It's not gory, just distressing

Months pass where one day might as well look like the next. My cat continues to be a serial killer, which makes me think of both cereal and murder. It is not a coincidence every time I send away a rodent to freedom or read its last rites I get a weird craving for cornflakes. A couple of big game drops have helped form minor distractions. FFXIV's latest expansion, Dawntrail, came out in one of the warmest weeks of summer like always, requiring careful rationing of playtime after work while minimising the hazards to our hardware. This isn't exactly a joke. Me and Seth have had video cards dying on us during early access week in the past 11 years of this MMO. Dawntrail is set in a roughly 15th century fantasy Americas-like environment. It's pretty and incredibly detailed in ways that appeals to both my inner nerd that goes into a dungeon and admires the floor tiles and my inner nerd that reads about the Columbian exchange and squeals when I see visual representations of the "three sisters" planting method inside a pueblo village. As usual, my husband spends the first weeks zooming through new zones really hoping for more people to talk to about Plot and Stuff, while I lag behind fishing at every pond, stream and pool of stagnant water wailing sadly about my dwindling inventory space. This expansion also gives players random cravings for Central/South American food, particularly corn as a staple carb. Luckily for us, a delightful Mexican restaurant called Mayah's opened within walking blocks from us that specialises in some amazing pibil they kindly top a great deal of menu items with. Most dishes also come with hot, freshly made corn tortillas I would happily eat plain. The store is one of the few we've encountered that serves food in actual American portions though. I've joked the next time I go there, I'll just get the waffles for breakfast because I know I probably won't overeat that. The last time I ordered an as described 'small plate' of fried plantains, I could probably have eaten a quarter and packed the rest home and I wouldn't have needed anything else. Dawntrail also respects bananas as a staple carb, resulting in a secondary craving for bananas.

The other thing that came out was Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance. You know SMT V, that game I spent years waiting for while finding out the next Atlus game was yet another Persona. That came out late last year. Unfortunately, it first came out for the Switch, which was all right but not too kind to its vast explorable open-world design. Performance was sufficiently stilted to give both of us motion sickness while playing. The new expanded version of the game was also released for the PS5, whose much more powerful engine now enabled us to tag team this comfortably. We're about 60% through the story (I think), so far playing the original game without touching the new content at all. One of the recent story reveals had me seriously thinking about the difference in storytelling style for Persona games (an SMT spin-off) and the original SMT line. Persona games are centred around a complex main plot, like online rumours are mysteriously coming true in the real world. You resolve the story by connecting with a large cast of NPCs, who each have their own arcs and develop alongside your character. It's very tightly interwoven and structured.

SMT games are typically premised around the end of the world. The creator god is probably dead. Angels, demons and gods from all manner of pantheons battle over how the new world is to be shaped, with your character as the final arbiter. There are NPCs, and they might be important in some way, but you're not going to spend dozens of hours listening to their woes or trying to date them. Plot development can happen like this: Your boss comes in and tells you and your fellow top achievers there's a global conference for your org coming up. Your subsidiary is going to secede from the main org. It's going to be okay, says your boss, because he's also one of the progenitor Japanese gods. Also, Tokyo is slowly fading away into the ether and you might not have a reality to go home to. That's a five minute conversation. That's all you need to know because you have a huge herd of demons to tame and combine to create better demons so you can fight even more powerful demons and who else is going to spend another 50 hours running around grinding if not you?

If collecting and evolving a menagerie of demons sounds oddly familiar, this might be because a certain other franchise that starts with a P borrowed SMT's core mechanic for a wider, younger audience. SMT games are not for kids. They might not even be for a segment of adults. It is gloriously blasphemous. Virtually nothing is sacred. SMT (specifically its spin-off Digital Devil Saga) is the game that taught me there is nothing that running around in the parking lot for an extra two hours levelling up your party will not solve. Even that might only be enough to beat the next optional boss after a few tries, because unlike its spin-offs where the difficulty may plateau with enough over-levelling, the flagship SMT games are habitually unforgiving. They love their cheap surprises. Your power to customise your party is commensurate to the game's RNG. Also, every SMT has featured at least one penis demon. The latest one has a boss I can only describe as "fruit vagina". If we go into detail, it's a putrifying fruit vagina with wee bat wings and a tongue making lewd gestures in your general direction.

As a result of my depressing media diet, I don't tend to get nightmares about monsters, because the real world makes me way more anxious.