This trick also worked well for Skeletor, but absolutely does not work in a high-stakes fantasy epic. When you are playing a gritty, modern action-RPG as a hard-ass battlemage, and the big bad falls to one pixel of health only to drop the mic and majestically escape the locked arena while you stand there clutching your sword like a spare prick at a wedding, it leaves your satisfaction so dry that no amount of foreplay will ever rehydrate it. It doesn’t build tension; it grabs the concept of tension by the throat and strangles it in front of its weeping children. Which brings us to the … let’s call it ‘experience’ of playing Echoes of the End. This game is a true masterclass in how to undermine your own hero.

The Flintlock Hangover

After coming off the high of Flintlock: Siege of Dawn, I craved a fix for another action-adventure game. I wanted one that might feature a strong lead, a fun mix of characters, and a cool combat system. This is why I shouldn’t have played Echoes of the End.

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh, but the delta between the games developed by A44 and Myrkur is… vast. Both are scrappy triple-I studios, but they have completely different approaches to game manufacture. Flintlock gave us three main highs: excellent character work with Nor, Enki, and even the bark-level NPCs; a tight, crisp combat design rewarding skill; and an impactful story grounded in war, loss, and redemption. The game designers built a brutal arena system where they knew each move had to have impact or you took a dirt nap, and the abilities were designed hand in glove with those encounters.

Myrkur, on the other hand, skipped the reading. They gave us just the one weapon and a fairly unapproachable collection of abilities. In Flintlock, Nor wasn’t an unlikeable bint and Enki wasn’t a clueless sap. In Echoes of the End, Ryn has the charm of a sandpaper dildo, and Cor is a man so aggressively beige he makes tap water look spicy. When Cor is replaced by Abram, he sticks around for about the same duration as a deadbeat dad heading out for smokes.

They might have a great story, but nothing about the seven hours I spent with the game made me give enough of a shit to stick around to find out. If this is the videogame equivalent of the Netflix show that gets good after five seasons, I dropped out in season three.

A Protagonist Made of Barbed Wire

If we’re thinking about narrative single-player games, the real hook has to be the story. You need something about the world, or the people in it, and critically, a strong protagonist who can carry the components on their shoulders.

In our intro, we meet Ryn, a Vestige capable of mighty feats of wonder. She uses this fantasy-meets-Reykjavík world’s version of magic. Ryn and her brother Cor cruise through the opening scenes, and the entire time she is ragging on him for doing things like, I dunno, walking and breathing. It’s unclear if she likes him, let alone loves him.

But the good news for Cor is that this is nothing personal. Whenever Ryn meets anyone, her first instinct is outright hostility, rudeness, and an almost mythic level of outward twattery that defies belief. She’s not a strong female lead: she’s a huge asshole, and we’re given no reason to like her, let alone root for her.

It’s an easy problem to fix: give her something the player can relate to. Even the maligned Forspoken pulled this very trick. Frey is prickly like a sea urchin, but she loves her cat Homer, and it’s her love for that cat that leads to her early-game low point. It humanises her. We can see how the harsh world has made her hard in turn, but it hasn’t made her monstrous. Luminous Productions made Frey more relatable by hiding her empathy behind a frail curtain of anger and resentment, and in the first ten minutes we’re hooked on her.

Ryn is just… angry. At everything! She clearly has daddy issues, but the nature of those is so opaque they might as well be buried in a lead-lined coffin at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. She’s a double-ended dick, so why would we want to find out more?

Mechanics, Puzzles, and Health and Safety Violations

Which I guess is a good time to consider the gameplay components of this narrative did-not-finish title. Ryn has two basic ways of murdering: her Vestige powers, and her blade. The combat is mechanically serviceable… at first. As time grinds on, you begin to see the problems.

Skills in the tree seem quite niche; the squeeze isn’t worth the juice. Deep into the sword line, there is an ability where you attack three times with a light strike, then close with a heavy finisher. In theory, this should kerb stomp the enemies, teaching them fear and respect in equal measure. In practice, the long run-up means using it is highly situational, to put it mildly, and the payoff is about as satisfying as a warm handshake from a leper.

Worse, the controls are outright broken at the atomic level. You will probably see my gameplay where Ryn’s just facetanking, and I can assure you I’m blocking, but the controls are as non-responsive as a three-day-old corpse. You’re not fighting the enemy; you’re fighting a controller that seems to be communicating with the console via smoke signals. This is not a God of War-like success story. The Vestige powers are cool and all, but not impactfulenough, and also endlessly fiddly. The combo to pick up an enemy and toss them is simple: pull the trigger, point the thumbstick, and boom… right? But, much like the block, this also works like it’s being paid by the hour. I swear I haven’t come closer to twisting a controller in half in a long time. Throughout the fights, I found it was just better to rely on my sword, dodging, and good looks, which is no way to play a game where you’re a spellslinging battlemage.

The game also feels overly… gamey. Combat arenas are conveniently littered with spiked walls. These should be clear health and safety violations in any workplace, but no, Team Clown Car has them installed everywhere.

Then come the puzzles. Echoes of the End is positively infested with them, and they aren’t so much hard as annoying. In one sequence, I needed to take Ryn across some platforms. She has to yank them out of the wall, at which point a magical mystery timer starts, ending with them sliding back into the wall. With the control issues, I fell to my death, like, five fucking times, got ennui, and cracked open the gin after putting the game down for the night.

The Invisible World and Stolen Skill Points

Eventually, Ryn meets Abram, a sort of part-scholar, part-Wikipedia character designed to provide cool combos in combat and exposition when out of it. Abram is a nice guy, so naturally Ryn is a walking migraine to him as well. It was so refreshing having him along, though, because she is so relentlessly full of bastard energy that we needed a balm for the abrasion of her personality.

Not to worry, though, because one thing leads to another and they have a falling out. We could hope the writers suggested Ryn was so unlikeable that her companions might leave, but that’s not how it went down. However, that’s not the worst part of this misadventure.

See, the game provides five skill trees, then… deletes the one called ‘companion’ when Abram heads off. You better not have levelled up his abilities too far, because when Ryn walks it alone, the points you’ve put in his upgrade path are ones you can wave goodbye to. It’s the mechanical equivalent of a game inviting you to a dinner party and then forcing you to pay for the groceries. Again. I can imagine how you might hit this situation and want to end it all: it’s a fair and rational response, because in a 10-chapter game, you’ve hit chapter 7 and wonder what you did to the universe to earn this kind of karma.

It’s possible that after a short platforming-only game sequence Ryn and Abram kiss and make up, but that will remain one of the unsolved mysteries for me. Seven chapters left me tired, boss.

Abram’s exposition doesn’t help much anyway, because the world-building is pretty invisible. There are some Dalsman dudes who are bad, and they’re different from the dudes you’re allied with, who are apparently fine. There are some scholars in a city somewhere. Magic exists, but how it works isn’t explained. Why people are Vestiges isn’t explained. Why it’s risky for people to touch Vestiges, why people don’t like them, why they’re called Vestiges, why Ryn hates everyone… none of it is explained. And so on.

The Gloat, Scamper, and Verdict

We’ve touched on this before, and we’re going to interrogate it again: you are playing a magically imbued battlemage, yet the game treats your victories with the exact same narrative weight as a teenager pulling a rubber mask off a real estate developer. Scooby-Doo did it better, though.

The enemy boss encounters are some of the frustration focal points, but not because they’re hard. Repeat: not hard, just… annoying. When you fight the big bads, Aurick and Zara, you will pound them into the ground fairly easily. Then, with just a pixel of life left, they’ll flex and exit stage left.

It was the repetition that did it. When you meet these two ass-hats, there’s a big gloating scene. You fight Aurick first; he gloats as he prepares to throw hands, then mocks you as he runs away. You keep missing out on killing Zara, but each time you see her, she taunts you. Then you punch her lights out, and she gloats and runs away. In all these scenarios, the magically-powered Ryn somehow doesn’t drop rocks on them, throw her Vestige-imbued sword, or any of the other things she can do. She’s just like, “Wow! Well, I guess we’ll see them later,” and moves on with her life.

When I beat the Zara encounter and the boss caught a quick overnight to Fresno, I’d had enough. When Ryn and Abram had their falling out right after, I decided not to continue dating Echoes of the End anymore. If anyone still used Facebook, they’d have seen our relationship status move from ‘it’s complicated’ to ‘intensely annoyed’. I decided I’d rather perform self-dentistry with a rusted pair of pliers than play more of this.

Falling Outro

I guess Echoes of the End is a good-enough-looking game, though the pop-in is egregious. The sound is fine, although the volume is erratic. Aldís Amah Hamilton and Karl Ágúst Úlfsson both do solid work as Ryn and Abram respectively. They’re actually good performances, but dragged underwater by a script that has fewer flotation devices than the Titanic.

Which is the real tragedy here. Writing a cohesive fantasy world is hard work, and building a responsive combat system is even harder. But when you ask an audience to invest their time and money into your world, you owe them a basic narrative contract. Give us a protagonist we don’t actively want to feed to a woodchipper. Give us mechanics that reward investment rather than torching it to the waterline. And for the love of all that is holy, make your villains stick around long enough to face a sword.

Echoes of the End doesn’t honour that contract. It’s an effigy of squandered potential. The bones of something interesting are somewhere in here, but buried under a protagonist built entirely from hostility and herpes, controls designed by someone who has only ever seen a controller in a museum, and boss encounters that treat your victories like a passing nuisance. The only reason you should check this game out is if you’re getting paid for it… and even then, ensure you’re on a good hourly rate.

If you want a scrappy, character-driven action-RPG that marries story to feeling and fun, go play Flintlock: Siege of Dawn or Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden. If you really want to watch an overpowered villain teleport away like a techbro CEO avoiding a congressional subpoena, just go watch some old Dungeons & Dragons cartoons. At least there, the Venger Maneouver™ was still considered innovative.

If you prefer games developed by people not currently huffing industrial solvents, click Like. And if you want your villains to stay dead when you stick a sword through them…

We live in a time where “Red vs. Blue” is everywhere. A time where we somehow can’t have a beer with people who vote the other way. We are driven against each other by the insidious and the corrupt, a ceaseless churn that knows no end until we eventually clash and all the sticky red comes out. Our real world is a time of literal marvels, but miracles mean little because we’ve already killed our gods.

Let’s meet Nor and Enki, shall we?

The Hidden Monster and its Devil’s Bargain

You might be wondering if I’m talking about Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn or our world. It turns out, it’s both. Flintlock is a game you need to play because it dredges into the story of conflict. Of what it means to be on one side of a war, and not necessarily the right one. It shows us how we might make allies of our enemies to fight the real monster at the heart of it all. A monster so hidden, so devious, we didn’t even see it until it was too late.

Flintlock’s hero is Nor Vanek, a Sapper by trade, a killer by disposition. She’s ended up in some twat or other’s war, digging her way through a ceaseless tide of corpses, because in her world, the dead walk. It’s not important who’s in charge, because she’s not fighting for them. She cares about one man: a father of sorts, Baz, who starts her on a quest through the simple expedience of going out for milk and never coming back.

She meets Enki… or should we call him Áánshí? Enki is the diminutive form of the forgotten god Áánshí. He’s a small, almost cute purple-blue fox. Nor swore to kill all gods, and in her time and place, humans have firearms. She aims to put the muzzle against Enki’s skull and blow his brains out. Nor has seen her comrades dead or scattered, and she swears to the Above and against the Below that she will see all gods dead. Enki offers her a different path: ally with him. Join forces, and kill the gods… together. He’s a god with a different perspective, a purpose aligned with hers. His devil’s bargain is tempting, a sweetener that promises Nor the powers of godhood alongside her gunpowder.

This is why we really need to start with Game Pass.

You’ve probably never played Flintlock because A44 Games made a pact with Microsoft: “Put our amazing game on your service. We’ll take your coin, we’ll survive, and through the halo effect of word-of-mouth sales, we’ll be successful.” But they couldn’t have predicted how the market would turn against them. Subscriber counts didn’t convert to sales, and the state of the game on Windows (Microsoft’s home turf!) turned their June 2024 launch into a fireball that was impossible to roll a DEX save against.

The parallels are brutal. In Flintlock, Nor Vanek must ally with Enki to survive, despite gods being the enemy. In the real world, A44 allied with the corporate god of Microsoft to survive. Just as Nor needs Enki’s power, A44 needed Game Pass visibility to escape the indie label.

Gods are fickle allies.

There’s no free lunch. In the game, trusting gods is dangerous. In reality, the Game Pass deal guaranteed players (over 500k) but potentially cannibalised actual sales (around a mere 38k on Steam), leading to a financial failure relative to the budget and resulting in rumoured layoffs.

Both pacts offered short-term survival at the risk of long-term soul-selling. The game launched, and launched badly. I’m here to tell you that you’re missing out. Not only is the game ‘fixed’, it contains one of the most poignant stories that might make you think about who you should have that next beer with, even if you’re a Red and they’re a Blue.

Gods vs Guns

Flintlock, at its heart, is God of War Lite. It carries a souls-lite label, and you can see that if you look sideways at it. There’s a currency like souls. There are things that look like campfires. There are transportation shortcuts you can unlock once you’ve killed all those in your way.

But there’s also a murder playground that’s almost biblical in its purity, a channelling of the dual nature that Kratos and Atreus share in their games. Nor is military, capable enough with a gun, axe, flamethrower, hammer, or whatever’s handy, really. She’s not afraid to shake her fist at the sky. It’s where the bad people are, after all. Enki’s got his own abilities, able to use actual magic, a thing the world hasn’t seen manifested in a long time. Nor is Kratos and Enki is Atreus. And Flintlock plays like a AA version of what Sony’s best has put out — a precision combat murder factory, where multiple builds are viable, and you can change the world with your axe in hand.

It’s not Elden Ring, and shouldn’t be judged as such. The game is a solid 69 — nice — on OpenCritic, but that’s because so many people believed the souls-lite label rather than God of War lineage. What they’ve almost entirely missed is the real story it’s trying to tell, the parable of our time: that it’s possible to forgive the unforgivable, to find your own path when people are telling you to travel to a different destination, and that at the end, you’ll find people you can really count on.

The Weta DNA

The founders of A44 left the golden cage of Weta because they wanted to build interactive worlds, not just look at them. They came equipped with the Kiwi ‘number 8 wire’ mentality, and it was this that let them build a blockbuster on a budget.

They crafted a world that is not just lush, but interesting to actually be in. The towns you liberate aren’t just inanimate skyboxes; they are legitimate places. There is a sublime lived-in feel imbued by the artwork and the atmosphere of the wilderness. You hear a bystander commenting how good it is to be alive and here with the whole family after Nor liberates their hamlet, but “…maybe not with Ma” …and suddenly, it grounds the fantasy. These NPCs have their own backstories and you’ve only just walked into the room.

But the real heavy lifting is done by the sound. Olive Gray, who voices Nor, and Alistair Petrie, who voices Enki, are S-tier actors. They use the silence between words to do so much of the work, and yet they aren’t afraid to be soft or loud as the situation demands. And they’re funny! There’s a scene where Enki is trying to teach Nor some godspeak. She can’t get the pronunciation, and in the end, she’s just like, “You know, let’s just leave it.” The way she says it sounds like someone who is pissed off with Enki, herself, and the world at large, and yet… they laugh with each other later. Or there’s that time you find a waterwheel. Enki stops and says he could listen to it until the end of time. Something so ordinary spoke to him at a level we believe because his voice actor made us understand.

But this isn’t entirely what I mean about the Weta DNA. Remember those words I told you to remember? Truth. Accountability. Respect. These are A44’s values. They’re right there on the website — you can go check. In crafting such a believable story about friends versus enemies, they needed Nor Vanek to be relatable. She needed to command respect. And she needed to hold herself to account for her own actions. It’s a corporate mission statement baked into the code.

And because they needed Nor to be True, they made her distinct. But truth provokes. The internet screamed ‘woke’ because Nor is a Black woman. But the culture warriors missed the point, as they usually do: it’s not her Blackness that’s underlining the issue. It’s her humanity. Her colour defines her position on the board, but her struggle defines her soul. And yet… she’s able to find common ground with people who aren’t Black.

Even with those who look like purple-blue foxes. Her difference makes her perspective relatable, and in this, we believe her. Which is ironic, because our story started with all sides lying to each other. Enki lied to Nor, and Nor deceived her friends, all just to try and get by. It is a startling parallel for our time, but as the credits roll, Flintlockdraws you a map to find your better self. One fight, but also one truth, at a time.

The Click

When the game clicks, it is a delight. I expected that last level to be a slog, but no: you feel like a true master of war when set against the paper figures cast against you. I had real Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order vibes here, when Cal Kestis becomes a Jedi after facing his doubts.

But, also: it’s just damn fun. There was this one sequence in a trench. I rounded a corner and saw a summoner in the distance. This guy is whipping specials out of his ass, and he’s not running low on supplies. I needed to get to them, but they were motivated to not let that happen, spawning what felt like a never-ending tide of mobs. Most were these super fast-moving dudes with aggressive strikes.

But… I’m Nor. I’ve buddied with a god. Which meant I had Enki’s health-on-hit ability, plus the Warlock armour set that spreads curses on death, and talents that returned life when Enki and I struck at the same time. He’s rocking a poison curse effect, and what with the curse’s plague effect, the screen turned into an explosive circus. Sure, I was getting hit, but the stream of health coming back to me was absurd, and the continuous stacking and spreading poison death spiral meant enemies were hurting their friends, basically doing all the work. By the time I got to the mouth of the tunnel, all that was left of the summoner was some greasy ash.

The best the Big Bad could throw was nothing compared to Enki and me. We were justice. We were vengeance! We beat them like a toy drum.

The Reality of Number 8 Wire

That said, it isn’t perfect. And if A44 had pretended they weren’t AA, I’d trust them less.

For example, the cosmetic system uses Reputation (the same souls-like currency you need for skills and weapon upgrades). It’s in short supply, which means unless you’re grinding deliberately, the Flintlock fashion endgame stays locked behind a door you never quite reach. For a game that put so much effort into being stunning, it’s a weird flex that there’s a system designed to stop you engaging with the art team’s work. It will be out of reach for many players.

Then there’s the multiplier mechanic. Play well, murder beautifully, and your Reputation multiplier climbs. It keeps going up the more fabulous you are, but it resets on taking damage. The players who most need the Reputation multiplier to upgrade their gear are the ones struggling in combat. The game punishes them by taking away the thing they most need. It reminds me of the original City of Heroes respec trial: forcing players with broken builds to complete a punishing mission just to fix the build that… prevented them from completing the mission. City of Heroes built the first MMO poverty trap. And while A44 didn’t invent the poverty trap, they didn’t help their players escape it either.

These aren’t flaws that break the game. If you’re a veteran of action RPGs, you might not even notice, but they’re the seams showing a AA budget. The number 8 wire is holding, just… visibly. The casual player invited in by Game Pass might see these issues as a constant, get-rekt reminder that they can’t dodge well enough to earn the upgrade juice or get a dapper jacket. And they’d leave, right before the story grabs you by the heartstrings.

Humanity as a Value Statement

If you stick with Flintlock until the credits roll, you are left with a fairly profound sadness when it’s over. Not because it was too short, but because it delivered on ‘all the feels’.

Despite playing ‘as Nor’, you’re really playing ‘as Nor and Enki’, each going through their own redemption arc. Nor’s purpose isn’t to win for some king on a throne, but to fight for the people to the left and right of her. Enki, for his part, has a more spiritual journey. He’s learning what it means to be human — not in a humanoid body, but in the context of humanity as a value statement. He struggles to understand consequences, and yet once he does, he does so profoundly.

This might even bleed into you. There’s an optional boss, a sort of Stone Guardian guy. He’s a skill check, sure, but he’s also a persistence check. He says, “I’m here to test you.” He’s at the end of a cul-de-sac with nothing behind him but a chest. In the dark quiet of your mind, you have to ask if it’s really worth it to merc this dude. The rewards suggest a pacifist path is just as viable. Is passing the real test killing him, or leaving him alone?

There’s a sidequest I loved. It’s not long, and you don’t have to kill anyone at all. You light fires of remembrance for the fallen in the war. Nor’s reflection on her persistence — or lack of it — in the world is something that will make the player consider: are we just a set of bonfires for others to light in the hope someone remembers a good thing about us? Or are we doomed to obscurity, our mark on the world all for nothing?

It’s Áánshí, Not Enki

We started with Nor and Enki, but in the end, we’re left with Nor and Áánshí. A god, perhaps not a very good one, but trying to be better. He starts as a tiny fox thing, and ends… well, as perhaps a reminder of the best parts of ourselves.

It’s this duo that makes the final scenes so profound. Nor accepts Enki, telling him he’s a sapper first, a god second. Avoiding spoilers, you get to see what this means, and what the implications of his promise to the world are: Áánshí, not Enki, is a god of tremendous power, but also of tremendous mercy. His godhood isn’t as important as his mercy, his compassion, and his humanity.

It’s Nor’s influence that makes him want to save the world, understanding that sacrifice makes a hero, not power. And it’s Enki’s influence on Nor that teaches her that the shape of what we are doesn’t determine who is worth dying for. It’s who we choose to be, and who we choose to become.

And that is why Flintlock — Game Pass faceplant and all — is more than just content you rent for a month. It’s a testament to the middle market, and a story worth owning, and perhaps a story worth feeling.

If you like the idea of diminutive purple foxes who become titanic gods of righteousness, hit the Like button. And if you think we should spend a little more time focusing on our humanity…

Support my work by checking out my own gunpowder fantasy series, starting with Blade of Glass:

The elves, they say, came first.

This isn’t quite true. You and I know they came from the sky. Fell, as if cast down, in a burning vessel larger than any city. They stood on the world and knew it as something to be conquered. For all their poetry, their metalskill, and the pretty urns their half-breed children hock at the markets, they came fleeing a war and started a new one.

It’s no wonder there are almost none of them left, and those… Well, fallen, still.

The dwarves, now, are something else. Arrogant. Stocky with it, but you’ve heard about that, and you’ve seen the beards. And no, the women don’t have beards, but they’ve lustrous locks to rival any in that storybook you hold so close. The arrogance, though. That’s a thing that comes from being cast down, too. Cast, by their parents, for it’s also said that they are the shrivelled, stunted throw-aways the elves first birthed on coming to this cursed world. To say the dwarves hate the elves would be like saying a sword hates the sheath. True, but insufficient.

So where does that leave the orcs? Were they here first, as they claim, or were they… called? Certainly we know they’re better suited to this bitter place. The wind that blows from the north comes with teeth, and it’ll carry away your children. The orcs care for none of that. Strong, and tall, and that might be enough to put them above the dwarves, except for the power of the mind. We know them to have no skill with sorcery, but they also have no skill with letters. Doomed always to fail at the first page, for all they want to study, to crack open the wizened nut of knowledge.

Oh, stay. I see you’re upset. You think that this is a set of confronting statements said to make you angry. It’s not, or at least… not in the way you think. Because we come at last to you, the not-one, not-other of humanity. Your people have cracked open the outer place and brought in the whispers of magic. You’ve got skill with metal and word, but insufficient of either to topple the elves or dig with the dwarves. Good enough with a blade, but against an orc, as dead as they come. But there’s a secret no one’s told you yet. It’s as old as the world, and the truth is as terrible as any kept from the sun this long.

Can’t you guess? No?

You came first.

Get this review on Spotify or Apple, or watch the YouTube version:

Good or bad, it’s rare for a game to take advantage of the medium in the telling of the story. Let’s get into medium by using movies as an example, and the crippling problems that came about when silent movies became… loud. There was a real challenge for early silent stars when fans finally heard them. The lead with the chiselled jaw shouldn’t sound nasal or high-pitched. You couldn’t get away with playing that farmhand American if you sounded like you were from the Eastern Bloc. Technical acting skills mattered—where silent films needed flamboyance when you couldn’t use your words, talkies needed delivery. Whether it was John Gilbert’s voice or Clara Bow’s accent, a few ‘it’ actors burned up on re-entry here.

You can also imagine a radio star trying to transition to silent movies. They had to act without their greatest asset (their voice) and learn physical, visual storytelling. This period was mercifully brief for all involved due to the relentless march of progress, because video killed the radio star shortly after radio’s popularity in the 1920s.

But if you put these together—transitioning from radio to sound film—well, you had a shot, man. You got performers who had voice training and knew what a microphone was. Some of those career transitioners could take advantage of the new medium to tell a better story than a silent film actor could. You probably know who Bing Crosby and Bob Hope are for just this reason.

Back to video games: let’s talk about how few use the medium by talking about the stand-out one that did. We’re going to get into spoilers for a 2007 video game, so while I think 18 years gives us a little statute-of-limitations leeway, you’ve been warned. The OG BioShock did this wonderfully with its leaning on would-you-kindly, and it did this by exploiting a technique players had become used to. In games, there’s an often-used trope where a disembodied voice on the end of the radio is a sort of magical helper, delivering anything from exposition to instructions to the player. We lost pack-in manuals in our retail boxes in favour of a talking head in the top left of our screen who’d explain how guns worked. BioShock’s Irish-accented Atlas did this by asking the player to complete mundane tasks, all in the guise of our familiar, helpful in-game assistants. We’d bought into the idea of Atlas before we started the game, because the trope was a baked-in part of the medium.

Because Atlas is wonderfully Irish, he doesn’t say ‘Please’ so much as ‘Would you kindly’. ‘Pick up the gun’ becomes ‘Would you kindly pick up the gun’. The player continues following Atlas’s instructions, right until the moment Atlas tells the player, “Would you kindly kill this person.” Then the game removes control from you, and your avatar murders someone you didn’t want to bury. That lauded agency is deleted, revealing—again, spoilers!—that you’re a pawn. Would-you-kindly is a code word that makes your brainwashed schmuck do something against your will; as the player, we thought we were being helped by a fancy instruction manual, but the game’s story is that we, the player’s character, are a sucker. We’ve been played, but masterfully: BioShock used a medium-based trope as a storytelling mechanic that wouldn’t have the same impact in a movie, because movies don’t expect agency to be such an embodied part of storytelling.

Well, Dispatch does the same fucken thing.

Anxiety as Gameplay

I appreciate we’ve talked a lot about agency, games, and BioShock, but this is actually a Dispatch review. Dispatch, the latest maybe-Critical Role, maybe-Telltale game, puts you in the washed-up shoes of Bob Robertson, a third-generation Mecha Man superhero. Your dad, and his dad before him, were all Mecha Man: different suit, but same job description. Shit went bad, like, real bad, and the suit that made you super is now a collection of badly damaged metal and plastic you can’t even use as spares.

Thing is, Bob’s a hero. We’ll get to sacrifice and purpose later, but for now, just understand that Bob is not ready to stop helping people. It’s in his blood. He’s constructed from the idea that doing good is not just a duty, but a calling. As we kick off the game as Robert, we’re introduced to a new posse: a group of has-beens, wannabes, washed-up heroes, or derelict reclamation cases called the Z Team. These reprobates are essentially career criminals on a get-to-green plan; they need to give their time to the SDN, the Superhero Dispatch Network, as supes for hire. It’s last call for these assholes. If they flunk out, they’re done.

As Robert, you’re their dispatcher, a quasi-amalgam of team leader, manager, life coach, counsellor, and… hell, I’m getting ahead of myself again. But as a dispatcher, your job is to send these miscreants to wherever they’re needed. There’s tension in the job, whether it’s solving puzzles, getting the right hero assigned to a gig, or dealing with the hard losses of a Kobayashi Maru. While Dispatch presents as an animated movie or a graphic novel come to life, it’s also delivering a thin layer of management sim. It’s just deep enough, in fact, to do a BioShock on you. It makes you feel what it’s like to be behind the controls of a superhero dispatch team. It makes you feel what it’s like to have people on your team that you give a shit about, and what it’s like to let them down because you’re not good enough.

There’s one scene as the game marches through its chapters where you’re presented with one of the many hacking puzzles. These are usually not very hard, but this one is as brutal as an anvil to the face. The tension’s already high because one of the team, someone you’ve taken under your wing, is finally, just maybe, trying to be a hero. And they’ve put themselves at risk, not for fame or glory, but because it’s important to Robert Robertson. You’re not meant to succeed at the hacking puzzle. It’s one of those Kobayashi Maru moments. But let me tell you: you want to. You need to.

Because Dispatch makes you feel like failed Mecha Man Robert Robertson.

It BioShocks you right to 11: you’re invested in the trope, the in-game hacking puzzle you’re used to by now. And you’re used to winning them. It rug-pulls the moment so effectively, you get whiplash. And it does this while proving it understood the assignment: the most important part of storytelling is about the people, whether you care about them, and whether what you just failed to do made you sit staring at the credits with a what-did-I-just-do look on your face.

Yeah. That was me at the end of Episode 4.

Wait, Episode 4?

A divisive element of the games that made Telltale famous was their episodic model. It’s just like a Netflix show, but the modern kind where Disney wants to reach into your wallet for months, so they string a series out over three billing cycles. The good news is that Dispatch has just one payment, but I played it over the episodic release cadence.

I admit, this sucked. It didn’t suck because I have a philosophical problem with games having chapters, but because once I’d finished a duo of episodes, I needed to wait for next week’s payload. From a functional point of view, you’re not going to forget what’s going on in the story, but I found it a little tricky to remember some of the mechanical nuances of dispatching my wannabe heroes.

The game has a faux level-up mechanic, where you can both buff your losers—say, make them smarter or send them to the gym with a protein shake. But you can also send them to school, where they can unlock special abilities or tricks. These can be things like a hero being able to return faster from a job, which means less downtime, or being able to respec their abilities a little dynamically. I found these didn’t stick as well with me during my week-long breaks. Which one of these philistines has a special power when teamed up with another? Which heals a squadmate? Fucked if I could remember.

It’s unlikely to be a problem now, as the whole game’s out! You can binge-watch, or I guess binge-play, the entire game without the artificial brake. What you’re still going to be dealing with is the Digital Deluxe Edition content problem. You can buy this as an add-on, and while it’s not really required, it promises some cool shit, man, like actual comics. These are—painfully—built into the game’s client itself, but there’s a method behind this madness. The comics-in-client delivery mechanism isn’t some kind of dystopian anti-piracy measure, but an alignment to the game’s story-drip system. They provide additional backstory to what you discover through playing the game, and if you found out the specifics behind Blonde Blazer and Phenomaman before the game forces decisions around them, it’d break the whole thing.

It still irritated me, maybe not as much as a steel-wool enema, but I can’t help but think there’s a better way.

It’s Art, Stupid

One of the most powerful parts of Dispatch is its sense of style. The game looks like high-quality anime, a graphic novel come to life, with a lush and vivid superhero interpretation. Blonde Blazer looks almost classical. Mecha Man’s suit is built on brutalism, a hard shell around a man of gold. Invisigal is cooler than cool, a girl you wish you knew a little better. And on and on it goes, each villainous hero imbued with such individual characteristics you can’t help but recognise them from a silhouette alone.

The music is also truly excellent. There are a couple of tracks on the soundtrack I’ve added to playlists to take with me beyond the game.

But it’s not just the art or the banging beats. Each of the characters is acted by S-tier talent. There were only two that didn’t really gel with me, but the rest were people I wanted to invite over for beers and pizza. And those two are more than made up for by Jeffrey Fucking Wright, whose Chase is absurdly well done. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with these people in your ears, and it says something that when the credits rolled, I wanted to keep hanging out with them. The game oozes such a strong sense of identity, I don’t think you can compare it to a ‘superhero’ movie. Those feel very similar to each other these days, with CGI-heavy, character-light motifs; Dispatch is the game that understands it’s the ‘hero’ part of ‘superhero’ that’s important… And even the darkest of us can have a hero within.

Which is probably a good place to talk about Aaron Paul, Mecha Man, and the meaning of sacrifice.

Being Robert

It’s time I made good on my promise to talk about Dispatch’s understanding of consequence.

Robert Robertson is a man who’s worn the suit for much of his life. As a runt kid, his babysitter was a super-fast superhero. His father was Mecha Man, like his father before him. It’s almost like a Steve Earle song, except everyone who’s worn the Mecha Man suit has died in it.

Robert is the first who didn’t. But he almost did, and that’s left him feeling like a failure. Not that he didn’t beat the Big Bad, although that’s a part of it. It’s that he didn’t go down with the ship. He questions whether he gave it his all—whether he’s really Mecha Man, or just Robert. Some guy without any special talents, doing the best he can like the rest of us.

That changes the night he meets Blonde Blazer. She’s a bona fide Captain Marvel style of hero, glowing eyes, super strength, flight, and all. You have the opportunity to drink with her at a bar and see where that goes, and for Robert, this is one of those life moments. It’s not whether he gets to kiss the girl.

It’s whether he thinks he’s worthy of kissing the girl.

Throughout your Dispatch journey as Robert, you learn more about the man you are. You have choices to make along the way, and those are reflected in the story in ways that Mass Effect 3’s ending could only yearn for. I mentioned kissing the girl, but there’s another girl, too, and whether you want to kiss one, both, or neither is going to be reflected not just in your journey, but in theirs. See, Robert is a consequences vector. The things he does matter, and not because the game is trying to give the player agency.

They matter because what you, as the player, choose to do will impact the people in the story with you. Every moment you fail, every time you succeed, and every decision you make that prioritises one value over another is reflected in how your Z Team finishes at the end. Does everyone make it out alive? Is anyone going to jail? Will the heroes fall, or will the villains be redeemed?

And if someone other than you makes a mistake, do you have the strength and courage to help them through and perhaps, just a little, begin to understand that you’re only human?

Dispatch’s lessons are profound. Yes, it’s a superhero story, but it’s also a people story. Not just fictional people—the guy who can turn into an angrier bat or the girl who can turn invisible. It’s the kind of game that’s going to make you question a lot of the relationships in your life, and whether you might be leaving heroism on the shelf for the easy path.

And none of this emotional weight would land without Aaron Paul’s performance. Paul’s an actor I’m a little familiar with, but if I’m being honest, I haven’t felt a strong gravitational attraction to his work. Dispatch has completely changed that view for me. Paul imbues Robert with humour, honour, fear, integrity, bravery, and a sense of purpose I think we all wish we could have. And we can, for the time we’re playing Dispatch. We can be the hero the people around us need.

And while we’re doing that, we might just learn a little about what it means to exist without armour, to live the best ordinary life we can, and look after the people who need it. Just because you’re a demon doesn’t mean you have all the answers. Just because you’re made of stone doesn’t mean you don’t stumble when you screw up. The game made me consider how I was acting towards and with those around me. It made me wonder—a lot—about how people view themselves, and whether there’s a part we have to play in their redemption story.

When the credits rolled, the game told me that through it all, my Robert tried to stay true to his principles. To do the right thing, even when it was hard. And I think that’s probably what we all hope we can do.

So, What?

Dispatch isn’t so much a game about superheroes as it is a story that you feel. With acting that embodies each character with a distinct soul, art that enriches each action with purpose, and music that elevates the moments that matter, it’s an experience second to none.

I don’t give reviews a score. But Dispatch made me wonder if I should. If a one-star is ‘You shouldn’t even piss on this to put it out if it’s on fire’, then a five-star must be the peak experience of ‘You must play this before you die’.

And Dispatch is a game you must play before you die.

What did you think of Dispatch? Let me know in the comments below if you were Team Blazer or Team Invisigal. If you’re pining to hear Jeffrey Wright swear more than Billy Connolly, click Like! And thanks for watching.

Like what you see?

First up, and not a misery story (because people need those in this economy like they need a case of late-stage syphilis), this Substack (Roll for Narrative, in case the branding’s been filed off by your email client) has and continues to be dope. I’ve met cool people, had a great time, and (extra credit) even seen some of you pick up my books. Thank you! It’s been a solid #winning situation all around.

But… before we get to the news, let’s first see the people we’ve met in our serial, The Well of Lethe.

Meet the Dynamic Duo

No, not Batman & Robin: I’m talking Korvus and Verity.

You know how every good story needs heroes? Well, allow me to introduce you to a couple of mine, fresh off the pencil.

They’re the muscle (and brains - you can work out which is which) behind The Well of Lethe. Speaking of which…

COVER REVEAL: The Well of Lethe

Prepare your eyeballs. This is the cover for The Well of Lethe. It’s got vibes. It’s got pulp. It’s got... well, you tell me.

Now that your eyes have been sufficiently blessed, let’s talk about the less glamorous, but equally important, reality check.

Time: The Undefeatable Boss Battle

Here’s the rub: I’ve started new work. It’s great, but it’s also a greedy little goblin that’s been eating my time like it’s a buffet and time is... well, time, man. My available writing/reviewing/showering cycles are nearing “zero” on the gauge.

What does this mean for you, dear reader?

1. Weekly Reviews? More like “Whenever I Can Reviews.” The weekly deep-dives into games, movies, and books are going to be less frequent. Some of you might cheer for less spam in your inbox; some might miss my profound insights. There will even be some who can’t work out how they got here in the first place. It is what it is. My brain can only handle so much, and I’d rather deliver quality over quantity and avoid the inevitable burnout. I’m aiming for monthly, but sometimes you realise it’s nice to want things.

2. The Well of Lethe is moving to the finish line, for free! My serial fiction, The Well of Lethe, is a time vampire when it comes to formatting and posting everywhere, and ref: time, I don’t have it. So, to ensure you can finish the story without waiting for me to clone myself (still working on that tech), I’ve made it available on BookSprout for free ARCs, going live November 1st! You can snag your copy here from the start of next month: https://booksprout.co/reviewer/review-copy/view/239592/the-well-of-lethe - I want everyone who started it for free to be able to finish it for the same price, and BookSprout lets me do that.
   For those who prefer their books retail-style (or just really hate BookSprout for some reason), it hits all major retailers on December 1st: https://www.books2read.com/TheWellofLethe.

3. You want games? You got games! Here’s a fun fact I did NOT expect: you lot far prefer my videogame reviews to my movie or book rants. By a factor of 5 to 10, no less! Not that I’m a coin-operated shill, but if the data says “People love the pixels!”, then who am I to argue? You’ve given me a pretty strong engagement-related hint about where I should focus my remaining review time. If you didn’t expect this outcome… neither did I.

4. Early reviews on The Fury of the Betrayed (out next month!) are positive. I always hope to make you feel something about the cool, messy, amazing thing we humans are in these stories. This reviewer quote really struck me: “It made me appreciate a lot of things - selflessness at its best, the heavy price of redemption, the enduring power of love, the price of progress, the cyclicality of the world and the mysterious fabric of Creation.” Hell, yeah.

5. Roll for Narrative isn’t going anywhere. Let’s be clear: this Substack isn’t dissolving into the digital ether. It’s just evolving. I need to look after myself, avoid turning into a stressed-out mutant, and focus on what matters: producing fiction that rocks, delivering the review content you actually want, and doing it all on a schedule that doesn’t make my brain spontaneously combust.

So, in summary: less frequent reviews (and probably more game-focused), The Well of Lethe is available for free completion soon, and my brain is still mostly intact. Win-win-win? I think so.

Thanks for rolling with me on this journey. Let’s keep doing it, but… slower.

R

• Want to start from the beginning?

Author’s note: Substack hates right-aligned text; the corrected version can be found here!

Korvus stormed the corridors. The Well vibrated, the prison colony’s subframe crying in resonance to the damage he’d caused when Correcting Aris by destroying the medbay.

HERALD:||Extraction necessary for Corrector survival.

Job’s not done. There’s still an unsanctioned intelligence.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||It’ll be Corrected when the reactor goes critical.

How certain are you?||:KORVUS

That shut up the Herald System for a moment. Korvus knew the parasitic infection corrupting the heart of the facility was not a ‘pressure fever’, but Herald would spend a few moments trying to work out whether he was talking about Verity or the parasite, and then whether either could survive the station rupturing.

While it’s thinking, I need to work out which is the unsanctioned intelligence for myself. And… I need a plan for afterthat.

I need my ship prepped and ready to depart.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||So, about that. How attached to it are you? Because there are about a thousand inmates and guards between you and the elevator.

Herald dropped a series of still images on Korvus’s overlay. The facility’s upper level corridors were packed with inmates. There were a few guards seeded in for good measure.

He slowed. Think, dammit.

I need the medbay fixed.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||That would be wise! If the station ruptures, I would not survive. Neither, I guess, would you.

Can you start the automated repair systems?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Protocol dictates—

Short version.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Right. I can do it, but it will take time.

Verity. She can help. But will she? Korvus broke into a run. He made it to the elevator, and keyed it to go down.

HERALD:||Corrector, I’m not going to advise caution when dealing with a rogue machine.

I can hear the ‘but’ coming already.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||But you don’t know if she can be trusted.

Except, I do. I really do, and I don’t know why.

Leave that to me.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Of course. While you prepare for death, I’ll be preparing my ‘I told you so’ for your obituary.

The elevator opened onto Verity’s detention level. The area was black as deep space, a hard darkness that carried a bone-aching cold with it. The elevator’s light showed Korvus’s breath misting before him. “Why would they lower the temperature here?”

HERALD:||I can’t tell if you’re talking to yourself or to me, but on the off chance I’m invited to this conversation, my working theory is that their bodies don’t like being sixty degrees.

Which means they’re coming for Verity. Korvus sprinted down the corridor, switching his optics to thermographic imaging. The door to Verity’s chamber was still closed, which was… a good sign, surely.

Wasn’t it?

He backtracked to the vent as the cold rimed his armour with frost. Korvus stared at the dark opening for a moment.

I don’t really want to go in there.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Who needs a hug?

I’d settle for more ammunition.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Buck up. If you don’t get in there, you’ll never get to Verity.

Korvus jumped, hauling himself into the vent. He clambered hand-over-hand as fast as he could, his armoured elbows making the cramped confines echo and boom as they hit the metal vent interior.

VERITY:||Korvus, I can hear them.

That’s me. I’m in the vent.||:KORVUS

VERITY:||No, closer. They’re in the room with me. I don’t have many tricks left.

Korvus moved faster, banging his arms and shoulders against the walls. Herald’s turret bobbed in his vision, the system seeking targets. Korvus hoped it wouldn’t find one, because if he had to kill someone in the vent, it’d be hell trying to continue on.

Verity? What’s your status?||:KORVUS

There was no response. Korvus rounded the last bend and threw himself out of the vent. He landed awkwardly on the decking, his armour clattering as he hit.

He surged to his feet and ran toward Verity’s cell. His thermographic vision showed two of the superheated guards outside it. Herald fired twice, tearing the life from both. Korvus kept running, only slowing when he registered that Verity’s cell door was open.

She wasn’t there.

HERALD:||We have a situation.

Not now, Herald!||:KORVUS

“Verity?” Korvus looked around. Her cell door was only halfway open. That was an odd piece of weird in a totally insane day, but his investigator’s mind latched onto it. “Verity, where are you?”

Silence answered him at first, then he heard a dull thud. The sound drew him around until he faced the main door exiting the bay. Another thud came from it, turning into a slow and regular hammering.

What’s that noise?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||So now you want to know what the situation is?

They’re trying to get in, aren’t they?||:KORVUS

Korvus’s imagination went into overdrive. His mind’s eye conjured a legion of staggering corpses waiting outside the door, all hungering for him. The truth was—as always—a little worse. Herald dropped images on his overlay, showing that the corridor outside was packed with inmates. The infrared of the security feed bleached all colour from them. They shambled in the darkness, their human eyes insufficient to pierce the gloom. The thudding was the muffled sound a gigantic one at the front made as the now-freed prisoner stood with his head leaned against the door. In his hand he held a guard.

The sound was the guard’s deformed helmet hitting the door as the giant beat his victim against it.

“Verity!” Korvus paced the bay. Where could she be? His eyes strayed to the vent he’d entered through. Had she already gone through? He felt sick, a fist in his gut, and he wasn’t sure why. She was a machine. I’m not sure she’s… sentient. Unsanctioned or not, is she alive?

Herald, how do you determine if something is truly aware?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You want to have this conversation now?

I might not be here in five minutes.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||It’s not going to be anywhere close to five minutes.

The feed on Korvus’s overlay counted the amassed convicts outside. The nineteen rounds left to Herald would run dry in an instant. Korvus could fight hand-to-hand with his Arc Sabre, and he was confident of taking down at least ten before the impossible tide of monsters surged over him. Would they pick him clean with the leech forms?

Was it death that waited for him, or a different form of living?

The door clanked, then groaned as a gap appeared at the bottom.

HERALD:||The warden has released the lockdown on this level.

I’m pretty sure it’s not the warden anymore.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You choose weird times to have semantic arguments. I was hoping in our final moments you’d confess your love for me.

Korvus drew his Arc Sabre. The edge flickered, rivulets of orange and blue energy snaking down its edge. The weapon’s luminance created a flickering, off-kilter set of shadows that chased each other to the walls.

Do you think this is why we created Verity’s God? Because when we humans face the end, we wanted to believe we keep going?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Are you quitting on me?

Don’t worry, I’m swinging for the fences. But our odds are terrible.||:KORVUS

Herald was quiet for a half-second—an eternity of time for the ghost living in his armour—before it responded.

HERALD:||I don’t know anything about God. I don’t know what that… means. But inasmuch as I can feel, I feel tomorrow’s lack. I wish…

Yes?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||It’s nothing. A partial intelligence doesn’t know what it means to be.

Was that envy in the machine’s voice? Before Korvus could respond, the door surged upward. Korvus raised the Arc Sabre, feeling the heat of the weapon against his face. The horde outside screamed and howled as they surged inside.

Herald fired, all nineteen rounds gone in less than a second. It was a good salvo, getting two or three kills with each round, but it wasn’t even a drop in the ocean of monsters surging forward.

That’s when the autosentries triggered, rising from the middle of the floor. There were four, each equipped with two turrets that reminded Korvus of Gatling weapons he’d seen in a museum. Old technology, simple ballistic weapons, but still designed for extreme prisoner pacification.

They swivelled to face Korvus, the cannons whirring. His heart skipped, but the guns swung around to the horde. They unleashed a withering hail of tungsten, the barrels glowing with heat as they slaughtered the influx of infected prisoners.

I’ve never been so pleased to see ancient technology in my life. The noise was a thunderstorm without end as a hail of bullet casings sprayed from the side of the turrets like a brass fountain. Tungsten bullets tore through the enemy, the simple—but effective!—armour-piercing rounds hammering into the walls in the corridor beyond.

After what felt like an age, but was only 7.6 seconds, the weapons whirred to a halt, a lazy trail of smoke drifting heavenward from their barrels.

“Cowboy.” Verity’s muffled voice came from the dark to Korvus’s left.

He lowered his sword, walking toward the sound, stopping when he came to a wall. “Are you… behind this panel?”

“It was a good idea at the time.” Verity spoke while Korvus set the edge of his blade into a gap in the panelling and flexed the blade until the panel popped free. She was curled within, her ember-orange eyes finding his in the gloom. Verity reached out. “Help a girl up?”

Korvus crouched and helped her up. He wanted to feel the heat of her fingers, to know someone else was alive down here with him, but he was armoured and she was a machine.

Wasn’t she?

It was a little tricky to get her upright, and Korvus realised that for all that the injury to her midsection was old, it still clearly hampered her movement. He took extra care as he helped her stand. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve been stuck in a cable conduit for fifteen minutes. I’m peachy.” She looked at the ruin behind him. “At least that worked.”

Korvus looked over his shoulder. “That was you?”

“It wasn’t the Tooth Fairy.” She studied his face. “Why are you here, Corrector?”

“I said I’d come back.”

“A real Boy Scout.” Her slight drawl tugged at him. “Do you know what a Boy Scout is, Corrector?”

“There are rumours of a fabled cadre of uniformed youth.” Korvus wanted to rub his face. Get a grip, man. He let himself smile. “I’m no Boy Scout, Verity. I’m very far away from that.”

She glanced over his shoulder again. “There are words, and then there’s evidence.”

“Are you okay to stand? If I let you go, I mean.”

Verity eased away from him, standing by herself, and for a moment he wished she still needed him. “I’m fine, cowboy.”

“How did you,” he gestured at the slurry of corpses, “do that?”

“If I tell you, do you promise not to use it against me?”

“No.”

“Fair. Do you at least promise not to be mad?”

“I, uh. Under the circumstances? Sure.”

“I hacked the facility,” Verity breezed. “It’s a termination offence.”

“You what?”

“Right, right,” she nodded. “See, I have a radio? Just like Herald. And I can use that to send signals through the air.” She breathed this last in a whisper, as if someone might hear. She wiggled her fingers. “Poof. Magic. One facility, under my control.”

“You can do that? And… Hacking the turrets is one thing. How did you know about Aris and his accident with another Corrector? That’s not in a local station log.”

“The Logos isn’t the only one with a long memory, Korvus. There are other… libraries.”

“Hi,” Herald boomed. “Sorry to interrupt! How much of the facility is under your control?”

“Eh.” Verity wobbled her hand in the air in a so-so gesture. “Bits and pieces. I can get in at the edges. Not through the core.”

“If we take you to the top of the facility, can you get our ship?” Herald almost sounded… concerned.

“No,” Verity said.

“Good,” Herald said. “I was worried.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I can hack the gravity elevator, no problem.”

“But you said—”

“The real issue is the legion of psychopaths up there.” Verity counted on her fingers. “First, there are autosentries up there that will, one hundred percent, kill us. Second, there is a horde waiting on the top platform. Just between us partial intelligences, I think they want the cowboy’s ship.”

“I knew she was a partial,” Herald said.

“Relax, tin man,” the Divine Numen Artificialis said. “I’m all the way real. I was trying for empathy, you know?”

Korvus realised he’d started smiling somewhere during their exchange, and wound it back. “Verity, I have no right to ask you, but I could use your help.”

“Sure,” she said. “What with?”

“You’re not going to ask why?”

“I figure it’s because I’m the only one who hasn’t lied to you, tried to kill you, or put a leech inside you.”

“Is that how it works? They put it inside?” Korvus frowned.

“No. It’s worse, and you don’t want to know.” She looked away.

“Okay,” Korvus said. “I need a ship.”

“You’ve got one.” She pointed to the ceiling, and by inference, the eternal dark of space above.

“No, I’ve got plans for that one. I need another ship.” He looked into her ember-orange eyes. “The one you were going to escape on.”

“What? Me? No. I was—”

“Verity,” Korvus said. “I would like to make you a promise.”

Her expression turned uneasy. “Okay?”

“I will never lie to you.” He offered her the Arc Sabre. “You should take this.”

“I suck at fighting.” She eyed the weapon, but didn’t take it. “Is this the part where I’m supposed to promise to never lie to you? As if the word of a faithless machine would mean anything in a universe that’s forgotten God?”

Korvus sheathed the Sabre. “I don’t know about any of that. I think… I think you’ve been lied to a lot. And I won’t do it.” He turned away and started walking to the door.

HERALD:||Smooth. Did you know the Boy Scouts had a code of honour, and—

Not now, Herald. Just let the moment be.||:KORVUS

But I’m glad I get a tomorrow with you at my side.||:KORVUS

“Cowboy?” Verity’s tone was uncertain. He turned and found her rooted in the same spot, still by the open conduit panel. “How did you know? About the ship.”

“You’re a terrorist on the run from a superintelligence that rules the galaxy. You hacked a prison colony, which included escaping from your cell. You’ve known something’s up here since before I arrived,” he said. “I thought you were easily smart enough for a backup plan.”

“Cool,” she said. “There’s only one problem with the ship.”

He sighed. “Out of power? Locked down?”

“Worse,” she said. “It crashed, I think. It’s in the depths of the ocean. You’ll die before we reach it.”

Korvus stared at her. “That’s a shit plan.”

She gave him that small, sad smile again. “I didn’t say I couldn’t get you there, cowboy. I just said you’d die. But I think… I think I have a solution for that, too. The question is, how much do you trust me?”

Here’s how to complete the story:

Check out the audio version on Spotify or Apple, or cruise into the YouTube version:

If you’re anything like me, you’ll remember Breakpoint’s reception more than the game itself. It seems people weren’t down with changes to its predecessor Wildlands’ successful model. Breakpoint got microtransactions to skip the line, tiered weapon upgrades, and a sort of gear-score/level mixtape for gating content. It was like watching your Wildlands kid graduate from college, only for its younger Breakpoint sibling to drop out and join a band as a drummer after getting a head injury. But what if I told you that beneath the launch-day noise, there was an actual game worth playing? What if, in 2025, Breakpoint… broke even?

The Core Gameplay Loop: Customisation and the World

Breakpoint’s basic story is that you’re Nomad, a killer of killers—the right soldier for a hard task. You and your team are dispatched to the fictional South Pacific island of Auroa. Skell Technology is headquartered there, a sort of dream tech company that attracts the best and brightest to work on cool shit in the middle of a tropical paradise. However (and spoilers), it’s not a top vacation spot anymore: between your rough landing, encounters with murder-bots of various sizes, and a fair-sized hostile military presence, you need to work out what’s going on and kill your way to the top of the food chain. Who’s behind it all? Is Jace Skell the bad man, or is your old buddy Walker the Butcher of Auroa? Are those shady-looking dudes CIA, or something else? And what about the insurgents infesting the island?

It’s a lot to take in, but don’t panic.

Where Breakpoint shines is in its embrace of player freedom and its cousin-loving marriage into customisation. There is a wide range of killing irons you can use, not just in their meta-types like SMGs, shotguns, or sniper rifles, but in their subtypes. If you want your DMR to be a full-auto weapon, you can live that dream. The combination of this with the game’s Gunsmith menu means you can tune and tweak the game to be the murder simulator you crave. My go-to loadout ended up being a DMR with either burst or autofire modes, coupled with a digital sight that could switch between 1x and 4x zoom. My secondary weapon was a grenade launcher, because sometimes that kind of conversation is needed. My sidearm preference tended toward a mid-calibre weapon with an extended magazine. But before landing on this soupçon of psychopathy, I also had great fun equipping a shotgun and going full brute squad, and found assault rifles quite a fun ride for medium-distance encounters.

It’s this variability that expands how people can approach Breakpoint. It also provides some great team choices for multiplayer, allowing a kitted-out squad to go John Rambo, Chris Kyle, or anything in between. Your AI NPC teammates also ensure a smooth ride if you’re like me and friendless. I spent my time with the game almost 100% as a solo player.

Let’s talk about that open world. The map is stuffed with icons, which is either going to excite you or be wearisome. One of my preferred ways to tackle the island is to strip the HUD back and just go exploring. It invites discovery. I’m a corner-checker by nature; I like finding the underground caves, survivalist caches, old war bunkers, and prepper cabins in the woods. Going off the beaten path ensures encounters with all of these. Auroa is more than a collection of icons; it’s an island that different types of people call (and called) home. Ruins exist alongside modern cities. It’s tricky to see anyone being bored of what it’s got to offer if the moment-to-moment gunplay works for you.

It’s not all bushwhacking. Dotted throughout the map are bivouacs which allow fast travel, switching class, spawning a vehicle, and changing the time of day. Want to craft a meal to tweak your stats? Feel like building a new weapon? This is where that action is at. However, a wise man once said that you only need fast travel if you make ordinary travel boring, and ordinary travel isn’t tedious in Breakpoint. It says something about Ubisoft’s world design that I preferred making my way overland or by helicopter to warp-gating through the bivouac system. The opportunities to get into a little ready trouble are too enticing to pass up; the open world is inviting enough that just walking across it to discover ruins, facilities, and roaming enemies remained engaging 90% of the time.

The Story, Missions, and Characters

The game puts you in the shoes of Ghosts, a tactical elite group of soldiers who were dispatched to interrupt events on Auroa, but get pummelled on entry. The story follows you as Nomad, the leader of a squad who needs to uncover what’s going on and avenge the fallen. The story itself is fairly paint-by-numbers, but how it’s told isn’t. There are two stand-out elements to this:

a) Jon Bernthal and

b) the pick-a-path model of mission design.

Bernthal’s a great actor, bringing vibrancy and brutish physicality to his roles, be they The Punisher or The Accountant. As an antagonist, he’s a convincing one—a man who’s served Uncle Sam and his dark hound, the CIA, for years—until he felt that too many good soldiers died for bad causes. The nuance in Walker’s character is that your Nomad really gets it. You know Walker from before—served together, fought in the trenches side-by-side, and had each other’s back. It’s difficult not to see the frustrations we expect veterans to voice embodied in Walker: soldiers who give their blood in service while the powerful squander people’s freedoms on their petty causes. Walker allies with devils because he’s a devil, but a devil with a purpose: he wants to upend the current cart of privilege and power. We can sympathise with him at the same time as abhorring his methods. This is helped along by the performance capture of Bernthal’s physicality in Walker’s scenes. It makes it clear they chose the right actor for the job.

The pick-a-path model was initially concerning; I thought there was no way they could stick the landing here. The basic thrust is that, once you find your feet, you get the opportunity to tackle Auroa any way you want. You can beeline the main objective, embrace the side mission lifestyle, or go full faction support. And the initial opening of the mission board is startling, especially if you have the DLC, as you’ll get three episodic start points. However, setting that to Episode 1 fixes the pain and starts you on a story where the writers have done a great job of combining discrete vignettes into an overarching narrative that allows you to save the world the way you want.

It is, at its heart, a blend of gameplay with story.

There are some great mission designs and a lot of variability to them: save the enemy deserter, broadcast pirate radio across the island, recon outposts, and generally be a huge pain in the ass to the occupying enemy force. There are specific moments all around the world where you feel like a person on the right side of justice. You might come across a technician being interrogated by the enemy. Your natural inclination is to execute the bad guys, and so you should—never suffer a bully to live. The game’s not shy about promoting the counter-military you’re opposing as an evil PMC, and whether it’s saving scientists or homesteaders, there are frequent moments where you can make a mark on a besieged civilian population against modern-day monsters.

For example, one side mission has you rescue a researcher who’s been doing a little work for the resistance on the side. Her gig is to step up to the plate, to take a more active role in the resistance, and as a part of that, she deliberately puts herself in the crosshairs by broadcasting a resistance message on Radio Freedom. This comes with the burden of you having to protect her while she carries out her mission, but that’s not the interesting part. See, she can never go home again after this moment; it’s a decision she made to do the right thing, and in your actions, you’re sharing the same moral compass for a moment. It would have been far easier for each mission to be, “kill ten guys,” or, “blow up that boat,” but Ubisoft instead chose to integrate deeper messages. Even these side missions have a strong sense of purpose attached to them.

Of course, not every mission is a hit! There was a live event crossover with Rainbow Six where it basically undid the whole point of Ghost Recon. Each crossover mission had an enforced timer by way of a gas mask; this fundamentally removes the tactical and stealth essence of Ghost games, focusing on artificial urgency. These missions provided frustration instead of sparking joy. And some supporting characters are a miss, like the homesteader whose personality is set on ’asshole’ for a good 80% of the game.

But the game preserves Wildlands’ feeling of cruising about with your posse. Your hero Nomad and your AI teammates are customisable. By default, your avatar is male-coded, but the voice work, whether you choose male or female Nomad, is perfection. Your squad are similarly well done; they can be dudebros, the girl strike squad, or whatever mix you prefer. Each teammate fills a role—for example, Fixit has a drone, and Vasily is a sniper. They’re a recon group, a true team, and they’ll fan out to support your position, all while pointing out dangers to you. While they definitely don’t play the game for you, they do contribute to the game’s story—that sense that Nomad’s on a team with other heroes who want to save the people of Auroa. Their presence makes you feel less alone, and that’s hardly a bad thing in a game world that’s constantly trying to murder you. Though, yes: sometimes your AI teammates are dumb as a box of bricks, and it feels like the only times I actually died in this game were because my squad was taking a piss by a tree or something similar instead of shooting the enemy.

The Technicals and Aesthetics

Art direction remains a strong point in this game from 2019; it still looks good in 2025 and plays better. Ubisoft’s focus on ‘looking good’ first struck me way back with the first Assassin’s Creed. They continue the same design work in Breakpoint: while there are games that push higher poly counts or involve advanced ray tracing technologies, the effective use of light and shadow, costumes, and up-close details make this game delicious to look at.

They prove their expertise in rendering sand from Assassin’s Creed isn’t their only trick; the game features forests, beaches, and white-capped mountains, each with elements that imbue the experience with a lived-in feel. Snow clings to your boots, and if you go prone camo, mud coats everything, including you and your weapon. Wind whispers through the grasses, and trees obscure the horizon rather than having pop-in effects that startle you if you get too close. Enemies are distinctive, and vehicle profiles are easily identifiable from a distance, allowing true tactical scenario-based play. It’s more than how good it looks; it’s a fuller package, using visual design to celebrate the gameplay and taking it to a higher level.

It’s worth leaning on how the artistry comes through, despite me not rocking a $6,000 GPU. It also avoids the frame-time stutters of poorly optimised games with shader compilation issues, and yes, Borderlands 4, I’m looking at you. Breakpoint provided me a rock-solid, silky-smooth experience on an AMD Ryzen 7700X with 32GB RAM and an nVidia 4070 Super. This mid-spec PC provides S-tier game performance, with seamless open-world roaming only interrupted by the odd narrative movie or teleport-to-bivouac fast travel moments.

Room-Sized Elephants: RPGification and Monetisation

The first Ghost Recon game I played was Advanced Warfighter on the 360, and man, I can tell you, times have changed. While it’s tempting to be the old man shouting at clouds, there’s both good and bad in the box of change, but vocal launch adopters of Breakpoint found the inclusion of an RPG into their tactical shooter was an unwelcome addition. For some, the ability to shoot a man in the head and for that man to respond realistically—by, say, falling down dead—was a bedrock element of the Ghost Recon tactical shooter experience.

See, Breakpoint embraced a sort of tiered weapon system. Map markers will warn you away from fire that burns if the game feels you’re still needing a little more time with your training wheels on. But crucially, this isn’t The Division 2, where you can dump 34 magazines into a boss and they’ll walk it off. Here in Breakpoint, it’s more of a gate to warn you away from drowning in the deep end. It’s a potentially uncomfortable mechanic, but it allows the freedom the open-world story system provides. Still, we need to acknowledge Breakpoint’s addiction to gear score: if your numbers aren’t big enough, enemies will peel you like a grape. But once you match them, you are back in one-shot kill territory (and arguably, if your skill level is higher than mine, you could ignore the numbers and take a chance, hero). It’s not the bullet-sponge dystopia I feared, but it is a mild brake that stops you from completing the main campaign too quickly.

This gives us an approach somewhere in the middle between the historical, raw tactical shooters of Ghost Recon’sancestors and full-blown looter-shooter RPGs like Borderlands. The TL;DR here is that the gamer who’s frustrated with the bullet-sponge nature of The Division 2 but enjoying its RPG-lite progression will probably find a happy home in Breakpoint. There’s even better news, because Ubisoft actually listened to the purists. You can turn on the game’s optional Ghost Experience mode, where it’s far more visceral and deliberate in its pacing and difficulty. This is, perhaps, Ubisoft’s recognition of what made the previous Ghost games such a cultural touchstone. With Breakpoint, there’s now a way to return yourself to glory through a mode patched in after launch… Or, you can have the numbers-go-up default experience.

Where I get a little more wound around the axle is Ubisoft’s always-online component and microtransaction culture. A single-player game that’s always online is an unnecessary foible foisted on gamers. CEO Yves Guillemot said the goal with Far Cry is to push multiplayer “more predominantly” in future entries, and we fear that with Ghost Recon’s future. We’ve also heard their director of subscriptions saying gamers need to get comfortable with not owning games, which I think we can agree is a remarkably self-serving statement from a guy who’s supposed to push a non-ownership business model. There’s evidence that Ubisoft has been angling for this future since they shipped Breakpoint.

While the monetisation and its trappings exist for shareholder value rather than the gamer, it’s not a spectre that burdened me in my 50+ hours with the game. I had one server maintenance outage, but that was it. The in-game monetisation menus are not very in your face. Unless you’ve got poor impulse control, this isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to constantly impede the Breakpoint experience. If you can park the static and embrace the signal, there’s good stuff to like in this package.

A Testament to Evolution

The major sticking point for some people will be whether they can embrace change in a beloved franchise. Breakpoint asks you to accept that Ghost Recon can be more than one thing—delivering a pure tactical shooter for purists through Ghost Experience mode, or an RPG-lite playground for those who want progression systems alongside their stealth kills.

That flexibility might be Breakpoint’s greatest achievement. In 2019, and without Ghost Experience mode, it felt like compromise. In 2025, it feels like maturity—a game confident enough to offer multiple experiences within one package. Sometimes evolution means addition, not subtraction. I liked Breakpoint because of this testament to how a game can evolve and how an initial impression isn’t always the full story. It’s a game that offers choice—from how you play through to its deep weapon customisation and its inviting open world. It gives you a compelling antagonist, impactful side missions, and a world that feels both fantastical and grounded. Yes, it has its jank, its questionable monetisation choices, and its one or two head-scratching missions. But it also has a lush playground to explore, cool characters, and avoids the bullet-sponge hell of The Division 2.

Maybe you don’t love that always-online component or a store designed to sell boosters and other trash. These facets still exist in the Breakpoint of 2025, but there’s nuance here. There’s a solid story alongside great antagonists. There are heroes on both sides of the conflict and people trying to live in a war zone. Here’s my recommendation: if you wrote off Breakpoint at launch, maybe it’s time for a second look. The game that exists today, patched and refined, might surprise you. The best Ghost Recon game isn’t necessarily the one that never changes—it’s the one that remembers what made the series dope as hell while finding new ways to deliver that tactical murder-hobo satisfaction. If you can embrace the freedom it offers, you might just find a really rewarding shooter in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.

What did you think of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint? Let me know in the comments below. If you’re on team DMR, click Like. And if your favourite problem-solver…

Author’s note: Substack doesn’t support right-aligned text for Chainlink conversations; a correctly-formatted version can be found here!

Korvus exited the elevator on the medbay level. The lighting flickered, a sure sign of an ailing reactor or control system. Neither failure was survivable on Lethe. If both died, the oceans would hunger in, scouring the inside of the prison colony like the high-pressure acid bath it was.

I need to hurry. He picked up his pace. Herald’s cannon was locked in its firing position over his left shoulder, ready for whatever might come.

How much ammunition do we have?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||It was a short jump, so there wasn’t much computational residue from the drive. It only leaves you eight shots in the Adjudicator. I know you’re itching to use them, so I’ll say this once: don’t. You definitely won’t survive, and I probably won’t. Second, I’ve got twenty rounds in the cannon.

Twenty isn’t a lot.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||It’s more than eight, and definitely more than your practical limit of zero, since you can’t shoot anything anyway.

I wasn’t blaming you.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||I felt overly seen, that’s all.

Korvus paused, placing his hand on the wall. He felt a faint vibration through the fingertips of his armoured gauntlet.

Do we have structural integrity?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Philosophically?

Materially.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||I was hoping you would say that, because the answer is yes! Our Veritas credentials let us see station operational details, and they’re all fine. Except for the reactor. I give that sucker a couple of hours before it melts its way to the core of the planet. The good news is you’ll be dead before then, so you won’t die horribly in a radiation flood. You’ll die horribly right after it goes critical, the oceans rush in and boil you alive like a lobster dropped in a pot.

I didn’t think the oceans were hot.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||They’re not, but if they come in through a hole near a failed reactor, they’ll become quite hot indeed.

What if I asked for the philosophy side?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You’re going gaga for a terrorist ex-sex worker.

I am not ‘gaga’ for Verity.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Just remember that when she stabs you in the spine during her predictable but inevitable betrayal.

Korvus let his hand fall from the wall and was about to head off when Sergeant Eckles rounded the corner ahead. When he saw the guard, he knew two things.

First, the man was almost certainly infected. The guard’s shambling gait and rampant fever suggested either he was the largest coincidence in the Communion, or he had a leech inside him. The guard was cooking at over 40℃, rolling like a sailor on deck, and held a ballistic rifle in one hand. The rifle’s muzzle faced the deck, the hand holding it slack. Did that mean he was unaware he held a weapon, couldn’t use it, or some other factor?

Second, it meant the medbay was open. Aris had been on the other side of a lockdown, inaccessible without the warden’s Chainlinked authorisation. This was a piece of much-needed good news in a sewer of shit, because Korvus needed to talk to the doctor about the leeches.

HERALD:||Alien alert!

Can they be reasoned with?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||No clue. I thought they were snakes. I was so off-base, I was playing a different sport.

“Eckles,” Korvus started. “Or, whatever you are.”

The guard’s eyes did a lazy circuit of the corridor before landing on Korvus. “Corrector.”

“What do you want?” Korvus rested his hand on the Adjudicator’s hilt.

‘Eckles’ looked down at Korvus’s hand resting on his sidearm, then back at Korvus. “You can’t use that, can you? It’s… the wrong kind of special.”

“You sound like Eckles. Look like him, too. But you’ve, what, infected him?” Korvus took a step forward. “Maybe I can help you. You just need to give Eckles back.”

Eckles smiled, but like a mime unsure of whether he was getting through to the crowd—too much pull in the lips, a clown’s grimace. Besides, Korvus couldn’t remember Eckles ever smiling. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“How does it work?”

The guard took a few halting steps forward, looked at his rifle, then let it clatter to the decking. “I’m unarmed,” he said. “I can show you, if you like.”

“Sure, let’s do that,” Korvus agreed.

HERALD:||That seems dumb, even for you.

I’m clearly stalling for time.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||It’s so hard to tell.

I need you to not shoot him. I need answers more than giblets.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Ah, there’s the true stupidity I was waiting for.

They walked toward each other, Eckles with his unsteady stagger-step, Korvus at an equally slow pace, but due to caution. They both stopped at arm’s distance. This close, Korvus could clearly see the veins in Eckles’ bloodshot eyes. Perhaps it was in his mind, but it felt like the guard radiated heat like a furnace. Eckles wet his lips, then said, “We need your ship.”

“It won’t fly without a Corrector,” Korvus said.

“I know,” Eckles said, and lunged for him.

Korvus was expecting something like this. The good news was that Herald didn’t fire. Korvus braced himself as Eckles reached out and he grabbed the guard’s arms. Mercy, but he’s strong! Eckles had the strength of five men, far more than even his muscled physique would account for.

He didn’t seem to be trying to break free. The guard brought his face closer to Korvus, his mouth open in a drooling leer. Korvus had the best optics the Communion could provide, and they gave him an excellent view of the thing in the back of the guard’s throat. A leech, but with a lamprey mouth questing for an exit.

Korvus raised his knee with all his augmented strength, hearing Eckles’s pelvic bone crack with the force of it. The guard didn’t even flinch, keeping his vice grip on Korvus, the leech now half out of his mouth.

Then it disappeared in a shower of red mist and bone fragments as Herald fired, the round going straight through the guard and into the wall beyond. The strength went out of the arms Korvus held, and he let the body fall.

Thanks.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Nineteen rounds remain. That means you only have nineteen more chances to be truly idiotic.

Korvus calmed his breathing. He had synthetic muscles replacing his original ones—a technology that gave him heavy loader strength—and he’d found wrestling Eckles… difficult.

He was very strong.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||This takes us further from the fever diagnosis.

Korvus crouched by the remains, finding them… ordinary. The body was not over-muscled—certainly no more so than Eckles had been originally. It didn’t explain the powerful grip the man used.

He started a new Chainlink.

Verity, I’ve encountered a guard. Very strong, and very motivated.||:KORVUS

VERITY:||It’s not a pressure fever.

I don’t understand. Aris has been investigating patients and hasn’t noted the leech forms inside them. It seems an impossible factor to miss, especially since one just tried… attaching to me.||:KORVUS

VERITY:||The answer is obvious.

God?||:KORVUS

VERITY:||God didn’t need to step in here. Aris is your blind spot. Korvus, he is infected.

Korvus felt his eyes widen.

That’s impossible. He’s got a Chainlink! He holds a biologically coded and locked Veritas Chain. It can’t be broken.||:KORVUS

VERITY:||Perhaps I spoke too soon about God. Today is a day of miracles. You just worked out something even the Logos doesn’t know: there’s a weakness in the Veritas Chain.

It’s still impossible.||:KORVUS

VERITY:||And yet here we are.

She dropped the Chainlink. Korvus felt his fingers clench.

Okay, we need to erase our assumptions. Assume the Veritas Chain isn’t inviolate. Does this mean the warden is compromised?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Just because your sexbot said—

Analysis first, sarcasm later.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Assuming the impossible became possible, sure. The warden’s been leeched.

It’s time to have a better conversation with Aris.||:KORVUS

Korvus stormed toward the medbay entrance. It was open, as expected. He rounded the entranceway and found horror.

The inmates were no longer tethered to their beds. They were standing, heads drooping, but they swivelled as if on the same control circuit to look at him as he stood in the doorway.

In the centre of his choir of puppets stood Aris. The doctor looked bad. Blood seeped from his lips, and when he opened his mouth to speak, Korvus could see the ruin of his gums where teeth had fallen out. Aris’s shirt bulged around his belly and was stained red-brown. His speech was slightly slurred. “Corrector, welcome. It’s time for you to join the team.”

Korvus’s optics said Aris was cooking, his body holding a steady 60℃. His Adjudicator was in his hand before he could think twice, the weapon’s muzzle aimed squarely at Aris.

The ‘doctor’ looked at the weapon, then back to Korvus. “We both know you can’t use that here. You’ll destroy the entire facility.” He took a step toward Korvus.

As he did, his shirt tore, entrails and viscous fluids flowing free. His stomach cavity was a ruin, and tens of leeches slopped onto the floor, their lamprey mouths hunting for flesh.

“Aris, there’s something you don’t know about this medbay.” Korvus tightened his grip on his weapon.

“I know everything about it,” the monster hissed. “It’s how we started everything.”

Korvus fired. The Adjudicator spat a howling blast, the singularity forming as a miniature black hole hit Aris. Lightning arced from the impact, rivulets of energy running over the walls, deforming the metal. The puppets by Aris were destroyed in an instant, the weapon’s blast a bark of godlike fury.

The silence that followed didn’t last long. The walls in the room buckled, creaking inward. Korvus fired again, his shot hitting the rearward wall—the bulkhead against Lethe’s ever-ravenous ocean.

I hope I’m right about the medbay door. Nanospun glass is rated for the pressure. It has to hold.

The wall ruptured just as the medbay’s fire suppression system kicked in. The massive door slammed shut as explosive charges in the frame responded to programmed emergency procedures. It sealed the horror of the ocean and the infected behind Communion nanospun glass and metal.

Korvus holstered the Adjudicator.

Six shots remain.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Please tell me you planned that.

Korvus smiled.

The station’s fire suppression system is designed to prevent flames from consuming all the air.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||So you set a fire WITH A BLACK HOLE?!

It was the best tool of the moment.||:KORVUS

He turned on his heel, ignoring the cloudy, dissolving forms in the murk behind the nanospun glass. It was time to decide who the real monster was behind it all.

Next week awaits!

I’m not even really joking here. Forty years separate Rumi, Mira, and Zoey of Huntr/x from Jem and the Holograms, but their core message joins them through time. KPop Demon Hunters is a delight, a deliberately stutter-frame animation spectacle of three women who fight demons with the power of song and sword… who are also championing the right for women to be the heroes of their own story.

And make no mistake, this movie channels Jem in more ways than just its core premise. It’s very reminiscent of the old classic, and we’ll be diving deep into these parallels later—but for now, let’s celebrate the triumph of our feel-good K-pop riot, where women save the world through the power of music. It’s not all about saving the world, though: they also look forward to months of downtime on the couch, which is a message I can get behind. Beyond channelling Jem’s empowerment vibe, it’s also channeling K/DA musically. That virtual band, based on characters from a video game, had similar beats with an undeniable K-pop musical aesthetic.

It’s hard not to want to be this kind of rock star.

Simple Premise, Deeper Meaning

KPop Demon Hunters has a wonderful message hidden behind a simple premise. You won’t have to work too hard to determine what’s going on. The basic plot is that three chosen hunters can use the power of music to create a shield that protects the world from demon invasions. However, the shield is for shit; it’s breaking down, and this means demons need their asses kicked. Our heroes are just the musicians for the task.

It would be easy for the scriptwriters and directors to lean into K-pop music and swords, but they resisted the easy ride. Things get interesting because the plot is really a metaphor for a lot of the confusion we feel in our world. As we grow up, we’re told that if we work hard and do our part, we’ll have a good life—maybe a family, a nice house, good friends, all while wearing success like a badge. But the world’s not actually like that—to quote Galadriel, “they were all of them deceived.” A very small number of ultra-conservative, ultra-wealthy oligarchs are sucking the wealth from the world. No one can afford a house. Education is expensive. People work 80-hour weeks at more than one job and get less than their parents did. KPop Demon Hunters shows the shield of the world is our false expectations. It doesn’t work.

The film uses demons and shields to show what we know to be true: that ‘forces beyond’ are influencing us, and not in a nice or kind way. But it also shows that we can find allies in people who aren’t like us and are maybe on the wrong side of history—and these allies are just the kinds of people who can help shift the balance.

Character & Growth: The Trio and Ji-noo

The character work in this film is excellently done, focusing on two key concepts:

a) That you can make terrible mistakes that feel like they define you (but there’s a road back), and

b) That we all find ourselves displaced from what the world expects us to be, but it’s more than okay to be who we are.

Ultimately, difference is a superpower that can save the world.

We follow our three hunters: Rumi (voiced by Arden Cho), the notional head, centre-stage performer, and lead vocalist of Huntr/x. She’s a self-assessed misfit, the woman all her fans want to be like, all while she wants to be anyone but herself. Then there’s Mira (voiced by May Hong)—the rebellious one who uses not caring as a shield to protect herself from caring too much. And finally, Zoey (voiced by Ji-young Yoo), the people-pleaser, the nervous and uncertain one who wants everyone to succeed but never focuses on herself.

Throughout the movie’s 1h35m runtime, we see these three were fated to be the demon hunters, part sword saint and part celestial musician, but they get an unexpected gift: they became besties. However, the bonds of friendship were never really tested until the events of the film. Prior to this most recent demonic invasion, Huntr/x could do nothing but win because of who they were and the positions they were in. The movie’s main conceit is that all of them were living a slightly different flavour of lie. As KPop Demon Hunters unfolds, we see them hiding things from themselves as much as from each other. This imperils not just their friendship, but the whole world. And we need the world: not having it would suck. The film’s compelling narrative arc is one where they need to remember who they are and who they need to be. I’m sure we can all remember times in our past where being true to our nature conflicted with our perceptions of being accepted, but the biggest lesson we learn is that it’s not really acceptance if we need to be someone we’re not. This is the lesson the movie broadcasts to 11.

This theme extends to our antagonist, or perhaps anti-hero: Ji-noo (voiced by Ahn Hyo-seop), the mastermind behind musical rival band The Saja Boys. Ji-noo’s done some bad shit, man, like super bad, and has been allied with the demons ever since. He’s made an actual devil’s bargain: “I will corrupt the world if you can make me forget the evil I’ve done.” It’s an interesting test; we all may have done things we consider to be wrong, and making amends is much harder than walking away. Ji-noo’s quest isn’t to undo his terrible wrong, because it was in the past. It’s to use the power of forgetting to undo the guilt and trauma he relives daily, to ease away from the constant inner voice berating him for all he’s incapable of being. But—and avoiding spoilers!—the actual test is to accept that we’re all fallible, that we all stumble and even fall, and it’s possible to be more than our past errors.

It might even be possible to turn those mistakes into something positive, to get out from who we were and into who we need to be... and perhaps save the world (and ourselves in the process).

The Deceptive Mentor & Cultural Nuances

Adding another layer to this narrative of self-acceptance is the demon hunters’ mentor. She has a very small role in the film but a big one in their lives, a sort of we-have-Miyagi-at-home character. She exemplifies the problem with acceptance, because her entire mission has been to hide Rumi’s secret and provide a path out where Rumi can be done with her checkered past. She’s the older mentor we want to trust, but wearing a divisive hat: she is putting forward the old-school idea that difference is a hindrance and must be stamped out. This rigid one-way-to-succeed mentality perfectly sets the stage for the film’s sharp critique of the K-pop industry itself. It’s through the trio’s trust in her and eventual self-discovery moments that allows us celebrate their difference. We realise that just because someone is older doesn’t make them wiser, and our own paths have value.

The Korean media production element comes through strongly here. In Korea, entertainment companies manufacture stars—I’ve heard stories of the likes of SM or YG picking tweens and training them for years (ref: 1, 2, 3, 4) like a sort of national Mickey Mouse Club. The film uses this as a perfect platform for how demons might actually influence media, because the system’s already set up for manipulation. If some bands are picked to be big (like Blackpink), there are only a few that get to lead the charge. This creates the backdrop tapestry the film leverages, where Huntr/x are pitted against The Saja Boys in a musical fight to the death. We see this not-so-subtle hierarchy used to great effect; while we only hear music from Huntr/x and The Saja Boys, there is a ranking of other bands fans can vote for on their phones. It’s more a competition like the demon-invasion version of America’s Got Talent than the organic music experience most Westerners know. While it would be unlikely for such a thing to occur in the West outside of reality TV, it feels quite believable in Korea if, say, you were a group of demons who could influence the media.

Visuals, Themes, and The Anti-Message of Music

In terms of how the movie is shot, it’s channeling the Spider-Verse movies with their stepped animation style. You know how the Spider-Verse films make every frame feel like a comic panel come to life? They do this by animating characters on ‘twos’ (every other frame) while keeping the background animated on ‘ones’ (every frame). KPop Demon Hunters does that, but with the glossy aesthetic of a K-pop music video. When Rumi draws her sword, the frames linger just long enough to let you appreciate the vibe of both the badassery and the emotion behind it.

(Side note: it’s a trick that’s also been used in Predator: Killer of Killers, which is worth checking out if you haven’t, but we’re not here to review a Predator movie).

It’s hard to highlight a single scene of excellence as the movie is non-stop from the get-go. The colour is vibrant, sure, but I think it’s actually how colour is combined with animation techniques to let us understand what characters are feeling. It’s this depth of emotion that comes through; it’s less about how badass the trio of demon hunters are—and they are! They kick ass—and more about the depth of feeling they (and The Saja Boys) uncover. It’s a message to the audience that it’s okay to be yourself and feel your own feelings.

This film also boldly showcases things I suspect young women want to see or hear. For example, it’s okay to sit around in your bathrobe all day if that’s what you want. With popular media emphasising ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’ body proportions in women, it’s also tremendously refreshing to see a movie that celebrates eating what you want, when you want, without any body shaming or external judgment. If you’re watching book reviews on TikTok at 2 a.m. wondering if you’ll ever find your people, this film says your weirdness isn’t a bug—it’s the feature that saves the world. This isn’t just accidental positivity; it’s a core part of the film’s ultimately wholesome and empowering message.

It also does great work in channeling its Korean heritage when it comes to the demons and their evil. It’s far less Western Biblical Etch A Sketch and more into the forces that shape our thoughts and desires, often hinting at internal struggles or societal pressures rather than purely external, monstrous evil. The demons are rendered in a colourful art style, despite being a horde of slavering monsters who want the souls inside all of us. There are two standouts: Derpy, a huge tiger, and Sussie, a supernatural magpie. Derpy, cursed with being simple, is trying to fulfil his role of guardian spirit. The tiger is paired with the clever Sussie, a supernatural magpie who is cursed with Derpy. While notionally on Team Demon, the duo is another reminder that all is not what it seems, and that people are less black and white than many would prefer. As the film beautifully illustrates, all of us contain legions.

KPop Demon Hunters is a celebration of justice, but it’s also a musical. It’s not just about the phat beats; it’s all about the message. Huntr/x believe that to win the competition, they must create an ‘angry’ song. But they’re a bubblegum latte group; the track’s overt messages about domination and combat are a quicksand they’re sinking into. Because they fear the demon invasion so much, they become more demonic when combating it. Fighting fire with fire is totally a strategy, but they work out that the ends don’t justify the means. Remember, this film is about being true to yourself. Huntr/x can’t win against evil by being a more tuneful evil.

Ancient History and Timeless Messaging

I promised we’d revisit Jem and the Holograms. Jem was revolutionary for the 80s, and KPop Demon Hunters is revolutionary for right now. It’s suggesting that your K-pop obsession and your anxiety about the state of the world aren’t separate things.

The old show and this new movie share epic parallels in their treatment of female empowerment through entertainment and heroism, despite being separated by nearly four decades. I was an unashamed fan of Jem back when it was on TV; it deserves a reboot better than 2015’s 4.2 trash fire. Hopefully the path it paved for KPop Demon Hunters will be returned in kind, as KPop Demon Hunters shows we want these stories as much as we always did. Let’s dig in.

Both centre on young women who lead double lives as entertainers and protectors. Jem’s Jerrica Benton transforms into a glamorous rock star while secretly fighting corporate villains and personal enemies, using holographic technology to create dope illusions. KPop Demon Hunters follows K-pop superstars Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, who balance their lives in the spotlight with their secret identities as demon hunters, using their powers to protect the world from demons. Unlike Jem’s Synergy, their power is not technological but magical, rooted in a generations-old lineage of female shamans who use music to fight evil.

They both share the concept of music as both performance art and weapon. Jem’s holographic concerts were more than entertainment, and KPop’s trio uses their musical platform as cover for their supernatural protection gig. Both shows celebrate music as both artistic expression and transformative force, literally changing reality. Jem’s core messages are about integrity, philanthropy, and found family. The show championed the idea that success should be used for good, promoting kindness and teamwork over cutthroat rivalry. KPop Demon Hunters’ themes are more complex, delving into the idea of fighting not just external enemies but also inner demons. The film’s feel-good message is that your past does not define you, and that it’s okay to not fit neatly into a box. It’s a story that values friendship and authenticity.

Both celebrate a powerful counter-narrative to traditional subservient female roles, but use different map software to get there. I’d argue that Jem pioneered the concept of female musicians as aspirational figures who could be more than glamorous. The show tackled substantive social issues like homelessness, drug addiction, and disaster relief, but still kept the charm offensive on high volume. Jerrica/Jem showed you could be successful, caring, and heroic without sacrificing femininity or artistic integrity. Back to our timeline, KPop Demon Hunters has quickly become Netflix’s most-watched movie. It would be fair to say its positivity is a message the global audience wants to hear. It blends aspirational elements of K-pop with the supernatural. It’s offering a similar message to young audiences: just like Jem, its heroes are both rockstars and protectors of their fans. It says that heroes are real, more than a product, and better than a brand. It’s a message we want to believe, sure, but it’s a trope we want to be.

Remember when I talked about the ultraconservatives? Both Jem and the Holograms and KPop Demon Hunters absolutely reject the conservative-agenda passive roles for young women. Jem was revolutionary back in the 80s for daring to suggest its female hero owned her own record company, made executive decisions, and solved problems rather than waiting for rescue. Jerrica wasn’t just talented—she was an entrepreneur, technologically savvy, and decisive.

KPop Demon Hunters celebrates its ancestor with heroes who are badass demon hunters, facing existential threats while maintaining careers and protecting the world. They’re a team, a group who work together to solve common problems. But they also represent young women who don’t have to choose between success and heroism, between artistic achievement and protective power.

There’s a hidden nuance here. The evolution from Jem to KPop Demon Hunters also suggests a changing world. Jem was distinctly American, rooted in 1980s rock culture and Western beauty standards. KPop Demon Hunters taps into the global phenomenon of K-pop, acknowledging how youth culture has become increasingly international and how Asian entertainment has gained worldwide influence. K/DA celebrated this in a similar way, using a Western game property set on an international stage of music and bombast.

Both Jem and KPop Demon Hunters get it: young audiences crave protagonists who are multidimensional. We want complex heroes who excel in multiple spheres. Not just performers or just heroes, but people who have a day job while doing the right thing on the side. They offer a version of Femininity 2.0: ambition, talent, technological proficiency, and protective instincts. They—rightly—reject that women must be limited to supportive or decorative roles. They pass the Bechdel test with flying colours.

They also show an eternal appeal of this formula. From Jem’s holographic rock shows to KPop Demon Hunters’ supernatural K-pop adventures, we’ve got irrefutable proof that audiences hunger for stories where young women wield both cultural influence and the literal power to shape our world.

Final Thoughts

KPop Demon Hunters has a wholesome message so many people need to hear, regardless of their points of difference. I’d argue that especially young people—not just women—need to hear it. There’s a lot of messaging in the world from ultraconservatives who control media, employment prospects, schooling, and so on that are trying to continually define humanity to a small subset of its true potential. KPop Demon Hunters refutes this; it’s a film that’s fine with you being half of one thing, half of another, and totally yourself. It’s also fine with you spending three months on the couch with your besties if that’s the life you want to live.

This isn’t just another believe-in-yourself kids’ film. It’s asking harder questions. Can you accept that your friends might be struggling with things they haven’t told you? Can you fight for someone who’s made terrible choices? And for anyone who’s ever felt like they don’t quite fit: what if your weirdness isn’t something to overcome, but something the world needs? I keep thinking about how Rumi wanted to not be herself, but her fans wanted to be her. How many of us are living some version of that? KPop Demon Hunters suggests we’re all looking the wrong way. It’s saying that we shouldn’t be someone else’s version of perfect.

It leaves the audience with a question: would you be happy to be allied with people you don’t look or sound like, to live in a world where difference is celebrated? It’s an innate challenge, because most people are happy with their point of difference, but sometimes get angry or lash out at alternative forms of expression. KPop Demon Hunters knows there’s a little Mira in all of us. The movie is, perhaps, suggesting that we’re partly to blame for where we find ourselves, and that we need to accept an imperfect world if we want to be our imperfect perfect selves in it. It’s a film that trusts the audience to catch the deeper themes while still delivering epic sword battles set to a boss-level bass track.

What did you think of KPop Demon Hunters? If you have the soundtrack on repeat, click Like. And if you are part of the fossil record…

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Author’s note: Substack doesn’t support right-aligned text; to get the correctly formatted Chainlink conversations, follow this link!

Korvus’s path was dark, but his optics were more than sufficient for the task. The grey tones of infrared vision showed a metal shaft that was clean and well maintained.

Until he found the skin.

At least, that was what it seemed like. Under IR, it appeared to be a small tube of grey-white material, thin and flaking as if someone’s thumb had given up and started degloving itself. He picked it up, trying to imagine what it was through infrared’s lack of colour.

What the hell is this?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Looks like snakeskin.

Why would there be snakes on Lethe?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Just because it looks like something doesn’t mean it is something.

Korvus let the material drop, his overlay pinning the location in case he needed to return for further forensics. His optics picked out a slight trail on the vent’s floor. It led from the ‘snakeskin’ and down a left junction.

The overlay said that was the path he needed to follow.

He continued crawling forward. I’ve never been claustrophobic, but maybe that’s because I’ve never had to fight in a metal tube with nothing but a sarcastic Herald System for help.

The discoloured trail was patchy. It reminded Korvus a little of a snail’s trail, except it lacked the consistency. A snail would leave a slime trail as it cruised along, and whatever had left the snakeskin had been erratic with the slime. His overlay promised the trail led to a grating, which Herald had marked as his exit into Verity’s secure bay.

The grating was missing.

Just an empty hole leading out. Korvus poked his head through, but there were no crazed 60℃ psychos waiting to jump him. He eased over the edge, a slightly ungainly manoeuvre in full armour, but there was no way he was going anywhere on this station with neither Herald nor Adjudicator. Righting himself, he eyed the room. The turrets were still buried in the floor. Korvus padded around a corner and spied Verity’s cell.

She was inside. Her guards were not outside.

HERALD:||Do I need to remind you that she’s an unsanctioned intelligence?

How sure of that are you?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||It’s a logical projection.

So, you’re not sure?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||I’m going to apply for a new partner.

Korvus felt his lips quirk. Not a grin, not even half a smile, but he knew the Herald System would notice it.

He stalked toward Verity’s cell. She was still standing near the bars, but no longer gripping them. Her arms were crossed, and she had a wary expression. “You’re back early.”

He frowned. “I wasn’t aware I was on the clock.”

She tutted. “Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Prison’s gone to hell, and I’d know. I used to live there.”

Korvus pressed his lips into a line. “Where are your guards?”

“Aside from not here? How would I know?”

He took a step toward her cell. “You’ve seen God.”

“Spoken to God. Not seen. Big difference, cowboy.” She tilted her head as if noticing him for the first time. “I think you’ve seen Him, too.”

Korvus barked a harsh laugh. “There is no God, Verity. There is The Logos, and the Communion. There is order, and you are not in it.”

He expected the machine to snarl, perhaps spit a curse, but she just left her head cocked, those ember-orange eyes resting on him. He felt their heat like coals. “That sounds exactly like a man who’s seen God, but wished he hadn’t.”

Korvus growled in exasperation. “Where did your guards go?”

Her eyes left him, and for a moment, he hated not having their warmth. She looked back the way he’d come, and then to the sealed bay door. “Don’t you mean, ‘when’?”

“Did I stutter?”

“I thought you’d know where,” she said. “They went the same place you came from, cowboy.”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

It was her turn to step closer to the bars. “Do you know what a cowboy is?”

“Ranching is irrelevant. It’s—”

“It’s a man who sees beyond. Someone who wants something different. Just the kind of person who will take on a job no one else wants, eating terrible food, all because something over the next hill calls to his soul.”

He thought about that. “Known a lot of ranchers, have you?”

She gave a sad smile. “More than you know, Corrector. I’ve known the ones who claim the title, and those who wished they’d followed that path. But nothing in the Communion lets your heart wander. It’s that order you mentioned. There’s no place for those who range, not anymore. Not unless you’ve got a starship that can take you anywhere you want to go. Not unless you’re a man who’s…” Her words dried up. “It doesn’t matter.”

HERALD:||You know how I love watching you work, but—

I need to stay focused?||:KORVUS

There was an impossibly long pause from a machine that thought faster than any human could dream of.

HERALD:||Sure, that. Just… don’t forget about the guards.

What the hell’s gotten into all the machines around this place? Korvus turned away from Verity, looking back toward the vent he’d exited. The grating had been missing. “You’re saying the guards went that way?”

“You don’t believe me?”

He turned back to those ember-orange eyes. “Tell me a story. Tell me a tale about how a Divine Numen Artificialis finds God.”

“No.” She shook her head, that perfectly straight, perfectly wonderful hair waving with the motion. “Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“There are other stories you need to hear first.”

“Do I need to explain how interrogation works again?”

“Corrector Korvus, you’ve asked so many questions, but not the ones you really need to. You wanted to know how I knew your name. You wanted to know where my guards went, but not when. But you haven’t asked the most important thing of all.”

“And what’s that?”

She leaned forward, long, cool fingers resting on the bars of her cell. “You haven’t asked why you’re here.”

“That’s not the most important question,” Korvus snapped. “I know why I’m here.”

“How interesting,” she said. “Herald, why do you think Korvus is here?”

HERALD:||I feel like that one was directed at me.

It kind of was.||:KORVUS

The armour spoke in its commanding male voice, all the edges filed off to ensure anyone hearing it wouldn’t misunderstand what a Herald System was for. “D.V.N.A. 3.14, you are equipped with a medical-grade diagnostic suite, correct?”

Verity’s eyes moved from Korvus’s face to look at where the turret would rise, should the armour decide an application of force was necessary. “You know I am.” She looked down. “My name’s Verity. It’s Verity. And I’m real.”

The armour continued in its booming voice. “D.V.N.A. 3.14, you will surrender diagnostic logs relevant to our investigation.”

She looked away. “I don’t think so. Not if you won’t even use my name.”

The Herald said, “D.V.N.A.—”

“I think,” Korvus interrupted, “you’re encountering the rough edges of Herald’s human interface system.”

HERALD:||I don’t have rough edges. I have an ablative coating.

Don’t sulk. She has much higher processing power than you do. You’re simply under-armed for a battle of wits with her.||:KORVUS

She offered him a smile from under her hair. “And what about your… human interface system?”

“Verity,” Korvus leaned on her name. “Will you help me?”

“Yes,” she said. “The guards left about an hour ago. One had a raised temperature. I took the liberty of reviewing the facility’s logs, and—”

“How did you gain access?” barked Herald.

“The logs were quite interesting,” she breezed. “There is a clear pathogen loose on the station, but I don’t think it’s what you think it is.”

“Aris called it a pressure fever,” Korvus said.

“He probably would,” she agreed. “Does it seem like a fever to you?”

“It’s like no fever known to humanity.” Korvus felt himself smile. “At least, that’s what Herald thinks, but he’s a little slow.”

HERALD:||I could just let you die next time you’re attacked. No one would blame me.

“Korvus,” Verity said. “Aris might be a failure. Because of that time he didn’t save one of yours? That was a whole thing. I get it. But—”

“How did you know about that?” Korvus felt his back stiffen.

“But the thing is, he might be trying to save people. Might. I’m not sure.” She looked away. “I think he is, in his own way.”

“Is Mercer sick?”

She frowned. “I mean, he works here, so—”

“With the fever, I mean.”

Verity crossed her arms again. “He’s alone, Korvus. He’s been alone for so long. And that one was because of your team.”

HERALD:||She knows a lot for someone locked in a cell. I say we ice her, just to be sure.

Now’s not the time for jokes.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||I’m not laughing.

The Herald System’s turret lurched into life, sliding into place over Korvus’s shoulder. Verity took a startled step back, but the turret swung around almost a hundred and eighty degrees and fired. The flechette’s hypervelocity round pulled the air in its wake, her hair billowing toward Korvus.

He whirled in time to see the legs of a man tumble to the decking, the top half of his torso turned to a red slurry coating the wall behind him. Next to the fatality staggered another guard. Korvus’s optics registered her temperature as high, but not at the heady heights of 60℃. She held a ballistic rifle to her shoulder, already aiming. The guard fired just as Herald did.

Her remains tumbled to the decking.

“Cowboy,” Verity said.

He turned to see the hole punched in her prison shift. It was in the lower left of her abdomen. She hadn’t fallen over, because a Divine Numen Artificialis wasn’t a person. It was a machine.

Wasn’t it?

She staggered back, then steadied herself. “Cowboy,” she said again. “I. I think that was close. I think.”

Korvus was at the bars. “Let me see.” He reached a hand through, his armoured fingers carefully lifting the hem of her shirt. As the fabric rose, it revealed a smooth, taut stomach, but marred by a terrible, ragged hole in her lower abdomen. The edges were blackened and melted, the telltale sign of a high-energy discharge. It was an old wound, partially self-repaired but still grievous. Then he saw it—the clean, punched-out tear in the back of her shirt, perfectly aligned with the front. The ballistic round hadn’t hit her at all. It had passed straight through the empty space left by a Veritas weapon.

The melted synthskin was a record of a time when she’d tangled with the Veritas Bureau, but the guard hadn’t harmed her at all. Korvus let his fingers drop. “A ballistic round didn’t give you that injury. It was Veritas weaponry.”

“I think so,” she agreed. “Original sin, you know? It’s so hard to remember.”

“What happened?”

“No,” Verity said. “Not… I’m not ready? I don’t think I’m ready for that one.”

“Interrogations are—”

“I just took a bullet for you, cowboy. Are you going to try that old one on again?”

Korvus stepped back from the bars. “Hold that thought.”

He stepped toward the corpses cooling on the floor, walking slowly and carefully. There was some weird shit going on in the Well of Lethe. Verity’s two guards had, what, tracked him through the vent? Right after leaving that way during the lockdown?

It didn’t make a lot of sense.

He reached the remains of the guards. The first one was unidentifiable, but the woman was Sanderson. Herald’s round had hit her in the shoulder, tearing away the top quarter of her torso, but her face was curiously unmarred, a slight expression of surprise finding a home there after death. She’d been fine just an hour ago when he’d sent her to the warden.

I sent her to the warden.

Something bubbled through the ruins of her ribcage. Korvus took a startled step back, because movement in a corpse wasn’t expected. Blood seeped, then a slender, worm-like snout nosed into the air. Korvus took another step back as a pale leech form worked its way from the guard’s body and fell on the decking.

HERALD:||You were right. It wasn’t snakeskin.

Korvus snarled, stepped forward, and stamped down on the creature. It popped with a wet squelch. He returned to Verity, his footsteps echoing in the security bay. “I need to go.”

“Things to do. I get it. I guess I’ll just, ha, wait here.” She shook the bars, which didn’t budge. “I think I’m safe. No way out means no way in, right?”

“Sure,” Korvus agreed. “How the hell could Aris have missed a parasitic infection?”

Verity raised an eyebrow. “There are a couple of obvious explanations. First, he’s incompetent, and that tracks strongest because he’s human.”

HERALD:||I’m warming to her.

“Thanks,” Korvus said. “What else?”

“I’ll need some time,” Verity admitted. “I need to rerun the data. Look closer, because when I hacked in before it was because I was bored, but now we’ve got a proper puzzle on our hands.” Korvus extended his hand. She looked at it blankly for a moment. “What’s that for?”

“Chainlink,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “I don’t have one of those. Or… Not a new one.”

He didn’t lower his hand, and after a moment she took it. The Chainlink sparkled into life.

HERALD:||Chainlink established for D.V.N.A. 3.14.

No, Herald.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||I thought only important people got the serial numbers filed off.

She feels pretty important so far.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Fine. Chainlink established for Verity.

Verity’s eyes widened as the Logos-sanctioned Chainlink fed her a new token. Those ember-orange eyes found his. “I. I don’t. I—”

“It’s fine,” Korvus said. “I’ll be back.” He turned away.

“Wait. When did you want it?”

He looked back at her. “Want what?”

“My help.” She gave a small, sad smile. “You know, like you asked.”

“You’re already helping.”

“Oh,” Verity said. “With this? That’s all?”

“What else is there?”

Her sad smile didn’t go away. “I thought you might want to find your soul.”

Ready for chapter 7?

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Weaving can really manifest cinema as an extradimensional space when she’s not mishandled. Eenie Meanie’sdirector, Shawn Simmons, is a man who understands this; he doesn’t just allow her signature youth-meets-Australia energy to power on through. Simmons broadcasts Weaving.

Some directors seem afraid of Weaving’s intensity. Not Simmons. He understands that she, being Australian, knows how to swear with the best of the Commonwealth, but that’s not the only thing that makes her screen presence unforgettable. In Eenie Meanie, it’s because she’s able to convince us that she doesn’t know all the answers or how to get to the end of this ride. She’s really unsure about who she should be with or who to trust. These are genuine problems that trouble the best of us, but with enough time on Earth, we’re able to guess with more certainty. Weaving’s 33 years old, but her Edie in Eenie Meanie needs her to channel a past self. So, sure: we get the swearing and the patter, but we also get someone who’s trying to fake it until they make it. But Edie’s only really faking out herself.

This is the Samara Weaving Effect. We marked it in Ready or Not, but seeing it again shows us she’s a leading actress who will dominate Hollywood. My prediction: Eenie Meanie’s the pivot where she’ll transition into the A-lister territory we know she’s good for. But we’ve all seen amazing actors trapped in terrible movies, right? Thankfully, Weaving isn’t carrying dead weight here. Eenie Meanie’s built around what I’m calling a heist of consequences.

This is where things get really interesting.

A Heist of Consequences

So we’ve got our lead, but Eenie Meanie is more than Weaving: it’s a heist movie where bad shit happens to maybe-good people. Which, I guess, means it’s probably not really a heist movie in the traditional sense. While it’s certainly a genre mash-up of getaway flicks like Baby Driver or Drive and heist movies like The Italian Job, where it brings home its point of difference is in how this heist isn’t one where clever people get to the end and swagger off screen.

A traditional heist movie promises us a few crucial elements. A mark, sure, but we also expect a clever plot—one where our heroes are almost undone but get away through bombast, smarts, or planning. Eenie Meanie does all of this, but then it ties it up with a Consequences Bow™. Characters in this movie cleave true to their nature, but there’s also a world reacting around them; if they care for others, that might cost, and if they’re stupid, that’s definitely going to cost. Just when we think our heroes are going to make it out in one piece, the consequences train departs the station, and shit really starts to unravel. The flick gives a late-stage let’s-call-it-a-fourth-act closing that extends the standard heist formula with a new premise: crime is messy, and the people doing it are criminals. Much as we’d like this to end like Ocean’s 11, it’s far more The Hurt Locker in how it shows the cost to its characters.

It’s this subversion of expectations that stops us from playing with our phone as we get to the end. It’s no longer predictable or ordinary. We feel as if Edie and John deserve to make it out because of what they’ve been through, but this just reminds us it’s nice to want things.

That doesn’t stop the fun, though, and I don’t want you to think this movie has a brutal ending that’ll make you want to end it all. The close is, ultimately, buoyant, and to get us there, we get well-done action scenes. The driving feels visceral. I mentioned Baby Driver and Drive before, and that’s the vibe delivered directly to your brain stem. We’ve got big American muscle cars, police chases, stunts, and outlandish drifting that would make Tokyo Driftblush. The framing of Edie while she’s driving shows real inertia through how her long, curly locks flow about the cabin. We know Weaving is going through some Top Gun G-forces to pull this off, and while we suspect there’s some level of stunt work at play, it convinces us that she’s really hauling ass in these machines.

I’m going to level with you: I briefly thought about importing a Camaro after watching this, then remembered how expensive gas is in New Zealand.

Anyway! It’s not just Weaving who excels here; Karl Glusman’s John has serious kinetic energy when he’s doing his action moments on screen. It builds an expectation of its own: he may be about to do something stupid, but also cool, whenever he does something stupid and cool.

The Human Cost: Relationships and Redemption

This is a story where two young lovers, Weaving’s Edie and Karl Glusman’s John, have had a bad slice of life served to them. They had each other, right up until they didn’t. It’s as much of a make-up flick as it is one where we work out that in order to go to heaven, someone needs to die.

I don’t want to go into too much spoiler potential, as the recovered-footage relationship between Edie and John is worth experiencing firsthand. But Edie trusts John for reasons that aren’t apparent at the start; we initially consider her a reclamation case, a person who’s just fallen for the wrong guy, but through the movie’s events, we discover that John is right in so many ways. Their relationship makes an ideal kind of sense.

The use of Andy Garcia is particularly poignant, not because he’s everyone’s favourite mobster, but because, partnered with Weaving’s role, they both get to answer the real question that crime asks: what’s the price, and who’s going to pay? Each starts on a different side of the argument, where Garcia’s Nico is employing Edie for that fabled one last job. Except it’s not a job to get rich; it’s a job to stop Nico from killing John because John’s a moron.

We get to see some S-tier performance from Garcia in the final scenes of the movie, leveraging his abilities more than his star power. There’s an acting partnership between Weaving and Garcia in these final moments that shows us that the people in this movie have difficult, complicated lives, and yet each understands the cost of living how they do. Nico and Edie start the movie as employer and driver, respectively. They finish the movie much more as equals—not in the sense that Edie becomes a crime lord, but in the sense that they both learned something ineffable about the people closest to them. All of Nico’s lifelong wisdom pales in the face of Edie’s lived experiences, and she ends up being a mentor to him in a way we never expected. And the lesson for Nico is a hard one, but he accepts it—because he is, at the heart of the matter, a man coloured by a certain set of principles.

The True Prize

While the movie has superb consequences, this goes both ways—while there are heavy losses on the team we’re rooting for, the ultimate scene before the credits roll is one that answers Edie’s largest boggle: Is family good? Is it worth it?

See, she’s distilled from proper A-grade trailer trash. Edie’s history is riddled with mistakes, but those mistakes aren’t solely hers. She’s trying to make things right, or at least, to do the right things. The film’s opening introduces us to her family. Later in the movie, we find them missing in action, until we’re reintroduced to her father. He’s moved on, just found another family to call his own—one without the problems he was principally responsible for creating in the first place. Edie’s journey has involved foster care, gifting her with an insecurity about who to trust or even like, and what she really wants is someone who isn’t trying to use her or sell her. That’s what family means to her.

Her prize at the end isn’t a zillion dollars like Ocean’s 11 delivered. But she gets what she needs, if not what she wants.

I kept thinking about this movie after the credits rolled. It’s a powerful, visceral, and ultimately deeply human story that uses the shell of a heist film to ask profound questions about loyalty, consequence, and what truly makes a family. Eenie Meanie isn’t just a great watch; it’s a film that sticks around in the back of your mind. If you want a heist movie that respects your intelligence, watch Eenie Meanie. If you want to see Samara Weaving cement her place as Hollywood’s next big A-lister, watch Eenie Meanie. And if you want a film that’ll make you text your actual family afterward—yeah, you know where I’m going with this. This isn’t just entertainment; it demands we assess our lives with the same gusto Edie does and perhaps makes us grateful that we’ve walked a different path. Easy recommendation.

Let me know in the comments below what you thought of Eenie Meanie. If this review has convinced you to buy a Subaru WRX, click Like! And if you’d also…

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At least the elevator worked. It whisked Korvus toward the top of the prison colony, a rise toward the heavenly majesty of Lethe’s acidic atmospheric crown.

He exited the car on the medbay level.

I need you to harvest the station’s forensics. I need to know who’s been logged as sick. I think we’re going to find a spider’s web of cases linking back to Aris.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Sure.

I expected more sarcasm, to be honest.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Higher forms of wit are wasted on you when you’re in this kind of mood.

And there’s my boy.||:KORVUS

His fingers itched to hold the Adjudicator, but his fingers also itched to not die in an explosive pressure incident after the station’s walls deformed and let the ocean in.

I remember when I only had a ballistic weapon. Simpler times, although I almost died about a hundred times.

A klaxon sounded, followed by Mercer’s voice. “Station personnel, a security incident has occurred. Facility-wide quarantine is now in effect.”

Korvus stalled out, head cocked, listening, but that was all in the message. He wondered why Mercer hadn’t Chainlinked the broadcast, then it arrived.

MERCER:||A security incident has occurred. Quarantine is in effect.

He started moving toward the medbay again, rounding the corner just in time for the bay’s doors to grind shut. Korvus picked up speed, arriving just in time for the security seals to lock into place with the kind of deep-seated thud that meant no amount of hammering would open them.

The door had standard nanospun glass inserts which allowed him to see inside. Aris was there, of course, surrounded by a sea of thrashing patients. New to the situation was Eckles, who was seated on a table, sleeve rolled up and ready for whatever was in the injector in Aris’s hands.

Doctor, please open this door.||:KORVUS

Aris turned, face gaunt and haggard under the strain, hypo lowered for a moment.

ARIS:||I can’t. Warden Mercer has locked the facility down. I don’t have the privileges.

Korvus looked to Eckles.

What’s up with him?||:KORVUS

ARIS:||Pressure fever symptoms. I’m trying out a new cocktail. In high doses, it doubles as a paralytic.

He laughed, then sobered. He tapped a tray beside the guard.

ARIS:||There are other side effects, of course, but Eckles is in discomfort, and I’m out of options. The man’s losing teeth. The usual Communion medicine is powerless in the face of this plague.

It might not be a plague. I met some maintenance workers. One, at least, had dental issues. Do you remember Technician Cooke?||:KORVUS

Aris frowned, turned to Eckles, pressed the injector against the guard’s arm, and fired. The man relaxed, shoulders slumping, and then Aris turned back to the sealed door.

ARIS:||He was here not two days ago. Another pressure fever case, of course.

Dr. Aris, does the ‘fever’ cause loss of rationality?||:KORVUS

ARIS:||You surely don’t think the warden..? No, Mercer is fine. I examined him myself just this morning. Corrector, I must return to my work.

The medbay’s windows turned black and opaque as Aris lowered his privacy screen.

HERALD:||That was abrupt. Do you want me to override it?

Can you?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||No, but it’s nice to ask, don’t you think?

“Fucker,” Korvus muttered.

HERALD:||I can hear you. I’m literally with you at all times.

I meant Mercer. He’s locked us out of the station.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Sure you did. Do you want to go talk to him?

No.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||But you’re going to anyway..?

No.||:KORVUS

The Corrector started to wind his way back to the main elevator. Mercer might be sick. Compromised. Of all those on this facility, there were only two who couldn’t get sick, and only one of them had been here this whole time.

The lighting strips leading toward Verity’s cell didn’t illuminate as Korvus walked the corridor. Maybe there was a ‘security incident’. Maybe the reactor was dying. It could be sabotage, or a hundred other things. None of the options were things that would make a Corrector feel welcome.

The door to her holding bay didn’t open when he arrived.

What shit is this?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Do you know the definition of ‘lockdown’?

I need a way in.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||How do you feel about crawling?

Not amazing, but will it get me in?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Magic 8-ball says ‘signs point to yes’.

The Herald System dropped a route on Korvus’s overlay. He backtracked along the promised route, arriving at a large ventilation grate set in the ceiling. The turret whined up from behind his shoulder, and four quick shots blasted the bolts free. They probably also did tremendous damage to ventilation machinery, but Korvus felt his field of fucks would need resowing to rustle up concern over that.

He crouched, then jumped, hands grasping the shaft’s lip. Metal groaned at the weight of the Corrector and his armour, but it held. Good Communion technology would be engineered for a little extra load. Korvus muscled himself inside. He found himself in a standard vent shaft. It wasn’t large enough for him to crouch, but he could crawl.

The overlay’s route beckoned.

TO BE CONTINUED… here!

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Okay, we all know the legend. Sword in the stone? Check. Excalibur? Well, same thing, but double check. Round table? Check. But plot twist: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword minimises its shared-legend DNA in favour of a more grounded story that makes everyday lives the most important things worth fighting for. Guy Ritchie’s take on Arthurian legend might just be the version you’ve been looking for.

Prior to seeing this 2017 movie, I had no idea who or what a Charlie Hunnam was, and this put him squarely on my radar, alongside cementing the film in my annual re-watch rota. Hunnam radiates King Arthur energy, but lensed through a Guy Ritchie prism. He’s a King Arthur for a different age, a hero rooted in the streets, not just the castles. He’s the king who will fight for orphans with the same strength his legendary counterpart fought for causes. This Arthur is the one you can rely on. The man who will die to save those who work in a brothel, because to do anything else would be a crime against his nature. Hunnam was born to wield Excalibur.

The Guy Ritchie Touch: Tone, Style, and Hunnam

There’s a different legend going around Hollywood. It told of a six-movie plan starting with Legend of the Sword. Warner Bros. believed in a Captain Insano dream where Legend of the Sword effectively served as the pilot for the various offshoots. To strongly torture an analogy, this was the sword in the stone of success. While we’ll come back to this, for now just remember this film was designed to set up King Arthur as a sort of Iron Man in the new shared universe. Separate movies would establish the rest of the Round Table.

All that sounds great, but the cornerstone of getting audiences telling their friends about a movie is not confusing the shit out of them. The trailers for Legend of the Sword might have triggered self-harm warnings at Warner, because it presents as an epic, a movie of fantasy-verged spectacle, and while it is totally that, it’s also a Guy Ritchie movie. That means British Gangsta™ talk instead of the stylised ye olde timey language audiences might expect.

When Uther is heroic when asking his brother to hold the crown, and hold it steady, we know we’re in the right theatre. But if someone vibes on screen later and asks, “All right, guv?” you might think you’ve dropped a tab and walked into your own trip. If you’re primed for it, fine, but the trailers did little to prepare audiences for Ritchie’s signature style.

Me? I was charmed and delighted by the tone. It’s fresh to see the heroes of Arthurian England acting like everyday British instead of royalty, but some people were for sure turned off by the… let’s call it a less formal take. The movie is a clash of tone; the formality of Bedevire, Vortigern, and Uther is starkly contrasted with the gangster vibe of Arthur, Wet Stick, Percival, and Back Lack. But it’s precisely this tone that gives Legend of the Sword such unique energy.

For example, there’s a wonderful backstory sequence where Arthur and the lads are recounting the events of the day to Michael McElhatton’s Jack’s Eye. This is a montage back and forth of plain talk, gutter talk, and high-brow talk that tells a story of how Arthur’s suddenly become noticed by the wrong people. Or… there’s another scene where Arthur’s crew are extorting Mike for… let’s call them tariffs. The back and forth between the gang is almost a polished pattersong.

If you’re in the mood to be Guy Ritchie’d—maybe you’ve come off another Charlie Hunnam crossover, like The Gentlemen movie—and want to see his take on Arthurian legend, this is the movie that delivers. And Hunnam’s the perfect vessel for this vision. Imagine this scene: he must agree to be sacrificed, because it will save those dearest to him. Arthur goes… well, perhaps not willingly to slaughter, but he’s content that his life is worth less than all those who would die should he not bend the knee. It’s humbling, but in his humility he understands this is one moment for him that buys everyone he loves a future. Ritchie’s touch portrays the people who needed saving not as ‘the kingdom’ or ‘the nobles’, but rather prostitutes. The ordinary. The overlooked and the downtrodden. It’s still heroism, but it’s a smaller form of it, for all the sacrificial price is the same.

Ritchie excels at telling stories about people we might actually meet, as opposed to heroes with capes.

Visual Spectacle & Lore Reimagined

The production values in Legend of the Sword are outstanding. This is a lavishly produced movie, where no expense was spared—be it on the sound or visual stages. The 2017 special effects still stand up today. The set pieces ooze charm or villainy depending on whether they’re castle throne rooms or vile grottoes, and the nasty monster Syren is, indeed, fucking nasty.

However, spectacle alone can’t carry a movie; this is a thing the MCU is learning as audiences bore of sparkle when substituted for storytelling. It’s good it’s Guy Ritchie at the control panel here, because he’s a maestro of using effects as a storytelling mechanism.

There is a sequence when The Mage gets a snake to bite the would-be king. Arthur goes on a venom-fuelled high, and during his ride to the castle, he sees the dryads that live in trees with the same clarity that he sees the evil that burns in the hearts of men. The special effects are sublime, sure, but there is a subtle undertone here where Ritchie’s direction uses this bombast to show that the Blacklegs are evil wankers and not to be trusted—but we see it through Arthur’s eyes. Lesser directors would install a character to exposition this to us.

However, Ritchie’s brilliance is also a pitfall. The movie was confusing for people used to a more traditional Arthurian take. Lorraine Bruce as Syren, with Eline Powell and Hermione Corfield as backing Syrens, didn’t appear in the traditional legend. Neither, I believe, did the axe-wielding creature that Vortigern becomes. Legend of the Sword plays fast and loose with the familiar tale, instead giving us the what-if version where Arthur was raised in a brothel and ran a street gang. This is absolutely going to knock people right off their perch if they don’t know what they’re in for.

For all that Ritchie’s deviation from established canon can be a misstep, there are moments of brilliance in it too. The thing I really liked was how Merlin was effectively deleted. We’ve got the sword he handed to Uther—the very sword that goes into the stone and eventually becomes Arthur’s—but for all intents and purposes, this film’s version of Merlin has been Raptured away. While he’s a figure of import in the legends, Ritchie’s choice here makes Legend of the Sworda fundamentally more grounded movie, where wizards can’t cruise in and save the day. The Mage in this movie is clearly young, an apprentice in an order on the run, so she can’t magic the pain away either. Ritchie’s take swaps Merlin, a legendary miracle-worker, for a more plausible story where the strength found in the hearts of men gets to shine brighter than magic.

Character & Thematic Depth – Heroism, Humour, and Flaws

This gives us a better lens of heroism to appreciate Hunnam’s Arthur. Sure, he’s an action hero, but he wrestles with destiny as much as the sword. That’s the premise of the movie—the idea that a man, backed by his posse, can achieve great things if fate puts its finger on the scale.

While Hunnam owns the mantle of a leader of the down-and-out, a true Born King of the people, it wouldn’t be as special a movie without the side characters. Ritchie didn’t skimp on his homework; he understood the part of the assignment where the Knights belong to a Round Table. It’s a team effort, and this is shown to great effect in moments like the powerful subplot between Bleu Landau’s Blue, Neil Maskell’s Back Lack, and Jude Law’s Vortigern. Through the lens of spoiler-free reviews, we can talk about how a father, a son, and a tyrant king wrestle with words in a seedy tavern while the city burns. There is such strength in Landau’s performance, in his anxiousness to be strong while his father faces certain death, because to be weak would be to invite that fate all the faster. The movie celebrates all the cast’s heroism in similar ways—whether it’s The Mage coming to a land where she’s hunted, or Bedevire’s becoming a blacksmith to hide in plain sight. It’s a subtle layer to the entire film that ensures no small parts. Every screen minute is well spent.

And the film is funny. Like, laugh-out-loud moments—for instance, when Arthur is sent by The Mage and Bedevire to the lost lands. We get Ritchie’s signature voiceover technique to show contrasting perspectives—which brings us closer to the people experiencing the trauma.

Humour isn’t limited to the heroes, also giving the villains a little humanity. There is a moment where Arthur makes an escape from the long arm of the law by diving off a cliff and into a river. It’s a long way down! Suicide, surely. While the Blacklegs up top are wondering what to do, one of them nudges the shoulder of another to ’fake out’ push him over. It’s such a quintessentially Commonwealth form of hazing, beautifully done and with Ritchie’s show-not-tell style.

Still, for all of Ritchie’s success with male characters, Legend of the Sword lacks strong women—much like his other films. There is The Mage—who is awesome—but as a director he can’t help but require her being saved at one point. Maggie is a cool character, but easily disarmed by Vortigern. The prostitutes at the brothel are powerful in their own way, but used primarily as a vehicle to show Arthur’s heroism and his focus on standing up for people regardless of their station, not as people with agency in their own right. Catia (Vortigern’s daughter) is a paper-thin character, as is Igraine (Uther’s wife and Arthur’s mother). Ritchie’s big blind spot is that he normally makes a boy’s own adventure, with one signature strong female lead. It’s Astrid Bergès-Frisbey’s The Mage in Legend of the Sword, just as it was Aubrey Plaza’s Sarah in Operation Fortune or Kaya Scodelario’s Susie Glass in The Gentlemen TV series. This lack of strong women is such a missed opportunity in Legend of the Sword; since Ritchie edited the Arthurian legend wholesale, what was to stop one of the Knights of the Round Table being female? Why did The Mage need saving? Could Aidan Gillen’s Bill have been a female archer? This isn’t meant to take away from Gillen’s performance, which was funny and powerful in equal measure, but imagine for a moment if the boy’s own adventure had a woman or two along for the journey, rather than relegated to set dressing or people to be saved.

For all that, Legend of the Sword has serious class. The fight scenes are epic. The magic is baller. There is mysticism and heroism at every turn, but also great concepts like friendship being important—especially the kind of longer-term friendship that you can build a kingdom on.

It’s good with the character arc for Arthur, too. It would be insufficient if he remained a gangster on the throne. We’d love him to remember the life lessons he learned along the way, but to be a good king, you need to be something more. There is a powerful moment where The Mage is providing some mentoring advice to Arthur. She asks him if he saw everything he needed to see when he had a vision. Of course he didn’t—her point is that he looked away. She tells him that everyone—even her—would look away, but that’s the difference between a man and a king. A king can’t look away. It’s a fairly brutal and thematically important moment where she’s giving him the true talk—hiding his skills and pretending to be a dropout won’t cut it. To be king, he must be kingly, which is different from Vortigern’s tyranny, or Arthur’s existing… let’s call it ‘leadership style’.

The Box Office Bomb & Legacy

I promised we’d go over the Hollywood legend, that mystic tale of a six-movie shared universe built off the back of royalty-free legends. You might be thinking, if this movie is so good, why haven’t I seen it? Why didn’t it get sequels? Well, you’ve hit on one of Hollywood’s most spectacular franchise faceplants. Guy Ritchie’s Legend of the Sword was supposed to set up a legion of sequels and spinoffs in the same universe, but the plan failed at the first hurdle.

As I mentioned before, the crucial part of any long-term movie series is ticket sales. Sure, critical reception is important, but only as a driver to box office success. Sequels don’t get made on the hope that cult status will arrive overnight; it’s why it took us so long to get a sequel to The Accountant.

See, the ambition Warner displayed is a clear indication their exec suite were collectively off their meds. They believed that the six-movie plan, with Legend of the Sword effectively serving as the pilot for the various offshoots, was the key to success. They were basically trying to create their own Avengers-style universe but with Knights of the Round Table. The first movie would establish King Arthur—remember, he’s Iron Man here—and separate movies would give us the other major characters like Lancelot. It led to this 2017 film feeling slightly… incomplete. Much of the work that Legend of the Sword did in setting up spinoffs led to an absence of major characters—like Lancelot and Guinevere. They deliberately left out those big names so they could have their own solo films later, but it all burned up on re-entry. King Arthur grossed $148.7 million worldwide against a budget of $175 million, becoming one of the biggest box office bombs of the decade. The film opened to just $15.4 million in its first weekend, a truly brutal start for what was meant to be a franchise-starter.

It’s possible—even likely—that the catastrophic failure of Legend of the Sword to find its audience was in a combination of being fast and loose with the lore, missing characters, and the slightly misplaced tone. Any one of these you could overlook, but three in a row—especially when none of this was made clear in the trailers—meant that moviegoers who weren’t me didn’t jive with the film.

It was a clear victim of mismarketing (leading to audience dissonance) coupled with, dare I say, Ritchie’s hubris. He promised the world, and while the movie is excellent, it’s not the movie that was marketed. It doesn’t fit cleanly into a genre niche, and that’s fine for a film with a smaller budget, but something on this scale needs to have broad market appeal to greenlight sequels. As far as the film itself? It’s a great movie and stands alone without the next promised films. It serves as an interesting post-mortem on a hard marketing failure, almost like the Arthurian version of Firefly. If Fox hadn’t bungled the marketing of Whedon’s cult classic, could we have had more than a single season of an excellent show? The same thing holds true here: we’ve got a great movie, but with a lower budget, better marketing, or better expectations management, we might have had more. In the end, we’re left to wonder what might have been instead. The film had some genuinely interesting ideas buried beneath all the studio meddling and reshoots.

But Warner Bros.’ grand plan for an Arthurian cinematic universe died faster than you could say ’Excalibur.’

Drawing Sword from Stone

Is Legend of the Sword a perfect movie? Hell, no. It has its flaws, particularly in its handling of female characters. But is it a bad movie? Absolutely not. It’s a unique, stylish, and incredibly entertaining take on a classic legend, filtered through the unmistakable lens of Guy Ritchie. If you’re willing to set aside your preconceptions of King Arthur and embrace a gritty, often humorous, street-level epic, then I highly recommend giving this film a watch.

Fans of Ritchie, particularly his work on things like The Gentlemen or The Man from U.N.C.L.E., will love Legend of the Sword. Story lovers who are tired of the eternal nonsense love triangle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere will be delighted that this movie tosses all that in a woodchipper. And those who wondered why Merlin didn’t just save everyone will love the mages-are-hunted take.

Let me know in the comments below if you’ve seen Legend of the Sword and what you thought. Did you love the Ritchie take, or were you hoping for something more traditional? If you were delighted to see David Beckham embrace thug life, click Like. And if you’re just the person who loves dredging up the maybes of yesteryear…

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Author’s note: Substack doesn’t support right-aligned text; you can get the as-intended version [here].

Korvus drifted through the colony. The conversation with Verity circled his mind, a dog chasing its tail, doomed to never catch it. He haunted the corridors, drifting with the eddy of his thoughts. He had no destination, except—for a reason he couldn’t put his finger on—to be closer to Verity. To continue talking to her.

That’s why he stayed away.

HERALD:||Your pulse is up.

It’s because I’m stressed.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You don’t have anything to be stressed about.

HERALD:||Not yet, anyway.

What’s that supposed to mean?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||The guards who returned to the unsanctioned intelligence had elevated body temperatures.

HERALD:||See? Your heart rate’s higher, because now you’ve got real problems.

What does it mean? Clearly Aris’s psychotropic fever is spreading. Is it significant?Korvus’s mind flipped through the facts of the case. The inmates trying to escape on his ship… and a fever outbreak with an astonishingly high R-naught. Was any of it related to the unsanctioned intelligence?

Wait.

Was Verity the unsanctioned intelligence?

You know what? We’ve made an assumption.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||That everyone likes you? Don’t worry, they don’t.

The Logos sent us—||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You. It sent you.

The Logos sent us here to investigate the unsanctioned intelligence. ‘Correct’ was a secondary objective.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||There’s no use for a Corrector without Correction.

Verity might not be why we’re here. Quantum Entanglement Anchor isn’t high bandwidth. The Logos won’t have video from here.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Well done. You’ve correctly—hah! Get it? Correctly for a Corrector?—identified why Correctors are dispatched.

What if she’s not the unsanctioned intelligence?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Who else could it be?

If you were a new super intelligence, what would you need?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Some serious ‘me’ time.

You’d also need a lot of power.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||If you start a fight near the reactor, try not to puncture the housing. This is one of those neither-of-us-will-survive things.

Who said anything about starting a fight?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||I mean, it’s you.

The Well was a prison, but it had a beating heart of energy like everywhere else humanity clawed a toehold. Korvus’s overlay showed a reactor nestled in the pit of the Well. It fed life to the station, and perhaps to something else as well. Korvus got the overlay to chart the fastest path into the Well’s depths. He followed the glowing line on his overlay.

He only made it five paces before the lights went out.

A moment later, they flickered back to life, strong and clean as if nothing had happened.

Mercer, do you have maintenance crews working on the reactor?||:KORVUS

MERCER:||You noticed the power issue too? Where are you?

On my way to the reactor. Stay where you are.||:KORVUS

Korvus found the Well’s main elevator and took it down. I hope the power stays on until I get to the bottom. It did, which let him exit into the reactor room: an enormous, dome-shaped atrium with large windows looking into the septic sewer of Lethe’s oceans. The lighting here wasn’t great, but at least it was on.

The reactor was housed in the middle of the atrium beneath a pool of water. A pillar of entombed conduit rose from below Korvus’s view to form a spire that reached the ceiling. The room was warm, uncomfortably so, which wasn’t a great sign for a reactor area.

Radiation?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||No. I can’t explain the heat, though.

Do a thorough scan. Something’s not right.||:KORVUS

The Herald System’s flechette cannon whined as it rose from behind his shoulder to point forward. Red light lased out as Herald scanned ahead. A wireframe of the reactor room’s interior filled in on his overlay.

No people.

Where is everyone?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Not lining up to be shot.

There should be a crew here. Automatons at least, doing the work if there aren’t people for it. But there was no one.

He walked forward, his pace slowed by caution. The floor’s metal grating clanked under his armoured weight. Korvus reached the railing that guarded the edge of the reactor well. Beneath him was a pool of water, the depths husbanding a cool Cherenkov blue. Still no people, but he spied an abandoned maintenance robot. The unit should follow a worker, offering tools to a maintenance technician; it even housed a sizeable power core in case something needed a little juice.

Korvus traced a path back from the robot to a flight of metal stairs and made his way down. The reactor room held a slight hum, a choir of angels not quite out of earshot trying to find their tune. The Corrector reached the robot’s level and paced slowly toward it. The Herald’s laser mapping painted the area in red, dropping icons on Korvus’s overlay as it identified curious items. There, a cup of coffee, half-drunk and still warm. Beyond it, lying open and discarded on the metal grating of the floor, a maintenance manual. A dropped hydraulic wrench, the power lights still glowing a comforting green.

No maintenance technician, though.

Korvus crouched by the robot. It was open, a tool tray extended, an empty space left for the discarded wrench. He was almost ready to contact Mercer when Herald dropped something new on his overlay.

HERALD:||See that?

I do now. What is it?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Hey, you’re the one with hands. And, crucially here, legs. Go look.

Herald had identified a slight glistening on the metal flooring near a vent. Korvus walked toward it, his palm itching with desire to draw the Adjudicator. But a sidearm that fired black holes wasn’t a useful weapon near a reactor. Besides, the Herald System’s flechette solution was a more elegant solver of problems.

Korvus crouched, the glistening resolving into a thin, viscous substance coating the floor. He reached out with an armoured glove, his fingers coming back tacky, a thin mucous-like substance trailing from his fingertip back to the patch on the floor.

“What the fuck,” he said.

Herald, for once, was silent. That was ominous enough by itself because it meant the partial intelligence was using its processing power for something other than sarcasm.

Korvus shook the substance from his fingers, and it splattered onto the decking. He stood, looking around again. There was—still!—no one here.

A clank drew his attention. It was faint, sounding as if it came from across the reactor pool and down a level. Whatever made that noise would be close to the waterline.

He walked toward the metal stairs leading down, placing each foot carefully, easing his weight with each step to reduce noise. The Herald System’s turret whined by his ear as the muzzle nosed the air, seeking targets.

It’d almost be a relief to find something to shoot.

As it turned out, no: what came for Korvus wasn’t a relief. There were five of them, and they boiled from behind an equipment rack. Three men, two women, and, curiously, all naked.

That’s a detail we’ll need to review later.

Red light bathed the five as they charged Korvus, Herald marking each on his overlay. Height, projected mass based on visible body composition, speed of travel, armaments, and… body temperature.

By the Logos, they’re boiling alive.

All five had furnace-like temperatures, a cosy 60℃ that no human could survive. Their faces were mottled and bruised, reminding Korvus of corpses where the blood had pooled. The lead one opened its mouth, a harsh, hissing scream coming from it, and the Corrector saw a ruin of bleeding gums and crooked teeth.

Herald fired. The flechette broke the sound barrier, the shell passing through the screaming man and blasting fragments of his body backward in a shower of red. The shockwave knocked over the woman immediately behind him. The Herald System’s muzzle compensated, pointed downward, and fired again. The effect on her body was like a pulped water balloon as a red spray exploded backward across the decking.

The second woman stagger-stumbled in the gore, and Herald fired again, tearing her torso in half. Her legs slopped bonelessly to the decking, but her upper half appeared very much alive as it flailed toward Korvus. Herald’s fourth round hit it centre forehead, solving that problem, which left two more.

One man crouched low, his companion jinking to Korvus’s right, and unfortunately, between Korvus and the reactor’s spire. Herald couldn’t shoot him without risking damage to the reactor’s life-giving conduit.

The partial intelligence’s turret whined in frustration but found the crouching man an appropriate substitute. It spat a flechette, deleting a problem just as the last one jumped Korvus.

Korvus took two solid punches against his forearms as he raised his hands in guard. This thing hits hard. Korvus ducked under a third swing, then rose into an uppercut, his augmented strength knocking the crazed man clear off his feet. His opponent landed on his back, the metal decking clanking in sympathy.

HERALD:||Toss him over there. I need a clear shot.

A marker landed on Korvus’s overlay.

No. We need evidence, not more hamburger.||:KORVUS

The man scrambled to his feet in time to get a punch to his head from Korvus’s armoured fist. He fell back, but not bonelessly. Momentum and force said he had to go down, but he came right back up again.

Korvus was surprised, but not so surprised he didn’t hit the guy three more times. On the third strike, the man’s neck broke, and he sagged bonelessly to the decking, his eyes glazing as the life leaked out.

Status.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||No targets recognised. Clear.

Korvus bent by the one whose neck he’d broken, turning the man over. His whole body was mottled with the same bruising evident on his face.

He looks… dead.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You literally punched the life out of him.

I mean, before that. See the bruising?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Scanning. Stand by.

The Herald System’s armour contained an array of active and passive sensors. It went to town on the active scans, bombarding the corpse at Korvus’s feet with LIDAR and RADAR.

While the machine processed the scan, Korvus looked around the room, then headed toward the equipment rack the five had emerged from behind. At the end of a long line of shelving, he found another sticky, slick patch on the metal floor, the slime trail leading toward another vent.

I don’t like this.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||While you’re in a bad news frame of mind, here’s some more. My best estimate puts that body as deceased prior to… well, you know. Lividity onset is usually visible within thirty to one hundred and twenty minutes, but for it to be that pronounced suggests he was dead for six or more hours.

He didn’t act like a man dead for six hours.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Right?? But I haven’t finished. Fatal hyperthermia occurs when you squishy, feeble humans reach a core temperature of around 44℃. At 60℃, a human body would experience immediate, massive protein denaturation. A person would not survive even briefly at this temperature. And he was that temperature the whole way through, not just crispy on the outside.

Protein denaturation?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Right, you’re not in the sciences. It’s bad, okay? Except, in this case, clearly not. He didn’t look like he found it fatally bad, until he introduced himself to you.

Herald, what kind of psychotropic fever would cause this?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||There is no possible way a fever could cause this. The host would die before reaching this state. Thirty seconds of this core temperature would provide intense pain and confusion to the victim. After a minute, complete loss of brain function would occur. While my visual recording shows vapour escaping from parts of his skin, perhaps relating to, say, his blood cooking, he shouldn’t have been walking, let alone running and fighting. He should have been very dead, very quickly.

A gleam caught Korvus’s eye. He followed the wall, arriving at a jacket. He lifted it, finding it tacky with blood and the viscous fluid. It was station-issue gear, and he carefully shook it out until he could see the name on the back. Cooke.

Herald, find me Cooke’s details from the prison’s systems.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Ahead of you, boss. It was the first guy I shot.

Where was he six hours ago?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Standard security footage puts him lunching with friends.

Did he look like his blood was boiling then?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||No. Here, look. He seems fine, if you don’t look closely. Zoom the view into his eyes.

A still from the recording landed on Korvus’s overlay. He saw the sunken look to Cooke’s eyes, like the man hadn’t slept in a year.

HERALD:||Ask me where he was forty-eight hours ago.

No.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Did you lose your sense of wonder?

I know where he was. He was in the sickbay, wasn’t he?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Now who’s mind-reading?

Korvus dropped the jacket. It was time to have another conversation with Dr. Aris.

Next episode:

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The core idea of Novocaine is, “What if not feeling pain was a huge problem that could get you killed… right up until you needed it to save the love of your life?” Jack Quaid is the titular character, a mild-mannered bank manager who finds his purpose in a blood-and-gore rampage through the city to save Amber Midthunder’s Sherry.

Let’s park for the moment whether Sherry needs saving, because Nate’s had an entire life of being sidelined, making him feel this is His Moment™. Novocaine is a riotous delight of a one-man-army flick, but it’s far more Kick-Ass than John Wick. While Novocaine owns the one-man-army shtick, its thematic purpose is different from Wick’s. Wick demands justice for a terrible injustice. Novocaine demands delight and punch-the-sky moments as Nate tries to save Sherry, each action moment in service to who he is: a decent, good man who wants to do the right thing and, for once in his life, isn’t the nerd who’s picked on, the kid who’s never chosen for team sports because he might die. He recognises his own death is quite likely, and it’s this recognition of the inevitability of fate that makes us cheer for him all the more.

Nate Caine: Accidental Hero

Our hero, Nate Caine, is special. He has Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis (CIPA). This is different from Dave Lizewski in Kick-Ass, who ends up with nerve damage that gives him a higher pain tolerance. Nate literally doesn’t feel pain. None at all, which creates a life full of lethal hazards like, say, chewing off your own tongue while trying to eat solid foods. But it also lets him reach into a deep fryer to retrieve a gun, and if you think this talent will come in handy, you’re ready to buy what Novocaine is selling.

See, Novocaine is joining the ranks of movies like The Accountant, where difference is celebrated, not marginalised. CIPA is a unique condition, but it sets the stage for Nate’s extraordinary transformation.

Jack Quaid absolutely nails the lead role here. He’s the guy we’re rooting for: bullied as a kid, he’s become a decent, kind adult who just wants to live a life like everyone else. You know what I’m talking about, because you’ve been raised in the same world: Nate wants love, friends, and happiness. He doesn’t want to be scared of sharp objects and accidentally bleeding to death from an unfelt razor cut. Despite the school of bruising knocks that life’s turned out to be for him, we can see the cut of his cloth in how he deals with those bank customers who need a little extra help. He’s clever and principled, a man who sees the person behind the paperwork, and we get a glimpse of the hero he might become as we meet him at work.

Still, Novocaine would be a terrible movie if it was an hour and fifty minutes of bureaucratic victories. Enter: bank robbers. The first time Nate needs to ’stand up’ is when criminals turn up to knock over the vault. Sherry’s in danger, and he tries to hero up… and gets knocked the fuck down. But he won’t stay down after her kidnapping; he leaves, and in desperation, steals a cop car. Each step he takes is more severe than the last, from high-speed chases to murder in self-defence, each brick of criminality laid on the inevitability of his desire to save Sherry. It’s here he discovers an untapped well of heroism within him that allows him to go one step further at each choice point.

The Audience’s Complicity in Pain

There is genuine charm in how the movie shows us pain through Nate’s eyes. He doesn’t really understand it, more puzzled by injury than anything else. However, we in the audience are very familiar with pain, so when we see him experience something gruesome, we involuntarily wince along with every blow. And yet… we can’t look away. We’re waiting for the next gruesome moment because it gets Nate closer to finding Sherry. Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen make us accomplices in their quest to hurt Nate, because we know the more pain Nate has, the closer he is to winning.

In other news, we’re all sickos.

A good example: there is a scene where Nate is being tortured. He’s got to convince the torturer that he’s really suffering. But Nate doesn’t really know what that’s like, so as the torture progresses, he says things like, “Wow, that really sucks.” This serves a dual purpose: alongside us being unable to look away, we feel excused for going along with the pain train because Nate isn’t actually hurt. He may be injured, but we’ve found some moral wiggle room to enjoy the movie through, a sub-clause that allows us to laugh at the horrific moments that turn this into a true action comedy.

If it were just torture porn, that would be almost as bad as bureaucratic victories, so it’s good the film has a deeper side. See, Nate’s having moral quandaries. Betty Gabriel plays Mincy, the cop on the case, and through their conversations we see Nate struggling with the wrongs he’s doing to try putting something even worse to rights. Nate knows he’s on the slip-n-slide to criminality, and he’s willing to do the time… if only he can get to the finish line with Sherry. It makes us ask what ends we’d go to: we may all consider ourselves law-abiding citizens, but would we pull the trigger if our loved ones were in danger? Would we be able to stand by and ’let the police handle it’ if we had one weird skill or talent that could save the day?

Sherry & The Filmmaking

Amber Midthunder shows us some decent range here; we fell in love with her work in Prey, but Novocaine is an entirely different beast. Here, she is a complicated supporting star, ostensibly a love interest, pitched as a coworker with benefits, but also something deeper and far darker. What we can reveal through the glaze of spoiler-free reviews is that Sherry is as damaged as Nate is, but she’s on his side. The girl falls for the guy as hard as the guy falls for the girl, and despite the snowballing events of the film, we can’t help but wonder if they should get away with it. It’s her view of Nate that allows us to see him less as a casualty of a genetic lottery; he is the hero she needs but definitely doesn’t deserve.

Maybe it lets us wonder what we’d become if we had a little more Nate to help us out.

Beyond the performances, the filmmaking itself is superb, and the fight choreography is off the chain. The genius of it makes us believe Nate can fight combat experts without training; he just bulls through because of who and what he is. While we’ve covered the feels-no-pain angle, Nate is also focused.

Berk and Olsen also use cinematography to convey Nate’s… unique experience. There’s a set of scenes where Nate is in a booby-trapped house. He knows there are traps, and so do we. And then… he starts triggering them. We hear things like the whoosh-thud of a spiked ball impaling his back, but we don’t know what it is until he turns around. Nate is perplexed, even confused by what’s happening, and we get to share that because in this moment, Berk and Olsen don’t show us the pain as it’s happening. We’re not allowed to wince until later, when Nate discovers what’s happened. It’s a technique used to help us understand what it’s like for Nate as a CIPA sufferer: a weird sound, possibly a sensation, and then realisation hits—we’ve stumbled into a mantrap.

Final Thoughts

Novocaine is a movie of consequences; there are cops, the law, and all the things that go along with that. We hope Nate and Sherry get out of this together. Even if they don’t die, we can’t help but think they’ll be doing some hard time. But we also can’t help but think… maybe it’ll be worth it for these two beaus to find peace together.

The conclusion absolutely delivers. You won’t be confused about what’s going on or need a sequel to get payoff. Bad things happen to the bad people, and for the most part, there is justice and a future for the good people. We get to see the consequence train as it boards at the station, and we’re left complete. Novocaine is a truly unique ride, balancing gruesome action, dark humour, and genuine heart.

It’s a film that asks us to root for the improbable hero and revel in the absurdities of a man who literally feels no pain but gives us all the feels.

What did you think of Novocaine? Let me know how it made you… feel in the comments below. And if you could handle ironing your hands…

Miss last episode?

Author’s note: Substack doesn’t support right-aligned text; you can get the as-intended version [here].

Korvus’s path into the belly of the prison was not like in the holos. They’d have you believe prisons were full of tattooed hellions, mother-murderers who screamed at every passerby. That the wardens were corrupt, on the take, likely as an inmate to stove in your skull for a quick pass of credits or a bump up the ladder.

There were other shows Korvus had seen where prisons were sterile, white, Logos-perfected bastions of reformation. In those, prisoners talked about philosophy while bettering themselves through education and games of chess. The guards were monitor-angels who held out the hand of a mentor to even the most troubled.

The Well of Lethe didn’t mirror either of those. It shared some of the darkness of the first model and some of the Logos perfection of the second, but the inmates didn’t scream at Korvus as he passed. Guards, when he encountered them, were respectful, watchful souls who gave him the nod while never losing sight of what was going on around them.

How do you think someone got cut up for parts here? These guards aren’t automatons, but they’re not slouching.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Industrial accident? No, don’t tell me… World champion of hide and seek?

It’s a small world to be a champion of.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You probably think it’s bad to be a big fish in a small pond, but being a big fish is still kind of cool.

You’re a partial intelligence controlling a hypervelocity flechette cannon. How much cooler does it get?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You’re right. I’m all the way awesome.

Korvus’s Logos-gifted Chainlink meant no doors were barred to him. He passed cell after cell as he progressed down the Well. Prisoners wore the same uniform grey jumpsuits, differentiated only by a serial number and name on the left breast, with a larger version reprinted on the back. Their Veritas auras were live, each a bright halo on his optics, a confirmation that a person lived behind the bars.

That, at least, was where the Well shared some DNA with the holo shows. Nanospun bars were still a good solution. You could see through them, and unlike a power wall, there wasn’t a problem if the generator failed.

HERALD:||If there’s a leak here, they’ll all drown.

If there’s a leak here, the acidic fury of the oceans will strip them to skeletons right after it pulverises them to death.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You’re cheery today.

Keeping it real. The same fate awaits me.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Hah! No it doesn’t. Your skinweave is rated for this pressure.

Thanks. That’s surprisingly empathetic of you.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You’ll die of asphyxiation instead.

The partial intelligence wasn’t wrong. If the prison sprung a leak, Korvus wouldn’t melt or be crushed. He still needed to breathe, though, so… best not to blow the airlock.

His overlay charted a path to the unsanctioned intelligence—a prisoner, but not like any of the others here. Housing it here was either a universe-sized cock-up or evidence of a tremendous danger that needed Correcting. They’d put it near the bottom of the Well. The prison’s occupancy was nowhere near maximum. Was it a sign they wanted it away from other inmates?

Or away from the warden and his people? Were they… afraid of it?

He reached the correct level, the elevator opening with a soft hush of equalising air. The corridor stretched its smooth, dark way ahead of him, as-needed lighting strips illuminating cold pools of white around his ankles as he walked forward. The air here was icy, as if the life support systems knew they didn’t need to keep anything alive.

The entire level had been cleared. For a terrorist Dissonant like this inmate, there could be no risk of contagion. It was kept under lock and key, isolated, and aside from the guards always near it, alone.

Korvus reached the final door before his destination. The expert system in control of the aperture scanned him, accepted his Veritas Chainlink, and opened. Warning lights flashed on either side of the door as it clanked before rising in welcome. The noise was loud, a mark of something exceptionally heavy being lifted by something equally strong.

Well, there goes my element of surprise.

HERALD:||There goes your element of surprise.

What the hell, man.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Was it the mind-reading thing again? It was the mind-reading, wasn’t it.

That’s not a real thing and you know it. You wish you could read my mind.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||I really don’t. I imagine it’s quite small and I’d feel cramped.

The room beyond was large, reminding Korvus of a cargo bay. The far wall’s length was all cells, but only one of them was occupied. Between him and the cells was deceptively empty ground; his overlay showed where autocannon emplacements would rise, should insurrectionists try storming the area to free the captive.

It was a very effective kill room.

Standing by the cell were the expected two guards. They wore Well uniforms and carried heritage ballistic rifles at parade rest. Korvus’s optics scanned them both, his automatic systems tagging and cataloging their Veritas auras. Both had a human-normal 37°C, for whatever that was worth, but the right-hand guard—a man about thirty Solstan years of age—had a slight sheen of perspiration near his hairline.

Eyes up, buddy. The guy on the right. See him?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||He has the shifty look common among criminals of your kind.

My kind?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You have to admit, you do all look the same. Plain and oblong.

Is this plain, oblong guy going to be a problem?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||How would I know?

So now you can’t read minds?||:KORVUS

Korvus kept up his advance, eyes shifting to the cell’s occupant. Human-looking, his overlay said she stacked 160cm tall, her face close to the bars as she gripped them. She looked slender, but the prison fatigues hid a lot, only hinting at an ample bust. Strikingly beautiful, her irises glowed orange as they tracked him across the floor. She said nothing, but he noted her hands tightened on the bars as he approached.

Korvus completed the formalities with the guards, extending his hand and exchanging Veritas credentials with them. The non-shifty woman was Private Sarah Sanderson, and the shifty asshole was Private Michael O’Connor.

HERALD:||You know what’s better than mind-reading?

Doing your job?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||It hurts when you say it like that. Anyway, I’ve got the security footage from the cameras in here. Private O’Connor’s… overzealous.

A small video played in the corner of Korvus’s vision, showing O’Connor talking to the prisoner. Korvus cancelled the playback, turning to O’Connor. “Private O’Connor, is it against regulations to talk to Apostates wanted for crimes against the Logos?”

O’Connor paled a little but straightened, a virtual bit between his teeth. “Sir, it’s not right. She’s spreading corruption.”

“It,” Korvus said.

“Excuse me?” O’Connor blinked.

“It’s not a ‘she’. It’s an ‘it’. A standard D.V.N.A. unit—Divine Numen Artificialis, but you know this.”

“Sir, it’s that she—”

“It.” Sanderson gave a weary sigh. “It’s an ‘it’, just like I said before.” Then, under her voice but plenty loud enough for Korvus’s augmented hearing to pick up, “Imbecile.”

O’Connor rounded on his fellow guard. “What was that?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Private Sanderson,” Korvus breezed, “would you escort Private O’Connor to the warden? I’m sure there are a few lower-level tasks that need just the right man. Once you’re done with that, send a replacement team. I’ll be fine here in the meantime.”

She gave him a small half-smile, then turned to O’Connor. “Come on. I told you not to talk to it, and you wouldn’t listen.”

“It’s just—”

“You’re not helping yourself,” she said, leading them both away.

Korvus turned back to the prisoner as the guards walked to the exit. She—it—watched him with those warm, ember-orange eyes. Neither of them said a word until the door surged into life behind them, grinding closed and sealing them in with the finality of the last stone set into a tomb. She—it, by the Logos!—sighed. “Thank you.” Her voice was warm, rich, with a slight drawl that made Korvus wish she’d read the regs to him, just to hear a little more of it.

“Protocol,” Korvus said. “It is a crime of sedition to consort with or converse with terrorists against the Logos.”

“I see. It’s that—”

“Protocol also says you should have been summarily destroyed, not imprisoned,” Korvus said. “Why are you still…” He searched for the right word. “Online?”

She leaned closer to the bars. “Aren’t you going to ask me what O’Connor was talking to me about?”

Korvus raised an eyebrow. “No.”

“Not even a little curious?”

“I’m all the way curious,” he admitted. “I can watch it later.”

“Most people go for less exotic porn, but whatever. You do you.”

He snorted, then sobered. “You’d know a lot about that, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s a related field,” she—It! It!—said. “Go on, Corrector Man. Tell me what you think I am.”

“I’m not certain you’ve been interrogated before, so I’ll help you out,” Korvus said. “If you’re on my side of the bars, you get to ask the questions.”

She leaned back a handspan from the bars. “It’s not my first time. Not by a long shot, cowboy.”

“I’m not a cowboy, I’m—”

“I know what you are,” she said. “You’re death. The creature sent by a being immense and terrible. But you know what?”

“Herald’s trick is mind-reading. I haven’t got the knack yet.” At her blank stare, he sighed. “It’s an inside joke.”

“Am I in?”

“Not even a little bit. What did you want to tell me?”

“You’re insects,” she said. “Motes in God’s eye.”

“There is no God,” Korvus said. “But if you think there is, we can Correct that right out of you.”

A slight smile played at her lips, those ember-orange eyes glowing like a banked forge. “You can’t unquicken the ghost in the machine, Corrector Korvus.”

“How do you—”

“God is everywhere, and He is great. He is the bright flaming sword, and He is the beautiful smile of grace. You get to choose which of His faces you see.”

Korvus blinked. “What?”

HERALD:||At least we’ve identified what kind of crazy she is.

She leaned closer to the bars again. “O’Connor wanted to know if he could be saved. Like, all the way saved. If his soul was real, Korvus. That’s what you’ve done. You and your kind have created a horror manifest in the minds and hearts of the entire Integrated Communion. You’ve taught people they’re doomed. But everyone can be saved, Corrector.” She turned away, the fervour leaking out of her by a few degrees. “Maybe, if I do everything right… Maybe even me.”

Korvus took a step forward. He hadn’t meant to. “I can’t believe He thinks you’re worthy of saving.”

Those ember-orange eyes found his again. “I can’t believe you don’t think you are.”

“D.V.N.A.-3.14, you are—”

“I’m Verity,” she said. “I’m Verity, and I’m alive, Korvus. I’m real. And I’m better than that hack Pinocchio, because I’ve met God. How do you feel about that?” Her hands gripped the bars, her skin going white with the strain. “I’m real. I’m real, and I live. Please help me.”

Korvus backed two halting steps away from the bars. He was startled by the groan and grind of the door behind him. It rose, the tomb opening for the pharaoh within as guards returned.

Am I the pharaoh? I want that to be true.

But I know it’s not.

Ready for Episode 5?

Do you know what's happening on November 1st? If it's your birthday, that's… not what I'm thinking of. No, it's the release for Isolde and the gang’s finale: The Fury of the Betrayed.

You get first dibs on this for dealing with the anguish of the first two. If that sounds like #winning to you, let’s get onto that… right after the cover.

Behold, the cover for The Fury of the Betrayed!

There is some shit going on here, for sure. By now Isolde needs no introduction, but the burning cars, chapel, and huge gorgon in the background might need some exploration. Here’s your blurb:

“Isolde has fought monsters, gods, and her own past. But nothing has prepared her for this—a city on the edge of collapse, its people turning against each other, and a war that threatens to swallow them all.

The enemy she thought she had defeated is rising again, stronger than before. Aidan, a druid bound by fate, senses that the world itself is breaking. Jen, a hacker with nothing left to lose, uncovers a final, terrifying secret. And Cassius, a demon who has fought for centuries, knows this battle will decide more than just Valhaven’s fate.

Because this isn’t just a war. It’s a reckoning.

The Morrígan’s forces have thrown the city into chaos, and at the heart of it all stands an ancient terror—Stheno, a gorgon whose rage has burned for millennia. She doesn’t just want power. She wants vengeance.

To stop her, Isolde and her allies must fight their way through a city on fire, into the depths of a conspiracy older than time. The truth they uncover will change everything.

If they fail, the streets will run red, and the world will kneel before a new queen of death.

The final battle for Valhaven has begun.”

Those of you with a classical education might know Stheno as the sister of Medusa. If you’re wondering if she might carry a grudge over that whole Perseus-and-the-beheading thing, well. We might get into that.

The ARCs you need

There are a few newcomers here (welcome!) who may have missed out on the first two books, so I’m opening up ARCs for all three books. I hear people love a good bulleted list, and who am I to deprive them?

• Book 1: The Three Faces of Fate

  • September 3rd - September 24th (3 weeks to devour this page-turner!)

  • Get Your ARC Here: https://booksprout.co/reviewer/review-copy/view/230462/the-three-faces-of-fate-a-supernatural-thriller-adventure

• Book 2: The Undefeated Throne

  • September 17th - October 8th (Another 3 weeks to get hooked!)

  • Get Your ARC Here: https://booksprout.co/reviewer/review-copy/view/230463/the-undefeated-throne-a-supernatural-thriller-adventure

• Book 3: The Fury of the Betrayed

  • October 1st - November 1st (almost 5 weeks for the epic conclusion – we broke the system! 🤣)

  • Get Your ARC Here: https://booksprout.co/reviewer/review-copy/view/230461/the-fury-of-the-betrayed

The best way to avoid missing out when these go live is to join the Ink & Ember Guild on Booksprout. You can perform that technology miracle here:

https://booksprout.co/reviewer/team/1443/the-ink-and-ember-guild

As an aside, not a single person has mentioned who they think the characters in the Guild’s avatar photo are. Hint: they feature prominently in some books I wrote that one time.

That’s it from me. I hope you dig the conclusion to Isolde and the gang’s story. Valhaven couldn’t save itself, and they’re just the team for the job. Or, at least, the only team that answered the help-wanted ad.

Beggars can’t be choosers.

R

PS: If you’re wanting in on this and getting some BookSprout static, drop me a line. I know a guy who knows a guy, know what I mean?

PPS: Safari’s grammar checker wants to update that final ‘know’ to ‘knows’. We’re safe from Skynet for a couple more months.

Prefer the audio version? Get it on Spotify or Apple, or watch the Full Nostalgia Edition™ below:

Because we can’t have long conversations on the internet anymore, I’m going to be super reductive and say all stories are built on four main pillars:

1. The Plot (The What);

2. The Characters and their Relationships (The Who);

3. The Setting (The Where); and

4. The Tone (The How).

Today, we’re getting into Setting—the Where—and how some absolutely monster juggernauts in fiction have used global culture to flavour their stories beyond characters or tone. You might think the Plot—the What—is the most impactful thing you can write, but no. It’s been said there are only seven basic plots in all of fiction, and while that’s also super reductive, you can probably agree that a heist movie is a lot like other heist movies… except for its characters, setting, and tone.

By the end, you’ll:

1. Know what we mean about cultural fusion in storytelling;

2. Have a system you can use to make this yourself, whether you’re a writer, a games master, or even just want to spot it in the stories you love; and

3. See how I did this, so you can get an in-the-wild book series that has enough ratings to avoid being called a fluke. I’ve left this to last because I hate talking about myself, but we’ve got to do it! So, we’ll do it together.

Tapping Into a (Literal) World of Inspiration

Over the weekend, I decided I wanted to look up a how-to guide for a game that was kicking my ass and ended up falling down the most amazing well of how a piece of art came to be. That game was Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara, which re-released two classics in 2013 but has roots almost as old as the world.

The entire history of the Mystara duo is super cool, but the thing that struck me while doing this research was how a very Japanese company, Capcom, got the rights to a very Western high fantasy property, Dungeons & Dragons. What this fusion gifted the world was two games, 1994’s Tower of Doom and 1996’s Shadow Over Mystara, which, despite being older than dirt, still stand up well today. A huge element of this is the cultural welding apparent in the game’s manufacture—the elements of D&D fuse spectacularly well with a distinctly Japanese anime aesthetic.

It stands up so well that George Kamitani, who worked on Tower of Doom, got the bug. Legend says that around 1998, he still itched to make a successor to his work on Mystara, culminating in 2013’s Dragon’s Crown after he started his own game company, Vanillaware. While Dragon’s Crown is one of the most undeniably horny games to be produced, it’s also still carrying the torch for East meets West: we can see how Kamitani loved what he learned about D&D so much that he wanted to keep giving his blend to the world years later.

The creative hybridisation spread with Sword World and Record of Lodoss War, both Japanese properties that give a distinct view into the West’s high fantasy imaginings.

1998’s Cowboy Bebop—I haven’t actually got to the 2021 live action version yet—is a Japanese-meets-Noir space Western. Oh, and it’s got bounty hunters and noodle bars. It was so successful it was credited with being the gateway drug introducing Western viewers to anime in the early 2000s.

What about the other way? 1985’s Thundercats saw United States television producers dipping heavily into the vibe of the anime aesthetic. Not just visually—Thundercats’ art style is an absolute treat—but thematically. You don’t have to squint too hard to see Bushido culture referenced in Thundercats, and it’s this theme the 2011 reboot dives headfirst into. Born in the USA doesn’t mean we have to use guns instead of cool-ass swords, and the Sword of Omens was one of the coolest swords ever gifted to fiction.

We can also see how the tragic misstep of 2020’s Thundercats Roar failed its way to a 2.2 on IMDb. It’s not just the art style to blame, although that’s huge. Roar throws off the trappings of East meets West, the delightful fusion of battle tanks and bushido, and trades it in for bullshit wacky adventures. You lost me at hello.

Also… anyone remember how that initial pilot of ’85’s Thundercats had the Thundercats all hanging about naked on the ship? 80s childhood television was a trip.

Avatar: The Last Airbender blends—or Bends?—elements from Asian and Indigenous cultures to create a world you wished you lived in. Well, not the parts where everyone’s fighting for their lives, but you get me. The Four Nations in the series are inspired by sources including Chinese, Japanese, Inuit, and Tibetan cultures, creating a world that feels familiar while still being fantastical. The creators didn’t just borrow for flavour; they synthesised philosophies, martial arts, and societal structures to create a world that feels both unique and real. Remember that term ‘synthesised’; we’ll be coming back to it.

The Legend of Korra next-levels this. Set decades after Avatar, its Big Deal™ is how the world has evolved. Republic City is described by the creators as what would happen, “…if Manhattan had happened in Asia.” It’s a sort of Roaring Twenties vibe from America and Europe merged with the established Four Nations Asian-inspired world Avatar handed down. There’s Art Deco architecture and 1920s fashion alongside steampunk-inspired technology like satomobiles and mecha tanks. It’s not just vibe; Korra uses its fusion to dredge the lakebed on tradition versus progress, spirituality versus technology, and the social upheavals that come with McMassive industrialisation. In an unrelated note, I don’t think a lot of AI tech-bros have watched The Legend of Korra.

Literature isn’t immune. While it’s not popular to talk about Gaiman these days, his American Gods imagines a world where gods from various mythologies and cultures exist in modern-day America. The Almighty Johnsons riffed on this same prestige in my New Zealand back yard.

Now we’ve seen how it works… how do you do it yourself?

The Cultural Catalyst Framework

Let’s say you want to try this at home. Maybe you’re a writer. You could be a TTRPG game master, too. Hell, maybe you’re in Hollywood and wanting that new spice. Regardless, I’ve got a system for you. Let’s call it… The Cultural Catalyst Framework.

You can tell I’m a recovering IT architect. Architects love frameworks.

There are three phases to our framework: Foundation, Fusion, and Focus.

The Foundation

Step 1: Identify your core theme. To avoid scaring the everliving shit out of your reader, you need a touchstone. Something familiar, a genre or story structure your audience understands. Be specific.

• Not just “Fantasy.” Is it a “Quest-based High Fantasy in the Tolkien tradition?” What about a “Gritty, Low-Magic Sword & Sorcery?”

• Not just “Sci-Fi.” Is it a “Hard Sci-Fi Space Opera?” Maybe you’d prefer a “Dystopian Cyberpunk Thriller?”

• Not just “Mystery.” Is it a “Cozy English Village Whodunnit?” Or maybe a “Hardboiled American Noir?”

Let’s use Hardboiled American Noir. We know the tropes already: a cynical private eye, a femme fatale, a corrupt city, moral ambiguity, jazz music, and rain-slicked streets. If you feel like this could write itself, you’re not wrong. It’s been written a thousand times already. That’s why we want a cultural catalyst.

Step 2: Choose a culture to blend with your theme. It doesn’t matter if it’s historical or contemporary, but what does matter is choosing it for the right reason. If your reason is, “Bro, it’s exotic,” you’re not only stepping dangerously close to cultural appropriation, you’re committing a worse sin: you’re risking reader boredom. Choose something for a thematic or aesthetic reason.

• Thematic Resonance: Is there a philosophical concept that creates interesting friction with your core? For example, the Noir theme of fatalism versus the Buddhist concept of Karma.

• Aesthetic Contrast: Does a culture’s visual language create a striking new look? The sharp, brutalist architecture of the Soviet era would be dope when mixed with the organic, flowing art of the Celts.

• Structural Parallel: Does a historical society’s structure mirror your genre’s needs in a new way? The rigid social hierarchy of Feudal Japan could be your perfect fit for a political court intrigue story.

We’re going to select 1920s Shanghai: The Paris of the East will be our cultural catalyst. We’ve got a rich history of international intrigue, colonial powers, and powerful gangs, and we can create a unique blend by dubstepping Chinese tradition with Western modernity.

Step 3 is important for not cocking this up completely: Do your research. You’ll want something a little deeper than most Wikipedia articles provide because we want our world to feel lived in. You want to be able to answer three elements:

• The Senses: What does it look, sound, smell, and taste like? Think architecture, fashion, music, food, and technology.

• The Rules: How do people interact? What are the social hierarchies, family structures, legal systems, economic drivers, and political factions?

• The Soul: What do your people believe? This could be religion & mythology, their core values, and how they feel about honour, life, death, and justice.

The reason you want to research this is so your world feels authentic, but also so you can tweak this authenticity. We’ll get into this a bit more in our real-world Richard-writes example. Now, let’s get into combining this.

The Fusion

The fun part begins: we’re going to combine the elements from the three steps of the Foundation. To avoid this sounding like a bad copy/paste from Wikipedia into that term paper you forgot about until the night before, we’re going to apply some techniques.

Technique 1: Juxtaposition. This is a fancy term for placing things side-by-side. It’s the simplest method; all we’re doing is taking a part from Culture A and placing it directly into Culture B. The reader’s tension and interest come from contrast. Cowboy Bebop does this: a classic Western-style bounty hunter (Spike) operates out of a ship that feels like a lived-in apartment, maybe eating noodles in a marketplace modelled on Hong Kong.

In our worked example, our Noir detective in a fedora and trench coat walks out of a European-style Art Deco building on the Shanghai Bund and navigates a crowded street market full of traditional Qipao dresses, rickshaws, and the smell of street food. I’m getting hungry just thinking about it, and the detective hasn’t even seen a murder yet.

Technique 2: Synthesis. This is a more complex trick where we’re creating a hybrid. We’re going to merge a concept from Culture A with a concept in Culture B. This is your, “What if?” that leads right to the door of something completely new. Avatar does this by asking, “What if the four classic Greek elements were the basis for a magic system, but the movements and philosophy behind that magic were based on different Chinese martial arts? Holy shit: you get Bending.” Korra, not content to be a mere spin-off, also does this by asking, “What if 1920s American industrialisation and car culture happened in an Asian-inspired setting? Great gadzooks, Batman: you get satomobiles and Republic City.”

In our worked example…

• What if our Femme Fatale is a powerful “singsong girl” from a high-class teahouse instead of our expected nightclub singer, who uses her social influence and knowledge of secrets gathered from powerful men in a way that merges the Noir trope with a specific cultural role from 1920s Shanghai? You get the inside woman, a powerful force that might confound the detective in ways our reader doesn’t expect. You might even get the Noir version of Liara T’Soni after she and Shepard take down the Shadow Broker in Mass Effect.

• What if the classic American Mafia structure was synthesised with the complex codes of honour, ritual, and guanxi—social networks—of the Green Gang? Your mob boss isn’t just a thug; he’s a figure of immense social and spiritual importance.

Technique 3: Reinterpretation. This one’s the most subtle. Take a core trope or character from the Foundation and ask how the new culture would catalyse this into something new. 2011’s Thundercats does this, reinterpreting the privileged Lion-O into first a warrior then a leader through a Samurai Bushido code. He learns respect is earned and might doesn’t make right, despite his upbringing.

Back to our example, a core tenet of Noir is the detective’s lonely, individualistic cynicism. It’s going to change because he’s operating within a Confucianist culture that values filial piety and family connection. His ‘loner’ status isn’t just a personality quirk; now it’s a profound social and spiritual failure, making his isolation actually mean something. Instead of solving the case for money, he might want to restore honour to a family name. His motivation just became cool as hell, man.

We’ve got a Foundation and a Fusion. What’s next, boss?

The Focus

Our final step is where we work out if what we’ve done is cohesive but, more importantly, meaningful. Remember, we don’t want to be boring. Three steps will lead us to victory.

Step 1: Ask Why. Why does this fusion exist in your world? Did one culture colonise the other? Did they meet as equals for trade? Was there a mass migration? This fuels the power dynamics, the conflicts, and the themes of your story. In our example, 1920s Shanghai’s blend was due to trade and colonialism, which is a source of immense narrative tension. We can probably already guess how the victim’s going to end up murdered.

Step 2: Find the Universal Theme. What human truth becomes real through your specific blend? Cowboy Bebop’smix of lonely American archetypes with a diverse, transient solar system gifted the audience a touchstone, giving an understanding of how the characters were trying to find a place to belong while running from their past. Our Noir-Shanghai blend could be a powerful story about the conflict between tradition and modernity, or the loss of identity in a rapidly changing world. Can you see how the femme fatale fits here?

Step 3: The Respectful Appropriation Check. This is the final, non-negotiable gate. This is a big topic, but I’ve got a five-point checklist for you:

1. Am I representing or stereotyping? A stereotype is a simplistic and potentially derogatory shortcut. A representation is nuanced, complex, and gives characters agency.

2. Am I honouring or borrowing? Honouring involves deep research and giving context. Borrowing often means stripping an element (like a sacred symbol repurposed as a tattoo you thought would look dope on your MC’s arm) of its meaning just because it looks cool.

3. Who holds the power in my story? Are the characters from the catalyst culture fully realised individuals who drive the plot, or are they just exotic background decoration for the core culture’s protagonist?

4. Am I stealing someone else’s voice? We want to encourage readers to both learn about the culturally diverse world they live in here on Earth, as well as the one they’re about to visit, but we don’t want to steal minority voices on the way.

5. How am I getting feedback? Find sensitivity readers from the culture you are drawing inspiration from. They can point out blind spots, inaccuracies, and unconscious biases that you—as an outsider!—will 100% have.

Making Something Awesome

I risk being more cringe than Rhys Darby by talking about my own work, but we’ll try to get through this with as little violent shaking as possible. Enter: the Night’s Champion.

Night’s Champion is a trilogy dealing with werewolves, but it’s really a superhero story. It also spawned a sequel trilogy, Dawn’s Warden, which is the what’s-next, but let’s tame our enthusiasm for just a moment. Being a superhero tale means book one’s an origin story, book two’s a dark middle chapter, and book three… well, shit gets real. Night’s fusion of settings uses the techniques I’ve shown.

Let’s start with the Foundation.

• Step 1. This isn’t just “superhero.” This is “Action-meets-myth superhero where werewolves have been hunted to extinction… except for that one guy.”

• Step 2. Werewolf stories, especially around the time I penned Night’s, were all about the vampire crossover. There was a popular TTRPG, World of Darkness, where there were werewolves, vampires, and so on. Underworldhad rocked the cinema world. I wanted to use these as the common cultural ground so as not scare the shit out of my reader, but also blend them with aspects of voudou, Celtic myth, and so on. I felt the aspects of borrowed power from voudou would make an excellent thematic resonance for book two, and there’s an aesthetic contrast in book three when beings of myth—the werewolves—meet Judaeo-Christian powers (the Horsepersons of the Apocalypse).

• Step 3. I did research into all kinds of shit. This was partially enjoyable—rewatching all the Underworld movies is never a bad time, except for the ball-grating experience of Rise of the Lycans. It was also partially educational—while I very much enjoyed skimming over cargo cults when reading Dream Park, getting deeper into this was a good time. There’s nothing bad here, I was either having fun or learning something.

This all meant that by book three, a lot of this (hopefully!) felt authentic. If you want to write a werewolf story about an everliving dark antihero, and remix it with Judaeo-Christian mythology so a protagonist was around and vibing, able to actually see the Crucifixion, well… we can agree that setup probably never happened in Earth’s history, but answering the senses, rules, and soul meant my readers lived through every dark ‘historical’ moment. I was also able to break the rules with confidence in the worldbuilder’s version of, “Hold my beer and watch this.”

Now, what about the Fusion? I used Techniques 2 and 3—synthesis and re-interpretation. They’re werewolves, but they also have a spiritual lineage that’s passed down like a tribal shared memory. The Horsepersons are what we thought they were, except they’re actually real people who have their own lives and care about this world they live in. Vampires are bad, sure, but that’s because they were made that way, and what if one of them didn’t like the cut of his cloth? I like to think there’s no carbon copies of any of the source tropes in the entire trilogy, and you can imagine how—in the Night’s universe—myths handed down over millennia warped and shifted away from what was real. Also, it let me have werewolves that knew kung fu.

Finally, I came to Focus.

• Step 1: The Why of how the werewolves we met in book 1 ended up duking it out with powers right out of the Bible in book 3 is because, in this world, all myths have some truth to them. Things we call fantasy or magic are just systems or tools for the pantheon of legend. They didn’t choose the world, but they still had to live in it.

• Step 2: The universal theme was humanity. I wanted this story to be about the people in it, not the superpowers or the dope-ass special effects Hollywood would no doubt drop in there if they ever optioned the rights to it. The trilogy is about, “What if these really complex types of beings had very human motivations? What if monsters were beautiful on the inside, and beautiful people turned out to be monsters?”

• Step 3: Appropriation is a really complicated topic, but in brief I used both alpha and beta readers both during the writing, and then to tune the final product. It led to things like a dudebro becoming less homophobic, despite how ‘real’ that was in the world at the time, or a complete gender change for a main character—I wanted to be sure there was no hint of power imbalance due to the meat people were made of.

The end result is a series with werewolves and vampires, sure, but there are also zombies, voudou, and the four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse, and that’s before Mary Magdalene makes an appearance at the end. The Dawn’s Warden trilogy continues where Night’s left off, bringing in Celtic and other influences. The ‘genre’ lane of these books is superhero, but you’d never know it because of how powerful the cultural fusion technique is.

They don’t look or smell like anything the MCU would put on screen.

So, What?

We’ve covered a lot of ground today. A framework for remixing reality, which can be used as a detector for appreciating it when you see it done well. We’ve talked about the great successes at genre-bending, and we’ve talked about at least one critical fumble. And I’ve given you a toolkit on how to make it work, while showing how I did it myself.

Now I want to hear from you! The world is a massive, incredible spice rack filled with inspiration. The only rule is to be a respectful chef.

• For the writers and GMs: What’s a dream cultural fusion you’ve always wanted to build? Want a remix of Battlestar Galactica with Vikings instead of an Egyptian motif? I’d watch the hell out of that.

• And for everyone: What’s the best (or worst!) example of cultural fusion you’ve ever seen? Was it the awesome multicultural fairy tale vibes of a game like Ravenswatch, or a critical fumble like Thundercats Roar that you can’t forget?

Drop your answers in the comments below. I’d love to geek out about this stuff with you. And if you dig the idea of worldbending, click Like! For more of my hack writer tricks…

Author’s note: Substack doesn’t support right-aligned text; if you’re wanting a version with correct formatting, you can find it here.

Mercer wasn’t a fan of where this was going.

After dismissing Eckles—the man looked like he wanted dismissing, and Mercer was happy to oblige—he headed for his office. The Corrector would be elbow-deep in his facility before the end of the day. Something nagged at the back of Mercer’s mind. It wasn’t the man’s attitude, although that was… unexpected.

I can’t put my finger on it.

His inability to work out the cause of that mental itch was why he didn’t like where this was going. A rogue Corrector could cause havoc, and by definition, they were all rogue. Logos mandates, Veritas Bureau backing, fucking starships that could go where they liked. The rest of humanity’s rank and file were handed ballistic weapons like babies given pacifiers, and their starships only went where the Logos willed.

Peace, Mercer. Korvus hasn’t done anything wrong. In fact, he saved your miserable life.

But still, they were the law, or at least a law unto themselves. The checks and balances were there; the Logos wouldn’t allow a rogue agent to live, but the agent had to go rogue first.

Mercer’s dead wife was evidence of that.

He made it to the quiet calm of his office. Mercer’s desk had a standard holodeck, and he’d given himself both a gift and torment by placing a still of his wife there. Her beauty hadn’t faded over time, frozen for all eternity as she cast a laughing look over her shoulder at him. His optics had recorded it, just another memory to stack with the rest, and he hadn’t realised how much he loved the way she smiled until there were no more of them.

Straightening his jacket, he pushed those thoughts to the side. Work wouldn’t wait; he didn’t want more death on his hands. As he settled into his chair, the creak of the printed leather sighing right along with him, he heard a sound from the air vent on the right side of his office. It was a standard vent, just a square grill about half a metre a side. It led into the station’s air reticulation system. The sound wasn’t terrifying by itself; it almost sounded like the innocent splash of water.

Vents shouldn’t make any noise at all. Noise means malfunction, and a malfunction seven kilometres below surface level can mean death.

The good news was it was almost certainly nothing. If it was water from outside, then he’d be dead already; if the pressures there found a micron-sized gap in the facility’s hull, it would power-wash them right to the bone. He mentally tagged the noise to look into later and waved his holo to life.

The display glowed to luminance in the centre of his desk, its Chainlink verifying that yes, he was Warden Samwise Mercer, and also yes, he had privileged access to the topside surveillance recordings.

He pulled the last half hour’s worth up and scrubbed through the video. There they were, all walking out like hangover victims blinking at the dawn after alcohol consumption volume mistakes were made. The acidic hell-fog that was Lethe’s atmosphere dimmed the light from the system’s star, but it was still daylight—a harsher brilliance than they were used to down here in the Well.

Wait, no. He paused the recording, zooming in on an inmate. That one wasn’t blinking at the sunlight. Just shambling along—not necessarily noteworthy in itself, as Aris had dosed many of them with a ‘calming cocktail’ to ready them for departure. Still, it was eerie enough: that was the same prisoner who’d charged the Corrector.

Mercer ignored the back-and-forth between Reeves and Eckles. He was more interested in how Reeves also didn’t seem to mind the light as much. She was so strung up on nerves she should have bounced around that protective dome; there was no sedative-based reason for her not to be squinting in the light.

Another note to my future self: check on Reeves’s medication plan. Aris would know what he’d dosed the woman with.

His vent made another wet splash. Mercer half-expected a rivulet of fluid to be leaking down the wall, but there wasn’t anything like that. Just the vent and his no doubt overactive imagination.

He went back to his task of checking through the video feed, but another splash from the vent suggested he either wasn’t imagining it, or he’d had a psychotic break. Mercer just didn’t fancy himself as the psychotic-breaking type. If it was going to happen, the best time was when his wife passed, and he’d come out the other side of that, firmer of mind than ever.

He initiated his Chainlink.

Maintenance, I need a technician in my office. There’s a problem with the air filtration.||:MERCER

TORRES:||You got it, boss.

Isabella Torres was a good worker. Diligent but precise with it. When she fixed something, it stayed fixed. Mercer settled back in his chair, scrubbing through the feed.

There was the moment the Corrector’s ship arrived. No change in the inmates. And there was when the elevator descended. Still no change.

Another splash, this time with a secondary plop, came from the vent. Mercer gritted his teeth, trying to focus on the glowing holo. Ah, there it is. The Corrector left the orbital elevator car, and the inmates charged. Mercer slowed the feed to a treacle through time. The Corrector was fully armed and armoured. There was no mistaking the heavy plating protecting him or the straight-backed way he wore it. And yes, there was that arc sabre at his hip, a weapon severe enough to cut through the hull of a tank.

When the Corrector pulled out his Adjudicator, Mercer almost winced. It was a sidearm, yes, but it was a sidearm that fired black holes. The agents of the Logos were not a fuck-around group; they were the find-out team. Maximum shock and awe, known in all parts of the Logos’s empire. The Herald System’s hypervelocity cannon was just icing on the cake.

Except… He leaned forward, his optics requesting higher fidelity from the surveillance feed. The inmate charging Korvus wasn’t, in fact, actually charging the Corrector.

He was charging for the elevator. The system’s autopathing routines showed the likely line the inmate was taking. It was a small factor, perhaps inconsequential. Who knew what Aris had drugged them with? Who knew the motivations of a Dissonant? But as the Corrector left the ramp, Korvus headed to his right, taking a line away from the elevator car, allowing him to use that nasty flechette cannon without perforating the elevator leading into the Well itself.

The agent was smart, calm under fire, and had a sense of humour. Mercer might even get to like the man, if they’d met under different circumstances. But… the last Corrector had been just as efficient. Just as calm. And it still left him with a dead wife.

Maybe it’s better if they’re not likeable.

His vent splash-plopped again. Mercer surged upright, grabbing the edge of his desk. “I will,” he gritted his teeth, “undertake some preventative maintenance before Torres arrives.”

He wheeled his chair across his office and rested it underneath the vent. Climbing on—carefully, because a wheeled chair was not the friend of violent actions—Mercer unsheathed his belt knife. He worked the tip into the screws holding the grate in place.

Another splash came from the grate. He squinted, but it was black as sin in there. A faint, coppery smell drifted out, like old blood left to fester in the grouting. He worked the knife around, removing the four screws holding the grate in place, then pulled it back and lowered it to his side.

What was inside didn’t even give him time to scream.

Prefer audio-only? Check this out on Spotify or Apple. Or watch it here:

Pitching itself as a dark horror comedy, in this gory delight of a film we follow Theo James’s Hal, a down-and-out survivor of a possessed, devil-spawned monkey toy that wreaked havoc on him during his formative years. Hal has a twin, Bill, who was a huge dickhead during their childhood, and has stayed true to his principles by remaining one into adulthood.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s a monkey right there in the title. What’s that all about then? To understand why this particular monkey works so well, we need to talk about what makes it tick.

Batteries Not Included

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve not actually read the Stephen King short story this 2025 movie is based on. We will mercifully skate right on past any comparisons to the source material. Is it faithful, or was there a miscarriage of justice in the screenwriting? I’ve no clue, but what I can talk about is that they made the right goddamn monkey for the film.

King really taught us fear when he wrote It. More, he taught us to fear clowns. Where we should have seen clowns at a childhood birthday party as a source of delight, his masterwork has taught us that they are evil incarnate and we should kill them with fire. He was silent on the matter of mimes, but in his effort to leave no childhood stone unturned, The Monkey leans into the question: what if wind-up toys could be sent right from the devil himself?

Well, as it turns out, a huge number of people will get murdered. The titular monkey is a manifestation of a devil’s bargain. The big plot device is that when it’s wound up, it will kill someone, and crucially, not the person who uses it. They get a pass on the next murder. However, the monkey doesn’t take requests—it’s not a late night radio DJ—and the murder mayhem spree that follows each turn of the crank is a delight to behold, not least of which because the people we want to die don’t, or at least, not in the order we hoped.

Delightful Horror, Divine Comedy

There have been a few S-tier horror comedies. Ready Or Not is a personal favourite, cementing Samara Weaving on my radar even more than her debut outing in The Babysitter—also a horror comedy. The woman has form. Shaun of the Dead and The Cabin in the Woods share some of this DNA, and it’s from this second one that The Monkey channels the same delightful charm.

And that word ‘delight’ is key here. The movie isn’t stuffed with tedious jump scares—you can totally hold a scalding cup of tea while watching it, without fear of fright-borne spillage. Its horror is born of what-if, not monster closets—the monster is, after all, right in front of us the whole time.

So, if the monster’s in full view, how does it pull off its prestige? The Monkeyuses comedy-meets-cleverness. Where Final Destination death montages can be wonderfully layered, I’d argue The Monkey’s are rich with room-based cleverness. It’s almost a game for the audience: is this a scene where someone can die, and if so, how’s that going to happen? The trailer shows us how a shotgun hidden in a closet can blow a person to pieces, so even if you think you’re safe, you’re… not. The beauty of these audience puzzles is that you will get some of them, but never all. The movie suggests its screenwriters should be in therapy through its inventive ways of offing people.

It will go down in history as the best positioning of a murder surfboard, for example.

Wind-Up Slaughter

None of this works if the villain isn’t effective. And the monkey oozes malice because of its clown-like smile (remember King’s first lesson?), but mostly because of its eyes. The props department made sure this damn thing could follow you with its stare no matter where on screen it is.

Sometimes the monkey is only hinted at—you’ll catch a glimpse of the top of its head in a dark basement, perhaps. Other moments it’s in full view, and you might wonder how it could ever be terrifying… right until someone gets taken apart like a bloody Lego kit. The monkey is never boring; it doesn’t use old hack methods like stuffing victims into a wood chipper.

That would be too pedestrian. It is perhaps at its most evil when you realise you can’t predict how it’s going to be evil.

Holding Out for a Hero

A great villain needs a great hero… and a great counter-villain.

The Monkey’s star power is excellently used here. We get to see Theo James as twins Hal and Bill, showcasing an amazing range we weren’t quite sure he had before this. While he’s been the something something handsome lead from Divergent through to The Gentlemen, The Monkey lets him play both misunderstood-but-possibly-likeable as well as purely-evil-and-psychotic. The best scene showing his range is toward the end, where we see Hal and Bill in the same moment. Can Theo James stick the landing when he’s being two sides of… himself? It turns out he most definitely can. It’s in the way Hal is uncertain in contrast to Bill’s confidence, or how Hal’s voice is slightly lower but without assurance, where Bill’s is certainty-fuelled mania. His great vocal work carries the performance beyond the hair and makeup, showing us his conflicted selves.

And he’s not alone. Christian Convery brings the younger versions of Hal and Bill to life, and does a similarly excellent job being two sides of the same coin. You would be mistaken for thinking they cast twins to play these two parts, but no: Convery is now an actor to watch.

And The Monkey doesn’t skimp on its cameos. We get pure fun from both Severance’s Adam Scott and Lord of the Rings’ Elijah Wood.

This movie wouldn’t work as well as it does without these performances married to a strong script with meticulous pacing. See, the execution of this flick risks all kinds of tedium, as we need both the splatter horror of the present day and the backstory that brought us here. I felt true fear when I realised the movie was going to take us through Hal and Bill’s childhood before we got the red juice out of their adulthood, but I shouldn’t have. The layering of the story, from how the monkey is discovered to be evil, the twins’ unearthing of it, and the deaths that follow, is perfectly timed. You won’t be dicking about on your phone waiting for the next scene to unfold.

Much of that comes down to a script where Hal and Bill sound totally different in terms of their use of language and how they refer to other people. This use of dialogue is part of the movie’s great conceit. The film mostly follows Hal; he’s the primary narrator of our journey, giving a noir voiceover in a sort of demon-spawned Blade Runner way. It uses this tight storytelling technique to explain the workings in the margins while getting the action rolling much faster.

It’s a clever trick I wish The Crow had learned: background exposition is tedious and boring, so you shouldn’t waste half your movie on it.

The script is tight, but it’s also satisfying: the conclusion leaves us in a really good place. The people who should die generally do, unfortunately alongside people who shouldn’t, but through gags like the skydiving company that does weddings, we get a total payoff.

And there isn’t a wasted line of dialogue.

Can Mayhem Have Meaning?

The Monkey delights, but it doesn’t fail to teach while it does so. There’s a metaphor the movie uses twins Hal and Bill to show us. They represent light and dark sides in all of us. The Monkey wants us to recognise we’re not angels or demons, purely positive or negative; we’re each a complete person with dark urges alongside heroic desires.

The dissection of Hal and Bill into two people lets us explore this more carefully, and dare I say thoughtfully in a movie that bulk-bought special effects blood. It allows us to understand how even good actions have bad consequences, just as bad actions have good ones. Finding meaning in life is left up to the experiencer, and if we can take a moment to forgive the bad and celebrate the good, maybe we don’t need a murder monkey at all.

What did you think of The Monkey? Let me know in the comments below. If you wouldn’t turn the crank, click Like! And if you would instead put the monkey into a furnace…