#gameblogging

[downtroddendeity]

I'd seen lots of people describe Night in the Woods as being heavily rooted in the experience of growing up in a dying small town in the American Rust Belt, but somehow nobody told my West Virginian ass that it's so Appalachian that I probably live closer to where Mae's house would be than to the nearest IKEA.

[eyeswaitingfortuesdaynight]

it's midnight and i'm lowkey crying about genshin impact, specifically the traveller and their abyssal twin (natlan archon quest spoilers below)

it's just AUGH. the whole revelation about the abyssal twin waking up with amnesia and living in khaenri'ah for YEARS and becoming their prince/ss before they started remembering the traveller makes so much sense in retrospect in terms of their actions

it doesn't compute to the traveller (or myself, up to this point) why the abyssal twin is going to such lengths to save khaenri'ah, including and up to refusing to leave with the traveller and rewriting reality and fight gods, etc. they're probably long lived if not straight up immortal and have been to most likely multiple worlds - why specifically does teyvat make the abyssal twin want to stay and fight so badly? sure, the traveller will help the people in front of them, but they're not invested in teyvat the same way the abyssal twin is, and it's stated they both had very similar personalities and viewpoints before all this happened

but if the abyssal twin views khaenri'ah as their home and its people as theirs and values it just as much as their relationship with the traveller, it all clicks for me. they are extremely invested in the planet now and are not going to leave it willingly while this situation with khanrei'ah is so dire. it also makes their explicit guilt for abandoning khanrei'ah to search for the traveller even more heartwrenching

i am now convinced that istaroth set up the whole time loop situation because the only way the heavenly principles could take down khaenri'ah the way they wanted to was to get the abyssal twin out of the picture. because the abyssal twin is far too powerful to take out easily and too invested to not be involved in khaenri'ah's hour of need, literally the only way istaroth/the heavenly principles could do it was by dangling clues about the traveller in their face and luring them out to look for them because their relationship with the traveller was literally the only thing that could trump their relationship with khaenri'ah. it's genuinely heartbreaking and obviously feeds into the abyssal twin's guilt about the whole situation even more, even though they weren't the ones that got khaenri'ah into this mess in the first place

i'm also lowkey convinced that the abyssal twin asked the traveller to explore teyvat because they were hoping the traveller would get just as invested and want to stay on teyvat so they wouldn't have to choose between leaving khaenri'ah behind or abandoning their twin. the abyssal twin already made that choice once and i'm sure this time, with everything that's happened, the abyssal twin will stay with khaenri'ah instead

[loyalhorror]

I’ve been playing a game on mobile (but there’s a web browser for it too! I haven’t tested it myself) called FarmRPG and man. the community is so nice it rules. highly recommend if you like text based idle games centered around farming. to me it kind of gives the same oldschool vibes as furcadia did (though they are obviously very different games)

my referral code is E36AF1 if you want to use it but like. you don’t have to. go take a peek at it anyway

there’s a mailbox system where people can send each other gifts and the community just has this like. spirit of “aggressive kindness” where everyone just LOVES spamming people with free items to help them, especially when you’re new. it’s so cute skgdkgk

[domidextrus]

I'm with Fredrik on this: Hypnospace Outlaw's worldbuilding is absolutely goated. Not only does every song you come across perfectly convey this "wild-west-era internet" landscape of fluctuating quality between professional acts and amateur musicians, but it also invents an entire branching history of music genres AND EVEN FRICKIN' MUSIC MEDIA EVOLUTION.

I'm just so gobsmacked at how thorough this game's setting is!

[thevoidlookedback]

So I’m just checking here.

Are there people who don’t think Marcus Holloway and Wrench are dating?

[foxingpeculiar]

Death Stranding blogging:

I have now finished the game. I’m still processing all of it, but I think I basically understand how it all ties together.

So, if I have this right: Bridget has a near-death experience in her 20s, which separates her soul and body, basically. The soul half is the woman we’ve known as Amelie. But because of this trauma and split, she essentially becomes an EE—a link between the worlds of the living and the dead. This causes the initial appearance of BTs (the voidout in Manhattan), and is what spurs her into researching BBs. Clifford, meanwhile, almost loses his pregnant wife and his son becomes a BB that’s part of Bridget’s program. But she’s using him, not actually trying to save his son, so he tries to escape with the baby, helped by his old soldier buddy Die-Hardman, who is now Bridget’s right hand. In the process, both Clifford and the baby are killed, but Bridget freaks out and uses her Amelie half to find the baby on the beach and bring it back to the world of the living. This act accelerates the connection between the living world and the other side and essentially causes the Death Stranding—a much more worldwide/massive version of the thing that had previously happened in Manhattan. This baby then grows up to be Sam, who she adopts and raises. The Amelie half, because of her nature as an EE is setting the stage for the Last Stranding, and is using Higgs to help push that plan along, even though she has also set up the now grown Sam to stop her (this is the part I’m fuzziest on—how she’s working both for and against the apocalypse). Setting up the Chiral network is also part of this plan, since it taps into the Beach and the more firmly connects the world of the living to the Beach multiverse… or something like that. Bridget continues the BB experiments but keeps DHM out of the loop because he’s still fucked up about what happened to Clifford, since they’re integral to the chiral network. And while all of this is happening, Clifford’s spirit—trapped in the trauma of war that he experienced—is clawing its way back into the living world searching for his son, making him like a unique kind of BT-type thing that causes the big supercell storms.

I think.

The whole Sam/BB misdirect was a pretty fun move. I didn’t cotton on to it until almost the end, just a bit before the reveal, but looking back, there’s foreshadowing for it throughout the game. I’m thinking specifically of a moment when you’re carrying Mama to Mountain Knot and she talks to Sam about how she remembers being in the womb and asks him if he does too. Even after BB is “reset” and had its memory erased by Deadman, we still get the flashbacks. And of course there’s the whole “Sam was raised by Bridget” detail that gets mentioned early on, but the story quickly distracts you from that detail with so much other bonkers stuff going on that you don’t really think to question how that situation came to be. It’s well-executed.

I was also impressed by how Kojima’s characteristic anti-war messaging was deployed here. The BB program has parents (Clifford in particular) essentially sacrificing their children “to protect the country” (Bridget’s words, which she says herself are a lie). But that sacrifice sucks the children into the same cycle of trauma that their parents endured—we see this represented in the fact that the war flashback episodes progress through generations from WWI the first time, then, WW2, then Vietnam. I dunno—that thought/analysis needs more cooking time, but there’s an interesting thread (strand? haha) of sociopolitical commentary there.

The theme of connection is fairly obvious—both narratively and in the gameplay elements of the shared world and the “Likes” system and all that, but what strikes me as more potent to the narrative is the idea of moving past trauma. Amelie says, during her long spiel on the beach, that “extinction forces life to endure and survive,” that our whole existence is in defiance of the universe trying to return us to nothingness, and we see that in all of the characters. Everyone in this game is half-dead in some way, has endured some horrible shit, but it is by coming together through and despite that that they’re able to save the world and allow life to persist and flourish. Pain and trauma isolate us, make us fear each other, recoil from one another, But if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to move through that, that’s how we survive, that’s what gives our lives meaning. And that’s a powerful message, delivered in a bizarre and certainly wildly idiosyncratic but nonetheless effective way, which is what makes for an interesting piece of art.

As a couple of side notes: the cameos were wild and unexpected. Conan O’Brien I obviously recognized, but also Junji Ito? Edgar Wright? What!? Also, I really enjoyed Higgs breaking the fourth wall (referring to his fight with Sam as a boss fight, for example). God, there were other little things that jumped out at me, but I can’t remember them all now—I’m just kind of sitting with it.

I also finished it remarkably fast (34 hours). I definitely did a bunch (though definitely not all) of the standard orders and whatnot, so I’m not sure why it went by so quickly, but I guess I’m not complaining. It’s definitely a game I’ll revisit at some point, though probably not for some time.

But now I need to ponder what I want to play next. Hmmm.

[foxstens]

the reason i stick with sorcery in souls games isn't because i like it. it's because i despise the alternative

[crimsonfluidessence]

Preliminary Dawntrail Thoughts

I haven't played Dawntrail yet, but my opinion is simple:

It has manatees, so it objectively cannot be a bad expansion. I don't make the rules, I am bound by them.

Thank you for your time.