forestofglory

I have a lot of unplayed Steam games kicking around in my library, and to avoid choice paralysis, sometimes I like to use a random-number generator to determine the Next Game I Will Play.

This time, it landed on: Sunless Sea. Hmmm.

I played about four hours of this game back in July 2016, which probably tracks with the period of time in which I was a mild Fallen London sicko. I remember finding the game somewhat impenetrable at the time. The early game loop seemed to involve blundering blindly around in the dark, discovering the beginnings of little mysterious quest-chains, and then dying -- at which point you started the game over again. I am a little more accepting of rogue-like mechanisms these days, so possibly I'll have a better time playing it on this go-round. We'll see!

Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs (1942) -- Years after her mother is convicted for the murder of her father, a young heiress begs Hercule Poirot to investigate the crime afresh.

Listened to this as an audiobook while I played my little casino games. This is a good application of Agatha Christie for me. My local library has one million Christie audiobooks available online, and their formulaic plots make a perfect verbal bath when you're only devoting 60% of your attention to them.

The basic premise of Five Little Pigs has the potential to be interesting. Poirot tracks down five witnesses to a very old crime. He interviews them repeatedly, and, when cross-referenced, the things they choose to remember or suppress reveal their own secret motives. That could be cool, especially when the interviewees return to the narrative a second or third time; the book could potentially make a daisy-chain of their revealing contradictions upon each new iteration of the same basic case facts. Five Little Pigs does not really do this. Instead, a lot of it feels repetitious and redundant. The five different witnesses do have very distinct voices, and I assume Christie plotted out the book almost entirely so that she could have the fun of writing long soliloquies for slightly wacky characters. Unfortunately, there's too many "little pigs" at play here; the fourth or fifth time we get a mostly similar description of the same scene, my patience was starting to wear thin.

One darkly funny background joke: Poirot's client was a very young child present in the household during the events leading up to her father's death, but none of the five witnesses initially remember her existence. Even when prompted by Poirot, they tend to stare vaguely into the distance and say, Huh, sure, I guess there was a small child around in those days, sure, I dunno. As a running gag about early-twentieth-century views on children among the English upper classes, it's very good.

Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum (1998) -- Vampires show up in Lancre, and it's up to the local witches, an Omnian missionary, and the Nac Mac Feegle to drive them off.

This book feels like a short story about Granny Weatherwax and vampires plus a lot of aimless scenes with other characters not-doing-very-much to fill the rest of the allotted pages. The vampires show up early, everyone spins their wheels and retraces their steps for most of the book, and then there's an ending when it becomes time to conclude the book. I don't hate it -- I love the Lancre witches, I love the Wee Free Men, I'm happy to spend time with those characters -- but I would not describe the book as "tightly plotted." It often feels like the whole thing was reverse-engineered around a long list of jokes about Hammer horror films. Sure! Okay! But I'm inclined to think a better novel with this premise would have developed Granny's infection of the vampires with more depth. I would have liked to see their gradual transformations over the course of the novel under the influence of Granny's unyielding and self-lacerating love.

But that would have involved making the vampires the primary protagonists of the novel and potentially semi-sympathetic, which would have left less time for "jokes" about Igor's recycled body parts.