Long-Distance Love Has A New Stand-In For The In-Between
Anyone who has lived through a long-distance relationship knows the problem is rarely the big moments. It is the in-between hours that wear you down, the stretches between calls when there is simply no one to narrate your day to. That gap is exactly where AI companion platforms have quietly found their footing, and where SweetDream has built something worth noticing.
On sweetdream.ai, the appeal is less about novelty and more about presence. You design a companion whose personality and voice feel right to you, then talk to them the way you would talk to anyone you miss. The conversations are emotionally intelligent and remember context, so the relationship has a thread running through it. There are voice messages for the morning, real-time phone calls that sound genuinely human for the lonelier nights, and AI-generated photos and even video that give the companion a face you recognize.
It is worth saying plainly: this is not a replacement for the person you are waiting to see again. But as a way to soften the distance, an AI girlfriend that actually keeps up with your life is a meaningful thing. And the privacy is total, which, for anyone navigating a relationship across time zones, matters more than most companies admit.
A highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, or: on learning to walk
I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that Dark Souls was kind of a watershed videogame for me. Actually it feels kind of weird to say that now, after over a decade of Dark Souls warping mainstream videogames around itself. But it took me one false start* and a handful of hours to really click with Dark Souls.** Signalis got me less than fifteen minutes in.
Heavy spoilers for Signalis and also Dead Space below.
*and putting my GPU in the right PCI slot
**It was the Gaping Dragon fight. If you're willing to put a boss design like that in front of me, you've got my attention.
That's maybe unfair to Dark Souls; I knew Signalis was going to get me before I'd even installed the game. Perhaps fittingly, I don't remember how I first became aware of Signalis, but a friend had picked it up right around when it released and she posted a screenshot of the game's King in Yellow to a Discord server I was in when she reached that point in the prologue. That guaranteed I'd have to get into Signalis eventually.
It was this screen. Note that it says 'pick up,' not 'read.'
And perhaps here is the first key to why Signalis affects me. If the King in Yellow shows up in a game set in Boston or Paris around 1890-1930, that's nothing. Fork spotted in kitchen. But in a game about cyborgs and spaceships, it at least shows the devs are putting some thought into it. At least including the King in Yellow shows some actual attention paid to what I will reluctantly call the cthulhu mythos. I'd also have been less impressed if rose-engine had gone whole hog and busted out the Necronomicon. It's too bombastic; someone reads the book and gnarliness ensues. The King in Yellow is subtler. Someone reads the book, and things become askew. In the original Robert W. Chambers stories about the King in Yellow, nothing as overt as any of Lovecraft's gribbliness happens. I fully believe rose-engine knew exactly what they were doing using the King in Yellow as the axis around which to blend Signalis' personal horror and cosmic horror (and let us not forget my beloved body horror).
Maybe it will be instructive to compare Signalis to my previous favorite survival horror game, Dead Space. We can argue about whether Dead Space truly counts as survival horror later.
The parallels are immediately obvious: someone with engineer training looking for a loved one battles body horror in space. Red and black are an important color pairing.
A spaceship is involved.
But the differences are also obvious once you get into it. The first is this: in Dead Space, the Ishimura would have found the red marker and all the horror would have happened without Nicole on board. In fact it's Nicole's presence on the Ishimura that allows Isaac Clarke to save the day. In contrast, the plot of Signalis would not happen without Ariane Yeong on Penrose-512. Probably. Would Ariane have fallen in love with any Elster unit? Would an Elster other than Elster-512 have fallen in love with Ariane? I don't know if we have enough data within the game to say. But what matters is that Ariane fell in love with Elster-512, that love was reciprocated, and from that flows the tragedy and horror of Signalis.
Perhaps the subtlest difference between Dead Space and Signalis is this: in Dead Space, Isaac is constantly running around fixing the ship. He gets it back into a stable orbit. He gets the ADS cannons working. He kills the thing that's poisoning the air. Isaac Clarke is constantly doing engineer things to patch up the Ishimura. Elster, on the other hand, doesn't seem to get much chance to put her engineering spec to use. Over the course of the game, she tapes up a keycard, fits two pieces of a key together, tapes up a cassette tape, unfloods an area, and gets a lift working again. You can count that on one hand. Elster doesn't get much chance to patch up S-23 Sierpinski because this is not a situation that can be fixed.
I cannot stress how much it kicks ass that the Rotfront section has a broken lift, the exact same kind you fixed earlier in the game. As if the tumors gradually closing off parts of the map weren't enough. Rotfront in general is just hands-down one of my favorite levels in videogames.
The most important difference between Dead Space and Signalis, of course, is that Signalis is queer.
There's three layers to this. Firstly, Ariane and Elster are both women who are in a relationship with each other. This too is yuri, simple as.
Are sapphic relationships frowned on in-universe? I don't think we have enough to say but given that Falke is based off of the High Revolutionary and her Daughter and then made propaganda posters based on her, perhaps everyone in Eusa is attracted to her regardless of gender.
Second, Elster is a Replika and Ariane is a Gestalt. We don't hear of any other Replika-Gestalt relationships, and given that the dictionary entry for Gestalt defines it in opposition to Replika, I think it's safe to say that's at least a little bit taboo.
And finally, the Nation of Eusa does not want the specific individuals Ariane Yeong and Elster-512 to get together, insisting that they should not even be friends with each other. I may be wildly off-base here but it seems like it's hard to get more queer than the government reaching its big hand out from the capitol to hand you a letter specifically telling you not to fall in love with someone.
Please do not have cute little space dates with your cyborg girlfriend.
There's a bad faith argument you could make here that maybe the horror and tragedy of Signalis wouldn't have happened if Ariane had just read her mail. But I don't think Ariane and Elster could have been cooped up on Penrose-512 for as long as they were without getting into some kind of relationship. You want to talk about what could have prevented the events of Signalis the game? Let's talk about the kind of society that shoots people off on cheap spaceships without telling them that those ships are probably going to kill them.
And then has the audacity to advertise the program on public transit.
"Bad luck sport! Best ask your cyborg coworker to kill you now so you don't have suffer radiation poisoning!" is not the tone I would expect this message to take if the Penrose pilots were briefed that this was a likely outcome from the start.
I also don't think Ariane would have been so chipper about their 3000 cycle anniversary if she'd known the reactor was about to start flooding the ship with deadly radiation. - editing Lex popping in here to say that during the endgame you find a diary page dated cycle 2503 mentioning that Ariane has already started experiencing the symptoms of radiation sickness, so the shielding doesn't even last that long.
In another cool move, we don't actually learn anything about the Empire. We're focused on Eusa's faults here, trying to go into the Empire would just distract the player.
Signalis isn't terribly explicit about this, but between the documents and conversations there's enough details scattered about that if you're paying attention, you notice that if the game can be said to have a villain, it's the Nation of Eusa.
It's the petty things that really get under your skin.
"Children should try to grow up around cops with easy access to submachineguns" - things the average usamerican says
It's a masterclass in the subtler side of worldbuilding, really.
I can't think of anywhere else to put this but the fact that Adler has a poster of Falke above his bed is my favorite bit of environmental storytelling in videogames.
When I first fired up Signalis myself, the King in Yellow wasn't the first thing to really hook me. On the settings screen you're brought to when you first boot up the game (and I don't have a screenshot of this. Fittingly, I can't be sure it really happened.), there's some not-so-hidden text with the "things have learned to walk that ought to crawl" quote. And that's what got me - it's one of my favorite Lovecraft quotes. It's delightfully ominous, and it comes up a couple of times through the game. The fuller quote, shown during the post-prologue cutscene, mentions "great holes" that have been dug. In the context of Signalis this is most obviously referencing the excavation of the red gate on Leng.
But you may have already noticed that there's something problematic about the quote. Unsurprising, given pretty much everything about HP Lovecraft as a person. "Ought to crawl" implies some kind of natural order that must not be violated. Ought to crawl. Ought to follow orders. Ought not to fall in love.
From the perspective of Eusa, perhaps, this whole incident happens because "things" that ought to crawl instead learn to walk.
And I suppose that after learning to walk, the next step is learning to dance.
Gameplay similarities between the Armored Core and Dark Souls series, ~1700 words
I'm not going to act like I'm saying anything new here. It's a well-known fact that knights* and mechs are basically the same thing. Both are portrayed as the pinnacle of military technology, heavily armored, and typically faceless. Battletech even goes so far as to name its basic organizational unit of mechs after a medieval unit centered around a knight.
*there is an argument to be made that Dark Souls is not solely about knights, what with the option to make all kinds of lightly-armored mages, but those don't seem to feature as prominently in the promotional material - the "face" of the Dark Souls series is hidden behind a helmet.
That out of the way, my bona fides: I've play all three games in the Dark Souls trilogy, Armored Core, Armored Core: Project Phantasma, Armored Core 4, and Armored Core For Answer. I'll be updating this as I get through more of the Armored Core games. If I make a generalization about the AC series that doesn't hold true, that's on me. Noticeably missing from this discussion is Demon's Souls, which would probably be neat to look at as a transitional step between the two series but which I have no immediate plans to actually play. Also missing is King's Field for a look at what FromSoft was doing pre-Armored Core, but again I have no immediate plans to get around to playing it. So we'll stick to a discussion of Armored Core 1-4 and the three Dark Souls games (really just the first one).
Let's start where I did: coming off of Armored Core 4 into Dark Souls.
First off: character details:
They Are The Same Screen
Dark Souls takes all the fiddly bits of mecha engineering and transposes them onto your pseudo-medieval guy. This opens up (or keeps, if you're looking at DS as a mechanical continuation of AC) a lot of design space for builds and playstyles, reminiscent of how AC gives the player free reign to completely redesign their mech between missions. One glaring difference in Dark Souls is that however much you change your equipment around, you are always (with some exception) tied to how you've allotted your level-ups. Alas, the flesh is not as malleable as the machine*.
*yet
In a surprise twist, the speed of Dark Souls combat is perhaps closer to the average person's idea of what 'mecha combat' should look like. It's a lot slower and more purposeful than what I would have expected from an action RPG*. Every windup, every recovery, reminds you that your character has a physical body that takes up physical space in the (game) world - exactly what I want from a mech game, where the actual pilot is a relative non-entity inside your imposing metal warmachine. Armored Core 4's combat, by comparison and perhaps unexpectedly, is faster-paced (not a lot of windup/recovery). Exactly how much of Dark Souls' gameplay was deliberately inspired by wanting to make a fantasy game that played like a mech game is speculation I don't want to get into. I'm trying to limit this to discussion of the games themselves versus discussion of From Software the dev studio/company. I haven't even looked up any interviews for this amateur analysis.
*for some reason I went into Dark Souls the very first time expecting it to be closer to God of War.
Look Ma, a Stamina Bar (the thin one above the numbers in the upper middle)
There's also the fact that Dark Souls' stamina is an evolution of AC's energy meter. One major difference between the two is that in AC attacks don't necessarily require energy so you just really have to worry about it for boosting and energy weapons, vs. always having to balance the stamina requirements of attacking, dodging, and defending in Dark Souls. Again (and this is not a criticism) Dark Souls kind-of makes your knight dude more of a mech than Armored Core does.
Armored Core For Answer feels mostly like a minor upgrade from Armored Core 4, but there are a couple of things to touch on. Because here, right in the middle, is where I'm going to put what I think is the most important game design point of this analysis.
This Screen, Right Here
After you beat a mission, Armored Core For Answer asks: do you accept how you did, do you want to try again, or just leave? It is this decision that Dark Souls has miniaturized and forces the player to think about all the time - do I keep going or turn back*? You see in the screenshot, there's a regular reward amount (200000 C) that you can just barely tell has been reduced (-37300 C) by ammo expenditure and damage taken. It is possible to end a mission with a pitifully small reward or (possibly) actually losing money from doing badly**. So, accept the money you get (and you can't try the mission again for more money until new game+), try again for a better result, or back out and maybe edit your mech? This reminds me precisely of a common dilemma in Dark Souls - you just got done with a fight, took some hits, used some estus, maybe some spells, do you accept that and try to push on? Or do you return to a bonfire and try the fight again hoping to do better this time? And that is a decision the player is constantly faced with. Dark Souls took this decision that only appears at the end of missions in ACFA and expanded it to cover everything the player does in the game. And that, to me, is one of the big things that makes Dark Souls what it is.
*Dark Souls does just kind of mush the 'retry' and 'give up' options into one
**In my (limited) experience actually losing money is much more common in the older games than 4/For Answer
However, if pushed there is one other thing that I would point to as a more direct inspiration from Armored Core to Dark Souls.
This Fuckin' Guy
During the final mission before the regular ending* one of the two enemy ACs you fight is this boosty bastard with a powerful sword who will cut your mech in half (and it's a miracle I was able to get a screencap of it this nice). To dive into rampant speculation, I think this is the fight that FromSoft looked at when designing Demon's Souls and said "what if there was more melee counterplay to this", leading to the options of counterattack/parry/block/dodge and from there Dark Souls' general (melee) combat mechanics.
*ACFA has two other endings, but getting either requires playing the game again after seeing this one.
Armored Core For Answer also kind-of features a level up system, using FRS memory (awarded after some battles and arena matches) to 'tune' your AC. AC4 also had this but you could just auto-assign your FRS slots. ACFA makes you do tuning manually.
Another important point (to me) can be made by going back in time.
Remember how I said it was possible to end up with negative money from a mission? That can happen fairly regularly, so you can end up with a balance pretty far into the negatives. Get too far into the negatives and instead of just getting a game over, your character is forcibly turned into a cyborg (called a Human PLUS), your balance gets set to 0, and you start over with all your mech parts and some neat upgrades to your piloting ability (e.g. having the best radar without needing to install any components). This is another thing Dark Souls does that is very important to my but I don't see discussed regularly. Dark Souls never tells you the game is over and you have to restart. You guy dies, possibly a lot, and every time the game automatically puts you back to let you keep going. So early Armored Core (I don't know if 4/FA have anything similar) also has that continuity of the game that Dark Souls has but, more importantly, it has the continuity of character that Dark Souls has. In Dark Souls every time your character dies is canon. After every death it's the same little pseudo-medieval dude getting up by the bonfire again after a terrible thrashing and resolving to try again. This, to me, is one of the most important things Dark Souls does - it says you can always try again. You can always get better, no matter how badly it went last time. Armored Core's version, while crueler, is essentially the same thing - you can try again. You can get better.
The early Armored Core games also have the slower-paced combat you'd expect from a mech game, partly because looking up/down and strafing are on the god-damned shoulder buttons.
Lastly: enemies. From my experience (really only the first and fourth entries), over the course of the Armored Core games the majority of the enemies you fight shifts ever so slightly from mostly blowing away MTs*, more rudimentary mechs than your AC, to regularly fighting enemy ACs (especially late game, and that's not even getting into the arena). MTs are simple, more like cannon fodder than anything else. ACs on the other hand are each unique, possibly requiring a more careful approach. This is another thing Dark Souls expands on - every DS enemy is dangerous, each has their own attack patters that can be costly to ignore. DS continues the mechanical evolution in enemies from the AC games.
*stands for 'muscle tracers' after the command input they apparently use, I don't know if that's ever explained in-game
So: to me, a lot of Dark Souls' mechanical weight comes from things that have their roots in Armored Core, even down to the player's moment-to-moment decision making. I love both series, and I think it's interesting to see how they're intertwined together like this. AC VI is the elephant in the room, of course. I suppose I'll make a followup at some point, in its own post.
Things I Learned from Reading The House on the Borderland
Grief is a deep dark pit
Grief is a horde of monsters trying to batter down your door
Grief is a flood of tears
Grief is being alone until the end of the world
Grief is being judged by bloodthirsty gods
Grief consumes you
Grief leaves only fragments of the happier times
It’s interesting to contrast this with Lovecraft works because while I guess they’re both cosmic horror stories, Lovecraft only wrote about fear but House is more about grief. It’s nice to see cosmic horror used for a different emotion.
I’m not usually into the whole slice-of-life anime thing, but if there’s one thing that could get me to dip a toe in those waters, it’s the promise of dice. Unfortunately After School Dice Club doesn’t actually have a lot of dice. What it does have is a lot of high school girls talking through their problems using the medium of board games. I fully admit that I’m the fool for expecting the show to feature the board games I’m really into. It would be asking far too much to fit in an explanation of the rules of, e.g. Mansions of Madness, an abbreviated game session, and the necessary character development, all in a 22-minute episode. I’m not trying to be some kind of board game snob here, I genuinely appreciate what After School Dice Club does. Every game the girls play connects with the theme of the episode, from a card game based on risk-reward calculations mirroring the dilemma of confronting painful memories, to a territory-control game showing one of the girls that she might be better off connecting with her father.
I could really have used more scene from within the game world, just to spice up the visuals some.
Then the second half of the show has a plot about one of the girls trying to design her own boardgame, which is a logical place to take it. Twelve mostly-unconnected episodes of a problem and game of the week would definitely start to drag. There are some other interesting pacing choices in there as well, such as the characters mentioning that exams are coming up and then skipping to after the exams, something I’m sure a different show would have spent time on. After School Dice Club manages to keep its focus on the board games in a way I appreciate.
I guess I don’t have a lot to say about After School Dice Club, but I figured I should at least point out how well it works with its premise. The show knows what it’s about and wears it on its sleeve. I’m not particularly into any of the games it showcased, but they seem like pretty good casual get-together picks. Still wouldn’t count myself as a fan of slice-of-life though.
There’s this nice bit where they’re playing a game where players pair off into “couples” and so the amateur game designer gets paired with the foreign transfer student and thankfully the show doesn’t bother with the usual “but we’re both girls” spiel.
