Picnic at Hanging Rock is an classic in Australian psychological horror. It’s a genuinely disturbing book, and thinking about it makes me feel queasy and cold. It’s also Australia’s Blair Witch: a literary stunt that left its own provenance unclear. Many thought that the book told a true story, and even now you’ll meet folk who talk about the “Hanging Rock mystery” as if it really happened.

Hanging Rock was written in 1967 but is set over half a century earlier at a girls’ boarding school in Victoria. A group of four people (three students and teacher), leave a picnic to explore the nearby Hanging Rock formation. Three are never seen again. The fourth is discovered days later, nearly dead from sunstroke. When she recovers, she has no memory of what happened to the others.

The rest of the book is the community coming to terms with the mystery. A bloodhound fails to find the missing women, as does a local “black tracker”. An army of well-meaning volunteer searchers blankets Hanging Rock in footprints and trail-marks, trampling whatever evidence might have existed. The final people to see the party report some odd things: the three students were in a trancelike state, with staid mathematics teacher Greta McShaw literally undressed to her underwear. The reader actually follows the girls until the final moment, and knows some additional facts that the other characters don’t. But ultimately, we don’t know the full truth either.

Whatever happened at Hanging Rock (and there are signs that some characters know more than they are telling), the lack of resolution is like a thorn embedded in the community’s collective flesh, driving them frustration and to madness and then to further tragedy.

The events of the story bear an odd resemblance to Finland’s Lake Bodom murders, where three backpackers were slaughtered, with the sole survivor possessing no memory of the night’s events. Bodom happened in 1960, but I doubt Joan Lindsay was aware of it. Finland is far from Australia, and was further still in 1967. The world was much bigger then.

And unlike the United States (where a Bodom-style incident would have inspired sixteen made-for-TV movies, a Netflix series by Jordan Peele, and teenage girls obsessed with finding and marrying the killer), Finland isn’t culturally fascinated by tales of violent crimes, nor does it possess the regency to spread them all over the world.

Like Lake Bodom, Hanging Rock exists in the real world. I learned some interesting things about it on Wikipedia. It’s more properly called Mount Diogenes, after the Greek philosopher who held that civilisation is corrupt and nature is moral. Geologically, Hanging Rock is a mamelon, after the French word for nipple (is it important, in light of this, that all the main characters are female?)

Joan Lindsay does a good job of making Hanging Rock sound old-fashioned. Like any turn-of-the-century novelist, she almost puts on a pair of white gloves and chaperones you through the pages. This is the sort of book where you read sentences like “All this was nearly six years before this chronicle begins”. Only a few anachronistic words betray the book’s modernity – such as “deadbeat”, American slang that entered common usage in the 1940s.

When you climb Hanging Rock, you ascend a to a sharp point and then descend down gently rolling hills. The book’s structure is a little like that: the climax arrives in the first three chapters, and the rest of the book is a gradual come-down. Some readers find this anticlimactic, but to me it adds to the book’s sense of unease. As you read on, you realise you are wandering further from knowing what happened. You aren’t solving the mystery, you’re anti-solving it! It’s as if the answer to the puzzle is a solid island, and the book is an ocean dragging you ever further away. It’s agonizing, and compelling.

So, do we ever learn what happened? Do we even get a look through a crack in the door? Make up your own mind, but maybe there’s a reason they call it mystery fiction as opposed to solution fiction.

For over eleven years, Reality wore a title it was never meant to bear: that of Last David Bowie Album.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Bowie had every intention of continuing recording and touring. But in 2004 (near the end of the grueling 112-date Reality World Tour) he collapsed on stage in Germany, evidently from a heart attack. The beautiful statue that had worn countless layers of paint had suffered an interior crack.

There were no more tours, no more albums. For over ten years, Reality was the end. It never felt like one: it was a small, transitory album, trivial at times, and lacked an identity. It wasn’t a grand, towering tombstone, with HERE LIES DAVID BOWIE etched in stone.

Maybe its battlefield promotion helped it, giving threadbare songs like “She’ll Drive the Big Car” and “Looking for Water” more attention than they deserved. But after The Next Day came out in 2013, Reality fell into its correct place. It’s in the lower half of Bowie’s albums, which is no demerit. It’s also in the lower half of Bowie’s post-70s work, which probably is.

It has good songs, as they all do. “Pablo Picasso” takes the Modern Lovers’ one-chord pony on new and surprising adventures. “The Loneliest Guy” is very unsettling, like a taut and humming spiderweb of Mike Garson’s reverb-soaked piano and Gerry Leonard’s vibrato-drenched guitar. Bowie seems to be drawing from Scott Walker’s approach to songwriting here, turning the soundscape into a huge blank space that crashes sea-shell-like with the sound of its own emptiness.

“Fall Dog Bombs the Moon” is like the last Tin Machine song, very dry and underproduced. The lyrics are both cryptic and heavy-handed, clearly exculpatory of George Bush while not really naming him. I sort of like it.

“Try Some, Buy Some” was originally produced by Phil Spector, and sounds like Regina Spektor. I’ve only listened to it once or twice – a little of this stuff goes a long way.

“Reality” is noisy and quickly becomes unwelcome: it’s like a jam session that nobody has the courage to end. But closing track “Bring Me the Disco King” is another album highlight. It’s another powerful minimalistic song, consisting of Bowie’s voice, Garson’s jazz-influenced piano playing, and Matt Chamberlain’s drum loops. The result is enchanting: it has some of the same magic that “Lady Grinning Soul” had, all those years ago. But then Garson starts vamping all sorts of neo-tonal stuff over the outro (as if trying to recapture “Aladdin Sane”), and a lot of the magic leaves.

And then Reality ends. It was supposed to be yet another stone in a road with no clear end or destination: the road of life. The trouble with such a road is that it can just stop at any moment, without warning, and you have to accept that the final moment has come. For a while, Bowie fans had to accept that this album was his Abbey Road. But eleven years later, a new stone appeared.

Radio personality Ron Bennington described stand-up comedy as a game of “tell a joke, or become the joke”. Your audience has invested time into you, and they want it repaid. If you bomb and your jokes fall flat, be afraid. Your audience came here to laugh, and they’re going to do it, one way or another.

Id software co-founder John Romero was an extremely hot property in 1996. Heavily promoted as gaming’s bad boy, he’d just left id software and had launched a new company, Ion Storm, under the mantra “design is law”. Ion Storm promoted their debut game Daikatana with an ad campaign suggesting that FPS games had become lame and boring, and now long-haired John Romero was going to crash the party on a skateboard and kick everyone’s ass. Radical, dude!

Daikatana was supposed to be the next big thing. Instead, it became a joke. It missed its 1997 ship date, and then perhaps half a dozen ship dates after that. It finally came out in 2000 in a plague field of negative publicity, having gone through two engine upgrades, a full dev team, and thirty million dollars in funding.

What went wrong? It’s a long and fascinating story (told here by Gamespot’s Geoff Keighley) which, along with Duke Nukem Forever, has become an industry cautionary tale on hubris and perfectionism. Daikatana essentially ended Romero’s career as a Triple-A game dev, and he’s spent twenty years bouncing from company to company, leaving a shallow strew of indie and mobile shovelware.

Assuming you’re immune to the charms of Gunman Taco Truck and Pettington Park, Daikatana will likely remain Romero’s last hurrah as a game dev. Was it any good?

That depends on what you want. If you’re eager to play four badly designed half-a-games at once, with a graphical engine years out of date, it’s quite good.

It’s a first person shooter featuring “RPG” “elements” (LEVEL UP flashes on the screen occasionally, and this apparently does something.) Unlike Doom the game attempts to tell a story and establish a rich universe filled with lore, although it isn’t successful on either count.

We start off with a cutscene: an old man who is dying of polygon deficiency explains the plot to you. It goes on for quite a while. The developers must have realised they were boring the player, because they have ninjas jump out of the shadows, beat the shit out of the old man, and run away…after which he continues explaining the plot to you. A mood is created. I don’t think it’s the mood the developers intended.

The story is confusing, and the game as a whole lacks thematic direction. What’s the vibe here? Berserk? Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Doom? It’s neither funny nor dramatic. It reminds me of a ten year old boy play-acting Spiderman fighting Sonic the Hedgehog while he smashes action figures together.  There’s time travel, ancient Greece, a black sidekick called Superfly (note the spelling) and an Asian female sidekick who’s into martial arts, a giant sword…

But that wouldn’t have mattered if the game was fun. Fun has an excellent track record of elevating games above their own conceptual stupidity. Not so here.

The game technically has “depth”, but so does the Marianas Trench. Eleven thousand meters of water and squid-shit isn’t interesting, and nor are Daikatana‘s huge stack of poorly-integrated, half-tested features.

Why shove an RPG-lite stats system into the game when it has no visible impact on gameplay? Why is there an XP system? What does it do, and why do I care? Why design unique enemies for every level when they all feel like variants of either “annoying fast flying enemy” or “annoying slow-moving bullet-sponge”?

None of the weapons obey logic. There’s a double-barrelled shotgun that fires six shots at once (???), a rocket launcher that shoots two twisty rockets that hit everything except the enemy you aimed them at, etc. This is MC Escher with a gun catalog. The titular weapon, the Daikatana, proves to be a gigantic sword that blocks a large portion of your screen when you have it equipped. It murders everything it touches, including your peripheral vision!

But the game’s absolute nadir is the sidekicks.

They have the worst AI I have ever seen. They run in front of your gun. They get stuck on corners. They get crushed by elevators. They ignore weapons on the ground and charge heavily-armed enemies using their fists. When they die you lose, and they exist at all times in a state of permanent about-to-die. They are comprehensively broken.

Daikatana is off-the-box unplayable because of the sidekicks. Un-fucking-playable. I don’t exaggerate. Daikanata literally cannot be played because of the sidekicks and you will frustrate yourself trying. Don’t bother.

Here’s what you should do instead: download the community-made 1.3 patch, which deletes the fucking sidekicks from the game, thus rehabbing it to “barely playable”. You’re welcome.

The graphics are visually interesting at times (how often do you see the colour purple in FPS titles?), but are mostly dull and ugly. There’s no vibrancy. Why did they upgrade from the Quake engine when the colour scheme recreates most of Quake’s excesses?

What else was happening in 2000? What did the market look like? System Shock 2, Perfect Dark, Deus Ex, Half Life, Unreal Tournament, NOLF, and two Quake games. Next to these titles, Daikatana looks like a game from 1997, with inferior playability. It isn’t as bad as people say: it’s worse.