Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is objectively excellent, but also, it’s as if someone sat down, made a list of everything that appeals to me, and then devoted themselves to putting the entire list into one beautiful game.

I had trouble with Hollow Knight when I first tried to play it at the beginning of 2020, but I’m happy I returned to it under better circumstances.

To begin with, the game isn’t as hard as I thought it was. I suspect the problems I was experiencing the first time around weren’t so much a matter of the game being difficult and more a matter of me being completely exhausted, which was exacerbated by an incipient case of the infamous Nintendo Switch controller drift.

I’m in a much better place now, psychologically speaking, and thankfully I managed to get a new set of Joy-Con controllers before the pandemic decimated the market.

Hollow Knight is a somewhat dark game palette-wise, so it helps that I’m now playing it at night in pitch darkness while using the Switch as a handheld console instead of trying to squint past the glare on a large television screen. A lot of the hidden areas are indicated by various faint sounds instead of visual cues, so playing it at night in near-total silence also helps.

This is a bit off-topic, but I hope that the Nintendo Switch release of Skyward Sword provides a similar set of “better circumstances” so that I can finally enjoy the game without all the horrible frustrations that accompanied the highly flawed Wiimote motion controls.

American Dream, New Jersey

True to my ambition to visit abandoned malls in New Jersey once I got vaccinated, I went to the American Dream mall yesterday afternoon.

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And this entire place is completely empty. Just, completely empty. Except for a skeleton crew of retail employees at the stores and a few maintenance staff tending to the plants and flowers, there's no one there. I have an entire camera reel of prime "abandoned mall photos," and they're surreal. American Dream looks like how I imagine the international terminal of an airport during an apocalypse. Like, very shiny and modern and clean, but totally empty.

So did I buy anything in this mall? No, of course not. Don't be silly. I don't have money. I just came to poke at a strange and bloated undead corpse of capitalism, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Re: American Dream, New Jersey

Anyway, now I'm wondering how you get the job of being a member of the gardening staff at a high-end abandoned mall that was a ruin before it even opened, because the people I saw tending to the plants and misting the flowers yesterday looked very peaceful and happy. It was some next-level Studio Ghibli magic, like Castle in the Sky except real.

If anyone asks, that's very much where I would like to see myself in five years.