Things I played: Majora's Mask - A fun but sometimes frustrating time-travelling adventure

Me and Majora’s Mask have a slightly fraught history. 

I first played it as a teenager via a ROM emulator and promptly broke the game by cheating my way into places I clearly wasn’t meant to be. I tried again in 2017 on the Wii U during my master’s degree and gave up somewhere around Snowhead. Playing — and finally finishing — it on Switch last week, I think I now understand why it took me so long.

It’s a game of dazzling highs and deeply frustrating lows.

If you’ve somehow missed the last 15 years, Majora’s Mask is the direct sequel to Ocarina of Time, developed in just over a year by Nintendo’s EAD studio. Link is pulled into the strange land of Termina, trapped in a repeating three-day cycle as a mysterious mask threatens to crash the moon into the world.

That cycle defines everything, mostly for the better. Progress is built around rewinding time, meaning dungeons and quests unfold over multiple loops rather than one clean run. Key items persist, money doesn’t, and planning becomes essential. The masks feed beautifully into this, giving side quests real weight and purpose.

What I love most is how singular it feels. There’s no other Zelda like this. It’s dark, melancholic and often unsettling, with the moon hanging over Clock Town like a quiet threat. The music, characters and time mechanic combine into something genuinely strange and memorable.

But it’s also cryptic and, at times, stressful. Certain progression chains feel opaque enough to demand a guide, and waiting for specific days can turn tension into irritation. The main plot is surprisingly slight too: only four dungeons, with Stone Tower arriving far too late to carry the whole thing.

So Majora’s Mask sits firmly in my middle tier of Zelda games. I admired it, often enjoyed it, and occasionally had to push myself not to stop. Still — I beat it. And that feels oddly fitting.

Onto Mario Galaxy next.

Things I watched: Dead Calm - An unsettling psychological thriller set on the high seas

Dead Calm came onto my radar in a fairly roundabout way. 

I was watching old YouTube footage of Orson Welles interviews and stumbled across mention of an unfinished project of his called The Deep, based on a novel by Charles Williams. The film sat in limbo for decades before finally being adapted into something else entirely by Philip Noyce.

It’s not Welles’ vision, but it is a taut, nervy thriller in its own right.

The story follows a young couple, played by Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman, sailing across the Pacific in an attempt to escape a recent family tragedy. Their journey is interrupted when they encounter a sinking schooner and a lone man rowing desperately toward them. He’s sick, agitated, and quickly taken aboard.

That turns out to be a mistake.

Suspicion builds fast and before long he seizes control of the yacht, taking Nicole with him and leaving Sam stranded aboard a doomed vessel. From there the film splits neatly in two: Sam fighting to survive at sea, and Nicole trapped in a tense psychological standoff with an increasingly unstable captor.

What really elevates it is the setting. The ocean is vast, hostile, and isolating, turning the yacht into a floating pressure cooker. The claustrophobia is intense, and every decision feels loaded — especially the repeated moments where Nicole hesitates over loading a gun that could end everything instantly.

Would Orson Welles have approved? Hard to say, but I did. The film blends psychological horror with survival thriller remarkably well. The ending is poor — reworked by the studio months after shooting — but if you mentally discard it, what remains is 90 minutes of gripping, economical filmmaking.

In my opinion, a genuinely underappreciated gem.