PLAY PLANET ALPHA

I found Planet Alpha to be a fun, short little game that was well worth the 4 dollars I paid for it. The game has no dialogue, but does a great job of showing rather than telling. You play as an alien explorer on a hostile planet. You can move, jump, time-manipulate, and crouch-walk your way through various threats in your consistent effort to reach the right edge of the screen.

A HOSTILE PLANET

The first thing emotions struck me upon starting up Planet Alpha were concern and regret. You start the game moving (very slowly) across a dead, featureless landscape. If I wanted that, I'd have moved to Arizona. Don't come after me; Arizona has some redeeming features... I just don't think humans should live anywhere where they're dependent on functioning climate control systems as a condition for survival. If a power outage is a life-threatening problem for you in July, I think you should move somewhere more hospitable, where there's also water.

Eventually the setting improved; the desert gave way to hills, valleys, forests, and more - and did so beautifully. Say what you will about Planet Alpha, Adrian Lazar (who apparently has little online presence to link towards) envisioned a gorgeous world in vibrant color that brings immediate comparisons to properties with proportionally enormous budgets like Avatar. 

The creatures of Planet Alpha are varied and fantastical, and include giant sauropod-like alien herbivores, soaring pink tentacled sky-whales, propeller-shaped color-changing bird-things, and all manner of creatures besides. Many of the flora and fauna mean you harm, but most of them are entirely peaceful or ignore the player's presence, existing on a grander or more removed scale in a way that makes you feel small and insignificant as a player.

By contrast, there are also robots that are entirely hostile, and always searching for you. The robots were clearly designed differently - they are much more conventional in a way that looks ripped from early Dr. Who or from Lost in Space. This means that they (probably intentionally) don't feel native to Planet Alpha at all. As they do battle with the planet's various flora throughout the game, they force you the player to feel empathy for the strange aliens they slaughter, and a sense of victory every time the robotic invaders explode. I'm into it - death to the machines!

Planet Alpha boasts some fantastic wildlife.

SURVIVAL BY TRIAL AND ERROR

In general, Planet Alpha is a side-scrolling, stealthy, puzzly platformer. Gameplay consists of jumping over things, climbing on things, pushing things around, and crouching to hide behind various objects. Enemies move in a 3d world around your 2d plane, which means that you'll end up hiding above, below, or in front/behind objects in the games fore and backgrounds. 

The game also features a neat time-control mechanic it uses for puzzle solving. This mechanic has nothing to do with objects in the world around you, but instead manipulates the astral bodies (the sun) in the sky overhead. Sometimes you use this to force nocturnal, fungal platforms to grow by switching day to night, in order to jump across their vibrant, mushroom-like caps. Other times you'll switch nighttime to day in order to encourage a diurnal alien creature to return to an area and attack nearby robots, giving you a distraction so you can sneak past.

Very often, you'll die horribly. There is no direct combat in Planet Alpha; you never get a laser gun, shield, or melee weapon. You're not particularly agile at avoiding enemies either, so you'll watch often as a robot fires a few blasts from their gun and blows you away. This isn't really a problem - it's just a sign that you haven't figured out (yet) how to get past that enemy/threat and move to the next one. You'll reload in the same spot to try again. I confess I did have to google a couple of the puzzles, usually to learn that their solution involved backtracking farther than I had considered in order to find a helpful tool (a pushable block, or a destructible tree, a broken elevator, etc) to find victory.

Your journey will take you into dark places.

REACHING THE END

My main gripe with Planet Alpha is that while the game is gorgeous, and it does a fine job of narrative without dialogue, and exploration is satisfying... I didn't really find the actual minute-to-minute gameplay to be that much fun. Interesting, compelling, surprising, but rarely joyful. I was curious to see the end of it, and glad that I reached that end... but I never really got lost in the game or wanted to live in the world it presented.

There are only eight chapters to Planet Alpha - each of them full of spectacle and exploration in a dangerous world. It isn't long, but it is a very smart game, in the way that Star Trek is a smart show. I definitely enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who wants to explore a vibrant and unique alien world for a few hours. I give it seven beautiful alien fungi out of ten.

CHEESY LENTIL AND MUSHROOM QUICHE

Quiche is probably my favorite breakfast construct. You can put almost anything into a quiche, which makes them super flexible and useful as a way to eat up leftovers. They also work double-duty as a solid option for either breakfast or dinner! I use this basic blueprint for most any quiche, swapping out approximate ingredients for whatever I have on hand.

It's worth noting that with all the cheese and heavy cream in here, this is not really a "healthy" meal. It's still kinda-healthy-ish though. Let's get cooking!

It's not the sexiest-looking quiche, but still pretty tasty.

OVERVIEW

Prep - About 30 minutes

Cook - 45 minutes, then another 15

Serves - 6 or more adults easily

You'll need - Cooked lentils, button mushrooms, shallots or onions, cheese, eggs, and a pie crust

RECIPE

Start with the oven, bringing it up to 400 degrees, or 200c if you call cilantro 'coriander.' You'll use that temperature for the mushrooms, and then again later the quiche itself.

While the oven warms, prep the 'shrooms; you'll need about 8 or 10 button mushrooms for this. You'll want to get any debris off of them with a damp cloth, trim the bottom part of the stems, then quarter them and toss them with salt, pepper, and a couple tablespoons of oil. Spread them over a sheet pan (you don't need to wait for the preheat to finish for this, just check them regularly) and pop them into the oven. They'll need about 20-25 minutes; you want them to shrink up, turn golden, and to lose a lot of their moisture. If you don't let them cook out their moisture, the quiche will be too wet.

While they cook, you'll prep your onions and/or shallots - you'll need about 1 cup of onions/shallots in total. You're looking for thin, regular slices, nothing bigger than a quarter inch thick, so that they break down well. Trying not to cry, toss them into a frying pan with 2 tablespoons of butter. Stir them regularly over low/medium heat and they should finish around the same time as the mushrooms, about 20 minutes. If they're browning too fast, turn the heat down and take your time.

While the veggies are cooking, crack 8 eggs and pour 1.5 cups of heavy whipping cream into a large mixing bowl. Whisk that (I use a fork for this, since I find whisks tedious to clean) until smooth, adding salt and pepper to taste. Once the eggs are mixed, grate up about 2 cups of cheese - I usually make this with 2 parts cheddar to 1 part whatever-I'm-using-up (in this case, it was a smoked gouda) and add that to the bowl as well.

Spread out your pie crust into a pie pan, pinching any cracked parts back together again so it forms a coherent surface for your quiche. Now you've just got to put it all together.

As they finish, add the mushrooms, onions (you cooked them with lots of butter, right?), and 2 cups of cooked lentils to the bowl, mixing until it's all incorporated. Tip that mixture into the pie crust, taking care not to overfill it.

Put the pie crust onto a baking sheet (in case it overflows) and pop it into the oven with a loose tent of foil overhead to keep it from burning. Set the timer for 45 minutes. Once the timer finishes, you'll want to remove the foil but leave the quiche in there for another 15 minutes, then check it. If it's looking nice and browned around the edges, and no longer (very) loose in the center, you can pop it out to let it cool, otherwise check it every five minutes or so until it's ready.

NOTES

On lentils. I tend to cook lentils in batches in an instant pot - they cook up pretty quick and easy that way, and I'll generally split the result and make a curry out of half a batch, with the other half reserved for a future use (like for this recipe). I used brown/yellow lentils here, but any sort will do.

Extra mushrooms. If you've got more mushrooms on hand than this recipe calls for, cook 'em up on the sheet pan and then reserve them after that step - you can easily toss them into a future soup, egg dish, or whatever else. Warm them and put them into a dish with some mint and olive oil for a tasty side to a future meal. I generally find that cooking food ahead of time leads to easier meal-prep the next day.

Onions or shallots? They're not the same thing, but I generally find them pretty interchangeable nonetheless. I initially planned to use yellow onions for this recipe, but one had gone moldy so I subbed in some shallots and liked the way it worked out.

Which pie crust? My (now) wife put me onto the pie crusts at Trader Joe's when we started dating about a decade ago, and I've never looked back. That said, any roll of pie crust will work for this, or you can make your own.

SUSHI WITH MY DAD

I grew up (in the 1990s/2000s) in a small town called Carnation, which is about an hour outside of Seattle, Washington. There were no sushi restaurants in the area, and my mom wasn't really into the idea of raw fish anyway, so the first time I had sushi was with my dad, on "Take Your Child to Work" day.

DRIVING WITH MY DAD

My dad worked a few jobs during my childhood, but for most of my life he was a salesman. More specifically, he sold energy-efficient lighting solutions to businesses. It sounded incredibly boring to me as a kid, but it's actually kind of a neat job, reflecting back on it as an adult.

He'd tour a potential client's facilities to determine the current state of illumination in various spaces - a hospital needs different lighting in their operating rooms, offices, waiting rooms, and parking lots. A dining area needs low ambient lighting in a warm spectrum that makes food look nice and sets a mood, but the kitchen needs brighter light so that chefs can see what they're doing. He'd interview employees to ask about what they thought of their current lighting situation, and what improvements they'd like to see. He'd gather and mark up blueprints for the clients' buildings, determining what wiring options were available for a space - what lights were currently there, and what could be installed in the same places to replace those lights. He'd also consider security features like exit signs, and exterior lighting around doorways that might be subject to a break-in. He'd crunch the numbers of electrical costs - how frequently lights needed replacing, how much energy various models would use, and how expensive utility costs were within a given area. Finally he'd determine the cost to his own company to do the work he'd plotted out, and then would pitch a sale to the client for comparison against other similar services, to see if his company won their business.

My dad didn't install the lights himself most of the time, but he did often end up transporting light fixtures around. He'd stuff them into his little Geo Metro, fitting enough electrical equipment into that little car, often poking out through rolled-down windows, that it looked something like a budget-version of Back to the Future's DeLorean.

Such was the day he took me, his son, to work with him. I was about 12, sitting beside him in the front seat of the car, my feet kicked up onto a box of 30 Watt Metal Halide bulbs, for the drive out of Carnation, through progressively larger towns and cities, on our way to Seattle. While we drove, my dad would talk about fishing, about camping trips, about the news, or about chores that needed doing around the house. 

He'd tell stories full of puns - nobody called them "dad jokes" back then - and would delight in my groans or (better) laughter. My father and uncles were a master class in wordplay for me growing up, and shaped my sense of humor into the warped and twisted thing that it is today.

All too often on drives with my dad, I'd make semi-interested noises in the manner of a not-quite-teenager, my mind drifting to thoughts of Diablo, Age of Empires, or Starcraft. I'm sure I wasn't great company, but he took it in stride. Gradually the view outside grew more urban, the pastures of Carnation and Fall City giving way to the forests around Redmond and Bellevue, as we finally worked our way toward Ballard in Seattle.

My dad was never really a fan of navigational systems; he hated computers and prided himself on a thorough knowledge of the Seattle area. Given an address, there was a good chance that he could jump behind the wheel and (perhaps with a bit of trial and error) find a place on his own. Some of that was a learned skill. He taught me that even-numbered highways run East to West, while odd-numbered ones run North to South. That 2-digit interstates (I90 for example) go directly through cities, while 3-digit ones (I405 for example) tend to go around them. He taught me that Jesus Christ Built Seattle Under Protest, that even numbered houses were generally on the north and west side of the street, while odd numbered houses were on the south or east. If all else failed, he'd break out a paper map or ask for directions. 

Some of his navigational skills were simply from experience - he drove a lot, back and forth between client offices and his own, in a career that spanned over 20 years. He had a habit of calling ahead in the evenings to tell us that he'd be home at a very specific time; he'd say something like "I'll be home at 6:43" in a time before Google Maps existed, before Street View would tell us what an address looked like, or how long it would take to reach. Usually he was right with those bogus ETAs. He used to joke that he always knew which direction was West, because he could "hear the crabs calling out" to him.

I don't remember much about what we actually did on "Take Your Child to Work" day. I expect we visited his office at Veca electric. I probably sat reading a book in the car at some point, while he chatted up a client in their office. Those memories are ephemeral now, their subjects boring to me at the time, but I do remember going out to lunch.

Sushi and New Year’s Sake, c 1810

ANOTHER WORLD

Going out to sushi with my dad felt like being allowed into a new and private world. This was something that I gathered he did all the time - eating lunch out someplace in the middle of his work day - but without the context of his family around him. Not beholden to the wants of his wife or children, his lunch was chance for him to pick a restaurant that appealed to him, rather than one that appealed to his family.

The smells were different; I had never eaten kelp in any form, or raw fish. I had never ordered from a restaurant with menus in another language. In retrospect, sushi is an excellent option for getting kids to eat something new, since everything is interesting, delicious, and easily shared.

Going out to a restaurant with my dad always meant listening to him second-guess the lighting in a given space. He'd talk about how the fixtures had too much white light, weren't warm enough, or used too much power. I'd sit embarrassed as he stood and examined a bulb or fixture, blathering on about wattage and lumens, leaking all sorts of peripheral lighting knowledge that eventually oozed into my own brain through osmosis. I miss that sometimes.

I was a picky little shit as a kid, but I loved seafood; I'd try something, sure, but everything was raw and weird and new and definitely to be distrusted. Raw fish was slimy; I remember comparing a piece of salmon nigiri to "a slug on a blob of rice." One of the rolls was just full of fish eggs, which I recognized (with horror) from a salmon-hatchery exhibit at my school. It blew my mind to learn that people actually ate some of the things in there - most of it wrapped in seaweed of all things! The whole trip was all wild and new to me, but whenever I'd turn my nose up at something, my dad would laugh, say something condescending about how "eventually my palette would mature," and would pop a bite of the offending dish into his mouth. 

To my frustration as an adult, he was sort of right. Things that I found repellent back then, the chewiness of a chunk of raw fish, or the textural mix of roe in a roll, make my mouth water today to think about them. Back then, that first time, the only dishes that really appealed to me were the plain cooked shrimp nigiri, or gyoza appetizers. I got better.

My dad taught me how to use chopsticks at that sushi place, though admittedly it wasn't with any proficiency the first time. He taught me to "try a bite" of new things; he enforced a "take what you want, but eat what you take" mentality to family dinners, which I'm sure he learned growing up himself in a household with 7 children. My parents both encouraged me to "eat something alive" every meal, referring to fruit and vegetables. I rolled my eyes a lot, hearing those words back then, and miss them today; I try to honor them in my occasionally pescatarian adult life.

I don't mean to say that my mom had no input towards encouraging me to eat like a healthy adult - she absolutely did. I think there was also a certain element to my home life, where my mom spent a whole day surrounded by her kids, cooking them meals and trying to keep our home under control, such that my dad had more energy at the end of the day to force us to eat the vegetables mom had prepared. It takes work to engage with a stubborn kid, and my dad always seemed to arrive home fresh and ready for that work.

LOOKING BACK

I think about that sushi restaurant trip often, but never really talked to my dad about it. I'm deeply touched that he took the opportunity to show me something genuine about his day, rather than grabbing a burger or something of my choice. It's something that I wish I'd spoken to my dad about, that I'd gotten a chance to thank him for in his life. 

My dad used to expound on the benefits of yard work, and specifically the "instant gratification" inherent in a garden freshly cleansed of weeds. Parenting is nothing like that - parents don't get to see what sort of people their kids will turn out to be for years, if ever; they have to keep faith that they're setting up a foundation to allow their kids to flourish after they're gone. In life, we often don't get to see the results of our labor. 

More than a decade after that first sushi restaurant trip, I went out to a sushi place for the first date with the wonderful young woman who would become my wife.

PLAY KENA: BRIDGE OF SPIRITS

It took me too damn long to get around to finishing Kena. I just kept getting torn between the core story, the various collectibles, and other games competing for my time. A full year (and about 28 hours of gameplay) after I initially picked it up though, it's finally time to write something up about it.

ARRIVAL OF A SPIRIT GUIDE

In Kena: Bridge of Spirits you play as a teenager far too much work to do. As a spirit guide, Kena seeks a mystical mountain shrine. On her journey to it, she's charged - by a spirit- with a quest to bring peace to the ruined village at the base of the mountain. It's an epic task; everywhere she goes, the world is covered in corrupted pustules full of evil creatures that seem to want her dead.

This is probably a good time to mention that everyone you encounter in the game is a spirit. Within the game's world, the dead linger as spirits if they have unfinished business, and Kena's job is to help them find peace. 

She does that with the help of Rot, adorable little blobs that react to Kena's instructions. Throughout the game, you'll use Rot to solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and rejuvenate the land. There are 100 Rot to find in the game, which each have a charming little animation when they're discovered. You can also unlock various hats for your Rot buddies, most of which are pretty adorable.

Kena is a gorgeous game.

Along her quest, Kena will also meditate, shoot things with her spirit bow, and indiscriminately throw glowing sticky-bombs at stuff a lot too. There are plenty of timed agility puzzles, hidden collectibles, and unlockable cosmetics - enough to keep completionists busy for a while.

WHAT CAME BEFORE

Kena was the first major game from Ember Lab, a studio that has a background in animation, not video games. This shows, which I mean in the best way. Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a beautiful romp through a gorgeously realized world, and Ember cut no corners in conceptualizing and breathing life into that world in a way that is a joy to play. In many ways, playing this game feels like playing a Miyazaki movie through a Pixar lens.

Ember worked with a Vietnamese studio called Sparx to produce some of the art for the game, and used ancient Bali and Japan as inspiration for the world. This comes across in the look and feel of buildings, runes, shrines, and flora throughout the game, and also characterizes the look and feel of the game's many foes.

As a piece of feminist culture, this game is powerful. Picking a teenage girl as the game's protagonist was sort of a risky move for Ember Lab - a bigger studio likely would have switched Kena to a male character or added a male option to "broaden the target market" or some nonsense. Kena is an incredibly strong character (literally the hero who saves the village) who spends much of the game fixing the problems of adult men and then helping them get over their failings. 

THE END OF THE JOURNEY

In a way, Kena: Bridge of Spirits feels a bit like a detective story. The game takes place in the wake of a horrible tragedy involving an explosion at the mountain peak, the details of which aren't fully revealed until the end of the game. It adds a certain melancholic beauty to the game when you realize that the town you're saving is dead, and cannot come back. The ghosts that inhabit it certainly appreciate Kena's efforts, but there's a sense of loneliness that feels palpable as she explores a world in which she's the only living person - a traveler in a literal ghost town.

In terms of genre, this is a combat-focused action-adventure game with RPG elements - I would compare it with something like Zelda (similar balance of combat/exploration) or Bloodborne (challenging enemies you can learn and anticipate) in terms of gameplay. Coming from a studio that hadn't made a game before, I expected the game to be buggy or unsatisfying, but I was happily mistaken on both counts. 

In my playthrough I didn't really encounter any major bugs, and found my gripes with the combat to be mostly my own fault. Some of the boss battles are pretty challenging, specifically around mechanics (like counter-attacking) which require precision timing. I gave up on fully completing this game's "challenge mode" but still pushed myself to finish the main story and most of the collectible content.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits does an excellent job of showing that small studios can produce fantastic, beautiful games. It's also a testament to the power and freedom a small studio has, to the narrative risks that a larger studio wouldn't take, that gives me hope for the future of the medium. It also scratched a certain Zelda-itch for me in a way that the (immense open world) newer Zelda games haven't, which I think says something about the strength of building games with a limited and focused scope. Without going into spoilers, I found the ending to be a perfect balance of satisfying and tragic. In short, I found this game to be incredibly underrated, and give it ten adorable hats out of ten. Go check it out!