"It wasn't fear anymore, it was madness. And when you're mad, you cease to exist."

The Last of Us, Limbo, Inside, Bioshock: take all these games with amazing stories and you'll find that video game storytelling works hand in hand with superb gameplay design. From Inside's simple 2D platforming forcing you to act like a puppet to Bioshock's main power-up gameplay system showing you memories of residents of Rapture, all of these games have a story that feels satisfying because it ties back to gameplay. I think that sort of storytelling is why some narratives can only be experienced in video games and why those games and more like them are so good. But they're not the only games with a good story.

The Town of Light is a first-person walking simulator game about a mentally unstable girl named Reneé and the journey we go on with her, exploring her past and present through her memories and experiences at a mental asylum. From the beginning it reminded me of Benoit Sokal's Syberia and this "other type" of games with a good story. I mean games that are so focused on their presentation that either their gameplay is too simple (like Syberia) or genuinely simple gameplay designs are not present in them and this makes the whole experience suffer.

Case in point, The Town of Light is a beautiful game and it's one of the best depictions of the on-goings and effects of being held up in a mental asylum in any media I have ever experienced. The game really manages to create an authentic immersive mental asylum in Italy through the various hospital documents, posters of fascist Italy, pictures of Mussolini and through it's dialogues and story accompanied in each of the game's fifteen chapters by an animated sequence of what is going on with Renee. What I adored even more is how the developers actually went to a real life mental asylum and recreated it in-game, highly recommend to check out the live-action trailer after finishing the game.

It seems to be that the whole purpose of this game's existence is to make you realize how fucked up these asylums were in real life and it really commits to that which is awesome. There are even branching chapters that you can get based on multiple choices you can make during the game which seems to really unlock different parts of the story. Unfortunately, while the presentation really gets fully realized, the gameplay and feel of the "game" aspect of it is actually annoying. I don't know how common it is for games like these but having unskippable cutscenes is always lame, the fact that my character can't run is stupid. The game was also very fond of crashing on my system even though it's built on Unity and I expected that would mean it would be pretty stable.

Overrall: The Town of Light is absolutely worth one playthrough atleast if you can look past the gameplay issues I mentioned and it's really a very unique and one of a kind presentation in gaming because of the themes it deals with. 7.5/10

(Read through CloudLibrary)

“Are you happy here?” I said at last.

I felt a little spoiled when I was reading this book, primarily because thrillers are some of my favorite types of books and I have read some that have twists on every page and then here was The Secret History, starting with the death of a main character, telling you who did it and then rewinding the clock and through the whole book showing us why it happened the way it did.

In that context, it seems fairly understandable to think that I should not be comparing this book to the fast and forgotten triumphs of Dan Brown but more meditative, characteristic journey of people who are friends. Normal teenage people just living life really, attending college, falling in love, studying haha

To me that feels like Harry Potter, Tolstoy, it feels like warmth and love. Don't get me wrong there is a lot of tension in this book and the characters are for the most part not likeable because they are rich assholes but compelling because of how truly Donna Tartt embraces her characters and lets them be as they are, she lets them run around in circles doing their own little things and because the writing is so good, you engage with their actions and want to follow them wherever they go.

This is a book built on great pacing and rigid structure, there are only eight chapters and they are really big ones. The shortest is like 19 pages and the big ones are 82. What it allows the book to present to the reader is a story told in stages where each stage is a mood, a haze, a drunken splendor of amazing writing and aesthetics that put shame to anything Instagram can create; each stage being able to stand out distinctly meanwhile living cohesive with the others.

That can sometimes backfire and it does, sometimes you have no idea what happened just twenty pages before, only because most of the text feels like you're in a trance, drunk and moving through the motions of life. That's probably my only complaint about the book aside from Donna Tartt showcasing large sections that read as Islamophobic but not having the gall to use the word Islam instead using the fiction term isram which is just confusing, especially when one of her principle character's whole mythology is built around meeting people that actually existed in real life, like George Orwell!

Overall: I really adored the book, the vibe it brings and just how beautiful the writing is. While I understand it feels like not much happens in the story itself, that does not take away much from the book because it was never going to play that card anyway, from the moment we see Bunny falling down that cliff to it's last sci-fi/afterlife reunion.