wootsauce

Returning to Pride Month media, I played Mighty Jill Off by Anna Anthropy. If you're looking for a precision platformer made by a trans woman and you've already beaten Celeste, fear not, for this game also exists!



The setup is that Jill has to earn the right to lick her domme's boots by platforming her way up a creepy tower past various obstacles such as fire and spikes and deadly skull-spiders. The kinky content is only in the framing cutscenes, but it does make you spend the entire game thinking about the D/s dynamics between game developers and players, which I believe is the point. You keep hitting the spikes and dying, grr! But you keep trying again and again because you have to prove your worth, or maybe you just crave punishment. When you try to exit the game it asks if you really want to safeword. Good times.

The game is short—I didn't check the time, but I think I spent maybe an hour on it—and the platforming is not actually that hard. (Certainly not as hard as Celeste.) There are a lot of checkpoints. Make sure you note the controls before you start, though: pressing jump again in the air stops the jump early, and hitting the jump key repeatedly makes you slow-fall. You have to spam the key aggressively for long stretches to get through some parts, which can be physically uncomfortable, but again I am sure that's on purpose.

(I guess a lot of people learned of this game because Jill is an unlockable character in Super Meat Boy, which I have never played, but I'm told it's good. It's not currently on my wishlist, but maybe if one of the devs comes out as trans I'll consider it.)

Mighty Jill Off is free on itch.io. If you have trouble running it, check the comments there for compatibility tips!

I learned a few days ago that the Latin American Games Showcase is happening this week. This is very relevant to my interests, so I downloaded some demos. Too many demos, really, so I'm going to break my thoughts into two posts.

⭐ I want to play this.
❓ Maybe someday if it's on sale or if issues are fixed by release.
🚫 Not for me.

⚒️ Unreleased/early access.


⭐⚒️ ( Oscuro: Blossom's Glow (puzzle platformer - Hongoneon, Costa Rica )

⭐⚒️ ( PancitoMerge (Suika-like puzzle - Fáyer, Mexico )

⭐ ( I Did Not Buy This Ticket (surreal horror visual novel - Tiago Rech, Brazil )

❓ ( Adore (creature-collecting ARPG - Cadabra Games, Brazil )

❓⚒️ ( Beacon of Neyda (tower defense - Ghost Creative Studio, Uruguay )

🚫 ( The End is Nahual (variety puzzles - Third World Productions, Mexico )

🚫 ( Alexandria IV (sci-fi visual novel - J.M. Beraldo, Brazil )

🚫 ( Dreamcore ('liminal space' walking sim - Montraluz, Argentina )

Note: Stronach came out as trans after this book was published, so earlier reviews may misgender her, as does the cover bio.

In this first book of a planned fantasy trilogy (of which two books have so far been released), we're introduced to the city of Hainak, a seaport that's just been through a political revolution, as well as an alchemical-biological magitech revolution. Our main character is Yat, a naive cop who wants to be a hero, but instead she's just been demoted for being queer. As her life crumbles into a haze of drugs and disillusionment, she stumbles into the doings of a secret faction, gets murdered, and finds herself resurrected with new powers that allow her to manipulate life force with her mind, all of which gives her a very different perspective on what a hero is and what she actually wants to fight for.

So... I really wanted to like this. I did enjoy the Māori-inspired worldbuilding and the author's vivid visual imagination, filling the city with a profusion of bizarre wonders as well as a strong sense of place. I also liked a lot of the characters and cared what happened to them. But ultimately I found the book didn't have enough structure to hold together.

It's being marketed as akin to Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series, and I think that comparison pinpoints the problem. Many aspects of the book do seem similar—there's magic with body horror, fantasy with sci-fi, loads of queerness... as well as byzantine political intrigue, misdirections about characters' identities, conversations that don't specify what's being discussed, and long monologues from unidentified speakers. But the reason all the confusing stuff works when Muir does it is that she does eventually provide enough information for you to fit all the pieces together, and on re-reading you discover that all the things that initially confused you actually make complete sense and Muir had a plan all along. And maybe Stronach also has a plan in her head, but if so it didn't make it onto the page. The book ends in a muddle of events that seem superficially dramatic but don't actually explain that much or draw the needed connections between the disparate plot elements.

The part of the book that's presented the most clearly is Yat's journey of realizing that the police only protect the powerful and serve the status quo, so if she wants to be a hero to the downtrodden then being a cop isn't the way to do it. Which would be a perfectly reasonable character arc, except that Yat's backstory is that she was an orphan living on the streets and she saw firsthand on a daily basis what cops are like, so why is her story about her "realizing" something she already knows? I guess she's supposed to be in deep denial, but it just didn't make any sense to me.

Some reviews I read had also led me to believe that the book has a lot more pirate content than it actually does. I mean, it does have pirates! But I felt cheated that we didn't spend more time with them, both because pirates are awesome and because the backstory of these specific pirates was super intriguing but criminally underexplained. I often felt like the book was barely intersecting the outskirts of a way more interesting story centered on the pirate captain and her crew, and wondered why they weren't the main characters.

Anyway, I think there was a lot of potential here but it didn't cohere enough for me to want to continue with the series. Too bad.