Thoughts on things I’ve experienced over the past week: 1 Movie, 1 Season of Television, 1 Gamemaking Docuseries (and the Game It’s About), & 1 Manga

Evil Dead Burn (Sébastien Vaniček, 2026)

Evil Dead has officially staked its identity as two separate things: on one side is the Raimi series starring Bruce Campbell first as a trilogy of films and then much later as a television series. The films are classics (with Evil Dead 2 being about as classic as a film can be), and I’ve heard basically only good things about the series; they mix horror and humor (in vastly varying degrees) but man Campbell is such a leading man.

On the other side are the Raimi-produced-but-not-directed films. These are directed by young filmmakers early in their careers: Evil Dead (2013) was Fede Alvarez’s first feature, and Evil Deads Rise, Burn, and the forthcoming Wrath are all sophomore efforts. They are broadly disconnected stories starring women (for probably the same reason Linkin Park replaced Chester Bennington with Emily Armstrong) that are extremely fucking brutal. 

Burn is directed by Sébastien Vaniček, a French filmmaker whose debut was the well-received spider movie Infested that I didn’t see because like most people I’m not big on spiders and I heard “Spider tunnel” and thought Oh Hell Naw, and it’s pretty dang French. Like, it got me actively listening to French music with its banger credits song “Paradis”  by Double Danger featuring Chella (alongside Gavin Brivik’s (very different) Ur Mad, the Faces of Death reboot's closer, which is finally on Deezer et al).

It is obvious that Vaniček is inspired by works from the French New Extremity that he must’ve grown up watching, but while he’s got the viciousness down, there’s something about this film that just didn’t totally click with me. It is occasionally spooky: it pulls off some effective imagery and every so often whips out something truly inventive that made me legitimately giddy and easily justified the price of A-List admission (i.e. “free”)… there’s none of the dread that I felt with either 2013’s Evil Dead or 2022’s Rise. 

And that’s a shame, because there was potential for something greater. Burn is trying to say something about domestic violence (and maybe violence against women in general), which is a lofty goal I appreciate in theory but man is he not the right person to do it, because he doesn’t know how to portray said violence in anything but the most cartoonish of broad strokes, and he doesn’t know what to say in the end other than “It’s bad,” which it certainly is and I’m glad it says that instead of the other thing… but there are a million missed opportunities here to make that idea really connect. 

Also, apparently smoking is cool again. Dunno when that happened. 

Twin Peaks Season 1 (David Lynch & Mark Frost, 1990)
When I look back on the history of television, there are a handful of shows that I feel culturally embarrassed to admit to not having seen. Twin Peaks was at the top of that list before 2017’s “The Return” and I have felt ever-more disappointed in myself for knowing “Oh that’s a Twin Peaks reference” but not knowing how or why. 

I no longer have to be quite so embarrassed. Though I’ve got two more seasons (and at least one film) to get through before I can actually say “I’ve seen Twin Peaks,” I’m officially past the point of saying “Never seen it…” 

In any case, it’s a good show! The first season is a measly 8 episodes, but it’s so specific that you really do believe there’s something underneath all of it, because it’s all just too odd for there not to be. Maybe the best word to describe it is “disorienting (complimentary)” because you really can’t know if someone is “acting normal” because frankly no one at any point during this entire season of television “acts normal.” Although this town ostensibly has 51,000+ people, only a dozen or so actually seem to matter… and they’re all cheating on each other! With each other!! 

Season 1 ends on multiple cliff-hangers and a literal “To Be Continued…” which is always frustrating… but I’m looking forward to what’s to come. It has absolutely gotten its hooks into me, and maybe I’ll have some grand thing to say when I get to the other side.

Or maybe I’ll read something really good from someone else and just recommend you read that instead. We’ll see! 

Double Fine Adventure (2 Player Productions, 2013-2015) & Broken Age (Double Fine, 2015)
As mentioned in the past few issues, I've been working by way through the Double Fine YouTube catalog as I think about whatever statement it is I want to make about video games as the industry faces genuinely the most existential crisis it's faced since the early 1980s (tentatively titled “Video Games Are Too Expensive*”). Even in the absolute worst case scenario, “video games” will never die because their existence does not require traditional publishers the way they did in 1983… but it's hard to say what they will look like.

Double Fine Adventure is fascinating to watch in that context, as Broken Age was the first game to really break through on Kickstarter. It was a multi-million dollar game without a publisher: $3.3 million raised to make an old-fashioned adventure game like the ones that made Double Fine head Tim Schafer a name that people who like video games knew. It's a fascinating document of the creation process – one that feels less raw than Psychodyssey but still honest to the challenges of making what is ultimately a fairly small-scale game!

But at least it came out well. I followed some of this at the time but skipped the game because, frankly, I don’t really like adventure games… but watching the series convinced me to finally give it a try (and in fact buy the entire Double Fine adventure collection). But while I do plan to check those remastered classics out, I’ll do so with a walkthrough beside me because man I am just not good at doing the things that game designers expect of me. The first Act of Broken Age is pretty straightforward – I only got truly stuck once – but the near-universal feedback was that it was too easy and so they went and made Act 2 not straightforward at all. 

And it's not like I never figured things out: I figured out more puzzles than I didn’t on my own… but I just guessed the name of the kid's pet snake (which I would have learned by letting him be attacked by said snake, but in order to use the snake as the solution to a different puzzle I had to wait like a full minute for the snake to tire itself out which I would have literally never done) and did not bother pulling out an actual notebook to truly detective what color his bronzed-over boots would have been when he was 5. I get why some people genuinely enjoy that kind of thing, because in those times when I was bashing my head against a wall and it actually clicked it felt real good. And using walkthroughs definitely robs the game of a lot of that (an in-game hint system, while impossible to implement given their timeline, would have probably been a best-of-both-worlds thing, because there were a bunch of times where a few words would have put me on the right track… c’est la vie).

But the game isn’t just its puzzles: there’s the gorgeous artwork and the fully-voiced dialogue telling a genuinely compelling and often-hilarious story about family and , like… perspective, I guess? I dunno. I liked it a lot: the ending would have probably hit a few times harder if it hadn’t taken me like 20 minutes to actually implement the thing I understood how to implement because I kept missing steps as I rushed against the invisible countdown clock… but it still felt good. I know that everyone involved is proud because I literally watched them all say how proud they are, but they should be.

Blue Box (Kouji Miura, 2021-2016)
I said a couple weeks ago that several of the shonen romance series I’ve been following are coincidentally(?) ending at the same time. The least good of these, Hima-Ten, ended first, and despite having followed it for 96 chapters I dunno when I would have thought of it again if I didn’t have to bring it up here. 

This week, the middle-best-one, Blue Box, went out on chapter 250, which is frankly a better 250th to celebrate than whatever it was people were talking about on the 4th. It is part romance, part sports manga: a bunch of high school athletes doing sports and trying to date each other (sometimes successfully!). But Miura’s focus was always in the favor of the characters: many chapters can go without a game being played, and especially as the series progressed those games would become increasingly compressed to the point where what you might expect would be the big climactic game actually happens entirely off-page, because the emotionally climactic game already happened. 

Part of what appealed to me about Blue Box and got me reading in the first place was that its author is a woman. Although the lead is still an utterly hopeless boy and not all of the girls get the focus they deserved (or which you might expect given the series’ length), this is a far more nuanced depictions of young love than you see with your average Shonen Jump series and doesn’t even hint at, as the weird kids say, “Fan service” (e.g. images of women/girls in needlessly provocative poses). 

The early chapters especially I thought were just really nice and I liked having it as sort of a palate cleanser each Sunday morning from the more action-y other series that tend to fill that day, though I’ll admit that I probably would have stopped reading a few months back if it had seemed like Blue Box was set to run another year or more because it was starting to meander a bit and I was looking forward to that less and less (also I have given up on most of those Sunday action series, so I don’t need that palate cleanser anymore). 

Still, I thought it ended well. It’s a nice final few chapters ending on a nice actual final chapter, so I’ll remember it fondly. Heck, maybe I’ll even check out the anime that has its second season premiering in October so I can go enjoy those early storylines all over again.