{"id":64811,"date":"2026-07-26T08:50:49","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T12:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/?p=64811"},"modified":"2026-07-26T08:50:49","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T12:50:49","slug":"troubleshooter-masteries-backlog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/troubleshooter-masteries-backlog\/","title":{"rendered":"Troubleshooter gets player wrapped in masteries and 100-hour adventures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sundays are for sobbingly lifting exactly one boulder from the groaning dreampile that is my backlog. Good news, Vacuity, cpt_freakout and the rest \u2014 I am trying out your precious, precious Troubleshooter game<\/a>. I hear it is a hundred hours long, so please do not take this as a promise that a write-up is forthcoming. So far my major takeaways are that I enjoy collecting masteries, aka packages of abilities and modifiers, and that the “Short Break” track is cooool. Troubleshooter gets player wrapped in masteries and 100-hour adventures, and it is precisely the kind of overwhelming, sprawling commitment that makes the Sunday ritual of sorting through the backlog feel both hopeful and absurd. Please hum along while browsing our latest collection of Rollicking Reads.<\/p>\n

Silicon Valley’s Science Fiction Problem: How Dystopian Fantasies Distract from Real Harm<\/h2>\n

Over at Aeon, Ali Riza Taskale delivers a sharp analysis of how self-appointed big tech visionaries have borrowed the trappings of Western sci-fi and fantasy works such as Neuromancer, the Foundation novels, and Star Trek for their political projects. The essay argues that these borrowed narratives serve a very specific function: they allow the industry to frame itself as the protagonist in a heroic story of technological salvation, while simultaneously deflecting attention from the actual damage being done in the present.<\/p>\n

One passage in particular distills the mechanism with brutal clarity. Taskale writes: “It is the triumph of the speculative sci-fi scenario over human solidarity: why fix the world we inhabit when we can spend billions preventing a robot uprising that exists only in the imagination?” The logic is perverse but effective. By steering policy debates toward distant catastrophic scenarios \u2014 killer robots, rogue AI, existential risk \u2014 the industry diverts attention from regulating the systems already causing harm: algorithmic bias in hiring, facial recognition’s racial disparities, platform amplification of extremism.<\/p>\n

What is striking about this analysis is how it reframes the relationship between technology and narrative. The tech industry does not merely build products; it builds stories about the future. And those stories, when wielded by the most powerful actors in the sector, become a kind of political weapon. The threat of sci-fantasy apocalypse gets perversely deployed as a means of distraction. Why fix the broken moderation systems on social media today when we could be preparing for the AI takeover tomorrow? The question is rhetorical, but the consequences are real.<\/p>\n

This is not a new observation, but Taskale’s framing is particularly useful because it connects the dots between the literary roots of Silicon Valley’s self-mythology and the material effects of that mythology on policy and regulation. The tech billionaires who cite Isaac Asimov and William Gibson are not just indulging in fanboy reverie. They are borrowing the authority of canonical science fiction to legitimize projects that would otherwise face serious scrutiny. Foundation becomes a justification for centralized planning. Neuromancer becomes a template for cyberpunk libertarianism. Star Trek becomes a vision of post-scarcity that conveniently ignores the scarcity of the present.<\/p>\n

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Scottish Nationalism, and the Politics of Language<\/h2>\n

For the London<\/a> Review of Books, Jenny Turner writes about the Scottish novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon \u2014 birthname James Leslie Mitchell \u2014 exploring nationalism, patriarchy, class, place, language, and changing times. I have never read any Gibbon or Mitchell, but I found this piece quite enveloping. It is a longer one, around 10,000 words, and it rewards the investment with a deep understanding of how a writer’s linguistic choices can become political acts.<\/p>\n

Turner draws a direct line from Gibbon’s use of Scots to the rise of Nicola Sturgeon’s vaguely social-democratic Scottish nationalism. The connection is not merely symbolic. The way Gibbon deployed Scots words, as instruments of interpellation, speaks directly to how language shapes identity and belonging. As Turner notes, “Scots is love, English learning, and you can’t do much of the latter before you lose your roots.” This Oedipal confusion of nation and class and agency and power still runs deep, and without it, there is no way Sturgeon’s nationalism would ever have wrung and held the hearts of people the way it did.<\/p>\n

What is particularly fascinating about Gibbon’s technique is its artificiality. His use of Scots is quite confusing, an artefact that looks authentic although it is not. As Gibbon himself confessed, “The technique is to mould the English language into the rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech, and to inject into the English vocabulary such minimum number of words from Braid Scots as that remodelling requires.” He was keen for his book to sell, to American audiences in particular, and appended a glossary of around a hundred words to the American edition. The most used “Scotticisms,” according to William K. Malcolm’s new biography, are modifiers such as awful, bit, coarse, fair, fell \u2014 “cosmetic rather than descriptive,” easy enough for diaspora Scots, more than a quarter of a million of whom left for North America in the 1920s alone.<\/p>\n

This is a writer who knew exactly what he was doing. The linguistic authenticity was a construction, a deliberate craft, not a natural inheritance. And that makes it no less powerful as a tool for building national identity. If anything, the constructedness of the language makes it more useful as a political instrument, because it can be shaped and deployed in ways that organic linguistic development cannot.<\/p>\n

Gender Dysphoria, Stellar Blade, and the Search for Self in the Rotting World<\/h2>\n

For Stop Caring, an anonymous writer considers gender dysphoria by way of two games I would somehow never have thought to place together: Stellar Blade and Brush Burial: Gutter World. The piece is raw, personal, and unflinching, and it is also a remarkable exercise in critical juxtaposition. Beware spoilers for each.<\/p>\n

The writer describes the protagonist of Brush Burial: Gutter World with a kind of desperate, aching admiration. “She is the epitome of what I wish I could be. An androgynous, femme-leaning killing machine with a fat ass and a tight waist. I can’t look at her without feeling a concoction of wild lust and furious jealousy.” The description is visceral, uncomfortable, and honest. The writer loves the way her eight eyes stare down and tell her to beg. The forked tail she strikes with. The way she folds her enemies and twists them like dolls. The suffocating thighs and calves she clamps down on brutish guards with. And all of it, she does to help her and her partner breathe a little easier while they try to make it through life in this rotting world.<\/p>\n

What makes this piece so powerful is the way it refuses to separate the sexual from the political, the aesthetic from the existential. The character in Brush Burial is not just a fantasy of power or beauty. She is a fantasy of being able to exist in the world without apology, of having a body that is both weapon and home. The writer sees in her something that the real world cannot provide: a way of being that is fully integrated, fully realized, fully at home in its own skin, even when that skin is monstrous, even when the world is rotting.<\/p>\n

Placing Stellar Blade alongside Brush Burial is a curious move. Stellar Blade is a high-budget action game with a protagonist whose design has been the subject of endless online debate about sexualization and objectification. Brush Burial is a smaller, stranger, more personal work. But the writer sees in both of them something that the discourse around them often misses: the possibility of identification that is not about ownership or consumption, but about recognition. The games become mirrors, and what they reflect is not always comfortable, but it is true.<\/p>\n

Sir, You Are Being Hunted: The Unrepeatable Confluence of Kickstarter, Early Access, and Procedural Generation<\/h2>\n

Jim Rossignol, formerly of this parish, has a little Bluesky thread about the creation and success of tweedy sandbox robo-avoider Sir, You Are Being Hunted. It maketh me feel old. The thread is a reflection on a moment in game development that feels increasingly distant, a time when the conditions for independent game projects aligned in a way that is now unrepeatable.<\/p>\n

Rossignol writes: “So here we had a confluence of events that is unrepeatable in spacetime. Kickstarter was a viable way to raise good amounts for a videogame project, Early Access was a novelty that everyone wants to check out, Steam<\/a> was still curated, people were fascinated in the idea of procedural generation.”<\/p>\n

This is a sobering reminder of how much has changed in the last decade. Kickstarter is no longer the wild west of crowdfunding that it once was. Early Access is no longer a novelty. Steam’s curation policies have been transformed. And procedural generation, once a selling point, is now a standard tool. The conditions that made Sir, You Are Being Hunted possible are gone, and they are not coming back.<\/p>\n

But the game itself remains, a testament to that moment. The thread is a small piece of history, a document of a time when the game industry felt like it was opening up, when it seemed like anyone with a good idea and a decent pitch could find an audience. That feeling has been eroded by platform consolidation, algorithm-driven discovery, and the sheer volume of games being released. But the memory of it persists, and games like Sir, You Are Being Hunted are proof that it was real, even if it was brief.<\/p>\n

The Stench of Dead Whales in 17th Century Dutch Art and the Scent of Videogames<\/h2>\n

This one is from 2021, but I do not care. Lizzie Marx has a fascinating essay on the stench of dead whales in 17th century Dutch art, which doubles as an invitation to consider smell in aesthetics and art production more generally. The essay is a reminder that art history is not just a history of the visual. It is a history of all the senses, even the ones that leave no trace<\/a> in the archive.<\/p>\n

Marx tells the story of Rembrandt’s studio, where visitors would come to admire the latest works by the master. As Rembrandt’s biographer Arnold Houbraken recounts, when visitors edged closer to the paintings, the artist pulled them away, saying, “The smell of the paint would irritate you.” Oil paint combines pulverised pigments with linseed oil, a sharp-smelling binding medium extracted from pressed flax seeds. The compound produces a wonderfully supple and jewel-like paint that can achieve fine details and varying textures. In Rembrandt’s self-portrait, he does not use oil paint sparingly, but practically sculpts with it. He smears out flesh-coloured oils to construct his nose, and in order to evoke the folds of his headpiece, he scrapes out lines of blue and yellow paint revealing the dark ground beneath. In the studio, the odour of linseed oil must have been a disruptive force, and Rembrandt used it to persuade his visitors to distance themselves from the painting, to best behold the rough, impasto slicks of paint. The painting has retained most of its lustre, but the odour, in time, has faded.<\/p>\n

Compare and contrast efforts to make videogames stink. The BBC recently reported on attempts to integrate scent into gaming experiences, a project that seems both absurd and inevitable. The history of smell in art is a history of loss \u2014 the scent of Rembrandt’s studio is gone forever, and no amount of digital reconstruction can bring it back. But the attempt to capture it, to understand what it meant, is itself a kind of aesthetic practice. And the efforts to bring smell into videogames are, in their own way, a continuation of that practice. They will probably fail, or at least fail to achieve the kind of integration that the best art achieves. But the ambition is real, and it speaks to a desire to make games more than just visual and auditory experiences.<\/p>\n

Sol Cesto, Jank Culture, and the Heatwave of the UK<\/h2>\n

I note with agony that Nic Reuben, former RPS librarian, has joined the musty has-beens of Jank.cool on their quest to publish no good writing whatsoever. Here he is on Sol Cesto. The review opens with a description of the UK heatwave that is so vivid it practically sweats on the page. “It’s the second heatwave of the year in the UK right now. My PC quivers like angry blancmange at the suggestion it perform even the laziest task, and Snickers ice creams melt down my palm and form crunchy bangles around my wrist before I can ferry them home to my face. Sol Cesto, you say? The sun has ceased? Sign me up!”<\/p>\n

This is the kind of writing that makes you miss someone the moment they leave. Reuben’s voice is unmistakable, and the fact that he is now writing for Jank.cool is both a loss for the publications he left behind and a gain for the strange, weird, wonderful corner of the internet that Jank.cool represents. Sol Cesto, whatever it is, benefits from being described in this way. It becomes a game that exists not just as a product or a set of mechanics, but as a response to a specific moment, a specific temperature, a specific kind of exhaustion.<\/p>\n

Pervert Jam 2026, Friendslop, and the Games That No One Asked For<\/h2>\n

Get in the filthmobile, loser, because Pervert Jam 2026 is underway. The goal is to “create games with no public in mind but yourself,” with the optional theme “A Pound of Flesh.” This is the kind of jam that would be easy to dismiss as provocation or nonsense, but it is actually something more serious. The instruction to make games with no public in mind but yourself is a radical rejection of the market logic that dominates game development. It is a call to make something that is not designed to sell, not designed to please, not designed to be consumed. It is a call to make something that is true to the maker, even if it is ugly, even if it is perverse, even if it is incomprehensible.<\/p>\n

If you have already pledged your intellectual faculties to Critical Distance’s latest “friendslop”-themed Blogs of the Round Table, then very well. We will watch your career with great interest. The friendslop theme is itself a kind of response to the same impulse that drives Pervert Jam. It is a celebration of the messy, the ugly, the unfinished, the things that are made for friends rather than for markets. The two initiatives are not in competition. They are two sides of the same coin, two attempts to reclaim a space for the amateur, the personal, the unprofessional, in an industry that is increasingly dominated by the professional, the polished, the marketable.<\/p>\n

Troubleshooter gets player wrapped in masteries and 100-hour adventures, and that is exactly the kind of commitment that makes the rest of these readings feel like a reprieve. The game is a promise of time spent, of systems mastered, of progress made. The readings are a promise of time spent differently, of ideas encountered, of perspectives shifted. Both are valuable. Both are necessary. The trick is finding the balance between them, and the Sunday ritual of the backlog is one way of trying to do that. It is not a perfect system. It is not even a good system. But it is a system, and that is something. The boulder gets lifted, one Sunday at a time, and the dreampile gets a little lighter, or at least a little more manageable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sundays are for sobbingly lifting exactly one boulder from the groaning dreampile that is my backlog. Good news, Vacuity, cpt_freakout and the rest \u2014 I am trying out your precious, precious Troubleshooter game. I hear it is a hundred hours long, so please do not take this as a promise that a write-up is forthcoming. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":83805,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cards.overcentral.com\/cards\/en\/64811.png","fifu_image_alt":"Troubleshooter gets player wrapped in masteries and 100-hour adventures","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-videogames"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cards.overcentral.com\/cards\/en\/64811.png","fifu_image_alt":"Troubleshooter gets player wrapped in masteries and 100-hour adventures","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}