After the somewhat underwhelming Heart-Shaped Box (review), I wasn’t sure what to expect of Joe Hill’s Strange Weather. It’s a collection of four novellas published in 2017, coming in at 432 pages total (paperback). It’s fair to call it a set of horror stories, but each one is very different:

• Snapshot is a classic “haunted artifact” story that could easily have been written by Joe Hill’s father, Stephen King. The artifact in question is an instant camera which not only preserves memories, it also takes them away.
  
  The protagonist, an overweight and very clever kid, has a close encounter with the device’s owner. Just when you think the story is pretty much over, it goes to some very interesting places. 5/5.

• Loaded is about the intersecting stories of several people whose lives are impacted, and in some cases erased, by guns.

  It’s the longest of the four pieces, but it moves at such a rapid clip that you’re unlikely to notice. This is a gut-wrenching, punishing, very American tale. 5/5.

• Aloft is the story of Aubrey Griffin, a neurotic musician who is reluctantly participating in a skydiving trip to honor a deceased loved one. But instead of safe and sound on planet Earth, Aubrey finds himself in a strange place that seems to never want to let him go.
  
  It’s an imaginative, not especially scary adventure that offers some reprieve between the two violent tales that precede and follow it. It invests us in its colorful characters, but that investment never quite pays off. Aloft might have worked better as a full-length novel. 3.5/5.

• Rain is a return to blood-splattering horror, in this case inflicted by the weather itself, in a scenario reminiscent of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Our protagonist, a young lesbian woman with the unlikely name Honeysuckle Speck, barely escapes the first wave of carnage.
  
  As she makes her way through a Colorado hellscape on a personal quest, she faces a wannabe vampire, members of a religious cult, a mad Russian, an MMA fighter, a bigoted neighbor, and other witnesses to the apocalypse. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is president, and he provides the deranged all-caps tweets you would expect from him.

  It’s horror, but it’s also tongue-in-cheek, and it works on both levels. 5/5.

For three of the four stories, I felt that the length was just about perfect, showing a remarkable mastery of the novella form. Hill also uses his talent for creating memorable characters, which was already evident in Heart-Shaped Box, to its fullest.

I recommend Strange Weather without reservations, but know what you’re signing up for. Loaded is the centerpiece novella, and it’s a brutal story about a very real subject (gun violence). This not a book you’ll want to pick up unless you’re in the right headspace for it.

Gainomax is a Swedish sports nutrition company. Their products can be found at least throughout Scandinavia.

This protein bar tastes absolutely amazing. It would be hard to tell this apart from candy bars. Smooth toffee flavor with hints of vanilla. The chocolate is nicely quite dark.

One bar contains 18 grams of protein which keeps hunger at bay at least for a while.

Retail prices are around 2€ a bar, which is clearly inflated. This is the only thing keeping this from a 5-star rating.

The world as we know it has ended long ago, and the ruins of San Francisco are crawling with orcs and goblins. Your are a novice necromancer, in pursuit of your brother, who has abandoned you and your family in search of fame and fortune. Perhaps you will find him somewhere in the Transamerica Pyramid, one of the few tall buildings that are still standing.

Knights of San Francisco is a choice-based adventure game for Android and iOS made by a single developer, Filip Hracek, and a single illustrator, Alec Webb. It is mostly text-based, and the gameplay is somewhat reminiscent of Choice of Games titles, but Knights also severs to showcase the game’s own engine, Egamebook.

You move through the game’s world by selecting destinations on a map. As you do so, you encounter allies, enemies, and items that may help you on your quest. During turn-based combat, you control only your own actions (your allies attack independently). You are given a surprisingly large set of choices, from feinting, to casting a spell, to kicking a weapon out of the way.

The game is mostly text-based, but the illustrations by Alec Webb help to establish the setting. (Credit: Raindead Games / Alec Webb. Fair use.)

After each choice, a dice roll determines success or failure; if you fail, you can drain your stamina or sanity points to re-roll. The game generates text that describes the result of each combatant’s actions.

There are no hitpoints or levels, and death can come quickly. Still, thanks to your allies, the necromancy skill, restorative items, and the re-roll option, most battles will not present much of a challenge. Just in case, the game lets you rewind bad decisions (I only had to do so once).

The story is told in short paragraphs, much of it through dialog with friendly characters which you can skip if you prefer to focus on combat. The writing is solid, and you do get to make a choices that will shape the story and its ending.

If you’re looking for a game that will give you hours of replay value, this isn’t it—a playthrough takes about 60-90 minutes, and there’s not much that changes on a second run. But it’s immersive, novel, and fun, and only costs $3. Whether or not you pick this one up, Raindead Games is worth keeping an eye on.

I read my first Stephen King book when I was a teenager, and I remain one of his constant readers decades later. He’s incredibly prolific, but he won’t live forever (unless he’s made some kind of special arrangement). Who will I turn to then in order to fill the King-shaped void in my life? Perhaps Joe Hill, AKA Joseph Hillström King.

King shortened his middle name to create his nom de plume so people wouldn’t do what I’m doing: pay attention to his work because of his father’s. By now that ship has sailed, and comparisons are inevitable the moment you look at Hill’s photo on a book jacket. Joe Hill has followed in his father’s footsteps as a horror author, but he’s also explored new territory as the writer of Locke & Key, a graphic novel adapted into a TV series.

Heart-Shaped Box (2007) was Hill’s debut novel. Named after the Nirvana song, it’s about the haunting of a washed-up rock star named Judas Coyne by a ghost he buys on the Internet. The book wastes little time with questions or preliminaries. Soon, Coyne and his hot, young goth girlfriend (the latest of many) are on the run for their lives, from an entity that seems capable of anything and impossible to defeat.

Each chapter is named after a famous rock song, and Hill’s story is loud, fast, violent, engaging and—not especially scary. Coyne is not a likable main character, nor is he easily scared; the stakes are mostly limited to the survival of him and the people around him; the ghost is creepy but all too familiar and human in its evil.

That doesn’t make Heart-Shaped Box a bad story; I enjoyed my time with it, and finished it in a few days. But as far as horror goes, it lacks the menacing quality of the best works of the genre; it never plants an idea in your head that comes back when you’re alone in the house and it’s after midnight. 3.5 stars, rounded down because I’m hoping Hill’s later works will pack more of a punch.

Take A Hike! is a very short visual novel by Jane Titor about three teenagers with botanically inspired names (Olive, Sage, and Heather) and their experiences during a hike in the woods. All are part of an outdoor education class led by a young teacher named Miss Yarrow. After Sage separates from the group, Olive runs after her to ensure she doesn’t get lost, and the two are soon joined by Heather.

This is a kinetic visual novel, meaning that you don’t get to make any choices. Or, as the game’s description puts it: “Follow three stressed-out teens on a journey full of bickering, mosquitoes, and self-discovery.”

The game includes only small amounts of original art, but the sprite assets by DejiNyucu are used to good effect throughout. (Credit: Jane Titor / DejiNyucu. Fair use.)

It’s a romantic story that doesn’t quite go where you might think it will. The writing is good, with a couple of moments that had me laugh out loud (especially the scenes with Miss Yarrow, the true heroine of this game). Take A Hike! is only about 30 minutes long; it’s $3.50 at full price, but if you have bought the Bundle for Palestinian Aid, you already own it. I enjoyed the hike, and only regretted that I didn’t get to spend more time with these characters.

This book is about the Planet Vulcan. All odd numbered chapters are the lame excuse for a story, about the Vulcans desiring to leave the Federation. This is supposed to somehow connect to what I would consider the good part: The rise of the Vulcan Civilisation from it’s prehistoric beginnings, to the Time of Awakening. This part is great if you are into this kind of thing. Good world building but not much else…

Julian Bashir is hired by a secret service to prevent a mad scientist from creating a clone army. If at this point you still want to read it, this might be your thing.

‘Gentlemen, I have a time machine in my basement’

‘Splendid! Lets play some chess!’

The Boy in the Book is a web-based full-motion video game; the website describes it as ”an interactive true story in 10 chapters”. It is free without any strings attached, and has also been published in book form and performed as a live show.

The game/documentary is premised on the random discovery of pages from an old diary in a stack of Choose Your Own Adventure books bought on eBay. In almost stenographic shorthand, the diary pages record the author’s experiences with bullying, with their attempts to overcome extreme shyness, and even suicidal thoughts.

The notes suggest that the diary’s author, a boy named Terence Prendergast, was born in 1975. Is he alive, and if so, what happened to him since he wrote the diary?

Choices in the chatroom

The buyer of the books, a Welsh writer and performer named Nathan Penlington, sets out to discover and document the story of the “boy in the book” together with his friends Fernando, Sam, Nick—and with you, the player.

You interact with Nathan & friends through an instant message chatroom in which the group discusses what to do: which leads to pursue to locate the author of the diary, which detours to take along the way, and whether to persist in what increasingly seems like a futile quest.

As the player, you are presented with dialog options throughout the chat, which sometimes represent important forks in the road. Depending on your choices, different responses, videos and images appear in the chatroom. They are grounded in the same reality (e.g., the same interviews), but put the focus on different narrative paths.

The events of the game play out in a chatroom with Nathan and his friends. Like in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, you get to make choices about how their effort to document the story of “the boy in the book” unfolds. (Credit: https://www.theboyinthebook.co.uk/. Fair use.)

Abort, abort, abort?

You can rewind your choices and take as many different paths as you like, and the game auto-saves in your browser (if you don’t play it in private browsing mode).

To underscore that these choices are meaningful, Nathan asks you in the first chapter whether he should pursue his obsession with the diary at all. If you tell him not to, the story comes to a quick end and the credits roll.

Nathan’s question is a fair one. The ethics of the whole undertaking can sometimes feel uncomfortable, since the found diary pages are presented as the writings of a private individual. As you play through the story, it becomes clear that everyone is appearing on screen willingly.

The Verdict

While the story feels a bit padded out in the way many documentaries are, I still found it was ultimately beautifully done and well worth my time. I watched two of the main endings and was moved by both of them. In total, I spent about two hours with The Boy in the Book.

The game features gorgeous illustrations and a fitting soundtrack. Overall, I found that the web-based format worked surprisingly well, with two exceptions: 1) The rewind feature didn’t always work for me (text was sometimes repeated or did not appear until I reloaded), 2) the game’s music kept playing even during videos which had their own music in them, which was a bit distracting.

The individual chapters are quite short. I would recommend giving the first one a try. If you find Nathan in particular offputting at all, you’re not going to enjoy The Boy in the Book—he’s on screen a lot. But if you like his style, and if you share at least some appreciation for Choose Your Own Adventure books, you’re likely to have a good time.

Before I Forget is a narrative game by 3-Fold Games, a two person development team based in the UK. It tells the story of Sunita Appleby, a woman who is struggling to remember her life and to navigate her day-to-day reality. You play as Sunita and explore her home, looking for her husband, Dylan. The game uses color, sound and music to evoke Sunita’s memories and to guide her on her path.

Some of Sunita’s memories form brief, interactive experiences in their own right. For example, in one childhood memory, her aunt explains the constellations to her, using references from Indian mythology (Prajapati for Orion, Saptarishi for the Big Dipper). As the player, you follow the directions of “Leela auntie” to identify the stars she talks about on the night sky.

While the graphics are very basic throughout the game, the voice acting and music help immerse the player in Sunita’s world.

The experience is about an hour long. The game also includes optional developer commentary. When it is enabled, little speech bubbles appear in various locations that let you play audio commentary recordings that are relevant to the specific setting you are in.

As you examine the objects in Sunita’s home, the world around you changes from grayscale to color, creating a sense of discovery. (Credit: 3-Fold Games. Fair use.)

Before I Forget encourages us to treasure our life and the people in it; it also tries to convey the experience of dementia in a way that builds understanding and connection. But above all it is telling a story which is building up towards a significant emotional impact.

If you enjoyed games like Gone Home (review) and Firewatch (review), you are likely to appreciate the experience 3-Fold Games have created. The asking price of $8 is a bit high for a one hour game, but if you purchased itch.io’s Bundle for Palestinian Aid, remember that you already own Before I Forget. Unless you’re in an emotionally dark place or the topic strikes too close to home, you won’t regret going on this short narrative journey.