E12 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022
these conversations — and the
underlying relationships —
toward a more productive place.
To their it-will-get-betters, you
can reply: “I want to believe that,
but some families don’t recover.
My ex’s is one of them.” That
invites discussion. So does asking
friends about the source of their
optimism. Their kids aren’t teens
yet, okay, but they were teens
once. Plus they have siblings,
cousins, niblings, neighbors.
Or they have professional
experiences as teachers, youth
coaches, babysitters, camp
counselors, therapists, managers
of teen employees, and similar.
Seek out any you know; they’ve
seen enough to be as useful as
parents of teens.
That is true in part because the
informal network of shoulder-
crying, storytelling and
assurance-seeking will always
have its limits. No one knows for
certain how they themselves will
turn out, much less how their
own child will, much much less
someone else’s. So the best you
can hope for is enough comfort
and context to see you through to
the next phase, whatever it may
be.
Fortunately, comfort and
context are pretty powerful
things. Your friends care about
you and you value them enough
to share your pain. If their
assurances aren’t working, then
guide them toward what you
need. Or let them be an argument
for the power of context: Your
experience (with son and
husband) says one thing but
friends can attest to the
possibility of other things.
Circumstances also can be too
much for the friend network to
handle, and that’s normal as well.
For that there’s professional help.Write to Carolyn Hax at
[email protected]. Get her column
delivered to your inbox each morning
at wapo.st/gethax. Join the discussion live at noon
Fridays at washingtonpost.com/live-
chats.off the books.Hi Carolyn: I’m going through a
very difficult time with my 17-
year-old son. Most of my parent
friends have children who aren’t
yet teens. These parents tell me it
will get better, that my child won’t
hate me forever and will become
a productive member of society.
I want to scream when they say
this because they don’t know! My
ex to this day hates his mother
and struggles with life. This could
be my son!
How can I nicely tell people
what they are saying is not
helpful and makes me want to
scream? Perhaps I should keep
my struggles to myself.
— Raising a TeenagerRaising a Teenager: No, no,
please don’t do that.
I see your point about the
hollowness of your friends’
advice. But discarding all peer
support is not your only option.
You can offer details to your
friends, ask questions and nudgeVIDEO GAMESBY CHRISTOPHER BYRDO
ne thing that has always
impressed me about film-
makers like Andrei Tark-
ovsky and Béla Tarr —
known for using slow-moving,
wide-angle shots — is the trust
they place in their audience.
To linger on a landscape or
fixate on slowly unfolding action
is to welcome the viewer into a
meditative space. A creator must
have exceptional faith in their
material to embrace such an ap-
proach because it carries the risk
of boring an audience accus-
tomed to the frequent scene-shift-
ing that’s the basis for so much
popular movie making. The same
holds true for video games. In a
medium, more often than not,
associated with histrionic action,
games like “FAR: Changing Tides”
tend to stand out. Like its pred-
ecessor “FAR: Lone Sail,” the new
game makes a virtue of quietude.
“FAR: Changing Tides” follows
the journey of Toe, a young adven-
turer. Avoiding any kind of stodgy
setup it opens simply, with the
boy plunging into water and
swimming through a partially
submerged city. The zoomed-out
camera recalls the work of Danish
development studio Playdead,
whose “Inside” seems like an obvi-
ous influence. Beautiful lighting
and water effects, coupled with a
subdued, rusty color palette, im-
bue the game with a lovely aes-
thetic that’s enriched by compos-
er Joel Schoch’s restrained, mel-
ancholic soundtrack.
In short order, Toe makes his
way into a building and acquires
an astronaut-like suit with a re-tractable propeller around its
neck, which helps him to navigate
deep water. Later, he comes upon
a ship with a mast that folds down
with the push of a button. A lever
next to the mast allows Toe to trim
the sails. It’s not long, however,
before the boy must contend with
one of the many obstacles that
interrupt his voyage. To get hisship moving, Toe will have to
fiddle with all sorts of machinery
in and out of water, as well as
make upgrades and repairs to the
ship. Eventually, Toe acquires a
steam engine that he must feed
with a steady supply of fuel to
keep it chugging. Farther down
the line his ship gains the ability
to transform into a submarine.The game skips between puzzle
sections in which players have to
work out how to get the ship from
one point to another and stretch-
es where there is little to do but
bask in the splendor of traveling
through an alluring, post-apoca-
lyptic landscape bereft of other
people. Those serene moments
are your reward for going about
the painstaking work of getting
the ship over, under and through
an escalating series of obstruc-
tions.
As I fell into the rhythm of
darting about adjusting the sail,
stoking the furnace and hosing
down the engine when it threat-
ened to overheat, I noted how my
focus narrowed and these tasks
became quite consuming. “FAR:
Changing Tides” effectively
makes the ship feel like its own
little world. Keeping the vessel
moving often comes down to exe-
cuting out-of-the-boat tasks —
like moving a power source with a
crane, sawing a piece of wood, or
heating up the engine to generate
electrical power that can be used
in different situations. The clever
puzzles spun around these satis-
fyingly low-key activities made
me soak in the relaxing sight of
watching the ship cutting
through the water, unimpeded.
“FAR: Changing Tides” ably
evokes the blissful passion of trav-
el. It is the perfect antidote to
overly stuffed, bloated video
games.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based
writer. His work has appeared in the
New York Times Book Review, the
New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow
him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.A gorgeous maritime adventure — and an ode to quietude
FRONTIER DEVELOPMENTSFAR: Changing Tides
Developed by: Okomotive
Published by: Frontier Developments
Available on: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4,
PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/Xmaybe didn’t always fit as
effortlessly as they would have
liked. Great people and great
loves are separate things.
Or, alternate thought: Even
such a beautiful, loving, nuanced
thing as a marriage that only
death could tear asunder can get
trounced in a feelings pageant
against new love. Which, by the
way, twitterpates older people
with almost the same intensity as
it does the young.
So, maybe your dad had a
tough road into widowerhood
and is just feeling stupid giddy
right now.
For either possibility, a lovingly
phrased, “Hey, I’m happy for you,
but I’m not ready to hear this,”
might be all you need to solve
this. Please at least give it a try
before you scrape any more plansDear Carolyn: My
father was
widowed about
five years ago and
has remarried.
Hurray. Except he
keeps talking
about his second
wife as “the love of
my life” in front of
us and his grandchildren. I’m
increasingly resentful of this
phrase and have minimized
contact with him as a result. He’s
complaining and I don’t know
what to say. “Quit [dumping] on
the memory of my mother in my
presence and you’ll see us more
than twice a year” is what I WANT
to say.
— ResentfulResentful: Then say it. Maybe
adjust your bluntness levels first
to suit your dad’s tolerances, but
otherwise it’s something he
deserves to know. Even an
unwelcome message is kinder
than vanishing on him without
explanation. “Hey, Dad, I really
am happy you’re happy — but it’s
hard to hear you be so effusive
about your new love while I’m
still missing Mom so much.”
About that: You’re the one, not
your dad, making the connection
between his love-of-his-life
swooning and “[dumping] on the
memory of my mother” — so you
can break it, too. You had your
own relationship with your
mother and it is yours to treasure
and grieve. Nothing your dad says
or does now puts a dent in that.
He, meanwhile, is and always
has been free to have his own
feelings about your mom. It
doesn’t discredit her, him, them,
or you if their marriage was, say, a
B+ to his current A+ remarriage.
It doesn’t discredit either of them
as people if they loved each other
and made a life together andMust dad call new wife
‘the love of his life’?
Carolyn
HaxNICK GALIFIANAKIS/ILLUSTRATION FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTMIKE DU JOUR B Y MIKE LESTERTake The Post shoppingwpost.com/podcastsWashington Post podcastsgo with you everywherePolitics • History • Culture • MoreS0108 4x3S0129-4x1RetropolisStories of the past, rediscovered.
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