So I've had the surreal experience today of being exposed to recent European entertainment at both its absolute best and absolute worst.

First, the bad so that we end on a high note later. OneyPlays is back (as sad as it sounds, I was genuinely hurting not having their dumb entertainment amuse me since their Sonic 3D Blast video last Christmas Eve), and they couldn't have picked a more controversial, toxic game to return with, 2024's EU-funded Dustborn. The Spider-verse inspired visuals look decent, but that's where the compliments end. Supposedly, it was made by European devs who were frustrated by Donald Trump winning the US Election back in 2016 (I'm sure they're furiously working on a Dustborn 2 right now, then), but the characters are SO insufferable and unlikeable, bullying each other and Nazis (or at least that's what they call people that disagree with them, this is no Wolfenstein), it almost feels like a right-wing psy-op to make us liberals look as stupid as possible before all the major world elections last year. Basically, it sounds like the polar opposite of fun, and it sold poorly. In fact, I'm still not 100% sure the game actually exists.

Thank goodness I watched Flow later in the day with my family. It was probably the first avant-garde European animated movie I've watched since I inexplicably watched The Triplets of Belleville at the age of 7 or 8, and it was fantastic--surprisingly easy to follow, too! It blows my mind that the entire movie was made in Blender (as opposed to prohibitively-expensive "industry-standard" software like Maya and Houdini), rendered in Eevee, and the water was accomplished using a $50 Blender Market plug-in, plus it practically moved me to tears at times without a single line of dialogue. Much better use of European tax money.