Actual Play: Prey

Actual Play is where we actually play games and then review them. You know, sort of like most video game sites do.

Available platforms: PC, PlayStation 4 (played), Xbox One

Whether or not a game necessarily has to be “fun” is a debate, I think, that’s worth having. So to is the ongoing conversation about fetishising difficulty and the ability of players. The times I struggled with Prey, though, were not borne out of a challenging stretch or the moments of gut-wrenching tension. It’s when it felt like a slog.

Her/Their/Your Story

“Closure is bullshit,” James Ellroy once wrote, “and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his ass.” The author of LA Confidential is wrong about a lot of things, but in this case, he’s bang on. An ending with no loose ends, unanswered questions of other dangling prepositions is desirable in storytelling, but if you try and apply a similar narrative arc to a human life, you’ll only be disappointed. Fiction which attempts to embrace the ambiguity of life treads a tricky line between purposefully disappointing those engaging with it, and just wasting their time. It’s a tightrope which Her Story, Sam Barlow’s surprise hit PC title from 2015, manages quite wonderfully imho.

Writing your life story in Even the Stars

I’m home sick. It sucks. Doubly so since, as well as enduring the dizziness and stomach troubles of undefined illness, any time I’m confined to my sickbed I am gripped by this contrarian desire to be productive. I’m wrapped in a duvet and sat on the sofa but staring out of the window, or into my computer screen, thinking of all the things I could be doing with all this spare time I suddenly have. I want to be creative! I want to explore the possibilities of what’s out there! But my weak and feeble body does not let me. It is, at least, the perfect situation to catch up on some videogames.

The Thing on the Landing

As a kid, I was kind of stupid. I was super into the supernatural, an interest that lingers to this day, in a less intense way. My trips to the library were mostly focussed on finding graphic novels that weren’t for adults, and similarly kid-friendly titles about UFOs, ghosts, crop circles, spontaneous combustion. There was a surprising surfeit of compendiums which explained the Roswell crash, or the Enfield Haunting, in child-friendly prose – with plenty of full-colour pictures to boot! I don’t know if it was because of the X-Files, or if there was just something in the air, but the nineties seemed particularly geared towards getting kids into the arcane. Neil Buchanan, of Art Attack and fronting a heavy metal band fame, hosted a CITV show called It’s a Mystery which investigated topics as many and varied as the Loch Ness Monster and people getting trapped in abandoned tube stations. Its creepy, Twilight Zone-biting opening still haunts me.