The Spotlight is a monthly summary that encapsulates some of the more notable media experiences I’ve had over the past thirty days. From insights on games played, to articles worth checking out, and even cool stories from tabletop role-playing games, it all has a place in the Spotlight.

Following in the footsteps of September, October has been just as hectic, which didn’t leave me with a ton of free time for video games. Slim pickings once again, but next month will hopefully calm down a bit.

For the month of October, 2024, here’s what I’m shining the spotlight on.

Games

The Case of the Golden Idol

I absolutely am in love with The Case of the Golden Idol and its brand of puzzle solving and storytelling. I haven’t beat it yet, but I’m super into everything it’s doing from its unsettling art style to its puzzle design.

The story follows the titular Golden Idol, a little statuette of immense arcane power. You follow the location of the idol and those who have held onto to it through the years, charting not only its owners, but the consequences of its usage.

It isn’t clear who or what you play as in The Case of the Golden Idol, but you inhabit some sort of third party spectator who arrives at the moment of, or shortly after a grizzly murder has taken place. Through a point-and-click interface, you explore each heinous tableau, rooting around pockets, cupboards, and trashcans for pieces of information that can steer you towards identifying who people are, who was present, and what motives existed. At the end of each level you input your assumptions into a Mad-Libs-styled notepad, filling out the story with its key figures, items and whatever other relevant information is needed.

I do wish there was an easy way for me to catch up on the story so far, considering every time I do manage to play the game, I found that I’ve forgotten a lot of key information I would have retained had I just blasted through in a sitting or two.

Regardless, I’m absolutely smitten by The Case of the Golden Idol and am eager to wrap it up before its sequel, The Rise of the Golden Idol releases in just a few short weeks.

Kind Words 2

Sometimes you just need someone to listen to you and tell you that you aren’t alone and your feelings are valid. That’s the promise of Kind Words 2, a game that’s made me tear up on more than one occasion.

In Kind Words 2, people from all over the world will toss their concerns and issues out into the void, a handful of which sail right onto your desk. With little more than a letter indicating who wrote what, you can read and respond to any of the notes that come your way, offering wisdom, solidarity, or just support to a random human being.

People are kind and thoughtful, bearing their souls to random people on the internet. I’ve sent some stuff out and gotten some truly wonderful responses back. It’s a lovely little application that’s all about promoting good vibes while listening to dope lo-fi beats.

It is worth mentioning that the responses you get might not be what you hope them to be. For instance, did you know that there’s a highly contentious election going on in America right now between someone who wants to not destroy our democracy and someone who actively courts Nazis? I may have expressed my general anxiety to the void at one point, only to be returned with some great answers like, “you don’t have to vote” and, “both candidates are just as bad as one-another.” These kind of sage nuggets of wisdom weren’t overly comforting, as you can imagine.

But that’s hardly the fault of Kind Words 2. Aside from that miserable example, the community is largely supportive and kind, and when it came to other things I sent out, they were much more endearing and helpful.

Escape From Mystwood Mansion

Escape From Mystwood Mansion isn’t a particularly long or difficult game, but it is the exact level of complexity I needed from puzzle game this month. Escape From Mystwood Mansion is a first-person escape room styled game, where you’re quite literally escaping from the titular mansion and its many rooms. There honestly isn’t a ton to say about it beyond that I enjoyed my time with it, and if you need a mildly challenging puzzle game, Escape From Mystwood Mansion is a pretty good choice.

Watch List

Over the Garden Wall

In about 100 minutes or so, Over the Garden Wall manages to not only build out an impressive fantastical world with interesting lore while balancing humor and tension effortlessly, but it does all that while also having Elijah Wood and Christopher Lloyd in the cast. Over the Garden Wall is my annual Halloween tradition and I think it should be yours too.

Listening Party

Counting Sheep – Anxious

On Melancholy Hill – Gorillaz

L.S.F – Kasabian

The Rest

Still Unpacking

Why do we own so much stuff? Fuck.

News

Of Course the Cops Would Blow Money on a Cybertruck

A Pokemon Leak Sounds Yucky But it Isn’t

Chick-fil-A is Launching a Streaming App With Original Content… For Real.

Capitalism is Alive and Well as Microsoft CEO Gets Huge Pay Bump in Spite of Massive Layoffs

Concord is Dead and its Developer is Dissolved

The Day Before Studio is Undefeated in Thinking it Has Community Support, Hosts Unpaid Design “Contest“

Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. We’ll be back at the end of November with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.

For the month of June, 2024, here’s what I’m shining the spotlight on.

Games

Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip

Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a weird little game where you step into the sandals of the titular Terry who simply wants to drive a car into space. This is an extremely weird game with humor that you’ll either love or hate, and if the premise of driving a car into space doesn’t do anything for you, then Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip isn’t for you. But if you’re still onboard then you’ll find a delightfully charming little game that’s chock-full of weird characters, ridiculous mini-games, and goofy quests that all result in getting the very valuable upgrade currency that Terry needs to get his car into space.

Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends

While the name, Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends is an accurate description of the product, it’s a mouthful of a title that clumsily trips off the tongue. Regardless, in Rolling Hills you play as a little robot that runs a sushi shop in a comically small town. During the day you’ll roam around town and help the inhabitants of the town while also taking time to buy ingredients and furniture to upgrade your recipes and restaurant respectively. At night, you’ll activate your sushi machine and rush different plates of sushi to different tables depending on what each customer wants. In practice it’s just you bringing a pink plate to a person with a pink icon, a green to the person with a green icon, and so on and so forth. It’s very simplistic, isn’t very challenging, and is kind of a slog, but the loop was solid enough that I played the whole thing anyway, so there’s that.

Deliver Us Mars

Deliver Us Mars is an adventure game that tells a familiar story of humanity mucking up the Earth so bad that instead of fixing their problems they’d rather go get a fresh start on the ever-so-welcoming planet Mars. There’s more to it than that, but effectively the world government constructed three massive colony space ships called Arks that would transport folks to Mars and become hubs for colonizing the red planet.

In the story, your dad is this incredible scientist who more or less can save Earth with his impressive brain, but lost faith in the world governments and their ability to actually get something done. So depleted is his faith in humanity that he tried to smuggle you (his youngest daughter Kathy) onto one of the Arks and bail on Earth all together, but only he manages to make it onto the Ark. Years later, the government is running one last mission to recover the Arks, which happens to be headed up by Kathy’s sister, Claire, because there’s a chance the Arks could help save the environment of Earth.

What follows next is the story of the crew’s approach to Mars, exploration of the Arks, and the uncovering of the fate of the colonists who managed to escape Earth. While the story itself isn’t breaking new ground, it’s so wonderfully written and performed that I was captivated throughout my 8 hours of playtime.

The problem with Deliver Us Mars is that it isn’t a very good game. From mechanical issues like finicky controls, texture pop-in, and choppy frame rates, to core issues with its design like uninspired puzzles and bad graphics, Deliver Us Mars is kind of a slog to play and look at. Character models and animations are absolutely terrible, with several characters having hair and beards that clip through their skulls and hover off their scalps. It’s so unfortunately janky from top to bottom, which should really exemplify just how good the acting and writing are that I still marathoned the game. It’s just a shame that the graphical fidelity of this game actively undermines its brilliant acting performances.

Deliver Us Mars isn’t a good game, but it manages to tell an exceptionally engaging and effective story that is buoyed by the strength of its actors. I sincerely hope its upcoming sequel, Deliver Us Home sands down a lot of the rough edges because there’s something special about this series that could really flourish with some extra polish.

Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition

Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition is a fine remaster of a very good game that doesn’t deserve the notoriety that’s been foisted upon it, due exclusively to the unknown status of its eventual sequel. It’s also a misnomer because the original game launched in 2003, so this would technically be the 21st anniversary, but I won’t kibbutz about it.

For the uninitiated, Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition is a very good game that follows in the footsteps of games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. It’s a third-person adventure game that sees you trekking around the world and completing various dungeons all in service of a plot that weirdly revolves around a government launching false-flag attacks on its people to tighten their control over the populous. Armed with a bow-staff and a camera, you’re out there bonking enemies to death, taking incriminating photos, and doing a weirdly high amount of sneaking around.

It’s a fun game that despite being remastered didn’t age super well. The combat is bad and the camera is miserable, retaining all the charm I remember from 3D adventure and platform games of the era. Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition is probably less of a celebration of this very good game of yesteryear, and more of a way to gauge continued interest for Beyond Good & Evil 2, and if it’s worth continuing developing. That’s complete speculation obviously, but that’s my theory nonetheless. Regardless, Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition is fairly priced at twenty bucks and a good way to play this classic game.

Watch List

The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel

This one required several viewing sessions, but getting such a detailed, first-hand account of a Disney World blunder is something I will always make time for. The blunder in question is the ill-fated Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser themed hotel, a promising concept with terrible, terrible execution. I had never heard of Jenny Nicholson up until this point, but if all of her content is as well-prepared, structured, and engaging as this video was, then I’ve got a lot in the queue.

Adventure Time

I had always heard people herald Adventure Time as an incredibly well-made and emotionally resonate show, but never really understood what they meant considering the first few seasons mostly adhere to fantastical fart jokes and rarely anything else. That’s not a bad thing on its face, but it was diametrically opposed to what I had heard about the show for so many years. Ready to uncover the truth for ourselves, my partner and I took the plunge and marathoned all 10 seasons of the show.

Ultimately, both views of Adventure Time are valid. The first few seasons occasionally peppered in impactful and lore-heavy episodes, but they were few and far between. It wasn’t until the end of the series that we’d get these multi-part episodes that expanded on the lore or just revealed an uncomfortable truth about the world. Eventually Adventure Time evolved into a show that we were so emotionally invested in. I really appreciated the stories it told and characters it developed while never sacrificing its sense of humor or whimsy. It’s a long series, but I’d gladly watch it all again.

Listening Party

Old Wives Tale – Young English

Arizona – Carter Vail

Call From You – Anxious

The Rest

The Best of the Summer Game Fest

Summer Game Fest was easily the biggest thing that happened this month, so I went ahead and wrote up a little list of some of the stuff that seemed interesting to me.

News

Since most of the news from this month comes from the Summer Game Fest, these headlines are very specifically not related to that event.