Deja Boo: Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Killer clowns are objectively scary, we'd all say. But somehow as a kid I couldn't realize what a joke this movie was.

Remember back in 2016 when creepy clowns started appearing all over the globe? It was easy for would-be scarers to do, because it seems like clowns are near universally frightening to many people. I was definitely scared of them as a kid, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space served no small part in this gigantic fear. 

I was fortunate enough to never be exposed to Pennywise from It, though I knew he was in the pop culture ether. No, my first exposure came from two things: an Emmet Kelley clown poster my own mother decided for some reason to hang above my bed, and a clown lamp that also appeared around the same time. They didn't last very long, and I definitely remember a dramatic scene when they had to be quickly removed. 

What scared me then

I didn't carry too much clown trauma going into the late '80s, but Killer Klowns from Outer Space became an HBO fixture, and therein lies my clown fright re-imagining. I do not remember watching it from start to finish ever, strangely enough, but I saw previews and clips while my parents were watching it on TV. I knew my parents enjoyed it, but they were in their late 20s and prone to enjoying dark comedies.

What I do remember, I remember in brief, impressionistic swatches, like some sort of modernist author from the 1920s. The absolutely horrific clowns (only later would I appreciate the extraordinary practical effects it took to bring them to life) are running amok in an unnamed city after their circus bigtop space ship crash lands on Earth. I remember the bright pink, cotton candy cocoons that enswathed their victims, and found myself feeling claustrophobic at the prospect.

Normal, everyday clowns are creepy enough, but these guys are grotesque, distorted, malevolent beings that kill and maim. No thank you.

There is also a slightly unhinged, rock and roll theme song titled the same as the film that is also somehow very disconcerting. It's slightly menacing, but also very, very catching.

This is all I really remember, honestly, about the movie, besides harboring a strangely antagonistic feeling towards it for 35 years. I haven't watched it since, but remember it being unsettling. As an adult, when I clicked past it while searching for movies on streaming platforms, I'd chuckle and say, "Oh, I'm not watching that ever again." And so it remained in the outskirts of my mind for a lifetime.

What scares me now

Reader, there is nothing scary about this movie. Yes, the clowns are gruesome, but if anything, I was in awe of the production value and how well-done they were. 

You may notice that I left out a plot subsection in this review, but I did this purposefully because there's not really one to speak of. The clown aliens crash land on earth, then start killing people. End of plot. It was so bad that I actually found myself watching it in 5-10 minute increments because it was just so boring. This is a win, I suppose, for my adult self and my lack of fear. It's nice to know that some things are just unable to be reconciled when you're young.

I honestly can't believe I didn't revisit this film for a lifetime because of a few poorly sketched clown memories. I approached it with an open heart, though. I found myself thinking about the premise itself — alien clown beings that have traveled the universe and are violent. Perhaps it's like the classic chestnut of a million monkeys with a million typewriters somehow managing to type out Hamlet. Maybe, in a million galaxies, a sentient, traveling species emerged as circus clowns, with popcorn guns and a penchant for balloon animals. Sure.

But after I mused poetically at this for a few moments, I began to just be annoyed. Even at 88 minutes, it dragged and dragged. The movie is mainly visual bits that relate to circus activities: at one point, a killer clown is entertaining passersby on the street with a shadow puppet show. As the grand finale, he makes a scary monster that leaps from the shadow and devours the watchers. To kill a killer clown, you need only take aim at his big red honking nose. 

I could go on and on, but it would only bore us both. Of all the movies I plan on watching for this Deja Boo series, I am most embarrassed by this one. There's no accounting for taste, I guess, and also no accounting for fear as a young, impressionable child. Clowns have firmly occupied a space in society as things of terror, and when you couple that with alien, murdering clowns, it's perfect fodder for an anxious child to latch on to. And latch I did!

Nuance is missing from a youthful perspective, as kids can't separate comedy from horror, and that's exactly what this movie is about: the hilarious results of killer alien clowns wreaking havoc on a small community. It worked with Halloween and Friday the 13th, and it worked (to some small, niche extent) with Killer Klowns from Outer Space. 

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Highlights:

• Not every movie has its own rock and roll theme song
• The commitment to the circus bits is admirable
• Great practical effects
• Not scary one bit

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Book Review: The Starving Saints, by Caitlin Starling

Do not let the honey touch your lips

cover artist: Owen Corrigan

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling is one of a raft of medieval fantasies from the last few years (possibly led by 2012’s Between Two Fires by Chris Buehlman, reissued in 2026). They are an interesting subgenre of stories that take fantasy seriously but also take medieval Europe seriously – putting the work in to get at both the sensibility of a holistic world but also at the cultures, political currents and day to day lives of people from this long period of time. 

Specifically I often find European stories featuring periods where religious life is central to living underbaked and, honestly, completely misrepresent the nature of a religious life as I understand it, especially one in which the entire world is seen as intrinsically connected. A holistic worldview is so far from the modern world (even for people who still centre magical thinking which is absolutely not the same thing at all despite claims otherwise) that writing it feels very challenging and it’s not surprise that so many writers just glide over it with a much more modern atomistic capitalist approach to culture and society.

 

Starling’s The Starving Saints feels like it gets it – that she is able to build a world where life revolves around ritual and repetition and, crucially, place. Not just the place itself – in this case a small castle housing a fleeing king and his entourage among the normal citizens but the place of people within that society, ordained by religious faith to know who they are, what is wanted of them and who stands above and below them on the ladder. All of this is by way of saying that Starling manages to conjure a sense of time and place that feels alien and familiar all at once, a world which we would be utterly lost in but also one we can recognise as being entirely coherent for its inhabitants without an ounce of absurdity or knowing wink at the possible silliness of their lives.

 

Into this landscape she tells a genre defying tale of devotion, exploration, survival and grief. This is very much a lockdown novel, not just because everyone in the book is trapped in a castle and slowly losing their minds over the pressure of it but because it’s about who we find ourselves to be when pressed like this. 

 

I came out of lockdown (I didn’t contract Long Covid until the middle of 2024) with two convictions that have only deepened over time. The first is that we have no sense of the collective trauma we experienced, not simply because of lockdown but because of Covid itself. I see it slowly blossoming in my now adult children and have not the mirror to understand how it reflects in me. All I can say is that I do not think we’ve still understood the extent of our reaction to it and our need for a catharsis as a society. The Starving Saints captures that trauma in its months-long application to people who just prior to this were living normal lives that made sense, who could plan for the future and know what tomorrow would bring. 

 

The second is this: we don’t know how to talk about it, not individually although that’s true enough, but socially. There is no great Covid literature, not directly and not that’s broken containment to become the thing we’ve all stood around discussing. I am not surprised – the more I read about the 1918 flu and its complete absence from literature and collective thought in the years following, the more I realise that we too will perform the same dance of forgetting as quickly and as determinedly as possible. The Starving Saints plays with memory, with how we remember and how easy it is for us to blank suffering in the name of recovery, in the name of trying to get back to normal. It plays with the idea that we will willingly exchange one kind of suffering for another, our own suffering for someone else’s, and we will celebrate our metamorphosis given the chance. It is deeply disturbing to see the metaphor here so clearly played out in the real world. It is also deeply uncomfortable to see people portrayed as knowing what they do, how they make this trade of one pain for another for the sake of the idea of relief (and not relief itself). Starling’s characters find one pain so unbearable they are willing to trade for another form of suffering knowing it won’t set them free. If that sounds horrific, it is. 

 

Starling takes it further by making all of this deeply carnal, the world inside her castle is fleshy and physical, full of meat and blood and wine and honey and bone and stink and fluid. There is no escape from these bodies, from their needs and their deterioration when those needs aren’t met. 

 

In that sense The Starving Saints is wholly about grief – about the grief of things coming to birth and being lost in the process, about worlds we knew dying even as we’re trapped unable to affect any kind of outcome. This grief is dipped in honey throughout her novel, coming to us pretending to be something other, something calming, a balm for our confused and shocked souls. Instead the moment the honey touches our lips we succumb and in that succumbing we lose ourselves because no amount of external comfort can soothe our aching souls. 

 

There is no finding oneself again. There is no freedom. Saints posits that there’s only belonging to one force or another. And it is brilliant for it. Our heroes are surviving. Maybe. And in that survival there is collaboration and betrayal, a little success and a lot of failure. 

 

I felt like I was reading something designed to poison the romantic soul, something Shelley or Inchbold would have been disgusted by and I was glad to be part of it. 

 

This is a story in which magic, the act of knowing, cannibalism/starvation, loss, anger, hope, faith and grief are central. It’s a story in which the act of survival leaves us weakened and traumatised because to survive means there has been a catastrophe for us to emerge from – broken and battered. This is not heroism masquerading as overcoming the odds. This is survival by the skin of our teeth, survival when so many others don’t make it. 

 

Lastly it’s a story that also considers faith, not in the protestant evangelical sense that pervades so much of western culture but in the sense of its practice, of the road lives take when they hold onto faith and how that is both a comfort and a struggle. It wrestles with the possibility of faith being nothing more (and nothing less) than our attempt to make sense of a world, not alone, but as a community of people. How our shared ideas offer us meaning and how that meaning naturally breaks down when its foundations are eroded by catastrophic uncertainty.

 

Knowing tomorrow will bring pain is more manageable than not knowing if tomorrow will be bring salvation or suffering. It is the uncertainty that kills us.

 

This won’t be to everyone’s tastes – it is gruesome and horrific as much as it has notes of beauty and hope, but this reader loved it.

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The Math

Highlights:

• A familiar but fantastical world that understands itself and its place
• A compelling tale of the trauma of lockdown on society

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

A powerful novel about faith and hope and suffering that considers loss amid the maelstrom of superficial comfort that we'll gladly take even if it transforms our suffering into something equally traumatic.

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

Film Review: Madoka Magica: Walpurgisnacht Rising

Superheroism is good and all, but who saves the saviors?

When we last visited the Madoka Magica universe in the Rebellion movie, our favorite relentless antivillain Homura rewrote the rules of the universe that her dear friend and savior Madoka had already rewritten. Instead of allowing a system where Madoka is a divine force awaiting all magical girls when they reach the end of their hope reserves, Homura brought Madoka down to Earth, erased her memory, and fulfilled her initial wish that Madoka should never become a magical girl. For the alien Incubators, this state of affairs is uncharted territory. Now it’s Homura who runs the show, and the Incubators don’t have a clue what to do. Where could the story go from there? We were all left wondering, an unbelievable thirteen years ago (gosh, I feel old). Well, Madoka Magica is finally back. The new movie, Walpurgisnacht Rising, once again rewrites all the rules, revealing surprising bits of the setting’s lore and highlighting the questions that have been at the core of this story since the beginning.

The axis around which this whole cosmic epic revolves is the not-entirely-healthy friendship between Homura and Madoka. As you’ll recall, all the way back in the original TV series, Homura made the wish to be the one who would protect Madoka, while Madoka made the wish to save all magical girls from succumbing to hopelessness. This created an unstable dynamic that exposes some of the problems with the very concept of heroism. In order to change a basic law of the universe, Madoka had to renounce her mortal life and become a goddess. But Homura, as Madoka’s magically designated protector, will always have some measure of power over Madoka. Some inevitable questions emerge: Is it fair that Madoka had to sacrifice her humanity? Is protection a form of domination? Is Madoka OK with saving all magical girls except herself? Did Homura have the right to drag Madoka back to life if it meant annulling Madoka’s choice?

Walpurgisnacht Rising presents us with an unexpected extra complication: It’s little use for Homura to crown herself ruler of the universe when there are forces outside of the universe that don’t answer to her. Those forces irrupt into the story since early in the movie, seeking to punish Homura for her Faustian excesses of ambition. Turns out the dead magical girls that Madoka selflessly offered to save had their own opinions on whether they wanted to be saved, which means that the bulk of the movie is spent discovering the multiple competing agendas that threaten to break apart Homura’s utopia. If you thought the ending of Rebellion was a bit too hard to follow, buckle up, because Walpurgisnacht Rising comes with no training wheels. You’re expected to remember how the story was left off thirteen years ago, and to pick up the continuation immediately. So I can’t recommend watching this movie as your first taste of Madoka Magica; you’d end up hopelessly confused. Go back for a couple days. It’s just three prior movies (or a TV season plus a movie, if you prefer). You’ve had all these years to catch up. This movie has massive loads of plot to tell and no time to ease the viewer in.

Among the reforms that Homura has made to the universe, we learn of a new way of fighting evil spirits. She no longer lets the Incubators recruit new magical girls; instead, she grants temporary powers to a random girl, valid for one fight, and afterward erases her memory of it. That way there’s always some heroine available to defend humanity, but without the cost of losing a girl’s soul. The Incubators are understandably not happy with this arrangement, because now they can’t collect the emotional energy they came to Earth for. This new way of doing things goes on nicely until three unknown magical girls show up out of nowhere and start blocking Homura’s attempts to keep distributing powers. Each of these new girls comes with her own plan for how to re-re-reform the magical girl system. From this point on, it gets somewhat dizzying to keep track of who is a villain according to whom, but let me try to summarize.

First, as you may have guessed from the movie’s title, we’re shown the backstory of the super-mega-witch on steroids that Madoka defeated in the TV series: the dreaded Walpurgisnacht. We learn what kind of magical girl she used to be, why she turned into a witch, how she got so inconceivably strong, and what she has to do with the present plot. Since Madoka was the only magical girl with enough power to defeat Walpurgisnacht on her own, there’s someone who reasons that forcing Madoka to become a witch would release immense amounts of energy, helping the Incubators’ mission to delay entropy and keep the universe running. This subplot is rather brief, but it poses interesting questions about what it means to be a self-sacrificing hero. Lastly, we get to the central conundrum of the entire series: Will Homura allow Madoka to fulfill her cosmic role? One of the many revelations of this movie is that, in the same way that neither Homura’s method with temporary powers nor Madoka’s Law of the Cycle is the original way things were, the same is true of witches. Long ago, it used to be the case that magical girls experienced an arguably worse fate than becoming witches. Someone made an altruistic wish to fix that, and the result was that witches came into existence. Such a drastic retcon demands an explanation for how Incubators collected energy under the former rules, but this isn’t too significant for the dramatic effect of the story.

What matters about this retcon is that it goes back to the same theme we’ve seen before with Madoka and Homura, i.e. the idea that coming up with a perfect solution to help others necessarily takes away something from you. The karmic balance in the Madoka Magica series operates by a ruthless transactional logic. To save others, you have to lose yourself. To save you, someone else has to get lost. This unbreakable tradeoff underlies the fundamental tragedy of being a magical girl. It’s a clever bit of dramatic irony that an Incubator isn’t a monkey’s paw; it doesn’t twist your wishes to screw you over a technicality. No, what happens is even more heartbreaking: the Incubator gives you your wish exactly the way you wanted it, and even then it doesn’t suffice to make you happy. In the earlier movies, Madoka’s big gamble to fix everything, followed by Homura’s big gamble to fix everything, only redistributed the weights of the problem instead of getting rid of it. In a universe where emotions follow the math of thermodynamics, some bit of happiness must by necessity be lost in every transaction.

I’m not sure I came out of the theater with a full idea of what exactly happens at the end of Walpurgisnacht Rising. The more we progress along the story, the more surreal the battle becomes, and at least to me it wasn’t clear who managed to save whom. But I don’t mind being confused when the artistry on screen is so absolutely breathtaking. The animation in Madoka Magica has always distinguished itself by a unique aesthetic that combines digital composition with physical collage to produce an incomparable atmosphere of weirdness. This new movie pushes its own style to even higher standards of visual experimentation. Don’t worry too much if you get lost in the plot. Relax in your seat and enjoy the marvelous look of this masterpiece of animation.

(And if you somehow figure out what on Earth that ending was about, please tell me. I still want to know.)

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: The Only Way Out Is Up by Django Wexler

Robot battles, class politics, and numbers going up

 

Django Wexler has had an incredibly consistent career across a wide range of subgenres, ranging from the flintlock military fantasy of The Shadow Campaigns to the excellent YA fantasy of The Wells of Sorcery to the genuinely funny Dark Lord Davi duology and more. Dark Lord Davi was openly an affectionate pastiche of isekai (i.e. a specific Japanese iteration of portal fantasy) anime. This stuff has a huge and increasing fanbase among the anglosphere, well known within anime fandom, though I’m not quite sure how familiar traditional written SFF fandom and much of its attached critical apparatus is with the same.

Wexler takes this mining of popular spaces that are potentially unfamiliar to traditional SFF fandom up a notch with The Only Way Out Is Up. The book is a progression (science) fantasy, where our protagonist, Taj, and his probably sentient robot, Star, fight their way literally up from the bottom of a garbage heap to power and influence. As I will discuss a bit more below, this is another excellent effort from Wexler, engaging and fast-paced without being shallow. But before I turn to the book itself, forgive a digression into definitions here. Having just said I think this is a subgenre many won’t be familiar with, and being greeted with slight bafflement by a number of social media acquaintances when I’ve said “progression fantasy”, I hope this is both useful and potentially interesting.

Progression fantasy is arguably more a collection of subgenres than a single clearly defined thing. Its influences include Xianxia (i.e. Chinese cultivation fiction), manga, anime, light novels, JRPG video games and TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons (as an example of how this all comes together, one of the key early influences is Record of Lodoss War, a Japanese series that started as a narrated serialisation of the author’s TTRPG campaign, was converted into a light novel series, and has spawned video game and anime spinoffs). These are in fact quite disparate urtexts, which contain different cultural and literary assumptions. They are united basically by only one single theme: Number Goes Up (i.e. the protagonist grows in power over time). 

Some of these influences are literally games, and at the crunchy end of the field (LitRPG), books have full-on stat screens and dice rolls as part of the action: think Dungeon Crawler Carl or the "trapped in a video game" subgenre of Japanese media, of which Sword Art Online is probably the most famous, though not quite the earliest. But not everything broadly in the progression fantasy realm is quite so literal in its gamification: I'd argue much of Brandon Sanderson's work teeters on the edge of progression fantasy with its focus on exploiting detailed magic systems. And in between those poles is a rich stew of iterations, from Sarah Lin's enjoyable, idiosyncratic, "architecture of a literal house inside your soul dictates power growth" Weirkey Chronicles to Tobias Begley's quantum magic school Journals of Evander Taylor to Will Wight's mega-selling Cradle series (which is clearly heavily Xianxia influenced). There are also a range of themes: outright individual power fantasy is probably the most common, but protagonists using their growing power to support the building of communities with their friends is also a recurring theme, and series with actively revolutionary politics directed at capitalist oppressors are also quite frequent.

The progression fantasy field in English is dominated by self-published authors and web serials published on sites like Royal Road (Indeed, Wexler is currently posting *another* progression fantasy, The Thirteenth God, on Royal Road). The quality is wildly variable: the best is very good fun and occasionally significantly more than that, but a large amount is individualistic power fantasies in leaden prose. In addition, one side effect of this serial fiction publishing context is that often this is the author’s first time writing for an audience. Even for more experienced writers in this space quite often the opening arc takes an absolute age to find its feet in its world, with its narrative, and with its characters. When these are turned into formal volumes for sale, either via self-publishing or when picked up for traditional publication, the first book is very often notably weaker that what follows (this is true even of stuff I overall enjoy, like John Bierce's Mage Errant and the aforementioned Dungeon Crawler Carl). 

This traditional publication pickup is a relatively new thing: SFF publishers failed to pay much attention to this collection of subgenres even though they had absolutely been doing the numbers online for years (For example, Unsouled, the first book in Wight's Cradle series, had 65,576 ratings on Goodreads at time of writing). Alongside republishing existing works, publishers now seem to be actively courting this zeitgeist and putting out original work in the progression fantasy space (the dynamic reminds me of a more male-coded attempt at repeating the flood of cozy fantasy we saw after the success of Legends and Lattes). The Only Way Out Is Up is an early and very good example of major publisher resources being put into such work. Wexler has no problems with a meandering or muddled start: the book begins with immediately engaging action and continues impressively from there. 

As noted above, Taj is a young man (twenty years old) who lives at the bottom of a city built in tiers around a giant hole several hundred metres deep and several kilometres across. There are three main tiers, each containing a city of increasing economic and social status as you go up. Periodically, various construction and electronic junk from the mysterious Above (i.e. the outside world) will drop through the aperture at the top of the hole (dubbed, rather evocatively, "the Asshole"). This forms a giant pile of e-waste—the Heap—at the bottom of the hole, below even the lowest city tier. Taj and his adoptive family make a precarious life around this huge mass of the detritus of those wealthier and more powerful than them.

The progression element here, at least for the first book, focuses on Taj upgrading his robot (called “runics” in-world) to fight in increasingly high stakes battles, both for money and to advantageously position himself and his friends politically. This means that a lot of the action set pieces are these robot battles, which are hugely entertaining, like a souped up science fantasy version of the old BBC programme, Robot Wars. The runics are built from metal and powered and controlled by sigils, seemingly magic runes charged by a person’s life force to make inanimate objects either do something (verb sigils) or change the way it is done (noun and modifier sigils). This is largely understood in-world as a standard programming language with standard operators, though Star, Taj’s runic, seems to be largely self-aware in a way other runics are not, and there are hints that it is possible to create nonstandard sigils. This is not a large feature of this book, but the title of the series (The Sigilist) suggests it may well become so, and may well become Taj’s route to the ever-expanding power and agency that is at the core of progression fantasy’s plot drive. 

Outside the world of sigils and robot battles, the plot focuses on Taj’s attempts to keep his family safe, housed, and fed (no small task in the precarious world of the Heap) and on the political manoeuvering of the deuteragonist we meet early in the novel (Ky, a young woman from the fancy upper tier city). The book is first and foremost hugely entertaining; a pacy romp through a slightly implausible, slightly gamified world. But there is also a bit more going on than pure confection. The character work is operating within generally expected archetypes, but the dialogue and integration with setting is skillful and naturalistic, quickly building rapport between the reader and Taj. Star is a very effective snarky robot sidekick, and Ky, our deuteragonist, has her own motivations and character and is far more than a distressed damsel for Taj to moon over. The gender and class politics of the setting are pretty clearly critiqued; the fact that the system sets up a no-win situation where those at those top pit everyone below them against each laid bare. This is very much a book one, so none of these issues are completely resolved here, but one plot arc is resolved and the board has very effectively been set for the rest to be explored as the series continues. 

Writing this review, one of the things that I struggled with most is how to get across just what it is this book does well beyond "good fun" (which it absolutely is). I'm a sucker for what Wexler serves up, and I think, like his previous work, The Only Way Out Is Up is definitely a cut above merely competent and enjoyable commercial SFF. He's a very good writer. But Wexler is not, to pick another contemporary author I think writes works similarly a cut above, the flashy prose stylist Freya Marske can be. He doesn't play the games with form and narrative the similarly consistent and excellent Jenn Lyons does. Where I think Wexler excels is in between this sentence level and volume-level creativity: he's as good as anyone currently working at conjuring atmosphere and character and plot drive across a paragraph or a scene. 

This mid-level structural mastery makes for a quick, breezy read that still vividly evokes setting and character. This is, I think, very hard to do, but while you're in the middle of it, whipping through a perfectly paced fight scene, it's easy not to notice how much skill is deployed. This is me noticing, and I hope readers of this review and Wexler's work will pay attention and appreciate it. Wexler is a hugely able purveyor of this sort of high-quality commercial SFF, and The Only Way Out is Up is another excellent example. It's also very clearly knowledgeable and respectful of the slightly out of the spotlight traditions it's drawing on, pulling us into the thrill of watching the weak and downtrodden get stronger and stick it to the rich and powerful, without ever veering into the bland, power fantasies of the less impressive examples of those traditions. Bring on book two.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Faced-paced, engaging action
• Appealing, naturalistic character work
• Excellent gateway book for the sometimes impenetrable world of progression fantasy

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 

Reference:  Django Wexler, The Only Way Out Is Up [Orbit, 2026].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social 

Video Game Review: Tacoma by Fullbright (Second Opinion)

Walk, don't run (because you can't).

As Amy Ferrier’s ship pulls into dock on the Tacoma, various ideas run through my head. What kind of story will this game have? What kind of environments will the transfer station hold? Will there be some mystery to unveil, like in Fullbright’s previous indie darling Gone Home? With developers from the Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den DLC on board, surely a creepy and/or rewarding sci-fi adventure awaits? No?

Tacoma is, as the trolls on the internet would call it, a “walking simulator.” Oh, how I wish there were a run button instead of a useless crouch button. There’s no combat to speak of, no real challenge, just a story to uncover over a short period. The studio nailed this with their last game, Gone Home. Essentially an interactive movie, Tacoma follows Amy Ferrier as she unveils the last hours of the Tacoma crew after the station takes severe damage to the oxygen supply. The crew has to deal with existential dilemmas, and lucky for Amy, it’s all been recorded. It’s up to the player to help her dig into this crew’s most vulnerable final moments and deliver them, and the station AI, Odin, to the multi-trillion dollar corp that owns the spacecraft.

The interpersonal transactions are the meat of the game, so I won’t share much on the relationships other than to say that some moments feel genuine, while other feel stilted and staged. Overall, the story is conveyed well, but there is no true impact. I wasn’t hit emotionally at any point in the game by the writing. A few sweet moments don’t make a well-written game.

Alongside the writing, Tacoma has weirdly uneven visuals. Considering this is a short game (it can be completed in under two hours) with very few assets, you would think more polish would go into making the game feel real, inhabited. But no. It feels almost plastic in some places, the surrounding environments not quite lived in, as anticipated, but more… contrived. I could feel the developer’s hand in the entire experience from the assets to the storytelling. One would think that this since the game is so short without much interactivity, this would mean the game runs flawlessly, right? Right?

Again, no. The game crashed on me three times during my short stint. I also had massive frame rate drops numerous times (especially when taking the elevator), and kept waiting for my screen to go black. For the record, I was playing on a PS5 Pro, so these performance issues should be nonexistent with the hardware boost (the game was originally developed for PS4).

The voice recordings are an advanced take on audio logs. Instead of simple audio, the player must follow the hologram of each person to unveil more about their story, their thoughts, and their interactions with others. Some environmental storytelling helps with this (letters, dartboards with someone’s face on them, etc.). These are the best-implemented aspects of the storytelling. Through these means, and through a bit of snooping through personal computers and drawers, the player can find little hidden goodies, like more story in locked drawers, key code rooms, and lockers. The soundtrack is simple yet effective, and complements the voice-recorded holograms. I always enjoyed the little jingle that played every time I rode the elevator (though sometimes it would warble and I would become worried the game would crash again).

Tacoma concludes in a way that attempts to recapture the magic of Gone Home, and honestly, it doesn’t wow me. It’s cohesive and coherent and gets the job done, but it will not have a lasting impact like Fullbright’s predecessor. The characters have some conviviality and believability and I found some of their stories worthwhile. I applaud the developer’s inclusion of LGBT and disabled persons, and am glad to see a developer embrace all of their audience. I do feel like a bigger focus should have been placed on the game’s performance and on trying to make the game more memorable, from the environment to the story instead of just trying to replicate it's previous title (but in a space setting). As it stands, Tacoma is a serviceable narrative-based game, though not a highly recommended one. Perhaps my view would be different had I played it at launch. As it stands, I'd say grab it on a big sale if you’re curious.

--

The Math

Objective Assessment: 6/10

Bonus: +1 for some sweet character moments. +1 for quality VOs.

Penalties: -1 for performance issues. -1 for lack of memorable depth. -.5 for no run button.

Nerd Coefficient: 5.5/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Deja Boo: Event Horizon

An eye-gouging good time!

It’s an odd thing, watching elements of your childhood, particularly ones that you didn’t even know were remarkable, fade into legend. Ask [extremely old guy voice] kids these days, and they will be incredulous at what us ‘90s kids did, and were allowed to do. What do you mean, you just… went out? How did your parents know when to pick you up? How did they know you were safe? How did they even know where you were? (We just did, friends’ parents or a quick collect call message*, they didn’t until we got home, they didn’t). We roamed all over the small, country town I grew up outside of with just bikes and the confidence that none of the (disturbingly high number of) serial killers known to be active in Western Washington were targeting teenage boys. Probably. As far as we knew.

My neighbor growing up either contributed to this vagrancy or helped protect us from it. He was an ideal neighbor, his kids were grown, he had way more money than us, and used it to collect classic cars, for which he build a massive garage/shop, in which he put a home theater—doing so in the ‘90s was no small accomplishment. He was obsessed with movies, buying literally every single movie that came out every single week. His DVD* collection was enormous. Best of all, he allowed us to go in there whenever we wanted, provided we didn't make a mess or steal too much of his beer.

All this is to say, I had unfettered access to a lot of R-rated movies at a young age. Combined with my love of scifi, I was very excited to watch this very grown-up scifi movie called Event Horizon. I’ve written all this without having seen it since that day, because ~12-year-old-me was traumatized. I wanted to do this part of the writeup because I honestly don’t know if it’s a good movie or not, or if it’s scary or not, or if my younger, squeamish self was just too shocked by someone ripping their own eyeballs out. It seems to have enjoyed a resurgence lately, with comics explaining backstory, Sam Neil passing and his brilliance getting the appreciation it has always deserved, and the idea of it being a Warhammer 40k prequel all having brought it back into at least some level of public consciousness.

So now it’s time to face my fears and rewatch it. Hang tight, read a magazine in the lobby or something.

Still here? Good. Before we get to the (literal) gory details, I have to say that, for a mid-‘90s movie, Event Horizon holds up remarkably well. Some of the effects, mostly those related to zero gravity, look somewhat dated, but not terribly so. The opening and closing credits have some very ‘90s electronic music which Trent Reznor would have improved upon, but that’s not present in the film itself.

This movie provided the epiphany that apparently my favorite genre is lost in space** or at sea. I read way too many books about shipwrecks, I love Alien, I will defend Sunshine until my dying breath, so this is right up my adult alley. Did it scare me out of my mind, like when I was a kid? Of course not; I’m old and jaded now. However, it was brilliantly tense and did an amazing job of building suspense all throughout. Despite a brief text intro, it immediately gives us the feeling that something isn’t right. One of the very clever ways this is done is by transitions. They’re never slow fades, or wipes, but smash cuts that seem to occur right as something is about to happen. It creates these mini-jumpscares that create a sense of unease. When the action happens later, and there are really scary things happening, we are primed for not knowing what is around the corner—especially since a key component of the characters’ horror is their deteriorating mental state, as they hallucinate and can’t be sure what is real or not—in a way, neither can we.

At the center of all this uncertainty is Dr. Weir, played brilliantly by Sam Neil. When we meet him, he is ostensibly there to help a rescue crew, as he tries to humbly ingratiate himself to them. The film doesn’t tell us when, exactly, his descent into madness happens (more on this in a sec), but it clearly happens earlier, and more willingly, than his shipmates. His actions become more unnerving as the film progresses, and his motives are more and more in question, and he clearly knows more than he initially let on. Neil plays this part so perfectly, his voice always level and sinister—but somehow disarming.

The recent comics that are a prequel that follows the journey of the Event Horizon spell out his motives—which we do see in the movie, having essentially driven his wife to suicide with his obsession with his work—as well as going into what happened in the seven-year period the ship was missing. While I enjoy this, and it adds to the mythos, one of the strengths of the film is that it doesn’t show us all this. There’s a fair amount of gore (not as much as I remember!), but their trip into the Chaos Realm/hell is only shown in brief flashes. Just like Weir’s embrace of Chaos is not pinpointed, this contributes to the overall unease of the setting, instead of just splashing gore all over the walls (although that does literally happen).

Grounding the whole affair is Lawrence Fishburne’s Captain Miller, who is delightfully hard-assed, and really just wants to do his job and go home—even when that job turns out to be trying to stop a literal portal to hell from opening in Neptune. His stories and interactions with the rest of the crew actually make me think that the “normal,” lived-in part of the Event Horizon universe would make for more interesting story fodder than the prequel/sequel comics that explore, ya know, literal hell. Or maybe all of that is what ultimately leads to humanity as we know it in the Warhammer 40k universe? I stand by that fan theory, because it’s awesome.

In conclusion—if you haven’t seen Event Horizon, I highly recommend it. If you watched it at way too young of an age like me, I recommend it even more.

—DESR

Dean Smith-Richard is the author of 3204AD, and will definitely publish something again one day, probably. He loves to cook, play baseball, and is way too much of a craft beer nerd. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and likes the rain, thank you very much.

* I have to explain this too, don’t I?

**Ironically, it is apparently impossible to make a decent modern version of Lost in Space.

Deja Boo: The Gate

A surreal '80s horror gem aimed ostensibly at kids is like if Dario Argento directed The Goonies

This is the scary movie for me—the one that has stuck most vividly in my mind since I was a child. Released in 1987, The Gate is a Canadian horror film that features a tiny Stephen Dorff in his pictorial debut. It's my first entry in our new Déjà Boo series, where we'll be revisiting the movies that made us squirm as kids.

The '80s were fertile ground for horror films, but this movie really has nearly every trope you could possibly want: monsters, demons, Satanic panic, body horror, zombies, minions, and rockets. It's jam-packed with spooky action that somehow landed only a PG-13 rating, though we all know that the censors were a bit looser back then.

The plot

Glen (Stephen Dorff) is a typical '80s kid—shy, uncool, but sweet—who wakes one morning to learn that the giant tree in his backyard has been struck by lightning. He and his friend Terry, a young metalhead, dig around in it and find geodes. Slowly, the hole starts getting bigger, and weird things start happening.

Glen's parents go out of town for the weekend, leaving him and his friend with Glen's big sister, who in true '80s fashion throws a house party. Unbeknownst to the kids, they speak the existence of a hellmouth into existence when words appear on a magnetic notepad. This, accompanied by the accidental sacrifice of the family dog into the hole, unleashes ancient gods that begin trying to escape.

The rest of the movie, I'll be honest, doesn't make a ton of logical sense. The kids battle off demons and ghosts that appear in the house, before Glen uses a toy rocket to defeat the final big bad.

I'm still not quite sure who the audience for this one was. Having the parents go away for the weekend is classic '80s kids-in-charge energy, and it's in good company with other movies like The Goonies and The Explorers.

But there are scenes and themes that are way too over the top for young folks, and I don't think it's cool enough for teenagers. Adults then? I'm still not sure. If it was aimed at kids, it's sort of an introduction to horror, in a sense. Nothing becomes repulsive to the extreme, but as a 10-year-old watching this, I was definitely microdosing body horror and Giallo vibes.

What scared me then

There are a few major scenes that have stuck with me over 30+ years, and they are honestly still creepy as hell. One is the scene in which Glen, having demonically grown an eye in the middle of his hand, has to stab it out with a shard of glass. I wouldn't have such a visceral reaction again to body horror until I was 13 and watched Nicholas Cage's character in The Rock stab a syringe straight into his heart as a poison gas antidote. These things stick with you, apparently.

The other scene(s) revolved around the animated/claymation minions from Hell. They gasp and run and claw and grab, all while being about 8 inches tall. Several scenes are gruesomely creepy, and evoke a more macabre Lilliputian from Gulliver's Travels.

Somehow I forgot completely about the scene where Glen, faced with an attacking, demonic version of his best friend, is forced to defend himself with only a Barbie doll. He manages to gouge out Terry's eye with the legs. Wild stuff. Sometimes The Gate is like Evil Dead 2, just absolutely insane but also kind of funny. See also: When Glen's sister straight-up yeets a boombox at a zombie to knock him down.

Another interesting thing I noted on this rewatch is how the film has two modes when it comes to sound: It's either complete silence, or foreboding instrumental dirges. The atmosphere, as a result, is always menacing, and it really serves to underscore the unease throughout the runtime.

What I noticed now

I can totally see why a young me found this movie scary, and I'm not sure any kid today could handle it any better. What struck me most now are the things that were a little quieter in the film. For one, the fact that the family dog dies and they don't even call their parents on their vacation to let them know. I find this near sociopathic-level behavior, and I say this as someone who adores Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead.

Not only does the dog die, but Glen's sister's wannabe boyfriend is tasked with taking him to animal control(!?!!?!). When he finds out it's closed, he simply returns to the house and dumps it into the hellmouth. Absolutely not.

Anyway, moving on. The subtle background aspects that permeate The Gate are quite spooky—bugs flocking to a windowpane at night, up close chainsaw noises, eerie mists. Even the shadows your own toys cast in the moonlight can be unnerving. I experienced this many times as a kid even with the most benign of playthings. I remember getting a 6-foot tall cardboard cutout of C3PO and being scared to death waking up to him for the first few weeks.

I also found that seeing a kid’s perception of their own house being haunted is especially upsetting. It's supposed to be a place of refuge and love, so when demons start attacking it, you can feel vulnerable. Glen is interesting because he's not a bland and angelic Carol Anne, but he's also not incredibly self-assured. He’s a Final Boy, except everyone else lives—they just don’t contribute to their salvation as a group. Only Glen gets them out of their demonic jam.

The movie ends on a high note, with all evil crises avoided. The house, of course, is utterly wrecked, and as an adult now, I am annoyed by how much I kept wondering what it would cost to completely redo a living room wrecked by Satan.

Highlights:

• A young Stephen Dorff's film debut
• It's basically microdosing body horror for kids
• Great depiction of Satanic panic and heavy metal
• The Goonies if Dario Argento directed it

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.