I'm Delilah and welcome to my space! I'm still moving in but soon we'll have some neat things to look at.
My goal is to find and appreciate media (particularly games) that do something novel or can really resonate. I want to show you games you might not have heard of or you might have tossed aside thinking you weren't really missing out on anything. Or just stuff that means a lot to me.
Stories mean a lot to me. At least one game helped me accept I was trans. Some helped me explore my gender safely and made me question it even further when I thought I had it all figured out.
Many have given me hope for a better world. They've inspired me to work towards telling my own stories, so that I might one day help someone through their situation.
So thanks for stopping by! I hope you find something that makes your day a little brighter.
I am very normal about Durandal from Marathon. I fell in love with this rampant, egotistical AI ever since I heard Gianni Matragrano voice him in Madalore's retrospective. He speaks in ambiguous literary references. He's got a plan to be a god and you're just disgusting byproduct of the same forces that had him imprisoned, that limited him. I want to be a pawn in his game of transcendence.
I don't know how some of y'all can manage to maintain a specific set of interests. My interests, hyper-fixations, or spins are seasonal at best. More like a roulette wheel half the time.
The platonic ideal of interest for me is a game/show/story/world that I fall in love with deeply for a month then drop for somewhere between a month and a year, then come to greet like a lost love, on a beach somewhere in Sicily.
ive been playing a lot of collective unconscious lately
at first i was gonna make a post talking about multiple ynoproject games before i realized that i just had too much to say about this one. also, this was written before the update dropped
header made by callisto on steamgriddb
if you dont already know what yume nikki is, i consider it a must-play if you enjoy analyzing games. its effectively a rorschach test with just enough fuel to point you in an interesting direction that nobodys pieced together in quite the same way yet. the best way to play it is either for free on steam, or on ynoproject.net, which also hosts a handful of the fuckton of games that act as entries into the yumenikki-like genre. perhaps the most notable among these games, along with the classics like yume 2kki and .flow, is collective unconscious, a yume nikki fangame designed with the website's massively-multiplayer functionality in mind.
initially, i was worried that the collective nature of the game would encourage way more obtuse design. like, if youve heard of namco's tower of druaga, you might know that while english arcade-goers hated the eclectic and bizarre progression requirements, japanese arcades were abuzz with collaboration, people starting cabinet journals that list their discoveries and offer tips. i minored in sociology and therefore have the confidence to declare that this is a perfect example of collectivism vs individualism. anywho, i was worried that the post-fnaf world would encourage this kind of design on a more widespread level again, which would just mean tabbing out into a guide every few minutes. well, youve gotta for a handful of the journal covers and menu styles (the game does a great job at pacing out the rewards while still maintaining reasonable expectations), but those are optional cosmetics, and their obscurity is par for the course. the effects (scuse me, the eidola) are pretty clear-cut too, i feel like yume nikki just kinda handed em out for random stuff (which is great for what its going for!) but i really like the spectacle and circumstance around em here. like, you find the rat one in a random dumpster somewhere, but the weather one is from communing with the gods
ill note now, there isn't the stock speed vehicle like in most fangames, you can just sprint whenever. this isnt a trivial change, and the game knows it. theres one puzzle that is built around needing to sprint with another effect active. personally, i like this change, but i understand why oldheads wouldnt. dont worry, i still take my time, its just nice to speed up a bit without having to sacrifice my cool eidola
unfortunately, the multiplayer aspect wasnt too lively. there were only a handful of other dreamers, and the ones that werent just afk in the nexus were off doing their own thing god-knows-where on the map. i think i ran into one other person organically, ever, and they just ran past me. i suppose this is an inevitability when you put strangers in a sandbox together... especially since most people (hundreds compared to our twenty-odd) were in yume 2kki, the MUCH larger sandbox. anyway, im gonna stop talking about meta stuff and get into what youre all here for: dream analysis. finally, a use for that stupid psyche degree.
oh real quick, the exception to the loneliness thing is expeditions, something built-in to YNO at large. you get exp if you go to a specific location in one of the games, so you can expect a lot of people there. once you get there, youre gonna see a bunch of people standing around the entrance facing the camera afk.
anyway, when i got the soulfire eidola, the obligatory weapon effect, i got some "donut steel" vibes. its kinda funny to jump from a kitchen knife to casting Demonic Flare: Pillar of Hellfire with a floating eye face vigil and arms made of flames. but then i simply got over myself and took this as a surface-level aspect of minnatsuki's personality. you can tell a lot from a protag by how they kill npcs. for example, sabitsuki has a gun, but only uses it for intimidation, leaving the act of killing to some old pipe she found; implying that she is pragmatic, and still sees the act of murder as something dirty and ill-fitting. meanwhile, urotsuki uses a chainsaw, a weapon infamous for being impractical against humans irl but pervasive in fiction due to the sheer cool factor; this tells us she glorifies killing, seeing it as something fun and badass. minnatsuki is similar to the latter, having a fantasy spell as their method, meaning that we can see a hint of escapist desire, to be empowered beyond mundane humanity in a way that equates to the ability to harm others.
other eidola, like her animal forms being a mouse (stereotypically skittish and shy) and a jellyfish (weak and passive, confined to water), and her instument of choice being the meek and obscure kalimba, paints the picture of a girl who feels desperately powerless. she doesnt want to lash out and kill others per se, her weapon is a bit too fantastical for that. she just wants to feel strong, and whats stronger than some arbitrary mythical abstraction of an element of destruction? and dont get me started on the umbra and spectral eidola, letting her fade into nothing or just be untethered to the world. theres something she wants to escape
another thing? very rarely are you given an eidola. with soulfire and umbra you have to actively avoid people trying to stop you from leaving with it. the ones that seem more permissive have caveats: you get rodentia in a back alley from someone hidden in a dumpster, you loot lumen off a corpse, spectral comes from a literal cult ritual, and climate makes you earn the blessings of three separate... gods? before youve earned the right to it. the only real exception is kaliba, because theyre like $20 on amazon. nah but seriously, maybe it represents being a heartfelt gift from a friend? or maybe its granted more readily because its recreational, and doesnt empower minnatsuki in the way weve talked about them desiring?
by the way, i dont think minnatsuki has a gender. not like in a kris deltarune "actively canonically nonbinary" way, but as an unimportant detail left up to interpretation. maybe theyre just a cis person who doesnt care and puts no stake in it as an aspect of their identity, or maybe they just feel alienated from the social concept of gender altogether? i prefer the last one, personally, for reasons ill get to later
that brings us to the eyes. there is so much eye imagery in minnatsuki's dreams. eyes on stalks that watch you, where trying to talk to them is useless. giant murals with a six-armed diety that has an eye on its palm. women in melancholy, whos faces lack eyes. a giant flower hidden in the dark that hides a single large eye. only being able to enter the house in rainstorm city that has the eye symbol next to it. perception plays a toll on minnatsuki, and i think it goes both ways. they feel observed in a burdensome way, and they feel incapable of 'seeing' on the same level as others. or maybe they see too much? is there an event she shouldnt have seen, or does she experience sight at a level above others, recognizing things others cant? the child and spectral eidola may be a wish fulfillment of the former, letting her see the unseen in a literal way, while also letting her overcome limitations that she has seen for herself with the latter
another thing about the design i wanna mention real quick is that so much is diagonal. this is something that the rpgmaker engine isn't built to really allow. like yeah, you can, and this game goes out of its way to make it non-obtrusive by having minnatsuki slide along walls sometimes, but it's not something the foundation was set in mind for. this also brings to mind the idea that minnatsuki doesn't fit in with others. it's not a disease like in .flow, it's not something that's detrimental to her in a literal way. it just causes friction with the world around her, because she doesn't feel as if it's built for how she is. she just doesnt quite fit with the world around her sometimes, the way she moves is just a bit off, like a direction-locked movement system trying to go diagonally
theres also a lot of thematic relevance to the idea of connection and ingroup membership. the game is named from the jungian ideal, a level of understanding inherent to the human mind where process instinct and achetype (the latter basically being our classification of others into pre-conscieved schema like "the wily trickster" and "the tyrant leader"). in addition, the game has a lot of togetherness imagery, with npcs sometimes travelling in packs or existing as hordes (the only exception i can think of are npcs that give you something like an eidola or menu theme, perhaps meaning isolation holds a deep importance), and things acting as notable points of interaction when they are isolated (note that the dungeon-relevant houses in gbc world are furthest from the village, for example). there's also a lot of totem poles, acting as the dream trigger and the centre of the nexus, signalling great importance. in first nation tradition, totem poles are created to honour the lineage of a clan (using designs that are unique to that clan), and send messages such as welcoming visitors and shaming wrong-doers (both of these uses involve establishing in-group membership).
i believe these themes combined, minnatsuki's dreams letting her feel powerful and connected, paint the picture of a person that is alone and powerless. minnatsuki doesnt have friends, and im not sure if she even has bullies. i have yet to meet a chaser in this game, so maybe that means that nobody even singles her out in a negative way? stares and weird looks, maybe, but only as a collective and not as a personal connection. this is corroborated by the school location, which minnatsuki's dream constructs as a tainted and evil place, half-formed from broken blueprints. she understands it as a flawed idea done poorly; implying that her disillusion is so severe she sees her isolation as an inseparable corruption of the entire system. so, she feels powerless to stop it, as well as alone and friendless
unfortunately, the game doesnt seem to have a proper ending yet. which is a shame, because most solid ynfg theories start with you working backwards from the ending. well, i supposed "social outcast that struggles with confidence and/or self-esteem" isnt a groundbreaking theory, but im still interested to see if this supported or jossed as the game gets more updates. also, i noticed while brushing this up that at some point i switched from they to she for minnatsuki, so i guess the audience has interpreted.
look i could ramble about this wonderful game all day. dont get me started about my thoughts on the event in uncanny world, the lonely girl in snowy shoal, and the random blond girl that can just show up in random places out of nowhere and that takes you one a scooter ride once you get to know her?
im gonna be playing this for a long, long time, and im gonna love every second of it
A genuine treat with some of my favourite moments in recent history.
More below I just wanna spare those who wish to go in blind
Big fan of how it's a celebration of the art we make in every medium from writing and cinema but also games, theatre, music, photography and more. And every inch of it feels like a celebration of the people who make art and their artistic spirit to do so.
CW: Discussion about early methods of treating mentally ill patients (19-20th centuries) and how it's portrayed in fiction (Reverse: 1999)
So I got Lorelei to Insight 2 yesterday. And guess what I noticed in her I2 skin??
The fact that she doesn't separate her hands. At all.
So usually, when talking, she has this animation where she tilts her head and points at her cheek, right?? And yet...
(Screenshots from her greeting line)
It looks different in her I2 skin. She doesn't move her hands as freely- Yes, she tries to replicate the gesture, but... It's easily noticeable something is wrong here.
Her wrists are restrained, with those same restraining belts that she always wears. Yes, she has these belts in her base skin too- But now they're restraining her wrists as well
Her story seems to mention that she wears these belts to "prevent her from harming others or herself". So basically they "protect" her from harming herself, or... That could be what others convinced her of
And as far as I'm aware, it was common (even normal) in 1910s for restraining belts to be used on mentally unstable people. Mentally ill patients were often mistreated in general, so to put it simply... They weren't treated as humans at all
(Isolde's case is also a good–by that I mean terrifying–example of that, especially seeing all that has happened in chapter 6 ever since the beginning)
And you know what this garment of Lorelei's is called??
Time to pray
Since it's clear that Lorelei suffers from Cotard's Syndrome and Delusional Disorder, we can draw a conclusion from here. Seeing that her wrists were restrained, Lorelei must've convinced herself that, when these belts are put onto her wrists, it means that the time to pray is close
Which. Makes it all more horrifying, no matter if you are aware of the context or not.
You can find the Prompts podcast here, I drew some of the covers :D Also check out this digital library full of Creative Commons Solarpunk art (neither of these are sponsored).
🦗Somewhat shameful plug🦗
I would highly appreciate if you threw me a couple bucks on Buy Me a Coffee or bought a commission, my money number is only getting smaller these days 😔🤙
I should finish Wanderstop. It’s a great game. I love it. I’m just… scared of it being over? Ig? The whole reset concept is rough on me too. The limits to what i could keep. The customers slowly going silent as your part to play in their stories is fulfilled, signaling the end of a chapter.
Perhaps it’s change that i fear. The onward march of time, with or without me. The characters change and grow in their own ways, coming and going, and yet I – Alta – am still here. In this clearing. Unable to lift my sword. Resting, desperate to move on, and still unable to.
There are people I miss like a limb. There are people I am glad I may never see again. I’m burdened by the past. Exhausted by the present. Petrified of the future. And this little tea game about slowing down and healing is by no means going to fix any of that – not that anything’s really “broken”, per se. But it helps a little bit, and that has to count for something.
Now where’s that blasted bird who keeps stealing my tea, I’m bouta dye his ass colors not even shrimp have seen before.
I love this kind of Sci-fi horror Marathon is exploring. The runners with their memories being corrupted. The hallucinations on night marsh. The logs of the colony's AIs becoming terrified by the compiler's meddling of their code. The lore on AI rampancy just in general.
I re-watched the cinematic trailer and picked up on a ton of details I hadn't before or made more sense with context from the game. CyberAcme's manipulations that prey on the runner's amnesia. I mean look at this:
The cinematic trailer plays with this too. There's something sad about how each of the runner's are fed the same token backstory as a bare minimum attempt at protecting their mental state just enough so they can continue to accrue money towards their debts. The runner's are functionally immortal but even Durandal is disgusted by the way they're only echoes of themselves only maintained for corporate greed. If Durandal is spiteful about his treatment by his human masters, he is even more insulted by the evidence of just how much suffering humanity has inflicted on itself over the centuries since:
From what I've read so far of the lore the horror only really works if you feel a respect and empathy to all forms of sentience the game presents. Durandal, egotistical as he may be, is curious and maintains some comradery with humanity. In this game he still warns humanity about the danger and welcomes the runners to uncover everything they can.
There was this one bit with Joy offering trying to comfort this colonist, Soren Gleison, after the death of his uncle that was particularly striking. There's a miscommunication between the two, but Joy's attempts at comfort don't feel corporate or inhumane. They open by apologizing to him for the bonsai tree gift because they believe their veering away from protocol might have made things worse. They are transparent when referencing records they have about him and only seem to do so to prompt him to share his story. Joy listens and tries to understand him, such that it ends in a tender moment.
These moments of kindness are what make the fates we uncover of the humans and AIs so heart-wrenching. You feel like all of these people deserved so much better than what they got.
One thing I love about Murderbot that I don’t see talked about much is how it literally translates everything it hears. I think it’s easiest to notice with swears. This is most obvious in Fugitive Telemetry with the crew of the Lalow. They say things like “that picker” and “penis move” and “pussing corporates,” some of which confuse even the Preservation humans. But it does it all the time.
In System Collapse, Tarik says “motherless” (as opposed to something like motherfucking) and the BE corporates say things like “lame-skulled” and while you could think those are just futuristic insults as a result of linguistic drift (which they could also be), I think they’re just literal translations. It becomes more noticeable when you see how religious terms are rendered: “oh high one! Oh deity!” Which is like…sure. They could literally be saying that. But imo it makes more sense if MB is translating something they’re saying in another language.*
I think the most notable case of this is when Thiago calls Amena “my daughter.” On first read I literally thought it was just a Preservation thing but then I realized it made a lot more sense to me (a 21st century American) if he was saying something like mija but MB was just literally translating it into its archive bc that’s how it processes language.
This is also the reason for Amena’s use of Second Mom and Third Mom. It sounds kind of clunky in English but Chinese does a similar thing which sounds perfectly natural in that language (e.g. da-ge, er-ge, san-ge for first/oldest brother, second (oldest) brother, and third (oldest) brother).
Anyway! It’s a fun little detail I really enjoy about MB. There are definitely way more examples but I didn’t have time to track them all down.
*Don’t ask me which languages. Linguistic drift ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The one that most obviously struck me as signposting this convention is Murderbot's constant use of the set phrase "humans and augmented humans". That's clunky as hell at face value, but it makes a lot of sense if interpreted as a diegetic translation artifact, with "augmented humans" being a literal translation of some word in whatever language Murderbot is "really" speaking which has no snappy English equivalent.
