Rouke Reviews

A review blog about podcasts, games, movies, comics, and anything else I feel like talking about, from the perspective of a 21 year old autistic, pan ace girl.

[roukereviews]

SABLE: A first impressions review

Sable is a narrative horror podcast by Lane Lloyd. For this review, I will talk about my first impressions and opinions I was left with after listening to the first five episodes only.

In the first episode, which is fairly short, we are introduced to Crow, a bird-like humanoid creature with a mask of bone for a face. I love the description of this figure and the overall concept of it, but the actual action present on the episode is somewhat strange and confusing. This proves to be a recurring problem for the podcast – It often tries to introduce an element of mystery in such a vague but long-winded way that it makes following what’s actually happening almost impossible. The sudden changes in setting and point of view that occur in the next few episodes really do not help with this.

I do like Lane Lloyd’s narration a lot, and the various voices he does for different characters. They’re distinct enough to recognise easily who’s talking each time, which can often be a problem for me because my auditory processing is terrible. But, from the start, this is handled really well.

The writing could certainly be better, though it’s far from awful and gives us a few interesting and evocative turns of phrase. I’m always more understanding of awkward or middling bits of writing at the beginning of any podcast, because often it takes a few episodes for shows to settle and find their voice and style, but here there really were a few amateurish lines bordering on the cliché that had me rolling my eyes.

Even though the descriptions are usually great (possibly my favourite part of the writing), creating some horrifying and captivating images, sometimes it becomes excessive and too elaborate, to the point it distracts from the story itself. Narrative podcasts, in my opinion, aren’t the place to show off your fanciest writing – The experience for the listener will be better if you focus on making your writing a simple vehicle for the story, clear and polished. Otherwise the listener’s attention can’t be entirely directed to the story, and suspension of disbelief becomes a lot more difficult.

As for the tone of it, the podcast is mostly pleasantly creepy, but it feels like it’s at risk of committing the same mistake too many horror podcasts fall into. If you make everything grim, grey, dark and awful, your audience will quickly become desensitised to it. Keeping it all at the same continuous level of emotion destroys any possible tension. You need to have a balance, variety, some lighter scenes, genuinely good moments and characters, things that people care and worry about so when the true horror finally happens it has weight to it, it has meaning.

Without it, the genre is nothing but a collection of vaguely disturbing and often gory but ultimately forgettable and empty moments. I am a huge horror fan, but this is such a common problem I’ve had to stop listening to many horror podcasts that become over-the-top oppressively depressing experiences. I feel Sable tries to do it right, but falls short. The introduction of Daniel Boggs, for example, is really good, but his character is never fleshed out and real enough for me to care much about him.

One thing this podcast does very well is presenting some very interesting and unsettling concepts, the kind of darkly fascinating and otherworldly images that can make horror fiction so uniquely appealing. It’s a shame that the follow-up to these concepts is too often disappointing and confusing. I don’t know if it’s just a personal problem, but I truly was left unsure of what exactly had happened and what the story was trying to say way too often. I believe the narrative would have benefited greatly from slightly more straightforward resolutions, because as it is the endings left me feeling nothing at all. It was still an entertaining listen, but it had no real impact.

At the end of each episode the creator of the podcast gives us the usual credits and announcements, a segment that can often be a bit rambling, but in a frankly endearing way. They give a podcast that otherwise would have felt a lot more generic a huge amount of personality, there’s a wonderful sincere tone to it, and I would love to feel more of that on the narrative itself.

On a technical level, the sound quality is usually really good, though it seems worse on parts of episode four for some reason. The website offers the episodes for download in a relatively easy way, though I had to rename them so they’d show up in order in my MP3, which is always an added inconvenience.

I usually like to talk about the ways something handles diversity in my reviews, but I can’t say much here, since there just wasn’t any. Not really anything offensive either. It was pretty unremarkable on that aspect.

In conclusion, @sablepodcast is a show that manages to stand out in the horror genre despite its flaws. Its first five episodes aren’t the best opening to a show I’ve seen, admittedly, but it was enough to make me want to keep listening in the hope that I can see its clear potential continue to develop in the next few episodes. What am I hoping for? A more consistent narrative, further exploration of some of these great concepts, and more diversity.

I’ve perhaps been a bit harsh in this review, but it’s only because this is a podcast I really want to love. I’ll keep listening, and possibly write a follow-up to this review after I’ve caught up with the most recent episode.

[roukereviews]

Review: King Falls AM Episode 34, and the reaction to it.

‘Blind, Deaf, and Dumb’ is the 34th episode of King Falls AM. There is a lot of good, enjoyable content where the podcast plays into its strengths, but ultimately a clumsily executed attempt at ableist humour left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

The episode starts really nicely, with an example of what I truly believe is the greatest strength of this podcast – Its characters and their interactions, and especially the great dynamic between Ben and Sammy, ‘The most formidable co-hosts AM radio has ever seen’. You get the feeling that they genuinely like and support each other, which is lovely. Ben takes the role of the moderator of a debate between Grisham, Hershel, and Ron, the town’s three mayoral candidates, while Sammy covers it for radio. It’s a welcome departure from their usual late-night radio show format, and having Ben provide the structure while Sammy adds narration or clarification when needed works quite well, considering this is an audio medium.

This also reflects on much of the rest of the episode too, when it’s time for Grisham, Hershel and Ron to speak. It does a good job of developing the goals and motivations of the candidates (something there was definitely a need for) more through dialogue and interactions than outright exposition, avoiding what could have been an easy narrative trap to fall into. Their distinct personalities shine through very clearly and the way they clash and intersect is definitely interesting.

You can clearly feel how Grisham, the current mayor, changes his demeanour when he’s forced away from his prepared statements and comfortable politician role when faced with these two men, so different from what he’s used to deal with in his public appearances. Ron is a great, complex gay character that’s woderful to see in a show that still has a long way to go in its representation of non-straight people, even though it has been improving a lot. Hershel’s grumpy libertarianism manages to be almost endearing, and I can’t deny the way he uses texting/internet lingo occasionally is pretty hilarious. The whole podcast usually does a good job using slang or mentioning social media in an organic way, when so many works of fiction that try to add something similar end up sounding very awkward about it, but some of the references go a bit too far (like mentioning the Zika virus now that it’s all over the news) and it might make the podcast feel very dated for future listeners.

In general, I found the actual debate to be quite a fun listen. Personally I always enjoy the voice acting in King Falls AM very much, especially since I’m Autistic and struggle a lot with auditory processing, so podcasts with many male voices that are similar to one another can be difficult to listen to. The unique and distinctive voices of the King Falls characters are therefore quite enjoyable for me.  

I really wish the podcast had been confident enough to let the debate carry the whole episode, instead of adding a ‘mystery’ that ultimately ended up derailing it. It’s not even highly offensive, it simply doesn’t work on a narrative level. I can almost see what they were trying to go for after my second listen through, but the first time was utterly confusing. There is a lot of build-up that’s anything but subtle, with the Mission Apparition ad to remind listeners about ghosts of historical figures in town, Sammy acknowledging the strange noises several times, and it ends up being excessive because there simply isn’t a satisfying resolution.

Turns out the noises were the wailing of Helen Keller's Banshee, angered by the repeated use of ableist words. And this is not funny, original or interesting. It’s a pretty jarring reveal and plain lazy writing. Unlike the situation with the ghost of President Lincoln, which plays with the general image people have of the historical figure to make him into a belligerent badass with very funny results, this is not departing from what is expected but playing straight into the stereotype for a cheap laugh. There is such a big difference.

There’s already a million shitty edgy Helen Keller jokes out there, none of them are funny, and I don’t understand why King Falls AM felt the need to do something that relies on the same awful premise to ‘work’ as a joke. When you’re writing humour, you need to ask yourself, why is this supposed to be funny? What assumptions and premises need to be accepted for someone to find this joke funny? The answer here is that Helen Keller was a Deaf-blind person who lacked the ability to communicate verbally for a considerable part of her life. So the joke is that in death she is reduced again to nothing but intelligible noises. The joke depends entirely on her disability. This is what we’re supposed to be laughing at.

As I’ve said before, in my first listen I mostly found it confusing. I didn’t understand what the podcast was trying to go for. They might have been able to do something good with the ableist language stuff, if it had been handled differently, and I don’t doubt the intentions were good, but the whole thing was badly executed and in my second listen it made me profoundly uncomfortable. I’m Autistic, and often non-verbal. Seeing a podcast I love turn disabled people, and especially such an important disabled historical figure, into a caricature of what this ableist society perceives them to be like is really hurtful. More so considering we don’t really have any other canon representation of disabled or neurodivergent people at all.

Helen Keller is an amazing disabled icon that is too often terribly misrepresented, with narratives focusing more on her helpers and teachers and erasing the many speeches and lectures she gave later in life, and her political activism and support of causes like women’s suffrage, labor rights, and socialism. Yet another narrative that reduces disabled people to something not human and takes away her voice is incredibly problematic when we take into account the ableist societal context.

Of course, this wasn’t some kind of unforgivable mistake. As I’ve explained, I liked most of the episode. Me and a few other fans raised some concerns about the issue and asked @kingfallsam to weigh in or explain, in case we were missing something. I personally didn’t see anyone being really angry or overly critical about it. But the way the creators of the podcast ended up responding just made me feel worse about it, and it’s definitely making this into a bigger deal than it needed to be originally.

I would have been perfectly happy with a quick acknowledgement, something more like ‘We’re sorry, it was just a lazy joke and we didn’t realise it’d hurt some of our listeners. We’ll try to be more mindful of ableism in the future’. I don’t think this is too much to ask. Instead, we got something that didn’t feel like an apology at all, but doubling down on the ableism.

Believe it or not, ‘fiction is supposed to make you feel things’ is not an excuse to make some of your listeners ‘cringe’. There is an enormous difference between the kind of pleasant shock and horror a well written creepy narrative leaves you with, and the unwanted hurt from finding yet more ableism in fiction you were expecting to enjoy. Believe me, disabled people already have to face that kind of ‘cringe’ all the time simply by existing in this society. Don’t pretend adding to that has some kind of artistic merit. Don’t pretend you’re having some high quality provocative writing censored by the ‘PC Police’ when you’re getting called out for your shitty, lazy joke.

‘Political Correctness’ is not really a thing. It’s about caring about how the way your narrative presents these kinds of issues affects people. You shouldn’t ever ‘be PC to be PC’, you should want not to be discriminatory and be on the side of inclusion and acceptance because it’s the right thing to do. If you don’t know how to do this without being ‘predictable and boring’, well, then you clearly have a lot to work on.

The existence of disabled people and the fact that we deserve respect is not a political issue. Open and explicit representation of ANY minority group shouldn’t be a political issue, or ‘pandering’ as it has been suggested, because our existence is simply a fact and you should want to represent that reality. Doing so openly is not ‘fishing for approval’. Diversity doesn’t need a justification, and the endless narrative possibilities it opens should be its own reward.

I’ve been a bit harsh in this review, but I really do love King Falls. Characters are the most important part of fiction for me, and I love Sammy and Ben. I don’t want to stop listening. I just want this show to be more welcoming of feedback from its fans, more diverse, bigger and better. I want to keep seeing you grow and improve, King Falls AM, but for that to happen you’re going to have to do a lot better than this. 

[roukereviews]

The Black Tapes podcast and Neurotypical Horror

In its very first episode, the Black Tapes podcast already sets their first paranormal investigation in an abandoned psychiatric hospital. It is used as a generic creepy scenario, and like so many horror stories have done before it, the underlying ableist assumptions that we need to accept for the place to be considered frightening are never questioned or challenged. 

It is relatively brief and the scene doesn’t dominate the entire episode, but it certainly creates a precedent and sets the tone for the treatment of mental illness through the entirety of the podcast.

Mental illness can be, in real life, the answer to many supposedly paranormal mysteries. In fiction though, the line is never so clear, and the way you decide to treat this hypothesis within the rules of your fictional world is incredibly important. Trying to take a ‘realistic’ and investigative approach, the Black Tapes podcast obviously suggests mental illness as the answer to some of its enigmas, but often does so in a vague and, in my opinion, slightly condescending way, once more playing into ableist stereotypes, expecting the listener to find the idea of this person possibly being mentally ill in any way pitiful and sad, and of course becoming a reason to discredit them completely.

The podcast has, in fact, shown a clear duality in its treatment of mentally ill people. There is, as I just said, the cases we are meant to feel sorry for, and for this purpose (possibly in a misguided attempt to engender empathy) mental illness won’t be mentioned in an explicit way, or much less given a concrete name or diagnosis, instead turning to weak and occasionally insulting euphemisms like ‘troubled’ or ‘disturbed’. These characters are always reduced to the tragedy of their mental illness, and often it is their sole defining trait.

Then, on the other hand, we have what is in truth nothing but the opposite side of the coin. These are the numerous times when mental illness and disability have been used to elevate the creepy factor of a story, as just another layer of horror. It’s then when the podcast does mention mental illness directly, and everything in the editing and especially sound design makes it clear that they’re showing it as something inherently strange and scary. It’s an attitude that contributes directly to the stigma mentally ill people have to face in society, and what’s more, when specific mental illnesses have been mentioned, it always has been some of the more stigmatised and misunderstood ones, like schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, DID, narcissistic disorder, and borderline personality disorder.

Which brings me directly to my next point -  Episode 106: The Devil’s Door, since most of those disorders where suggested as possible diagnosis for the character of Simon Reese, without any consideration given to the fact that they are very different disorders that can have wildly different symptoms, and in the limited time we hear from Simon we barely see signs of any of them. They are simply quickly namedropped precisely because of their status as frightening and ‘creepy’ mental illnesses, therefore judged appropriate to be linked to this young man committed to a mental institution for murder, and then immediately forgotten.

The entire episode shamelessly played into every single ableist horror trope. I found the way the staff talked about the patients in this psychiatric hospital to be utterly deplorable and chilling, but the narrative never acknowledges this and both Alex and Strand did nothing but accept this as normal, and indeed shared the same attitude themselves. Same thing happened with the violation of privacy and sharing of medical records of mentally ill people, who are never asked for consent to be used as a part of Alex’s podcast.

But why should their rights be considered? After all, the Black Tapes podcast never treats them as proper human beings, instead showing them as creepy, scary entities, their link to the supernatural serving only to further point out their otherness.

And this othering is exactly my main problem with the general treatment of mental illness in this podcast. We have, on one side, out neurotypical protagonists, the ‘sane’ people, the ‘normal’ people, that the narrative treats as superior, simply searching for the truth. And then, clearly different, always easily distinguished, we are presented with the ‘crazy’ people as victims, mysteries, tragedies, murderers and almost inhuman agents of the paranormal, imbued with some strange knowledge.

This separation, that necessarily creates an awful representation of mentally ill people, might go unnoticed by many, but personally and speaking as an Autistic, mentally ill person I felt it in every single episode I’ve listened to so far. It made me vaguely uncomfortable in its best moments, deeply upset at its worst. I had the feeling, one that sadly I have quite a bit of experience with, that I was listening to something not meant for me, but for allistic neurotypical people, something that didn’t care about how any of it would make me feel because it just didn’t take the existence of people like me or our point of view into account at any moment.

And I really want to mention a specific incident here. Maybe it wasn’t the worst or most ableist bit in the podcast, but it was the one that affected me the most. It is when they first refer to Simon as a selective mute. As an Autistic person who often goes non verbal for a variety of reasons, the way they talked about it immediately made my stomach drop. They described it as frustrating, and talked as if Simon’s lack of speech made any communication about his version of the events pretty much impossible.

It was clearly used as a creepy factor, which was only made a hundred times worse by the recording of an interview with a court appointed psychologist. It was all calculated to make the fact that he wasn’t communicating verbally as eerie as possible, from the scary music and deliberate sound design of the scene to the way they had him communicate, with taps so reminiscent of the method used when trying to talk to a ghost.

It’s as if that was the only option and no one in the Black Tapes podcast world had ever heard of Alternative and Augmentative communication or Assistive Communication Devices, or any of the various other ways you can help a non verbal person communicate with some dignity and possibility of complexity.

Instead they force this person into a simplistic and frankly degrading ‘yes or no’ system, and then the narrative blames him for being frustrated with it  and not giving more of an explanation about what happened. It’s once again caught in the ableist assumption that communicating verbally is the golden standard, the best and only way of communicating ‘properly’.

I found the entire segment deeply upsetting on a personal level. It was so clear how the point of view of a non verbal person, how they would feel in such a situation, wasn’t considered for a second.

It was a sudden terrible reminder of how other people see this fairly innocuous part of myself; As something that makes me frustrating to deal with at best, and something that makes me creepy, different, totally ‘other’. And let me tell you, that hurts a lot. It was so upsetting I actually had to pause the podcast for a moment to breathe and wipe the tears from my eyes.

I know some would put the blame on me for being too sensitive, for crying, but it is an undeniable fact that fiction has the power to affect people. The way you address complex and important issues in fiction matters because of the effect it can have on people, and so the way the Black Tapes podcast treats mental illness can have nothing but a negative effect, perpetuating the kind of tropes and stereotypes that make part of the horror genre so ableist, and so alienating to horror fans like me, who aren’t neurotypical and/or allistic. It contributes to the stigma that makes the lives of mentally ill people worldwide so much worse, the root of the disproportionate discrimination and violence that targets them.

I fully understand that this isn’t deliberate, but it is a great example of what can end up happening when you follow well established horror clichés without question, which is exactly the problem.

These clichés are ableist, and have the potential to seriously damage the lives of mentally ill people. It’s time horror fiction creators make an effort to think more carefully and critically about this sort of thing and take responsibility for the way it presents it to the public. And ultimately, getting used to consider questions like ‘why is this scary?’ and ‘what message is this sending out?’ can only result in an improvement of the entire genre, making horror into something more inclusive, more original, and a hundred times scarier.

[roukereviews]

Hey so I’ve been away from this for a while because of depression and stuff. Still working on a few reviews, not sure when they’ll be ready, but I do have something about the black tapes podcast that I’m posting today. It’s not really a review and I’m not giving it a score but I really want to talk about how it treats mental illness since it’s something very important for me, and I feel it still fits what I’m trying to do with this blog.  

[roukereviews]

There’s been a small change in the blog’s name. Also, I’m working on an IMSCARED review and a King Falls AM review, so expect those in the next couple of days :)

[roukereviews]

Game Review: Plantera

Plantera is a casual indie game developed and published by VaragtP. As of today it is 20% off on Steam with a price of £1.59.

The game has cute pixel-y graphics and is very colourful, the design of it immediately caught my eye. All the animals and creatures are roundish and adorable and I love them. I was quite excited to try this one, since I’m a big fan of cute things and more than a few clicker games, but I’m sad to say I was a bit disappointed by it.

Plantera throws you right into the game without any explanation or tutorial at all. It’s a simple game, so clicking around is enough to figure most things out, but it was still confusing for a few seconds and I would have appreciated some direction. A cute character introducing you to this world, for example, would have added so much to the experience.

Instead I clicked around until I got a few coins and could buy some carrots to grow. Then I watched them grow and this deadpan-faced blue blob (which is called a Helper) collect the carrots, which gave me more coins. The gameplay is basically a repeat of this in the typical incremental clicker game way, allowing you to win more coins to buy more vegetables, bushes and fruit threes that give you even more money to expand your garden and grow more stuff.

Then there are the animals, like birds and rabbits that appear to steal what you’re growing, and you can chase away by clicking on them a couple times. If you have chickens, a fox will try to get them and you have to get rid of it in the same way. I had a small problem with this because the game never tells you anything, like which animals are good and if having them around benefits you in any way, if you’re supposed to prevent them always from eating your plants or not. After a little while, I simply let them eat what they wanted because seeing the cute pink rabbits getting their carrots and the happy birds fly away with their apples made me happier than getting some imaginary coins, and I felt a bit bad if I didn’t.

As I said before, you can have vegetables, bushes and fruit trees, which stack in that order in the 2D environment, so you’ll have your veg growing in the ground and then a bush behind them and then the bigger fruit three behind that. This allows the limited garden space to be optimized in what seemed like a clever way at first (but again, you have to figure out yourself, since the game does not explain it to you) but ends up making everything too crowded. In fact, it wasn’t long until the game had so many things going on, so many stuff I was supposed to click on and animals running around and things piling on top of each other that I was simply overwhelmed and not having much fun anymore. I found this a big problem in a game that’s obviously supposed to be nice and relaxing.

But obviously that’s just my experience. Being autistic, I don’t handle that kind of overstimulation very well and I can’t really enjoy games that feel like they’re spiralling so out of my control like that. It might very well be that other people could truly enjoy expanding their garden and seeing how ridiculously full of stuff they can make it. (Something similar happened with the music, I believe. It has a cheerful soundtrack of quite typical videogame-style music which is something I simply cannot stand. 90% of videogame music just fucks with my sensory issues so badly for some reason. But it’d make no sense for me to say the soundtrack is bad because of it!)

In conclusion, Plantera is a small cute game that is sadly not for me. But if it sounds like something you’d enjoy, it’s quite cheap so at least checking it out and deciding for yourself wouldn’t be a huge investment.

5/10

[roukereviews]

First impressions - Podcasts mini-reviews

(I like listening to the first episode of random podcasts my usual podcast app recommends to me because I’m always in search of new ones to follow. This is just a few quick notes of what I thought when listening to the ones I chose to try this time.)

Chilling Tales: Yet another podcast of horror stories that, at least in my opinion, takes itself too seriously. Not necessarily a bad thing if you’re into that kinda show and want more of it, the production value seems good and the performances are competent, but I’m just so very bored by the whole thing at this point. 

King Falls AM: A fiction podcast in the form of a small town’s late-night AM talk radio about its inhabitants and the paranormal stuff that happens there. Definitely my favourite out of all of these, the first episode was only 13 minutes long but presented everything quite nicely and had me immediately interested in the characters running the show and in everything that was happening. Reminded me a bit of the early radio segments in the Pontypool movie, just the general vibe of it and that sense of possibility for creepy stories expanding from what was being said. I wanna listen to more of this and maybe write a proper review for it. 

Best of Friends Podcast: I liked this one quite a lot! I love Friends, it was my main comfort show for quite a while and I had it constantly going on in the background for months. This podcast is basically two women and one guy talking about a couple of Friends episodes for like an hour. The first episode that I listened to though is an introduction to both the podcast and the tv show, which was pretty great. I don’t like when non fiction podcasts don’t take at least a bit of time to explain their concept and how things are gonna be like so I feel like they did that right. Also the hosts just seem nice and like they’re genuinely having fun talking to each other about this. I’ll definitely listen to at least a few more episodes of this one! 

This is Why You’re Single: I know squarespace is sponsoring your podcast but do you really have to spend the first few minutes of your very first episode talking about it? Before you even present the hosts or what the podcast is about? It immediately made me so uninterested and bored. 

It was also vaguely cissexist and very heteronormative, and very very allosexual (I don’t blame them for that lst one since it was mostly just sharing their experiences, but still it’s always alienating as a sex repulsed asexual listening to these things.) In general it was very much just not for me.

But mostly I just found it so weird how this one girl kept being totally baffled by the other one’s life choices like liking guys who aren’t skinny or having some pairs of underwear with holes in them was the weirdest fucking thing she had heard in her entire life. Are they really supposed to be good friends or whatever? Because they talk like they barely know anything about each other and they barely explained anything about who they are so it was all very confusing.