Lena’s clients sometimes give her instructions containing words she cannot understand, and Clean Start makes those words meaningless to the player too. An unfamiliar term sits inside an otherwise ordinary request. You can read around it, examine the room, and look for an object that makes sense of what you have been asked to do. Finding it brings a small, surprisingly personal relief. You knew how to do the work. You needed to understand what somebody wanted. For a moment, the distance between those two things becomes something you have to experience yourself. There is time to sit with that...

Cosmo Speranza exposes a fake Titian at an art reception, then headbutts a museum official who mentions his father. The two gestures establish the peculiar privileges attached to expertise in ChiaroScuro. Cosmo can puncture an institution's authority and lose control of himself within the same encounter; his gift remains valuable enough for the police to offer consultancy as an escape from prosecution. The arrangement turns personal misconduct into a recruitment opportunity. This is a familiar indulgence of the eccentric male detective, dressed for a room in which everyone has supposedly learned to recognize quality. His usefulness becomes concrete at the...

Every episode of Apple TV’s 12 12 12 repeats FBI agent Jack Strickland’s account of the ideal robbery: twelve months to prepare, twelve hours to execute, twelve days in which to catch the thieves. Title cards identify the corresponding strands, The Planning, The Heist and The Takedown. The viewer receives both an organizing principle and regular reminders of the series’ distinctive feature. Such insistence gives this eight-episode thriller the peculiar confidence of a programme that knows exactly how to explain its format. The harder task is making that format continue to earn its prominence. Some of its most persuasive moments...

Jamie Egan lets a month slip past without meeting the deadlines he has set himself. Leaving teaching was supposed to make room for his own music; apparently, his new boss is already having trouble with the employee (both are Jamie). The admission becomes uncomfortable when he explains that working on other people's projects feels easier. His own work can be judged and rejected. Neil Garguilo's documentary Misfit Mentor catches this New Jersey music teacher and ska-punk musician discovering that an empty space in the calendar offers little protection against exposure. I am tempted to read his predicament as a problem...

Two operations take place beside each other because there is electricity for only one light. In Levan Koguashvili’s Guria, this is a practical arrangement, arrived at within a hospital that must accommodate wounds without having enough of the things required to treat them. Morphine is scarce too. The absurdity invites laughter, then leaves the patients lying there, still dependent on the same inadequate provision of care. Being hurt has brought them into a place where somebody will try to help. How much help their bodies can expect is another matter. The black-and-white photography makes this precarious world surprisingly easy to...

Flip an Essence card to generate the resource needed to power its effects, and you have already made a small commitment about how a fight will unfold. Magin: The Rat Project Stories gives these cards two faces, letting an unaffordable effect become a way of gathering Essence instead. A card that would otherwise sit uselessly in your hand retains a purpose. The interesting calculation is how to turn what you have drawn into something useful without spending the resource recklessly. That calculation develops through effects that consume the rest of your hand. Determination discards cards to build Anger, which strengthens...