Ling's Report

Apologies for the lack of updates for the past few months. A combination of acclimating to a new workplace and Fire Emblem: Three Houses has caused me to neglect my blog for a bit. Since it's Halloween, I thought I'd review a game that fits this holiday. I haven't played any horror games recently, but I do have a game that tells an interesting ghost story: Return of the Obra Dinn , a mystery game developed by Lucas Pope. In Return of the Obra Dinn , you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Company's London office.   The merchant ship Obra Dinn has reappeared months after it was declared lost at sea. The ship itself has no living crew on it, but that's no problem for you; you have a tool called the Memento Mortem, a pocket watch that lets you reexperience a person's last moments and creates an image of their death. With this pocket watch, you will need to find out what happened on the Obra Dinn . This game has a very en...

Into the Drowning Deep is the first book by Seanan McGuire (writing under the pseudonym of “Mira Grant”) that I've ever read, and it is a very good first impression of the author. Embarrassingly, I didn't know this book was a sequel to Rolling in the Deep , but thankfully knowledge of the first book wasn't a requirement to understand and enjoy the sequel. Be warned that this review will contain mild spoilers for the first book. Seven years ago, Imagine Network sent a crew out on the Atargatis to film a mockumentary on mermaids. The entire crew was lost at sea, leaving behind only a recording that hinted at a grim fate for all on board. Now a new crew is setting out to discover the truth behind the Atargatis incident, and on board is Victoria "Tory" Stewart, a scientist and the younger sister of one of the missing crew members. She hopes to find answers and closure, but soon discovers just how dangerous the mermaids she and the others had been chasing tr...

I am a big fan of the works of Emily Carroll . When I heard that she helped develop a game, I told myself that I had to check it out. That is how I discovered The Yawhg , a choose-your-own-adventure game developed by Emily Carroll and Damian Sommer. The Yawhg can be played by up to four people. Each player takes the role of a civilian going about their lives, unaware that the Yawhg will arrive in six weeks. The game has a bunch of randomized events that can help players build up their skills, screw up their lives, or both. However, once the Yawhg comes, these skills will determine whether the characters successfully rebuild their lives and hometown or do the equivalent of trying to put out a fire with gasoline. There are quite a few story chains to discover, and the randomization of the game means that there's no guarantee you'll actually see a story chain to its very end. Nevertheless, the story chains make for very interesting reads, even if the events ...

The Expression: Amrilato is one of the more unique visual novels that I ever played. Developed by SukeraSparo , The Expression: Amrilato is a yuri visual novel that tells the story of two girls trying to learn how to communicate with each other while also teaching players the language of Esperanto. The protagonist of the game is Rin Takatoh, a 17-year-old girl who finds herself transported to another world where Juliamo (known as Esperanto in the real world) is the official spoken language. Rin has no idea how to communicate with anyone, let alone how to get back home. Fortunately for her, she soon meets a girl named Ruka, who can understand and speak a tiny bit of Japanese. Ruka lets Rin stay at her home, and also offers to teach Rin how to speak Juliamo. As Rin learns more about the language, she finds herself growing closer to Ruka as the language barriers begin to break down. One unique feature of this visual novel is that it occasionally throws quiz minigam...

A while ago, I pledged money to a Kickstarter campaign for a game called Hunt the Night . One of the updates to that Kickstarter announced a collaboration with a game called The Count Lucanor  by Baroque Decay, stating a character from the game would be a boss. Intrigued, I decided to check out The Count Lucanor to see what kind of game it was. The Count Lucanor tells the story of a little boy named Hans. Hans and his mother live in poverty, and Hans becomes sick and tired of said life. He decides to set off on his own to find treasure, and his search soon takes him to the castle of Count Lucanor. There, he meets a kobold who informs him that the Count is seeking an heir, and that anyone who completes the Count's challenge can inherit his wealth. Unfortunately for Hans, the castle is full of nasty traps and vicious monsters eager to take a bite out of him. I love the atmosphere and setting of this game. The Count Lucanor reads and plays like an old fairy...

As someone who loves reading, I have a certain fondness for text-based games despite not having played many. The most recent one I've played is The Ghost of You , a text-based horror game by Noodletub Games . Seeing how June is LGBTQ Pride Month, I figured it's a good time to talk about this game. You play as Libretto Pansatto, a young woman and aspiring violinist still reeling from the death of her mother. She is invited to a performance celebrating the reopening of the town symphony hall, where her best friend and ex-girlfriend will be performing. However, while the symphony plays, Libertto is suddenly knocked out by a mysterious figure while the people around her start dying horribly. When she wakes up, she finds the symphony hall has become a scene of horrors, and her friends are nowhere to be seen. She has to find her friends, find a way to escape, and find out why this is happening to her. The game has a very simple look to it, having no pictures save fo...

This is my first post on this blog in...wow, four years. After I got my first job, I neglected maintaining this blog while trying to acclimate to my new workplace, and then just...sort of forgot about it. In hindsight, it was a bad idea to just leave it gathering dust, so I've decided to take it off the shelf and begin using it again. Those who have visited this blog before will notice that several reviews are gone, mostly the video game reviews. The site that the reviews were hosted on no longer exists, so I deleted the posts since they now consist of dead links. Any video game reviews I write from now on will be posted directly on this blog. I have also removed my web story The Stolen City  from the blog. I'm planning to rewrite it into something better, though I might not get to that any time soon. I hope to post more regularly on this blog from now on. I will probably not have a regular schedule, but I hope that what I do post encourages readers to go out and expe...

Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock is a book that immediately caught my attention from the moment I saw its summary. A labyrinthine forest filled with primeval magic? Entities born from old legends and fairytales? A place where fascination can turn into obsession and insanity? I was sold as soon as I finished reading the summary.   Mythago Wood is about a young man named Steven Huxley. His father, George Huxley, had been obsessed with the Ryhope Woods up until his death. George was convinced that Ryhope Woods was a place where legends and stories came to life, and he was particularly obsessed with the story of Guiwenneth, a warrior’s daughter who was rescued and raised by magpies after her aunt tried to take her for herself. Steven finds that his brother Christian is slowly starting to become just as obsessed with the Woods and Guiwenneth as their father was. When Christian disappears into the Woods to search for Guiwenneth, Steven soon begins to be drawn into the strangenes...

Since October is the month of frights and monsters, I figured I’d start the month off with a review of a book that had recently caught my eye: Asylum by Madeleine Roux. I have always been a fan of horror stories, and the combination of title and cover was enough to pique my curiosity. Asylum is about a boy named Daniel Crawford who is enrolled in the New Hampshire College Prep program. Once he reaches the place, however, he discovers that the usual summer housing program is closed, so students will need to stay at the Brookline dorms. As usual, there is a catch: Brookline dorms used to be a psychiatric hospital that housed the criminally insane. Dan still does what he can to make the most of his stay, even making friends with a girl named Abby and a boy named Jordan. However, Brookline hides many dark secrets, and Dan soon finds that he might be connected to its grim past. And then, strange things start happening: it starts with emails that only he can see, and then he...

As much as I like stories about the supernatural, I do not read that many books with vampires. Perhaps it was because most of the vampire books I did read when I was younger did not leave a good impression, since most of them featured an unlikeable, misanthropic heroine who wanted to get together with a brooding bloodsucker with all the personality of a cardboard box. When I was an undergraduate, I often went to the local Barnes & Noble to see what books were out, and I recalled seeing the Young Adult section filled with a whole bunch of paranormal romance books featuring vampires and werewolves. I suppose most of them were trying to appeal to the same audience that enjoyed Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, an audience that I was not a part of. I found myself wondering if I would ever be able to find a vampire story that could hold my attention without being some vapid tale of “Idiot Girl meets Angsting Bloodsucker.” Then, one day at my local library, I found The Str...

On July 2001, McFarlane Toys released six action figures designed by English writer Clive Barker. Each toy was packaged along with a chapter of a novelette penned by Barker himself, detailing the character’s history and the world that they live in. This series of action figures was known as Tortured Souls and sought to convey what Barker described as ‘the use of flesh as canvas.’ The chapters would then be bundled together in a book titled Tortured Souls: The Legend of Primordium . Primordium is a city that is said to have existed before all other cities. It is a place of corruption and decadence, a place where the rich and powerful indulge in all manners of sins. An assassin named Kreiger kills a Senator on behalf of the criminal Duraf Cascarellian. However, Kreiger ends up running into the dead Senator’s daughter, Lucidique, who persuades him to try to strike back at the Empire that made his life so miserable. To do this, she leads him to the enigmatic Agonistes, an entity ru...

I was first introduced to this book by a boy that I was tutoring in writing. He wanted to read The Emerald Atlas for his weekly reading assignment and he showed me the copy he was using so that I could get a better understanding of what it was about. I read the summary and I was immediately intrigued, probably because I love fantasy books and because the summary of the book had several things that appealed to me as well: magic, adventure, children finding out that there is more to the world than they imagined, monsters that pose great challenges, and several other things.   The Emerald Atlas is the first book in the “Books of Beginning” series by John Stephens. The book features three children whose parents left them behind for some unknown reason: Kate the responsible oldest sibling, Michael the dwarf-obsessed middle child, and Emma the rambunctious youngest sibling. The three of them were recently adopted by a man known as Abraham who seems to possess the power of mag...

I will freely admit that I love fairytales and that I love folklore. I love reading about the fairies of old, the sort of fairies that both entranced and terrified people with their strange powers and their alien sense of morality. That is why, when I first heard of the premise of Forgotten Gods by S.B. Stewart- Laing and Michael J. Chernicoff, I knew that I had to pick it up and give it a read. I was not disappointed by my decision.   Forgotten Gods is an alternate history story set in 1745 Scotland. Scottish rebels are at war with the British Empire, but they are not doing very well and defeat seems to be inevitable. In desperation, the rebels decide to call upon the daione sidhe , known to others as the fairies. The Fair Folk say that they will help out in the war on one condition: that they be allowed to roam free in the human world. The rebels, who are in dire need of as much help as they can get, agree to the terms. The daione sidhe make good on their promise and soo...

I have two confessions to make. The first confession is that I do not usually read non-fiction books; I have always been more of a fiction reader, meaning that my picking up The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell is a little out of the ordinary for me. The second confession is that I have not watched Tommy Wiseau’s movie “The Room” in its entirety, though I know and have seen enough to understand the things detailed within the book.   Greg Sestero’s account of his time as one of the key actors of “The Room” and his friendship with the movie director Tommy Wiseau is a fascinating read. While Greg is the narrator and point-of-view character, this book is as much of Tommy’s story as it is Greg’s, shedding some light on a man whose origins remain a mystery even to this day. Each chapter alternates between Greg and Tommy in the early stages of their friendship and the filming of “The Room” itself, transitioning quite seamlessly. The structure of the narrative ...

I have recently been in a phase that I call the “Neil Gaiman Phase.” I will admit that my past knowledge of Neil Gaiman consisted only of the knowledge that he came up with “The Sandman” comics and wrote the book Coraline . However, after stumbling upon a book of his called American Gods , I began looking for more of his works; this resulted in me finding a book I had heard of before but never knew was written by him: Neverwhere . Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew, a relatively ordinary man whose life seems to consist of him being jerked around by his fiancée Jessica. However, that all changes when he runs into a heavily injured girl and decides to help her out. The girl’s name is Door, and it turns out that she comes from another world. However, helping Door ended up having unintended consequences: he seems to have become all but invisible to the people of London, and he also finds himself in Door’s world, known as London Below. As he struggles to get his life back on ...

Deeper is a horror science-fiction novel by Jeff Long and a sequel to The Descent , a dark tale of a group of explorers who discover that a group of humanoids dwell in a large underground kingdom; the humanoids are known as ‘hadals,’ named for their scientific name Homo hadalis , and their culture is one of frightening brutality. The sequel story is kicked off when a group of children suddenly disappear and it seems as though the hadals are responsible. Linguist Ali von Schade, the sole survivor of the previous expedition, finds herself going back to the underground to help find the children. Meanwhile, a mother of one of the missing girls gathers a miniature army to go down and retrieve the children. However, they are ill-equipped to handle the underground world and unprepared for the horrors found there… The strongest part of the story is most definitely the atmosphere and setting. The caverns are a very claustrophobic setting and Long does a good job in showing how the sanity ...

I am the type of person who enjoys books of a psychological nature. The human mind is one of the most familiar yet most mysterious aspects of humanity, capable of surprising us even after we believe we have seen it all. When someone recommended In This Way I was Saved to me by saying that it was a great psychological story, I decided to give it a shot and I was not disappointed. In This Way I was Saved is a book published in 2009, the first ever novel by Brian DeLeeuw. The story is told from the point of view of a boy named Daniel and his friendship and relationship with another boy named Luke. Luke himself is a seemingly normal child, but his personal life is plagued with many problems, particularly his psychologically disturbed mother. Luke’s friendship with Daniel is one of the only things he can enjoy when he needs to take refuge from the harshness of the real world; however, as the two grow older, Luke finds himself depending less and less on Daniel. Daniel doesn’t like th...

Last Days is a 2012 novel by Adam Nevill about a documentary maker named Kyle Freeman. Kyle is contacted by a man named Maximillian Solomon who wants him to make a film about the Temple of the Last Days, a cult run by a woman named Sister Katherine that was thought to have met its end when several members, Sister Katherine included, were found dead from what looked like a gruesome suicide ritual. Kyle, in desperate need of money, takes the job and begins filming, but complications begin to arise in strange sightings and dreams. Soon, Kyle begins to wonder if the Temple of the Last Days has some secrets of a more insidious nature. The atmosphere of the story is well-developed, particularly the cult. While the Temple of the Last Days itself seems to be an amalgamation of several horrific stereotypes associated with cults, the real life existence of such cults such as the one founded by Jim Jones does help in making the Temple not seem too over the top. The atrocities committed by...