AtheistPreacher's Media Digest, October 2025

I haven’t blogged in a while, and it’s probably because I tend to have unrealistic expectations for myself of feeling like I need to write about 5,000 words on something for it to be “blog-worthy.” I’ve decided that the solution is to simply write about several things at once in shorter form. Hopefully you’ll all still find it amusing. For this blog I’ll be discussing three very different pieces of media that I've experienced recently: an old Japanese visual novel/adventure game, a new Japanese anime series, and a long-running British comedy show. This being a gaming website, I’ll start with the game.

Zero Escape: The Nonary Games

I’ve been trying to expand my gaming horizons this year by playing more “visual novels” and adjacent genres... the type of game I’d generally ignored for more mechanically complex games. During this year’s Steam summer sale, I’d searched for well-regarded games in the genre, in addition to getting suggestions from people on these forums. One that popped up was Zero Escape: The Nonary Games, which I ended up purchasing for 80% off ($6 plus tax, normally $30).

This 2017 release is actually a bundle of two games: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009), and its sequel, Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward (2012). I only played the first game, and am not sure I’ll ever play the second, so I’ll write on only the first entry here.

The basic premise of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is that you play a dude who has been kidnapped, along with a number of other people, and is being forced to play a series of escape room style puzzles to survive. It’s a bit like Saw: the anime version, right down to exploding bracelets attached to everyone’s wrists. It sounded like something I might enjoy, so I decided to give it a try. I ended up playing it over Discord with a friend of mine over a series of three weekends.

There is a sliver of real history in the game’s setting. It all takes place on a ship called the Gigantic, supposedly a sister ship to the famous Titanic, which had been pressed into service as a hospital ship shortly after World War I began. Other than the name, this is mostly true: the real ship was called the Britannic; it hit a German mine and sank in 1916.

In the narrative of the game, a Titanic survivor had bought the ship and established the “Nonary Games” on it amongst people who owed him money, in which they were forced to survive a series of riddles for the amusement of rich people. From a wiki for the game:

Dashiell Gordain ... used the Gigantic as the setting of his idea of the Nonary Games for young Englishmen who had owed him money. Gordain and his millionaire friends bet on which man would survive the Nonary Games, with the losers being burned at the incinerator as part of the ceremony. The winners would be forgiven of their debt.

You play as a character named Junpei Tenmyouji, who wakes up in a room on the Gigantic that is flooding. Your first escape room style puzzle is to find a way out of the room before you drown.

The actual puzzles generally weren’t that difficult. Most of the "difficulty" seemed to stem from the traditional adventure game problem of hunting for clickable elements. For this first puzzle, I didn’t realize for quite a while that part of the code to a cipher that I needed to solve it was hidden under a pillow of one of the bunk beds. Once I’d acquired the needed item, the actual puzzle itself was rather trivial to solve.

The word “nonary” means “nine” or “ninth,” so it was no great surprise to discover, upon escaping that first room, that Junpei had been trapped with eight other people in this Nonary Game. And boy are those eight other characters just about the most anime-ass anime characters you’ve ever seen. I could say more, but I think that these two screenshots really say all you need to know:

From here, I think there are really two keys to understanding this game. The first is that, despite its self-evident ridiculousness both in characters and premise, it takes itself very seriously, and is more interested in narrative than puzzles, with the balance of the game tipped more in the direction of the characters standing around talking than puzzle-solving. For me personally I found that to be a bit of a pity. While the puzzles mostly weren’t that difficult, they were still satisfying to solve, and I would have preferred to spend a bit more time applying my brain to puzzles than listening to a fairly self-indulgent and overly complex narrative.

Speaking of “self-indulgent,” the second key to understanding this game is that it has both B-tier writing and a B-tier translation, and that the deficiencies of both multiply to offer a C-tier narrative experience.

Let’s start with the actual writing part of the problem.

Despite the fact that the participants are told that the ship will flood in nine hours, killing them all unless they can beat the game and escape in time, apparently none of these characters can resist blathering on about unrelated life experiences for long stretches of time. There are multiple points throughout the story in which characters spend way too much time talking about nothing useful, only for the game itself to break in with “THERE ARE NOW SEVEN HOURS LEFT BEFORE YOU ALL DIE,” prompting one of them to say, “Hey, maybe we should all, y’know, focus on getting out of here rather than standing around gabbing?”

Stronger writing would have fit the character development in between the narrative urgency of imminent death. Instead all the characters in this game seem to habitually forget that they’re in danger while they’re pontificating on some pseudo-philosophical hobby horse.

The game is also, I think, a bit over-ambitious. On the one hand, I did admire the fact that it contained branching narrative paths that you could jump back to and skip between at any point. That was a neat selling point that I don’t often see.

But upon finishing it for the first time, I also did some looking at a wiki and discovered that this was one of those games that absolutely required multiple playthroughs in order to get the “true” ending, and that this true ending also involved time travel, and one character trying to rescue a past version of themselves. Beyond this being convoluted and ridiculous, the game simply wasn’t interesting enough on first play for me to want to play it through multiple times to get the full experience (in contrast to several other games I’ve played this year, like Our Life: Beginnings and Always and I Was a Teenage Exocolonist).

Then there is the translation. It suffers from one of the usual translation problems of being technically correct, and yet often stilted and wooden and not resembling anything that a native English speaker would ever say. This problem is perhaps not exactly exacerbated but at least made more dreamily unreal-feeling by being almost fully voiced in English. Nor are these chump voice actors: they include such names as Wendee Lee and Richard Epcar. The latter’s voice is quite distinctive and I recognized him almost immediately, yet he seemed to me to be mailing it in a bit, and it’s no wonder with lines like this:

As an aside, it's times like this that make me wonder about the practical hurdles that voice actors face during jobs in which they know they’re being asked to perform dialogue that could use some touching up. Do you suggest rewrites? Do you just roll with it, no matter how bad it may be, because it’s a paycheck and you don't want to rock the boat?

Regardless, I can see a world in which the writing more credibly and realistically captured the sense of urgency in the situation, and in which the translation had been filtered through an actual native English speaker (or one who cared more about the plausibility of the dialogue, at any rate), and may then have driven me toward the multiple re-plays that the game was asking of me in order to get the entire schtick of its story. As it is, I was left wishing that it had leaned more into its B-tier-ness just so I could have gotten a little more unintentional comedy out of it. I don’t regret my 6–7 hours with The Nonary Games, but it feels like it could have easily been so much better than it turned out to be with a bit more thought and polish.

(Side note: It was amusing to write this and then notice old threads on these forums that spoke about this game in fairly glowing terms, including a blog by our esteemed @mento. It's not clear to me if this game just wasn't for me or simply hasn't aged well, given that all those old threads are from more than a decade ago now.)

The Summer Hikaru Died

I don’t watch a lot of new anime. Most of my new anime-watching happened during the late 20-aughts when I had just graduated from college. But as with anything, there are exceptions, and recently a friend of mine recommended a Netflix anime titled The Summer Hikaru Died. Based on a manga of same name, its twelve episodes were aired a week apart, with the final one airing on September 28... less than a week ago as I write this.

The basic premise is intriguing: a high-school-aged boy named Hikaru is lost for a week up on a supposedly cursed mountain. Eventually he is found, hospitalized, and returns to his normal life. But his closest friend and the show’s main character, Yoshiki, comes to realize that Hikaru is not really Hikaru anymore. The show’s opening scene is Yoshiki’s accusation to Hikaru that he is a fraud. As it turns out, Yoshiki is right: his friend’s dead body has been taken over by some sort of demon or otherworldly entity or spirit, inheriting Hikaru’s memories but having a will all its own... and very possibly a dangerous one.

After finishing all twelve episodes, I’m honestly not really sure how I feel about this show. It’s an odd combination of horror and slice of life, two genres which one might argue do not naturally go together very well. Horror relies on tension and anticipation, and on some sort of climax that provides a satisfying release, whether in bloody despair or triumphant salvation from evil. But Hikaru does not really provide either; it is one of those shows about which one always feels the next episode will finally really get things rolling, and yet it never really does. It seems only tangentially interested in the horror elements of the story, focusing instead on the relationship between its two (really three) central characters: Yoshiki, the dead Hikaru, and the new, monster Hikaru.

I think that part of the reason my friend recommended this show to me is that there are definite hints of queerness in it. This is never overt, but there are some clear suggestions throughout the story that Yoshiki is gay but closeted, and had been in love with Hikaru but had never told him (according to Wikipedia, the manga’s author originally introduced it as a “BL” [boys’ love] story, but “later specified that the manga was never serialized as a boys’ love story, instead describing the series as a ‘coming-of-age horror’ with ‘queer’ themes”). One can only imagine the complex emotions going through Yoshiki’s heart and mind upon the realization that his closest friend and secret crush had died three months earlier, to be replaced by a demon inhabiting his body, someone not really human and yet resembling the person he had loved so dearly. And it is easy to read the demon Hikaru as itself a metaphor for queerness, a being seeking acceptance into a human society in which it knows it is feared, even reviled, and does not really belong.

I can say unequivocally that the production values on this series are phenomenal. The animation is a treat to watch, vivid and experimental in its execution, giving it a truly unique look. The voicework and music are great. There is not a single technical thing wrong with this series that I can name.

I am also fascinated, intellectually, by the tightrope that it attempts to walk, a juxtaposition of slice of life, suppressed romance, and horror. I am just not sure that it has quite succeeded, and may instead simply be a bit of a muddle. At times, Yoshiki wants only to desperately hold on to this being who looks like his friend, yet is not his friend, while at other times he wants to kill it and end both of their suffering, but in all cases the viewer is left waiting for a payoff that never quite arrives. Perhaps my American sensibilities are at fault; I think the Japanese tend to be a little more comfortable with hanging chads in their narratives.

Regardless, a second season has been announced, and I am intrigued enough about where the story might go to watch it whenever it arrives, in the hope that it’ll give me more of the closure I was hoping for.

Taskmaster

Every now and again you’re lucky enough to discover a really great TV show that’s been going on for a long time, so that you can binge-watch a whole bunch of it in a row without the interruption of needing to wait for more to be made. This happened to me recently with the British comedy show Taskmaster. Created by Alex Horne in 2015 and hosted by Greg Davies, it’s now been running for twenty seasons—all but the first five seasons consisting of ten episodes of an hour each—and should hit its 200^th episode in Season 21. And the best part? It’s all free to watch on Youtube.

The basic premise is simple. Five comedians per season come on as contestants to compete in a series of utterly ridiculous tasks assigned by the Taskmaster, who awards them points for their efforts (sometimes objectively, but often very subjectively and arbitrarily for comedic effect). The first task is always a “prize task” in which each contestant brings in an item as a sort of ante for the episode that the day’s winner will take home. The second, third, and fourth tasks are pre-recorded, with contestants defending their performances and decisions in-studio to the Taskmaster before a live audience prior to points being awarded. Finally, the fifth and last task of each episode is live and in-studio.

The delight of this show is in the creativity of both Horne in creating the tasks and the comedians who have to carry them out. The tasks can range from such things as “Give Alex a special cuddle; most special cuddle wins” to “Build the highest tower of cans while saying you’re from a different country every 10 seconds.” Almost all the tasks are utterly ridiculous and yet are fertile ground for great comedy. To be sure, some seasons are stronger than others, with some let down by their cast of comedians, and others let down by overly complex and overwritten tasks, but the show is rarely less than delightful.

A particular strength is the way that the show’s tasks typically encourage "lateral thinking" and creative pedantry. One task, for instance, asked contestants to “put the most stuff on top of this jelly without breaking the jelly.” One contestant put a piece of paper on top of it on which they’d written their paraphrase of the third law of thermodynamics: “The third law of thermodynamics means that the universe will eventually end through a phase of heat death, with all life and energy extinguished.” In-studio, they argued that this was the heaviest thing possible! In another simple task, contestants were asked to go the longest time they could without blinking. After the task had ended, Horne pointed out that nothing in the rules had precluded them from starting with their eyes closed... leading to much groaning from the contestants. In short, it’s very much a show in which the hosts and contestants are constantly fucking with one another, which is really what defines it.

Thus far I’ve watched twelve seasons, with seasons four, five, and seven being particularly strong, and season six the weakest. After binge-watching more than a hundred episodes, I’m finally starting to slow down and move on to other things while watching the rest more slowly, but it’s become a reliable show for me to watch whenever I need something to lighten my mood. It's pure silly joy, something we need in dark times. And at the moment, I can’t really think of any comedy show that I’ve enjoyed more. Especially during its best seasons, it’s really that good.

So if you haven’t checked it out, then just trust me, and do it. If you only watch one season, I’d recommend season five. And if you only want to try one episode, watch the fifth episode of season five, which is my single favorite episode so far and has at least three truly iconic Taskmaster moments (without spoilers: Greg’s trousers, Sally’s watercooler moment, and Mark’s special task). And if you don’t like that, then I think you can safely say the show's not for you and move on... and I also dub you immune to good humor.