The Indie Gaming Cookie

  Make your own universe with two ingredients. You add a cup of coffee. Your universe is warm. Steamy and calm, it is a perfect heater for a rainy day. The cup is not to be drunk in one fell swoop. Rather, it is to be sipped slowly. You let the vast expanse wash over your tongue. You add a twisted vine. The vine has been cut from   a larger specimen. It is writhing and entangled. Climbing down your throat, its pin pricks you with excitement at first, but it quickly chafes and scrapes your airways. Thorns and shoots stay within. You are left voiceless, perturbed.   The mad (and possibly confused) alchemist that you now are, you may have just concocted Tmesis Studio's  Universe for Sale  (2023) .  The sci-fi, cozy, dystopian visual novel follows the journeys of Lila and Master, as the former struggles to stay alive under the immensity of a tyranny that disallows her space to grieve—only getting by via selling universes of her own creation—and Master, a renown...

  I read Danton Remoto's  Riverrun  at a striking time when, if one so placed my life beside that of the main character's, half the novel would be my past, and the other my possible future. Riverrun 's structure—that of short, flash fiction-style chapters each detailing a specific event in Danilo Cruz's life—guided my reminiscence. Its chapters didn't feel so much as "chapters" and more like brief, disparate moments in someone's biography, as if the book were a man's diary, but if it only included the diary's "Greatest Hits". Each of its chapters essentially had its standalone story (as proven by their being individually published on PhilStar ), and no chapter really led itself to the next. As a result, reading  Riverrun  felt less like a novel per se but more like looking through the images of a scrapbook or an old slide projector, each vignette different than the last. There's something oddly nostalgic and painful about  Riverru...