Trabia Garden

When 2020 was looming, I posted an entry about the media that had made a real impact on me in the 2010s. I had fun with this, but it's hard to narrow things down across an entire decade! Maybe I should start doing these media roundups more frequently? Every half-decade, perhaps?

Oh, hey, it's 2025.

In alphabetical order, here are ten canons from the last five years that I think I'm going to remember! Note that this is media I originally experienced between 2020 and 2024, rather than necessarily being media that was originally released in that period.


1. Celeste. One of my absolute favourite games. Great music, charming characters, satisfying gameplay. It's tough, but I rarely found it frustrating, and I was delighted to realise how much I'd improved when I went back to replay from the beginning. Playing Celeste is a lot like playing the piano, learning the right pattern and timing of button presses through repetition until you can run smoothly through a level. I'll often find myself replaying Celeste levels when I've got a little time and nothing else is grabbing me, in the same way I'll often take a moment to sit at the piano and play a few pieces I know by heart.

2. The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. The relationship between these siblings is just so awful and intimate and fascinating; I can't get enough of it. I want to swim around in all this hideous codependency. When I first drafted this list at the start of the year, I noted, There's a chance I'm being too hasty with this one; I discovered it right before 2024 ended, so I haven't had time to be sure it's going to be a lasting interest. But, having had my mind obliterated by the latest chapter, I can now say with confidence that I am never going to stop thinking about this horrible game.

3. Lost. What an experience! I love it when characters are stranded together and forced to bond under high pressure, and this is an absolutely stellar example. Went in some wild directions, too; I said 'what the fuck' so many times while watching this show. Jack Shephard is a wreck of a man in a way that I find fascinating.

4. Omori. This game fucked me up. A lot of it is fun and charming! And then there are the parts that severely messed with my head. Two separate aspects gave me trouble sleeping. Some really interesting uses of gameplay, including one of the best-executed plot reveals I've ever seen.

5. Person of Interest. In a lot of case-of-the-week shows, the case itself is the least interesting part for me. In Person of Interest, I found the individual weekly cases absolutely gripping. The fact that the murders they're investigating haven't happened yet gives each case a living main character, usually the would-be victim, which makes them so much more fun to watch. I really enjoy Reese as a character, too.

6. Persona 5. I picked up Persona 5 in lockdown, when it was heavily discounted. I'd heard good things about the Persona series, but I'd always been intimidated by how long and complicated the games sounded. Still, it was 2020, and I wasn't able to leave the house, so it seemed like the right time for a hundred-hour RPG. It was an incredible decision. What a stylish, fun game! What great kids! I played it non-stop for a month and a half and had an absolute blast.

7. Persona 4. I was a little concerned about going back to Persona 4 after playing 5. I'd loved Persona 5 so much; what if the previous game was a disappointment? But I ended up loving Persona 4 just as passionately, largely because of Yosuke; he's a good-hearted but slightly shitty disaster of a teenage boy who's helplessly in love with the protagonist, and I find him endlessly endearing.

8. Severance. I've always been compelled by stories about weird things happening to people's memories, and by stories about people developing intense relationships while isolated together, so Severance is essentially the perfect canon for me. By a long way, it's the most gripping show I've ever watched. I'm so nervous when I sit down for a new episode; I never know what to expect!

9. Taskmaster. What a show. It makes me laugh like nothing else. The way it keeps a single set of contestants for each series adds a lot to the experience; you really get to know the contestants and their approaches to these ridiculous tasks over the course of a series. The New Zealand and Australian versions are just as great to watch; Greg Davies remains an unparalleled Taskmaster, but, if I'm honest, Paul Williams is my favourite assistant.

Wait, that's only nine! Okay, I'm going to add a tenth, but this is definitely cheating:

10. Death Note. I absolutely did not first experience Death Note between 2020 and 2024; I've enjoyed it since 2008! But I feel it sort of fits in my 'canons of the last five years' post because I got back into it in 2023 in a way I'd never been into it before. I watched the stage musical, absolutely lost my mind and spent months thinking about nothing but Light Yagami. Let's say the tenth canon here is Death Note: The Musical.

Honourable mention to The Quarry for the burst of intense ficwriting it inspired in me! I wasn't that drawn in by the canon itself, but the potential in Travis and Laura's relationship really grabbed me by the throat.

EDIT: WAIT, I just thought of a legitimate number ten!

10-2: Die Hard. We were locked down for Christmas in 2020, and I was sorry that I couldn't visit my family, but the upside was that I joined in my housemates' Christmas tradition of watching Die Hard. This film was such a delightful surprise for me! I went in expecting a badass, stoic action hero; I got a desperate, terrified mess. I found John McClane's suffering so compelling. What a blast.

I invited people on Tumblr to ask me questions about videogames; here are my answers!

As these answers were originally written for an audience that didn't necessarily read my Dreamwidth, I may repeat some sentiments I've already expressed here.


Questions from th_esaurus:

Hardest game you’ve played?

Probably Celeste! It was worth the struggle. I crawled through the main storyline, inch by inch, with ferocious determination, and then I replayed it three times afterwards because I was so delighted to see how much I'd improved.


( And lots more rambling about videogames. )


Finally (we're still on keltena's questions):

If you could immerse yourself in any game for one day, which game would it be? What would you do?

A lot of my favourite games would be too dangerous to visit personally, I think! Or I love them on the basis of their characters, and I'd never actually manage to have a conversation with those characters if I spent a day there. Final Fantasy VIII? Good luck talking to Squall Leonhart. Final Fantasy X? Yuna would absolutely talk to me if I approached her, but she's a very private person, so it'd never get beyond surface-level polite conversation about the weather.

Fortunately, I have the perfect answer to this question! I would go to the Pokémon world and admire all the Pokémon and maybe cuddle a Bulbasaur if I'm lucky.


If you have any videogame-related questions of your own, feel free to ask in the comments! It may surprise you to learn this, but I like to talk about videogames.

I started replaying Horizon Zero Dawn, because I desperately needed something to distract me from attempting all the way-too-hard postgame content in Celeste.

My Celeste death count is now over 14,000 and I'm nowhere near finishing everything. I feel pretty bad for Theo in all the timelines where I died in front of him, leaving him trapped in crystal and surrounded by cosmic horrors.

At one point I replayed the story, just to see how much better I was at it now. My original playthrough: twelve and a half hours, 3,500 deaths. My second playthrough: four hours, 1,000 deaths. I can't believe I've improved enough to shave 60% off my original time.

The story of Celeste is so good. I'd like to write fanfiction, but the game itself already deals with so many themes I love; there's nothing left for me to add! Characters bonding under intense pressure, characters having complicated relationships with dark reflections of themselves, environments that reshape themselves to reflect the people passing through: it's all there already.


Anyway! Yes! Horizon Zero Dawn!

It's so interesting to replay the opening of Horizon Zero Dawn with context. I understand what's going on now!

When Aloy first starts using the Focus, does it detect that she's a young child and start trying to teach her to read? It displays 'BOW' in big letters when she's handed a bow, and then the text turns green when she says, 'Bow?' That's a cute detail, although, to be honest, Focus, I'd start the kid out with lowercase.

(I'm going to ignore the later scene where the Focus shows 'BOW' to an adult Aloy, because I like this theory and I refuse to accept the fact that it probably doesn't hold up. IT'S JUST CHECKING THAT SHE STILL KNOWS HOW TO READ.)

Everyone's so hot for Aloy and it's hilarious. They're all so into her! Everyone she meets is just hitting on her, all the time.

'Time for Bast to get some sleep!' Bast proclaims, like he thinks it's cool to announce that you're going to bed in the third person. I snorted aloud.

Did Nil kill his 'hunting' partner? This didn't occur to me when I first played, because Nil tells you about his partner when you've just met him and haven't yet realised quite how horny for murder he is. Nil says his partner went ahead without him and 'we'd talked about this kind of behaviour', and he later proclaims himself to be 'just a traveller with a bow, a concern about the state of these lands and a missing partner' in a way that doesn't sound especially innocent. If his partner ruined Nil's fun by killing bandits without him, I can see Nil going, 'Look, we talked about this and now I'm going to kill you instead.'

Apparently, if you clear out the first bandit camp without Nil, he says, 'I'm glad I stayed to watch. Every kill you made, I pricked my fingers on an arrowhead just to feel part of things.'

Meanwhile, if you don't meet Nil until after you've cleared out all the bandit camps, he invites you to meet him elsewhere. If you do, he says, 'I'm so glad you came. In a way, I feel like I already know you. Every pile of corpses was like reading your journal.'

Nil is so weird and it's great. It's good to know what you're passionate about, and he is passionate about murder.

I conquered the mountain in Celeste! It took me twelve and a half hours and I died 3,557 times.

The Celestial Resort was particularly good at killing me: seven hundred and thirty deaths. Given that I died there, you could say it was my last resort. You could say it seven hundred and thirty times.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this game nearly as much as I did. On the surface, it doesn't sound particularly enjoyable to play a game where you're dying, on average, every thirteen seconds. But I genuinely had a great time. There were a handful of points where I started to lose patience, but I usually felt I was constantly improving and making progress, which made the game feel satisfying rather than frustrating.

(Also satisfying: going back and redoing the early levels once I'd beaten the game, just to see how much quicker I could do them now. I'd improved so much!)

Celeste is hard, but it's rarely unfair. It's not just hard as a 'screw you' to the player; it's presenting you with a challenge that can be overcome with determination. It earnestly believes in you and wants you to succeed.

And it's so charming! I really wasn't expecting that! I like that there's a boss battle where you're just trying really hard to give the boss a hug as she earnestly tries to murder you.

I'm a big fan of physical locations that reshape themselves to reflect the psyche of whoever passes through them. Much like Silent Hill, Celeste Mountain looks inside you and tests you by forcing you to confront yourself.

If you're curious about Celeste, it's included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. A few tips:

- If you're playing on a keyboard, you can remap the controls in the options. I'd recommend remapping jump/dash/grab so they're not all in a line, as the default setting means it's really hard to remember which is which. I put them on S, W and A respectively.

- If a level seems to demand impossibly perfect timing, there may be a simpler solution that you're missing. Often, when a level started to frustrate me, I ended up realising that my approach was wrong.

- Zipping through a level is satisfying when you get the hang of it! When you're struggling, though, calm down and slow down. At one point I threw myself unsuccessfully against one level for half an hour, took a break, slept, came back to the game, tried taking it slower and beat it within five minutes.


To my surprise and delight, there's a small but enthusiastic active Red Dwarf fanbase! I really thought the fandom would be a wasteland by now.

I've never confessed this anywhere online before, but I actually had a mild crush on Dave Lister when I was a kid. Apparently his unfortunate personal hygiene caused me no concern.

Anyway, I've located the exact moment in my rewatch that brought my crush on Lister straight back to me, and it's this scene from 'Holoship'. I'm slightly concerned.

(If you're wondering: the actor actually did do the ridiculous thing Lister does at the end of this clip, it was not scripted, he immediately regretted it.)

Q: Riona, do you really have time to write mini-reviews of every game you've ever played?
A: I absolutely don't.
Q: And yet.
A: And yet!

Some of these are more just reminiscences than reviews, but I've said at least a line or two about every game. Possibly. I've almost certainly forgotten about some.

For the most part these are listed alphabetically, so you can easily track down any games you're interested in, but games in a series are listed together, so, for example, 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma are all under Z for Zero Escape, and World of Final Fantasy comes under F. I've put a (LP) next to games I've only experienced through Let's Plays. Flash games, text adventures and electronic versions of card, tile or board games are not included.

Games I first played after originally posting this entry are marked with an asterisk.


( Thoughts on every game I've ever played, or close enough. )


I'm glad I've put this very important and necessary entry into the waiting world.