NPR's Rachel Martin speaks to Dr. Margaret Harris of the World Health Organization about the state of the global vaccine rollout.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to bring in another voice now, Dr. Margaret Harris of the World Health Organization. Thank you so much for being here.
MARGARET HARRIS: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: We just heard about the awful situation, really, in India and the growing death toll there. Brazil just topped 400,000 deaths. Understanding these are two different countries, but still, what needs to happen to stop the spread in these two places in particular?
HARRIS: We have seen this happen time and again in different countries. But in a country with such a huge population, it's on a horrendous scale. What needs to be done is to actually stop transmission, and that can be done. We've seen it happen over and over again, but it's hard work. And one of the things that your previous correspondent described, staying home if you can, is effective when you're at this stage because you're essentially putting the entire community in quarantine. And right now, what has to happen is stopping that transmission from person to person.
MARTIN: But the government, as India - the government of India has been reticent to impose nationwide lockdowns. That makes it difficult, no?
HARRIS: Well, it's difficult, especially putting huge populations in lockdown, because it has enormous economic and social consequences. But targeted lockdowns where you know you've got widespread community transmission and you're not able to test. So you're not able to identify where the virus is. That's when a lockdown is actually the most effective tool because you're essentially saying, we don't know where the virus is, but we're going to stop it from going from person to person. But indeed, when you do this, you have to do it making sure that you can support people, that people can feed their families, that you - your society can keep on going while you're stopping the transmission.
MARTIN: France just detected its first case of the variant first identified in India. What can you tell us about that variant?
HARRIS: So India detected the B.1.617 variant. That's the one that you're talking about. They first detected that in October 2020, and there has been an increasing detection of this variant during the surge in COVID-19 in parts of India. And preliminary modeling does suggest that it's got a higher growth rate than other circulating variants. However, we don't have enough information that - to suggest whether or not it's a major driver. We think that the driver of this large outbreak is a combination of factors of relaxation of the protective measures - the personal protective measures, perhaps a little bit of complacency along with the rise in transmission. They also have a number of other variants circulating as well, including the ones detected in the United Kingdom, in South Africa and in Brazil.
MARTIN: All of the variants have got people worried - right? - about whether or not the vaccines that are circulating right now are actually - will actually prevent getting COVID-19 and these variants. What can you say about the strength of the current vaccines against the way the vaccine - or the way the virus is mutating?
HARRIS: Well, certainly this is an area of ongoing and very intense work. We have a group who are looking at all the variants and classify them as variants of concern if we think that they are - they may have an effect on transmission or if they're trying - they have a tendency to escape vaccines. To date, some of the data that's - especially coming out of the United Kingdom - is quite positive in that it's showing that the vaccines that they're using there have been able to bring down disease and death in - even in the groups - even in people who have tested positive for a variant. So it seems that they are - the vaccines still are effective, but it's certainly something we're watching.
MARTIN: I want to talk about the distribution of the vaccines. The WHO says more than a billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide, but only 0.3% were given to people in low-income countries. How do you change that?
HARRIS: We change that by upping the amount of doses that are available that can be distributed around the world. And that comes down to dose sharing. That comes down to upscaling the manufacturing, increasing the manufacturing locally, technology transfer. So there is a lot that can be done. But the critical thing is to get it done as quickly as possible.
MARTIN: We will end it there, but we look forward to our next conversation.
Dr. Margaret Harris of the WHO, thank you so much for taking the time this morning.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Alassa Mfouapon was falsely accused by a German tabloid and a far-right leader of starting a violent protest. So he sued them, and won.
GELSENKIRCHEN, Germany — The country’s largest-circulation tabloid called him the “scandal asylum seeker” and accused him (falsely) of entering the country illegally. People hacked his social media accounts and broadcast his location and personal information. A far-right political leader decried him as the “ringleader” of a violent protest, while another even suggested people like him would be a good reason to bring back the death penalty in Germany.
Alassa Mfouapon is hardly the first refugee to become sensationalist fodder for tabloids or a convenient scapegoat for far-right, anti-immigration politicians. In the five years since a major wave of refugees arrived in Germany, such portrayals have become commonplace.
But the 31-year-old from Cameroon is the first to take them to court for those depictions — and win.
In the process, he has emerged as an ideological lightning rod in the debate over refugee politics in Germany, his journey highlighting the disconnect between the country’s image on refugee issues and the reality for many of those who seek asylum here.
“The target is to create unrest between refugees and the population in Germany,” Mr. Mfouapon said of the far right and right-wing news media in a recent interview in his home in Gelsenkirchen, a city outside Essen in western Germany. “They’re trying to show how criminal refugees are. And this is what they started to do with me. I decided that if I let this hatred stand, it would very soon take on other refugees.”
The online abuse came as Mr. Mfouapon (pronounced mm-FWA-pon) sought to process the difficult, yearslong journey that had brought him to Germany in the first place.
He was born in the village of Kouti in western Cameroon, but mostly grew up living with his uncle in the nation’s largest city, Douala, where he studied business and marketing at the city’s École Supérieure de Gestion. His father worked as a civil servant preserving local cultures and traditions, a role he was expected to take over when his father died but turned down.
He and his then-wife, Fleur, left Cameroon with their baby son Darel in 2014 to escape religious persecution: His decision to marry outside his religion (he is Muslim, she is Christian) brought problems and threats for the couple, and the local police refused to intervene.
The family went first to Algeria and then on to Libya, where Mr. Mfouapon was thrown in jail upon crossing the border. His wife and son, by then two years old, continued on, hoping to make it to Europe. She did, but it wasn’t until he finally made it to Italy himself that Mr. Mfouapon learned that his son had drowned during the crossing after their boat capsized.
Recounting the experience, Mr. Mfouapon paused. “If you are shocked, we can break a bit,” he said.
Struggling with the byzantine asylum system in Italy, he decided to make his way to Germany and was sent to the Ellwangen refugee camp, where he took on informal work as a translator (he speaks French, English, Italian and Arabic). There he realized he had been laboring under a false impression about the country’s attitude toward asylum seekers and refugees. “It was like, ‘If I reach Germany, my problems will be solved,’” he said. “It is not like it seems.”
“They’re trying to show how criminal refugees are,” Mr. Mfouapon said. “And this is what they started to do with me. I decided that if I let this hatred stand, it would very soon take on other refugees.”Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
It was in Ellwangen in April 2018 that Mr. Mfouapon’s troubles with the German news media and far-right scene started. When a 23-year-old Togolese man was slated to be deported from the camp, Mr. Mfouapon joined the approximately 150 camp residents who protested the move, calling on the government to allow the man to stay and challenge his asylum decision.
In the face of the protest, where some participants sought to physically prevent the deportation, the police initially backed off. But hundreds of officers returned before dawn a few days later to take the Togolese man into custody, rousing Mr. Mfouapon and others from their beds and securing their wrists with cable ties. Mr. Mfouapon was later released back into the camp.
Wildly exaggerated by the right-wing media, the events in Ellwangen sparked national outrage at the protesters. Some news reports described a lawless scene spiraling out of control, with violent attacks on the police. Top German officials seized on the protest as proof that the country should significantly tighten its asylum policy.
“All of Germany heard these claims of dangerous, violent refugees who banded together and somehow planned to wage a huge battle against the police,” said Seán McGinley, head of the Baden-Württemberg Refugee Council. “In retrospect, many of these things turned out to be nonsense, but as is often the case, the first impression was what stuck in public opinion.”
Mr. Mfouapon and some other camp residents appeared at a news conference to discuss the police raid and the conditions they faced in the camp. It was a rare moment when the voices of refugees found resonance and some public attention. But it also drew scrutiny from the tabloid Bild and an outcry from far-right politicians like Alice Weidel, leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, who falsely suggested that Mr. Mfouapon was the “ringleader” of the violence.
Under the so-called Dublin rule, those who come to the European Union must apply for asylum in the first country they reach. So when Mr. Mfouapon was deported later that month, he was sent to Italy and told he could not re-enter Germany for six months.
It wasn’t just far-right trolls who read the stories about Mr. Mfouapon: A lawyer heard about his case and reached out, and activists in Germany’s left-wing political scene started a petition to help him. He decided to fight his mistreatment and that of his fellow refugees in court.
Mr. Mfouapon’s defamation suits against Ms. Weidel and Bild brought some relief, if not total victory. Late last year, a court ruled that Ms. Weidel could no longer refer to Mr. Mfouapon as the ringleader. And Bild was ordered to stop repeating some of its most incendiary claims about him (although many of the older articles remain online).
In February, in response to another suit filed by Mr. Mfouapon, a German court ruled that aspects of the police’s handling of the Ellwangen raid were illegal. The court did not rule entirely in his favor — it said, for example, that his 2018 deportation to Italy was legal, and that people in refugee facilities like Ellwangen cannot expect the same privacy rights as ordinary citizens. But his case has spurred a re-examination of the treatment of the Ellwangen incident in the German news media, drawing more attention to the voices of the refugees involved.
Mr. Mfouapon’s lawsuits sparked a re-examination of the way the news media covered a police raid on a refugee camp. Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
Cases like Mr. Mfouapon’s remain rare, because few refugees want to stand up to the state for fear they will become targets, just as Mr. Mfouapon has.
Mr. Mfouapon returned to Germany in 2019. He and his wife split up, unable to move past the loss of their son. He has added German to his other language skills and, with the help of some activists involved in his petition, applied for and started a training program in media production last year.
He has also launched a refugee advocacy organization to continue drawing awareness to these issues. Speaking out about his experiences is important to him personally, but is also a way to cope with the trauma and loss he has faced.
“All these events in my life, all these things that were happening before — if you want to deal with them, the only way you can do it is to try to go forward,” he said. “To say, ‘I will be fighting for the people who are not yet in this situation, so that what’s happening will not happen to anyone else.’”
He believes Germany needs to re-examine its asylum policy, and is pushing for changes to the Dublin rule. With worsening conditions in his home country and many others, Mr. Mfouapon said, migration issues will only intensify in coming years — and governments like Germany’s need to be ready with better solutions.
“They are trying to stop it, they are not trying to solve it,” he said. “And trying to stop something that’s exploded already — you can’t.”
NPR's Noel King talks to Anna Sale about her book: Let's Talk About Hard Things. Sale, host of WNYC's podcast Death, Sex and Money, unpacks the things we must confront at some point in our lives
Like other businesses, the Peninsula Daily News, Sequim Gazette, Forks Forum and other Sound Publishing newspapers on the North Olympic Peninsula have survived a challenging year through adaptation, resilience and hard work.
That was the message of Sound Publishing vice president Terry Ward when he spoke during a Coffee with Colleen Zoom presentation last week to answer the question of how the newspapers had held up during the COVID-19 pandemic health restrictions.
“It was a tough year for us, but we fared better than many of our peers in our industry and many of our peers in Sound Publishing,” Ward said during the presentation.
Strong communities have been the glue that helped the newspapers come through the pandemic lockdown.
“We have community-minded people,” he said, mentioning among other things the donations made to the COVID-19 Relief Fund and to the Peninsula Home Fund to help others in need.
“We are a reflection of the businesses that we serve,” Ward said.
“As we saw businesses begin to lay off folks, we had to do the same thing,” he added.
Last April, Sound Publishing laid off some staffers, furloughed others and placed just about all on reduced hours to counter the cut in revenue.
But at the same time, the company worked to continue to provide strong news coverage, he said.
That included a decision made early on to offer all COVID-19 coverage free of charge online. All stories about the unique coronavirus were placed outside of the paywall so everyone can access them.
“We wanted to make sure that the community at large had access to the information they needed,” Ward said.
“We provided that as a service.”
That probably will continue for a short while longer while vaccination clinics are in progress.
During the year, print subscriptions stabilized, Ward said.
“We saw a 60 percent growth in digital subscriptions year to date. At one point it was trending at a 98 percent growth rate,” he said.
“Overall, the total number of subscribers in the last 12 months has grown.
“That’s very different than what we see in our industry at large.”
Advertising did not do as well, he pointed out.
“When businesses can’t be open, they can’t advertise,” Ward said, and revenue also took a hit with fewer festivals on the Peninsula.
“We decided early on in the summer last year to provide some grants to folks so that we could do some advertising match to help them get back on their feet.”
Sound Publishing awarded $300,000 in grants in August last year, reopened the program in January and, between then and March, provided an additional $197,000 in grants to small- and medium-sized businesses.
At the same time, the company also continued in-kind donations for nonprofits, Ward said.
Eventually, furloughed staff were brought back. About three staffers were laid off. Many are still working reduced hours — typically between 32 and 36 hours a week.
Digital ad revenue, however, is very strong, Ward said.
“We really embraced the digital side in the last couple of years, and that has helped a lot of our local businesses during Covid because they have had to pivot to offer more online,” Ward said.
Geo-targeted digital ads “are our best-kept secret” for local and regional businesses, he added.
“We can target the individual right where they’re at.”
Donations from the community for those in need were a highlight of the year.
“As we saw the Covid pandemic start to hit last year, it was suggested we reopen the Peninsula Home Fund, and we relaunched the fund that we typically do between Thanksgiving and the first of the year” as the COVID-19 Relief Fund.
That effort raised more than $392,000.
When the Peninsula Home Fund campaign was launched as usual, it brought in another $300,000.
“So that was about $700,000 in funds that we raised that goes back to the community,” Ward said.
Community members also got involved in bringing back the weekly Forks Forum.
Historically, the PDN has subsidized the Forks Forum by $62,000 a year.
But the West End community wanted its newspaper so badly that it came to support the Forum as a paid publication and ended the year with no financial loss.
“That’s a success story that I like to tell. It’s a testament to the fact that, when a community gets behind a local newspaper, they can make sure that the community not only survives but will thrive as the newspaper thrives.
“Study after study has shown nationwide that a community without a newspaper tends to pay more in the long run,” he said.
Because of a lack of reporting keeping local government accountable, “the cost of everything in the community began to rise,” he said.
“We take what we do seriously,” Ward said. “We have invested back into our publications.”
Examples are the revised print replicas online and the mobile app launched earlier this month.
In addition to the three newspapers on the Olympic Peninsula, Sound Publishing operates 42 newspapers in Western Washington and has a handful in Alaska as well, Ward said.
Most are weeklies. The Peninsula Daily News is the second-largest daily, behind the Everett Herald.
During the past year, the PDN published more than 2,500 local pieces of by-lined news stories, Ward said.
“The good stories are the ones we really enjoy publishing,” he added, encouraging listeners to contact the PDN with story ideas.
In earlier battles, waves of enemy attacks usually come in the form of slow laser orbs. They attack at a reasonable speed.
Before long, the number of orbs, their speed, and their patterns ramp up. And that's not even accounting for the pounce-and-strike foes. Hence, Selene's very quick feet become imperative to your survival.
Enemies from above and below. The watermark here confirms that everything in this gallery was provided to Ars by Sony, because the game is otherwise too hectic for the screens we captured to translate well. I feel like these images are fairly representative of the game in action, even if they're probably sweetened a bit.
The turret to the left has a shield, so it'll need extra firepower.
Selene eventually unlocks the sword seen here, which, among other things, instantly destroys some enemies' shields.
These freaking bats, man. They will swarm your position and raise utter hell in an average session.
You don't want to get hit by this walking tree's spores. They will slow you down and set you up for a brutal follow-up attack.
You better hope your favorite gun is upgraded by the time you meet this flying monster.
Returnal is a sci-fi video game about a person constantly reliving the past in order to find a new future. In some ways, it feels like a pointed metaphor for the game's creators.
PlayStation fans are likely familiar with Finnish game studio Housemarque, whose best modern games have masterfully combined classic arcade chops with modern flourishes. Yet even its biggest PS3 and PS4 games (Super Stardust HD, Resogun, Nex Machina) have mostly felt like translations from classic cabinets, thanks to fixed perspectives and allegiant action. Blow stuff up, aim for the high score, game over, and repeat.
This week, Returnal sees the studio aim its pedigree at a much higher scope: a game that combines the pure action of '80s arcade games with the plot, production value, and world exploration of a full-blown "adventure" game. It's as if someone at Housemarque looked at 1981's Galaga running next to 2018's God of War and said, "Can we somehow combine these two?"
The result feels like a statement game for Housemarque, arguably in the same way that 2019's Control solidified Remedy Studios' own reputation—though this effort isn't quite as successful. At its best, Returnal delivers the studio's finest-yet action and tension within a phenomenal 3D-shooting system. I've gone to sleep thinking about the game's best blasting moments, eager to wake up the next day and return (returnal?) for "one more run." Yet at its worst, Returnal's roguelite trappings sometimes threaten to bring the whole package down—especially if you're not very good at high-speed shooter games.
Returnal will be some people's favorite game of 2021. But even those players should prepare to strap in for a bumpy, weird start.
(Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.)
Returnal stars a modern-day astronaut named Selene, whom players take control of the moment she crash-lands onto a mysterious planet named Atropos. You crawl out of your wrecked ship, get your bearings, and run (as seen from a third-person, over-the-shoulder perspective) to find a useful weapon... next to a dead astronaut with the same outfit and callsign as yours.
More dead Selenes appear, usually clutching personal audio recording devices that spoonfeed more of the game's mysterious plot. You'll add to that pile of corpses before long, since the opening tutorial segment includes a brutally difficult monster that traps you in a pit and kills in two hits. Immediately after your death, the screen flashes black, and the opening crash-on-a-planet sequence plays again with different camera angles; Groundhog Day stuff, but instead of "I've Got You, Babe," your mornings always open with screams and smoke.
Your version of Selene remembers dying and coming back to life this time, but the world you've landed on looks different. The opening door reveals a new zone to run through. Different dead Selenes lie in different places (sometimes with new audio logs). Different rooms, lairs, and caverns appear, now full of new arrangements of enemies, items, and secrets.
Hence, we're in roguelite territory, and the object is to die-and-retry while unraveling Atropos' mysteries and finding a mix of temporary and permanent upgrades within every randomly generated sequence. That's different than a roguelike, where each death starts you from scratch; roguelites bring you back to life with some upgrades remaining persistent after every death, while other stuff vanishes if you don't use or spend it before you die. (The latter is much more common in the modern gaming era, with popular examples like Hades and Dead Cells; comparatively, Spelunky is the best example of a modern roguelike, if not the titular PC classic itself, Rogue.)
You’ll get stronger, you’ll keep going, you’ll keep dying
What, this little guy? Surely when it attaches to my body, nothing bad will happen.
Turns out, any parasites you find add both a positive and negative aspect. And you can attach many simultaneously, if you want. But some of those negatives can really add up, so be careful.
One-use item, to be stored in an item slot and used when you need it.
You'll find a lot of malignant objects in the world, which usually give you stuff you need in a run (cash, power, items) at the cost of various temporary penalties.
Look at the top-left. That's an example of two malfunctions, earned by the random dice roll of picking up malignant stuff. Worse, if I pick up another malignant item while I have two negative conditions listed here, the new item might completely vanish. Hence, managing malfunctions is a huge part of getting through Returnal's randomly generated chaos.
Cash goes away every time you die, so make sure you spend it. Fabricators let you do just that.
By the time you find that stronger monster again, you'll have recovered a permanent "alt-fire" mode for your gun that shoots a charged, concentrated blast, along with a likely assortment of temporary upgrades. You'll get stronger, in both permanent and temporary ways, and you'll keep going.
But you'll also keep dying.
Selene’s spacesuit has some nice batteries built in.
Returnal would rather you learn its systems within the course of the game's die-and-retry loop, instead of breaking its brutality out to a tutorial. To some extent, I get it. This serves a plot that hinges on Selene's confused dedication to breaking a time loop, and plot morsels emerge at a steady rate—which, I assure you, I haven't spoiled here in the slightest. Still, you'll have a better time if you understand the type of difficulty you're getting yourself into.
Like Demon's Souls before it, Returnal establishes a unique, tough-as-nails ruleset for combat, only this game's take feels so much more like a Housemarque game. In a major departure from the Souls-like genre, Selene's default movement speed is "damned fast," and this is helped by unlimited "run" stamina (for even faster movement) and an instant dash-dodge button, which needs a second to recharge. In fact, there's no "stamina" limitation anywhere in Returnal. Selene's spacesuit clearly has some nice batteries built in.
This speed is imperative because players see Selene from a tight third-person angle as she runs through a mix of open fields and fallen-apart architecture. To live, you'll have to keep moving, lest you get caught by waves of enemy bullets (usually large, slow-moving laser orbs) coming from all sides, along with foes that hunt for Selene's body and pounce with melee attacks. To organically encourage your "git gud" mentality, Housemarque offers built-in help in the form of "adrenaline," a meter that fills up every time Selene kills a foe without taking damage. Get your adrenaline high enough, and you'll get perks. Some are combat boosts like increased melee damage (for the sword you eventually find), but others contribute directly to combat visibility. One perk makes ghosts of enemies appear if they're behind cover. Another creates a warning radius around Selene's body, lighting up to indicate whether you're being targeted by bullets (white), turrets (purple), or pouncing foes (red) in any direction.
The only “wave” I will do
Hence, your path to survival is visibility, landscape mastery, constant movement, and strategic retreat—though like other modern action games, you'll want to be close to your enemies' corpses shortly after they die, since they spew a coin currency that you'll need to purchase upgrades, health refills, and more during a given run. Kill enemies from afar and their coins will vanish by the time you reach them—which isn't a novel concept in these kinds of games.
And getting into the weeds of how Returnal's individual parts resemble other roguelites could miss the larger point. Instead of describing game aspects in isolation—each gun, each power-up, each difficult min-max decision—I'd like to set the stage by describing one of my more successful gameplay runs.
I open the game with Selene once again gasping in the despair of dying and returning to the same stupid crash site, on the rainy, forested surface of Atropos. I have a few permanent upgrades at this point, including a melee attack and certain unlocked perks for the four guns I've found thus far: a pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun, and a weird rifle (the "Hollowseeker") that shoots slower, weaker, heat-seeking shots than other guns.
Enlarge/ Newer weapons may list perks with a percentage next to them. These indicate that you need to rack up a certain number of kills to unlock that perk, and doing this will make future guns you discover more powerful.
Sony Interactive Entertainment / Housemarque
Every run starts with a base, perkless version of the pistol, and before long, I find other weapon options in randomly generated treasure chests. Some have perks I've already unlocked; others have grayed-out descriptions of perks I can unlock by killing enough foes. My first chest contains a Hollowseeker with a new listed perk called "wave." I'm not a fan of this rifle yet, but I'd like to unlock and understand this perk. After getting through early rooms full of weaker foes, I learn that "wave" means "shoot big, slow, purple saw blades in addition to my standard firepower." Wave is rad. Really, most of the perks are as rad, and they routinely put you in the head-scratching position of picking between guns. The shotgun, for example, is a tricky weapon when enemies float from afar, but once you perk it up with things like additional heat-seeking missiles and "stagger" abilities, it becomes a game-changer in some of the toughest battles.
In fact, in this run, I survive some of my toughest fights against hunt-and-pounce foes by staggering them, which drops them to their knees and exposes a weak point long enough for me to focus fire, kill them up close, grab their useful coins, and resume strafing-and-dodging other nearby pests.
When random isn’t random enough
This run might be my 12th time in the opening "Overgrown Ruins" biome, however, and things are starting to look familiar.
Roguelites revolve around premade building blocks for their stairwells, their treasure zones, their pools of lava, and so on. When a roguelite game is in 2D, those jigsaw puzzle pieces aren't just simpler to jumble up; they're also smaller. You might see tiny nooks reappear from one Spelunky run to the next, but generally, their block arrangements have a lot more leeway to work with—and benefit from a crapton of variables. You can mash together hundreds of 2D sprites without worrying about whether 3D geometry is going to intersect awkwardly or break the game.
I need that sweet, sweet adrenaline.
I wondered how Returnal would grapple with this as a fully 3D roguelite—a rarity in the genre—and the answer, as it turns out, is a bare-minimum effort. Atropos is largely made up of premade "rooms," which I put in scare quotes because they're marked on your handy mini-map with entrances and exits but can vary from constrained caverns to wide-open outdoor spaces. If you walk into a room and recognize its stairwell, then you'll recognize the rest of it—every platform, every gap, every bottomless pit. This even applies to the very mild puzzles found in various rooms; the Ruins biome in particular is rich with a "shoot a hidden target to unlock a treasure chest" gimmick, yet it doesn't use the roguelite system as an opportunity to randomize where the target is. It's always in the same spot. Meh.
Instead, the game's tension largely comes from wondering exactly what's behind the next door. Will a room be full of enemies? Which ones and where? And what items are scattered around a room's outskirts? This all works in service of Returnal's very satisfying combat—which, again, benefits from letting players enjoy freedom from stamina-related restrictions—and that means whenever you get into a fight, you can expect battles to play out in Housemarque's finely honed mixes of cramped spaces, hidey-holes, open gaps, and temporary, destructible cover. In this particular run, I'm getting the added benefit of some zone mastery during these Ruins biome fights. "Over there's the bottomless pit," I remark as I dash around, knowing that an errant fall will cost me a bit of health and my entire accrued adrenaline meter. I need that sweet, sweet adrenaline to keep tabs on foes, after all. I'm doing better this time.
But I'm also a bit bored by the noncombat rooms' familiarity. Was there really no way to move things around in the seen-this-before zones, Housemarque?
To clarify: You do not have to be online to play Returnal. However, this online check can pop up in the middle of gameplay, and in this crash's case, it started bogging down the game's UI.
This is the point during one run that the game stopped responding to my controls. While I was reading lore. Ugh.
Building a machine in the Ruins
The beautiful thing about the run in question, however, is that I'd finally gotten a strong handle on the opening Ruins biome, along with some familiarity with the second "Crimson Wastes" biome. The latter opens the rooms up considerably and adds new and remixed foes—including a few fantastic air-controlling pests that take great advantage of newly opened skies.
Once you accrue enough permanent gear, Returnal offers players a few shortcuts when dying-and-retrying to skip ahead to later biomes, and part of me was eager to jump ahead to newer stuff. But for this run, I decided to explore every corner of the opening Ruins biome, since I had no idea which rooms, fights, and treasures it would hide. I did know I'd be more likely to accumulate useful temporary upgrades, along with a few more gun-specific perk unlocks, if I ran through the familiar biome one more time. (I also spent more time practicing Returnal's active-reload system, which largely resembles the one found in Gears of War and must be mastered to withstand the game's worst fights.)
The result was exactly the build that roguelite fantatics drool over: a perfect "machine" of complementary bonuses, which came thanks to a mix of smart purchases and dumb luck.
Part of this was my selection of "mutations," a risk-reward system that adds one benefit and one drawback. You'll find mutations as alien blobs on the ground in some treasure rooms, and their pros and cons are clearly described via your HUD before you choose whether or not to equip them. I had also found an "artifact," the game's name for temporary, one-run-only bonuses, that gave me additional "repair speed" for every mutation I'd equipped, and another artifact that made each mutation's positive aspect stronger. The negatives became noticeably less negative.
That repair-speed bonus coupled nicely with an artifact that automatically healed me whenever my health got low—which normally takes way too long to recharge. As described, this build's mutations overclocked the auto-heal process, so whenever I took too much damage, my health would almost instantly refill to a small-but-doable amount. I had other perks that helped with things like shields and damage output, along with consumable items that (thanks to an artifact) would sometimes remain in my inventory after use. Suffice it to say, I'd finally stumbled upon a build that stared back at Returnal's high difficulty and growled, "Bring it."
I began feeling confident. I leaned into each weapon's special abilities. I got extra bandwidth to understand new enemies' patterns and how multiple creatures' AI might crescendo to rain lightning-orb terror on Selene if I didn't react appropriately—and that bandwidth came as much from the run's bonuses as from the die-and-retry learning I'd done up to that point.
Story and visuals
The run, sadly, ended with a wacky game crash (see above), but not before I'd reached an entirely new threshold of game progress. Returnal establishes solid stopping points within its campaign, and the biggest ones automatically wipe your temporary inventory, anyway, so there's less inherent heartbreak no matter how far you get or how brutal your last death was.
Though the action is randomized, the plot is not, and you'll follow Selene's journey of interstellar discovery and existential dread via some trippy, haunting sequences. Occasionally, Housemarque's Finnish take on an English-speaking hero tips its hat with awkward phrases and pronunciations, but it's not enough to devalue one of the cooler repeating-loop stories I've seen in a long time—and certainly the best and most polished I've seen in a game. (If you're wondering, this year's Loop Hero comes in at second place.)
Some images from my personal gameplay that reflect the game's aesthetics: Great art direction, but not necessarily something that pushes PS5's limits as a console exclusive.
This boss creature, for example, looks a lot better warping around and attacking than it does in a tight zoom.
The game's small exploration zones look haunting, but they're not epic in scope. You have to shoot at these giant eyeballs in order to stop them from seeing and attacking you.
As the game shifts to outdoor biomes, the shift in style is welcome, but that doesn't make it look like a particular PS5 stunner.
Not the highest fidelity details within this body-upgrading machine.
A hall dedicated to a race of alien memories, all built out of striking particle effects.
Another boss that looks ho-hum in a still screenshot—but absolutely stuns in action.
I can't ascribe the same praise to Returnal's visual makeup, and the more I have played it, the more I've wondered whether Housemarque had originally planned this game for PlayStation 4 instead. Enemies look cheap and plasticky up close, and tight zooms on Selene's in-game face, typically behind an astronaut helmet, are remarkably gaudy. Landscapes don't teem with wind-swept plant life or other tiny, dense details.
And while the game's official site mentions "ray tracing," I have yet to see any particular in-game proof that either its reflections, shadows, or other lighting pipelines actually benefit from a next-gen light-bounce system. Instead, I've seen particularly unattractive reflections on some waterfalls and lakes, and absolutely no dynamic light bounces on others.
Perhaps most telling of all, PS5's PCI-e 4.0 storage isn't leveraged to render massive, unbroken worlds. Instead, most biomes are broken apart with doors or barriers, as if to help an older game platform (like, cough, PS4) contain each battling zone in a safe amount of system RAM.
The game's PS5 benefits are mostly found in nearly instant loading times when warping between distant rooms and dense particle and alpha effects, evidenced by flashy enemy laser-orb attacks and rainy, windy weather systems. Perhaps the game will add "locked 60 fps refresh" to its visual bullet-point list at some point, but until I see the day-one patch, I'm left contending with a few inconsistent, sub-60 fps stutters during some fights in larger biomes. The slowdown I've seen thus far hasn't been bad or frequent enough to criticize the game over—everything runs fast and fluid enough, and I'm not sure whether PS4 would've run the same game anywhere near 60 fps—but Returnal doesn't look next-gen enough to make me shrug off those stumbles, either. Since Returnal prioritizes the moments when attacks fly fast and Selene dashes madly, I'm ultimately in the thumbs-up column about how it looks and runs.
This zigs where Hades zags—and that’s fine
I must admit, I haven't beaten Returnal yet. The game is freaking hard, for one, and even upon completing the campaign, I imagine Returnal will offer other ways to continue engaging over time. As one early example, a "daily challenge" run gives players a static perk loadout, then asks them to play through a specific "seed" of combat-filled rooms and compete for a spot on the day's leaderboards. It's a nice combat-forward option to help new players experiment with higher-powered loadouts and battle through smaller stakes, and I'm glad this unlocks quite early in the campaign.
But my 24 hours of play, in spite of being unceremoniously interrupted by crashes, have convinced me that this is a fine addition to the roguelite pantheon, even if it's not quite up to the same caliber as Hades, last year's Ars Game of the Year.
Hades's Greek-god trappings, humor-filled plot, and gorgeous art helped a lot, but its systems truly made it a tantalizing over-and-over roguelite. You could aspire to tailor your runs to certain play styles but still be left with compelling min-max decisions all along the way as other options and power paths shouldered in. These were combined with six fantastic weapon options—and each had its own variety of sub-styles, along with a solid rewards system encouraging players to try each as they moved into endgame mastery.
Hades' results tapped more successfully into the genre's endorphin-producing potential than anything I've played before or since. Returnal is clever enough with its randomized min-max decision trees, thanks to systems like the aforementioned mutations and a mix of temporary and permanent currencies that drive a number of "Ugh, should I spend my cash?" decisions along the way. But on a systems level, it's not surpassing what Hades got so right.
Returnal launch trailer
Instead, Returnal stands out thanks to how its brilliant 3D combat is bolstered by the unpredictability of its randomized worlds—and how Housemarque somehow managed to marry that content with a cinema-caliber story. Sadly, the studio left too much randomization off of Returnal's table, arguably in service of the plot. Additionally, the game often beats its players silly before they become "good enough" to see its most compelling plot twists—and how those twists affect Returnal's worlds and mechanics.
I really like Returnal, but if you check the Ars Slack logs, you'll find that I complained quite a bit along the way. I needed a full 10 hours for its combat and universe to click in a crucial, "I want to beat this game" way, and I'm still left wondering how many good ideas and systems were left out of this game just to get its sky-high aspirations out the door. Maybe some of my positive bias comes from dreams of a sequel, which might build upon Housemarque's first stab at the genre. But I won't blame anyone for having less patience with Returnal's uneven ambition (or its $70 price point, which, from what I've seen, does not favorably compare to last year's $60 Last of Us Part 2 or Ghost of Tsushima, also published by Sony).
But this is the stuff that keeps Sony fanboys drooling: ambitious new IP that succeeds more than it fails while turning the familiar into something fresh. Returnal clearly heralds a new era for Housemarque, in terms of turning the focused arcade-blasting likes of Super Stardust HD into quest-worthy 3D action. Keep it coming, Sony and Housemarque.
The Good:
Housemarque's arcade-action pedigree scales tremendously to 3D combat against waves of enemies and their lasers, in ways that feel dramatically different than other modern third-person shooters.
Enemy variety lays it on thick in terms of tricky attack patterns and AI—and these organically and fairly ramp up, no matter how difficult the results may be.
Die-and-retry system, as bolstered by a dense soup of temporary and permanent buffs, ultimately serves the game's battling mechanics and tension, even if it's not your cup of tea.
3D positional audio and a sensible "adrenaline" meter keep players keenly aware of nearby threats—which they can whimsically dodge and dance around thanks to the lack of limiting "stamina" meters.
Masterful weave of compelling time-loop plot into an otherwise randomly generated game.
Daily challenge system adds powerful, quick-burst play as a palate-cleansing alternative to this game kicking your butt.
I don't want to spoil them, but the boss fights are redonkulously good. This is the first time I've ever typed "redonkulous" at Ars Technica.
The Bad:
"Roguelite" suggests a lot more variation in repeating environments than what Housemarque has built.
In terms of endgame replayability, other roguelites do it better.
If you like a gentle ramping-up of difficulty, Returnal is not for you.
The story and atmosphere are pretty desolate. It's a proper match for the Alien and Dead Space mold, but be ready for zero sense of humor.
The Ugly:
Too many crashes, ahead of the game's day-one patch. We don't know if those will be fixed.
A lack of a crystallized save-game option. Housemarque may need to be petitioned to change that.
Verdict: "Buy" is tough to flatly state at a $70 price point, but Returnal certainly isn't the worst purchase a content-starved PS5 owner could make right now.
Comparing multilayered narratives to onions can be an effective way of communicating that they possess various levels and many elements that work together simultaneously.
However, I've always thought the onion comparison implies some kind of organic nature, a type of structure that grows naturally. In the case of Elissa Washuta's White Magic, a better comparison is to a hand-rolled cigar — because there was clearly a deliberate layering after a series of violent events and a lot of pressure involved in the process.
White Magic is three books in one. The first is a critique of cheap, modern facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult practices that can be bought online in plastic, often kitschy, kits. This critique branches out to discuss some of the things that made those modern facsimiles possible: the cultural appropriation of ancient Native American practices, colonialism, and a search for something more that will help us escape, control, and improve our lives. The second book is a biography in which Washuta openly discusses the abusive men in her life, how a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder lead to years on useless pills that didn't help, her identity and heritage as a Cowlitz, the experiences that shaped — and often broke — her, and her battle with PTSD, drugs, these abusive men, and alcohol. Finally, the third book is a sort of fragmented encyclopedia of facts, stories, history, and even etymology. Magic and a constant search for answers are the glue that holds the three narratives together, and Washuta's writing makes it all a gripping, emotionally harrowing read.
This is a collection of mostly biographical intertwined essays, which makes it nonfiction, but other than that, this book is hard to categorize. To name all the things Washuta discusses here would be impossible because of word count constraints, but she brings it all together beautifully. For example, she writes about the history of the land, recounts her past relationships, and enters into conversation with a plethora of fiction and nonfiction texts. The book has an impressive bibliography. However, the two most important conversations Washuta has are with herself and with the reader. The conversation with herself is rich in both reflection and gloom. The conversation with the reader is sometimes direct, as happens in one of the many wild footnotes that accompany a few of the also numerous epigraphs:
"Are you wondering what I'm trying to do here? Do you think I made an error? Did you flip back to the previous epigraphs? Do you worry you're missing my meaning? Do you like my epigraphs? Have you ever been to church? Have you ever cast a spell? How do you feel about being asked a question? A rhetorical question? A hypothetical question? An intrusive question? Have you ever played devil's advocate? If you don't like my epigraphs, let me play devil's advocate: What if you don't actually know what an epigraph is for? Or, at least, not here, where I am the center."
The jumpy nature of that passage can be seen throughout the book. It's not, however, disorganized jumping. Washuta is always in control and uses borrowed narratives, folklore, legends, myths, and occasional help not only from books but also from Google and Wikipedia to infuse every essay in White Magic with information that shows she's not afraid to explore what lies beyond any of the doors that open in her mind. Also, she loves to discuss things like films, music videos, video games, and other visual and aural narratives that are often used to frame her words or offer respite from the onslaught of dark memories found here.
White Magic is a survival story, but one that's hard to read. Washuta's writing makes reading her a superb experience, but this is the type of book that runs toward darkness. From rape and horror movies to drug abuse and death from black lung, this is a book that digs deep to expose the ugliest corners of our history as well as colonization, alcoholism, abusive relationships, and heartbreak:
"Hell is not the underworld or the land of the dead. Hell is not where you go when you die. Hell is a place you get to while living. You get there through men. I kept looking for a husband, but nearly every body was a door to hell. I'm drowning in a lake of fire, barely keeping my mouth above magma."
White Magic is full of magic and pain. This is a complex book that deals with trauma while exploring cultural inheritance and the way the attacks on Native women never stopped. Yes, it's tough to read, but it is also necessary and magical because Washuta manages to give us pain, history, and abuse via words in a way that her survival becomes an invitation to push through our own hard times.
Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at@Gabino_Iglesias.
“Hard Luck Hank” series author Steven Campbell. Photo by Bondo Wyszpolski
A self-made writer and his hard luck hero
In another galaxy with Hermosa Beach resident Steven Campbell
by Bondo Wyszpolski
So what happens when you’re the highest paid computer programmer in your company and you get laid off because, well, you’re the highest paid programmer on the payroll and these days new hires are getting cheaper by the dozen? If you’re Steven Campbell you wrap up the novel you’ve been working on, and a few years later you’ve completed seven sequels and then some. Thousands sold, and all profitable. But Campbell’s approach to writing fiction has had its own unique trajectory and so let’s follow it… all the way into a distant galaxy.
Cover art by Tariq Raheem for “Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy,” the first volume of Steven Campbell’s “Hard Luck Hank” series
By and large, his “Hard Luck Hank” series takes place on a space station called Belvaille. “It’s 10 miles by 10 miles alone in space,” he says, “and I’ve set eight books there so far.”
Hard Luck Hank himself is something of a superhero, loosely defined. He’s a big, heavy fellow, a mutant, and bulletproof. The latter is a good quality to have because Belvaille isn’t exactly a resort town by the sea, but rather an outpost with an exceedingly large criminal element. Not a place to raise your kids.
“The whole story is picaresque,” Campbell explains, “so it kind of jumps around.” At the same time, the books are a blend of action, science fiction, comedy, and noir detective fiction. “The big point is, it’s science fiction comedy, and that was a really hard sell with every agent and publisher I spoke with because there was only one successful series with that type of genre before.”
He’s referring to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and so Campbell would be asked if his book was like Douglas Adams’ books. “And I would say, No, I’m not British, and they would say, Well, no thanks.”
Cover art by Tariq Raheem for “Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap,” the second volume of Steven Campbell’s “Hard Luck Hank” series
One reader on Amazon referred to the “Hard Luck Hank” series as space opera, but Campbell says that label doesn’t apply to his work.
“‘Star Wars’ is the prototypical space opera. Ninety-five percent of my eight books take place in one city. Instead of getting in spaceships and flying around and having these big adventures — like in ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Star Trek’ — it’s really about one community, and I’ve based that off of my experiences here in the South Bay. Hermosa Beach is super tiny, so is Manhattan Beach, and so is Redondo. They occupy almost exactly the same geographic location. They have almost the same demographics. But they are totally different in personality.
“And so I got the sense that you can make local stories in science fiction that are entertaining. It doesn’t have to be ‘We’re sailing across the universe to meet some completely different species.’ That’s fine, I just didn’t want to do that. It’s been done, and I made the stories a bit smaller and more local and, again, based off of my experiences in the South Bay.”
Steven Campbell, a South Bay resident for 25 years, with his dog, Sasquatch. Photo by Bondo Wyszpolski
Loved by few, hated by many
When Campbell completed his first novel in the series and showed it to people, the reactions weren’t exactly flattering. Most authors would find that discouraging, to say the least. Campbell’s advice is to take criticism with a grain of salt.
“I’ve been in maybe five writers’ groups and they’ve all been miserable experiences. I did workshop the book at UCLA and that was actually very helpful. And I got advice there that I repeat to many writers: Be very careful who you give your writing to, and be careful whose advice you take.” Why? Because the vast majority of the people who read your work, Campbell says, will not like it.
“So your job isn’t to just throw your writing out there. Ninety-five percent of the people are going to hate it, and you have to be careful not to listen to that. By the same token, if you can get five percent of the people to like your writing and give you money, you will be the most successful writer that ever existed.”
Well, Campbell workshopped his book and showed it to people and, yes, “Just about everyone I gave it to did not like it.” Fortunately, some of the pros at UCLA did like it, and told him there was a market for it. But wait a second, didn’t we just go through this fiasco with its comparison, or rather non-comparison, to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”?
Yes, but, as Campbell goes on to say, “The internet has shown us that you can have a sub-community of anything. No matter how niche or weird you are, there’s probably a thousand people who share the exact same disposition and interest. So, just about any business can be profitable if you understand the size of your market and keep your costs accordingly.” He then said to himself, “I can’t be that weird where I’m the only person who likes science fiction comedy. Science fiction and humor together just doesn’t seem that strange to me.”
However, it still might sound strange or too much of a gamble for a traditional New York publishing firm. So that’s where self-publishing comes in. We’ll get to that, but first let’s take a little detour to Sin City.
Cover art by Ian Llanas for “Hard Luck Hank: Dumber Than Dead,” the seventh volume of Steven Campbell’s “Hard Luck Hank” series
Literary Las Vegas?
By his own estimate, Campbell is producing about 1.2 books a year. That seems to be a pretty good clip, but Campbell says he has to up the pace a little. “If you’re not an A-list writer but more like a B-minus or a C-plus writer like me, you have to put out more product more often.” So what does he do to prepare for each new work? “What I would do very often is find a hotel room, go there for a week and just brainstorm.”
He discovered the value of doing this by accident, or rather when traveling to various cities for his previous jobs he’d end up stuck in some hotel in some unknown city. And he realized that it was possible to do a lot of writing: “You’re not watching TV, you’re not going on the internet, you’re not talking to anyone.
“And what I would do for years is go to Vegas; I was the only person who’d go to Vegas for a week, more than a week, because you’re getting a five-star hotel for cheap; everything’s taken care of in a hotel. You don’t have to do anything, so you can concentrate on writing. Plus it’s a 24-hour city so you can write for two-three hours, get burnt out, go down, turn your brain off and play some slot machines, go back up, take a nap. Time is irrelevant, you don’t have to be on a schedule.
“I found Vegas to be a really fantastic city for writing. And it’s got a lot of museums, a lot of shows, a lot of creative things going on; and it can be mindless. So I would go with books, and I would read a couple of novels while I was there.” In short, Campbell sums up, “I found it an excellent experience.”
Specifically, while in Vegas, Campbell might mull over a list of potential titles and then focus on his ideas for cover art. After all, the “Hard Luck Hank” books do sport some rather snazzy cover images. And, yes, he’d ponder the novel’s beginning and its ending, plus “fill in some chapters and some of the main characters.”
When he’s completed a first draft he’ll go over it, make some revisions, and then hand it over to a professional copy editor. The last thing any writer wants is to have even a few typos in a work that has been labor intensive. A few too many errors and you can lose your reader. Remember, most people are already looking for the slightest reason to hate your book!
Listen to my story
Fans of Hard Luck Hank, and there are many, may have noticed that their hero is on a long cigarette break — although he’ll be back in the building pretty soon. Campbell wanted to try his hand at something a little different.
“So I did an urban fantasy called ‘Spell Talker,’” he says. “I’m not a big enough name that people [will] buy anything that Steve Campbell writes. They like a specific type of my writing, and it wasn’t that as much. It did okay, it just didn’t do as well as the ‘Hank’ series. As a writer you’ve got to write what you’re good at, and what you enjoy, and that was much more difficult for me.”
Campbell admits that, while he likes and could even write serious dramas, he says he knows that he wouldn’t be very good at it. “It beats me up to try. The kind of light-hearted comedy-adventure is very easy for me, and just kind of flows through. So my current book is another Hard Luck Hand book.”
To date, Campbell figures he’s sold between 100,000 and 150,000 books and audiobooks. That’s impressive when one considers that well over nine-tenths of the books published last year sold under 5,000 copies. But you know what else is impressive? The fact that Campbell made more money off his audiobooks than his print editions. “I think partly because my work is kind of light, comedic fare, and that works well in audio format. It’s the same book, just through a narrator.” And the point he’s making? Most writers might not even think that their work could be successfully marketed in another medium. “But you can’t look away from those things; you have to take advantage of what comes along.”
Cover art by Konstantinos Skenteridis for “Hard Luck Hank: Stank Delicious,” the fourth volume of Steven Campbell’s “Hard Luck Hank” series
It’s not the same old scene
Fifty years ago, there were vanity presses and very, very little that they published was taken seriously. Bookstores didn’t stock them, and bookshelves in cyberspace didn’t exist. “Now,” Campbell says, “more writers make their living off self-publishing than traditional publishing.
“A lot of people want to be writers, and it’s extremely difficult. That’s why I push self-publishing because you don’t have to make a blockbuster book that every single person would have an interest in. You can write what you’re specifically good at and what interests you. And,” he emphasizes, “because you’re getting a greater percentage of the royalties you can make a profitable living doing that.”
Imagine someone telling you this in 1970. You can’t.
By and large, writers would still rather be taken up by Random House or Penguin because of the prestige, not to mention the distribution and the greater chance of garnering reviews. And readers are more likely to put their trust in, let’s say, a Knopf or Pantheon title. On the other hand, as Campbell quickly mentions, the major publishing houses “have rent, they’ve got leases, they’ve got janitors; they’ve got to pay people.” The argument is, if you had so much overhead wouldn’t you be less likely to gamble on some small guy with a quirky book? If you’re a celebrity or an A-list writer the door’s probably open. All others may be knocking for a long time.
Campbell might be described as a breakthrough niche author, which is, when one thinks about it, a rather nifty achievement. He found a side door, so to speak, and went through it. But remember, he persevered despite little initial encouragement.
“I was trying to write for about 20 years, and I kept doing it for 20 years. So, 20 years of rejections, of not really selling anything or certainly not enough to make any money. The whole point is that if you really like doing it, then don’t worry about the money side. Do it yourself, and do it because you really like doing it.”
To learn more about Steven Campbell and Hard Luck Hank, go to hardluckhank.com or track him down on Facebook. ER
