Confronting the Blue Prince

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Every review or video I have seen about Blue Prince has spent at least a bit of time dealing with the title, often doing an “oh, I get it!” moment as though it was happening just then.  While my sample size is small, it does seem like an obvious go-to gag to avoid at this point, so I am just going to say it is a homonym and leave it at that.  (Also, look at me playing a semi-new game!)

Blue Prince

Blue Prince, BP going forward, is a rogue-like, pseudo deck building, puzzle game that was in the top ten list for the best scoring games in Fantasy Critic League in 2025.  It got high marks all around and won some indie awards, even with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

Anyway, lots of good press and it was marked down during the Steam Winter Sale 2025, so I grabbed a copy and then started playing it after I wrote my speculation as to what I might play this year, but before it went live.  Anyway, mark that one off the list.

The premise of the game is… well, I am just going to steal from the Wikipedia article.

The player takes the role of Simon P. Jones, who has been willed the Mt. Holly Estate, a mansion owned by his deceased great uncle Herbert S. Sinclair. The one stipulation in Herbert’s will is that Simon must locate a hidden 46th room within the mansion in order to secure his inheritance. Failure to reach that room within the span of a single day means Simon must start the search fresh the next day, as the house’s architecture is rearranged overnight.

Basically, you start each day walking into the entry hall which has three doors.  When you click on one of the doors you are given three possible rooms you can draft… because blueprints… see, that was the thing about the title… and you must pick one.

Pick one of Three Choices

You keep doing that to build out the mansion… technically you’re the one rearranging the layout every day I suppose… in something akin to Carcassonne… minimal boardgame knowledge achievement unlocked… only constrained by the outer walls of the mansion layout.

See, it says Blueprint right there

So you build out the mansion, room by room, constrained by a few factors.

First, there are the rooms themselves, some of which have one, two, or three exits, and some of which have none.  Having a door to work from is clutch and many sessions of mine have ended when the draw on the last free door yields choices which give you no path forward.

That was the problem in the image above.  All out of doors.

Then there are locked doors, rooms with prices, and rooms with costs.  You have three common items you can accumulate, keys, gems, and gold.  When you get to a locked door, you will need a key to open it in order to proceed.  Out of keys and only locked doors available?  You’re done for the day.

Then there are gems.  You can see in the draft screen shot above that the Observatory costs one gem to draft.  No gems, no luck.

Coins can be used to buy things, but there also rooms that cost a coin to pass through.

And then there are steps.  You start with a pool of steps you can take, consuming one with each room you enter.  Bedrooms will restore some steps, some rooms require extra steps to pass through them.  Initially steps will not be much of a constrained as you’ll box your way into ending your day.

When you’ve done that… run out of doors, have no keys, or run out of steps… they day will end and you will get a little summary of how you did.

The end of day 7… not a great day…

My reaction on my first day play through was kind of “well, that’s easy enough… but I am not sure what the draw here really is.”

And then, two hours later, when I was still playing, doing “one more day”… yeah, that was kind of the indicator that maybe there was a hook in there.

One of the joys of the rogue-like genre is the easy “go, go again, and again…” nature.

Another is the discovery of new things.  There are a wide range of rooms, some of which you need to get to have other rooms become available in the pool of possible rooms, something even mentioned on a sign in the pool room.

Pool Rules from the Pool Room

Some rooms come with specific resources, like keys or gems, others have the possibility of having items that will help you in your daily task.

The ivory die

And some rooms give you information.  In the security room you can see what is up in other possible rooms.

Security cameras everywhere

Over in the library you can get information about all the rooms, as well as some insights into your attempts so far, such as the rooms you have drafted the most or which ones you have passed on.

There is also the store room, where you can leave an item to pick up later, the mail room, which gets a package you can open the next time you arrive… when the RNG lets you draft it again… or the freezer, which freezes your gem, key, and coin count so they return with you the next day.

All of which is great, but then there is the downside of rogue-likes, their primary defining characteristic after randomness… that when you fail you have to start again.  Run out of doors, be left with locked doors and no keys, use up all your steps, and your day is over and you must begin once again in the entry way.

Day 23 was going so well

Nothing can be as disheartening that getting so close to the Antechamber, the gateway to room 46, though getting in there is a task on its own.

The Antechamber entry from the Library

At the end of the day you have to start all over again.  Mostly.

There are a few things that persist between days.  If you get the Foundation room, that remains in place where you first drew it.  There are some updates that carry over.  There are places like the store room.

And if you have upgraded a room… then it stays upgraded.

Room upgrades available

So you do gain something through repeated days on the same save.  It isn’t total rogue-like where the slate is wiped clean when you start again.

And there is a whole story to unravel and piece together through letters and post cards and envelopes scattered about the place and pictures on the wall and inscriptions and what not.

It is an easy enough title to pick up when you have a bit of time… and also easy to keep playing, at least until you are so close only to run out of keys or doors or steps and you have to start a new day.  And then it can be an easy game to put down for a bit as well.

The curse of the rogue-likes.

Guild Wars Reforged – In Which We Discover Missions

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One of the hazards of starting off fresh with a 20 year old game is that I wander along a line wondering if I should write about things that anybody who has played will show up and go “well, duh!” about.  But then I also want to chart our journey, as I have done with so many titles over the last 19 years.

Guild Wars Reforged

It isn’t like missions are a hidden item in the game.  In fact, you are sent pretty swiftly in the direction of the first mission once you’re in Ascalon City after you go through the searing event.  There is a quest right away that sends you to the Great Northern Wall, which announces itself as a cooperative mission.

What makes this wall so great anyway?

You get there, there is a quest to turn in, and then you look up and see another NPC with a quest over their head… and you’ve so far been trained to click on them.  So you go over to the Zaishen Scout with his quest and he says “Let’s go to the beach!”

It’s the beach! It’ll be fun!

Sure, why not?  Let’s go make friends at the beach!

And then you arrive as a level 5 solo and you see a bunch of people with tags over their head with their professions and levels and… they’re almost all level 20.

What is this Embark Beach

There is a lot going on there that I, as a new player, did not understand.  I poked around, found missions and a few other things.

But can I do that mission?

More importantly, I had no idea how to get back to where I came from, which is always a hazard for a game. I had to go Google how to get out, and even then the answer I found was a bit vague about where the guy was I needed to speak to.  I found him eventually.

Kenai! Send me home or something!

The lesson from all of that was to leave the Great Northern Wall area and seek my fortune elsewhere.  This is how you end up with blog posts about me wandering the Diessa Lowlands in search of the next settlement.

My fifth journey through Diessa Lowlands

Fortunately for the group, Potshot was not so easily deterred.  One evening when we were both on he asked if I wanted to run a mission.  He had fiddled with it and had done it successfully once.  So we went back to the Great Norther Wall, avoided making eye contact with the Zaishen Scout (Potshot had been on that ride as well), and went on the first mission as a duo with two henchmen in support.

Welcome to the missions, good luck scouting the wall!

As with a lot of the game, which is 20 years old, there isn’t a lot of direction… and no mention of the fact that there is a bonus mission within every mission.  You get a slap on the back, a shove in the right direction, and off you go.

Scout, report back, how hard could it be?

Fortunately, Potshot had done the legwork before and knew about the bonus mission, so we ran through things, fighting mobs that hang out around every corner, to get to the bonus guy and get that quest going.

We found the missing items, turned them in, which got us 1,000 xp.  Not an insubstantial amount at our level.

Then we pressed on, found our way to the spot from which to scout, got the update, then were instructed to get back to Captain Calhaan… with the whole army chasing us.

There are what, 20 Charr there… tops?

I did get a timely tool tip along the way.

Let the devil take the hindmost!

And we did, in fact, win the mission, got the 1,000 xp for that, which gets you the double crossed swords on a shield, something reflected on the map so you can see where you have succeeded.

Mission and bonus success

Also, at the end of the mission you get dropped off at the next mission… or somewhere near the next mission… which is a handy way to move forward on the map without, you know, all the wandering.  Anyway, we were now at Fort Ranik.

Great.  We managed that with alts.  Now to get the group together to do it.

With the holidays and travel… that proved a bit of a challenge.  Ula, Potshot, and I did the first mission one Sunday.

Then Holden was back but Ula was out, so we did the first two missions with him.  I was the group leader this time, so I finally got the last bit of the puzzle, how to start the mission, because you don’t see that as just a group member.

It seems obvious once you see it

We managed that successfully.  But now we were still out of sync.  So this past weekend we managed to all get on together where we ran through the second mission again to get Ula caught up… you only get the mission and bonus mission xp the first time you do a mission it seems, but there is always kill xp and drops… using the siege weapons and getting a side quest from a pop culture reference.

We’ll tell Elly Rigby we saw you too

We got through and were all on the same page and ready for the next mission in the Ruins of Surmia.

That was one where we had to travel a bit to get to the mission site, and it was the first mission where you really get involved with the manic depressive nature of Prince Rurik.  At some points he is keen to run ahead of the party and it is all you can do to keep up and keep him safe.  Then suddenly he’ll be all “where ever you guys want to go, I’ll just tag along.”

But we kept on track, though some of that was because I had done the mission on the alt ahead of time.  That wasn’t enough to give me the optimum route through things, but I at least kind of knew where to go.  As I noted, we’re in the land of 2005, where something like map references or precise objectives were viewed as a luxury.  First we had to rescue some guys… which fortunately Rurik was keen to lead us to because one pass through the mission doesn’t make you a ranger or the north or anything.

We line up so nicely while Rurik frees the captives

Then we ended up at the wrong side of a drawbridge and the prince idly muses that there is probably a way around the back to lower it.

Rurik the dismissive

It is through some tar and he doesn’t want to get his armor dirty, so we’re sent to go look into it while he idles there waiting for his path to be cleared.

Add “imperious and/or lazy” to the many faces of Rurik I guess.

Also, angry Rurik

At this point it was a good thing that I had done the mission already, as Rurik is less than vague about how to get to the “other side” he mentions.

Also, I knew about the bonus mission.  So we got that.  It involves trailing a group of four Charr to their altar, but you have to follow at a distance or they’ll aggro, you’ll have to kill them, and then you won’t be able to finish the bonus mission.  Ask me how I know that!

With that in mind we were extra cautious and managed not to blow our cover.

The Altar in Sight!

That done and cleared, we ran back and did the tar river run to get to the lever to let Rurik in through the gate.  There he spots the Charr forces, declares they are too much and that we most avoid contact, then runs off and directly into half a dozen fights with groups of Charr.

So a bit of chaotic Rurik as well I guess.

We ended up at the gates of the Nolani Academy, where Rurik went to school as a lad if I got his exposition right.  There we had to defend him while he fiddled with the lock.  Again, having done this once was an advantage, so I knew we were going to face rushes from east, west, and south at intervals.  So we watched the mini-map and went after any group that started to rush us.

As such, nobody got anywhere close to Rurik.  Then, on completing that, we got a cut scene where the hostiles were practically on top of Rurik and he saved us by opening the gate in the nick of time.

Rurik the self-important?  I guess we’re all the hero of our own stories.

Anyway, through the gate we got the cut scene that described what went on.

Why do we have to line up for every cut scene?

And there we were in Nolani Academy, the starting point for the next mission and well along on the map towards Yaks Bend and eventually Lions Arch… names I vaguely remember from playing some Guild Wars 2.

Our group… worked pretty well.  Having three pets along makes us seem more than we are I suppose.

Our group with Rurik

That said, there was enough of a workout in getting through the mission that we learned a few things.  But we seem to be on the mission track for now.  There will likely need to be some side ventures.  Quests out in the field still get you skills for your profession.

Between Expeditions in No Man’s Sky

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I spent the holidays running all five of the expeditions that Hello Games brought back for No Man’s Sky, ending up with the lesson that, despite any bitching I do about some of the tasks required, I am drawn to the structure and guided experience that an expedition brings.

So when I get back from an expedition… I feel the absence of a list of things to do.

Back to Smooth Operator, my main save corvette

That isn’t exactly true.  There are a lot of things to do, and there are any number of goals I could set off in pursuit of.  I am more at a loss of which direction to go.  In a sandbox game like NMS, figuring out your objective is as important as anything else.

Do I want to build a base?  Expand my settlement?  Upgrade my freighter?  Farm?  Explore?  Chase milestones?  Work on my standings with the three races or with the four factions?  Work on the three primary quests?  Work on the dozen secondary quests?

And key to picking that is figuring out which of the above I can make some tangible progress with.

For example, Potshot and I spent some time searching for a paradise planet on which we could experiment with base building.  And we found such a planet and spent some time working on it, only to deal mostly with the quirks and bugs of how bases work in the game.

I’ve been trying to make this work… and it has been difficult

After some builds and rebuilds and learning that flattening some land to build on was a mistake because it will randomly return to its original state.  After a week or so of fiddling with that I had something like the basics of a base, but was tired out on the whole thing.  Also, I remain annoyed that there are no landing pads that will accommodate a corvette.

This is why I am hoping for a big base building revamp expansion, but we’ll see.

At one point I decided to chase some of the remaining Steam achievements I had left.  There were four remaining, two related to extreme survival and two related to reaching the center of the galaxy.

I spent a bit of time each evening jumping down the path laid out to the center of the galaxy, but that started to feel like a fool’s errand, that just traveling by ship jumps was going to take me well beyond my patience for such a task.

The primary missions… I hope on them every so often.

The big three quests

But those too seem… a bit repetitive.  I spent some time on The Atlas Path this past weekend, which basically added up to following a slightly different path through the galaxy in order to find a series of Atlas Stations where you can dock up, learn a few words, get some minor insight, then get sent along to find the next one.

My character may dream in Atlas, but I do not

Cool look, the whole Atlas thing… but I am inevitably distracted by… just about anything.  I find a planet type I haven’t seen before or I feel the need to stop and check in at every station to talk to the locals.  That gets me a bit further along in all of those milestone.  Granted, I am already exalted, or whatever the final rank is, with each of the primary lifeforms.

Standings with the Gek

There are still some things to wrap up with the Gek, for example.  Nothing that grants me anything special, but I think we’re all aware that, given the right circumstances, I’ll working on making the numbers go up just to see the numbers go up.  Better go smuggle a bit more.

I am likewise set with the Korvax and the Vy’keen, as well as two of the four factions.  I need to work on the Explorer’s Guild.

Explorer’s Guild Stats

I am the furthest behind with the Outlaws… and even with them I am pretty far along considering that Outlaw systems are not as common.

The Outlaws

I can probably knock those out with some effort… should I choose to apply it.  We shall see.  The one things I did lock on to a bit over the last week was one of the extreme survival milestones.  All I had to do was get to “Robust” and I would get one of those four missing Steam achievements.

In my wanderings I found a scorched planet that offered exactly the right setting.  The temp was hot enough day and night to keep the timer counting up and there were plenty of storms so I could spend some time running around harvesting storm crystals, which is one of the things you can turn into the Explorer’s League to raise your ranking, as well as plenty of phosphorous deposits to mine in order to keep my extra heat resist shielding topped up.

It is hot out tonight!

So the timer slowly moved towards my goal.

Almost to Robust!

The “minutes” are in game minutes, which equal one second.  Also, I was going from the previous milestone, at around 18K minutes, so I didn’t spend 450 hours on the planet in order to get the achievement.

Robust at last

Still, the seconds ass up.  The final achievement on the Extreme Survival path will require another 4.5 hours of hanging out in hostile weather.  I like the game, but I am going to have to take that in smaller bites.  I can only harvest so many storm crystals before the game gets a little tiring.

So I carry on.  As noted, there are a lot of things to do in NMS, but I do sometimes need a goal to drive me in order to get me to log in.

But we should be getting another expedition… soon-ish?  We shall see.

TAGN Fantasy Critic League 2026 – Week Four and the First Score

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The first rule of headline writing is that if you can make a rhyme then you should run with it.  So here we are in week four where had not just one score, but three titles with scores, setting the season in motion.

Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games

We were off to the races on Monday when enough reviews had already come in for the first title of the season.

  • Mio: Memories in Orbit
    • [Picked by Anthania Interactive (Ula)]
    • Now has a score of 79.2

That actually led to a message from Ula asking about dropping games that have a score already.  I guess she wasn’t thrilled with kicking off with a score under 80.

Mio: Memories in Orbit

However, while I could set up a league where you could drop titles with scores… the rules have a lot of options and you can make a league that is a lot different than we have now… that is not an option for us.  In the TAGN league once it has a score it is yours to keep.

And that wasn’t an awful score.  The average score for last year was just shy of 82.

So the game released when the day rolled over to Tuesday and the first big shuffle of the rankings hit.

  • Publisher Score Updates
    • Anthania Interactive (Ula)
      • Score has gone UP from 0 to 9.6
      • Moved from 12th place to 1st place

The Discord bot actually riffled through the entire list, but since everybody else still had no points, I decided that was a lot of noise for a very specific piece of information.

After that a host of additional reviews came in which pushed the score for Mio up some.

  • Mio: Memories in Orbit
    • [Picked by Anthania Interactive (Ula)]
    • Score has gone UP from 80.0 to 81.1
  • Mio: Memories in Orbit
    • [Picked by Anthania Interactive (Ula)]
    • Score has gone UP from 80.4 to 81.6
  • Mio: Memories in Orbit
    • [Picked by Anthania Interactive (Ula)]
    • Score has gone UP from 81.9 to 83.0

That pushed Ula up to a score of 13 before another title launched.

However, it wasn’t long before we got a second score as reviews were already starting to come in for Arknights: Endfield.

Arknights: Endfield

That also started out as a fairly “mid” score.

  • Arknights: Endfield
    • [Picked by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)]
    • Now has a score of 80

Again, kind of in the mid zone where scores land when there isn’t a reviewer consensus on a title.  That too got some updates as we approached the release date.

  • Arknights: Endfield
    • [Picked by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)]
    • Score has gone UP from 80.0 to 81.2
  • Arknights: Endfield
    • [Picked by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)]
    • Score has gone DOWN from 81.2 to 79.6

Come Thursday morning we had two more titles hit their release date,

  • Cult of the Lamb: Woolhaven has released!
  • Arknights: Endfield has released!

That gave us another update to the scoreboard, pushing Nimgimli into second place.

  • Publisher Score Updates
    • Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)
      • Score has gone UP from 0 to 9.6
      • Moved from 10th place to 2nd place

However, the second title, Cult of the Lamb: Woolhaven, had no score yet.

Cult of the Lamb: Woolhaven

There was not even a review listed, making me wonder if it was going to succumb to the sheep curse.  Last year, the one title that shipped but did not get a score… and still does not have enough reviews for a score… was Ultimate Sheep Raccoon.  Wool.  Sheep.  It is all coming together!

But Woolhaven launched on every console as well as PC, so reviews eventually started to show up.  There was no curse, and in fact it kicked off very well.

  • Cult of the Lamb: Woolhaven
    • [Picked by Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)]
    • Now has a score of 89.3

That, of course, stirred up the rankings, such that they are at this point in the year.

  • Publisher Score Updates
    • Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)
      • Score has gone UP from 0 to 19.3
      • Moved from 9th place to 1st place
    • Anthania Interactive (Ula)
      • Moved from 1st place to 2nd place
    • Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)
      • Moved from 2nd place to 3rd place

However, while that score is pretty good… it is based on just FOUR reviews as of my writing this.  I expect that we will see fluctuation in that score next week.

All of which left us with this scoreboard at the end of week four.

Week 4 Scores

Not only did Shintar pop up into first place, but the strength of her one live pick was enough for the league to decide that she is destined for first place.

Then there were bids.  We had more bids this week.

Week 4 Bids

When everything was resolved last night, these were the results.

  • Drops in TAGN League
    • TAGN HQ (Wilhelm): Highguard (Drop Successful)

I actually looked up Highguard last week and… the previews were not great.  I am kind of surprised nobody counter picked it.  But I put it on the drop list and away it went.  It launches this week, so I’ll soon know if that was a mistake or not.

  • Bids in TAGN League
    • Mariachi Legends
      Won by TAGN HQ (Wilhelm) with a bid of $1
    • Enter the Gungeon 2
      • Won by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli) with a bid of $1
    • Unannounced Witcher 3 DLC
      • Won by Anthania Interactive (Ula) with a bid of $11
    • Esoteric Ebb
      • Won by TAGN HQ (Wilhelm) with a bid of $1
    • Beast of Reincarnation
      • Won by Anthania Interactive (Ula) with a bid of $26
        • Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)’s bid of $11 did not succeed: Publisher was outbid.
        • Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)’s bid of $8 did not succeed: Publisher was outbid.
    • High on Life 2
      • Won by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli) with a bid of $1
    • Planet of Lana II – Children of the Leaf
      • Won by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli) with a bid of $2
    • Pokémon Generation 10 (Unannounced)
      • Won by Anthania Interactive (Ula) with a bid of $1
    • Unannounced Mainline Half-Life Game
      • Won by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli) with a bid of $2 (🎯 Counter Pick)
    • Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus II
      • Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)’s bid of $2 did not succeed: No roster spots available.
    • Ananta
      • Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)’s bid of $1 did not succeed: No roster spots available.

Nimgimli had a total of seven bids in play this week and won four,  got in the counter pick against Half Life 3, which seems like a safe bet here in January, and had two fail as there was no space left on their roster.  But, you never know when you’re going to be out bid.

Ula was in on three bids, included the contested bid over Beast of Reincarnation, where she threw in $26 of her budget to secure the win.

And then I got in there with two uncontested one dollar bids.

Then, with coming titles, we got a few updates:

  • Marathon
    • [Picked by Hidalgo Trading Company (Pallais)]
    • Release date changed from ‘March 2026’ to ‘Thursday, March 05, 2026’.
  • Fable
    • [Picked by Hidalgo Trading Company (Pallais)]
    • Estimated release date changed from ‘2026’ to ‘Fall 2026’.
  • Forza Horizon 6
    • [Picked by TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)]
    • Release date changed from ‘2026’ to ‘Tuesday, May 19, 2026’.

Marathon got a hard date, Fable got a season (though they’ll need more than that to convince some), and Forza Horizon 6 confirmed on Thursday the date that leaked last week.  It is up for pre-order on Steam and XBox now.

We also got something about Prince of Persia… that set a date as well… if “never” is a date.

  • Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake
    • [Picked by Hidalgo Trading Company (Pallais)]
    • Estimated release date changed from ‘By March 2026’ to ‘Cancelled’.
    • Tags changed from Remake to Cancelled, Remake.

Ubisoft is being Ubisoft and following the industry trend of cancellations and delays because they don’t want to pay anybody to do the work.

You cannot grab it as a counter pick either.  Cancelled items are out of bounds unless you picked them before they were cancelled.  So Pallais has a title to drop and a new slot on their roster to fill.

All of that left the coming up list looking like this:

Coming Up for Week 5

With Highguard out of the running, that leaves us two releases next week, with both Shintar and Nimgimli looking to get their second titles on the board.  We will have to wait until week six to get anybody new with a score on the board, but then week seven, Valentine’s week, will see seven titles launch, which should shake things up a bit.

And there are still 48 weeks left to go from here.

Related:

Binge Watching into the New Year Once More

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I have yet to determine what makes me write a whole post about some shows while feeling content to summarize others in a post like this.  It certainly isn’t that I focus on the shows I love.  But here we are again at another batch summary post while I have a different post queued up for later about one show I didn’t even like all that much.  There is no logic, so let’s just go.

Hey, presidential assassination time!

Death by Lightning

Perhaps the best mini-series about late 19th century presidential politics ever made.  It is awesome, you should watch it, and if you do not like it you are objectively and provably wrong in your opinion.  Also, it is only four episodes.  You can do this, it is worth it.

The casting, the performances, the costumes, the sets, the dialog… all so good I want to weep and howl in joy at the same time.

The era often gets caught up in Victorian legend of people being overly quiet and polite and uncomfortably dressed and very unhappy to sit on a chair where the body warmth of the previous occupant, but people drank, swore, had sex, and had loud opinions about things out in the world.  So it was nice to see that embraced in the production.

Add in that the whole thing is about as historically accurate as one can hope from such a production… I mean it is this or obscure PBS documentaries.. AND it explores the events around the least well remembered of the 4 US presidential assassinations, back when that was just something people did, so what is not to love?

You still won’t remember the name Charles J. Guiteau after you’re done, but you’ll be like me and at least remember that you have forgotten it.

Less overt oil company propaganda and more… accounting?

Landman

Also, Paramount, could you put something in your press kit that has the season 2 cast on the title card?  Jon Hamm died in season one.

Anyway, it is all still Taylor Sheridan being “You know nothing Jon Snow” about some group of people doing a job you wouldn’t want.  This seaons we just spend a lot more time with the rich people, the oil execs, lawyers, and accountants, than we do with the roughnecks.  And if you think rich people problems get sympathy… well, that was the eventual downfall of Yellowstone for me as well.  And doubly so since most of the problems in Landman are due to Jon Hamm’s character who, as I noted above, died in season one.

The whole of season 2 of Landman would spin out of control, likely becoming an unholy mix of Hunting Wives and Succession, if it were not for Billy Bob Thorton.

But Billy Bob as Tommy Norris, holds the whole thing together and makes it worth the time.  How much of that is his skill as an actor and how much the quality of the script I could not say, but it works… and is popular enough that there is a third season set up for sure.

A whodunnit murder mystery in six episodes, so no wasted time.

His & Hers

Well, mostly no wasted time.  You could argue that the first 5.9 episodes are misdirection.  But what murder mystery isn’t made up of that sort of thing?  So it spends a lot of the first three episodes framing up somebody, splits to a couple other suspects for two episodes, then goes all in on a final suspect and starts wrapping everything up… and then, almost as an epilogue, tells you who did do it, showing you all the clues you missed so you feel like a chump.

Granted, those clues were tiny and unexplained, and mostly unexamined by characters in the show, so it edges close to a Broadchurch level of psych.  But it works hard enough to convince you that you should have seen it coming that I’ll allow it… since none of the characters in the show actually solved the murder we’re at least on the level of the detective running the case.  This is also a “limited series,” which means one season only.  Yet there is talk of second season, though I don’t know how that would work at all.

Another Harlen Coben mystery set in the UK.

Run Away Indeed

I mention this because… he is an American author and his novels are set in the US, but for some reason his “make a series about every single one of my books” deal had a clause in it somewhere that said they all had to be set in the UK or something.  I don’t know why.

Also, Minnie Driver is the headliner here and appears in any significant way in maybe three out of the eight episodes.  Anyway, James Nesbitt is off to find his missing drug addicted daughter and ends up involved in a murder and a drug gang and things happen.

I don’t want to be sour on Harlen Coben as I haven’t read any of his books.  I have only seen the Netflix productions based on them, and whatever studio in the UK is doing them is turning them into bland, somewhat forgettable fare.  I had to go look up what happened and we watched this ten days ago.

The most interesting character was played by Ruth Jones, the woman on the far left in the title card, who is a private detective looking… for something… but she was fun to follow and I would watch a series about her and her detective agency… except that… well… there was an incident.

Hey, it turns out Mick Herron wrote something before Slow Horses!

Down Cemetery Road

I knew this as I had read the book on which this show was based because… I had read all the Slow Horses books and figured some of that magic might also reside in his first series outing.

It did not… to the point that I only remembered I had read the book when the series started to feel vaguely familiar, and even then I had to go check to see if it was on my Good Reads list.  I gave it three stars there, but I think I was being polite or admitting that I don’t have to love everything.  But I did not bother reading any of the following three books in the series.

So Apple TV, desperate for some more Slow Horses magic in the way I was, so rushed this into production and now we have a season of it.

On the plus side of thing, it does feature Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, whose combined acting talents carry much of the show.

On the down side, the shadowy government conspiracy is played for a few more laughs than strictly necessary and the plot is still vague and meandering and the actions of most of the players don’t withstand scrutiny.  A lot of “that doesn’t make a lot of sense” in the whole thing.

Still, I didn’t hate it and we’ll probably watch season two when it appears.  Maybe things got better with the second book… there being four in the series, so we probably have three more seasons coming.

This was a thing… about a secret spy agency that keeps an eye on our secret spy agencies.

The Copenhagen Test

Also, it doesn’t take place in Copenhagen, in case you were seeking glimpses of the capital of Denmark, the country we’ve been trying to start a war with for the last two weeks or so.  Or was it even that long?  The event horizon for international crises is so short these days with President Dementia running the show.

So Simu Liu, a former special forces operative, works downstairs at a secret agency doing normal secret stuff, but gets invited upstairs where the interesting stuff goes on.  Only he has been compromised in a way that I cannot mention because it is a spoiler and it would sound ridiculous enough that you might think I was kidding.

Anyway, the whole plot is figuring out who is pulling the strings of the operation as those with the agency, who know Simu has been compromised, use him as bait to expose the overall conspiracy.

This get rolled up in the end, but it feels like this is a one season outing because what made it interesting at all was resolved.  Another “not awful” level of effort, but it feels less like an Apple TV production and more like a classic network TV outing… which is probably how it landed on Peacock.