TALES FROM THE CRYPT

The Longing: A Gamer's Meditation

Published on 3/16/2026

It's been a crazy winter in the city outside of the Crypt. One of the ways I've been relaxing is by delving into the depths of Steam, namely checking for games that are a few dollars. One of those I picked up recently was "The Longing," developed by Studio Seufz and published by Application Systems Heidelberg in 2020.

The Game follows a character named 'The Shade,' a simply designed, sweet-faced antropomorphic lump of coal with bright yellow eyes. He is the servant of a King who rules over an empty undergound kingdom. This King has tasked The Shade to watch over the kingdom while the King sleeps, and to awaken him in 400 days. This span of time passes in real time, meaning that if you did nothing to help The Shade pass the time more quickly, it would take more than a year to complete the game.

It's easy to sympathize with The Shade, and I found myself very protective of him before the first day had passed. He spends his time exploring slowly, reading books you can find for him, decorating his humble space and drawing. In a way, it was like looking in a mirror.

We live in what I think will be studied one day as a society of exceptional loneliness. We are kept apart by brutal schedules that we must maintain in order to feed and house ourselves, by technology that is marketed as connective but isolating by design, and by the loss of freedom of movement and third spaces that has become a marker of 21st century society. I think it is a strange coincidence that a game that is about waiting and isolation come out on March 5th, 2020, right as our world was about to be pushed into fear and loneliness on a scale that would maybe only be rivaled by the Spanish flu or Bubonic plague.

The Shade moves slowly through the sprawling, confusing cave system at the instruction of the player, sometimes chiming in with sad little thoughts about the circumstances it finds itself in. It worries about obeying the King as it explores further and further, thinks about its little home, interprets its dreams. Occasionally, the player is rewarded with short cutscenes of those dreams, the only moments in gameplay that take place above ground. The environments the Shade passes through, and the ambient music that accompanies it, are at once grand and somber. The illusration of the King in particular, looming large in the room right outside the Shade's home, has a mythic quaility about it.

Now that I am a few days into The Longing, I'm more often letting in run in the background as I write or play other games than I am actively playing. I think that's by design. It lulls you into waiting patiently as the Shade does, contemplating your own isolation while you help the poor thing along. It is a game that is uniquely of this time, a meditation on what we're doing in the world, staring at screens and grinding endlessly for small creature comforts. We are not very different from a tiny Shade, digging through stone and wandering endless tunnels, all while dreaming of his armchair. 10/10 Game, 400/10 Sense of Ennui.

Analog Rituals in a Digital Age

Published on 10/12/2025

The TV was $25. I picked it up from a guy in the suburbs one afternoon, who assured me it was in perfect working order.

I had been hunting for a CRT TV for months, striking out over and over again online and in person. Even at the specialized electronics thrift store, the clerk told me they only get a few in a month, and that they aren't really worth fixing if they don't work perfectly. They take up too much space, she said, and aren't in high demand outside of the small community of retro game enthusiasts. But I finally had one, the centerpiece to my stash of old consoles and half-functional VCRs, sitting in their tangle of cords and adapters like birds in a nest.

I don't know what possessed me, really, the day I decided that my next mission was to build an analog media set-up in the Crypt. In a world with endless entertainment at my fingertips, why spend so much time and money on something outdated and clunky? After a bit of thought, I came to the conclusion that it's the same feeling that makes me occasionally pause near the door of the Church kitty-corner to the Crypt, albeit on a smaller scale. The longing for ritual.

The whirring of the machines, the fiddling of cords. Plugging things in in the correct sequence to make the humming TV click over from static to blue. The slow fade-in of the logo of some movie studio long bought out by a media conglomerate that now specializes mostly in data farming. The quiet buzz of the cathode ray tubes that glow behind the screen, the shlick shlick slick of the tape being unspooled in the VCR. Commercials that give you just enough time to make popcorn and get a drink. This is the ritual of movies.

It took me by surprise how quickly my mind readjusted to the ritual. My phone and computer where soon forgotten. Maid Jean was in the armchair, I curled up on the floor, and we passed snacks back and forth as the night grew dark outside the window. Soon, the room was lit only by the soft glow of the TV. The movie finished, and we moved into the muscle memory of shutting it all down. My brain was quiet, thoughts less tangled than they usually were after a night of binge-watching and doomscrolling. I pressed the button that turned the TV off with a burst of static and a muffled crack. The tape was ejected and I slid it into the sleek little rewinder I had found at the thrift store, a relic of the days of single-purpose machines that would outlast generations. I had already dropped it once, and it kept humming along like nothing had happened.

It is strange to romanticize something as mundane as watching a movie, but I think it's important to remember that it was magic once. Before the mass production of "content," movies were something almost otherworldly. The Silver Screen was somewhere we went to step outside of our day-to-day lives and experience a story together, and later, the room in which families and friends congregated to bookend our days. It was a ritual, an important one, and it can be one again.

"WNUF Halloween Special" A blast from the local TV past.

Published on 10/1/2025

Scrolling on Shudder has become a favorite weeknight pastime for Maid Jean and I. There seems to be a never-ending pool of b-movies and schlock, as well as an impressive catalog of obscure gems and classics. Tonight we stumbled upon a movie neither of us had ever even heard of, a rarity, and we had an absolute blast watching it. 2013's "WNUF Halloween Special," a spoof 80's local TV broadcast complete with commercials and technical difficulties.

The format is familiar to anyone who grew up with local cable, a low-budget news talk segment interspersed with fuzzy commercials that sport bright, flashing headlines about things like carpet repair and your local library's newest reading initiative. The vibe and feel of pre-21st century TV was faithfully recreated, down to the gamma fuzziness that is largely gone from modern TVs.

The plot follows local WNUF news on Halloween night as they send snarky anchor Frank Stewart on a field mission to hunt for ghosts live on air, hosting a crowd of costumed townies from outside and inside the "Webber House." The cast of characters expands to include a satirical spoof of Ed and Lorianne Warren, named Louis and Clare Berger and guided by their psyhic cat Shadow in this iteration, as well as a hesitant parish priest. Chaos and spooks ensue, propelled forward by the sharp writing and frequent "commerical breaks."

The "commercial breaks" are truly what set this movie apart. It's an effective scene-setting technique that has the added benefit of also being oddly cozy for a horror movie. It took me right back to watching TV in the living room with my family in the 90's, sitting through oddball local commercials with bated breath, waiting for the next 15 minutes of whatever horror movie was on that night. The commercials themselves also have interlinking plotlines that give the setting of "WNUF" some serious local color, with battling state election candidates sniping at each other and a fanatical church railing against the sins of Halloween.

THe only real gripe I have with this rollicking horror-comedy is that I could have used more of it. The ending felt a touch abrupt, rushing past what could have been an awesome "Ghostwatch" style camera feed bonanza. I'm sure others don't like "WNUF Halloween Special"'s lack of polish, but to me, all of the wacky editing choices and cheesy dialogue screams future cult classic. I will be checking out this director, Chris LaMartina, and finding everything else he's ever made. 9/10 movie, 11/10 commercials.

"The Keep," 1983's Almost Classic

Published on 9/28/2025

Signing up for the email list of the Trylon Microcinema is one of the best things I've ever done. A Minneapolis institution, the 90 seat movie theatre is known for showing obscure and rare film prints. But, even as familiar as I am with the Trylon, I was gobsmacked to see that they were showing 1983's "The Keep" on the big screen.

The Trylon is in Longfellow, close to a lot of my other favorite spots, like Dreamhaven Books and the Chatterbox Pub. It's a cash-only kind of place, with $3 sodas and $5 large popcorns, and they still give you little blue paper tickets. Maid Jean and I showed up about 15 minutes early and managed to find good seats in the theatre full of film bros, and everyone chatted through some vintage Japanese horror trailers and the iconic John Waters Don't (;)) Smoke in the Theatre ad.

The Keep is one of my favorite movies. It has beautiful sets, incredible pre-cgi special effects, and a unique visual style that sticks in your brain. But, I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that I am a fan of the book, and my memory fills in the context that is woefully missing in at least 2/3rds of the 96 minute released cut. This movie was a notorious victim of the cutting room floor, trimmed from an (admittedly overlong) first cut of 210 minutes down to the theatrical release time, losing almost two hours of content. As a result, there are jarring cuts and timelines that make very little sense. Also, this movie has some of the most inconsistent sound editing I've ever encountered, with the dialog often drowned out by foley effects or the (incredible) score by Tangerine Dream.

"The Keep" follows a squad of Nazi soldiers in the Romanian Carpathian Alps, assigned to guard a remote mountain pass. They set up a perimeter using the eponymous keep as a base of operations. The keep is a forboding, slate-grey structure that looms over the rural village that it flanks, otherworldly and brutal. They march into the fog-wreathed interior and find it lined by silver crosses that- well, I won't go much further. The rest of the plot is pretty mangled, and honestly, if you're curious I would highly reccomend the book by F. Paul Wilson. It's an overlooked masterpiece of weird horror that is one of my perennial favorite reads.

The true strength of the movie is in the visuals. The sets are nothing short of magnificent, and the creature designs are imagninative and well-executed. The first third of the movie in particular manages to give a really impressive sense of scale, the walls of the keep seem endless, and one shot zooms out on a soldier discovering a cavern until you realize that he has stumbled into something unfathomably massive.

The movie was a fun watch, flaws and all, and the Trylon remains one of my favorite spots in the Twin Cities. It was a perfect September night, and Maid Jean and I stopped by the Chatterbox pub after the movie to dissect the tropes and trials of "The Keep." We split some fries and had a couple drinks, I had a lovely Oktoberfest from Toppling Goliath brewery, and we headed home as a September chill settled over the city. 6/10 movie, 10/10 night.