The first rule of Titanium Court is that you can’t explain Titanium Court. Not because we’re living under the omerta of an 8-bit Fight Club, but because it’s one truth I can stand by. For the past week, I’ve been facing the consequences of getting isekai’d into a digital pastiche of the entire history of dramatic allegory and contemporary humor, leading a whimsical quasi-sentient court of wildly unmedicated faeries to their doom. They try, in their roundabout faerie way, to be helpful, because I don’t know what I’m doing. “I’m looking forward to you explaining the game to me,” said my editor Andrew Webster — words he silently swallowed after I tried to do just that. 

This isn’t to say that Titanium Court is unknowable. It is simply one of those things you have to experience for yourself. The most straightforward description, to paraphrase from developer AP Thomson’s game credits, is “a match-3 tower defense game for people who love to read.” This is a bit of an understatement because Titanium Court is also a point-and-click roguelite RPG, a resource management game, a deckbuilder, a visual novel metacomedy of manners, a whole helping of postmodern theater, an ode to HyperCard, the equivalent of ludic ASMR for appreciators of the victory animation from Windows 98 Solitaire, and, if you grew up reading Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, Titanium Court is a rare and precious gift.  

We begin with literal curtains parting and an emcee stepping forward with an introduction. He discusses my role as the player with the nonchalance of a zookeeper giving a tour of the lion enclosure at feeding time. And just like that, we begin with the player minding their own business — a blip of pixels moving through a gridded landscape — before the entire map trembles and reforms to introduce the mechanics and key components of the terrain that you can “harvest” by matching at least three tiles (wheat gives food, hills give stone, and so on). Soon, over the horizon, we see the mysterious Court and are swept inside to meet its faerie residents. Here, the world lives at the mercy of a magic tide, with no clear way of leaving.

There are two modes: when you’re at war, and when you’re not. Being at war is a deeply unserious yet profound endeavor – the Court is immortal, so death isn’t really a huge deal to them, but you also can’t get a grip on the Court’s absurd mythology and the faeries’ evasiveness. War is matter-of-fact and routine. It’s something you wake up and do after breakfast, which involves choosing a job (the default is as the Monarch, which earns money per enemy keep destroyed), and learning to traverse two kinds of maps, strategize between different terrain and enemies, and find different ways to overcome bosses. My favorite job is Youth, which you receive by means of a cigarette lighter and involves incinerating tiles on the board to make money.

Every battle begins with High Tide — the match-3 portion — where you do your best to arrange the board to your advantage. Low Tide is when the RPG / combat / management stuff kicks in. You queue up workers and combat units, make transactions with vendors, and take advantage of useful buildings like hospitals and shops. Sometimes you might find a giant jar, or come across a man on a stump, or float past a billboard that captures the imagination of the Court (faeries do not believe in cars, and every time you see a road sign designed for vehicular laws, it causes a small fuss). You might try an obscure solution from a magic journal entry you can’t remember writing, gleaned from a hallucinated future in which you are a clockwork monastery. 

Once everything is arranged how you want it, hit the play button, sit back, and hope for the best: All your little dudes stream out of the Court in a queue, perform their duties on a set timer, and hopefully, the Court remains standing when time is up. If all goes well you win the battle and edge closer to the boss on the overworld map. If not, you get wine and “comfort.” After enough progress, you are offered the chance to skip boss fights by watching a wholly unskippable musical performance by AP Thomson himself, rendered in grainy, nigh-indecipherable full-motion video. The first one I watched was — and I say this with the utmost admiration for everyone involved — like if Paul Banks from Interpol was in Ween and did an educational take on the Salmon Dance.

I realize it sounds like I have a gas leak in my apartment, but I don’t. I have something better, which is Titanium Court. 

When you aren’t at war, you’re hanging around the Court, an arcane medieval keep as befits a bunch of meddling faeries, but with the blessing of modern plumbing. The faeries here are a decidedly magical but contemporary bunch who believe in science and alcohol and supporting their beloved queen, even when it hurts them. There are curses and secret rooms and arguments to be settled. There is sportsball and a library and a cat. There’s a lot to unpack within the Court’s walls about why you were brought here, what you need to do, and how you leave, both allegorically and mechanically. Every night, everything collapses, and the next morning, it begins anew. 

Titanium Court doesn’t break the fourth wall; it makes the player dismantle it themselves, brick by brick, before leaving them there in a limbo of indecisive regret and sentimental reflection, perhaps to build a new outlook of their own. The Court isn’t just a place. It’s an exercise in self-restraint and self-gratification, brimming with wordplay and satire and the endless “yes, and” mentality of good improv. At one point, after hours of (extremely good and creatively wrought) misdirection, after hours of NPCs trying to both help and hinder me, the game threw me such an emotional curveball that I had to step away and hug my cat. It dawned on me that AP Thomson is Jigsaw. He is squatting behind the scenes with his guitar, cackling when I realize the effect I’m having on the faeries as I hit the 15-hour mark of playtime. 

Maybe the real game is trying to explain Titanium Court and failing, and in the process realizing what it’s done to your understanding of capital-m Magic — the silvery intangible stuff that glues our imagination together. When I finally manage to leave the Court, I marvel at having somehow survived all these deeply personal surgical strikes not just on me as a player, but on my relationship with storytelling and fiction as a whole. It’s a singular metacomedy that learned how to layer its story beats from the best sitcoms, and plays out like your most correct frenemy telling you exactly what you don’t want to hear about the nature of consumerism and entertainment.

This is the sort of game that will undoubtedly launch a thousand discussions, but for me it will remain personal and private. Nobody needs to know how much suffering I caused before I got up and walked away. To understand what that means, you’ll have to play it for yourself.

_{Titanium Court launches April 23rd on Steam.}

Life is a series of battles, and I just lost my last one against four gyoza on a skewer. It was an unexpected blow, because honestly, who could have expected me — a springy, respectably proportioned hot dog — to lose against a seemingly inflexible spear of small, unassuming dumplings? This is my struggle in Sausage Legend: Arena, a mobile game with a very simple premise: duel with other players’ sausages and win.

On the surface, it looks like a garden-variety mobile game riddled with bugs (it is). But the difference between Sausage Legend and a fleeting idea you had after overdoing it on edibles is that 3.5 million people have played Sausage Legend, it has been on Japanese national television, and it is shockingly fun. And with an upcoming release on Steam, it’s poised to get even bigger.

As befits combat that demands swatting two wieners at each other, Sausage Legend is a heavily physics-based game. Each sausage is thrust onto the battlefield by a fork; players flop their sausages around to bludgeon each other to death. As someone with the vestigial sensibilities of a 13-year-old shitposter, I love this ballet of well-timed jabs and opportunistic ripostes, all while I admire the resilience and elasticity of my humble meat sword. 

I fight lightning-infused cocktail sausages and weisswurst. There are brats and goteborgs, as well as pickled cucumber and a slice of pepperoni pizza (which, I guess technically contains sausage). There are more than 50 different sausages and other food items, each with different advantages — length, strength, special powers, and so on. My health bar smugly refuses to replenish between rounds. I learn that at some point, I will encounter a chrome-covered metal sausage that looks like something out of the deepest pit of T-1000 Terminator fanfic. There are barely any instructions, there are tedious ads, and when I reopen the game, it has not saved my meager progress. And yet, I crave more sausage.

For developer Tadaki Tani, the inspiration behind Sausage Legend didn’t come from playing with his food. “In the beginning, we found giraffes fighting on YouTube and the giraffes were ‘hanging’ their heads around and round, and that’s how we got the first idea [for the game],” he explains through a translator. The first prototype of the game used giraffes, but the fighting scenes didn’t quite work out. Why not try sausages? And so, in 2016, Sausage Legend was born. 

Tani is the CEO of MilkCorp, a studio he founded in 2009 that offers meme-y mobile games like My Grizzly Bear, Sleep In Office, and Pollen Heaven. My Grizzly Bear is exactly what it sounds like — a free grizzly bear care simulator whose official page (correctly) reads, “The only people who would think of doing something like that are Youtubers desperate for views.” Pollen Heaven is a self-described “silly game” based on Tani’s own hay fever. Sausage Legend: Arena 2, its Japan-only sequel, features a medieval story world where slaves must sausage-duel for their freedom. The development team consists of Tani, and one other person. 

The biggest boost to Sausage Legend came from a niche corner of the internet: a Hololive vtuber named Oozora Subaru, who became besotted with the original game and plays it obsessively to the delight (or chagrin, in some cases) of her fans. (We did reach out to Hololive’s parent company Cover for comment, but it did not respond.) In 2021, Subaru got her own legendary sausage in Sausage Legend 2, styled like a duck, which is her informal mascot. Her fellow vtuber Hakui Koyori also got a special sausage: the “Koyori Skin of the Large Intestine” sausage which sported a fluffy pink tail. “There are a lot of people playing because of her,” Tani says, noting that it took around 10 of her streams to see a noticeable uptick in players. 

Later this year, Tani is going to release an expanded version of Sausage Legend: Arena on Steam — essentially a more filled-out Sausage Legend 2 story mode with added features. Slaves must take up arms (sausages) to fight for their freedom in a spectacular pastime favored by nobles: the sausage duel. There will be a deckbuilding mechanic to help you strategize the duels a little better — “the character doesn’t heal itself, but the cards will help you do that,” Tani says — as well as a few new modes and moves. 

“We want to expand the game, and we want [more] people to know about it,” Tani says earnestly, before presenting me with a little acrylic standee of a hot dog. Sausage Legend’s upcoming release on Steam is poised to bring the game to a wider audience, one that I fervently hope will include avid modders. Half of the playerbase is Japanese, while the rest are overseas in the US and Taiwan, with France coming in fourth. Tani and I are both surprised that Germany isn’t in the top five; his favorite sausage type is weisswurst, which seems appropriate in the canon of significant video game sausages.

After the successful collaborations he’s had — crossovers with the 2016 movie Sausage Party, Morinaga Pino ice-cream, and Hololive — I ask if he would consider working with Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, perhaps even the Olympics of sausages. “If there is a chance, we would love to,” he says with a smile. “Just eating a hot dog is the best way to eat a sausage.”

The third season of Yellowjackets is a bit like getting lured back to the high school reunion that was delightfully fun the first time but eventually becomes an exercise in diminishing returns. Maybe it’s part of our soft human inability to let go of the past, especially coming-of-age drama that seems increasingly romantic and valid as we continue hurtling toward old age and (hopefully) painless deaths. Maybe it’s the misplaced optimism that middle-aged reunions will evoke some kind of sobering epiphany about lost youth or, god forbid, a painful opportunity for personal growth or redemption. Or maybe we just go for the free food and cheap wine while hubris rears its ugly head.

Either way, these are not unique themes to Yellowjackets. We are not here for drawn-out hand-wringing and easy fillers. Some of us are here to watch our childhood It Girls behave badly, but all of us are here for the teen cannibal drama. 

Yellowjackets has a juicy premise: a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness forces a teen girl softball team to get weird (and a little cannibal-y) to survive, while in the present, the handful of adult survivors are forced back together after years without contact. The last season ended with the cabin burned to a dramatic crisp, and we reunite with the girls in the warm, bustling heart of spring, complete with organized activities, domesticated ducks and bunnies, and makeshift huts. Van (Liv Hewson), who serves as a kind of overinflated town crier / meta narrator, addresses her teammates with the familiar recap words “previously, on Yellowjackets,” as she recounts the events that led them to their current status quo.

Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), of course, is furiously journaling alone. The show also brings a couple of “who were they again?” characters into the spotlight for the season — low-key familiar faces who become increasingly more important to the main ensemble of teen survivors. “You suddenly have a personality?” Shauna says to one of them. “You’re not going to turn out to be fucking boring, are you?”

Shauna, girl… I’m having the exact same thought about the series as a whole. I’m not sure if we’ll actually get to see how the girls pulled themselves together after the fire, but the end product we’re given — more girl rituals, girl games in the forest, girl hallucinations, girl hierarchies — is more or less a Florence & the Machine-themed LARP with a side of PTSD. The first three episodes are largely more of the same of what we’ve seen: messy trauma-slinging and (at times, overly polished) awkwardness from the adults, and unmitigated bile and angst from their younger selves.

There are a bunch of food metaphors and food-themed character arcs with lines like “you can’t just DoorDash human entrails” and a spectacularly silly bit of VFX. We also focus more on Callie (Sarah Desjardins), Shauna’s (Melanie Lynskey as the adult version) daughter, who has perhaps one of the best resting bitch faces I’ve ever seen onscreen. There are a couple of meaty moments where the show peels apart the politics of necessity in longtime friendships, particularly between Shauna and Misty (Christina Ricci), that do introduce new and relatable tensions. The women may not be stranded in the woods anymore, but that doesn’t make their interpersonal relationships any less painful. 

The fourth episode jolted me awake: a kangaroo court full of angry kids who aren’t entirely sure what a trial involves, aping civilization by cosplaying high-powered, bloodthirsty lawyers (the episode is literally called “12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis” as a nod to Sidney Lumet’s classic film). I will never turn down a pseudo-procedural, especially when it’s run by violent, traumatized teenagers looking for an excuse to get medieval. I’ll gladly watch a sympathetic protagonist show her whole ass by being an abject monster; the young cast here does a stellar job of digging into the ugly soft power play for camp leadership.

The whole trial is a great close-up of the stilted teething period where the girls’ fledgling rites are still marked by hesitation and peer pressure; it’s also a nice narrative foundation for the opening sequence in the very excellent series premiere that got people hooked on the show in the first place.

The jury’s still out on how season 3 is going to ride out. As I’ve written about Yellowjackets in the past, sentimentality and nostalgia and all of that rose-colored stuff is a hell of a drug when taken strategically with thought and purpose and skill; in heavy-handed, unrefined doses, it’s about as charming as the hundredth wave of Urban Outfitters Nirvana T-shirts floating around in a corporate vacuum. The music supervision is still really grating — amateur cuts and edits and fades that feel way too forced. One particular appearance of a Limp Bizkit song felt like something I’d hear at a house party in the ’90s, which, if intentional, did not land. 

“There’s something about the belief that TV is inherently deeper and more profound than film because it has more time that has always perked up my eyebrow,” critic Angelica Jade Bastién posted about the dichotomous relationship between film and TV. This approach is perhaps the biggest albatross around Yellowjackets’ neck — the fact that it was first sold as an ambitious five-season show that seemed at once promising and also wildly overstretched for a very finite, contained premise. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Yellowjackets, even when firing on all cylinders, almost certainly does not need to be five seasons long. The fourth episode certainly offered a few promising glimpses at some new story arcs.

But for now, I’m only sticking with this middle-aged multi-train collision because the whole cast is doing a phenomenal job of carrying the pacing and writing on their survivalist-trained shoulders.

_{Season 3 of Yellowjackets premieres on Showtime on February 14th.}

When the Dragon’s Dogma 2 loading screen announces that I probably don’t have to worry about dying from a big fall, I’m elated. This means I can yeet myself off ledges with impunity because the game says that my pawn — my ever-faithful companion, protector, and sentient extra inventory — “may cushion your fall.” I test this claim immediately and instantly pancake on cold, hard rock. There isn’t even time to flail or scream — my body simply submits to gravity. I am dead, my pawns are nowhere in sight, and I’m playing my favorite game of the year so far.

Capcom’s long-awaited sequel to Dragon’s Dogma mostly follows the same formula: an action RPG set in a medieval fantasy world where existence is defined by the duality of a Dragon and its would-be killer, a singular Arisen (the former chooses the latter by ripping out their heart). The Dragon is a harbinger of end times, and the Arisen, who has the power to control characters known as pawns, must fulfill their destiny by killing it. This time, the Arisen’s sworn duty includes serving as Sovran to the kingdom of Vermund, which proves to be a struggle because the game opens with my royal person waking up in a prison camp. 

But we’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to talk about Oni Peepaws.

Pawns are creatures of the rift, a blue-tinged limbo where they wait for Arisen in other realms (i.e., other players) to summon them. I created my main pawn in the likeness of my cat; we shall not analyze this decision further than the fact that they are both very good, very noisy boys. Oni Peepaws is a hulking red tabby, though I doubt anyone would say tabby to his face — he is a proud Beastren, a race of catfolk native to neighboring Battahl. Using a riftstone, I retain two more pawns to round out my party: a friend’s pawn named Lady Omelet and a random third. It is an understatement to say that pawns are the backbone of the game. They are, in my mind, the impossibly pure, anarchic heart of its core identity. 

Lady Omelet takes charge. She’s 15 levels above me, having been created days earlier, and has seen much more of the world than the rest of us. When she wants my attention, she waves and does a little dance to point the way forward for whatever quest I’ve prioritized. The pawns strategize, gossip, learn from each other, and harvest knowledge to carry back to their own Masters, each going about their business in accordance with their behavioral type. Oni Peepaws, like his namesake, is independent and a little haughty; Lady Omelet is mouthy and a little bossy. They cajole me into scaling cliffs and navigating byzantine paths to reach an obscure chest containing a single bottle of lantern oil. At times, the pawns bicker good-naturedly about their different tactics. I am negged, praised, chided, and finally, after falling off a large monster, caught and saved by a pawn. My Arisen is surrounded by a boisterous maelstrom of love, and it’s beautiful. 

Later in the game, I rotate out my two supporting pawns like an RPG version of Mambo No. 5. There’s Rita, a slightly manic mage who destroys every box and critter in her path to see what’s inside. There’s Kratos — I’ve seen at least two loitering in the rift — whom I accidentally lose during a Benny Hill-style sequence of failures on a rope bridge. I meet Abby on the road. She is fluent in Elvish, and I grab her because it’s impossible to deal with elves without a translator. Steve is an Astarion lookalike with a sweet tooth; a thief named Princess gets on my nerves because she dawdles.

When we stumble across new, slapstick ways of killing enemies, the other pawns get excited about the prospect of sharing new strategies with their Masters. Where possible, I help the pawns accomplish their individual quests — tasks assigned to them by their Masters — so they can return home in victory. (Not all pawns belong to other players; there are official ones “owned” by Capcom, but where’s the fun in that?) The final party I put together to face the Dragon is an all-catboy lineup, a strategy that I silently vow to adopt as a good-luck charm. 

Oni Peepaws goes on adventures when I log off and comes back to share his successes and failures. In one travelogue, he vaguely describes “suffering many injustices” at the hands of another Arisen, and I am filled with white-hot indignation. An early death in the game (pawns don’t die but must be revived) leaves him slightly shaken, and he dwells on this “failure” as we do a mundane escort quest. As I sift through more pawns in the rift, I cling to Oni — in all his myriad forms as I have him try different classes and builds — as both comfort and constant. There are many like him, but he is mine, and I think about what he’s doing while I’m offline and wonder what he’s learning, not just from other players but other pawns. 

My pawns discuss the troubling rumor of Dragonsplague, which supposedly makes them hostile and unmanageable. The disease passes around like a hot potato. According to a friend, I can “cure” Oni by letting him go off to another realm and infect someone else’s pawn. The problem is that I don’t know what the symptoms are; a game pop-up explains that the pawns won’t even know if they’re infected. It’s not long before I find out, spotting Oni with bright red eyes, oblivious to his predicament. To be on the safe side, I strip him of his belongings and armor; this is when I notice that my third pawn, Xun, is hiding red eyes under her low-brimmed hat. To be on the even safer side, I throw all three of them into the sea, where The Brine dissolves their flesh and bears them back to the rift. When I pick up Oni afresh, he apologizes for his failure.

The truth is, I am the sick one. I may not have finished the first Dragon’s Dogma, but I am well on the way to becoming a dogma sicko. The pawns aren’t just core gameplay mechanics but the key to how the game so brilliantly embraces the constraints of narrative and artifice. There is no attempt at assimilating this conceit of pawns into grounded fact or a sense of “immersion.” This is a story about the way stories are told and retold — through pawns and players — and the body of knowledge that forms between the bones of that shared lore. There is nothing immersive about constantly being reminded of the framework in which Vermund and Battahl exist.

Instead, it’s an exquisitely imperfect trinity of emergent narrative, ambient multiplayer, and the eternal adage of shit happens — and sometimes that’s all you need from three weird little guys for an incredible adventure.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X / S.

With the end of Yellowjackets’ second season, even as a self-confessed indulger of period dramas and teen angst, I don’t know how they’re going to stretch it across three more seasons. (It was initially sold as a five-season show, and co-creator Ashley Lyle says they’re still on track for that.) I say this with both love and optimism because it has, across the board, a brilliant ensemble cast with stellar chemistry; there’s a little bit of meta irony in that, among the adult Yellowjackets, Juliette Lewis (Natalie), Christina Ricci (Misty), and Melanie Lynskey (Shauna) have the shared experience of beginning their acting careers as teens and making it big in the ’90s in a past iteration of Hollywood that thrived on the trauma of young women.

Perhaps disappointment is inevitable in a show about unreliable storytelling rituals (“Storytelling” is literally the name of this season’s finale) and the projection of fantasy onto trauma. In the wilderness, the team struggles through their first winter while, in the present, the survivors struggle through what is essentially the aftermath of Shauna fucking around and finding out. That she’s become a perpetually moving train wreck isn’t particularly surprising or noteworthy, but Lynskey inhabits this role so well that it’s often easy to forgive adult Shauna for being her own worst enemy. 

In some ways, the show has played me like a fiddle. The first season was an invitation to regress to a high school headspace where popularity mattered, and many of the characters were concerned — even in the face of death and dismemberment — about being liked. Yellowjackets’ strongest win this season has been slowly and somewhat unevenly turning that likability on its head (no, I don’t mean the cannibalism) and deconstructing what passes for logic behind coming-of-age priorities.

There’s real weight to the way Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) and Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) — the worn-down holdouts among ardent believers — slowly and inevitably succumb to madness clothed in self-righteous preternatural vibes. When young Lottie (Courtney Eaton) decides to pass on the mantle of leadership, it’s not so much a blessing as a curse — a curse that becomes the foundation of the girls’ survival myth. “Lottie is like this because of us,” says Van (Liv Hewson), speaking to a multitude moving further away from the autonomy of their individual selves. 

There is some profound moment-to-moment writing here that really gets at the heart of the show: the arbitrary nature of the wilderness; the need to mythologize things we can’t understand; and the lengths we’ll go to in the name of closure. It’s a quiet, shameful delight to admit that the brutal beatdown between Shauna and Lottie brought out the sadist in me. Yes, it’s a face-value inversion of the naive idea that only boys use violence to solve problems and girls adhere to an inscrutably cruel social code more often than their fists. But it was a long time coming, and there’s palpable relief in Shauna’s bloody catharsis. It also prompts a wave of acceptance about the group’s nascent understanding of violence and its ability to manage the otherwise unmanageable. 

The real senseless violence was watching clumsy stylistic elements severely undercut the momentum and energy of the performances on-screen. When episode seven opened with Kurt Cobain solemnly intoning “Something in the Way,” I didn’t realize the most jarring obstacle this season would turn out to be music direction. It seems that Yellowjackets’ period quirks finally managed to hit my admittedly generous limits for easy sentimentality. More often than not, this season trotted out grunge / alt-rock singles like a preprogrammed MTV hour, to mixed effect.

When The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” kicked in at the beginning of the girls’ first hunt, it might have delivered a killer gut punch 20 years ago but has, in the context of weaponizing iconic riffs, since diminished into the realm of background fodder. These musical flaws were (almost) balanced out by a wonderfully campy fantasy sequence in which Misty (Samantha Hanratty), ensconced in the hallucinatory confines of a flotation tank, finally gets some much-needed clarity — with a special guest appearance from Walter (Elijah Wood).

Where Yellowjackets consistently does well, even in this much patchier season, is in its dark humor. There’s a universal resonance to the way we turn to pithy comebacks and bleak goofs under the worst possible conditions, bolstered by the purposefully unsubtle themes of “teamwork” and harmony as the girls, clad in their uniform letterman jackets, prepare for their second feast. There’s some real levity in adult Natalie’s cult-endorsing turnaround: having the closest thing to effective therapy she’s had in years at Lottie’s retreat, even when the “truest most authentic selves” messaging gets a little heavy-handed. There’s also comfort in Jeff’s (Warren Kole) minor redemption arc from pathetic blackmailer to supportive family man, which started to grow on me in the face of Shauna’s descent into “self-care.”

And if coach Scott (Steven Krueger), the poor soul who simply can’t get away, ends up having to share his new refuge with the girls for the rest of the winter, that right there is some great tragicomedy.

Yellowjackets is not a subtle piece of storytelling, nor is it meant to be. It’s a show about craving and compulsion and the need for closure. It’s also a show about eating your friends because, if not, you’re gonna die. When young Van gives Travis (Kevin Alves) a firm but encouraging talk in the wake of the hunt, I want to believe the whole group, as one multiheaded organism, is finally entering full goblin (I really mean gobblin’) mode. Please let this be the point of no return. But there are Three! More! Seasons! Frankly, I don’t need more emo ruminations on what it means to be a good person in the face of dire odds; we’re already watching the grown survivors try and fail to reconcile their survival sins with the present.

The cast is the real linchpin of this show, and it’s frustrating to muddy the strength and presence of their characters with a distinctly “Yellowjackets is testing well across this demographic so we must throw more ’90s into this already saturated pastiche” creative strategy. It’s like people who loudly use 10 cloves of garlic in a three-clove recipe because they unabashedly love garlic and either don’t realize or care that their overindulgence will derail the flavor of the whole dish.

I don’t know what to expect from the next few seasons — but I can only hope they’ll cut back on overcooking and overseasoning a perfectly good cut of meat.

Yellowjackets season 2 is out now on Showtime.