Yeah, playing Amnesia with a cat on your arm is a lot like that

On the minus side, the cat will sometimes silently grab your leg during the scariest part, or use his toy that sounds just like a monster walking directly behind you. You take the bad with the good.

I could give a more detailed review, but basically it comes down to: do you enjoy being scared? If so, purchase Amnesia: The Dark Descent, ideally waiting for it to go on sale for $4. If no, proceed directly to watching people play it on youtube, because this is hilarious. My favorite is Screaming like a girl Season 2, but is more popular.

The Magician King, by Lev Grossman

So I love The Magicians. And I like, and will possibly come to love The Magician King. But I seriously question The Magician King as a sequel to The Magicians

First, a rant: A workplace blogger I usually like complained about The Magicians being derivative of Harry Potter and Narnia. And just... ugh. There is always room for debate on artistic issues, but that one is provably false. It's not derivative of Narnia because it's a deliberate comment on the fan culture around Narnia. QED. And it's no more derivative of Harry Potter than the thousands of other books about children discovering they have magical powers and going to school for them are. Many of these were written before Harry Potter was even published, and one of them was written by me when I was six, which FYI is before I learned to read.

This is a longstanding pet peeve of mind: Harry Potter is a fine series, and it has done no harm and much good for the world. But it owes more of its success to luck than to quality. There are better books in the world, and better books in the subgenre, and it pisses me off when JK Rowling says the books aren't even fantasy.

Anyways, I feel The Magicians is somewhat maligned, and it makes me very protective of it.

My rule of thumb for series is that they can't be just one story taking up three volumes, that's a waste of our time. I want to see serious growth and change in perspective between books that come together in a harmony. See: Lilith's Brood, whose second and third books follow the descendants of the first protagonist.

TMG is really good evidence for this: it's really has two stories. One follows Quintin, the hero of the last book accompanied a physically preset but emotionally and mentally absent Julia, who had minor appearances in The Magicians. This is the big quest storyline. The other follows Julia in the time period covered by the Magicians. That storyline is pure gold, and it's resolution in the quest storyline is perfect. I don't think you could quite get away with cutting out the entire rest of the quest story, but I haven't given up on it as an idea either. Honestly, the quest would be perfectly tolerable just so you can see how Julia is doing, if it weren't so counter to the messages in the last book.

( Vague spoilers for Magician King )

I wish I could describe why the Julia thread is so amazing, but I either think that spoilers would weaken it (not an attitude I generally hold), or that it's so delicate I don't want to sully it with my description. Suffice to say that one thing Lev Grossman does really well is show people grow. Quintin's growth in the last book and Julia's in this one generate exactly the harmony I talked about earlier.