Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month?
Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends.
At the end of every month, we have an edition of Remap Recommends focused on video games. But in the middle of the month, we'll have an edition focused on...everything else. It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been reading, listening to, or watching.
Patrick Recommends: Blade Chimera
Very Cool Game Name: Blade Chimera
Platforms: Switch (it runs great on Steam Deck), PC
Developer: Ladybug, who I had not heard of but apparently has made a whole series of great games that are as good as, if not better than, Blade Chimera
On some level, it's my job to be aware of upcoming video games, and yet, it's always great when a video game can surprise you. Blade Chimera is one of those, a game I discovered while casually scrolling through Steam's chaotic new releases category and going "oh, what's that?" (It directly inspired our new video feature.)
A little more than 10 hours later, I had absolutely devoured this sci-fi take on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, full of delightful and colorful bouncing damage numbers, endorphin-releasing level up sequences, and genuinely thrilling (if a lil' easy) combat. The exploration leave something to be desired, as it's awfully straightforward and gatekept, but if you're looking to scratch an itch, Blade Chimera is happy to do so with sick ass guns. It's too bad the "true ending" is locked behind a boring collectible hunt, but eh...the "normal" ending is just fine.
This game put me on a Metroid kick, as I've already dumped a bunch of hours into another excellent (but dour!!!) one-of-these, Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist.
Rob Recommends: The Dynasty
Until Patrick Mahomes’ second season in the NFL, it seemed unthinkable that the predominance the New England Patriots enjoyed within the NFL would ever be repeated. For two decades, with only brief runs of poor form, the Patriots were consistently in contention to win the Super Bowl despite the league’s long-term efforts to make it impossible to build durable championship teams. They were also frequently embroiled in scandals that ranged from oddly petty to grimly violent. The Dynasty, streaming on AppleTV+, is a detailed history of this era, unpacking the team’s unlikely rise and chronicling the ways it breached rules and doubled-down on a reputation and attitude that made them widely loathed.
Post The Last Dance, every sports documentary seems to have a legacy-burnishing angle. The Dynasty seems like it is team owner Robert Kraft’s attempt to write himself into the history books as more than just the deep pockets behind the team. As he lays out, he was the nurturing, caring figure at the top of the Patriots in contrast to Bill Belichick‘s pathological coldness that crossed into cruelty. There might be an argument for Kraft’s importance in keeping Tom Brady from cracking under his coach’s psychological brutality, but even in this sympathetic telling, it’s hard to tell how much an impact Kraft really had in shaping the identity of the Patriots and the vaunted Patriot Way.
However, The Dynasty is more than just a reputation exercise. It’s a study in how miserable success can be. Players describe a tense atmosphere where at any moment you might find yourself replaced or publicly humiliated or both. Tom Brady is described by teammates as one of the most brutally picked-on members of the team, held to impossible standards almost to underscore to the rest of the team that if Bill can treat the greatest QB in history like a junior varsity scrub, imagine what he could do to the rest of them.
The dissonance is fascinating to watch. Everyone involved with the Patriots is proud of what they achieved, they love going back and telling the stories of their unlikely triumphs and the way they won in spite of a league that was always trying to hit them with exaggerated cheating charges. But the players especially seem ambivalent. They’re still relatively young, far from the age when they emerge like graying veterans to attend team events and reunions and everything is recast through rose-tinted lenses. They are a group of men nearing or in the midst of middle age, trying to explain how the place where they did the greatest work of their professional lives was a place of personal angst and dread, constantly on the verge of imploding from black hole of ambition and demand that was their coach. It‘s not the primary question of The Dynasty but it’s the most interesting one that takes increasing prominence in the background: was all this worth it?
Cado Recommends: Desierto
Itch.io Descriptipon: This is a game about getting lost.
Platform: Browser/HTML 5
Developer: José Sanz "Josyan"
You ever randomly scroll on itch.io and get bodied by a stunning piece of art? Well, that's what happened to me when I randomly came across Desierto one night. Something about the monochrome digital pointillism of the cover drew me instantly in, and the game itself did not disappoint (aside from the fact that I wish there were more). It's amazingly short. 25-ish minutes, free, and you can play it in your browser. If this piece of art calls to you the way it called to me, I implore you to jump in and spend a little time getting lost.