#frictional discussion

[blookmallow]

#soma spoilers, here is a list of questions i still have

this is a long post

what were the glitch head things. no seriously what were those

was the strange figure at the end ross, and if so, how was he still sentient/aware of himself/able to communicate while infected with the WAU and how was he able to appear/disappear at will

why did they use a damaged, dying brain as the “template” for every other AI. how does that make sense

why did simon’s brain damage apparently have no effect on his copies

if they used simon’s brain as the template for the AI doesn’t that mean he was involved in the creation of the WAU

could simon feel it when he lost his hand,

why did simon have that weird hallucination sequence where he was suddenly back in his apartment with ashley..... that was so. unexpected and was never mentioned again and never explained,

did doctor munshi ever do a scan on himself (you would think he would have??) and does that mean his data is in any way accessible. is he on the ark. who all is on there

are people in the ark essentially immortal? they presumably can’t reproduce and i dont know why they would age, so is it just the same group of people eternally young for thousands of years?

thousands of years is a long time but catherine specifically said “thousands of years” not “indefinitely” and if they don’t age, what happens to them when they run out of time

why did the wau pods heal simon anyway was it feeding structure gel back into his system or something

what caused simon to wake up in the beginning and how did he get in the diving suit/body?? there was nobody around to do that intentionally (and why would they?) and catherine seemed really confused about who he was or what he was doing there, he was just. sort of a template brain stored in the system he shouldn’t have ended up in anything and yet somehow he ended up in imogen reed’s body for some reason???? how???

what were all those images that flash by whenever simon dies

was akers always...a bit mad or was it entirely the wau controlling him

did the wau speak to him in words or was he just completely delusional

who or what was saying “it’s alright, it’s alright, you instead of me, stay, stay, stay” in that one room (where you first find a wau pod i think??) near the beginning

why did carl think he could see his own human body. catherine was aware of what she was and simon didn’t know what he was but could accurately see what his own body looked like 

WHY DID THE DUNBAT RANDOMLY START SCREAMING ABOUT CATHERINE AND THEN DIE. SIMON NEVER MENTIONED THAT AGAIN

why doesn’t simon miss his friends? he says at one point “i miss toronto, not because my family and friends are there but because that’s where i fit in and know who i am” he never really mentions missing anyone and even ashley is barely mentioned at all

and im assuming there’s only one ending regardless of your choices but do you actually legitimately have choices, and do those choices have effects

like: can you choose to kill carl, and can you choose not to hurt carl at all (never even touch the switch)

can you choose to kill robin

can you choose to kill the round helper bot instead of the other robot that was muttering to itself 

can you choose not to kill sarah

can you choose not to kill the simon left behind at omicron. and if you do that, doesn’t that mean that the simon who is left behind at the end potentially could find him. what happens then. they’re the two leftover simons trapped in hell forever would they manage to get along or would they hate each other 

i was really hoping they’d do more with the “there could be more versions of ourselves out there” concept i wanted to know what would happen if catherine was forced to deal with her original self in some way other than finding her dead, i wanted there to be some fucked up robot that believes itself to be simon out there

and i really think the way they handled catherine’s character was. well done but i wish they’d expanded on her more honestly 

i wanted to know more about what life on the ark is like and how simon fit in with the others and to actually see alive, human catherine a little closer up but that’s just beyond the scope of the game i think, the way they ended it was very nice and if they’d included an entire “simon learning to fit in/simon meeting everyone else” sequence it would’ve just dragged it out and wouldn’t have ended as neatly so. im satisfied but i stil wish i knew more though

and i want.... to know what the simon that was left behind did........ i mean we can only assume he eventually died there, there’s nothing else he could’ve done, but.... what did he do.... did he try to find a way to live for a while or did he just... find a method of suicide... i wonder if he ever was able to fix catherine or if she was just gone forever 

what if he did manage to turn her back on and they reconciled with each other and at least. weren’t alone until the end. there’s still a few robots left even if no one else is

do you think catherine in the ark ever told simon that they left his other self behind. i mean i figured out immediately that that was going to happen based on past experiences but judging by the reactions of the simon that was left behind, he did not make that connection

im guessing based on how catherine tended to act toward simon (assuming he knows things he doesn’t, not telling him things that would upset him) she probably never did and just let him believe he was only transferred 

but it’s likely someone else will probably make him realize that eventually i mean... theres at least 3 people in there who committed suicide after they got the scans

i guess the scanned versions of them dont know that since it happened after they were scanned in but they’d still remember having that intention

i also still rly like my “theres a fucked up WAU version of simon behind all this” theory even tho it didnt turn out to be true,

[blookmallow]

oh my god wait #soma spoilers (also some. penumbra spoilers mention bc im comparing a thing)

those weird. things that when you touch them and they heal you for some reason

at first you just touch them, then it starts like. swallowing your hand but then it lets you go and every time it heals you

catherine said that’s. i dont completely understand but she said it’s like a cancer, it’s sort of biological sort of artificial but either way it’s not sentient and doesn’t think or feel (or she claims it doesn’t, who knows) 

it’s slowly infecting the whole complex, it’s breaking through walls it’s eating the power it’s killing humans or latching onto them like parasites (i think it’s the “black blood” that the other scientist tore their eyes out for too) 

and I’m using them to heal myself 

this is not a good thing : ) it’s gonna get worse isn’t it it’s gonna do more than just pulling simon’s hands in

it goes right along with philip using the artifacts as save points even though they were slowly infecting him the whole time (i forget exactly what those were was that the way clarence got into him? i mean im sure even if you manage not to ever touch one you’d still have that happen im sure if there was a “philip never gets infected” ending id have heard of it by now :’) but. point is its the same ‘these things are helping you and you need them but it’s doing something very bad to you and you cant avoid it’ thing) 

could arguably be similar to daniel using laudanum constantly despite the fact that that’s very probably making his hallucinations worse too

i love how there’s like. little similar mechanics that make it feel familiar and make it feel like frictional while being so completely different that it doesn’t feel lazy or too similar either

soma feels very very penumbra-like and im sure ill have an entire essay worth of words on that when i finish it :’) 

[blookmallow]

Amnesia vs. Penumbra (for the opinion thing)

HI sorry i got caught up in school stuff and didnt see this 

this is a subject i could go on about forever but in a nutshell:

i LOVE both of them, amnesia is my personal favorite between the two

this is kinda long and confusing theres a lot of different. aspects of the games to consider and i got a lil rambly

spoilers ahead (for both) (im not rly talking about machine for pigs in this one tho)

i think daniel is a more interesting protagonist to me because we hear more from him than we do from philip, he’s more directly involved in the story of amnesia itself whereas philip just sort of ended up in the story of penumbra, there’s a deeper connection to what you’re experiencing because its daniel realizing that all this pain and suffering is his own fault and you don’t really get that with philip

but then there’s also a really strong emotional connection with philip too specifically because he’s innocent, this isn’t his fault and he doesn’t deserve any of it but it just keeps getting worse for him, you’re watching him getting slowly corrupted by the environment he’s in, the infection is spreading to him and he’s got a voice in his head mocking him now and you’re right there experiencing it with him 

they’re both really great characters i just feel like there’s a little bit more depth with daniel 

the graphics in amnesia are a little bit better since it came out later, penumbra’s graphics are not bad by any means but amnesia is definitely a lot more. visually appealing i guess

penumbra’s a lot harder than amnesia, it’s very frustrating at times, it’s challenging but it’s also just. there were a lot of times when i just didn’t even want to deal with it anymore and wasn’t sure id ever get past certain sections and that’s not good :’)

amnesia’s monsters are more difficult to sneak around (you can generally just kinda outrun the infected in penumbra but there’s other sections of the game that are waayyy harder) but penumbra’s infected are scarier to me because you know that they were human once and you know that that’s what you’re turning into once you get clarence, you can hear them speaking and searching for you vs in amnesia yea the grunts used to be human but they don’t look like it anymore and it doesn’t quite register as anything other than “MONSTER, RUN” (tho i do love the designs of the monsters in amnesia A+ terrifying) and they just make noises at you. they are really scary noises tho

penumbra was a lot scarier to me and i think it hit harder emotionally than amnesia did, maybe because amnesia ended on a more triumphant “maybe daniel will be okay after this” note (if you get a good ending) while penumbra just sort of. gets really confusing and you don’t really know what happened to philip at all in the end

all the life gets crushed out of him, he’s got nothing left to fight for anymore by the end of it vs in amnesia there’s way more emphasis on redemption, you’re given the ability to have an ending where you defeat alexander and maybe even help agrippa 

you don’t get that in penumbra

you have to stab a corpse in the brain and cut off a dude’s head in amnesia (he wanted you to tho it apparently doesnt hurt him its part of the ritual or w/e :’) but still) but in penumbra you have to incinerate your only friend while you listen to him scream and face philip’s trauma later on after he’s done it, you have to hand a doctor a saw to cut off his own hand for you, you have to kill an infected that turns out to have been a woman that might’ve loved you and genuinely wanted to help you, penumbra makes you do WAY more awful shit you don’t want to do and it was so much more painful for me in the best of ways 

i also went into amnesia after having watched someone else play it on youtube already so i had a pretty good understanding of what was going to happen while i went into penumbra 100% blind which probably made a difference too

[blookmallow]

mandus-sexual replied to your post:i love how like. in dark descent when u do the...

…yeah and oswald never said anything when you might have done something wrong; just goes to show that maybe he didn’t know what he was doing the whole time

with oswald you pretty much only get his notes and random like "WHERE ARE MY CHILLDDDRREENNNNNNN" dialogue notes so 

i also (i commented on this in my mfp LP i think but) i like how daniel's notes to self are like "passage blocked. need to find another entry." and oswald's are like "tHE DAMNED, VILE, HIDEOUS PASSAGE HAS BEEN CLOGGED UP LIKE THE DISEASED ARTERIES OF THE MACHINE, I MUST FIND ANOTHER WAY... I MUST.... FOR MY CHILDREN...."

i cant remember what philip's notes r like im pretty sure they're just like daniel's 

[blookmallow]

somethin ive been thinking about 

the corpses in amnesia seem very. dehumanized to me like they all look pretty much the same, they all don't have clothes they don't have hair they're just sort of blank bodies

and they're ALL male too i dunno why that is since we know there were women, id say it was to avoid showing female nudity but i mean they show the whole goddamn everything on the male corpses so idk

now on the one hand that could just be lazy design but if you consider the fact that penumbra came out before amnesia, and those corpses have at least some distinguishing features about them to the point that you can tell it's not the same corpse model 

let's talk about the difference between use of corpses in penumbra vs amnesia, shall we? this is all just my opinion and me speculating 

definitely major penumbra spoilers

and amnesia spoilers i guess but i think most people know those already

machine for pigs spoilers too but i dont really have my thoughts as clear on that one 

--

in Penumbra you actually don't see corpses nearly as often, there's only a few of them (to the point that i probably could count them off by memory if i thought about it long enough)

while there are the occasional ones you just sort of see lying around with no idea of who they were or how they died, several of the corpses have MAJOR plot significance

most of (but not all of) the corpses in Penumbra aren't just "some dead guy" - we have some hint of who they were, Philip looks at them and comments on how awful their death must have been, and I think often he comments like "I wonder if they could have helped me..."

the whole thing Penumbra does to you is it kills every little glimmer of hope Philip gets (which is why i absolutely expected amabel's death, but I didn't expect the way she died, though i wasnt surprised when i realized it)

I think the first actual corpse you see is a great example - you find a note from a nice, over-optimistic perhaps, but helpful sounding scientist promising to meet up with you and have hot chocolate 

sounds too good to be true, and it is- you find him, and he's dead. there's a name tag on his body so you know who he was, you know that he was the one who wrote that note and he could have helped you, but he's dead 

you find notes from the people who now lay dead, you find the corpse of philip's father locked away in a hidden room, you see amabel's corpse lying dead on the floor after you killed her 

Corpses in penumbra are meant to be human, they're meant to have emotional weight and significance to them, Philip is an unwitting innocent who wandered into this mess and his every hope of escape and safety always ends up getting taken away from him 

every corpse you find just enhances that sense of despair and hopelessness, and that feeling that you really are alone 

Amnesia is much different than that

the corpses you find are human of course but it's almost like they aren't, you just find pieces of dead flesh and piles of bodies that all look the same all around you, daniel hardly comments on them (apart from noting that the one corpse in the morgue is fresher- though his sanity drains from looking at the piles, so you know it is affecting him) there's so many corpses it's practically impossible to even guess at how many there really are 

you don't know how many there are

you don't know who they were

you don't know anything about them they have no names they're just in piles all over the floor 

we do know the names and stories of some of the victims (mostly from the extra Remember file) but you don't find those corpses in particular (or do you? how would you know) (except you never find female corpses so you don't find the mother and daughter)

i don't think there's a single corpse in dark descent that we have any concept of who that person was

and i think that's actually the point- daniel didn't think about who they were either. he didn't know he didn't really care all that much (I think he did care to some extent, but not enough to stop himself or question Alexander)

he was told they were criminals, and he accepted that, he lost his ability to see them as humans with lives and families and names 

they really did become nothing but piles of flesh to him, he stopped seeing them as human and we're seeing the game through his eyes

Daniel's known for hallucinations (and even hallucinates corpses in several places if your sanity's low enough- which makes me question how many of them were real to begin with) so I can't help but wonder if maybe those corpses don't actually look like that at all 

maybe they all do look like individuals but daniel just sees them as all the same now 

I'm not sure how to interpret that into machine for pigs 

there's definitely not as many corpses around in the first place, you see two that I remember in the city and then there's a pile of them on the ground in one place (i know because i died LITERALLY ON TOP OF IT)

then you see the torsos in the butcher machine and a few floating bits of people in the. i dont know how else to describe it, the entire lake of blood room

there's a hell of a lot of blood but only in one part of the game pretty much

but then maybe that's intentional too

Mandus is surrounded in pigs and blood (there are blood stains all over the place before the section with the. um. blood rivers. and you find several pig corpses, at least one of which you can actually pick up and interact with if you want to) but rarely ever any of the actual corpses of the people he killed

and the whole thing with mandus is he never kills people directly (except for the twins and that one professor oops) he always does it through the use of his machines, he's never directly involved with the murder and the corpses with his own hands

but he knows the effects of it he knows full well what he's doing 

the blood is there but you don't see the person it came from 

but there is so much blood 

I feel like maybe even mandus himself wasn't prepared for the amount of blood he was going to encounter, i dont know if he really realized he'd produced enough to make rivers of and fill an entire room with 

and the best part is he had to wade through it

[blookmallow]

ohh im watching cry's LP of penumbra and i think i just understood something (penumbra spoilers)

--

clarence says at one point "I SHOULD BE WITH THEM, THERE SHOULD BE NO "I"!" 

i think that's why most infected people were "not allowed to die" but clarence keeps encouraging philip to kill himself 

philip got out of the hallucination thing 

no one else had ever done that, the hallucination was supposed to take him over and infect him entirely, but he escaped it, it didn't work

so clarence ended up being separated from the tuurngait 

that's why he's different 

philip broke it and messed him up 

so clarence wanted philip to die so that he (clarence) could be reincorporated with the tuurngait like he's supposed to be but as time goes on i think maybe he mighta had some second thoughts about that, maybe he realized he liked his freedom even if it meant being stuck with philip

i think thats right?

[blookmallow]

which frictional monsters r ur fav

grunts, i think

i HATE penumbra wolves and spiders thats for sure

the infected are the scariest ones to me tho

the pig monsters in machine for pigs just arent scary to me i cant take them seriously 

but like the grunts are a really cool kind of horror to me because usually they’re not bursting out at you (like the infected do. hhaa. like they’re not jumpscare levels of bursting out but its still usually like OH GOD N O NO NO NO NO) usually like

you see one from a distance and it just looks like a not-quite-right figure, or you hear that familiar growl and its like nnOOOO

the music that plays when one’s there is GREAT it does a perfect job of instilling that feeling of fear and unease and also helps to tell you when one’s there and when it left 

and i just think they look the coolest 

[blookmallow]

i thought of something vERY UPSETTING ( #penumbra spoilers )

i still dont understand the ending of requiem but 

basically either philip's dead (the most likely option) 

or i mean. even if he didn't die he's probably not going to be able to get out of there. im not even sure he wants to anymore he said he hopes he'll be dead by the time his email sends out 

so either he let himself die or killed himself, probably

or maybe he just. holed himself up in that room and. what if he got stuck there for years. what if he ended up like red 

what if the person he emailed really did come 

but by the time they found him he wasn't philip anymore 

not like they knew him