Every single week, I try without fail to convince myself that I’m finally becoming a sensible adult. A person with restraint. A person who doesn’t immediately fall headfirst into obsession the second a weird new game, comic, board game, or shiny piece of tech crosses their timeline.
And then Wishlist Wednesday rolls around and absolutely obliterates that fantasy. In this week’s edition, we’ve got a psychologically broken espionage RPG dripping in existential dread, a horror comic where Fashion Week becomes nightmare fuel, a beautiful post-apocalyptic board game about rebuilding civilisation, and an AI-powered foldable guitar.
Honestly, at this point, my wishlist is less of a list and more of a cry for help. But it’s almost my birthday, and you only live once, or something like that.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies
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The second somebody says “from the creators of Disco Elysium,” I immediately stop what I’m doing and pay attention. So naturally, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies has been living in my brain like a psychological parasite. And honestly? It looks incredible.
You play as Hershel Wilk, a shattered operative known as CASCADE, who is dragged back into the world of espionage years after a catastrophic mission destroyed both his team and, seemingly, most of his sanity. Already, I’m obsessed because I love protagonists who look like they haven’t slept properly since 2009.
But what really grabs me is the atmosphere. This isn’t slick spy fantasy where everyone wears perfect suits and says cool one-liners before explosions happen in the background. This feels dirty, paranoid, philosophical, and deeply human. The city itself appears to be rotting beneath layers of political manipulation, ideological warfare, psychological collapse, and deeply strange supernatural undertones.
Smile: For The Camera
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There are horror concepts that work because they’re loud, violent, and chaotic, and then there’s Smile, a franchise built almost entirely around dread. The kind of dread that crawls under your skin and quietly waits there. Which is exactly why Smile: For The Camera instantly hooked me.
Set during Fashion Month in 2005, the comic follows a group of international models who arrive in New York, chasing fame, success, and the fantasy of making it big. But as the pressure of the industry starts tearing at them psychologically, the horrifying Smile Entity begins stalking the group one by one.
And honestly? The fashion world already feels like a horror setting before you even add supernatural nightmare creatures into the mix.
What excites me most about this comic is how perfectly the concept fits the franchise’s themes. Fashion is already built around performance, beauty, identity, image, and impossible expectations. Add paranoia, exploitation, sleep deprivation, manipulative agents, predatory photographers, and a reality-warping entity feeding on suffering, and suddenly you’ve got a setting that feels horrifyingly believable.
Rebirth
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There’s something incredibly refreshing about a post-apocalyptic setting that isn’t relentlessly miserable. Rebirth immediately stood out to me because, instead of focusing on survival through violence and endless suffering, it imagines a future in which humanity rebuilds in harmony with nature after civilisation collapses.
Which, honestly, feels strangely hopeful in a genre usually obsessed with making everybody eat canned beans in radioactive wastelands. Designed by legendary board game creator Reiner Knizia, Rebirth is a tile-laying strategy game set across the ruins of Scotland, where ancient clans work to restore the land by rebuilding castles and reclaiming territory.
What I love most here is how elegant the entire thing sounds. Every turn revolves around placing tiles strategically across the board, but beneath that simplicity is what appears to be a deeply tactical experience built around long-term planning and adapting to the changing state of the map.
Melo-D AI Guitar
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Every now and then, a piece of tech appears that feels like something I’ve always needed and just know I did. Enter the Melo-D AI Guitar.
This foldable AI-powered guitar is built around one very cool concept: making music creation feel immediately accessible, even if you’ve never properly learned an instrument before.
And as someone who has repeatedly looked at my guitar collection and thought, “I absolutely want to learn that,” only to immediately become overwhelmed by chord charts, this thing feels alarmingly persuasive.
The LED guidance system lights up exactly where your fingers need to go while the built-in touchscreen walks you through songs in real time. Which basically means it removes the terrifying “where do I even start?” wall that stops so many people from learning instruments in the first place.
And then the AI features are just the cherry on top. You can upload songs and have the system automatically convert them into playable chord maps. You can hum melodies into the app and generate guitar solos from them. You can even type in moods and have the AI build original jam sessions around them.
I love the philosophy behind it. Melo-D isn’t trying to replace creativity or musicianship. It’s trying to remove intimidation and friction so people can actually start creating. And that’s a genuinely exciting idea.
This week’s Wishlist Wednesday somehow perfectly captured the current state of my brain: equal parts existential spy thriller, psychological horror, peaceful strategy gaming, and hyper-fixation on bizarre tech gadgets at 2 AM. Honestly, I regret none of it.
