2025-04-25 01:30:00
If I’m being honest, by the time The Ballad of Wallis Island started wrapping things up, I wasn’t sure that I even liked it. I’d expected it to be a small movie, and my choice to see it in a theater was only partly to make full use of my AMC subscription, but mostly to give it the best chance possible to charm me.
The premise is that Herb, a musician who’d been half of the folk duo McGwyer and Mortimer before going off on a less successful solo career, is hired for a small performance on a remote island. On arriving, he discovers that the audience for the show will be one man, Charles, a McGwyer and Mortimer superfan who’d won the lottery and could therefore afford to pay for the exclusive show. He then discovers that Charles isn’t that interested in the solo stuff, and he’s also hired McGwyer’s ex and former partner Nell to come to the island to perform their duets, and that she’s brought along her new husband.
But as much as I like the cast — in particular, I’ve liked Tim Key since Taskmaster and been a big fan of Carey Mulligan since she was in the best episode of Doctor Who — I didn’t find it quite as funny as I’d hoped I would. And while the music is very good, none of the songs had that transcendent quality I’d hoped from a movie devoted to the power of music to move people.
Most of the comedy comes from the fact that Charles’s character is impossibly awkward and unused to being around other people, especially since the death of his wife. There’s a strong sense that Tim Key and Tom Basden are riffing their way through much of the movie, hoping that the chemistry of their friendship will come through via their script. It’s kind of a risky move, because there’s a delicate balance between “charmingly awkward” and “exhausting,” and a significant part of the movie depends on your being more charmed than annoyed.
It also feels like a bit of a risk having Mulligan playing a part that is written like an actual human being would act in this situation. She’s essentially playing a happier version of the same role she played in Inside Llewyn Davis, as if we’d fast-forwarded a decade or so past her depression and into a well-adjusted life, but she still has no patience for men from her past who can’t get their shit together. It depends a lot on Mulligan’s charisma coming through, which she has in enormous supply. And the character of Nell is nice, friendly, and supportive, but it’s clear that she came to perform a concert and she simply has no desire to be a character in a romantic comedy.
One thing I liked a lot was when Herb was showing Nell the cover of his next album, a collection of collaborations called “Feat.” It shows him in sunglasses and a bucket hat and ridiculously whitened teeth, surrounded by money. He explains that the title is a play on “featuring,” as in Herb McGwyer feat. Other Artist Name.
The movie and the characters seem to focus on how shamelessly commercial the album cover is, how he’s posing at something that he’s not, while the McGwyer and Mortimer covers that we see feel a lot more genuine. I liked the slightly more subtle implication of it, which became more evident as the movie went on: not satisfied as a solo artist, he’s been trying in vain to recreate his most successful collaboration.
Or at least, it was a subtle implication, before a character comes right out and tells him this directly in a later scene. Which is my main disappointment with the movie, that there’s basically nothing that’s left unsaid or unexplained. If it seems like I’ve given away too much in a “spoiler-free” post about it, that’s just because I have a hard time imagining anyone who gets 30 minutes into this movie without being able to predict exactly how it’s going to end. So it ends up being a long time watching two men who don’t recognize the things that are plainly evident to everyone else.
But in the end, the movie is so heartfelt and so earnest that it was impossible for me not to be charmed and moved by it. And it feels like it’d be churlish of me to dismiss it. It’s ultimately a sweet movie about appreciating the time we get to have with people, and taking that with us as we move on.
2025-04-22 05:36:46
I’m likely going to be thinking about Sinners for weeks, trying to unpack the various ways it works. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, since thinking about it is all I’m going to be able to do for a while. I looked into getting tickets to see it again with my husband, but just about every single IMAX showing in our area is sold out for the next couple of weeks.
Bad for me, but I like to hope it’ll dispel the notion that you can’t get people into theaters to see an original movie not based on any existing IP. Even after Ryan Coogler has repeatedly proven himself, and even after he’s proven that with Michael B Jordan and Ludwig Göransson he’s completely unstoppable, I’ve still heard people describe the movie as a “gamble” on Warner Brothers’s part. Which seems ludicrous.
In any case, this post contains tons of spoilers that could ruin the magic of the movie, so I strongly suggest avoiding the rest of it unless you’ve already seen it. And again, I implore you to see it in a theater, IMAX if possible if you can get the tickets, to get the maximum effect.
While listening to the soundtrack, I remembered one of the funniest scenes in the movie: when the trio of white strangers shows up at the juke joint, asking to come inside and join the fun. To show how much they just want to hear and play music, they launch into a jaunty and cheerful version of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” possibly the corniest and whitest rendition of a song that you could possibly imagine.
The funniest thing about this scene is how surreal and out-of-place it seems. The entire movie to this point has been a slow build-up to the opening of the juke joint, and we know that a showdown with some kind of supernatural evil is coming. Not to mention that it comes after a show-stopping sequence about the power of music to span across cultures and even across time, and it feels so small and awkward by comparison.
Earlier, Delta Slim told a story about playing music for a bunch of racist white people, and how they were so into it that they couldn’t help but stomp their feet — some of them were even on the beat, he says to a laugh. At first, this seems like another take on that gag: these corny crackers have no soul!
Of course, at that point the audience knows, or at least strongly suspects, that these corny crackers literally have no soul. When I was watching Sinners after months of seeing the trailer set up its confrontation between the creatures and the people inside the juke joint, I was initially confused as to why the movie included the scene showing original vampire Remmick attacking the homestead. Wouldn’t it have been stronger to keep it ambiguous until they show up at the front door? To keep up the illusion that these could just be a bunch of white people trying to get into a safe space for non-whites, until we definitively learn who and what they actually are?
Thinking more about everything that’s going on in this scene, I’m realizing that there’s nothing in Sinners that’s out of place, and hardly anything that has only one purpose. It’s crucial that everyone in the audience understands exactly what the threat is.
Part of the humor in the scene is the surreal irony of these people we now know to be supernatural monsters, singing happily a song about devouring a creature down to the bones. But we also know unequivocally, more than the characters themselves do, that these strangers must not be let inside.
Delta Slim’s story from earlier wasn’t just about a bunch of racist white people listening to the music of black musicians, of course. He tells it after they pass a chain gang, and he says that he recognizes everyone there. They’d been arrested by a bunch of Klan-supporting cops, and their music was the only thing that kept them from being lynched.
The characters make it explicit at multiple points that there’s a reason white people aren’t welcome in the juke joint. It’s not just another type of segregation; it’s self-preservation. Even being around white people was dangerous, since mobs would use any perceived insult — or invent a perceived insult if none actually happened — as a justification for violence. But the threat is a vague distant one if we’re thinking of it in terms of letting whites into a non-white space. Everyone in the audience understands it when it’s about inviting vampires come in.
Even in Georgia, I learned about Jim Crow and the history of the south in the period between the end of the Civil War and the civil rights movement. But it’s always been something that I know about intellectually, but never really understood. Every time I read or see a piece of fiction about life for black people in America in the first half of the 20th century — Lovecraft Country was the most recent example — I’m reminded that I’m basically incapable of understanding it, because I have no frame of reference. Even in Sinners, when the twins accuse the mill owner of being in the Klan, I assumed that they were being paranoid. Entirely justifiably paranoid, but still paranoid. And I’d assumed that that subplot was over, and the conflict would shift from human racists to inhuman monsters.
But even those of us who don’t have that frame of reference, to grow up in a world where every innocuous situation could potentially turn into a deadly threat, we still get it at a gut level when the intruders are literal monsters.
I’d first thought that “Pick Poor Robin Clean” was some kind of traditional Irish folk song, but it’s part of the blues tradition. The soundtrack includes both the version in the movie and the original version recorded by Geeshie Wiley. I interpreted the placement of these scenes, plus the choice of this song in particular, as a deliberate attempt to show the nuanced distinction between cultural appropriation and just culture. And also to show how we’re trapped in cycles of societal constructs that are designed to exploit and manipulate each other instead of celebrating our shared humanity.
It seems clear that the corniness of the vampires’ version of “Pick Poor Robin Clean” was deliberately comedic, to contrast its corniness with the showpiece celebration of musical history — musical rapture, even — that we just witnessed. They’re competent musicians; the notes are all there, but they simply don’t get what it’s all about. In the context of the movie, what seems to be important is that they’ve taken a rural black folk song, clumsily appropriated it, and we in the audience know that they’ve turned it into a threat. It’s key that it’s not an Irish folk song, because it’s not part of their lineage. Maybe there’s the implicit idea that they’re using a minstrel song to mock the people in the juke joint?
Later, though, after the vampires have turned most of the people in the club, there’s a scene where they’re dancing in a circle around Remmick, who’s singing “Rocky Road to Dublin” and Irish dancing. It’s a little difficult to be sure what to make of it — I know how I interpreted the scene, but it’s entirely possible that I’m being more magnanimous than Coogler intended. I didn’t see it as sinister (or at least any more than all Irish folk music seems a little bit sinister), and I certainly didn’t see it as a simple case of pitting whites with Irish heritage against non-white people with African and Chinese heritage.
Instead, it seemed pretty bad-ass. Like a genuine celebration of their culture and the music that’s carried it throughout history. It’s key to have all of the connotations of Irish refugees in America, people who had all the privileges of being white but were still treated as an ethnic minority, and who were protective of their own heritage and ties to their home country. But even if the vampires were carrying out a heartfelt expression of culture, it was still isolated, cut off from its lineage. In a sense, just going through the rituals.
I thought that was the only truthful part of what Remmick was claiming: he missed his home, and wanted Sam’s gift to “pierce the veil” and have that transcendent experience of connection. I didn’t get a feeling of debauchery or evil from that sequence, but of desperation. They’re furiously trying to recreate the scene inside the juke joint, but it doesn’t have the same sense of joy and celebration, but more like a heritage lost.
Because it’s hard for me to interpret the scene with Sam’s performance in the club as anything but a celebration of the power of music to transcend societal and cultural divisions and connect us all as humans. It seems deliberate to draw a line between African traditions of music and dance from their origins, to blues, and through funk and hip-hop, but every bit as deliberate to show the Chows connected to dance and music in the Chinese tradition.
It seems deliberate to have the scene earlier, when someone (Sam, I believe?) asks Mary, “What are you?” to which she replies “I’m a human being.” The question is intended to figure out why she’s the only white woman allowed into the juke joint, and she answers by explaining her ties to Smoke and Stack’s family, and the fact that she’s got black ancestry. But I think her first answer is the most relevant one. (And I thought it was especially satisfying to see her come back in the 1990s as a fly girl, suggesting that she finally lived in a time when mixed ethnicity was no longer a defining feature, even if it’d be far too optimistic to say it was no longer an issue).
For that matter, it seems deliberate to have Native Americans be the characters who try to warn the homesteaders about their new visitor. And why they left quickly, not just at the sight of a shotgun but at the Klan robes visible inside the house. I think it’s reasonable to assume that Remmick went to them earlier, trying to exploit their own ties to their heritage and possibly find communion there.
Of course I don’t think we’re supposed to believe the vampires, or even sympathize with them. But that idea of finding communion is legitimate. They describe what they’re doing as creating heaven on earth. Like most ideas intended to seduce, there’s a small element of truth to it, whether or not they actually believe it. They are all connected, regardless of race or ethnicity. But they’re still cut off from whatever divine spirit inhabited the juke joint earlier.
Sinners uses quite a bit of vampire lore, some of it just for plot purposes: aversion to garlic, holy water, and silver. But it emphasizes two aspects thematically, which are the inability to enter spaces without an invitation, and the inability to survive in sunlight. The latter is emphasized at the very end, with the song “Last Time I Seen the Sun.” So much of the story from “Pick Poor Robin Clean” onwards is about the (mostly white) vampires trying to enter a space that doesn’t belong to them, that again I could be misinterpreting what was intended to be an extended metaphor about appropriating a culture that doesn’t belong to you, with no sense of respect or acknowledgement that others have deeper ties to it.
But it’s such a strong image of the vampires succumbing to not just the silver in the guitar, but the morning light that finally destroys (most of) them. It reinforces that idea that they’ve been cast out. Similar to their soulless rendition of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” they’re a soulless simulation of humanity, never able to connect with the divine like even the most “sinful” humans can. And, as emphasized by the post-credits sequence, when Stack just wants to hear Sam play again, they’re always painfully aware of being cut off.
And the scene of the Klansmen attacking isn’t just a tacked-on action sequence, it’s an illustration of how they’re humans who’ve essentially cast themselves out of heaven. They’re contrasted with the vampires, who now become tragic if not actually sympathetic. If nothing else, at least the vampires are aware of their curse. The Klansmen can do nothing but subjugate and segregate, and they do nothing but destroy sacred spaces.
The title of the movie, and the repeated scene in the church that bookends the main story, invite the use of words like “sacred” and “divine.” But again, Sinners seems more interested in a type of multicultural, humanist spirituality that’s far older than Christianity. The church feels absent from this story. Not exactly evil, since Sam’s father welcomes him back into the church, but not useful, either, since the welcome comes with the stipulation that he give up the one thing that brings him closer to any notion of God.
It’s actually Annie’s Hoodoo that is of any practical use to the survivors — and as we saw earlier, she serves the community meeting them where they’re at, instead of making demands on them. She, Smoke, and their child are the only ones that we actually see finding each other in the afterlife, and they’re the characters we can most safely assume have been cast out by the church, labeled as sinners.
It all suggests to me that it’s about our connection to culture, and the free and joyful expression of it that ties us back to our most distant ancestors and forward to our descendants, and how that will outlast all of the societal constructs that try to divide and domineer us. It’s what lets us get a glimpse of the divine. And by choosing to share it, we form connections of shared humanity across cultures and we come closer to creating heaven on earth.
2025-04-21 08:52:19
The opening credits of Drop, after establishing that it’s directed by the writer/director of Freaky and the Happy Death Day movies, show a bunch of computer-generated signifiers of the restaurant that is the movie’s setting, all swirling against a black background before being destroyed.
Plates shatter, glasses break, flowers fall, the distinctive archway into the dining hall spirals around the camera. There are chess pieces, and for some reason, dominoes instead of Yahtzee dice.1 It’s all set to Bear McCreary’s tense score, and I think it does a great job of setting the mood for everything that’s to follow.
The sequence doesn’t directly reference anything that I’m aware of, but the overall vibe is immediately reminiscent of a Hitchcock movie, Vertigo in particular. I don’t want to oversell the movie by suggesting that it stands up to Hitchcock’s classics, but the thing I like best about it is that it aspires to be that same kind of high-concept, experimental suspense thriller.
The premise of the movie is that Violet, a widowed single mom, is on her first date since the violent death of her abusive husband. She’s nervously agreed to meet her date — who’s played by one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen, which if I’m being honest probably went a long way towards my liking this movie — in a top-floor restaurant surrounded by windows overlooking the city. During the date, she starts getting anonymous Air Drop messages on her phone, which gradually become more sinister and threatening, eventually ordering her to kill her date or they’ll murder her son.
I think I kept thinking of the opening credits, and the implicit references to classic suspense thrillers, because the movie feels so deliberately constructed. It seems to be constantly experimenting with what it can do with its limited set, its small cast of characters, and its building sense of paranoia in a way that feels very old-school. You’re invested in what’s happening, but even more than that, you’re invested in the question of how the filmmakers are going to pull this off. Can they make an entire feature-length suspense thriller set entirely inside one restaurant? Can they keep raising the stakes without stretching the plausibility too far? Can they keep you guessing who’s behind the messages, and wondering how Violet is going to get out of the situation?
As it turns out: mostly. There’s a clever gimmick where the incoming messages are projected as giant white words around Violet’s head. It keeps the pace moving, feeling like a conversation between Violet and her assailant instead of someone reading and responding to text messages. It also is a constant reminder of the artifice of the premise, reminding you that this is very much supposed to feel like a thrill ride.
Probably my biggest criticism of Drop is that I wish they’d somehow completely committed to the bit. Things kind of fall apart and get predictable at the climax, and I can imagine an alternate scenario in which the action never had to leave the restaurant. What if Violet had somehow turned the tables on her assailants, using her own security system to help defeat the home invader? What if the reveal of the person who was sending the messages had been saved until the very end, at which point we get our action-packed showdown?2
You could also make a reasonable argument that the movie is a bit exploitative of survivors of domestic abuse, but personally, I think it justifies itself. It shows how abusers try to make their targets believe that the abuse is their own fault, and it makes them feel trapped with no escape. I did appreciate that they included multiple references to resources for people to escape domestic violence, within the movie itself, instead of just at the end of the credits which most people will rarely see.
Overall, I liked it a lot, much more than I’d expected to. It feels deliberately old-school, inviting you to suspend your disbelief, see how long they can maintain the premise without it all falling apart, and just enjoy the ride.
2025-04-20 11:00:56
There’s a sequence in the middle of Sinners that’s such a breathtaking combination of music and imagery, performances and cinematography, spectacle and ideas, that my eyes were already full of tears before it was even over. If nothing else, that one sequence is why I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that experiences like watching Sinners in IMAX are why cinema exists in the first place.
But I feel like saying anything more would ruin the magic of it, so I’ll pick another thing I love about the movie, which is how it’s so meticulously put together in a way that doesn’t seem at all sterile or artificial.
Walking into the theater, I knew that it was going to be odd to go to a movie and not have it start out with a trailer for Sinners. It seems like it’s run before everything I’ve seen this year, and possibly it started with teasers last year? It’s been an effective but completely unnecessary case of overkill in marketing, since I was sold from the moment I saw the trailer for the first time. You had me at “Ryan Coogler, Ludwig Göransson, Michael B Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, and Wunmi Mosaku1 with a 1930s period piece about human-looking monsters attacking a nightclub in the deep south.”
I don’t know if it’s because I had trailers on the mind, but I gradually started to realize that the entire 2+ hour run of Sinners was constructed with the best qualities of the best movie trailers. Not that it was in any way cursory or slight, but that there was a sense of rhythm and clarity to everything. Every shot is chosen to be the most impactful image. Each scene has a clear purpose and fits exactly into its necessary place. Characters give an immediate sense of who they are, before you know their names or they’ve even spoken a word.
It’s worth calling out that last part in particular, since the introduction of Michael B Jordan’s twin characters Smoke and Stack was masterful. There’s a shot of the two of them leaning against a car, and you’ve already got a strong idea of each one’s character well before they’ve been named. And Jordan does such a fantastic job at inhabiting each distinct personality that you almost immediately forget that they’re both played by the same person. I just plain stopped even thinking about “how did they do that shot?” moments, because they were clearly two different actors, obviously.
And like a trailer, the movie is filled with music. Not just as much as you’d expect from a movie featuring blues singers, and not even as you’d expect from a movie scored by Göransson. Music seems to be playing almost constantly throughout the scenes, when other movies would’ve let the score fade into the background to emphasize the dialogue. It never seems jarring or discordant — I was about a quarter of the way into the movie before I even realized there was more music than usual — but simply as if these characters are constantly surrounded by music.
There’s one scene where Smoke visits the home of his wife (?) Annie after years of separation. Annie decides to remake the protective mojo bag she’d given to Smoke before he’d left. Throughout, the scene has been set to an instrumental blues guitar piece, and as Annie is lighting a candle for the preparation, she strikes the match three times, each strike perfectly in sync with a note in the background music.
Sinners isn’t really a musical, even though there’s a ton of wonderful music throughout. It’s not really a horror movie that has breaks for musical numbers, either. The narrative isn’t told through the music, but is inextricably linked with the music. It’s difficult for me to even think of them as separate works of art, since even when it’s not the main focus, the music is such a huge part of how the movie feels.
In other words, much like a movie trailer. On the way home, I was actually trying to rein in my post-movie hype and figure out exactly why I was so blown away by it. Why I was sitting through the end credits thinking of nothing except for how much I wanted to see it again right now. It’s not some huge, sprawling epic. It’s not a special effects showcase filled with spectacle. It wasn’t breathtaking or adrenaline-pumping as an action movie, and it wasn’t all that horrifying for a horror movie. The music is excellent but none of it was in a style that particularly resonates with me. I liked all the characters but didn’t really love any of them.2 And the ideas in the movie are wonderful but not perspective-alteringly profound.
What I realized is that, like the music perfectly coming in sync with Annie’s action before diverging again, everything in Sinners is perfectly combined. It’s got the attention to detail, pacing, and storytelling that has trailer creators working for weeks to distill the perfect encapsulation of a film into a minute or two, and it spreads that across two hours. The result is an experience that I didn’t just watch but felt.
2025-04-18 07:30:49
My obsession of the moment is Blue Prince, the outstanding first1 game from the studio Dogubomb, written, designed, and directed by Tonda Ros. It’s been getting a ton of attention and buzz from video game fans, in addition to several perfect reviews calling it one of the best games ever made, and I think the praise is entirely deserved.
The premise is that you’ve been named in your great uncle’s will to inherit his magnificent estate Mount Holly. As with most fictional wills, there’s one significant stipulation: you have to find the secret 46th room in the 45-room manor. Each night, all of the rooms leading from the entrance hall shift position, and the house never has the same layout twice. As an additional complication, you have to start each day’s attempt fresh, keeping nothing from your previous days apart from the things you’ve learned in your exploration.2
My first couple of hours of playing, I wasn’t going for an optimal strategy so much as I was marveling at how many different types of game they’d managed to blend together. What if Myst and Riven were roguelikes? What if Betrayal at House on the Hill created a real 3D environment that you could move around, picking up pieces of environmental storytelling? What if a traditional inventory-based adventure game added the layer of making you responsible for placing the rooms containing puzzles and the rooms containing their solutions?
The initial experience is the best kind of overwhelming. Rooms are filled with enigmatic photographs and drawings that suggest every single detail might be a necessary clue for later on. I happily pulled out a notebook — which I never do in games, insisting “that’s what computers are for!” — and began furiously documenting everything. The photo library on my phone is now overflowing with screenshots of book pages and other documents found in the game. Some are probably useful for a puzzle later on, many are probably only there to establish the game’s lore and world-building.
In fact, that feeling of drowning in clues is the only criticism I have of the game so far.3 The game is very good at communicating its clues for puzzles, but not as good at communicating when or where the clues can be applied. And because the available rooms are semi-randomized, and the layout is up to the player’s discretion, there’s a disorienting sense that you’re missing opportunities to solve puzzles, or you’re wasting time going around in circles.
For me, the most anxiety-inducing case of this was with the pairs of related drawings that appear in most rooms. It was obvious that they had some significance, and it was straightforward enough to figure out how to decipher them. The game has copious hints to help you decipher them, but I was left at a loss trying to figure out how and where to apply them. I spent multiple rooms through the house trying out the permutations to find a connection, convinced that I was losing progress each time I had to reset. My husband, who’s usually better at puzzles than I am, figured it out quickly, and he gave me exactly the nudge I needed without spoiling it for me outright. (In case you’re in the same boat I was: notice that the rooms can change based on their placement in the house itself, not just based on their placement in relation to each other).
And as it turns out, if I’d been patient, I would’ve eventually encountered the room that explains how to solve the puzzle. I was thankful that I’d gotten a hint that let me feel like I’d figured it out mostly by myself, instead of the outright explanation given by the game. But the larger lesson was clear: even though the game’s premise can make it feel like overwhelming chaos, there’s a very thoughtful and carefully-designed curve of progression through it.
I reached the end credits of the game last night, after 20 in-game days and, according to Steam, around 20 hours of real-time play. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that there is still a ton left to explore, puzzles I still haven’t solved, areas of the estate I haven’t yet opened, blueprints I haven’t yet placed in the house, and parts of the story I haven’t yet uncovered. Considering how I’ve never been a completionist, even before I got old and more precious with my free time, it’s a testament to how well the game is made that I’m still eager to dive back in and see everything.4
But even if the game had ended on its end credits, it was extremely satisfying. Not just a cleverly-constructed game, but a surprisingly engaging story, with an ending that felt moving because I’d been allowed to make all the necessary connections myself. It really is a masterpiece.
Here are some high-level, non-spoiler ideas to keep in mind if you’re planning to play the game or are still early in it, things that I wish I’d known that would’ve calmed my tendency to meta-game it:
I’ve got more thoughts about the game that might veer into mild spoiler territory, so I’d avoid reading the rest of this post if you haven’t yet reached the end credits of the game and want to discover everything completely fresh.
Back when I was working at Telltale in preproduction on the Sam & Max games that would become The Devil’s Playhouse, I got fixated on the idea of how to apply repeatable game mechanics to narrative-driven games. The style of game that the studio was making at the time was deliberately based on the Monkey Island model, which at its most abstract level is a bunch of single-purpose keys that each fits a single door that leads to the next part of the story. Over time, it became the explicit goal of these games to hide the “game-ness” as much as possible; eventually, you’d reach the platonic ideal of an interactive story in which the game mechanics are the story, and vice versa.5
Meanwhile, I was playing a lot of board games, which consist entirely of explicit, repeatable mechanics that can still sometimes convey a strong sense of theme.6 Even more than that, I was playing independent video games — and more notably, the big-budget games that were either inspired by indie games or directly based on them — that often consisted of taking a single game mechanic and then spending hours riffing on all the various ways that that mechanic could be used. (That might also be why Day of the Tentacle is my favorite of the SCUMM games: because almost all of the puzzles are variations on the theme of time travel, Looney Toons cartoon logic, or both).
In Sam & Max, those ideas turned into the toys that give Max his psychic powers, with the plan that each episode would mainly focus on puzzles that depended on one of Max’s abilities. Kind of like Half-Life 2‘s gravity gun or the Portal gun, you’d be thinking less about how to find a specific item to solve a specific puzzle, and more about how to use the same tool in different ways to solve different problems.
I can’t objectively say how well that idea came across in the final games, but I think it’s a fascinating branch of game design, especially narrative game design. And it’s especially applicable to Blue Prince, because I’ve been marveling that not only does it make no attempt to hide its “game-ness,” it leans into it. It initially presents itself as essentially a tile-laying board game, and yet by the time end credits rolled, I felt as if I’d explored a real place and been told a genuinely compelling story about a family and the world they lived in, with their love stories, their allegiances, and their betrayals.
Possibly the one thing that’s most impressed me about the game is that it takes what seems to be a chaotic system completely at the whim of a random number generator, and somehow gets a steady, manageable progression curve out of it.
At first, it seemed like an overwhelming amount of stuff, rooms packed full of details and every detail feeling significant. But it gradually became clear that there was an order to all of it. It’s about exploration first and foremost, and its core driving mechanic encourages you to explore and experiment. What will I discover if I place this new room? What will happen if I place this room in this location? And as you’re explicitly making connections between rooms, you’re implicitly forming connections between ideas.
As I started, I was completely focused on optimizing rooms with the number of exits, so I could make the most progress through the house. Then I started to pick up on hints that the game was responding to where I placed the rooms in the house, not just how I placed them in relation to each other. It took me a while to pick up on it, but the game was giving hints the whole time that it was paying attention, which I’d originally just taken as thoughtful design flourishes. Some rooms only show up on the east wing or west wing of the house, for instance, and they’re named accordingly. Some rooms will have solid walls if placed in the interior of the house, or windows if they’re placed on an edge. Sometimes those windows show parts of the exterior grounds.
Meanwhile, placing those rooms would give me the chance to explore them and pick up details of environmental storytelling. Is this a clue for a puzzle? Probably, better take a picture of it. Who is the person in this picture? Who wrote this note or email? Oh, I recognize them from earlier.
It meant that I was constantly mode-switching. Not in the jarring sense, but in the sense that different parts of my brain were firing off simultaneously. Now I’m playing a strategic tile-laying game, now I’m playing a Myst-like puzzle game trying to figure out how to operate a device, now I’m in an exploration game filling out more of the details about the people who lived here.
And I understand the frustration with the roguelike aspect of the design, and the feeling that your progress in the game is entirely dependent on a random number generator. But I genuinely believe that Blue Prince has managed to flip the script on the traditional roguelike, somewhat.
I tend to think of roguelikes as a steadily rising line of repeatedly interrupted progress. I go into a dungeon, I get wiped out, I start over again, each time getting a little bit farther. Blue Prince does often feel like that, where you’ve got a good run going, somehow finding exactly the keys and other items you need, and you get so close to the final room before you’re blocked into a dead end and have to call it a day. And you’ve lost all that progress, and have to start over from scratch!
The thing that I’d barely noticed until the end credits rolled, though, was that I wasn’t actually losing my progress. Almost none of the runs through the house felt wasted, since even when I didn’t discover a new room or solve a new puzzle, I still learned something. (I say “almost none” because I did have a couple runs of extremely bad luck, where I almost immediately bricked myself into a corner. It happens). And it began to feel like the resets weren’t wiping out my progress, but wiping out my mistakes.
This is largely made possible by that overwhelming number of details that you’re hit with at the start of the game. There are always multiple things that you can be thinking of, multiple puzzles you’re trying to solve, multiple places you’re trying to get to.
I started run hoping that I’d get all the right combination of rooms and items that would help me unlock an area on the grounds. Instead, I found a set of car keys. That meant a change of plans, in which this run would be focused on getting me back into the garage. It still gives the satisfaction of setting a goal and then working towards achieving it, but it does require starting each new day with the zen of letting the random number generator decide what your goal is for the day.
Maybe that does become impossibly frustrating when you’re trying to 100% the game, and you spend day after day just hoping for the lucky roll of the dice that will get you the one thing left that you need. But that’s a problem for future Chuck. Currently I’m excited at the chance to dive back in and unlock entire sections of the house that I still have yet to see.
There are tons of other examples of how Blue Prince confounded my expectations and accomplished things I’d always thought you just couldn’t do without tight, linear control over the player’s experience. And it does them confidently and seemingly effortlessly7, with a sense of “What, like it’s hard?” It’s definitely one that I’m going to keep going back to over and over again, not just to play, but to try and pick apart to figure out how it works.
2025-04-12 09:45:21
I guess there was an anniversary for the Apple Vision Pro a while ago, because I kept seeing people doing retrospectives on it, and I figured I should probably write about my own experiences. If only because I spent so much time leading up to the launch writing about how hyped I was, but then never did a follow-up after the honeymoon period was over.
But that idea, like the headset itself, went back to sitting unused on a shelf.
Even though I almost never use it, I don’t regret getting it, and I don’t have any real intention of trying to sell it.1 With all my back-and-forth trying to talk myself into getting one, the thing that finally pushed me over the edge was simply owning the device itself. Like the Apple Watch “series 0,” the first iPad, the first iPhone, one of the original iPods, and the used Macintosh SE I’ve got sitting on my desk, I like having it as a kind of landmark of consumer technology history more than for its practical utility. In other words: I still just think it looks neat.
I still think that a lot of the negative reviews early on had too much of a We were promised jetpacks! vibe to them. There’s still an amazing amount of groundbreaking technology crammed into the headset, all in service of trying to make the experience of using it as frictionless and approachable as possible, and it still seems short-sighted to be dismissive of all that to focus on frivolous complaints.2 Essentially complaining that it’s only 10 years ahead of its time instead of 20.
Ultimately, pretty much everything I like and dislike about the Vision Pro is a result of one key decision Apple made when positioning it as a product: they want it to be a “lifestyle” device instead of an “enthusiast” one.
There’s nothing surprising about that, and it was pretty evident even before the device launched. The Vision Pro in its first incarnation feels like something that could only be made by Apple, because of the industrial design, the focus on interconnected devices, vertical integration, tight connection between hardware and software, and the years spent advancing and refining the state of ARKit on iOS devices. But that also means that Apple would need the device to sell at iPad or Mac levels to make any sense as an Apple product, and it’s probably impossible to get those numbers from being limited just to gamers or fans of the Quest.3
What did surprise me was how much that one decision rippled out into everything else, and how much it’s keeping the platform from feeling like it’ll find its audience.
For starters, there’s such a strong mandate to avoid all of the things that keep normal people from getting into VR: the hassle of setup, the disorientation of being in a virtual environment, and the feeling of isolation from wearing a headset.
So you start by seeing your actual environment4, and you use hand gestures for everything. No trying to find your way around or re-orient the room, no worrying about tripping over obstacles, no process of setting up a room boundary, or finding where you left the controllers, or making sure the controllers are charged up. Most of that is good and necessary. It’s just that it feels like they took the idea so far that it almost became reactionary.
Most obvious is the front display showing your eyes, to simulate having actual eye contact with someone else in the room. It made such a bad first impression in the marketing material that it felt tone deaf, does no one at Apple realize how creepy this is?! But it’s been used so often as part of the “brand” of the Vision Pro that now it feels almost arrogant. I appreciate that it’s part of Apple’s philosophy to take big swings and solve unsolvable problems, but this just feels like it backfired. And it’s become so associated with the platform, if not just this initial device, that it doesn’t seem like it will quickly be forgotten as another case of “well-intentioned attempts to humanize tech,” like the sharing-your-heartbeat feature from the Apple Watch.
(And not to keep harping on it unnecessarily, but even with all the system updates, I still can’t get it to make a good “Persona” for me. Once again, I’m baffled as to how a tech company founded in Silicon Valley in the 1970s has failed to accommodate an old man with a big white beard).
But for me, it’s been other things that fall out of that decision that make the Vision Pro a lot less interesting for me. The system always prioritizes your real-world scene over virtual elements, meaning that when it detects your hand or another real-world object colliding with something virtual, it’ll fade out the virtual object.
This means that almost all of your interaction with the device is indirect: you look at something from some distance away, and you use hand gestures to interact with it. Most of the app ideas that I’d had, and the types of games and apps that I’d been looking forward to, get their appeal from being able to interact with objects directly. After all, using my hand on a mouse to indirectly manipulate things on a distant screen is 90% of how I already interact with computers.5 Why would I go through the hassle of putting on a headset just to get the same experience, with the only difference that I’ve got a larger distant screen?
I have just started trying an app called Simply Piano that can project tutorial info either directly onto your desk, or as an overlay on a real-world piano or keyboard. So far, this seems like an ideal use case for the headset, but the pure-virtual keyboard seems to have a problem figuring out exactly which key I’m pressing. I’ll have to see if it has the same issue with a real keyboard.
That kind of direct interaction seems to be a rarity, though. I’d been looking forward to the Game Room app on the Vision Pro, just as a no-brainer demonstration of how tactile and immersive a board or card game could feel in a virtual environment. So it was a big disappointment to try it out and learn that it does pretty much everything possible to keep you from being able to touch any of the game components.
I’ve done just enough development with the Vision Pro to know that it supports multiple modes of interaction, the two key ones being self-contained 3D scenes you interact with from a distance, and “immersive” scenes that you can in theory interact with directly. “In theory” because from what I’ve seen, there’s still a system-level mandate to avoid all of the kinds of things that make room-scale VR possible, in favor of completely stationary (standing or seated) experiences.
The development tools are still evolving, but at least as of the last time I checked, Apple had made it much more straightforward to make self-contained 3D experiences and windowed apps than fully immersive ones. I get too quickly frustrated with SwiftUI to have spent a lot of time with it6, but even I can tell that they’ve put a ton of effort into making the skills from iOS and iPad development carry over seamlessly to the Vision platform.
For more complicated 3D scenes, and especially fully immersive ones, I have a hard time imagining how to pull that together without a dedicated game engine. Apple’s Reality Composer Pro does a lot for a tool included for free with Xcode, but it still feels pretty bare-bones for someone who’s used to Unity, Unreal, or even Godot. It seems like it would’ve been a better move to make an easier pipeline for devs to use the tools they’re already comfortable with, so you really could just choose the headset as another build target.
And in the most frustrating move for somebody in my position (as a hobbyist developer who works in game engines at his day job), the only option for using Unity is with an expensive professional license. I can completely understand why Unity isn’t supporting the free version7, since it’s a ton of work to support a platform that hasn’t proven itself to give a good return on investment. But it does mean a much larger barrier to entry for hobbyists and indie developers to just try something goofy for the Vision Pro to see if it takes off.
I’d been hoping that Apple would just acquire an existing game engine and work on giving it “official” support for the Vision platform, but the window of opportunity for that seems to have passed.
All of this means that the majority of the available apps for the Vision platform are going to be “windowed” or based directly on iPad or iOS apps, using 3D sparingly if at all. That’s even in Apple’s recommended app design guidelines, to use 3D sparingly. It feels very frustrating to me, because 3D scenes and immersive environments are the biggest draw for putting on a headset in the first place. Why am I strapping a computer to my face just to keep using windows?
I installed the 2.5 version of the OS before I started writing this, to check out how things have progressed since the last time I used the Vision Pro. And I’ve been writing a lot of this blog post in a big virtual desktop screen mirroring my MacBook’s. It’s neat, having a giant Mac desktop that fills up an entire wall. But it goes back to that same question: is it neat enough to warrant strapping a computer to my face, instead of just using my monitor?
So far, the best use of the Vision Pro for me has been (unsurprisingly) to watch movies. But even there, there’s only a subset of movies and media that make sense to strap on the headset to watch. It’s got to be something that I either don’t mind watching alone or prefer to, and it’s got to be something that really benefits from a huge screen. I avoided seeing Dune 2 and Furiosa in theaters specifically for the opportunity to watch them at home alone on a huge 3D screen.
Of course, I haven’t actually watched either one of those yet, since there never seems to be a good opportunity to sit by myself in a room for 2+ hours with a computer strapped to my face. But I paid for the privilege of knowing that I could.
And it’s not really related to the design of the headset or the philosophy of the platform, but still: even if you are in the mood to strap a screen and start watching, there’s no guarantee it’ll be available. YouTube and Netflix still don’t have official apps, and watching them in Safari isn’t great. And with the fragmented state of streaming these days, it’s more likely that the weird thing I’m in a sudden mood to watch — like when I spontaneously decided I had to see Black Sunday — has a fairly slim chance of being available.
Apple has recognized that media is probably the most obvious killer feature of the platform, though. They’ve released quite a few entires in their “Immersive” series, at this point including the expected documentaries along with some concert movies and one fictional movie that I know of.
The Photos app on the Vision Pro now lets you generate a “spatial” version of most photos in your library, even if they weren’t taken with a 3D camera or with that mode on the iPhone Pro models.8 It works surprisingly well, and it’s a neat encouragement to look through photos on the headset, even if I’m not confident that the novelty will last long. Viewing panorama photos with the scene stretched around your room remains fantastic, though, and might be the biggest bang for the buck on the whole device.
They’ve also added a dedicated Spatial Gallery app, which has an updated set of 3D photos and short video clips, at least a third of which seem to be extended ads for Apple TV programming, in the form of behind-the-scenes photos. It’s obviously not something that warrants getting an expensive headset, but it’s a good sign that Apple at least recognizes that the people who bought an expensive headset are eager to have more reasons to use it.
I was prepared that the Vision Pro would become something that just sat around collecting dust apart from watching the occasional movie; I just expected that I’d have gotten more development-experimentation time out of it before then. Esoteric technical limitations9, specialized development tools that encourage simple windowed apps, and opinionated decisions at the platform level, have all thrown a bucket of cold water on my goal of making simple games and goofy special-purpose apps for the headset.
The stuff that it does well, it still does shockingly well. When I put it on last night after such a long period of not using it, I was stunned all over again by just how good the gesture recognition and gaze detection are. At this stage, though, it just seems like an astonishing amount of groundbreaking technical work was applied to the most mundane parts of the experience, like moving windows around and mirroring your desktop. The show-stopping experiences and things you can only do on the Vision Pro platform don’t seem to have materialized yet.