Rotten Kigdom - FAQs

                                 Originally written in response to a few questions about the project.

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Rotten Kingdom is a dark fantasy game built in Python. It’s stripped-down, text-driven, more like a lorebook or a D&D session than a polished release. You explore a collapsing world where the rot — a core, undefeatable force — spreads through matter, minds, and morals. The following are my answers to a few questions about the project.

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Where did Rotten Kingdom come from?
It started with a dark fantasy obsession and watching the interactive Black Mirror episode about the game one too many times. I wanted something unstable.

Why does it look like it came from a floppy disk?
Because it should feel found, not released. It relies on imagination. More like a D&D session than a polished product. It began as a lorebook — the world came first.

Why Python?
Because I knew just enough to make it work. I used AI to fix bugs. I’m not ashamed of that. The point was to make it run.

Is it finished?
It’s finished enough to stand.
But it’s a constant updating kind of thing.

Do you expect people to like it?
Some will. Some won’t. Most might ignore it because it isn’t flashy. It feels right to me. That’s enough.

What is the rot?
It’s the core mechanic and the core threat. You can’t defeat it. It’s decay — of matter, minds, morals. The world isn’t exploding. It’s eroding.

If it disappeared tomorrow?
I’d build it again.









You can get the latest release here - 

Mazda MX-81 Aria

Bertone built this on a Mazda 323 chassis in 1981 — the most sensible car of its moment used as a skeleton for something that looked like it had no business existing. Marc Deschamps ran the design, and the result is a gold wedge that still looks a little unhinged forty years later.

 

The thing that actually gets you is the glass. The greenhouse is enormous, almost aggressively open, and it bleeds all the way down into the rear fascia — body and glass split roughly fifty-fifty, which gives the whole car this strange floating quality, like the roof isn't quite attached. The pop-up headlights and the tall vertical tail lights at the C-pillars eventually made it into real Mazda production cars. The drag coefficient was 0.28, which for 1981 was genuinely impressive.

Inside, they got rid of the steering wheel entirely and replaced it with a rubber belt running around a rectangular frame — you slid it left or right to steer. A small colour CRT screen sat in the centre where gauges would normally be. The front seats swivelled outward to let you in.

It debuted at the 1981 Tokyo Motor Show, then quietly disappeared into a Mazda warehouse for forty years until someone stumbled across it in 2020. They sent it to Turin for restoration, and now it exists again.

It just looks cool. That's the whole argument.

The Scully Sceptical Response Generator

I did a silly X-Files themed thing - here's the Scully Sceptical Response Generator!

Test it out and let me know if you like it! 


 https://scullyskepticalrensponsegenerator.netlify.app/

Suwarôteiru - (Swallowtail Butterfly) / 1996

 

Suwarôteiru - (Swallowtail Butterfly) is the film where Shunji Iwai stops being gentle and just lets things get messy.

If you come to it expecting his usual soft, melancholic teenage longing, quiet sadness (Hideaki Anno is that you?) — this will feel out of place.

The film drops you straight into Yentown, a near-future slum packed with immigrants, scams, bad money, and people trying to survive without much of a plan. It’s dystopian, but not in a sci-fi way. More like a city that’s already broken and just keeps going.

The heart of it is simple and kind of brutal. Ageha loses her mother and ends up with Glico, a sex worker who agrees to take her in because she needs the cash. There’s no big maternal awakening, no clean arc. They stick together because they have to. For a while, it works. They build something that almost feels stable — which, of course, is when it all starts to fall apart.

The film refuses to sit still. It jumps between street drama, crime story, pop-idol fantasy, and back again. Characters show up, matter a lot for a moment, then disappear. It can feel unfocused, even frustrating, but that chaos feels intentional. It isn’t telling a neat story — it is letting you drift through a place, a world where nothing stays fixed for too long.

Visually it’s rough, noisy, sometimes weird - there is quite a lot of Handheld camera, crowded frames, and no gloss. The soundtrack is deeply embedded in the film, especially Chara, who feels less like an actress and more like a presence the movie is built around.

What stuck with me isn’t the plot mechanics, but the feeling: the belief that money, success, or the next big break will make everything settle down — and the quiet realization that it won’t. Swallowtail Butterfly lets you enjoy that fantasy just long enough before it pulls it apart. It’s flawed, chaotic, and very alive. And somehow, years later, it still lingers - maybe it is the evident reasoning about capitalism and it's consequences, maybe is that exotic fascination we get from a certain aesthetic, still, it's a movie worth your time and that deserves more international recognition - 

I am rewatching The X-Files(1993)

The X-Files is the show that literally taught childhood you that the dark was full of things with too many teeth, and you probably shouldn’t trust the people telling you it’s all in your head. ​

I use to watch it when I wasn’t supposed to In Italy in the late 90s, The X-Files lived in that forbidden “red” slot on TV, the colour that basically screamed “no kids allowed” even if every kid immediately took it as an invitation. ​ I remember peeking in the dark living room at around ten years old, while my dad watched the episodes with volume turned down to almost nothing, trying to watch Mulder and Scully chase monsters without him noticing that I waws mainlining the stuff the broadcasters had politely tagged as off-limits. ​

At least once it did exactly what that red badge warned about: a single episode slipped through my brain’s defences and followed me into sleep, the imagery turning into those cheap, sweaty nightmares that feel more like glitches than dreams. ​

How it feels on rewatch Coming back to it now

The X-Files feels like a transmission from a world where paranoia is analogue: VHS grain, CRT glow, case files in metal cabinets instead of cloud drives. ​ Those Vancouver years are still the definitive look in my head: endless wet forests, empty highways, flickering strip lights, and two flashlights cutting holes in the dark while something ugly breathes just outside the frame. ​ The show’s mix of “monster-of-the-week” weirdness and slow-drip conspiracy is clumsier than you remembered, but that actually makes it more charming; it’s messy, earnest horror TV that believes in its own campfire stories

Rewatching it now also adds this extra layer of fun: horror tastes have shifted so much that some of the cheap shocks, rubbery aliens, and overcooked conspiracy twists that once felt dangerous now land as accidental comedy, a kind of endearing, dumb genius that makes the scares and the silliness play together in the same scene. ​

Overall what hits hardest on rewatch isn’t the aliens or the green goo; it’s the tension between Mulder’s haunted need to believe and Scully’s stubborn, exhausted scepticism. ​

As a kid, Mulder is the fantasy: the adult who says “you’re right, there really is something under the bed,” and then goes to fight it; as an adult, you end up feeling more like Scully, trying to autopsy every fear into something rational. ​ Somewhere between those two positions is where the show lives, and maybe why it sticks: it gives shape to the idea that not knowing is scarier than any rubber-suit monster, but also suggests that having someone next to you with a flashlight makes that unknown survivable. ​ Does it still work? The big mythology arc absolutely wobbles now: years of retcons and reversals mean the alien colonisation plot feels more like a migraine than a narrative. ​ But the standalone horror episodes still have teeth; they’re tight, strange little urban legends that remember the basic rule that made ten-year-old you hide under the covers afterward: show just enough, then cut to black and let the brain do the rest. ​

 Rewatching The X-Files in 2026 is a weird comfort: it’s a return to that “red stamp” ambient terror of childhood, but with the awareness that the thing you were scared of was never just the monster—it was the feeling that the adults didn’t have answers either. ​

Arc Raiders

I usually don't cover big name games, I usually do indie-ish stuff but hey,
 I am loving this so here's couple of thoughts on
Arc Raiders 

Arc Raiders feels like a game that arrived carrying other people’s expectations on its back. You hear the name and you expect noise: bombast, endless firefights, another live-service meat grinder yelling at you to grind harder. The pedigree doesn’t help—ex-DICE devs, clean sci-fi aesthetic, big machines falling from the sky. It sounds like it should be loud, sweaty, and exhausting.

But playing it? It’s quieter. More deliberate. And honestly, that’s where it got me.

There’s something in the rhythm of it that clicks on a personal level. Earth isn’t heroic here—it’s picked clean, half-abandoned, lived-in southern Italy landscape. You’re not a chosen one, not a poster character. You’re a scavenger with a job, poking through ruins, listening for trouble, weighing risk against reward. The ARC machines don’t grandstand. They don’t perform. They just exist—huge, cold, and uncaring. When one shows up, the instinct isn’t excitement, it’s calculation. Can I slip past this? Can I get what I came for and leave?

That feeling—of being small, cautious, slightly out of place—is where Arc Raiders shines. It almost feels like what I was hoping The Forever Winter would be: a world dominated by incomprehensible machines, where survival comes from awareness and restraint. The difference is tone. Arc Raiders drops the oppressive dread and pitch-black nihilism and replaces it with something calmer, cleaner. Still tense, but breathable. Less despair, more quiet resolve.

The PvEvP mechanics (far from perfect) are there and keep the thing fresh, having you always on high alert but without the chance to trust and befriend players to go against the Mechanical enemies around the map.

Gunplay is solid without trying to impress you. Movement is grounded, unshowy. Combat is tense not because it’s flashy, but because mistakes matter. You lose time. You lose loot. You lose momentum. The game constantly nudges you toward smart decisions instead of heroic ones. Extraction feels like relief, not routine. Getting out alive with something valuable feels earned.

Visually, it’s restrained in a way I really respect. Clean lines, muted palettes, machines designed to be readable rather than ornamental. The human side stays deliberately anonymous, almost disposable. You’re not meant to admire yourself—you’re meant to function. That choice won’t land for everyone, but it reinforces the mood perfectly.

And yeah—this is the part where the unease creeps in.

You can feel the live-service framework humming beneath the surface. Systems that seem poised to expand. Loops that could easily tip from tension into grind. Right now, the game trusts silence, patience, and scarcity. If that restraint holds, Arc Raiders has something special. If it doesn’t—if seasons, metas, and engagement hooks start shouting over the atmosphere—this whole delicate balance collapses fast.

Still, in its current state, I’m more attached than I expected to be. There’s confidence here. A willingness to let players feel vulnerable, observant, and human instead of powerful.

Arc Raiders doesn’t beg for attention. It waits. And I really hope it keeps the nerve to stay this quiet—because that’s exactly why it works. 

See you topside, raider.


You can get it here: 

Maniac Cop

Honestly, Maniac Cop sat on my radar for years as one of those VHS urban legends—supposedly crusty, furious, off-the-rails. One of those movies that lives in whispered recommendations and battered tape sleeves. I figured I was in for a throat punch of sleaze and grit: sweaty New York streets, busted faces, the kind of cop flick your parents would confiscate on sight. But watching it now? It’s more polished than the legend—and weirdly, that’s what makes it interesting.

The ingredients are all there. You’ve got the killer cop: face half-melted, built like a truck, Robert Z’Dar looming as Officer Matt Cordell like a walking concrete block. The city looks right—overcast skies, wet-lit alleys, neon bleeding into puddles. The opening even plays mean, baiting you with a classic street-level scare before snapping a woman’s neck in cold daylight. It wants to feel nasty. But Maniac Cop never fully dives into grindhouse chaos.

Instead, it pulls back. There’s restraint in the action, control in the violence. Long shots, old-school pacing, a surprising amount of procedural DNA. Larry Cohen’s script treats the setup less like a slasher and more like a crooked-city paranoia piece: a killer in uniform, innocent cops getting gunned down by scared civilians, the system eating itself alive. It’s closer to a crime thriller with a supernatural infection than a splatter reel.

I went in chasing pure grit; I got mood.

TThe camera lingers. Lustig lets scenes breathe. The soundtrack leans toward synth tension instead of shock stings. You’re supposed to feel the dread spreading through the city, not just rubberneck at bodies dropping. Even the practical effects feel purposeful—there, but not screaming for attention. For a movie called Maniac Cop, it’s oddly careful.

There’s also real noir energy under the pulp. Bruce Campbell plays Jack Forrest as a man already halfway ruined—framed, compromised, exhausted. Laurene Landon’s Theresa Mallory has rough edges and weight, not just genre utility. Tom Atkins shows up as the kind of hard-edged authority figure you expect him to be… and then the movie casually tosses him out a window halfway through, just to remind you this thing doesn’t follow the rules you think it does. The characters are adults, messy, morally scuffed. No dumb teens, no cartoon heroics.

That’s the odd truth of it: Maniac Cop looks tougher than it actually is. The marketing promises pure grime, but the film itself is almost thoughtful, even a little tragic. Cordell isn’t just a monster—he’s a wronged enforcer, chewed up by corruption and brutality, turned into something relentless and empty. The slasher mechanics are there, but they’re wrapped in cynicism instead of cruelty.

It’s not toothless—but it’s not sleaze for the sake of sleaze either. It’s a midnight movie with a bit of pride. Rough enough to work, smooth enough to catch you off guard if you grew up hearing about it as the “dirtiest cop movie ever.”

Bottom line: Maniac Cop is an odd one. Not nearly as raw as I wanted—but cooler, stranger, and more controlled than expected. Worth your time, especially if you want to see what happens when VHS cult mythology meets a movie that quietly thinks it has something to say.

It’s not toothless, but it’s not sleaze for the sake of sleaze. It’s a midnight movie with a little pride—rough enough to work, smooth enough to surprise you if you grew up hearing about it as the “dirtiest cop movie ever.” Bottom line: Maniac Cop is an odd one. Not nearly as raw as I wanted, but cool in a way I didn’t expect. Worth your time, especially if you want to see what happens when VHS cult starts acting like it’s got something to prove.