Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 23

Book review: Kiss of Death by Rachel Caine

You had to know my next review was going to be for another Morganville Vampires book, and you probably shouldn’t be surprised that the next will be another. As a series, this has to be one of my favorites of all time, with vampires tat are morally ambiguous yet still committed to their methods of staying hidden from most humans. But Kiss of Death may be my least favorite book of the series for what I consider to be a couple of missteps. I’ll get to that soon.

This book opens with Claire and her friends being given passes to leave town and travel to Dallas, where Michael is scheduled to record tracks with a big-time studio. There’s a catch to this gift, not surprisingly, and the group must travel with Oliver acting as their escort. Oliver is riding along for other reasons, and soon everyone else is pulled into his plans when they all go horribly wrong.

What bothered me was what happens when Claire, Eve, Shane, and Michael roll into a little town looking for a place to eat. They are instantly set upon by the locals in what vaguely reminds me of a rehash of Deliverance.

What bugs me about this has to do with personal experience. I’ve lived in several small Texas towns, and it’s highly unbelievable to me that the locals would be this ugly. It’s even harder to believe because all four characters are also from a small Texas town. They’d talk with the same twang, and likely even have some of the same mannerisms. Maybe the locals could have asked, “Where are y’all from?” Then maybe they might be hostile because Morganville has a reputation or something, but the way these chapters play out, it feels extremely unrealistic. There’s also the waitress at the diner, who refuses to serve the group, so it seems like there’s a whole lot of so-called bad apples in this town. No, I just don’t believe it.

The Sheriff feels even more unrealistic, as later chapters claim these few bully characters are bad apples, known in town as troublemakers. But the sheriff instantly takes their side and makes Claire and her friends leave town. I also feel I need to point out another inconsistency, as the Sheriff catches Shane and Claire kissing, checks their IDs, and then asks what Shane is doing messing with an “underage girl.” Uh, no. The age of consent in Texas is seventeen. The cop would know that, and this feels like another moment where an outsider from another state took a guess at something that is pretty easy to find out with a little research.

Once the book moves past this point and gets back into the gory action, it’s a fast read with a somewhat satisfying conclusion. It ties up some loose ends from the previous book, but leaves open one question that I’m sure will be answered very soon in the next.

I’m giving Kiss of Death 3 stars. It’s not a bad story, but like I said, having lived in several small Texas towns, the middle chapters rubbed me the wrong way. It won’t stop me from picking up the next book, Ghost Town, very soon, and I look forward to seeing if I’ve guessed right about that one unanswered question.

Edited to add: After having a night to sleep on it, I’m also now kinda pissed about Claire’s “amazing” proficiency with a compound bow. In just a few minutes after being handed the bow and a quiver, with no tutors, Claire is able to learn pinpoint accuracy and near perfect speed, because “physics.” She doesn’t catch her boob with the first few draws. She doesn’t snap her forearm or wrist. And despite having her wrist slapped hard enough to make it numb, she still fires a perfect shot and saves the day. This is such bullshit. Claire is smart, but NOBODY becomes an expert using a compound bow in a few minutes.

Book review: Fade Out by Rachel Caine

Last year I read the first six books in the Morganville Vampires series back to back, and this caused me to avoid reading book 7, Fade Out, for quite some time. Why? Because I got nothing else done during that six day period. I was even forgetting to eat. I wanted to hold off on reading the next until I had some free time and I was sure I didn’t have any other obligations. These precautions were perhaps a bit too overzealous because Fade Out is the first book in the series with some breathing room built in. This is not to say that nothing happens, but compared to the previous books, the pace here is practically a mosey.

After the conclusion of the war, the town is slowly recovering and rebuilding. Amalie is still in mourning, and she’s letting some vampires and humans get away with serious violations of the town’s rules without doing anything about it. Claire and Myrnin are being increasingly attacked by the computer Ada, but Myrnin is in denial about how far corrupted Ada’s personality is, and keeps assuring Claire that the situation is under control. This is a shared theme with both Amalie and Myrnin, as neither seems willing to admit they’re letting things slide that maybe they shouldn’t.

Meanwhile, Claire feels she’s losing her connection to her best friend Eve because Eve’s got a goth crush on a “new” girl, Kim. Kim is a big deal around town, but has never been mentioned before. She’s apparently the only other goth in town, so now Eve has someone to share fashion tips with, and Claire is feeling forgotten in the wake of Eve’s new crush.

It comes out that Kim is very ambitious, and she has a plan that could expose the vampires to the outside world. She’s also got inside help, and I was able to piece together who her accomplice was long before the reveal thanks to some easy clues early on.

Add to this another subplot with a group of vampires wanting to leave town, and they hope to use Claire and her friends as a bargaining chip. Taken in total, it’s a pretty busy episode in the series, but it still has enough quiet times to give the characters room for development. There’s no cliffhanger ending this time, and an amusing line in the book is Claire saying she doesn’t like cliffhangers, which is funny considering how often they’ve been a part of the first books.

All in all, it’s a good book, and I’m very much looking forward to the next in the series, Kiss of Death. I give Fade Out 4 stars, and would recommend the series to all fans of vampires or dark fantasy.

Book excerpt: A Wolf In Girl’s Clothing, Chapter 31

Here’s the third and final excerpt from A Wolf In Girl’s Clothing, this time from chapter 31:

A grey Audi pulls into our driveway, and my cousin Evan Saunders opens the rear door on the driver’s side. I haven’t seen him in ages, but that’s because his parents blamed me for us becoming play cousins. I wasn’t solely responsible, though. It was a mutual agreement to be bad.

Age hasn’t changed him much, maybe adding some extra flare to his jaw. But he’s still got the same narrow chin, slim nose, and thin lips. Something about the shape of his round brown eyes is different, though I can’t say what it is. He’s let his brown hair grow out long and wavy, covering his ears, forehead, and most of his neck. He’s also growing some facial hair, but the wispy fluff on his upper lip and chin don’t qualify as a proper moustache and goatee.

Evan looks a lot taller, but he’s got the family’s thin frame. If his folks had enrolled him at Uncle John’s gym, he would have fit in. He’s got to be in some kind of sport, because his thighs stretch out the legs of his jeans. But his black T-shirt, emblazoned with a logo for Metallica, is baggy and makes it harder to assess his upper body.

I jump up and start across the yard. “Evan!”

He leaves the rear door open, and a huge German shepherd clambers out next. The dog takes one whiff of me and lunges, slamming me to the ground. I don’t have time to react before the bastard bites into my shoulder, and I lose control to my wolf. I growl and snap at the dog, but he pulls away from my attempt to get a lock on the side of his neck. Then he bites into my upper arm and starts rocking his head like he’s trying to rip it off.

Under my pained howl, I hear my aunt and uncle shouting at Evan to do something, and my cousin tries to pull the dog off by putting him in a headlock. I’m only dimly aware of his efforts, and my next attempt to bite the dog catches his forearm instead.

Evan yanks his arm back with a pained yell, so I forget about him and curl up to try and bite the dog again.

The dog gets lifted up and off of me by Robbie, and I try to sit up, already planning to maul the bastard as soon as Robbie sets him down.

Dad drops over me and pins my arms, his voice a strained hiss. “Alice, calm down.”

“I’m going to kill him,” I growl. “Fucking mutt bit me.”

“I can see that, but you’ve got to calm down.”

Somewhere over my head, my Aunt Sheila says, “Evan, you’re bleeding.”

“Alice bit me!” Evan says. “I was trying to get the dog off, and she snapped at my arm!”

“Oh hell.” Dad shakes me when I growl. “Snap out of it already!”

Little by little, the wolf lets go, and I regain control of myself and go still. Then it dawns on me what I’ve done.

Uncle Don says, “Did she have a flashback when Rex attacked her?”

“No, she didn’t have a flashback.” Dad scowls at me. “Are you in control now?”

“Yes.”

Dad lets go of my arms and peels back my shirt to look at my shoulder. He makes a grimacing face. “Hell…Don, you should have called ahead to tell us you got a dog.”

“I didn’t think he’d be a problem,” Uncle Don says, and Dad gives him a dirty look. “But yeah, this is a problem.”

“You have no idea how big of a problem.” Dad gets up and walks to Evan, taking his arm before he blows out a loud hissing breath. “But you’re going to find out.”

___

I hope you’ve enjoyed these excerpts, and remember that you can also sample the first chapters free on Amazon. Thanks very much for reading my stuff.

Book excerpt: A Wolf In Girl’s Clothing, Chapter 25

Here’s the second of three excerpts from A Wolf In Girl’s Clothing:

By the time I reach the second night of my trip, my knife is humming in my bag, and I know I’m close to my wolf. I’m going to find her tonight, and then I’ll find out if I’m really programmed for the task of killing and skinning a living creature.

The idea bothers me, but it’s not like I can avoid this. The alternative is driving myself insane every full moon, and that’s assuming there aren’t worse side effects that no one knows about. No one’s done any experiments to find out what happens if a skinwalker ignores the calling of their totem animal, and I’m not willing to be the guinea pig even if my curiosity is picking at the idea.

I venture cautiously back to the highway to check the road signs, and when I see Minneapolis on a green highway sign, I know where I am. That’s good enough for me, so I get back off the highway and pick up my pace to head into the wild country. When my knife shifts from humming to vibrating in the sheath, I drop my bags and get it out. I use a long section of rope to tie the sheath to my waist, wrapping the rest around in several passes though my belt loops before I tie the ends in a double knot over the snap.

I set out at a jog at something closer to human speeds. My senses are on full alert, bringing me the scents of the woods and the many animals lurking in the darkness. Hunger is trying to distract me, but I ignore my tight stomach and let the knife pull me toward my destiny.

I don’t expect to literally run into my wolf, and I’m stunned when this massive white wolf explodes out from the cover of some dry shrubbery and slams into my side, burying sharp teeth in my shoulder. My shock doesn’t last long, and my right hand drops to the sica to unsheathe it. When the wolf goes for another bite, I put my forearm into a gaping maw filled with pointed teeth. I let the wolf lock on, ignoring the pain while I push my arm up and raise the wolf’s head. My knife slides into the flesh under its jaw and through the roof of the mouth into the skull. The fight is over five seconds after it began.

I push off the wolf, and when it rolls over I get a real shock. She’s a he. Well…this should be interesting.

___

I hope you’re enjoying the previews from the book, and remember you can also preview the early chapters for free on Amazon. If you’re still undecided on getting it, the third and final excerpt will be posted on Wednesday.

Game review: Clicker Heroes for Steam

Last month, I was having some brain issues. Weather shifts and constant up and down cycling of the temperature made it hard for me to think, so much so that even playing a video game seemed beyond me. I stumbled across a story about Clicker Heroes on Eurogamer and after reading their take on it, I thought, Well here’s a game so simple, I won’t need to use my brain to play it. One month later, I find this to be mostly true, since I don’t have to play it at all. It plays itself, and I’m occasionally invited to add input before walking away again. But I did use some advanced math while watching it play itself, so it did at least get me to use my brain creatively.

If I had based my review on only the first 90 to 100 levels, it would have been far more positive because the initial pattern of monetary growth and buying upgrades was engaging enough, and the game is graphically charming. The music and sound effects…can be turned off, freeing me to put on my music and jam out to something less repetitive.

The game is simple in story and design. You are a wandering monster slayer who clicks on monsters to kill them. After you do this a few times, the eponymous heroes will notice your quest and join your party if you can afford to hire them. The first hero, Cid, only upgrades the amount of damage your clicks do, but after her, every new hero will bring their own amount of damage per second to the party, and once you’ve hired the first of many, Treebeast, you don’t ever have to click again. In fact, there’s absolutely no point to you doing it.

Don’t believe me? Okay, hire just one hero after upgrading Cid a bit. Go up a few levels so the monsters have higher hit points and allow for a more objective time frame to count with. (I did this with a stopwatch, but you don’t need to.) First, click the mouse as fast as you possibly can. (For me this is apparently seven clicks per second.) Now slow down and click it once per second. Then just stop clicking. Now level up Cid a few times to improve your click damage without leveling up Treebeast and repeat this experiment. What you’ll notice is, regardless of your click damage upgrades, the enemy hit bar’s movement NEVER changes. Congratulations, you are the most ineffectual member of your party of three. And from that first hire on, your clicks will almost never matter.

“But Zoe, there’s a range of trophies to earn for clicks, right?” you ask. Yep, and you don’t have to click to get them either. Bwa? You see, with enough level upgrades, Cid unlocks a special hot bar ability that you press to unleash a “clickstorm.” The game will count these ten clicks a second for thirty seconds as your input, even if you do nothing. It is possible to earn a trophy for X number of clicks without clicking at all. The game plays itself with minimal input from you.

This is not to say I never clicked. Oh, I click the fuck out of that mouse sometimes. This is because you can unlock other hot bar abilities as you hire heroes, and sometimes clickstorm is on cooldown and you have to do some clicking to take advantage of whatever power you unlocked. The hot bar powers can also be stacked, leading to a point where you can do a lot of extra damage for a 30 second burst, double the amount of gold enemies drop, and get extra gold dropped for every click that clickstorm does. So then for that 30 second window, your clicks mean something. But you can only do this once an hour, so it’s only marginally useful.

This brings me to the bees and the fish. The bwa-whawha? Yeah, see, to keep you from walking away, the game will randomly pop up a goldfish on the lower portion of the screen, or on the upper portion, a bee will fly slowly under the levels bar. The fish will always drop coins based on your highest completed level, and will sometimes also drop a more vital currency, rubies (more on both in a bit), while the bee will randomly unlock one of the special abilities without invoking a cooldown, even for powers you haven’t unlocked yet. Again, during the first 100 levels, these are very enticing incentives to keep plugged into your seat, watching for these little boosters to show up.

(By the way, the drop rate on rubies seems to work like this: if you have 1-9 rubies, the fish will drop a ruby on every two to three appearances. If you have 18 rubies and are close to being able to use them, they will drop a ruby once a week…I may be exaggerating slightly on that formula.)

So, let’s recap: you’re a mass murdering serial killer who’s got a cult of like minded psychopaths killing defenseless animals (who all look like they escaped from some cutesy Japanese or Chinese MMORPG) who never fight back and stealing any gold they drop to afford the expenses to upgrade your current army and hire on new recruits. The first hundred and ten levels sets up a pattern of fast upgrades and new hires, always giving you something to do even if it isn’t clicking the monsters themselves.

And then you get to Dread Knight. Let me explain. With every new hero you hire, there’s a price pattern involved. No wait, I need to back up further. When you earn gold, to keep the money bar numbers from overflowing, you never see anything over 100,000. The game adds a letter to the end and goes back down to 100. So first it’s 100M, then 100B, then 100T. My mind converted these early numbers to Million, Billion, and Trillion, even if I knew they weren’t accurately reflecting what I was making. After this, though, the letters become 100s, and then 100S, which means absolutely nothing to me.

Okay, but so when you get new heroes most of the time, the increase in price is like this: 500s for this one, and 5,000s for the next, 1,000S for this one, and 10,000S for the next. But after Frostsleaf’s relatively reasonable price, Dread Knight comes along with a price of 10,000U.

“U?” I asked when I initially saw it, and then I checked the damage to see it did N damage. I even wrote to Clicker Heroes on Twitter to ask, “Is that some kind of typo?” (I got no answer, by the way, and I suspect the account is just a bot to spam ads and news with no human monitoring it.) The first time I got to this point, I just said fuck it and reset the game using another special hero ability, Ascension. This brought me back to the fun early bits, but oh how it nagged at me that I didn’t know how much U was, or if it was just around the next bend in the money upgrades. So I played up to level 159 and found out that no, the next pay raise after 99,999S is to 100O, and I hit reset again.

This is the point at which my stubbornness kicked in, and I said, “Well god damn it, I can’t do a proper review if I don’t know how many pay raises up from S that U is. So even if it sucks, I’m going to find out how much time it takes to hire Dread Knight.”

And the answer to that question is two and a half weeks, as you need to play through O, N, and d levels of cash before you will finally see U. I should also note that your own time can be much longer depending on how you play, but it likely cannot be much shorter unless you can sit for many, many hours clicking on fish to get extra gold. I will also note that in this lengthy waiting time, I began to actively hate the game for making everything so god damn slow that I might play a few minutes before thinking of other things I could be doing. I would be watching the screen tick numbers up with the pace of paint drying and think, “I could clean the cat box.” When I would rather mine for cat shit than farm for gold in your game, you know that’s not a good time. It doesn’t help that the design on the level platforms begins to repeat along with the enemies, so there’s no reason to keep watching for anything new. It’s all the same after you get past a certain point.

But so let me get back to those goldfish. The way I was playing was to push for the highest possible level, where monsters take around two minutes each to kill, and this means that finding one fish would drop more gold than I might make in two to three hours of monster slaying. Then I would back down a few levels until dropping their health bar felt less dull to watch. This tactic makes finding the fish extremely lucrative, and in the times I was sitting at my PC, I often began the fish summoning chant that goes, “Fishy fishy fishy fish,” repeated four times with heavy emphasis on the final fish. (This works one time out of five, but since it did work that one time, I’m now locked into the pattern.) This is not, I should add, enough incentive to keep me from walking away for many hours at a time. But when I was sitting here doing nothing, it was at least a way to make the game less boring.

As I said before, fish also randomly drop rubies, and rubies buy one of three items in the shop. The first item is cheapest and the most important in my opinion. For 20 rubies, you fast forward time 8 hours and get gold equivalent to your current DPS and your highest level completed. You also unlock all of your special abilities, including THE DARK RITUAL, which is the only ability which does not burn out in 30 seconds, and which has a cooldown of 8 hours. What this does is add a damage multiplier to all your heroes, and while at first that paltry sum might not seem worth it, once you get past level 200, every little tick of it is a freaking godsend of added whoopass. The added money also helps you upgrade heroes, who become ungodly expensive past level 200, when their own personal damage multipliers start to kick in. And their damage multipliers are way, WAY better than THE DARK RITUAL. (Say it in a deep booming voice. Go on, try it. It just feels right. I can say that all day. “I’M GOING TO INVOKE THE DARK RITUAL.”)

(Having said that, the cost of certain heroes is way out of whack to do later upgrades. For instance, King Midas now requires more gold for one level than my highest level heroes, and his damage is still lagging way behind everyone else. His rate of upgrades is so expensive that every time I scroll past him and see his current damage level I say, “Fuck you, King Midas.” Which is quite cathartic, actually.)

The next highest ruby-purchased item is to unlock three gilded heroes for 30 rubies, which changes the heroes’ avatars to something “cooler” (actually lamer in most cases, but not all of them) and upgrades their damage by 50%. These upgrades can be duplicates, but the effect stacks and getting an added damage boost to the same hero takes the sting out of getting duplicates. It should be noted that you unlock one gilded hero every ten levels after level one hundred, so there’s actually no point to this upgrade. Sure, you can use it, but the fast forward is more useful in my opinion.

The last item is 50 rubies for an “easy” ascension along with a number of hero souls based on your highest level. Hero souls can be used to summon Ancients, but I have yet to find any ancient that didn’t seem pretty useless, and summoning them reduces the damage that heroes do by 10% for each Ancient in play, making the grinding process even slower. I also noticed that spending souls to reroll for ancients lowered the amount of gold I got for fast forwards, so it didn’t appeal to me to explore this after a few rerolls. Since it’s relatively easy to reach the Ascension ability without using up rubies, I don’t see a point to this purchase, either.

The thing is, none of these upgrades are going to do much for you for a long, long time. You might need to wait several days to eke past a boss and crawl up a few more levels before having to stop and build more gold and upgrade all your people before you can handle another boss. (And by the way, bosses don’t hit back either. They just have a 30 second timer. If you beat them before the timer counts down, a new boss shows up and the counter resets. In the early levels, this is a great way to pick up fuck tons of easy gold.)

“Well duh, Zoe, it’s a free to play game,” you say, “so you should expect that at a certain point your progress would push you into buying something for real money.”

And that might be a valid point, faceless straw man, except you can’t buy your way past this hurdle. If you go to the shop right after Dread Knight appears and paid $99.99 to get 1,300 rubies, and then you spent a bunch of time buying the 8 hour fast forwards for all that gold, you would still not be able to afford Dread Knight’s price. In fact, you could grind for a solid week, pay the $100 “best value” and still not get anywhere close to this one hero’s price. And this to me is the craziest thing about the shift in the pattern. Because there is nothing to do once you reach this point except walk away and do other stuff. You can’t even use real cash to overcome the hurdle unless you were willing to spend $1,000, and keep in mind, Dread Knight isn’t even the last hero to unlock. Nay nay, there are 8 more to unlock after that, and the next, Atlas, costs 10,000$ (What the fuck does that even mean?!) So let’s say you were theoretically stupid enough to spend all that money on one hero. Right after that is another requiring the same outlay of cash simply to avoid another 2-3 week wait for the next unlock.

The real insult about this change in the pattern is that once you unlock Dread Knight, he’s fucking useless. Up until this point, every hero unlock makes the enemies’ damage bars plummet to a half second flash, giving you this momentary sense of being overpowered before you progress up through the next few levels and hit another hurdle. But Dread Knight doesn’t change the speed of the damage bar whether you’re on a lower level or up at the highest possible level. It’s like “Here’s your reward for two and a half weeks of grinding, a hero who doesn’t even give a solitary second of a feeling of accomplishment.” It doesn’t help that just buying his first upgrade costs 100D, meaning you have to earn past 99,999U without buying anything else. That’s another fucking week of grinding with nothing to do in the meantime. Oh joy. And right after you unlock Dread Knight, here is another hero with a mystery number of levels to unlock before you can find out how equally useless he is.

So this is where I shut off the game and do my review, knowing that while I’m gone, the heroes will continue to play the game without me. Maybe I’ll come back in six months, buy all the remaining heroes, and then reset the game to get back to the part that at least pretended to need me. Or maybe I’ll just let them play by themselves, earning infinite money for murdering defenseless animals in their own digital circle of hell. I don’t know yet.

But I do know this: from a design standpoint, the levels after 100 are a complete failure for dragging out the grinding process and stripping away any sense of reward or accomplishment. Instead of offering a a hero at every new level of currency, the game stretches the rewards out while simultaneously lowering the amount of money one can earn for level upgrades. Even bosses begin to feel chintzy with the gold they drop. This change in the pattern takes something that was fun in a casual kind of way and makes it so dull and tedious that I would rather sift for cat shit than actually play the game. And for a free to play game to offer no viable way past the grind using real cash, it’s a failure of the basic free to play model as well. It is however, a great math tutor, because trying to solve various math questions over the course of the game had me suddenly realizing at the weirdest times, “Wait, did I really just use algebra while playing a game?” Yes, yes I did.

This is probably a longer review than you were expecting for a nothing of a game, but I’m nothing if not thorough. I’m going to give Clicker Heroes 3 stars. It’s not broken in any way, so it doesn’t deserve a 2. But its initial fun quickly gives way to tedium of the worst sort, and even in the best of times, it never requires me to be in the room. So I can only recommend this to people who are looking for a game that encourages them to do chores. Which, while that may be a good thing for the state of my house, is pretty damning commentary for a game.

Book excerpt: A Wolf In Girl’s Clothing, Chapter 15

Here is the first of three excerpts from my new book, A Wolf In Girl’s Clothing:

We slip in through the back, and I lead the way into the living room. I’m about to explain my first trip through the house when a flicking switch makes me jump.

But it’s Jesse who flipped it, and he looks at me and whispers, “No power.”

“No, the place has been abandoned for years.”

“Did you get that from the librarian?”

“Nope, from the real estate agent.”

“Why did you come out here the first time?”

“That’s another secret I can’t share.”

“Shoulda seen that coming,” Jesse says.

“Anyway.” I point to the side window. “See this window here?”

“Yeah?”

“This is a plastic pane, and when I showed up the first time, I found slivers of glass in the carpet about eight feet from the sill. Whatever came for Charles leapt through this window fast enough to blow the whole thing out.”

“You mean whoever.”

“I mean whatever, and I say that because there’s a high jump involved in coming through this—”

“Quiet,” Jesse says.

I shut up, and we both strain to listen. But it’s just the wind stirring the trees outside. I relax and whisper, “It’s the wind.”

Jesse lets go of his breath. “Sorry, go ahead.”

“Never mind, I’ll take you to the bedroom. There’s something in the closet I can show you that’s interesting, but I’ll have to use the camera light to point it out.”

We go through the hallway, and I get a tingly feeling that we’re being watched, just like the last time I was here. I glance around Jesse, worried that I’ll see the shadowy figure behind him. But there’s nothing following us.

The bedroom door is closed, and I stare at it, trying to remember if I shut it on my way out. I’m not sure, but my confusion is strong enough to make me turn the knob slowly.

The door groans as it opens, and we step into the room. The closet door is closed. But that’s not what freaks me out. What freaks me out is the idea that the bottom shelf will be back in place even though I didn’t put it back. I might not be sure about the bedroom door, but I damn well know I didn’t close the closet.

I open it, and sure enough, the bottom shelf is secured. I try to tell myself that after I called, Donald must have come out to check on the place. He could have closed everything up. It sounds logical, but I don’t believe it. I look down at the floor for other footprints, but even my footprints from my last visit are gone.

Jesse stands beside me, and he touches my arm, whispering, “Does it feel colder in here to you?”

“It’s the concrete floor,” I say.

Jesse opens his mouth, and then gasps when something made of glass shatters at the front of the house.

We spin around and back up at a loud thump in the hallway.

“Oh shit,” Jesse whispers.

There’s a growl from the living room, and heavy footsteps thump down the hall. My hand tightens around the camera, but I can’t look down to turn it on.

The bedroom door slams shut, and Jesse’s hand closes around mine. He’s squeezing my fingers so hard it hurts, but I can’t think to cry out. I can barely think over the sound of my heart slamming in my ears.

Something hits the door hard, and we both jolt.

“Oh shit,” Jesse says, his vocabulary reduced to two words. He’s doing better than me, because I can’t even manage a squeak.

Blow after blow slams the door, and Jesse loses his nerve and pulls me to the window and slides it open. He pushes me out first, and then he rolls over the sill. We just get outside when the bedroom door bangs open, and then every light in the place turns on. The back patio light shouldn’t be this bright, not even with a hundred-watt bulb, and never mind the fact that there’s no power. Every light pouring away from the house seems too bright in my eyes.

There’s light coming from the bedroom too, and I know that can’t be possible when there’s no fixture in the ceiling.

I back away from the window, but my feet root to the ground when the air is pierced by a blood curdling cry. It’s like a wolf howling, but much louder, and more frightening. I can feel the agony in the scream, and it shakes me to my bones.

Jesse is tugging at my hand when the window slams shut, and then blood explodes all over the inside of the glass. The scream takes on a louder volume, and it’s more shrill and full of pain. Underneath it, I can barely make out the sound of something else growling, but even worse, I hear something being torn apart. I hear wet flesh tearing, bones snapping, and sinews popping.

“Alice!” Jesse yells, his voice full of the same terror I feel.

I find my voice and choke out one word, “Look!” A black figure walks to the window and raises a hand to press a palm in the blood, swiping it to one side to smear the many splashes into one long streak.

New release! A Wolf In Girl’s Clothing

It’s been awhile since my last release, almost a year to the day, but at long last, her is A Wolf In Girl’s Clothing, the second book in the Alice the Wolf series. Take a look at the cover and blurb:

Alice Culpepper believes Fate is smiling on her when she is tricked into a reunion with the bullies who have made her life hell for years. But she is punished for taking revenge on them, and her violent outburst reignites the local weredogs’ distrust of her.

Her life is further complicated when Miriam Frost calls to warn Alice that she is being hunted by another wolf, Teresa Martinez. Then Alice stumbles upon a house haunted by a lycanthrope who may have been murdered by the weredogs, threatening to destroy their shaky alliance. As if this wasn’t enough trouble, Alice is called to her wolf and must deal with a unique set of problems none of the other lycanthropes has dealt with before.

Though she must keep her parents in the dark about her supernatural sleuthing, Alice isn’t dealing with these dilemmas alone. She’s got help from FBI agents Lilith and Bat Vayne, her packmates Pi and Josie, Sophia the witch, and her teammate Jesse Espinoza. She’ll need all the help she can get, because war is coming to Dallas, Pennsylvania, and no one will be safe in the coming battles.

You can find A Wolf in Girl’s Clothing on Amazon, Kobo, and my blog bookstore for $4.99, and it should soon be available on Barnes and Noble’s Nook Books store.

You can check out a free preview on your Kindle, and over the next week I’ll be posting a few short excerpts from later chapters.

I should apologize for taking so long to get this book out, but it’s been a rough year thus far, and I had trouble finding time to get into revisions and then edits. Hopefully it won’t take nearly as long to release book three, In the Mouth of the Wolf.

I hope you enjoy Alice’s story, and as always, thanks for checking out my stuff.

Music: Faith No More

So, you may have noticed this already, but Faith No More just put out a new album, Sol Invictus, their first studio album in 20 years. This for me is a Very Big Deal, and I was eager to get it and find out if the band sounded as good as they did back in my teens. The first song on the album, Sol Invictus had me slightly worried that they’d gone all mellow and soft, but the rest of the album quickly eased those fears. Definitely worth a listen.

Check out Faith No More’s website at http://www.fnm.com/ to find links to the new album, check tour dates, and watch some videos.

Visual art: Stephanie Pui-Mun Law

Here’s another fine artist I follow on Facebook (this is a thing with me, stalking artists on Facebook), Stephanie Pui-Mun Law, whose work is intricate, often whimsical, and always fantastic. You can check out her portfolio at http://stephanielaw.shadowscapes.com/

Game review: Toren for PS4

After seeing several gushing reviews for Toren and its artful poetic aspirations, I decided to give it a try on the PS4. It’s only 9.99, so even if it turned out awful, I’m not out much money. It only took a few hours to play through, and for the most part, the game wasn’t bad. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all that good, either.

From the start, I felt hampered by the camera, which at times refused to move with my character even if I’d been back and forth the same way a few times and knew what to expect. I missed an early pathway because when I attempted to duck under a certain arch, I fell through the floor and hit a glitching loop where my character would haul herself up only to fall again. Bear in mind, there was no ledge she was hanging from. She was falling though a solid floor. I restarted the checkpoint and wandered aimlessly for half an hour before sorting out that yes, the spot I’d fallen through was the right way to go, and I wandered out and found a shrine. This led me to restart once I realized I’d seen two other shrines at the beginning and had missed part of the game walking by them. (Even with the restart, I think my total playing time from start to finish was maybe four hours, tops. This will not take up a whole lot of your time.)

Let me set the glitches aside and talk about the game’s premise. Set in a dark fantasy world, the people of this world got hooked on a nameless mage’s idea to build a tower to the heavens in order to summon the moon. Why? Uh…I’m not really clear on that part. Maybe they all got drunk and it just sounded like a good idea at the time. Anywho, it’s sort of a Tower of Babel story, but instead of angering God, these people pissed off the sun. Now under an eternal daytime, the mage’s pet dragon goes nuts and kills everyone. Why? Um…maybe the dragon got a sunburn and the mage ran out of aloe.

The mage opts to send “Moonchild” to face the dragon, and she dies horribly and reincarnates in a pool of blood at the base of the tower. This puts the world in a loop, and the only way to change this fate is to ascend the tower and slay the dragon.

Right, so it’s not a bad story, if a bit…let’s say dreamlike. Dreams are a major part of the game as well, with each dream sequence unlocking another piece of the story. Moonchild starts the game as an infant, but there’s a few fast flashes to her growth into a girl of four or five. From there, she slowly develops into a young woman as she ascends the tower. So while the game may have only taken a few hours to whip through, for her, it’s a journey of many years.

The graphics are something that I’m of a mixed opinion on. Certain dream sequences and parts of the tower were lovely, and yet, others looked like they were still in a beta or alpha stage of development. One level in particular used a flat plane meant to give the illusion of reflecting the skybox on the floor, but the plane juts out a foot past the edge of the platform and looks really bad. On the other hand, there’s this one underwater dream sequence where I kept remarking “Ooh, that’s nice.” I only wish I could have moved the camera around to admire the view more. (More on that in a bit.)

I really don’t like Moonchild’s model at any age, though. Viewed at a distance, she’s…serviceable? But the thing is, in any cut-scene, she looks bad, with noticeable polygon pinching around her shoulders and mouth and with fat sausage fingers that make her hands look more like paws with really long toes. Her hair is a mess of random streaks that remind me of some of my first year attempts at 3D character modeling. There’s no risk of this kid stumbling into the uncanny valley, that’s for sure. Like I said, from a distance, none of these flaws really matter. The problem is, sometimes the camera insists on getting in real close and yeeeeesh, that’s one ugly kid.

I have to get back around to the camera controls, because they were awful. The right stick wiggles the camera around just slightly, so even if you want to look around, you can’t. There’s supposed to be a function to look at the current objective using the triangle button, but it doesn’t work at times. And like I said, at times, the camera just decides to lock in a certain angle, usually blocking your view in such a way that death is inevitable.

Then there’s the controls, which handle badly. A big part of the dream sequences is pouring salt over symbols on the ground, which can be really irritating trying to convince the character to walk in a straight, or worse, a diagonal line. Trying to cover a pentagram in salt was aggravating to say the least.

I’d be remiss to not mention the sliding statues sequence. There’s a set of three statues on sliding tracks that screams “puzzle.” The dragon is right there, breathing his black Medusa breath that can turn Moonchild to stone, and only the statues can block this. So I spent maybe half an hour sliding these damn things around, trying to see what they unlocked. Well guess what? THEY DON’T DO A GODDAMN THING. You run up, hack the dragon a few times, and it goes away. What the fuck is the point to designing something to look like a puzzle and give it absolutely no purpose for moving?

Oh speaking of which, there’s a part early in the game where Moonchild dies, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it. In fact, you later use your previous incarnation’s stone body as a stepping stool to access another level. This give me two random thoughts. The first is, it kind of sucks that I have to die in a cut-scene after I just did this stupid sequence just right to collect my sword. But eh, it’s typical indie logic. You win, but you lose.

But the other thought is, this concept would have been cooler if it wasn’t just that one body stuck like that. Like, why not have a little collection of former stone bodies wherever I died as a reminder of how much I suck? Or at the very least, reinforce the idea that this poor kid is stuck in a loop by littering the tower with her old selves. For that matter, once you die, why is it only the first reincarnation that causes a regression in growth? Shouldn’t every death start you back at the wee toddler stage?

Since I’m thinking about it, the whole concept of the tower itself is a little dodgy, because while there is a tower with a typical round design, the levels branch out into other areas that if my progress is to be believed are hung precariously off the side of this crumbling dilapidated tower. It’s bad level design, and there’s a lot of random obstacles like wind that cycles on an off at intervals until you reach a certain checkpoint. Then it just dies.

I have to say, the game had a much better idea for how to branch out from the round tower in the dream sequences. If they really wanted to up the challenge, they should have chucked in a dozen more of those and really put some brain teasers in among the platforming. But for as pretty as some sequences are, there’s nothing to them. Find the symbol, pour some salt on it, see a memory. Aside from the dragon in the waking world, there’s not that much going on in this game.

So now I need to talk about the dragon. You have to face this critter multiple times, even stabbing it through the head, only to have it fly off with your sword still stuck in his face. You wander along quite a long way before you can get the sword back, and once you pull it out, the dragon seems no worse for wear. No wound, no blood, nothing. Maybe I’m just being nitpicky, but would it have been so hard to maybe add a particle emitter and draw a gash on the skin texture to make me feel like I was doing something to my enemy?

The final fight with the dragon features a partner who is both slow and dependent upon you for survival, so instead of rushing up to the dragon, you have to hang back through several long delaying tactics waiting for Sir Dumbass to catch up. There’s also a floor puzzle, requiring running to push some blocks around, and then running back to protect this partner. Once this delaying tactic is played out, you don’t even do anything to kill the dragon. It’s played out in a cut-scene. Definitely antimclimatic.

The ending is pure indie. You save the day, and everyone is dead. The End. Welp, thank you for playing! And this is the thing that has me thinking WTF: if Sir Dumbass died ages and ages ago, how does he show up to help Moonchild in this final fight? If everyone is dead, why am I getting a trophy called Save Humanity? There’s no humanity left at this point. Moonchild goes away, leaving behind a mostly lifeless Earth. There’s maybe some birds left, possibly some fish that the dragon didn’t eat, but otherwise, nothing. Um, yay?

I know, I know. “It’s just a game, Zoe, don’t over think it.” But that’s what so many of these reviews were gushing about, like this was a really great deep thinking piece of gaming art. The problem is, it’s a school project that’s about as deep as a college student smoking pot can get. I won’t say there weren’t some sequences that I liked or thought were pretty, but for a puzzle game that’s supposed to foster deep thought, this completely fell flat for me.

Still it’s not a broken game…okay, most of the time it’s not broken. Sometimes it is broken, and it requires restarting a checkpoint to fix the glitch. But I can still finish the game with only a few random homicidal thoughts. So, I’ll give Toren three stars. I’m extremely tempted to give it 2 for the bugs and the wonky camera and controls, but I did like playing around with some of the dream sequences.

Anyway, your mileage may vary, but as an art project, I feel like this one was half-baked.