• Video Games

    5 Games I Actually Enjoyed Earning the Platinum Trophy For 

    October 7, 2024 - By 

    I love the idea of being the kind of person who has hundreds of platinum trophies. Unfortunately, it’s also incredibly rare for me to want to platinum a game. Platinums are a big commitment. Seeking a platinum for a game suggests that you loved it enough to spend even more time with it after completion – in some cases, hours and hours of more time spent on the usual trophy related activities. Unlocking collectibles, upgrading weapons, revealing every little inch of the map… and once you start working on one, it makes it so difficult to back down, as if…

  • green leaf trees on forest
    Books

    Hidden Melancholy and Nostalgia in Howard Pyle’s ‘Robin Hood’

    September 24, 2024 - By 

    In modern times, our perception of myths is very much shaped by different translations. With the Robin Hood legends, I mean this both literally and figuratively: the earliest Robin Hood ballads date back to the 15th century, and there have been many translations of the Middle English tales since. Howard Pyle’s 1883 children’s novel The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is one of these, along with dozens of film and television adaptations which base themselves on the medieval tellings. For many people born after the 1970s, their awareness of the character will stem from the likes of Disney’s Robin Hood…

  • brown field under white sky
    Books

    Farming, Love, Fate: The Natural World in ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’

    September 11, 2024 - By 

    Nature is one of my favourite elements in a book; whether it is soaring mountain peaks in a fantasy adventure, or the simplistic English countryside in a short but sincere novella, I love seeing the ways different authors present the natural world. I decided to read Far From the Madding Crowd with the expectation that Thomas Hardy would immerse me in the sort of sweeping nature prose I encountered while reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles – with a healthy dash of Victorian melodrama – and I wasn’t disappointed. Nature turned out to be a core characteristic of the novel, one…

  • Reviews - Video Games

    Why Live A Live Is the Perfect JRPG for People Who Hate JRPGs

    August 30, 2024 - By 

    Live A Live-ing up to Expectations? I appreciate JRPGs, but they’re not my genre of choice. The original Final Fantasy VII was a groundbreaking, childhood defining game for many, with characters, locations and music that are rightly considered iconic. But playing it for the first time, I found the story confusing and the combat gruelling (more on this later). Likewise, Octopath Traveller is a gorgeous game, with stunning visuals that understandably captured the hearts of millions. But I found the story progressed too slowly, and the dialogue was too cliche and simplistic to be interesting. So, when I decided to…

  • green leafed tree
    Books - Reviews

    ‘The Wolves of Savernake’, a Shadowy But Subtle Medieval Mystery – REVIEW

    August 18, 2024 - By 

    I bought my copy of The Wolves of Savernake as a ‘blind-date’ book – it was wrapped in brown paper, with only a tag that read “Historical novel where you can delve into the medieval world of Savernake Forest! Intrigue, crime, detective.” I picked it up from the used bookstore at Avebury Stone Circle, which as it turns out, was an incredibly appropriate place to buy this book. Synopsis of The Wolves of Savernake Set in the Wiltshire countryside following the Norman conquest, The Wolves of Savernake follows Ralph Delchard and Gervase Brett, two men commissioned by William the Conqueror to…

  • Reviews - Video Games

    Why ‘Dredge’ Is the Game That Will Cure Your Gaming Slump

    August 8, 2024 - By 

    What is a gaming slump? It’s like any other slump really – a period of time where you find it difficult to enjoy a hobby, when you just can’t find the motivation to do something you ordinarily love. The worst thing about a slump is that it can come on suddenly, and there’s no telling what will get you out of it. While I know tactics vary from person to person, my personal preference is to throw myself headfirst into as many games/books/movies as possible until something kick-starts my excitement again. Which is why I find that a quick fix…

  • Books - Literary Britain

    A Visit to the Birthplace of Jane Austen’s Most Famous Books: Chawton Cottage

    July 23, 2024 - By 

    Nestled in the Hampshire countryside, a modestly sized but unassuming house sits on a main road going through the village of Chawton. The village itself is as picturesque as most small English parishes come, but it’s the house covered in commemorative plaques which draws the eye. This is the house which was once inhabited by one of the world’s most celebrated authors – Jane Austen. It’s difficult, as you drive down Winchester road, not to picture Jane walking along in her own day. She was extremely fond of the Hampshire countryside having spent the first 25 years of her life…

  • Video Games

    Embracing the 7/10 Game – 7 Games You Might Just Love!

    July 7, 2024 - By 

    Recently, NakeyJakey released a video titled ‘In Defense of the 7/10 Games’, in which he explored the virtue, value and necessity of games which are typically considered not worth playing due to their middling score. As usual, I think Jakey has things exactly right; 7/10 has wrongly become a synonym for ‘mid’, when it is literally several spots above the middleground. When did we collectively decide that these average ranking games were not worth our time? True, they usually lack the polish and visual prestige of perfect 10s, but what they sacrifice in perfection they usually make up several fold…

  • photo of teacup on top of books
    Books - Reviews

    ‘Jamaica Inn’ Convinced Me – Daphne du Maurier is the Master of Writing Popular, ‘Real’ Literature

    June 26, 2024 - By 

    Margaret Forster once wrote that Daphne du Maurier ‘satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction, and yet satisfied too the exacting requirements of “real literature”, something very few novelists ever do.’ Having read Rebecca a year ago, I knew that du Maurier was particularly talented when it came to creating suspenseful stories, books that have lent themselves to being not only re-read but also re-adpated, again and again, making du Maurier one of the most beloved English language authors I have covered. But it was reading Jamaica Inn this summer that I realised how right Forster was. It’s difficult…

  • Video Games

    Why I Love A Plague Tale’s Exceptional Amicia de Rune

    June 14, 2024 - By 

    I’ve always struggled with linear games, not massively enjoying the experience of ‘playing a movie’ which often amounts to holding down forward on the analog stick. It was with the release of A Plague Tale: Innocence in 2019 that I began to appreciate that linear games don’t have to be glorified walking simulators – that they can showcase how to be a masterclass in video game writing and be as engrossing gameplay-wise as any open world action RPG. After playing the sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem and watching my partner play it too, I realised that this revelation of mine…