Film Review: Him

Justin Tipping knows writers who use subtlety and they are all cowards

American football has been compared to the gladiatorial matches of ancient Rome, and not without reason. It is a bloody sport, bloodier than any other popular sport in America. Going further, it has been likened to getting hit by a car repeatedly; I myself have referred to it as “one team on one side, one team on the other side, and they all get permanent brain damage.” Such is the driving force of Him, released in 2025, directed by Justin Tipping and written by Tipping, Skip Bronkie, and Jack Ayers.

Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is a young football fan who idolizes famed football player Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), and after the latter’s injury is inspired to play the game himself on White’s old team, the San Antonio Saviors. He becomes successful in college, but then suffers an injury of his own after being attacked by a man in a strange animalistic costume. As he takes the field again, despite warnings from his doctor, he is invited to White’s training compound in the middle of the Texas desert to become a better player. As he learns, though, White has made deals with unsavory forces and is pursuing this goal beyond all reason.

This is a brutal film. There are truly copious amounts of blood, delivered in ways that feel deliberately cruel, for none of the violence is accidental. It is a literalization of the idea that football is a blood sport. Cade is suffering for his own glory, for his duty to his family, and for what White wants to mold him into, and he is not the only one who suffers. As so many isolated compounds have warped into, this training facility has become so caught up in its mythology that it makes people do detestable, depraved things, the most visceral involving a machine that launches footballs through the air at a terrifying velocity. This group buy-in is the only way that these young men would tolerate such poor lighting, and what little there is is often in red.

I have read a number of other reviews of this film, and a running theme through them is that they don’t believe the film is particularly thematically coherent. The two themes that grind against each other, so it is claimed, are the theme of racism on the one hand (as the majority of the characters in this film, like the majority of NFL football players, are Black) and the theme of personal ambition on the other hand. I for one find that they can be squared if one looks at the film through the lens of racial capitalism. I am particularly indebted to Nathan Kalman-Lamb’s and Derek Silva’s book The End of College Football: the Human Cost of an All-American Game in my analysis here, and I recommend the curious read it post-haste. Long story short, they believe that the game should be abolished because it is both inhumanly cruel and because its structural pressures force young Black men into life-ruining violence for no real compensation. College Football, they say, is a relic of the plantations. And so with this film.

From this point onward I am going to spoil this film extensively because keeping it vague simply would not be satisfying. Those who want to see the film themselves are advised to stop here.

There are two characters who want something from Cameron: Cameron himself, and Isaiah. Both of these wants are filtered through and influenced by the reality of racial capitalism in which they are immersed. One force that shapes this is their own sense of masculinity; they are expected to be tough, to be ruthless, to sacrifice everything good in the world in the name of ambition. Cameron enters this training facility in a committed relationship, and is later brought to a pool where a number of scantily-clad women are there for his pleasure. He may or may not have had sex with one of them; when he expresses regret over infidelity to Isaiah, the latter says that he cannot care about the feelings of others on the way to football stardom. In the hands of a lesser story, this plot would simply serve as cheap titillation for straight male audiences, but here it represents a very real thing, as Silva and Kalman-Lamb discuss in their book. I refer to part of the bargain football teams implicitly strike with their players: endure all sorts of physical violence, and in exchange these young men can brutalize women as they please (as many sexual assault scandals at colleges and professionally bear witness to). This is seen again at a drug-induced ritual with the white team ownership, with several flashes of half-naked women (the cinematography is psychedelic). This bargain is made even clearer at the end, as Cameron, after killing Isaiah, strides onto a football field, his bare chest caked in blood, flanked by cheerleaders in revealing costumes. More revealing than their costumes are the masks that they wear, hiding their eyes, covering sockets with what appears to be flesh. In exchange for serving the white masters who own the San Antonio saviors, he is being offered women, white women at that, who cannot bear witness.

But women are not the only people Cameron is encouraged to brutalize. The entire system of this compound is not unlike a military boot camp, where young men are desensitized to brutal violence. One scene involves Cameron having to throw footballs at a target; every time he misses, a football is fired through one of the aforementioned machines at the face of another player. As one player is on the ground in incredible pain, the others, Cameron and Isaiah included, huddle around him and sing a team chant. Here, men are being encouraged to find camaraderie in one another, but only camaraderie in violence that serves the rulers of his society. In this society, it is the only way that men like Cameron are allowed camaraderie at all; namely, though hurting others.

At the end of the film, it is revealed that the initial attack on Cameron by a man in a strange animalistic costume was orchestrated by the Saviors leadership to isolate him, thereby making him an easy target for recruitment by the team later on. Cameron is forced to confront his role in the system of racial capitalism, specifically the fact that he is of the caste designated for brutal, degrading work, thereby propping the system up. He was chosen by accident of birth to suffer for others, as so vividly shown by the visceral display of interior human anatomy every time he gets an injection (and there are many injections in this film), or through the sequences where you see players without skin, but as collections of organs held together by bones. Through this X-Ray filter, you are forced to see the very real damage they are suffering - and by extension, the very real damage America consumes for entertainment, and cheers on with marching bands and fan clubs and broadcasts and trophies.

The scene where Isaiah reveals to Cameron that he is but one in a line of football players who have shared blood and ritual as part of the Saviors, followed by a fight between the two culminating in Isaiah’s death, bears a comparison to a scene in the recent film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Long Walk. In an ending changed from the novel, Peter McVries wins the titular competition and is congratulated by the Major, the man in charge of the brutal competition. Following the wishes of his compatriot Ray Garraty, who died not long before, he wishes, as is his prerogative as winner, for the rifle of a nearby soldier. The Major orders the soldier to give Peter his gun, upon which Peter shoots the Major dead. Some have wondered why the Major would not have seen this possibility coming, but I suspect the Major knew of this possibility much as Isaiah saw his death at Cameron’s hands as inevitable. By encouraging Peter and Cameron, respectively, to be violent, they validate the violence that has been inflicted upon them. By transforming these young men into monsters, they have justified in their own minds the monstrosities they uphold. I suspect that both the Major and Isaiah would be proud.

All of this thematic work is brought together in a bloody ending laden with symbolism. You have the rich white men in cushy suits serving as the arbiters of the dignity of a Black man who has been through hell. You have the rich white woman serving as an intermediary. You have a literal contract to be signed by Cameron, accepting a role in the system in exchange for his right to be cruel and to be applauded for his violence. You have the demonic sacrifice, complete with pentagram, showing how morality has been sacrificed to human greed. You have the violence these white men have encouraged bounding back towards them, which is as surprising to them as it is inevitable to us, and the one that gets the most screen time pathetically grovels as he realizes what has happened. You have all the minor functionaries, the cheerleaders and marching band members, all blinded with masks so they cannot witness the workings of this awful spectacle. But of all these the film has a stroke of genius with a chorus garbed in strange animal costumes deliver a rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner as a droning chant, with no melody and none of John Philip Sousa’s embellishments that can make the song beautiful but also a nightmare to sing. The genius is not merely in presentation, but in the fact that this chorus sings not one but two verses, one long-forgotten by most Americans. That verse reads:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore

⁠That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,

A home and a country should leave us no more?

⁠Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave,

From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This verse is one widely considered racist, as it refers to the defeat of the British armed forces at the Siege of Fort McHenry, including enslaved Black Americans that they had freed. It is a verse that is a condemnation of Black freedom as anathema to the American national project. It is a direct threat to those Black people in British service, and a demand that they know their place. That is exactly what the owners of the Saviors are doing to Cameron in that scene: demanding he accept his inferior status, and in exchange he will get to be a monster.

Him is a far smarter film than many critics give credit. It is a searing indictment of racial capitalism in America, and how Black men are sacrificed in droves for the entertainment of the nation. The entire structure of football culture in this country is ultimately a massive arena for human sacrifice, and that bloody enterprise is only barely metaphorized in this film (nor are players the only sacrifices; each year, the American city with the highest rate of sex trafficking is the one hosting the Super Bowl). As hard as it may be to admit, there are many Camerons playing football, and all who love the game are sacrificing him for their amusement.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: Fate's Bane by C. L. Clark

 A forbidden romance and an exploration of the complexities of duty.

Specificity is not always a virtue. Fantasy readers often disdain the generic medieval fantasy setting - and with good reason, given how overdone it is - but that doesn't mean that sometimes, a light hand on the worldbuilding tiller can be just as effective, or even more, than one that digs into granular details. Fate's Bane, the new novella from C. L. Clark, is a great example of exactly that.

The story follows two young women, one, Agnir, a hostage taken to ensure her father's good behaviour (read: not making war on the hostage-taker) and the other, Hadhnri, the daughter of the clan she's been taken into. Unsurprisingly, they fall in love. But Agnir is never truly one of Clan Aradoc, and Hadhnri cannot seem to see that her father will never let them be, and that Agnir is never so sure and comfortable of her place among them as she is in Hadhnri's affections. Clan Aradoc, and particularly their leader, expect of her the duty and loyalty of one born to them, but don't afford her the trust that would naturally go alongside it, denying her the weapon she yearns for as she goes into adulthood.

But in that imperfect childhood, the two girls-then-women find a magic that allows them to create, to influence the world beyond the realms of the mundane, the use of which brings them as close as their burgeoning feelings, until Agnir shies away from the risks that Hadhnri wants to take.

And so in the early part of the story, this tension is built up - two parts of the relationship with very different positions in the world, and thus very different outlooks, and very different ways of measuring risk and cost/benefit. Sitting within Agnir's perspective, it is easy to see all the dangers and problems that afflict her life that Hadhnri misses, blithe in her own security. And so, when Agnir's own clan steals her back, the reader sees easily how conflicted she is. On the one hand, she has all of her childhood experiences, the affection of Hadhnri and her brother Gunni, the food and shelter and care given, but on the other, the knowledge of how that situation came to be, and the ties that predate it all, to Clan Fein, her blood siblings and her father. To them she owes the loyalty of family, even if, after years of being raised elsewhere, they are nearly strangers to her. Clark makes clear - without belabouring the point, but in showing us in little snippets of life in these two clans - how clearly those blood ties and their sense of honour and duty matter to those in this world, these Fens. Agnir's divided self is set up and grounded just enough for it to feel a part of this setting, so that the story can then shift on to studying the (necessary, tragic) outcomes of that division of loves.

And that light touch embedding of the sense of this world's mores truly is one of the virtues of the book. It's a novella, and so such setting and groundwork as it does needs to be conveyed quickly, so the fact that Clark more evokes than explains stands it in good stead. I infer from words like "fens" and "seax" where and when in the world this is meant to be implying. Reference to the baneswood, and its stories, make clear the pagan nature of this culture, and so when outside forces come in wearing robes of a certain shape and worshipping a different god, it's easy to nod along and think "ah yes, the coming of Christianity to the British isles" and know roughly when and whereabouts this draws its inspiration from. It doesn't need more than roughly, because it is also very clearly a fantasy world - there are little shifts in culture, along with the clear magic, that take us a step outside of the bounds of reality. What Clark gives us instead of specificity, though, is coherence. We may not get a thorough explanatory guide to this place, but every single little detail we do get - the love locks courting couples share, the training grounds, the material culture, the clans and their quarrels - feeds into that sense of time and place, and helps to make it feel whole. It's a delicate line to walk, but one I think Clark has done phenomenally, in this instance.

Some of that is, of course, that the slightly abstracted historical period being evoked isn't the traditional-unspecified-north-west-European medieval. It's not taverns and wenches and kings and castles, and so gets points for rarity. But the skill Clark uses in sketching a sense of place in these clean lines with little moments of clarity is critical too. They know exactly when to give the reader a touch of something real, to ground the more nebulous whole and give it the semblance of greater depth.

It helps too, that the shape of the story owes a little to older traditions of "romance" as well as to modern, and that genre-shape helps guide how the story is read and make it feel of a piece with its setting. There are echoes of modern tropes, don't get me wrong. I recognise these lesbians from plenty of fiction. But there's also plenty of moments that draw on older myths and stories too. Which is to say that... happily ever after may not be the thing to be seeking here.

And, having read The Unbroken, I am not exactly surprised. Thematically, they're treading very similar ground here again, exploring how a person can have their loyalties owed in different ways to very competing people and powers. Both books examine the way that the deeper tie of family can be suborned and complicated by other forces, and that a person can quite blamelessly find themselves torn in two by the loves and duties they owe to the two different parts of themself. It's a very compelling theme, and one I think bears up under this repeated scrutiny. Interestingly, the story I found myself most reaching to for comparison however was one of the other yellow lesbian books of the same cohort - She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. There's a lot of thematic overlap between the two, don't get me wrong, but the particular love between someone raised by an enemy, and the child of the enemy, echoes really well between the eunuch Ouyang and Fate's Bane's Agnir. Both feel compelled to act against their personal desires in service of a duty greater than themself, and are pulled into a vengeance that can do nothing but hurt them. And both are extremely compelling for it. Agnir gets much less page time to get to a place of complexity than Ouyang does, but Clark does an excellent job of skimming where skimming needs to happen and lingering over personal moments to give us the shape of her personal feelings and dilemmas.

Again overlapping with Ouyang's story, as well as The Unbroken, Clark is clearly interested in thinking about power and powerlessness, agency and how that can be suborned or denied. Agnir is a symbol more than a person for much of the book - a token of her father's good behaviour and then, later, a symbol of the crimes of Clan Aradoc to her own people and those whose support her father seeks. Even to her beloved, sometimes, she becomes as much a token of rebellion against her family and their expectations as a real person with loyalties of her own. As with Ouyang and Esen, Agnir cannot seem to quite make Hadhnri see that she has ties outside of the ones that bind her to Clan Aradoc, and that what they have done to her has plenty of marks in the "bad" side of the ledger to balance out such good as there may be.

Much of this tension is built early and clearly, leaving an amount of the story's direction quite obvious to the reader. This is not a criticism - rather than the twists of an adventure novel, this again invokes older-style doomed romances, with the car-crash experience of watching two people bound by circumstances walk into a doom they cannot escape. Of such things is the entire tragic genre built, and for good reason.

It is not, however, a perfect book. I have two points to highlight that don't quite fit the otherwise excellent storytelling. The first is much more minor (though doesn't sound it), and that's the place of magic within the story. Despite the unexplained magic being the force that binds the characters to that tragic fate, its infrequent appearances within the story undercut its dramatic weight. Unlike so many of the other parts, here Clark's light hand doesn't quite do justice to the role that magic needs to play in the story, and leaves it feeling remarkably tacked on for what is, in essence, the motive force of the entire plot. And yet... I mostly couldn't bring myself to mind all that much. The character work is sufficiently compelling that it was easy to handwave in my head the course they were heading onto, rather than need it all spelled out. It's not missing, either, just a little thin, perhaps a casualty of the rather short length of the story and the greater focus (which has worked excellently) on character development. Given that it's a story that rides heavily on the strength of one character's own internal dilemma, this feels like a sacrifice that can be accepted, on the whole.

The second is more significant, but also one about which I've not quite made up my mind. For the majority of the book, the story follows a fairly linear standard structure. There are a few brief deviations into the mythic, but they are short and fairly closed off, and do not seem to say much to the shape of the story itself, rather instead to feed into the texture of it. But the ending takes something of a structural turn from all that. Clark opens up something of a wider possibility space for the shape the ending might take, and I cannot quite decide if this is a stroke of genius - leaning into the doom that has been shadowing the story the whole way to remind the reader that some stories cannot have a cleanly good ending - or a step away from that doom that undercuts some of its heft. Whichever way I find myself leaning, however, I cannot deny that the choice is an interesting one, and is one of the things that I suspect I will remember most clearly about the story when I look back to it in future. And I would rather that, I think, even if I come to a resolution that the ending does not work for me, I appreciate that it's such a distinctive stylistic and structural choice. I would always rather read a book that takes a punt than something more staid.

And I certainly couldn't call Fate's Bane that. In light sketches and deft moments of personal intimacy and turmoil, Clark has drawn out a story that manages to feel mythic and tragic, as well as with the more personal level of character work that is the best of what I like in modern story telling. It's an extremely competent novella, and one with a strong thematic core that helps give some of the lighter parts a greater narrative gravity and make it feel more than the sum of its parts. Alongside a prose voice that is distinctive while unobtrusive, and which feeds very neatly into the coherent atmosphere of this fantasy-but-slightly-historical world, the compelling chemistry and tragedy of the romance at the story's heart make this a novella well worth reading.

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The Math

Highlights: Interesting setting with cohesive atmosphere, compelling main characters, interesting tension between duty and romance

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: C. L. Clark, Fate's Bane [Tordotcom, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

TV Review: Alien: Earth

What are little (robot) girls made of?

After half a century of increasingly questionable sequels, prequels and crossovers, there aren’t many scares left to extract from the iconic xenomorphs of Alien. But what can still be done with them is probe from new angles the questions the first film raised with regard to the rise of corporatocracy and the ways humans keep finding to predate on each other. In the case of the new TV series Alien: Earth, the most noticeable theme is the futility of subjecting life to a regime of property rights. You don’t truly own that which you can’t control, and you can’t control that which can set its own goals apart from yours. Even less can you be simultaneously a parent and an owner. You either help life grow or make it serve you.

Alien: Earth expands the worldbuilding of its franchise by adding more players to the dystopian corporate ecosystem: alongside Weyland-Yutani, i.e. the devil you know, we meet the newcomer Prodigy Corporation, which specializes in producing AI systems. We follow its immature founder, a narcissistic jerk with the most punchable face in the galaxy, for a handful of days preceding the planned launch of a service that promises to make human beings immortal by transferring their minds to artificial bodies. So far, this technology only works on children, because their minds are malleable enough. However, their new bodies have to be adult-shaped, because robots don’t grow. As you may imagine, this is a very disturbing, even traumatic experience for the first batch of kids recruited as testers.

Meanwhile, a Weyland-Yutani spaceship carrying specimens of xenomorph and other assorted adorables crash-lands on a city that happens to belong to Prodigy, so a legal battle ensues over who has the right to salvage however much is recoverable from the disaster. As it happens, Marcy, one of the kids who were put in those shiny robot bodies, has a brother who works as a first responder in that city, so she pleads with the Prodigy boss to be allowed to lead a rescue mission at the crash site. Her excuse is that it would give them a useful opportunity to test their new bodies in harsh conditions, but what she really wants is to reconnect with her brother, because the mind transfer project is an industry secret and, for all he knows, she’s dead.

Mayhem erupts soon enough, and a pants-coloring fright is had by all. Many throats are cut open, many limbs are impaled, many liters of blood are inadvisably conveyed from people’s interior to the same people’s exterior. Anyway, the Prodigy team manages, at no small cost, to get hold of a cargo of several xenomorph eggs (and other assorted adorables). You already know how the xenomorphs work. Much of the fun of the season lies in learning how each of the rest of the critters go about making breakfast out of any passing human. The breakout star is one spry little fellow that the Xenopedia tells me is called Trypanohyncha ocellus, but I’ve seen more fun people call it Optipus, and I personally prefer to call it Tentoculus. It’s adorable in exactly the wrong ways.

Once the team and their loot return to Prodigy headquarters, it’s time for the real drama. Some of the former kids are suddenly thrown into adult-sized responsibilities, while others are left to deal with adult-sized trauma on their own. It becomes clear that every step this company makes is calculated to feed the ego of the boss, who likes to project a personal image of a chaotic manchild so smart that everyone bores him, but his actual choices reveal the self-destructive reach of his arrogance. A game of mismatched agendas begins between full humans, humans with robotic bodies, and full robots, with the ending episodes adding a hundred more dimensions to the two original Alien films’ commentary on twisted forms of parenthood.

There are thin parts to this plot, but you easily forget about them when you watch the fantastic performances that this show boasts. The actors who have to play child characters in adult bodies prove great at speaking like children, moving like children, emoting like children. And the self-proclaimed genius who put them in that situation is deliciously detestable, ultimately revealed to have been a mistreated child who had to make adult decisions too soon but didn’t learn to break the cycle, and grew up to inflict a more sophisticated form of violence upon his substitute children. And I don’t even mean the obvious violence of separating a mind from its body (the transfer process requires killing the child), but the easier to disguise violence of turning people into instruments.

What with all the drama you can see this story has to offer, the most interesting relationship is the one that develops between the former kid Marcy and the xenomorphs. Her advanced electronic brain figures out how to communicate with them, and they become unexpected prison pals. It certainly helps that her body has no meat for it to munch on, but from her side of the dynamic, what connects them is that they’ve both been forcibly pulled out of the natural stream of life, and now they’re lost and vulnerable among people whose only sincere intention is to use them. Whereas the Alien movies showed us a being that usurps the role of offspring to prey on its lifegiver, the Prodigy Corporation is an impostor parent that preys on its children.

Finding innovative ways to address the core questions that define a franchise is a challenging trick to pull off. Alien: Earth passes stellarly the prequel test that Alien: Romulus failed and that Andor taught the master class on, in that it doesn’t resort to shoehorned references to tickle viewers’ nostalgia buttons. Instead, it creates its own space in the franchise and grows from there.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

6 Books with Fran Wilde

Fran Wilde is the award-winning author of A Philosophy of Thieves, out 30th of September from Erewhon Books. You can find her at her website, her Patreon, and on instagram and bluesky under @fran_wilde.

A Philosophy of Thieves: Robin Hood meets Parasite meets Six of Crows in multi-award winning author Fran Wilde’s thrilling, high-tech adventure heist wrapped in a futuristic fantasy where thieves are entertainment for the wealthy. Get your copy here.

Today she tells us about her Six Books:

1. What book are you currently reading?

LD Lewis’ Year of the Mer (April 2026). I’m reading it to blurb and — spoilers — I’m going to blurb it A LOT. This is a story that goes beyond a retrenching of The Little Mermaid, to explore deeper issues of generational identity, trauma, revenge, and anger. It has so much heart, and so many moments where my own heart is ready to crumble. I am so looking forward to seeing this book out in the world, wrecking havoc.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

LD Lewis’ Year of the Mer, see above. 

AND Alix Harrow’s new book, The Everlasting (10/28).  I would read a phone book cover to cover if Alix wrote it. But The Everlasting has a mysterious book in it that is so rare it might not exist, which is absolute Fran-bait. And a female knight, and fiction vs. reality plot lines and I’m so here for it.

OH AND Will Alexander’s just-out book Sunward (9/16). What began as a short story for The Sunday Morning Transport has bloomed into a resplendent space opera with so many fantastic moving parts (and sarcastic intelligences) that I want to hug it and share it and then grab it back and hug it again. Do I feel a tiny bit like a book auntie on this one? Yes. Yes I do.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I love rereading Frances Hardinge’s books - this year it’s Unraveller that I want to revisit. 

4.  A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written.

Alix Harrow’s Starling House and Frances Hardinge’s Unraveller.  The prose in both, the awareness of relationships and the heart-strings that wrap around your throat in both as the main characters fall deeper and deeper into the plot. I’m so here for that kind of utterly immersive writing, and I can still hear the phrases and sentences I wish I’d written in both. 

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster and Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting are two childhood books that have both had a lasting influence on my writing (each deals with adventures and fantasy, getting your wildest dreams, and setting out from the real world into a very different place). Oh and puns. Lots of puns. And whimsy.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is A Philosophy of Thieves and I think it’s awesome because: high-society performance heists, tactical ballgowns (with lots of pockets), industrial espionage, immortality, and many heists wrapped in a speculative trench coat. 

Thank you, Fran!

Read Paul's review of A Philosophy of Thieves here at NOAF.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: Queen Demon by Martha Wells

The story of Kai, Ziede, and the humans and others in Martha Wells’s rich secondary fantasy world continues

Queen Demon drops us right into the action without preamble or prologue or recap.¹ This novel, like its predecessor, is set both in the present and in the past, something that surprised me. However, unlike in the previous novel, the past portions of this one don’t range across the entire life of Kai; rather, they are more narrowly focused, and to thematic effect. In the past, Kai is ramping up to be part of the ultimate struggle against the Hierarchs, the oppressive empire bent on world conquest and conversion to their way of life.² The first book, Witch King, jumped “around” the actual fall of the Hierarchs and how people came together to defeat them. This had the effect of the present day being purely aftermath and the actual rise and fall not as detailed as it might be. This novel takes a look at that portion of Kai’s history. It’s an important and long story of its own, and I see why Wells didn’t even go into it in the first novel, and instead showcased that entire important story here, although I can see how that might have frustrated readers of Witch King.

As for the portions set in the present, it’s about 60 years afterwards. The Hierarchs are beaten, driven away. But their remnants might yet linger, and what of their lost power? Can it be salvaged and used? Does it need to be sealed up even more firmly, like capping an oil well? And what are the costs and risks of doing either of those things? Kai gets caught up in one of his companions’ quest to find the Well, and the consequences of doing so.

So, while Witch King is a variety of things, ranging from a “coming of age” to “coming together to fight an oppressor” combined with a mystery and slow unveiling of Kai and his world, Queen Demon assumes you know all this and are ready for another installment. If we are thinking in musical terms, Witch King was the opening movement in the symphony, introducing us to what Wells is cooking up here. But Queen Demon is different. Queen Demon shows us some nuanced aspects of Kai’s theme, seeing just how difficult it is to get a diverse and often warring group of people to get together to face a common threat. Wells makes this subtext explicit by having Kai and his core companions realize that that is the power of the Hierarchs and their empire—they are counting on the their opponents’ inability to unite their powers effectively. So Past Kai’s goal and mission is to do that. His special focus as the novel progresses are the dust witches, who do not trust the others at all, and are in fact a threat in and of themselves. Kai has a lot of work to do in order to get them on his side. He might have beaten a couple of the Hierarchs already, but it takes more than a village to defeat an authoritarian regime backed by a Power.

In the other part of this movement of the symphony, in the present, Dahin, one of Kai’s oldest friends, is determined to find the source of the Hierarchs’ power. This theme in the symphony is concerned heavily with the costs and needs and necessities of power. One might say that the past narrative thread, as already discussed, is all about political and social power, how to accumulate it, concentrate it, and use it for good. The present-day thread is more concerned with the costs of magical power. We get plenty of detail in both threads, but especially the present day, about Kai’s power and what it costs him to use cantrips and intentions, the two main types of magical “spells”.

There are other ways to get that power, and understanding it and its cost in the case of the Hierarch’s Well is Dahin’s focus, and his obsession is what drags Kai, Ziede and company in a quest to find the Hierarch’s power source. After all, if the Well still exists, someone might resurrect their project. The power from the Well seems bottomless (at perhaps an even higher cost), and the lure and temptation are very real indeed. Kai begins to suspect, as the present-day narrative goes on, that others rather than Dahin might be very interested in getting the power of the Well… and becoming new Hierarchs themselves.³

The past narrative is all about how the band got together to defeat the Hierarchs; there is no doubt that Kai will succeed, only how and what will it cost him and those around him. The present narrative, in a “what’s next?” way of pulling the reader forward, was at times more intriguing from a plotwise perspective—just what the heck is the deal with the Well? Why is Dahin so obsessed? And what are the other agendas in play here? The author does a great job in making the past and present narratives resonate and have their themes speak to each other across time, allowing for a rich, braided story.

This is the point where I pitch the Raksura novels to readers unaware of them. In the time between the end of the Ile-Rien novels and her phoenix-like fulmination and rise with Murderbot, Wells wrote a number of things, some of which are coming back to print. My favorite of those are the novellas (and a couple of novels) of the Raksura sequence. They’re not in the same setting as the Rising World,⁴ but a rich secondary fantasy world of its own. Our main character Moon is a shapeshifting Raksura, who, at the beginning of The Cloud Roads (first in the series), doesn’t even know who or what he really is, only to hide his nature. The story of The Cloud Roads is for Moon to find his people, to uneasily make a place among them. The rest of the stories are their adventures as the Raksura eventually return to their homeland, and the threats, opportunities, friends, enemies, allies and wonders to be found there.

The Rising World novels and the books of the Raksura (or the Three Worlds, as they are called internally) have a lot in common: rich secondary world fantasy, full of characters and relationships (often thorny); a layered universe with a deep history that can come rising to the surface, for good or for ill; a focused point of view on a character who often is, or feels like, an outsider. What’s more, both Kai and Moon are not human, but often have to live among humans, deal with humans, and come to terms with humanity (or humanoids in the case of the Raksura).

Readers of Queen Demon who love the action and adventure against the Hierarchs and their remnants, both past and present, are going to love the Raksura books and stories, the struggles against the Fell, exploring ancient ruins, dealing with dread magics. Readers of these two novels who love the interdynamics of Kai and Ziede, of the cultures where Kai lives throughout his long demonic life, will love the thorny interpersonal relationships of the clans of Raksura, both within and between clans.

As good as the Three Worlds/Raksura series is, and I love it to pieces,⁵ I think that the Rising World books further exercise and strengthen Wells’s secondary world fantasy skills and are even better written. These books are very different from the Murderbot series: even with a narrow point of view, they feel much more expansive than the tight, snarky in-the-mind of Murderbot that we get in their books.⁶ It will take a gear shift for readers who came to Wells for Murderbot to try the Rising World (or the Raksura series), but I sure think it is worthwhile. Wells has a lot of arrows in her quiver, and with Queen Demon, continues to hone the arrow of secondary world fantasy.

The book is a nice and full pair to the first novel, Witch King, but the ending of this one leaves a big open door for further books set in the Rising World. It’s a big setting, there’s a lot out there, and we’ve not explored every inch of Kai’s history. I would love to continue Kai’s story, especially since this post-Hierarch world and its struggles covers something rarely seen: what happens after you defeat the big bad and seal evil back in the can. Happily Ever After takes work to avoid backsliding. Queen Demon, in its present tense, starts to tackle that problem, but it is far from barely beginning. More, please!

Highlights:

• Continues the story of Kai, Ziede and the Rising World ’verse
• Important themes about how to come to together to defeat evil, as well as what happens afterwards, showing an important part of Kai’s life not seen in the first book
• Shows the range of the writer beyond the popular confines of the Murderbot ’verse.

Reference: Wells, Martha. Queen Demon [Tor Books, 2025].

¹ I’ve lamented about this before and I do think that this novel could have used it. It had been a minute since I read Witch King, and while Ziede and Kai and the Hierarchs’ threat were fresh and permanent in my mind, the other characters and other setup of the book were less certain. And yes, this means you cannot really start the series here. You will be lost. There are some references dropped in here and there, but the novel assumes you know what Kai and Ziede are, and the geopolitical setup, as well as some basic facts about Demons and Witches. If you don't know who the Saredi are, or that Witches are descended from Demons and humans, then you are going to be lost and miss some important beats.

² The Hierarchs and their methods and structure remind me of a more magically focused Palliseen (from the Adrian Tchaikovsky books): implacable empire, with an ideology, but in this case backed by a Power.

³ Having a Power backing your magic puts me in mind of the Amber diceless roleplaying game (Pattern, Logrus, etc). If that reference is too obscure, consider 5e warlocks and their pact bonds. Now imagine them pacting to a place of power rather than to a being, and you can see how the Hierarchs work.

⁴ I’ve given this serious thought as a worldbuilder, without actually asking Wells. If the Raksura shared the same setting with the Rising World, it’d have to be on the far side of the planet, on another continent, but the magic systems and lines of power do not correspond. I think the history of the Rising World forestalls it being the same setting.

⁵ I’ve mentioned before that I might not be a fanfic writer, but I borrow ideas and things from books to put into my TTRPGs. The Raksura and Fell wound up in a TTRPG scenario I ran, sticking them in the old Forbidden City Module. The PCs wound up getting caught up in their conflict.

⁶ Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy is a new novelette that breaks this, and gives us a point of view entirely divorced from Murderbot’s.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Film Review: Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle

Stunning animation and nonstop action

The long-awaited Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle continues to break box office records for anime storytelling. Infinity Castle is the latest adventure of the popular anime Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba), which is known for its high-quality animation, likeable characters, and intense action sequences. Demon Slayer tells the story of the pure-hearted, hard-working child Tanjiro, who comes home to find his widowed mother and young siblings violently slaughtered by demons. The lone survivor is his younger sister Nezuko, who has been infected by the attacking monster and has turned into a demon. Initially violent, speechless, and unable to tolerate the sun, she eventually overcomes her murderous instincts and becomes an ally to Tanjiro. He begins a journey to heal his sister and become a formal demon slayer, and trains under a team of elite slayers known as Hashira, who battle violent demons controlled by the thousand-year-old villain Muzan. Tanjiro is joined by other students, including the comically fearful but secretly strong Zenitsu and the loudmouth wild boy Inosuke. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is the latest feature film to present a major story arc in the ongoing epic.

The most recent season of the Demon Slayer anime ended on a dramatic cliffhanger as the slayers’ intense confrontation with their enemy Muzan ended with them falling into an alternate-dimension-style, infinite multi-level structure. Infinity Castle picks up immediately with the falling slayers beginning the fight against the elite demons who are waiting for them in the vast surreal space. Unlike many other anime feature films, Demon Slayer films are directly connected to, and essential for, the primary ongoing anime arc. As a result, if viewers haven’t been watching the series, they may feel somewhat disconnected from the adventure and the emotions underlying the action. Even for those who have been watching, there are some moments that make it seem as if we may have missed something in the continuity. However, Infinity Castle is highly entertaining, despite some shortcomings, and well worth the effort to see it on a big screen.

Demon Slayer has always stood out for its stunning animation and was this year’s winner for Best Animation at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards in addition to winning Best Continuing Series. Although the series always excels in fluid, innovative, and intense animation (even when the plot becomes repetitive), Infinity Castle takes high-quality animation to a new level. The titular Infinity Castle dazzles with a perfect fusion of color, light, geometry, and movement as the characters navigate the enormous Inception-like space. Beyond the grand-scale effects, simpler art expressions (such as an airy fall of snow in a backstory, or the fantastical eyes of many of the characters) add to the immersive art style.

While the Demon Slayer anime periodically slows down to focus on human interaction and character growth, Infinity Castle is all about fighting. Demon Slayer often presents a character’s backstory in the form of flashbacks during a fight, and the new film fully leans into that style of storytelling. As a result, characters who are not involved in the main sets of physical duels disappear almost entirely from the story. This is true for lead characters Nezuko and Inosuke, who get very little screen time. On the other hand, the succession of battles with the accompanying backstories (in some cases, very long backstories) makes for a very long film. Among the primary battles is Hashira Shinobu’s poison battle with the sociopathic, murderously polite demon Doma. Another key fight is Zenitsu against his former training partner Kaigaku, whose cruelty is shown in the previous Hashira Training Arc season. Zenitsu is a unique character whose humorously fearful comic relief personality is contrasted with the lethal killer he becomes when he blacks out. The Jekyll-and-Hyde effect is always entertaining. However, in Infinity Castle, Zenitsu arrives in his lethal state and remains consciously engaged with his enemy throughout the battle. Other than a two-second backstory glimpse, we only see the killer version of Zenitsu. This stylistic change makes the battle particularly powerful and creates a significant shift in the tone of the narration.

The primary battle of the film is between the protagonist Tanjiro and the returning upper rank demon Akaza. Instead of being aided by his usual besties Inosuke and Zenitsu, Tanjiro fights with his long-time, stoic, young mentor Giyu, who finally gets enough screen time to lean into his awesomeness. Their battle is a callback to the critical final fight scene in Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, where the demon Akaza battles the confidently powerful and kind-hearted Rengoku. The original battle went beyond the usual tropes and created an emotional connection between the two evenly matched opponents. It left an impact that lasted long after the film ended. In contrast, the key battle in Infinity Castle is characterized by the fighters’ disdain for each other. The normally kind Tanjiro is focused on revenge, and the always serious Giyu is focused on the larger goal of killing Muzan. A traditional element in anime battles is the trash-talking or persuasive arguing that accompanies the physical fighting. However, Tanjiro is too angry to engage, and Giyu (in my favorite line of the film) stoically announces that he just doesn’t like talking. As a result, the film uses a lengthy one-sided backstory to explain Akaza’s personality. The story is tragic and thoughtful, but also very long, and occurs in a climactic moment of the battle. While integrated backstory is standard in Demon Slayer and many other anime, this backstory lasts around forty minutes, creating almost a separate movie. Depending on your storytelling tastes, this may be a welcome bonus or a too lengthy diversion from both the larger story and the momentum of the current intense fight.

While Mugen Train was a cohesive, linear, and complete story, Infinity Castle is the beginning of the long final war between the demons and the slayers with the fate of humanity in the balance. With a large cast of characters and a story that starts right in the middle of the action, Infinity Castle may seem jarring and intense. But the overall effect is entertaining, engaging, and stunningly artistic as we progress to the ultimate battles that lie ahead.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Stunning animation
• Lots of backstory
• Intense fighting

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Film Review: T.I.M.

Or, Tediously Imitative Movie

The British robot thriller T.I.M. was released in the year after the first M3GAN film, and it seems to be interested in some of the same questions about the bond we form with our electronic assistants, but the way it goes about it doesn’t reach the same skill level. Whereas the titular robot in M3GAN has as its primary function the protection of a child, and then takes the meaning of “protection” to horrifying extremes, the robot in T.I.M. is a more vaguely defined “manservant” who one day becomes fixated on the concept of love and suddenly decides that his owner doesn’t need her husband anymore.

Our protagonist is Abi, a robotics engineer who has started a new job at a Big Tech company that is planning to launch a new model of human-sized and -shaped robot assistants. Her assignment is to fix the fine motor skills of the mechanical hands, which still can’t control their grip with enough precision.  As part of the perks of her new position, the company has provided her with a luxurious smart home in the countryside and her own domestic robot to test. This doesn’t make her husband, Paul, too happy: he’s currently unemployed and going through a personal crisis of purpose, and it doesn’t help that T.I.M. performs better than him at satisfying Abi’s every need as a cook, gardener, shopping advisor, and foot massager. Paul begins to resent T.I.M.’s presence because it makes him feel redundant, and soon enough, T.I.M. comes to share the same opinion about Paul.

Australian actor Eamon Farren does a convincing job at portraying T.I.M.’s deceptively polite demeanor, letting its inner aggressiveness show only in the tiny twitch of an eyebrow or a lip. The rhythm of speech he chooses is too distractingly reminiscent of Brent Spiner’s carefully neutral delivery for the character Data, but the resemblance ends there. T.I.M. has no admiration for humans. Its only desire is to serve Abi—whether she likes it or not.

T.I.M.’s turn to full villainy is the movie’s weakest point. It was a more interesting character when it maneuvered behind the scenes to sow mistrust between Abi and Paul, planting clues here and there to lead her to suspect infidelity (which we learn has happened before). After its scheme is exposed, however, T.I.M. resorts to clichéd villain lines (“It doesn't have to end this way,” “You’re only delaying the inevitable,” etc.) that don’t sound believable.

In fact, T.I.M.’s motivation is confusing since the beginning. The scenes at Abi’s workplace show that her boss likes to skip quality checks to speed up production, which gives a hint that T.I.M. may not be following a very carefully written code, but even taking that into account, there’s no conceivable reason why it would harbor erotic desires for Abi. After a very basic conversation about the topic of love, T.I.M. starts stealing glances at her while she’s dressing, changes its hairstyle to match her browsing preferences, and adopts a creepy habit of smelling her clothes in private. Again, within the stated rules of this world, nothing points to T.I.M. having even the capacity for that type of desire. Its obsession with Abi happens because the movie needs something for you to be scared of.

It’s irritating to watch Abi’s continued refusal to believe Paul’s increasingly solid proof of T.I.M.’s true intentions. The broken trust implied in the backstory of their relationship can only go so far toward explaining why she’d be so slow to notice the obvious. The movie goes out of its way to set up the many ways T.I.M. can falsify images and sound, but somehow Abi forgets that information until her marriage has reached an irreversible state of crisis. T.I.M. is quite proficient at making Paul look like an incorrigible adulterer, but Abi’s obliviousness to the double agenda of its precisely timed malicious remarks stretches credulity.

There’s a hint of an interesting development regarding the enmity that grows between T.I.M. and Paul, in that Abi is trying to get pregnant, the one task at which T.I.M. can’t substitute Paul. But the script doesn’t flesh out T.I.M.’s personality with enough depth to explore that side of its jealousy. Also, Paul’s replaceability at home could have been better contrasted with Abi’s replaceability at work, given that we hear her boss explicitly describe her as a diversity hire, but the movie doesn’t do anything with that idea either.

T.I.M. is a mystery with no surprises, scary enough to justify giving it 1:41 minutes of your life, but not imaginative enough to be worth remembering afterwards.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Interview with Sean CW Korsgaard

Sean CW Korsgaard is a U.S. Army veteran, award-winning freelance journalist, author, editor, and publicist who has worked with Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Baen Books, and Writers of the Future, and recently became the editor of Anvil and Battleborn magazines. His first anthology, Worlds Long Lost, was released in December 2022, as was his debut short story, “Black Box.” He lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife and child, along with, depending on who you ask, either far too many or far too few books.

PW: Tell us about your new venture.

SK: So, the new venture!

Howard Andrew Jones and I conceived Battleborn shortly after Tales of the Magician's Skull was sold to new ownership, in part wondering how to improve upon the concept, in part wondering how to get a magazine under more stable footing. Though launch was delayed because of his death, what you see now with Battleborn is that same concept brought to life. The magazine 70k words an issue of cutting-edge sword-and-sorcery and heroic fantasy, with a focus on character-driven storytelling and hard knuckle action. Each issue will have some classic genre reprints, and our first two include a Michael Shea and David Drake story that have both been out of print for decades. We will also have around 10k words of non-fiction, ranging from genre history to book reviews, and even a comic that pays homage to Jack Vance and 2000AD. Through our crowdfunder, we hope to launch with three issues in 2026, and be able to pay if not pro-rates, close to it. We're also planning on rolling out audiobooks, merchandise, comics and even a line of reprints as resources allow, to keep the magazine more sustainable, and do so under a profit sharing agreement with the authors.

Our first issue is fully funded as of last week, our second is about halfway there, and we have well over a month to raise all we can to see Battleborn take to the frontlines of fantasy next year in bold fashion.

Another final touch you may appreciate: from first issue to final, Howard's name will be on our masthead as Editor Emeritus, a standard and role model for all who seek to submit to the magazine that, I hope, shall help carry on his spirit and love of this genre.

PW: So tell me a bit about the new authors you are looking to write pieces for, and how their work matches up with the genre reprints you are doing at the same time.

SK: We started with the authors who are well known in sword-and-sorcery - guys like John C. Hocking, James Enge, CL Werner, ones who have the well-earned reputations within the genre and are known by sword-and-sorcery buffs. Anyone familiar with Howard's tenure at Tales of the Magician's Skull should see a lot of old favorites among the ranks at Battleborn. Likewise, a lot of familiar heroes to genre fans - Werner's Shintaro Oba, Robert Rhodes' Gabriela de Quetar, Steven L. Shrewsbury's Rogan to name a few.

Then I went gunning for a few big names, with some outside draw - Michael Stackpole has a story in a setting very much inspired by Roger Zelazny, and Christopher Ruocchio will prove as adept at sword-and-sorcery as he has space opera. Speaking with a few others about the future, too - one author who might not make it in the first three issues (they're under deadline for their next novel with Tor) came to me with a wild idea for a setting I can't wait to showcase in a future issue.

The indies will prove to be the big wildcards for a lot of readers. Schyler Hernstrom has been a mainstay of small press sword-and-sorcery, and he's pulling double duty with a comic strip in the magazine, and a perfect introduction to his work, a novella that I feel is sword-and-sorcery's answer to Le Guin's Omelas quandary. Alyssa Hazel may be our biggest surprise - she's an expecting mother who handsells her self-published books at conventions, primarily horror and science fiction. I saw her reading Clarke Ashton Smith and asked if she had ever taken a stab at sword-and-sorcery, and her story Battleborn is her first - and given she turned in a gripping tale of a warrior with a Mongolian death worm on her heels that blew me away, no doubt the first of many more.

As for those reprints, I started with one key metric: A list of classic authors and stories, and compared them to how long they've been out of print. Our first two, Pearls of the Vampire Queen by Michael Shea and The Mantichore by David Drake, have both been out of print for decades, and Battleborn will be the first time either will appear in digital or audio form!

If all goes well and we fund to the level we need to, all remaining space will be going to an open submission period in October - we're looking at 50-60k words up for grabs split across three issues, and as excited as I am to showcase the authors and fiction we have already, THAT is something I'm looking even more forward to, knock on wood.

PW: I see on the crowdfunding page that additional artwork is part of the stretch goals, should the campaign succeed. Tell me about the importance for you of including artwork in sword and sorcery stories.

SK: Artwork is fundamental to the sword-and-sorcery subgenre - how many people were first turned into reading Conan and Elric by Frank Frazetta and Michael Whelan long before they knew the names of Robert E. Howard or Michael Moorcock?

It's also by far the most expensive part of the production process, I don't mind telling you. In spite of that, every story in Battleborn with have a black-and-white interior illustration. Two, if we hit that stretch goals.

I also wish to emphasize something here: AI Art will NEVER appear in Battleborn.

PW: That's great to hear about AI art being verboten. So what is it like to edit sword and sorcery, be it a reprint or new, in this day and age where sword and sorcery has a lot of competition from other fantasy sub-genres?

SK: Truthfully, I find it wonderfully refreshing. I've edited a LOT of fiction, from military science fiction to cozy fantasy, but getting to work in my favorite genre, sword-and-sorcery, is incredibly rewarding.

Even within sword-and-sorcery fandom, the approach we are taking with Battleborn involves a specific focus that maybe our contemporaries might not. For example, given the action-oriented focus of our fiction, I am giving special care to editing all the combat, that it feels tactile, authentic and exhilarating.

And that competition from other fantasy subgenres is part of why its so exciting - romantasy and LitRPG are having thier moment, but there's undeniably also an appetite and a market for more traditional heroic fantasy.

PW: So what feeds your brain lately in the heroic fantasy space, besides the fine works you plan on bringing to the public with Battleborn?

SK: So I read a lot of things at any given time, but lately? Scott Oden's new collection is wonderful, and I'm reading Elizabeth Bear's novel The Folded Sky for a review in Analog. Analog has been especially wonderful because it means I'm still reading science fiction, as opposed to fantasy entirely.

The big thing has been re-reading a ton of the sword-and-sorcery classics. There is another project I was working on with Howard - do remind me to read you in on that sometime - which means I have had to read if not the entire body of work of close to two dozen authors, close to it. I'm making my way through David Gemmell at the moment, he really was a master at staging his action scenes.

That has been one of the best parts of doing a deep dive like this - project or not, it has been highly educational, each of those authors has a unique touch or lesson to take away from their work.

PW: What else do you want readers to know about Battleborn, and where can they support it?

SK: For writers and artists? I want to be a fair dealer, cut you in where I can, and create the kind of magazine you will puff up with pride to have your work featured in.

For the industry types? I am sure there will some stumbles and some growing pains along the way, but I hope to do my best to create the kind of magazine worthy of being included in the company of such worthy outlets, from Analog to Clarkesworld.

For sword-and-sorcery fans? I hope in time that you trust our logo to strand for everything that you love in our subgenre, two-fisted action, and hardfighting heroes facing fearful odds, and with each issue, you feel that same rush you did the first time you picked up your first Conan or Elric paperback.

PW: Excellent. Where can readers find out more, and support the campaign?

SK: Our crowdfund is right here - we are a few hundred shy of guaranteeing digital releases of three issues next year, and at 10k and 15k, physical releases for two and three as well!

Longterm? battlebornmagazine.com, as well as everywhere fine books and magazines are sold.


Thank you, Sean!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Video Game Review: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 by Sandfall Interactive

Jack, I want you to paint me like one of your French games.

In the distance, across the vast sea, a daunting number stands as a beacon of mortality for those who live in Lumiere. Every year, the Paintress erases the number on the monolith, and every year she replaces it with one less, the number corresponding to the age of the sacrificial citizens of Lumiere. It has become the tradition of those in Lumiere to watch as those they love become flower petals on the winds of fate, to enjoy what little time they have left. But there are those who refuse to sit back; there are those who have no desire to let the Paintress take away their loved ones. These are the Expeditioners, the brave soldiers who set sail in hopes of locating the Paintress, of ending the war she sees fit to wage upon the innocent souls of Lumiere. But over the last seventy-six years, no expedition has yet been successful. Will Expedition 33 prosper where everyone else has failed?

The first few moments of Expedition 33 were enough to inform me that I was in for something special. As the camera zooms in over a distorted Eiffel Tower, the opening song, "Lumiere", grips with an enchanting sound, the prelude to an incredible soundtrack. The cutscene then focuses on Robert Pattin—sorry, Gustave as he gravely gazes in the distance toward the hulking Monolith, its aura threatening despite my lack of knowledge. Maelle and Gustave speak, and the dialogue feels natural, the characters’ histories in place, their ease apparent. The character models and facial animations, even the hair physics, all look wonderful. I’m already in.

This game is gorgeous. And French, very French. For instance, there is a set of “baguette” costumes for each character in which they don black pants with a black and white striped shirt, black suspenders, a red beret, and a baguette wrapped in a red and white sash. While the story can be dark and devastating at times, the developers did their best to add a bit of light to balance out their chiaroscuro foundation. The art style, from character to design to the splashes of paint used to decorate the UI, invites the player to stare at the screen. The game’s world, influenced by the extravagant and grandiose Belle Époque, creates a dazzling atmosphere. Each area is robust and filled with character and color, bursting with an enigmatic history of some long-forgotten battle. Even the world map, once it becomes available to the player, is a gorgeous proof of the ability of Sandfall Interactive’s veteran developers. Despite being this studio’s first game, it isn't the developers' first rodeo, and every ounce of love and effort poured into every facet of this game is evidence.

Exploration is simple and straightforward. While limited at first, the game opens up to allow for more traversal options, as is standard. Though I do wish there was some better form of fast travel, at least in the post-game, the map is captivating enough to observe over and over again as you pick up your last music records and pictos. While it’s exciting to scan each individual area for loot and discover little trinkets and mini-bosses throughout the map, I found that some areas that looked explorable were barred by invisible collision detectors. I don't mind keeping blinders on; a bit of suspension of disbelief never killed anyone, but when there is a rock that is less than a foot high, I should be able to climb atop (especially if I have a jump button and can do the same to other rocks of the same size in other areas). I also found that sometimes the developers created little hidden spaces that felt like they were meant to be discovered, only to find nothing waiting for me. If it happened once or twice, I wouldn't mind, but these were both frequent occurrences.

Before we get back to the good stuff, I must urge Sandfall to remove all platforming challenges from their future games. The jumping mechanic is serviceable, no doubt about it, but is it good? No, and it doesn't need to be. The Gestral beach challenges, where platforming was necessary, were some of the lowlights of the game. Though optional, they still interrupted my enjoyment of the game. It is my strong belief that if your game isn't built for platforming, it should not include any kind of platforming challenge. And what did I get for my toil? A costume.

I’ve spoken a bit about player input for exploration, but what about combat? Well, that part is absolutely brilliant, and if this wins game of the year, it will be the primary reason. Expedition 33 takes the classic turn-based JRPG-based team combat system and adds a massive twist: Souls-like dodging and parrying. I played on normal difficulty, and the game put up quite a challenge at times. Easy mitigates some of the reliance on dodges and parries (the former easier to pull off, the latter more difficult, though it offers a reward), while the harder difficulty will absolutely necessitate them. I find this to be a terrific balance on the part of the developer as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has an enticing story, characters, and world that should be enjoyed by players with lower skill as well as those looking for a challenge. Parries and standard attacks increase the AP (Attack Point) gauge by one, which in turn allows each character to use special abilities. In addition, weapons, Lumina, and Pictos alter combat so significantly that swapping them almost feels like playing a different game.

Speaking of variety, each character’s play style is so significantly different from one another that learning each one is a joy. Sandfall didn't simply alter or tweak the genre for the sake of tweaking it; every combat change they made was for the betterment of the genre. While I don't expect (nor want) every game to adapt something similar throughout any future games in the turn-based RPG genre, I would be shocked if this interactive, versatile, and diverse combat system doesn't heavily influence other creators. It should, it really should.

There’s more than one way this game takes influence from the Souls games: bosses. Bosses and mini-bosses litter the map and the storyline and challenge the player in ways they hadn't been before. New boss animations and abilities constantly kept me engaged and excited for the next encounter. The design on both bosses and standard enemies is wonderful and inventive, matching the world and creating enticing battles throughout the entire runtime. Good luck with Simon if you get there.

If the combat system is the roast beef of this French dip, the art, music, and UI are the baguette that surrounds it, then the story and its characters are the au jus, submerging all and giving extra flavor to every ounce of this fantastic game. There are huge moments, small gentle moments, character reveals, motivations, and growth that all drive the game forward. I was sucked in by the nuance each character showed and the relationships they forged along the way. The vulnerable decision to divulge more information back at camp always intrigued me (though I wish there was something to tell you when another character was ready to speak with you, as it was easy to avoid camp for long stretches of time). As one who does not wish to spoil anything story-related, I’ll have to leave it minimal and vague.

Despite my enjoyment, I had three primary issues with the story/revelatory mechanisms. First, while the game is meant to convey an air of mystery, there are many moments that feel like the developer is holding back for the sake of holding back; these moments feel like a contrivance and don't serve the plot, like Sandfall's hand is visibly holding back pages from you. When the concealment is done with care, it works well, when it isn't, it is quite noticeable. Second, the pacing is fantastic… until the third act. If you like to explore before finishing your game, make sure you don't start the third act, as it’s just one mission with no warning (as opposed to the first and second acts, which run for multiple hours across multiple missions). Third, there are moments where the game reveals things to the characters, though the player has no idea what these things are. Instead of feeling excited alongside the characters, in the moments you don’t feel like you’re part of their experience, but on the outside looking in.

While I noticed these small issues throughout my playthrough, they pale in comparison to how phenomenal this game is. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 delivers on every front that it intends to (minus the platforming). With such charming characters and engaging systems, it’s no wonder this game found immediate success. If this is Sandfall Interactive’s first swing at their own take on the genre, I can only imagine what they have in store for us next. I would recommend this to JRPG lovers, Souls-like lovers, and anyone who enjoys a unique world encircled with wonderful music, great characters and story, and engaging, unforgettable combat. And let me not forget the heavy helping of melancholic whimsy that accompanies the player until the very last brushstroke of this fantastic adventure.

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The Math

Objective Assessment: 9/10

Bonus: +1 for unique gameplay, characters, and world. +1 for visual splendor and engaging soundtrack.

Penalties: -1 for obscure for the sake of being obscure. -1 for any platforming levels.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.