Reviews | alunduil

Keeping Arth's Economy Running

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In Arth, corporate interests claim a monster’s hoard and sell it off to plunder funds long before the Heroes’ Guild gets round to killing the beast. That’s the premise of Orconomics, the first book of J. Zachary Pike’s Dark Profit Saga. It’s a well-executed satire of capitalism running amok, worth every word. I read it in July and went straight on to Son of a Liche. I’d tell you to do the same.

The book gives each fantasy convention a financial counterpart. Heroes need a licence from the guild, which ranks them by points. Firms like Goldson Baggs run the funds. Orcs, goblins, and kobolds have to apply to become Noncombatant Paper Carriers so that heroes won’t kill and loot them. NPC is a role-playing pun that also names the paperwork deciding who heroes may hunt.

Gorm Ingerson has fallen about as far as a hero can and kept his sense of honour. He’s a dwarf who lost his licence and his clan twenty years before the book opens. He gets by robbing adventurers. He still sticks up for an undocumented goblin. The goblin becomes his squire. Gorm stays loyal to him, and to the party of misfits around them, which is a lot of why he’s so lovable.

I read it as the 2008 housing crisis. Pike told Fantasy Hive that after losing his job that year he spent a lot of time reading and listening to coverage of the financial crisis. He doubts many publishers would have looked at a book about orcs and goblins “lampooning a housing crisis” before it had an audience. So the reading isn’t only mine. I don’t know whether the satire is generic enough to always be true.

Carried by Its Giants

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 07:00:00 GMT

The first giant in Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is a mother whom grief has made huge and furious. When the volcano erupted, she left her infant in the caves of the Hiddenfolk, hoping they would keep it safe. Senua doesn’t end her with a sword. Each giant in the game is a person undone by grief or fear and given a way to move on, arcs I found excellent every time.

I’d tell you to play it. Senua is as good as she was in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. The quality is top-notch again. For me the narrative flows through the playing as seamlessly as it did in the first game, because the game railroads Senua through environments where the tale happens along the path she walks. That design puts Hellblade II closer to Inside than to anything else I’ve played, a quick game told through its mechanics.

I played it with DTS:X, which puts the voices in Senua’s head all around you. They’re amazing to hear that way. They also talk to her differently this time. In Senua’s Sacrifice they fed her hints and lies, where here they offer fewer of either and run closer to inner monologue.

For me the ending falls short of the first game’s. It lands with a similar effect but with less power. Senua’s Sacrifice had one clear theme running under everything, while here the giants take the spotlight.

Nobody Explains the Bathtub

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 07:00:00 GMT

A cast-iron bathtub on cart wheels sits partway up a hillside in the Windscale quarantine zone. Three skeletons sit up inside it. One wears a flat cap. Another wears a knitted beanie low over the skull. Someone dressed them, propped them upright, and pushed the tub out into the grass. Atomfall never explains it.

The game has no quest markers. It gives leads instead—a note in a drawer, a set of coordinates, a name someone lets slip. I placed my own icons on the map from what they implied. I unpacked the zone rather than crossing it. That’s what I’d recommend it for.

Fallout is the comparison everyone reaches for. I think it’s the right one. Atomfall works the same post-apocalyptic ground without deriving from it. The place is bright green under a blue sky, all wet grass and birch scrub and wildflowers. The jokes are English. None of it reads as a wasteland.

I could carry four guns and sixteen other items, and no more. The game has no money at all. Trading means piling goods onto a set of scales until the merchant’s side balances. Reviewers named the inventory the worst decision in the game. I think they have it backwards. The limit stops the zone becoming a supply run. It was limiting and fun at once.

Red Strain and Wicked Isle are two more mysteries rather than more zone.

I chased most of the side stories, taking the leads I found and could resolve. I wasn’t going for completion. The side stories converge at the end all the same. The balancing gets wonky there. Six mutually exclusive endings collapse into whichever one you take. It’s satisfying in spite of that. The game expects a manual save beforehand and a reload after. That’s how it offers the other endings.

I never saw anything that explained the bathtub. I may have missed it.

The Cloud Over Roke

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Roke is already there in A Wizard of Earthsea. Ged arrives and finds a school older than anyone’s memory of it, the Masters already teaching. The novel never suggests it was otherwise. Tales from Earthsea shows it being built. I read it in June. I’d tell you to read it for the world.

“The Finder” runs three hundred years earlier, when wizards served whoever held wealth and power. Otter is taken and worked by the mage Gelluk in the mercury mines. Fugitives built the school Ged walks into, working in hiding and at their own risk. Most of them were women.

That isn’t what Roke teaches him. It teaches him songs. The Creation of Éa is one he learns there, and the novel says outright that the Deed of Ged leaves things out. So the past reaches Ged constantly, and always as song. Seeing a history from inside it is nothing like seeing it warped through story.

The collection lays out how the school closed. Women are barred from study and from teaching. Higher magery becomes a thing only men do. The Archmage is raised from a wizard into an office. Barbara Walker’s The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects reads our own symbols as a mythology that obscures how we got here, and that’s the parallel. It isn’t a complaint about distortion. Myth does more than history to make us who we are, and you don’t get to set it down. What you can do is learn to see around it, which is what these five stories are for.

Tolkien answers this with appendices, the chronologies dated, the genealogies settled. Le Guin closes her book with thirty-odd pages of much the same apparatus, then sets it behind five stories that tell you they may be wrong. She introduces “The Finder” as an airy quilt, half hearsay and half guesswork, yet true enough. “For a cloud hangs over the time when Roke first became the Isle of the Wise,” she writes, “and it may be that the wise men put it there.”

Almost none of it resolves. I came to it already reading Earthsea. It left me wanting more of the world than either book has shown me.

Whichever Comes Second

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Most of my time in The Invincible went on walking through metallic structures on a planet called Regis III. The walk is the best thing in the game. It takes its time, letting the place turn wrong while you’re still deciding whether anything is wrong at all. I’d read Lem’s novel before I played, so I already knew what was down there. The game made the place strange anyway, which is the better trick and the reason I’d tell you to play it.

The adaptation keeps the discovery. Not the sequence of events, but arriving somewhere that doesn’t answer to you, learning by degrees how little your equipment counts for. You walk into that rather than have a character explain it. Knowing the answer in advance should have spoiled it. It came close.

It isn’t a retelling, though. I hadn’t expected that to matter so much. The novel’s Rohan and the game’s Yasna aren’t the same person doing the same things. The events around them diverge early, the game working its way to endings of its own. So you don’t get the pleasure of a faithful adaptation, where you know the story already and came for the telling. Both versions are built on the same discovery.

Whichever reaches you first gets it whole. The other arrives with its strangeness already used. I came to the game second, so the game paid. Had I played first, the novel would have paid instead. No order saves both. The choice was never about sequence. You’re picking which one you want at full strength.

The walk does go on. Somewhere in the middle of those structures the tension stops building and just sits there. The novel got more out of the same material. The drag is real, though it ruins nothing. But the atmosphere kept accumulating and left me wanting more than it gave.

I can’t separate that from the order I took them in. The novel came first, so it had a hold the game was never going to get twice. I don’t know how much of the game’s slack is the game and how much is me already knowing what was coming. I played it second. That’s the only version of it I can tell you about.

Told Without Telling

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:00:00 GMT

A lighthouse pulls itself out of the ground and learns to walk. That’s the first thing Keeper asks you to take on faith. The game spends the next few hours earning that without once explaining itself.

I played it in June and had a good time. When I try to say what kind, I land on Inside, Playdead’s wordless side-scroller from 2016. I like that it never narrates and never needs to, the history sitting in the world rather than somebody’s mouth, the way the Souls games leave it for you to find. Games built like that can look thin to a player who wants things said out loud. They aren’t. Keeper works that way without the adrenaline.

The refusal is total. No dialogue, no text, no interface, nothing on screen keeping score. The beam carries it instead, burning off the Wither, bringing plants back where the purple rot has been, waking the mechanisms that open the way. One property, the only property a lighthouse has ever had, does the work of verb, tutorial, and explanation at once.

Where games like this often run on being hunted, Keeper runs on company. Twig, a seabird, reaches the levers, cranks, and vines a walking lighthouse can’t. Most of what the island asks needs both of them. The same silence that reads as loneliness elsewhere reads here as partnership.

It escalates anyway, which I didn’t expect. Somewhere near the middle the game changes what you are and how you move, then does it again once you’ve settled, each turn faster than the last. In most games that acceleration would mean something had started chasing you. Here what climbs is invention, not threat. That substitution is a harder trick than it sounds, and the reason I’d call this a romp rather than a quiet little game about a lighthouse.

The light itself fought me. Because the camera doesn’t move, you see the island only from wherever the game decides to stand. Aiming a beam is exactly the task that wants an angle you choose for yourself. The framing is mostly generous, often better than what I’d have picked. But you aim almost constantly. A camera that won’t move makes placing the beam fiddlier than a game this sure of its own images ought to need.

The Man in the Middle

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:00:00 GMT

I read The Sicilian in June. It’s well written and a fun read, another Puzo Godfather novel.

The book strands Michael Corleone between two ways of living: a belief that turns a bandit into a legend, and the older law of the Mafia.

Salvatore Guiliano, Puzo’s folk hero, loses his fear of death early. He doesn’t court it. The fear the rest of us carry has left him. Everyone near him feels the absence. They follow a man who has stopped flinching and robs the barons to feed them. A whole island builds a myth on one. Belief like that moves people. It moves them wherever it points, which isn’t always somewhere good.

Michael’s own family lives the other way, the Corleones among the wider Sicilian Mafia. Not lawlessness but a rival law: silence before the state, loyalty to the family, respect paid and debts kept, every quarrel settled inside the code instead of a courtroom. Don Croce, the boss who shadows Guiliano, goes by the Don of Peace. He keeps it on the Mafia’s terms, for the Mafia’s gain. It has no use for a man who fights for anyone but its own.

Michael is a Corleone. Blood and name hold him on the family’s side. But Guiliano pulls at him the whole way, a believer he half-wishes he could be. That puts him in the middle. The old name for it is practical wisdom, the mean between the pure thing and the safe one.

The book sets all this up and then stands back. I finished it sure of where I’d stand and no clearer on what I’d do there.