Author: Nic Reuben

We might rightly judge Batman Arkham-style combat by how cool the counters make you feel, what with the core of it melting into second-nature rhythmic meditation that renders you basically unkillable after a few minutes of practice. You will win the fight. This is guaranteed. The combat is designed to make you win. Usually the second tutorial prompt is “here’s the button that makes you win. Don’t worry if you don’t know when to press it. We’ll tell you”.
Likewise, you will win the fights in Dead As Disco’s Steam demo. Maybe the action after the demo gets harder. I dare not predict the future. But this is not the important part. The important part is that you will feel very cool as you easily win. You can hold down a button to beat your enemies with a glowstick that hits about three times to every beat in the music. It feels like doing violence with a turbo maraca made of steel and also filled with steel balls. You can also import your own music, so maybe this doesn’t exactly line up with, say, Meshuggah’s Bleed. But it certainly lines up with Michael Sembello’s She’s A Maniac. Here’s a trailer.

Booked For The Week is our weekly chat with industry folk about the books they love, have loved, and are hoping to love in the future.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Did you know that adopting language altered the position of the human larynx, making us more susceptible to choking on food? I learned this because I’ve finished Blood Meridian, and was reading McCarthy’s musings on the evolution of language as a chaser. Proof, then, that the only truly fitting way to leave this world is to die choking on a book. Perhaps this week’s guest can recommend a good one?
This week, it’s former Fallen London lead designer, and Skin Deep, Pathologic 2, and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine writer Bruno Dias! Cheers Bruno! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
Being in between major projects has me mostly disregarding research and just enjoying reading fiction for a while. I’m reading Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup. It’s billed as a ‘fantasy mystery novel’ but it’s pleasingly weirder than that; the setting is a sort of biopunk Ottoman Empire constantly beset by kaiju. Bennet engages in my favorite mode of dark fantasy storytelling, which is that he has believable characters in a completely insane world who are believable in their relationship to the insanity.
I’m also, very slowly, going through Clarice Lispector’s Todos os Contos (published in English a couple years ago as The Complete Stories). This is partially a re-read, partially new to me. I will pick it up and read a story every other week or so. I love these kinds of omnibuses set in chronological order; you can just keep going back to a writer over and over and watching them mature and age as artists and as people over time.
What did you last read?
It’s been a chaotic last few months where I’ve been reading a lot of samples, a lot of short fiction, and going back and re-reading a lot of influential things for me. I’m also a big believer in not finishing things; I drop books pretty aggressively. I think the last new-to-me novel I actually read cover to cover is Seth Dickinson’s Exordia, which to me is such a bolt-out-of-the-blue piece of writing. He’s also known for video game work, notably in the Destiny series. Recently I asked after who wrote some of the written matter in Obsidian’s Avowed, because I had an inkling it was him; I was, in fact, right. Dickinson just has such an instantly recognizable voice – a really playful way of pivoting around tone, and a knack for capturing the voice of creatures that don’t think like humans do.
On a much drier note: Ian Schreiber and Brenda Romero’s Game Balance. There’s probably very few people in the world to whom this book is truly relevant but I am very pleased that it exists because it’s both comprehensive and handy as a blunt weapon in a pinch.
What are you eyeing up next?
I don’t really keep a reading list or a backlog; I tend to pick things based on the moment. But the big pile of unread samples I do keep includes Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo, Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction Of Irena Rey, Kiersten White’s Mister Magic, Emily Nussbaum’s Cue The Sun, and Daniel M. Lavery’s Women’s Hotel.
What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?
Oddly enough, probably the Gom Jabbar scene early in Dune. I don’t think it’s the best scene in the book, from a writing standpoint, but at this point in my life I’ve read it twice and seen three different film and television versions of it, so it’s just holographically engraved in my mind. “What’s in the box?” “Pain.”

What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
Whenever it comes up, I’ll always tell people to read Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. I think to English speakers, Invisible Cities is more familiar; but Cosmicomics in particular is one of the most influential books on how I write. A genuinely mind-expanding piece of fiction. There’s stuff in Fallen London that I would tie almost directly to that book. The book is made up of loosely-connected short stories about a singular character who, surreally, recounts memories of living through different events in the history of the universe – the Big Bang, the formation of the solar system, and so on. It’s beautifully inventive ‘science fiction’ in an extremely literal sense – every story is directly inspired by one notable fact about cosmology or the history of the Earth.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
Video games are obviously really good at impossible spaces – from Portal to this year’s Blue Prince. So in my wildest dreams I’d love to see someone take a stab at Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It’s got it all: a mutable space to explore; a knowledge mismatch between player and player character; a bunch of opportunities for little economies, systems, affordances. I can’t think of a book that’s more like a video game without being about video games.
Not only did Bruno fail to name every book ever written, but also failed to specify which of these books could easily be swallowed in a single gulp. Therefore, I have no choice but to label this week’s edition of the column a choking hazard, and ban you all from reading it. Watch your tender larynxes out there, and book for now!

Many Nights A Whisper reviewA lovely, lighthearted game about longing and mastery that encourages just as much soul searching as it does archery training.

Developer: Selkie Harbour, Deconstructeam
Publisher: Deconstructeam
Release: Out now
On: Windows
From: Itch/Steam
Price: £2.50/€3/$3
Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-12600K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti, Windows 11

Although you won’t see everything, you can finish Many Nights A Whisper in under an hour. Each day you’ll train with your fiery sling, lighting braziers and honing your aim for a looming ceremony where you’ll try to hit a distant ritual chalice with a single shot. At night, you’ll sit at a confession wall. People will tell you their wishes, and you’ll decide which will ones be granted if the ceremony is a success.
The whole game takes place on a single large balcony, overlooking the sea. Tradition forbids you from speaking back to the wishful folk that come at night, feeding their braids through a statue for you to cut in acceptance, or else ignore. The only other person you’ll actually see is your mentor, a likeable septuagenarian who’s presided over these rituals for decades. You train, eat, listen to wishes, and sleep. After a few days of this, it’s time for the ceremony. As I say, takes about an hour.

Watch on YouTube
You’d be forgiven for worrying, then, that any review that talked about the game in any real detail would risk spoiling the whole thing. But Many Nights A Whisper isn’t really about revelations as much as it is contemplation; a game that encouraged me to spend as much time in my head as I spent on that balcony. Basically, I can’t spoil it for you, because I can’t play it for you.
Still, it’s the price of a coffee at Actually Very Reasonably Priced Coffee & Sons. It made me cry a bit and laugh a bit and think quite a bit in the space of that hour. So perhaps you’d like to pick it up anyway, if that sounds appealing and you don’t want to know anything else. Fair warning, because I’d like to talk about it in some detail.
So – some of these wishes are difficult, which meant I spent a lot of time contemplating how I am actually a very inconsistent human, full of contradictions and strange reasonings. That I’d probably feel more settled in myself if I had any sort of fixed, coherent system of values, even if that system proved inflexible and stifling. The world keeps doing weird new stuff and I keep learning things. Am I supposed to decide how I’m going to feel about these things before they happen? Does sound nice though. Gods. It is 11am, game. Here are some nice descriptions of your evenings in Many Nights A Whisper.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Selkie Harbour

The second person to come to me with a wish wants to bring back a beautiful, extinct flower. I think about the importance of accepting impermanence, and then worry if maybe there’s a specific genus of squirrel liable to give themselves the death shits by gorging on strange new flowers unceremoniously reintroduced into the ecosystem, get a bit stressed about the lack of information (this happens more than once), then opt for cowardice and ignore the wish.
There’s a poem that each person recites after they’ve made their request, and if you want to deny their wish you just don’t cut their braid by the time they finish. In terms of gamefeel, there’s a tangible, electric current of import to the act of holding down a button to ready your blade, then releasing it to cut. Destruction as hopeful creation. They grow these braids for years, then come to you wishing you’ll sever them in seconds.
The next person to visit is losing their hair. They could barely grow a braid to offer, they tell me. They were going to ask for beautiful hair, but they’ve changed their mind. “We’ve heard too many tales about beautiful long hair. Let’s give this world a legend about a spectacular cranium”. They want artists to stop in the street to paint them. My Dorian Gray senses start tingling and I get nervous, but this is soon replaced by an uglier conviction, apparent common sense about the value of humility that starts to feel more patriarchal and sneering the more I examine it.
I’ll have similar thoughts later. When asked to make someone immune to heartbreak, I’m reminded of the received wisdom about the character-building value of suffering. It’s the kind of thinking that can get you through hell but also serves power that demands you stay gracious as you wipe spit from your eye. Don’t have the grit to reframe your exploitation as self-mythology? Sounds like a you problem. Structural inequality? No! It’s a personal growth journey. And surely living in bliss and beauty would get tiresome. Wouldn’t I be denying them that ecstatic sense of triumph that only really comes from having well and truly made it through the shit? It’s always felt a little grim to me to consider joy as desirable only because it signals a cessation of pain, but there’s something in that, still. And what about self-acceptance?
It is 11:15am, game. Can’t say no to beautiful shining dome, though. G’wan then.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Selkie Harbour

There is no crosshair, only crossed hairs. Ahem. Aiming your sling takes a lot of practise. No help from any sort of UI element, the drop-off is considerable, and it feels counterintuitive and actually just not right at first. But you get used to it. Then you get good at it. And it takes me a couple of days to notice (maybe I zoned out an earlier explanation) but to reach the distant braziers and eventually the ritual chalice, you’ll need to grant enough wishes to make your sling powerful. There’s no upgrade system – this happens automatically – but the idea is that the braids from the wishes you do grant get tied to your sling.
And it’s somewhere between the person who wishes to become a rockstar and the person who wants me to remove the souls from animals so they don’t have to feel guilty about eating bacon that I realise the game isn’t going to let up. The wishes are going to keep getting weirder and harder. Someone else just asked me to cure their cancer so they can get healthy enough to murder the bastard who stole their life’s work. If I don’t grant some of these wishes I feel strange about, I’m not going to have the strength to make the shot anyway. Every wish will go unanswered.
A small child wants a pink cat but the cat also has to be invisible to everyone else because her parents won’t let her have one. Again, I need information! I imagine two allergic parents sneezing themselves into an early grave. I can’t do it.
I let a child become a hero. He wants to help people wherever he goes. More good sounds good I think, cutting the braid. He promises he’ll finish school first but I’m half convinced I’ve unleashed an eight year old Don Quixote on the world.
I agree to make two parents stop arguing. I initially evoke the Robin Williams’ Genie defence. I can’t make anyone fall in love, nor back in love. But the way it’s phrased, “make them coexist in harmony, focus on the things they love about each other”, feels hard to say no to. I agree. I don’t feel entirely good about it. My mentor asks me to think about changing free will, but it’s a nudge, not a lecture. The music sounds a bit like Hateno Village from Breath Of The Wild, so that chills me out a bit.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Selkie Harbour

Things get a bit murky later. There is one revelation, casually dropped by your mentor about two third of the way through, about the state of the world and the people in it after the wishes are granted, that removes some tension and significance from what you’ve been doing the whole time, and I think I could have done without it. It’s a real “well, you could have told me that from the start” moment, and while it encourages you to replay the game with fresh eyes, I think it undermines some of its power. Still, only some.
Make tobacco cheap and healthy? Fuck, go on then. Although, absent its miniature act of self-destruction, smoking won’t be as cool any more. No easy answers. None at all.
There is a theme running through the game, besides the wishes, of the value of mastery. Even the tutorials take on a tense significance, knowing how important it is to make that final chalice shot with only a single chance. The day before the ceremony, I practise hitting the chalice. When I find the correct angle, I take a screenshot so I can recreate the position when needed. When the time comes, I nail the shot. I am elated, though not surprised. After all, I’d removed the guesswork. You’ll learn to listen to what your body is telling you, said my mentor. Thing is, right, I’ve got this screenshot button.
Of every choice I made in Many Nights A Whisper, I am open to learning what this says about me the least. I really wanted to nail that shot, and what kind of selfish fool ignores such an obvious advantage with so much riding on success? This isn’t about me, I reason. Of course, it’s actually been about me the whole time.
This review is based on a review key provided the publisher. Jay Castello, who freelances for RPS, worked on Many Nights A Whisper as a text editor. Brendy has also worked with developers Deconstructeam

A sci-fi horror trope I quite enjoy is arboretums that provide oxygen to ships or structures, both because it’s a nifty (if spurious?) idea, and because I like the concept of people who’ve only seen iron bulkheads for months staring wistfully at small trees. I think Alex Garland’s criminally underrated Sunshine did it. Kenny Lentil’s Biological Shock did it. Dead Space too. The derelict ark you’ll be scavenging and surviving in Dandelion Void also has plants, but the caveat is that the plants can move. The other caveat is that the plants are bastards.

I’ve never been so happy to see a spike trap as I was in Debugging Hero. At the start of each combat encounter, the demo for this roguelite hack n’ slash hands you several numeric cards and lets you pause the game to view both your and your enemies’ stats: health, damage, and durability. You then drag the cards on to the relevant stat to modify it, then unpause to continue real-time combat.
It’s a cute gimmick, letting you knock down high health enemies to a manageable number, or kill weak ones outright, or heal yourself. But it felt a tad shallow to carry a whole game, even one with dodges and parries in its real-time combat. Then, I entered a room with a trap tile that thrust sharpened spikes upwards at timed intervals, and realised I could manipulate the timer. I tuned it right down, and raucously chortled like a portly racoon at the bakery bins as it pneumatically skewered my idiot attackers.

In 2023 EA opened a new studio named Cliffhanger Games, led by former Monolith head Kevin Stephens, and announced a new third-person, singleplayer game starring Marvel’s Black Panther. They’ve now cancelled that game and shut down that studio, IGN report.
According to EA Entertainment president Laura Miele, via an email sent to employees, this has been done to “sharpen our focus and put our creative energy behind the most significant growth opportunities.”