INKY SQUIGGLES

When I think of the first video games I ever played, my thoughts gravitate towards titles like Zelda: Ocarina of Time (my first experience of an epic 3D quest) and Discworld (my first taste of maddening moon logic). These games had a profound impact on me; they opened me up to exciting new worlds that seemed, at the time, without limit. These worlds were so immersive and engaging that they remain firmly entrenched in my memory over twenty years later. To this day, the mnemonic 'twenty-three is number one' (the order in which you need to beat a series of deku scrubs in Zelda: OoT ) is more stubbornly etched in my memory than my own phone number. But when I think back further, it's not quite true that this was my first exposure to video games. The nineties and early noughties saw the increased affordability and mainstream adoption of personal computers in both homes and – for the first time – schools. This led to an edutainment (or educational video games) boom, and my UK p...

Throughout the pandemic, one international location in particular haunted my imagination : South Germany. While locked down, I took advantage of my daily exercise allowance of a single socially distanced outing in my local area. However, while I'm lucky to have access to abundant pretty, green spaces, my hometown is also a place where noteworthy sheep regularly make the front-page news. Like everyone else in the world, I craved a change of scenery – so I turned to the immersive worlds of books, films and adventure games to transport me from my somewhat fertiliser-seasoned surroundings. And, with its majestic forests, fairytale castles and melding of medieval and modern locales, the setting of FMV adventure game  Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within  gave me the perfect fantasy fuel. Better yet, it was rooted in reality; this was somewhere I might actually go someday – as fellow adventure game fans  AdventureGameGeek and IPKISS4LIFE had before me. So, as soon as internatio...

The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl...

⚠️  This review contains spoilers for Volumes 1 to 5 . How it started Fuyumi Soryo's manga career had an unlikely start – as an artsy fashion college student, she earned an honorable mention in a manga competition after entering to raise money for a fashion contest.  Mars , which would become her most popular work, was first serialised in shōjo magazine Bessatsu Friend  from 1995 to 2000 before being published as 15 manga volumes from 1996 to 2000. Despite the shōjo genre's bubblegum trappings, Soryo became known for exploring darker, more psychological themes in her work.  While Mars fell out of print several years ago, it has enjoyed a recent resurgence ; it was adapted into a live-action series and film in Japan in 2016, and ComiXology and Kodansha Comics brought the series back into digital circulation in 2019. You can read it now via a Prime Reading or Kindle Unlimited subscription or buy it on Kindle (Amazon actually did good in this case). What's i...

With lockdown easing (i.e., becoming rapidly non-existent) here in the UK, the prospect of wider travel is, maybe, hopefully, starting to seem not so dim and distant after all. My Google Maps timeline update for July even cranked up from one visited place to – get this –  two . These are heady times. Meanwhile, in adventure game terms, these past few months have seen me exploring a foreboding ancestral manor in Suffolk, England , the vibrant electronic markets and maid cafés of Akihabara, Japan , and the idyllic mountainside landscape of a fictional  provincial park . I think it's safe to say that, through lockdown and beyond, games like these will continue to fuel my spirit of adventure. Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars , Paris, France 'Paris in the fall, the last months of the year, at the end of the millennium. The city holds many memories for me – of music, of cafés, of love... and of death.'  –  George Stobbart Broken Sword's first entry s...