#horror game

[studiointerlude]

DEVIL'S LIMINAL: JULY 17

Margo’s home isn’t a safe place to keep important information anymore, with her mom going through her stuff. They decide to keep some books at Bec’s place for the time being, and Bec learns more about Margo’s dad.

[ultimateanna]

Resident Evil - Claire Redfield after Resident Evil Village

[ultimateanna]

Silent Hill 3 - Heather Mason

[franki-lew-yo]

I think I'd be 100% more behind Poppy Playtime, warts and all, if it did two things:

Ax the whole "tortured children being turned into toys" bit from the plot completely with only a couple of exceptions. To be clear, keep there being a dark secret involving children's suffering but DON'T make the toys literally transformed kids. Like, keep that the backstory of the Prototype and like one other big bad or something. For everyone else; just make them sentient toys who are hostile and hate Playtime co each for their own specific reasons, prolly the fact that they were never played with and they know that Playtime hurt real life children. You never get an explanation as to HOW the toys are alive; only that they are as much as their original mascot personality but driven mad, hostile and angry that you, a human, is interrupting their play. Why yes!: I am saying a complete rewrite would be in order. I literally didn't make the rules; the developers made the rules and I say the rules are stupid.

Besides the above-mentioned unexplained nature of the toys being alive and angry, in lieu of any 'bigger body' nonsense have it be that you, the player are a human shrunk down to the size of a toy. That would eliminate convoluted explanation for giant versions of the toys; there was a bit of toy-adjacent media in the 70s-90s that would depict humans and children being shrunken down to the size of their toys, plushies and action figures and treated it like this was a 'fun' outcome and not absolutely terrifying, like this one Wee Sings special.

Living/possessed toys as monsters, be they sympathetic or not, is one of my favorite horror tropes. I loved Sally the Ragdoll and my plushies but got nightmares from the Talking Tina audiobook of Twilight Zone. I was deeply afraid of Furrbees, animatronic toys and American Girl dolls growing up; anything that was remotely non-soft and large enough to hurt if it fell on me as a kid was 'horror' material.

Nowadays I love haunted "unwanted" dolls and beyond-repairable animatronic toys.

The too-cute-to-be-scary/to-scary-to-be-a-believable-mascot designs, the lore and references to the irl toy lines the Playtime co. characters are referenced, the endless exploring of your environment mixed with chase sequences-- all of this sounds like absolute GOLD to me, way more than anything FNAF or Bendy could ever do...and then you tack on the "ooooh they literally turned children into toys ooooh" and my brain turns off; AND THEN starts complaining about things like the endless underground and convoluted lore/background. All of the preexisting quirks and flaws of the game are made SO MUCH WORSE by that being a thing.

[more-dread]

[snuglystupendousscheme]

The Chart That Remembers

╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ OVER-DOSE.ORG ║ ║ ARCHIVAL FILE: OD-0001 ║ ║ STATUS: ████████░░ CORRUPTED (81%) ║ ║ CLASSIFICATION: TYPE-3 OVERDOSE ║ ║ (Medical Chart Recursion) ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

[PATIENT STATEMENT - RECOVERED FROM DELETED LOG]

"You don't understand. It wasn't the accident.

I remember waking up. The room was warm. Too warm. There was an IV in my arm, but when I followed the tube, it led to nothing—just a bag of clear liquid hanging on a hook, no label, no drip chamber.

The doctor walked in. He didn't check my vitals. He didn't look at the monitor. He just… sat down. And he asked me:

'Do you remember the first time we met?'

I said no.

He smiled. Not a cruel smile. A patient one. The kind a teacher gives a student who keeps getting the same question wrong.

He pulled out a chart. My chart. But it was thicker than it should have been. Pages and pages. I saw dates from years ago. Prescriptions I never filled. Allergies I never told anyone about. Notes in the margins, in his handwriting:

'Still doesn't remember.' 'Said the same thing as last time.' 'Dose adjusted. Observe.'

I asked him how long I had been here.

He looked at the clock. Then back at me. And he said:

'Longer than you think. Shorter than you fear.'

That was the moment I understood.

The overdose isn't the drug. It's the knowing. It's the slow realization that your entire medical history—your pain, your fears, your body—has been someone else's reading material. And the doctor isn't treating you.

He's collecting you.

[screamglasses]

That’s a boss fight, isn’t it?

It was basically a boss fight.