For sites like these, Sundays are typically a more relaxing casual time, in order to catch up on what the week's demands may have made one miss. Although this site is more RE:BIND or UpperCut Crit cosplay than anything, I feel it might be helpful to do the same, and round up any obscure and interesting media the site's "staff" has to recommend without requring them to write too much about them. Below is one recommendation from each member of the website's staff (that wasn't too busy this week). Any regular readers are strictly required to check all of these out. In order to confirm that you have, please email us at holisticreview@protonmail.com.

Casey A. Malik (Lead Editor/Webmaster):

UNREAL LIFE is a Japanese indie game that wears its influences on its sleeve. Literally, on the creator's website, they list their influences, which include expected ones for a 2D adventure game, such as UNDERTALE, Yume Nikki, and Spirited Away, as well as odder ones, like Kirby Air Ride and, for some reason, the music of tricot? The first three are more apt, but where the game transcends its influences is in creating a world you can live inside, with easy puzzles not distracting from the comforting atmosphere and the ability to hang out with your best friend, a traffic light. There are undercurrents of something darker, though, and I've heard people say it contains themes of suicide and self-harm. I'm just chilling right now, though. The game is 20 dollars on Steam.

Kit Riemer (Lead Writer/Stealer of Valor):

As I understand it, everything Cernunnos Woods has ever made was recorded in the '90s. It's all now being rereleased to an eager audience in the forms of cassette ("murky transparent black cassette shells with silvery bog light imprint") and kitschy wall tapestry. Claustrophobic, lofi dungeon synth with growled, cryptic, corny fantasy vocals might seem like an odd candidate for the current zeitgeist, but it's an appropriate and weirdly comforting vibe for the nightmare (of fantastic proportions) that 2020 has been.

Skylar V. Lalonde (Indie Game Consulant/Certified Kinnie):

Hexcells is Minesweeper, but with hexagons. Besides just looking at the numbers in the hexes like in classic Minesweeper, there are at least four other ways to figure out whether a hex is safe or not, which makes it feel more like sudoku sometimes (a plus for me). It's super cheap, it has dynamic ambient music (seriously!), and the second sequel Hexcells Infinite features a seed-based "level generator" with something like 1,000,000 levels to play. The campaign levels require some 400 IQ tricks to avoid guessing sometimes, but that generator doesn't do me wrong. Grab all of them during a sale for, like, $2 total, and fill those gaps in your waking hours with hexagons and dynamic ambient music.

Rachael "Nova" Sheogayrath (Purveyor of the Weird/Professional Jester):

Nobodyhere.com is a collection of interactive web poetry documenting the rich internal life of an anonymous shut-in. It depicts a loose narrative through a combination of text, sound, images and interactive segments, ranging from melancholic to comedic. Each page presents a bite-sized segment of a story to be read in no particular order. To start, I would recommend the pages titled Peace, Rat, Ego, Dance and Wait. Jump to a random page by clicking the spiral. The site was founded in 1998 and today it stands as a last bastion of the old web. Much of this project will be rendered unusable with the decline of Flash and there appears to be no plan to back it up elsewhere, so I strongly recommend checking it out before another piece of internet history is lost.

Nicole Rodriguez (Retro Game Consultant/Midnight Wanderer):

T€∆M M£K4NØ's Classic Project 2000 is a barrage of noise, which some might call "experimental post-nightcore". It's got a bunch of cartoon noises and both sounds and imagery that bring back memories of growing up watching chilean TV. It also manages to be harmonic enough yet noisy enough to give my brain the exact amount of stimuli it usually needs. Big recommend if you like sounds.

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