Starting off a new series of super brief reviews/comments on games, books, and other stuff that I own or recently obtained. Today we’re going with Hylics, a great looking RPG Maker game, and Time of Need, one of my favorite critical books on art (yeah, yeah).

I won’t get super into Hylics right now, but I wanna say that the game looks and sounds fantastic. Mason Lindroth’s claymation/low-res artwork is fascinating to watch squirm around, and rarely are you even reminded that everything in boxed into RPG Maker tiles. It’s a testament to how far RPG Maker’s open endedness can lead to great things. The sound design is equally impressive, and definitely recalls Space Funeral’s use of Les Rallizes Denudes with its distorted, experimental guitar hums.

Hylics has something to say about Gnosticism, and while you don’t really get punched in the face by its gnostic hell world like in, say, Dark Souls, the use of real textures, bodies, and the motif of skin and transformation makes for a trippy adventure down transgression lane. It’s a short game, about two hours, though much of the length comes from how damn difficult the game is. The JRPG turn-based battles give you a decent amount of options, but players’ll probably find themselves dying frequently to the same enemies.

The writing is random to the point where it might be superfluous, and goofy NPC text is all over the place. I kept hoping that NPCs would start giving me puzzles clues or something, but that never really happened. There weren’t any lines of dialogue that stood out to me, but the writing should be taken with a grain of salt. Hylics is decidedly a game of beauty and aesthetic. Worth the couple bucks it costs.

I originally read this book when I was in high school because modernism freaked me out and William Barrett seemed to back up my notion that art of the 20th century was apocalyptic and that modernism was a problem that needed attention. Now that I’m old and boring, I know that Barrett’s not really saying anything radical, that he’s interested in sentence structures and telling it like it is about Camus and Nietzsche. It’s a fantastic read for kids interested in the development of atonality and Faulkner.

“Confronted by a world that has become meaningless, we cannot be convinced by rational arguments to finding meaning in it. But if life-giving energy flows we are able to create values, and we can then find reasons enough to find the world meaningful…Humor is a sign of vitality. So long as we can still laugh, we have not succumbed to despair.”

There’s a section on sculpture throughout history, comparing how men of different ages choose to portray man through art. I also like the cover ~