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december 2025

ah fuck it's dember.

now a better blogger than i would make a cute retrospective but this is my fifth december artlog. at this point we both know i don't do that. we'll live. also if you're reading this january 2nd (when i posted it) and there's typos and shit please don't look at them... i'm tired from my trip...

still let's do a little catching up. this year i made four whole ass vidyagames! the latest, maintain'n'fuck, came out this month, and i talk a little bit about it below. and i made music for all of them, because that's something i experiment with now yayyy. and also for a fifth game, amphigeum, which is by my beloved bestie and has an unofficial guide right here in my webbed sight, so i could finally fulfill my dream of writing a gamefaq.

andddd both of us got featured in indiepocalypse! amphigeum is on #71, and i'm on #72 with a machine walks on the beach at night :) this was a lovely capstone to a year of gamedev, methinks.

speaking of games i also completed my new year's resolution, playing umineko. it did take the whole damn year lol. very much worth it! the game's really fucking good. ummy will be all over this log, no spoilers. i considered making A Post about it where i can go into everything but hm maybe some other time. i did a lot of casual blogging on tumblr so the energy might have been diluted. in any case, i highly recommend reading this fucking thing. it's not just a delicious combo of murder mystery and metafiction (two things i'm absolutely a sickos of), it's so dense with amazing complex characters it makes me sick — don't be fooled by episode 1 feminist sex pest battler, that's ryushiki07 giving you a false sense of security. there's still a fair bit of shonen bullshit though. more on that later. anyway, i got the game on gog and used 07th mod for voice acting and visual changes, and then topped it off with the ep 8 manga (and some skimming of other eps). i'm not gonna be a purist and say that's Thee way to experience it though; i think the manga is very good on its own! and better paced.

• was lilith a joke? how bad translation and parody created a demon. this one's for those of us who've seen the old posts on tumblr about how lilith was a badass feminist icon etc. really neat.
• the monarch cannot return to the chrysalis.
• contemporary classical percussion is wild.
• spikes & kitten design notes. it's no secret that i find sylvie's games extremely compelling, despite (and maybe because of) them being very much not my thing in terms of genre and difficulty. no one's doing it like her.

maintain'n'fuck

woo fourth game this year holy hell what the fuck. like two weeks before i came across this jam i said to a friend four fangs was gonna be the last one this year but come on... i started the year with a robot game, it's fun to end it with another one!

since robotic romance wasn't a vn exclusive jam like the others i've joined, i figured i'd do something a little different — i thought of making more of a point and click game with different possible interactions for each spot. uhh the end result isn't really that, but that's alright. being in godot still let me do stuff i couldn't with renpy (like using shaders) and i didn't have to fight the screen language or whatever it's called. making volume sliders and stuff from scratch was a small price to pay (and i had help from my friend), and the dialogic plugin covered the putting-text-on-screen-in-order part pretty well.

so uh yeah i'm not sure that i have so much to say about this game honestly! i wanted to make something lighthearted, where the characters are very familiar with each other. it's not something i really write much of, i'm sooo self serious (and also both previous jams had Dark Themes), but it's very very fun ^_^.

but though i mostly thought of it as an ecchi game, the final and explicit [fuck] interaction was basically the best thing i could have done for it tbh... teasing and playfully soft-dominating the facility is great and the whole point — i love building sexual tension for its own sake (sexual tension is an amazing feeling which is basically ruined by having sex, anyone?) — but having it plainly state it wants you to fuck it is a big part of the fantasy too... it's the "receptive" partner but not passive yknow. or something. and from a utilitarian pov it was much better for the pacing too, it's a more graceful transition to the ending than just triggering it from reaching 100% cpu load.

and speaking of cpu load, i hope you enjoyed the layered computer fan soundscape ^_^ i had to tone the music down a fair bit so they could really come through without making an overcrowded mess — something like the bad cd drive is already super complex. see, ambient was my original plan but it's a game about fucking a research facility, doesn't it kinda beg for sexy sexy industrial / ebm? so i spent ages getting mad at my lack of musical knowledge and copying-then-tweaking riffs / basslines from lebanon hanover and boy harsher and there's basically only half of it in the final product lmao. i might reuse them eventually. but in any case a text based game isn't really something you want danceable music for, that's kinda distracting innit? i still need to get better at the whole music production thing though, that's a goal for 2026.

art

it's ummy time.

umineko character spoilers (they show up on episode 2)

proud to have a drawn this stupid ass image.

i wish this game had accurate 80s fashion... it'd be so fucking fun... also i love every single woman in this game so much.

media

games

• warm like flesh (2025)
• be witches (demo) (2017-): playing a breast expansion game but shaking my head the whole time so people know i prefer small boobs (i think you can adjust your characters boob size from the equip menu though, which is rather neat). i came across it because of the soundtrack, which is very fun, and while match-3 is as tiresome as it gets for eroge it's got a neat twist, with you having to pay attention to where your cursor is since it's a hitbox. i played until the first boss and that was kind of a tiresome slow pace though. with 8 years of updates that's an insane amount of match 3 interspersed with rather boring navigation.
• ruin: chapter 0 (2025): oughh show me your secrets... (be wary of softlocks... i got a couple)
• umineko no naku koro ni (2007-2008): i have officially achieved my new years resolution with a few weeks to spare. well, ish, since that was just the question arcs. and man how do you even review it succintly. i spent eleven months with this. it's very very good. i love how realized the characters and their relationships are — whenever we focused on one of the ushiromiya women i was clapping and cheering; i was so surprised by how well written they are, after the episode 1 sex pest battler moments —, the mystery just keeps unfolding and unfolding, the metanarrative aspects are great, and obviously it is made for freaks and sickos. that being said the pacing is atrocious though. five hundred thousand words, give or take, for the question arcs and man. it doesn't need all that... especially for the first couple episodes where everything is just kinda quaint, and i personally found the longer action sequences tremendously dull. sometimes you just gotta find a nice rhythm to tap ctrl and skim. the manga seem to be better in that regard (i read some of episode 1, which has a great art style). also, this isn't a criticism but mannn the game likes teasing you with whodunnit stuff and then keeping it for later... mean to me!! i've been valiantly holding the fort and not looking for the solutions because i am a whodunnit girlie but oo boy my curious nature...
• dating of the future (demo) (2025): omggg what a fun game, love the characters. gorgeous gorgeous art too. it'd be unwise to start another vn right now (i have yu-no queued after umineko) but i'm buying definitely this.
• queen's domain (demo) (2025): sighhh can we just ban retro aesthetic without retro performance. i got so much stuttering even at 30% resolution that it made me queasy. real shame, this seems like a damn good game.
• a summer's end - hong kong 1986 (2020): THROWING UPPPPP. i started reading this one back in march and then entirely forgot to continue despite it being like 3 hours long. it's really good... though i do think the choices could have been left just as flavor text because (except for the very last one) they don't really change the story (which i like) but you miss out on a couple cgs and an extra h-scene if you don't pick all the right ones... kicks a rock...
• umineko no naku koro ni chiru (2009-2010): uhh well guess who read episodes 5 and 6 in a week. and then 7 and 8 at the same pace. yesss i love actually being in the murder mystery / whodunnit register thank you so much erika — though we don't stay there forever, which shouldn't have surprised me as much as i did. the pace for the most part really picks up (action is as boring as ever though) and i did get better at fast forwarding teehee. but genuinely: this game's so goooood. i'll even forgive the rather saccharine tone of episode 8.
• about fishing (demo) (2025): actually the most mechanically compelling fishing gameplay i've ever encountered. small sample size, but it doesn't feel like an abstraction that's more in dialogue with other fishing minigames than it is with the act of reeling a fish. however that makes it pretty damn hard, and i couldn't get the last (?) fish after agesss trying (at least there's no time limit!). interested to see where this one heads, but i might not play it myself.
• metamorphosis (demo) (2025): ohohoho the megastructure nun horror game... i'm too bad at it... maybe i should try rebinding the controls to make platforming easy?
• rainbows are carnivores (2025): really cool! make sure you read the blog post!
robot yuri 64 (2025): really cute game, the open ended platforming reminds me of hoptix. however much like that game it's more fun if you like and are good at the genre, which uhh. yknow.
• 7 trillion nerves (2025): really love the visuals and music here.
• something in our heart (2025)
• goetia (2016): ermmm glad i got this one on sale with my fake trading card money. tbh. i did not care much for it, it's rather tedious. the puzzles are mostly fine but unremarkable, and there's so much information (a lot of it in small hard to read handwriting) it's hard to separate wheat and chaff — and i'm not forgving it for having a puzzle based on memorizing a melody (no accessibility options or anything there, and it isn't even thematically relevant). and the map is huge. and while the music is good but there isn't much of it and loops are short and repetitive. and it does something really really funny with its possession-based inventory system: you'll drop items, often very small and hard to see items, that you might need afterwards. i ended up in a pixel hunting hell of my own creation a couple times because where the fuck did i put my screwdriver. have i mentioned the map is huge. so uh yeah i was rather bored by it. it's some 5 or 6 hours long (i don't have an accurate measurement because i left it running while helping wrap presents lol) and i think it'd be more fun at 3.
• i can't say i'm surprised (2025)
• imitation girl (2025)
• 999: nine hours, nine persons, nine doors (2009): played over christmas. this game's pretty fun, though i was expecting it to be harder / more brainy (?). the harder puzzles are mostly just fiddly (the sokoban... the fucking out of tune piano...). but still the escape rooms are overall pleasing and the story is intriguing (though the gameplay can be tedious on subsequent loops, i did nawwwt go for all six endings), and i quite liked the music. it's worth checking out! though be warned it's extremely annoying without the faster text romhack.

movies and series

• the white lotus (2021-): freakish amount of people with blue eyes on season 1 of this. abnormal. that aside it's really good! i love dark comedies! i love drama with people sitting around and having terrible and awkward conversations when they should be mauling each other with their teeth and nails and such! yes! have the worst time of your life! it's also good to see alexandra daddario outside the dreadful percy jackson movie (oh and four from the shit divergent movies is on season 2). and i really enjoyed the day-by-day structure, works very well. however! i think season 2 was just too much of the same thing, and aubrey plaza felt soo typecast (like sydney sweeney before her) and it kinda demotivated me... it's still mindless fun but after three eps i figured i'd put it aside for now.
• the carpenter's son (2025): hm it's aggresively alright for what's the clearest 2/5 star rating i've ever watched. i enjoyed it well enough, i enjoyed reacting to every Jesus Power with "is this canon...?", but it's not horror by any stretch of imagination and it suffers from not getting weird with it. the concept is pretty fun but it needed someone like eggers to really shine. it needed to be less literal and more symbolic. hell, if you're gonna be a little heretical than go all the fucking way. fka twigs is entirely wasted on it, she's like this movie's trophy wife. and they should not have flat ironed nic cage's hair.
• wake up dead man (2025): look. no benoit blanc movie is gonna top knives out. i think this is maybe a better chill laid back murder mystery than glass onion but a worse benny film, and overall unremarkable tbh. the characters are rather bland and for the most part we don't really spend any time getting to know their possible motives or any extra things they could be hiding. it's not even really funny. it's fine and entertaining (almost quaint after my december umineko lockdown honestly), i quite enjoyed it, but i think it could have been either shorter or have more stuff in it. higher density!
• funny games (1997): fuuuck this movie's exhausting. it's very well made and the performances are great but it's so fucking exhausting.

and pluribus season 1 is over... i liked the last couple episodes (ep 7 is complicated) but i did not really like the series. i think it's very lukewarm and just kinda shuffles its feet, despite having some really compelling stuff when it bothers to touch on its own scifi premise. i feel i can be very very mean about it if you get me going but i didn't even hate it. it's perfectly lukewarm to me.

books and manga

• the crying of lot 49 (thomas pynchon): damn this book is dense. it's almost like a foucault's pendulum speedrun. i liked it.
• ammonite (nicola griffith): really good book! i love griffith's running theme of exploring forms of kinship between women...
• the mysterious affair at styles (agatha christie): yuuuup it's a relaxing agatha christie reread. i love how simple this one is. of course maybe it feels that way because i've read it a few times. nevertheless.
• umineko no naku koro ni chiru - episode 8: twilight of the golden witch (kei natsumi): oh yeah. also read ep 7, by eita mizuno, but that was more of a skim / speedread because it doesn't actually have many changes from the vn, except for some extra info at the climax. ep 8, on the other hand, is just excellent. better than the vn with its pacing and also adds a lot of extra character moments and the confession arc, which is just mwahhh amazing.
• bibliomania (orval and macchiro): i haven't been able to find anything about this manga or its authors, i just stumbled upon it. it's pretty good and the art is gorgeousssss.

happy new year ya filthy animals

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