Bound to Vengeance is a throwback revenge thriller with a particularly nasty streak. Eve is a young woman who finally finds a way to break free from her captor and escape. When she tries to find the keys for the van, she discovers a huge file of Polaroids of other young women, just like her, captured and chained up by the man she knocked out and chained in her place. Now she’s on a quest to free all the victims and force her tormentor to watch.
If you haven’t picked up on a trend in my gaming coverage at Sketching Details, I’ll clue you in on some constants. The games I enjoy are horror games, rhythm games, and rpg/adventure games. I like Rogue-like mechanics and the ability to play a game over and over with new experiences each time. I am fiercely loyal to franchises I’ve enjoyed in the past and will always give a series the benefit of a doubt if something goes wrong.
Monster Train is a roguelike deck building combat game. You play as the Champions of Hell. All of your power is attached to the last surviving remnants of the Pyre that powers Hell. You have been tasked with leading the train that takes you straight to the core of the inferno. The only thing that is stopping you is the Gilded Wing. They attack you at every juncture, invading your train with a wave of high powered magical soldiers who fight their way up the four levels of your train to the last fragment of the Pyre. If the Pyre is destroyed, you lose. If you defeat the army, you are rewarded with new cards, new artifacts that grant different powers and abilities to your train, and the opportunity to choose your path through a variety of merchants and treasures leading to the final stop.
All of this sets up my expectations for The Greatest Showman. I know a lot about P.T. Barnum. I was obsessed with the Barnum musical growing up and read many books on his life and the history of his circus. It should come as no surprise that a man who is quoted as saying “there is a sucker born every minute” is not a great person. That’s the kindest way I can say that I am tired of the glorification of a truly awful, manipulative, exploitative human being whose only concern was making money at the cost of human and animal safety and happiness.
The Child’s Play remake tries to be a little bit of everything. It’s social commentary on conglomerates and the necessity of interconnected technology in our lives. It’s a heartwarming (at times) story of a boy and his mom trying to get a fresh start in a new city. It’s an evil doll film with an ambulatory-by-design piece of technology set to have free will. It also riffs on some of the themes in the original series, including the reliability of child testimony in criminal cases and the power of imagination.
