Factory songs have many influences: synth, techno, heavy metal, and industrial music. One sure progenitor of the videogame factory song is Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse,” composed in 1937 and used in Looney Tunes as early as 1943. Madcap and sinister, “Powerhouse” has become synonymous with satirical representations of industry. Most videogame factory music strikes a similar tone, though often much darker.

Holland has sent me an INSULT. I do not know what it is, only that it is rude enough I now have an excuse to start a war against them. I don’t want to start a war with anyone outside of the French cultural pentagon. I don’t know how to win a Big War.

“Bonetrousle” deserves a spin in the spotlight. It’s a bop and, unlike “Megalovania,” not a bummer. Without going into too much detail, the narrative context of “Megalovania” captures Undertale at its darkest. The situation is macabre, as good death metal tends to be. “Bonetrousle” is relatively uncomplicated fun. It makes me wanna dance.

She is hungry for blood and dirt, not the cold stone walls or the warm spring pools where she bathes, or even the sweet perfumes her maidservants comb into her inevitably long, inevitably blonde hair. She is told she is beautiful so many times she does not know who she is.

catherine has never met a coward that she was too afraid to love / and when
she says “love,” she means lose / and when she says “lose,” she means
misplaced, open-mouth / chewed up penalties / places bets on boundaries /

It’s the only song the Spirans get, and they are obsessed with it. By limiting the diegetic music in Spira to a single song while making the game’s non-diegetic music rich and varied, Uematsu succeeded in conveying the bleak monotony of Spiran life while still evoking a complexity of emotions in the player.

They smile and touch my hair, I am an entire potentiality of fingertips and cleverness and I lust with the hugeness of all my doings. Their eye glitters with more mischief than an entire sack of stolen jewels.

From a white rabbit, to some dead grass, to a snow particle, and descending inside myself until I became a hydrogen atom wandering into a burnt green nothingness occasionally punctuated by wayward bacteria.

My brother was a wicked child: a class-ditching, prank-pulling, kegger-throwing hellion. At 38, he’s calmed down, but Castlevania gives an outlet to the wicked child in all of us, with its blood, bones, mummies, torture chambers, haunted clocktowers, and Death himself.

a father whose care
always depended on
how well you swung
a blade. a long-dead
mother. this country –
with all her craggy rocks
and poisoned waters –
she will never love you.

Somewhere worth bringing you home to
is the most I can ask. I thought we’d never
have a house with bread or wine again, gold

grain littered against the skyline, but we’ve come
so far for it. We’ve cut across this place in pickaxe
scars and stakewalls, stumps left like stray hairs