william kemp

Hi. I'm Will. This is my writing.

[williamwriteswell]

In which I gush about Stardew Valley

Holy sweet Christ I love me some Stardew Valley. LOVE ME SOME STARDEW VALLEY.

Let’s get that out of the way right now, because this is going to be nothing but an unabashed gushfest about one of the raddest games I’ve played in years, honestly.

First, a brief story:

For some ridiculous reason, little ol’ me with my cracking voice, during the summer of innocence before I got WAYYYY too into Linkin Park, got into Stardew Valley’s spiritual predecessor, Harvest Moon. Harvest Moon 64 came out in February of 1999 and for some reason I still can’t explain, I gravitated to the weird little deformed chibi dude on the box art with his weird little deformed chibi dog. And my mom bought me this wayyyyy overexpensive Japanese-as-fuck game for like $90 and I had no god-damned friends so I obsessed over Harvest Moon 64 during that summer. Like, I would play for a good eight hours a day probably three or four times a week and soon enough, by the end of the summer, I’d got NINE FUCKING YEARS into the game. I was like five years into marriage with the modest girl Ellie and I’m pretty sure we had twin kids and like really I wasn’t doing anything anymore but being a dad because the game’s story had run its course. And in grade nine, I flippantly let my best friend borrow Harvest Moon 64. AND THE MOTHERFUCKER SAVED OVER MY GAME. THE PIECE OF SHIT OVERWROTE MY FUCKING GAME AND I WAS DEVASTATED AND I STILL RESENT HIM FOR IT.

Anyway, this is all to say that I love me some Harvest Moon. Stardew Valley is very much Harvest Moon-esque. What makes Stardew Valley so fucking amazing is that unlike my poor pantomime of the Beat poets, Stardew Valley not only lives up to its inspirations, but kicks its inspiration’s teeth in and does it with some fuckin’ swagger.

To boil it down to a bullshit reductionist elevator pitch, Stardew Valley is a very very very very good Harvest Moon clone—to be much nicer, Stardew Valley is a very very very very very very good Harvest Moon homage. This game is the game I would make if I was able to program and design video games. It is everything I didn’t realize I wanted in a video game in 2016 until it just one unassuming day appeared and FUCKING CHANGED EVERYTHING.

If you’ve no clue what the Harvest Moon series is then I feel sorry for you. It’s a series that’s older than some of you reading this about farming. Yep. It’s a fuckin’ farming simulator. Throughout its various 2D and 3D incarnations you, as the player, have been on an island, you’ve been a girl, you’ve been a guy, you’ve been on a phone, etc. No matter what iteration of the series, though, you’ve been saving a city/village/little hamlet/island whatever by farming. And in Rune Factory, a spiritual successor of sorts to Harvest Moon, you also went dungeon raiding and fought some motherfuckers.

Stardew Valley is the most Harvest Moon/Rune Factory-ass game I’ve played in a long, long time. It’s even more of a Harvest Moon/Rune Factory game than a lot of the recent Harvest Moon/Rune Factory games.

So, if you’re like, “Why the fuck would I want to play a farming game?” then this isn’t for you but you are god-damned insane and a bad person and as The Dude says, well, you know, that’s your (very misguided) opinion, man.

So, why do I actually like this game? Honestly, the main factor is because it’s so damned similar to Harvest Moon. And yeah, sure, homage ain’t the most original thing and we, the people who play video games, “gamers” as you might call us, like to demand new experiences—lol not really—and homage, especially this blatant, is starting to become a bit stale but like hey not only is Stardew Valley not just another sequel it is doing what Natsume, Harvest Moon’s publisher isn’t doing anymore: putting out a fucking rad Harvest Moon game. It’s been a long-ass time since a good one of those, so Stardew Valley almost feels like a fan-made mod, or something. It’s fucking rad. What makes this game so much more than a “hey, this is a neat homage” is that it is demonstrably better than not only what it pays homage to, but can stand on its own merits.

In Stardew Valley—and in Harvest Moon and Rune Factory—the game is so much more than just farming. Yes, yes, you can get VERY VERY VERY DEEP into toiling away on your farm. Exactly like in Harvest Moon, in Stardew Valley, you inherit a piece of shit farm that has been abandoned for years and literally has overgrowth and trees and rocks and all this shit that you have to clear away before you even begin to make any progress. And it is monotonous and it sucks and you’ll spend at least a week in game time just toiling away, clearing shit. And that is boring. And it ought to be. But it is also weirdly zen-like. It’s a chore, for sure, but for you as the player, it feels like a strange kind of welcome relief; a getaway. Plus, you know, soon, that it will all be worth it.

And that’s the crux of Stardew Valley’s “gameplay loop”: it’ll all be worth it. 

You keep doing some pretty tedious/monotonous shit because you know something better will come along and it’ll all be worth it. You clear the shit on your land to begin farming and you toil away to plant seeds and you water your seeds dutifully to grow plants and produce to sell and get more money to get more seeds. You keep upgrading your tools to become more efficient. You get better at farming, you level up, to become more efficient and to eventually automate a lot of the monotony with sprinklers. You figure out the best way to set up your plants/produce to increase efficiency. You make your farm run like clockwork and put so much damned painstaking effort into doing so because it’ll pay off soon enough in the fact that a lot of the tedium is gone in the game, allowing you to explore the fascinating world of Stardew Valley’s Pelican Town and interact with its denizens.

So yeah, it’s not just about farming. It’s about, really, if anything, working towards automating the process of farming as much as you can to get to the real star of the game: the people and relationships you build with them.

In Stardew Valley, like the inspirations it wears on its sleeve proudly, you can get married. Awesomely, unlike its inspirations, not only can you completely customize your character’s appearance and sex (admittedly you could be a girl or a boy in later iterations of Harvest Moon/Rune Factory), but you can also marry people of the same sex. Fuck yeah it’s 2016. I’m currently romancing like two ladies and a dude and I genuinely don’t know who I want to marry. It’s fascinating.

It goes beyond just repeatedly giving beer/potatoes/cheese/blueberries/gems to random people and hoping they like you, though. You actually do forge some meaningful relationships with people. And not just with the goal of marrying them. Admittedly, yeah, at first, many characters are pretty one-note. You’ve got the stereotypes of the jock and the goth and the vapid blonde girl. And if there is a criticism to level at Stardew Valley, it’s that. But, just like, y’know, in real life, when you spend more time with people, and develop relationships with them, they become more rounded, fully-realized people. As I got to know people more, their idiosyncrasies revealed themselves to me. I actively sought out automatizing my farming activities so I could go interact with people. I became weirdly enraptured by the few frames of animation that played out in cutscenes that indicated a lot more. Seeing a little blob in the corner of a speech bubble change colour, indicating my relationship status with someone changed, was the raddest dopamine hit I’ve had from a game in a while.

What makes Pelican Town and its citizens so fascinating to interact with is how you, your agency, as a character, affects people. There is the most immediate level, of course: your relationship with someone. You give a gift to someone and they like it or hate it and that’s that. You listen to people bitch about their problems. They ask you how your farm’s going. You catch them at their most vulnerable in an unexpected cutscene and you gain insight into them as a person and you wanna fuckin’ connect, man. You figure out that someone is nothing more than their one-note depiction and they’re a fucking jerk and it doesn’t feel like bad writing so much as a real depiction of some real fucking jerks.

More than that, though, you witness relationships develop between people independent of you. Your interactions affect those relationships. The mayor of the town and the woman who owns the ranch are having a secret fling. One late, hazy summer night, I wandered out of the saloon to find them discussing their relationship and how they couldn’t come out about it because it might ruin the mayor’s reputation. And I had to decide whether or not to keep their relationship secret. What I decided to do would cause a ripple effect. Dat butterfly effect, doe. You become invested in these little pixelated people. You wanna see X and Y person get together. You’re rooting for them. You wanna know why Z person is such a dick.

Another thing I love about Stardew Valley is how the farming aspect and relationship building aspects of the game interact. It is, of course, rewarding as fuck to better your farm. It’s awesome to clear out a huge swath of rocks and toil some land and upgrade your watering can and so on. It’s awesome to harvest perfect melons. It’s awesome to get cows and a barn and to get a cheese press to turn your milk into cheese and then go into your kitchen and turn your cheese and a tomato and wheat into spaghetti. That shit’s rad as fuck. And then you learn that someone’s favourite dish is spaggetti. Well, now you are invested in bettering your farm because, hey, this person likes spaghetti and you like this person and you wanna impress them. And that’s fucking rad.

Oh, but it goes so much deeper. It goes beyond just relationships. Though there is no explicit end point to the game, a major arc throughout the game is the tension between a WalMart-esque conglomerate (that you TOTALLY USED TO WORK FOR OH SNAP WHAT!) taking over the town and a run-down shithole of a community centre being restored. And, of course, you are tasked with restoring the community centre. And you have to do so by gathering perfect crops and rare fish and fancy goat cheese and all types of shit. And you’re restoring this community centre by bettering your farming and foraging skills and getting goats and pigs and chickens and rabbits and turning milk into cheese and wool into cloth and all types of crazy shit. So the tedium of the day-to-day, the grind of it all, feels like it matters. It’s adding up to something. You feel invested beyond just appeasing people. You feel invested because it not only feels good to see progress on your farm, but you’re saving Pelican Town. Yeah, it’s on the nose, and it’s heavy-handed, but hey, man, fuck corporations, I type on my corporate-made laptop in my first-world apartment.

So, there seems to be a lot to this game, yeah? ‘Cause there fucking is. THERE’S SO MUCH. I’m into the Fall now, of the first year. And the game goes as long as you want it to, but, generally speaking, there’s story beats for about three years worth of content. Again, there’s no end goal, but the explicit purposes of the game are to save the community centre, get married, and make a dope-ass farm. I’m getting there and I’m loving it. Along the way I’ve done a shitttt-ton of stuff.

I’ve discovered two separate caves and fought a bunch of dickhole slime monsters and ghosts and other crazy shit and I’ve mined a bunch. Admittedly, yeah, the combat system is rudimentary, buttt it’s still engaging and fun and there’s totally a dope-ass loot system that makes you wanna explore all ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY LEVELS of one mine and TWENTY-FIVE of the other. 

I also have been asked to help curate the local museum with treasures and gems and such I find whilst mining and fishing and I get rewards and I get to actual curate the museum and how it looks and god damn if that isn’t weirdly satisfying.

I go explore the forests and forage on the daily and finally upgraded my axe enough to cut down a huge log that has totally lead me to a totally rad secret forest and now I can finally get hardwood, which is totally a different kind of wood, and it’s allowed me to upgrade my farm and build a barn and a silo and a coop and shit.

Speaking of animals I have two chickens, a brown and a white one, an awesome duck that I love, a newly-arrived rabbit, and an egg I’m incubating. I also totally have two cows, a goat, a pig, and a sheep, along with a horse and a dog—I had the option for a cat but like fuck cats man. They’re mostly all named after authors because I’m a pretentious ass and I pet them and love them every day and UNLIKE HARVEST MOON I don’t have to remember to herd them all inside before storms they just automatically are safe inside on days when it storms and though that may not seem like a big deal omfg it’s a huge improvement I never knew I wanted.

I have just built a slime hutch which means I can start harvesting slime eggs and having my own herd of slimes which is really fucking weird.

On my travels I’ve discovered a lady that only comes through the village on Sundays and she sells all types of weird, rare, out of season shit and every time I go and find her it’s like looking through the new arrivals section at a record store: so weirdly exhilarating that is the whitest thing I’ve ever said.

I am just now really getting into the recipes and I FUCKING LOVE making mayo and goat’s cheese and honey and all types of shit.

Every single time I stumble—literally—upon a cutscene I absolutely adore it and this game is overstuffed with fascinating, charming little scenes I adore. For example, in the Summer, I noticed Abigail, Sam, and Sebastian all hanging out in the saloon on weekends and eventually I stumbled upon Sam and Sebastian practicing music but they needed a drummer for a band and I suggested Abigail then they asked what type of music they should play, so I said weird synthy noise shit. Then, randomly, in the Fall, Sam, asked if I would come support them at a concert in the town over. Fuck yeah I would. It was so weird and rad.

AND THE FESTIVALS. A few times a season, you get a brief respite from your daily grind of farming, in the form of a festival. And though they are by no means more than a glorified cutscene, they weirdly feel special. You count down the days to them. You look forward to them, get invested like everyone else in Pelican Town. They’re just fun, man.

This is all to say that Stardew Valley does A LOT. And it’s all made by one dude, which is incredible. What’s awesome is that, generally speaking, it does all of it very well to damned near flawlessly. This game not only has countless hours to offer, but it has countless hours of rad shit to offer.

This game just kind of appeared out of nowhere and has exploded. It’s made a fuckton of money for a single individual developer and that in and of itself is rad. It’s such a hit that people are buying pirates copies of the game because it has such a groundswell of supprt. And that’s so fucking rad. 

Like I did when I was a kid, like I did with Pokémon Blue and Dark Souls and Football Manager and WWE Smackdown, I’ve stayed up all night playing this game. On multiple occasions, and it’s only been out a few weeks. Two separate times I’ve played this game for about seven hours and ten hours straight, respectively. That’s fucking ridiculous.Yet I don’t regret it at all. This game is the definition of “just one more turn.” Like Harvest Moon, it only saves when you go to sleep, so you can’t just see bits of a day; you have to see it all. It is deviously genius. And, of course, once you plant your corn, you have to see it grow and you have to harvest it and oh, look, Shane’s birthday is tomorrow and on Tuesday your silo will be built and then fuck it a festival is coming up soon and you’ve sunk five hours into this game. Yeah, if you have an addictive personality, it can be a sinkhole, but it’s so damned rad to play.

This game has come out, at a time, for me, that I need it. It’s been a hell of a winter. It’s been fucking exhausting mentally and physically. Work is piling up and I’m broke and I have no fucking job and of course I’ve been rejected from litmags and will inevitably be rejected again and boy have I felt worthless quite often. And this is totally a coping mechanism, this game—a distraction when I can’t quite articulate my horrible self-hatred or can’t get out of my damned head but it’s so necessary. It’s taking me back to being eleven again, holed up in my room with the window open because we don’t have air conditioning. It’s taking me back to a time where I was cool with being alone, where I didn’t feel like I was being crushed. And I’m sure that’ll all pass soon enough, but for now, Stardew Valley has been this incredible, god-damned amazingly well-made therapy that I didn’t know I needed until it just came out of nowhere on the Steam store.

[williamwriteswell]

Some thoughts on mental health.

I don’t know what this is other than a collection of thoughts on mental illness.

I’ve tried to kill myself five, maybe six times—in varying ways, but without much success considering the fact that I’m still alive typing this thing right here. When I was 13, for a week straight, I skipped out on school and my grandpa came to the house every morning and left when I said it was okay to leave—sometimes he would take me to his house, or to the mall, or simply out for food or out for errants; when I said I was ready. Other days I played video games or read all day and he just sat until my mom came home. He didn’t say anything out of the ordinary. He just let me go about my day and we’d talk every so often, but more often than not he’d simply sit in the kitchen just to be there. There was an unspoken “You’re cool, yeah?” sort of vibe to it and even though I wasn’t cool. It was appreciated because he was there and simply being there was an acknowledgement that if I was comfortable with it, he’d listen, and he—in my mother’s defense, nor did she—pressure me into going back to school, into talking, into feeling bad for needing to take a week off of school for reasons we weren’t ready to talk about and probably still aren’t—but that gesture was, at the time, enough—it was much more than I’d ever expected of either of them and much more than I felt like I deserved at the time in my horrible headspace. She later told me that she was worried she’d find me hanging from a rafter in the garage, and quite honestly, she was worried for good reason. It’s going on four or five years now since I last tried to kill myself, which is pretty rad. That isn’t to say I don’t think about doing so probably once every two or three weeks—maybe once a month sometimes; often a few times a week. And that’s a strange feeling. It’s a strange feeling to simultaneously know you’ve no reason to kill yourself, you’ve no “justification” for it, so to speak, and very much want to rip open your arms or swallow a whole bottle of Advil.

All of this is to say I’ve dealt with mental illness for a while. I was diagnosed with manic depression—now known as bipolar disorder—in my teens. That was also the opinion of one dude. So grain of salt and all that. And I haven’t got it any worse than others. It’s just an acknowledgement that diagnosed or not, I’ve got things to deal with. And I will fully admit right now I haven’t been back to a doctor in a long, long, long time for anything related to my mental health. That’s as much to do with fear as it is being broke as fuck as it is being busy as it is believing I have this shit under control when sometimes I very much do not have this shit under control in the least bit. So where I stand right now, in terms of clinical disorders? I haven’t a clue. I’m pretty fucked up and I’m dealing and that’s fine because hey fuck it we’re all pretty fucked up and dealing.

So, that’s all out of the way.

Suicidal thoughts and suicide—it’s some fucked up shit, man. It is a terrifying and strange feeling to want to die despite logic telling you not to. The fucked up thing about depression, about mental illness, is that it eats away at the logical part of your brain. It’s a thousand “Yeah, but what if…”s built up over time, and every fucking day is fighting to make sure that mental illness doesn’t win out. It’s a terrifying place to be when you’re simply living because you don’t want your loved ones to be upset. I’ve experienced that countless times. And it’s admirable. It shows compassion. It shows you’re a god-damned good person. It shows you’re not the piece of shit you think you are. It’s somewhere to start from. It’s hard. It’s so fucking hard. You’ll simultaneously tell yourself these people don’t really care and you ought to just do it, whilst telling yourself these people care for a reason—they like you for a reason. And it’ll leave you exhausted. And that exhaustion will just push you to want to kill yourself even more. But that exhaustion, all these horrible feelings—well, they’re feelings. They’re strangely exhilarating and punching walls and screaming into pillows and breaking mirrors means you give a fuck. It means you value yourself enough to want to fight for those people and ultimately for yourself. So remember that. It’s fucking hard. It’s always going to be hard. But depression and mental illness, they toughen you up and you fight.

The word “suffer” has, to me, always been problematic when talking about mental illness and disorders. I understand the reasoning behind it, because most days, it very much does feel like you’re suffering from something. When you can’t will yourself to get out of bed because you feel fucking terrible, or a sudden pang hits you whilst you’re among your friends and you just have to fucking leave, you are undoubtedly suffering. But the word “suffer” has always, to me, sounded so self-defeatist—so built to victimize those who do indeed suffer. It’s a word with connotations of weakness. You’ve seen many an ad with some authoritarian sounding person stating “X number of people suffer from Y disease.” Why must we all suffer? Why can’t we “deal with?” Why can’t we “cope?” It’s something seemingly small, but the rhetoric of “suffer” builds a sense of the disease already having defeated the person. Simply saying “I have” isn’t enough, either—“I have depression” or “I have OCD”. Again, I understand the reasoning, as it’s much better than saying one suffers, and it becomes something normalized, something routine, as if worn like an accessory. But I think that it breeds complaicancy when it comes to these issues. It’s taking away the power of these issues, but not in a productive way. It feels like dismissing them. In my 27 years of living and my roughly half of those 27 years dealing with various mental health issues I have fought them—with varying success I have fought them. They don’t simply exist with me like an accessory. They’re more like an unwelcome house guest in my mind that I cope with, that I give into sometimes and fight back against and constantly accommodate—but they’re a house guest I’m getting better at accommodating, I hope. They’re that stain I keep washing and can’t get out but I’ve made the stain less noticeable—or more importantly, more aptly, I’ve acknowledged that hey, yeah, I’ve got a fuckin’ stain in my apartment (read: my mind, because the metaphor here is my mind as an apartment, see) but that doesn’t mean it’s not a nice apartment and we all have stains it’s fine. We keep dealing with those stains, accommodating them, and then they hopefully accommodate us.

I’m very bad at talking. For having gone to school to literally talk into a microphone for a living, abandoned that, and then talking poetry into a microphone, I’m categorically and catastrophically horrid at communicating with people—especially with people I give a fuck about. That’s for countless reasons. I’m sure much of it is to do with being a single child in a single-parent home and feeling compelled to “take care of myself” as I grew up. I’m sure much of it has to do with the shame that latches itself onto someone with depression or suicidal tendencies or even just anyone who has a shitty day and doesn’t want to feel like a burden. I’m sure much of it has to do with people making others with depression or suicidal tendencies or even just anyone has a shitty day absolutely feel like shit for having those feelings and completely invalidating them. I’m sure it has to do with my self-loathing and not feeling like I matter enough to tell people how I feel; or how I deserve to feel like shit because I’m a pretty shitty human being. I’m sure it has to do with feeling like I’m stealing other people’s spotlights or attention. I’m sure it has to do with feeling uninteresting. Again: many reasons why I’m catastrophically bad at talking. So if I’ve ever talked to you about anything good or bad in my life and you listened, I sincerely thank you because that’s real fucking rare and it must have either been REAL GOOD or REAL BAD and I very much encourage you to encourage me to keep talking because if I don’t talk something is very wrong and I probably need your help. And if you feel like there is someone similar to me in a similar situation, encourage them to talk. And fucking listen. Really listen. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever shame. Give a fuck. If you can’t, then don’t, because people don’t need that shit. Sorry to be a dick, but they just don’t. And if you can’t, at that moment, listen, then don’t. That is totally cool. I get it. But acknowledge that and just sit with them. Be a distraction if they need it. Be there. Help them cope. If you realize you don’t talk enough then start talking. Friends ain’t psychics, man. They can’t just read your mind and know everything isn’t okay. If you can’t talk to friends because you feel ashamed then seek help because it is out there and if that feels too intimidating know that these people are trained professionally to make sure you don’t feel shame or anything like that. And they genuinely care. They wouldn’t have gone through all this schooling and what have you to just collect a paycheque. There’s much easier paycheques to collect. They’re doing this because they care and they’re equipped to help. I apologize to friends and girlfriends and family members whom I haven’t talked to when I should have.

The corporatization of mental health is, of course, problematic. Bell could be doing so much more with their position, their power, and their reach when it comes to conducting informative and nuanced programming and talks about mental health. Plastering streetcars and billboards with emoticons and the guy who voiced Bobby in Bobby’s World is pretty shit. Bell is also, simultaneously, the only corporation I see going out of its way to incite any kind of discussion whatsoever. It could be doing a MUCH better job than it is. It could do more than simply throwing an ad encouraging us to turn sad faces into smiley faces because mental illness is soooooo much more fucking complex and nuanced than that and honestly it isn’t that easy and sadness is essential to be a god-damned human being. And that fucking enrages me. What enrages me just as much, though, is the discussion that has seemed to erupt today—a discussion that only rails against Bell Media, instead of also talking about mental health; a discussion as one-sided as the oversimplification of “fixing” mental health that Bell has presented with its ad campaigns. And I acknowledge that I have just one take on the discussion surrounding Let’s Talk day because I follow people on social media and Facebook and what have you, but it’s still a pissoff to see these often compassionate and thoughtful people simply rail against Bell Media and not take a more nuanced view of things and also promote some discussion on mental health. The platform is here, no matter how flawed it is. It exists, so use it for some good, then tear it down, and build up something new, but acknowledge the discussions happening today about mental health that actually are doing something good.

It’s weird, dealing with a mental disorder, in 2016. I say that aware that dealing with a mental disorder at any point in history was weird—and very hard. But in 2016, dear sweet fuck, there’s simply so many people just seemingly being great at being human beings that it’s very easy to lose perspective and skew perception into reality because well of course you do mental illness just has a way of fucking with you. Ailsa Bristow (seriously she’s fucking incredible) said “It’s a really hard process to undertake because I sometimes so desperately wish I was one of those cool calm totally chilled out people who are just so #blessed, who seem to exist almost entirely on Instagram." That sums it up about perfectly, me thinks. We’re all just lumps of flesh held together by guts and water and anxiety. So, even the most “normal” of people feel a twinge of jealousy when they see perfect shiny people with their perfect shiny teeth and perfect shiny abs and perfect shiny lives on social media. And it is hard not to project; hard not to get jealous and envious and hate them and yourself. Throw in a little bit more anxiety and self-loathing and depression into the mix and jealousy and envy and hate quickly lead to not getting out of bed for four days.

So what the fuck does that mean? I don’t know, really. It’s just an acknowledgement of how brains work, I suppose. It’s very easy to tell people not to take social media and what have you seriously. It’s also very easy to present the best version of yourself to everyone on said social media—or even in bullshit smalltalk—because secretly, deep down, you’re a god-damned lump of skin and guts and water and anxiety and you don’t want to seem like anything other than perfect to other people because then you’re othered and being othered fucking sucks. What I’m saying is posture and be awesome and when you’re having a great day, fuckin’ you do you man because sometimes it’s hard to find some positivity and you very much deserve to have a good day and you can’t control how people are gonna react to your good day. But hey, fuck it, also acknowledge when you’re having a shit day and I guarantee people be there for you like my grandpa was for me. They’ll do whatever you need them to do—they’ll tell you your eyebrow game is ON FLEEK, they’ll listen, they’ll talk, they’ll take you out for coffee or ice cream or whatever and if they won’t then fuck it I will.

Again, I don’t much know what I’m saying, and I’ve exhausted not only what I have to say at this moment, but probably what you’re willing to listen to. There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to mental illness and how it’s dealt with and who’s “allowed” to speak and how they speak and all of that good stuff. This isn’t something we fix in one day. This isn’t something we fix by having a “Let’s Talk” day every year. This is something we really don’t ever fix. It’s something we fight and cope with and open ourselves up to. It’s something we come together to rally against.

[williamwriteswell]

Boy, did I like this thing: "Space Opera Millennials and Their Grand Narratives" by Austin Walker

Austin Walker waxes all philosophical about The Force Awakens and it's rad.

I actively dislike Star Wars a whole bunch. I am very much of the opinion that Trek > Wars, and honestly, even in a vacuum, I just don’t particularly like Star Wars for quite a few reasons that aren’t going to persuade you if you like Star Wars and really don’t matter at all. 

BUT I’m cool with people liking Star Wars. I mean, you’re fuckin’ wrong, but if you wanna be a god-damned lunatic, hey, that’s your prerogative. 

Anywho, Austin Walker, one of my favourite writers in video games journalism (and honestly one of my favourite non-fiction writers going), writes a great piece in defense of The Force Awakens that, for me, really re-contextualized the whole movie. I haven’t watched it (and I honestly probably won’t), but there’s been a lot of rhetoric I’ve seen and heard that is really portraying the film as relying heavily upon nostalgia and retreading a lot of old shit. And I’m not saying he’s right or wrong, but I think it’s important that this piece gets out there, and it hopefully allows there to be a nuanced debate about The Force Awakens. 

Again, I’m not particularly big on Star Wars, but it was rad to see someone come to bat for the movie in an articulate and insightful way. I now await the inevitable (hopefully well-written and well-researched) rebuttal.

[williamwriteswell]

Boy, did I like this thing: HOTLINE MIAMI 2′S SOUNDTRACK

Oh, hello there, humble reader. This is going to be a as frequently as I can do it, but, like, I’m gonna hold myself to writing about at least one thing by the end of every week—what with the new year being around and me needing to get off my sorry ass and writing (read: mansplaining, because I’m kind of a dick) about things. And really, I end up complaining a whole lot about things. So this is my contribution to the world with a little positivity in the only way I know how to do it: swearing and caps lock. Whether it’s literature or music or video games or movies or comic books or fuckin’ just shit in my life I did during the week that I enjoyed and wanna reflect on.

SO HERE GOES.

Hotline Miami 2′s soundtrack

Yo, I fuckin’ LOVEEEEEEEEE 2012′s Hotline Miami. That game was just—it fuckin’ oh man it was so good. It was just BATHING in excessive drug use in every single way; every single facet of the game was just a horrible trip in every way. This game was the Drive meets Sword and Sorcery meets DRUGGGGSSSSSS mashup I never knew I wanted. And I fucking LOVED it for that. The soundtrack was this synth-y, aggressive collection of licensed songs that was curated expertly—songs you’d think were created explicitly to do some downright nasty shit to. The basslines and the worbling electronic shit was as gritty as the horrible shit you got up to as a faceless dude beating the shit out of people. BUT IT WASN’T. It was all pre-existing shit. And there is totally something to curating a totally original soundtrack. But I think there’s a lot of praise to give to a well-curated soundtrack of licensed stuff. And Hotline Miami’s is one of the best ever in video games (maybe in any medium, really).

And the 2D, pixelated-as-fuck, almost ugly visuals matched the tone of the music and the gameplay and it all just fit. It was a cohesive whole of ultraviolence that despite some flaws (seriously Jesus fuck it got impossibly hard and sometimes too same-y) I absolutely god-damned adored. It had a “OH GOD DAMMIT I FUCKED UP REAL BAD OH WELL FUCK I’LL PLAY IT AGAIN!” gameplay loop of stuff like Spelunky and Rogue Legacy and the old Tony Hawk games that meant you could easily lose hours to “one more run” syndrome. And in a lot of other games where you’re repeating the same content, the soundtrack, no matter how good it is, can get grating. For whatever reason, for me, Hotline Miami’s soundtrack didn’t.

So, I was pretty stoked for Hotline Miami 2.

And then it came out. And it was a lot of the same. In terms of gameplay, in terms of visual; honestly, even in terms of the soundtrack—it was all very same-y, making me wonder “Wait, did I really want another Hotline Miami?”

Answer is: nope.

I just think it made a lot of design decisions that I just didn’t particularly like, and it felt superfluous and unnecessarily hard, and the level design just meant that unlike the original game, you just kinda filtered dudes into one choke point and kinda got lucky.

When it boils down to it, that doesn’t mean Hotline Miami 2 was downright BAD. It wasn’t. And I dunno what you do with a sequel that stays true to the first game without just feeling superfluous. Point is: Hotline Miami 2, as a game just kinda felt unnecessary.

So, I fell off Hotline Miami 2 real hard as a game and kinda just forgot about the soundtrack.

Over the last few weeks, though, it popped back up in my periphery, and I have come to realize that holy shit it is SO GOOD. And it’s even better than the original game’s soundtrack, which is stonking fantastic. I know, I know, music tastes is subjective, but regardless of one’s opinion, it’s a straight-up fact that Hotline Miami’s soundtrack featured a fuckton of same-y music—good music, mind, but same-y none the less.

Like, Hotline Miami’s soundtrack may be more “important”, and it is certainly more arresting given the context of it coming out of nowhere just like the original game. As a package, the original game and its accompanying soundtrack are just more inherently impressive because they both come out of fucking nowhere. And yeah, Hotline Miami 2, and its soundtrack, are less impressive because of their inherently derivative nature. But upon repeated listens, I kinda like Hotline Miami 2′s soundtrack more, despite the original’s meshing better with the game as a whole. Mostly, I like it more, because unlike the game’s level design, weirdly enough, it’s a lot more varied. And there are some songs I’m not HYPE AS FUCK on, but the good in Hotline Miami 2′s soundtrack is just as good, if not most times, better than the good in Hotline Miami’s (music opinions being subjective and all I know fuck you just listen to the soundtrack).

And, yeah, despite a lot more variation than its predecessor, the backbone of Hotline Miami 2′s soundtrack is, like its predecessor, headtrippy, synth-heavy, grimy-as-fuck stuff. And it does it real fucking good. And it may not, to me, line up with Hotline Miami 2′s whole vibe—granted, I didn’t finish the game due to the aforementioned issues with it—as well as Hotline Miami’s soundtrack did, but god damn if I am not absolutely loving this soundtrack.

So go give it a listen, because even without any context of the game, or its predecessor, it is just some fantastic shit.

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 31, OCTOBER 31ST: PHANTASMAGORIA: A PUZZLE OF FLESH (PC).

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

PHANTASMAGORIA: A PUZZLE OF FLESH

What a time to be alive, man. This game is nearly 20 years old. And holy sweet Christ does it show its age. Not only does this game show its age with its cruddy, blurry, shitty resolution full-motion video, but it shows its age in its gameplay. Even by 1997 standards, this point-and-click adventure game is some clunky-ass bullllllllllllllllllllllllllllllshit. So by 2015 it is the most god-damned atrocious thing ever.

Anywho, this game is just bad. It’s horrible. The characters are one-dimensional and portrayed terribly, the gameplay is shit, the story is completely forgettable, and the end of the game just kinda comes outta nowhere. And it’s shitty because this game is a sequel to Roberta Williams’ maybe-not-great-but-pretty-important Phantasmagoria.

This game has, like the original, its fair share of gore and “controversial” shit and it all looks terrible because, well, the special effects are shit and the resolution is shit and unlike Phantasmagoriai, for the most part, it feels unearned. So it just makes the whole thing a big “Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

BUT, I declare, it’s worth checking out. As a fascinating little dumb B-movie like thing for video games, it’s great fun to just have a few friends over and riff on this dumb shit. So do it.

SCARE-O-METER: The worst/10.

FUN-O-METER: Fuckkkkk no/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Like, as a good game? God no, but as a dumb B-movie like thing, sure/10.

Tomorrow I play: NOTHING BECAUSE I AM ALL DONE.

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 31, OCTOBER 31ST: SIREN: BLOOD CURSE (PS3)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

SIREN: BLOOD CURSE

What a fucking incredible game. What an underappreciated, fucking incredible game. I love me some Siren: Blood Curse. The best way I can explain why Siren: Blood Curse is so, so, so good is that it shares a lot of sensibilities with Asian horror cinema. Anddddd films like Shutter, like Ringu, Ju-On, even A Tale of Two Sisters are so god-damned effective mostly because of pacing. From the moment the credits come in you just have this horrible sense of foreboding and dread. And the same sensation goes for Siren: Blood Curse.

Also, holy sweet Christ, the enemies, the creepy-ass ghosts like the bloody penis-faced thing above. THE ENEMIES ARE TERRIFYING. Much like, hey, Asian horror cinema. You’re gonna see a whole lot of bloody ghost ladies and weird flying creatures and slimy gross shit and they’re all gonna be creepy as shit.

You play as a buttload of people on an American film crew that basically invades a small, abandoned, cursed as fuck island trying to figure out the history behind it. And you control every single person on the film crew, which sounds like it could be a disaster, but this game is so masterful at pacing that it just fucking works, somehow. Missions are relatively short, and it runs the risk of the game feeling disjointed, but to be honest it feels like you’re playing episodes in a TV show—a really fucking creepy TV show. And like I said, it just works. Everyone plays differently, even if it’s in subtle ways, meaning that the game avoids monotony in gameplay. And the characters, for the most part, are super interesting, so you genuinely give a fuck about them and wanna keep learning about their backgrounds, their relationships with one another, and how they deal with the shitshow of a ghost island they’ve been marooned on.

The game also has one of the most inventive systems I’ve ever seen in a horror game. Basically, you can get into the mind of the horrible ghost creatures somehow and figure out where they are, helping you plot out your path through some ghost-infested shit. It also is god-damned terrifying to switch to a ghost only to find out it’s like, five feet away from you. This isn’t a “OMGOMGOMGOMG RUN” kind of game, which I’m very much fucking sick of. It’s a stealth game, essentially, especially for characters that can’t defend themselves. And it is so pants-wettingly tense and terrifying trying to sneak past these horrific fucks. It’s so, so, so, so, so good.

The story also goes some places that are realllllll fucked up and weird and god-damned intense and depressing. I won’t spoil anything, but the church scene is still burned deep, deep into my memory as one of the most terrifying sequences in a game I’ve ever played.

The graphics still hold up really, really well, too. Mostly that has to do with the incredible enemy design, but the technical aspects of the game shine. The environment is just un-god-damned-pleasant, the ghosts look all kinds of fucked up, and the textures are solid.

And the sound design. Holy shit. If you aren’t unnerved by the horrifying ghosts or the intense as fuck stealth mechanics, the sound design will unnerve you. The soundtrack just burrows its way into your brain and just makes you feel uncomfortable. And the god-damned monsters that genuinely sound like Asian horror cinema ghosts. Flashbacks to Ringu and Ju-On, man. They sound unhuman.

Man, THIS GAME IS SO GOOD.

SCARE-O-METER: This might be tied with Amnesia: The Dark Descent and P.T., straight up/10.

FUN-O-METER: Genuinely awesome to play/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssss get it/10.

Tomorrow I play: NOTHING BECAUSE I’M DONE.

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 30, OCTOBER 30TH: P.T. (PS4)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

P.T.

Man, P.T. is a fascinating thing. It just came out of fuck-all nowhere on the PS4 and stood for “playable teaser”. After the internet just collectively bashed their heads against a wall for a little while, people figured out that it was a playable teaser for a Silent Hill game co-created by Hideo Kojima—yes, that creepy fuck I complained about the other day—and Guillermo Del god-damned Toro—who is fucking brilliant but has had like eight thousand canned video game experiments—THEN the game got canceled. And P.T. was removed from the Playstation Store, making it impossible to download anymore. And it was scrubbed completely, meaning if you delete P.T. from your PS4 you can never download it again LIKE WHAT, AND THEN not too long ago it was reveleaed that Junji Ito, a legendary Japanese horror manga writer was also working on the game—whose work I read after reading about his involvement and holy shitballs his work is absolutely fucking incredible and all kinds of fucked up and you can toooootallllyyy see his influence in the Silent Hills trailer here.

Anywho, P.T. is kinda fucking insane. You play as Darryl from The Walking Dead a dude who may or may not have killed his wife and gets stuck in a timeloop, meaning you wander a hall over and over and over and over and HOLY FUCK this is the best looking hallway I’ve ever seen. This was probably the game that really sold me on the PS4. Like, everything looked good, but P.T. was the proverbial “HOLY SHIT” moment for me and I felt justified in spending way too much money that I didn’t have on a console. I mean, yeah, it’s a fucking hallway, man, but holy shitdicks it’s an incredible looking hallway.

So, aside from looking good, how does P.T. actually play? The game doesn’t much play like a game. You just kinda interact with shit in the most basic way and blunt-force your way through the “puzzles” until shit works and you’re shepherded along to the next scurrrrryyyy plot point. That’a  bit reductionist, especially because the sound design is fucking incredible and the baby crying and the horrible, heavy breathing of your ex-wife genuinely does haunt you, the player. And the game does a fantastic job of knowing what horror tropes to play up and what horror tropes to subvert. You’re constantly on edge. And that’s fucking great. But this game is just a really, really, really effective guided tour through a dude’s fucked up psyche and a really amazingly well-crafted hallway.

So, you wander through said hallway, get spooked the fuck out real easy, shit goes pear-shaped, there’a horrible fetus thing, and shit just goes off. I’d argue that the first half-hour, maybe hour of P.T. is the most unsettling, uneasy, and terrifying half-hour, maybe hour of a game I’ve ever played. And there’s so much shit just on the periphery of this game that you may never catch that I don’t wanna spoil but like holy fuck there’s a terrifying thing that I never even knew about until like a month ago and then I played P.T. again today and searched it out and totally knew it would happen but it fucking happened and I was scared shitless anyway.

So, after that first hour-ish, things kinda go south because it’s a Hideo Kojima game and there’s some ol’ bullshit where you have to pixel hunt for photographs and plug in a microphone and just basically do shit that is completely fucking ridiculous and virtually fucking impossible to figure out without bashing your skull into a wall—maybe literally—or waiting and letting the internet do the skull-bashing for you. And a little bit of that is fine. Kojima is known for that shit with the Metal Gear Solid series. The codec code on the back of the box shit that I totally didn’t know about and was so god-damned confused by when I rented Metal Gear Solid. Like, you literally had to read a code of the back of your retail CD case to advance in the game. That is some meta shit I can get behind because it’s insane. But everything in P.T. just feels tedious instead of genuinely fun or intriguing. And all the meta shit especially gets frustrating after you’ve wasted like a half-hour pixel-hunting for pieces of a photograph through the decreasingly scary hallway.

Credit to Kojima and co. for doing weird meta shit and making players think, but solutions were so god-damned obfuscated and unclear that it just felt like an exercise in frustration, and it makes the whole thing that much more depressing and ultimately shitty to think that you do all this bullshit to unlock a teaser trailer for a game that ultimately got canceled: Silent Hills.

Boy, as a fan of the original series, even when it went to shit, playing P.T. and reading up on it and then reading everything surrounding the shitshow of Silent Hills’s cancellation and P.T.’s removal from the Playstation Store, this game is just god-damned fascinating and heartbreaking and frustrating and grIGFOGLd. It is wholly unique in games. And I’d say, confidently, that it will be talked about for fucking years because like holy shit it just came out of absolutely nowhere and was announced and available on the same day and made no sense at all for ages and the hivemind of the internet cracked it wide open and Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro and Junji Ito and Silent Hill and then it all goes to shit and it’s cancelled and taken down and it LITERALLY CAN’T BE DOWNLOADED ANYMORE. In an era of permanence, seeing a game be so ephemeral is fucking mind-blowing, man.

Still, as a game, it kinda, to be honest, sucks at some point. Like I said, it’s barely a game. For that first little bit, though, holy shit is it so effective at what it’s trying to do. And for that it’s totally worth checking out. But don’t be afraid to not put up with the game’s bullshit and put it down when it gets frustrating. 

But oh man. P.T. as a flashpoint in games, for that little while, was mesmerizing. I was so fucking stoked for Silent Hills despite P.T.’s bullshit. And then it all just went away. Like what the shit.

SCARE-O-METER: Holy fuck me like Amnesia: The Dark Descent might be the scariest game of all time but P.T. gives that game a run for its money god dammit/10.

FUN-O-METER: At first it’s amazing but then it’s fucking tedious bullshit/10 .

RECOMMEND-O-METER: As a historical curiosity this game is seriously one of the most fascinating things ever so read up on it or somehow find someone who has this game on their PS4 and play it for like a half-hour and then totally tell it to fuck off or at least watch a playthrough of it it’s incredible/10.

Tomorrow I play: Siren: Blood Curse (PS3) AND Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of the Flesh (PC).

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 29, OCTOBER 29TH: AMNESIA: THE DARK DESCENT (PC)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

AMNESIA: THE DARK DESCENT

The general internet scuttlebutt around Amnesia: The Dark Descent is this: “HOLY SHIT THIS IS THE SCARIEST GAME EVER.”

Now, the internet is known for dabbling in hyperbole, and I am most definitely one to stoke the proverbial flames.

Story time: I bought Amnesia: The Dark Descent shortly after it came out and the zeitgeist of “HOLY SHIT THIS GAME IS SO SCARY!” ruled the dank little corners of the internet known as message boards. But I never played it. Because I was a fucking hipster. A scared little hipster. I admired what the game was trying to do, having read up on it, and respecting the developer, Frictional’s Penumbra series—very similar to Amnesia: The Dark Descent—from a distance. Basically, it was Silent Hill 2 all over again. And then Youtubers blew the fuck up with this game and everyone knew of it. And I watched said videos and figured I was good because I was still absolutely petrified of this game. Watching this game was enough to make me NOPE forever.

So, two years ago, forever finally ended and I played it. And I was practically a sobbing, grovelling mess by the end of it. I put the game down at the infamous “water” scene I’d seen others be tortured by countless times. Even knowing exactly what would happen, I still NOPED forever and shut the game the fuck off and uninstalled it.

Then I played it again, today. With save game still in tact.

I booted right into the god-damned water level and KNOWING WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IT WAS STILL THE WORST.

What makes Amnesia: The Dark Descent so effective is its balance of dark and light. Though by no means the first of its kind when it comes to the “ shit shit shit shit shit run and hide RUN AND HIDE” school of horror game design, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the game that popularized it within a contemporary context and it felt fresh and new and interesting and it fucking worked. And it still does. Because it doesn’t feel tired or repetitive.

Again, light and dark. In the game, you’re haunted down by these melty-ass lookin’ like zombie demon Creature from the Black Lagoon horror shows that just aren’t pleasant to look at whatsoever in this old-ass house somewhere in Prussia. The only thing more unsettingly than these fuckers is the fact that the main character has hooves for hands. SERIOUSLY LOOK AT THOSE FUCKING THINGS THEY’RE JUST HOOVES. 

And you need to hide. That is the point of the game. So you need to run and hide. In the dark. Problem is: the dark makes you basically lose your god-damned mind and hallucinate and just have panic attacks and that’s no good. So the game forces you into the light to not only get the fuck outta this shit mansion and figure out what’s going on, but it forces you into the light to see these horrible god-damned creatures that chase you into the dark WHICH IS SUPER SCARY SO YOU GOTTA GET INTO THE LIGHT.

This gameplay loop doesn’t feel old because basically, well, the entire time you’re playing you’re screaming obscenities and whimpering and slamming doors and hearing genuinely horrific noises in the distance and footsteps and you’re rushing to get lantern fuel because the dark is real spooky. You’re just so god-damned flustered and panic-stricken all the time that you don’t have time to stop and think about how ridiculously repetitive this game could feel.

And it doesn’t feel repetitive because the game paces itself so well. It knows when to ramp things up and make you shit your pants. It knows when to go long stretches without anything. It knows how to create red herrings and freak you the fuck out and just leave you constantly on edge, your mind frayed and your breath heavy just like the character in the game. You get invested in the world of Amnesia: The Dark Descent because of the amazing sound design and terrifying as fuck half-glimpses of nightmare fuel that just makes your imagination go to the worst places. And you panic. And you can’t think. So you run. Then you HAVE to face your fear. It’s just impeccable game design.

The game also doesn’t run long, so you don’t feel like it’s a slog. And its story, oh-so-spooky and macabre and full of intrigue told through diary entries helps propel you forward through all the nasty shit you encounter. I mean, by the end of it, you’re certainly spent. Like, you feel like you ought to get a god-damned commemorative t-shirt after the whole ordeal. And you’ll uninstall the game and hate it but love it so much at the same time because this game is just so visceral. God, visceral is such a lazy word, but it’s a perfect description of this game. It gets at your gut. It sinks itself into your psyche and just fucks with you. It’s relentless. And it runs you ragged. And you’ll fucking hate it so much and you’ll turn it off and scream and be a blubbering mess and ten minutes later you’ll boot it back up.

This game lived up to all the hype. Is it THE SCARIEST GAME OF ALL TIME? Well, yeah. That’s just math.

But like actually I dunno to each their own, that’s just your opinion, man, etc. It’s up there, though. It’s just fucking IFFODSFFDOFDSOKFDOFDSOFDSFDSOFSDOSD

SCARE-O-METER: A gazillion blood-curdling screams and soiled undergarments/10

FUN-O-METER: If you’re a masochist, absolutely/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Honestly do it fuck yeah, man, or at least watch people play it because that shit is hilarious/10.

Tomorrow I play: P.T. (PS4)

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 28, OCTOBER 28TH: GHOSTSHIP AFTERMATH (PC)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

GHOSTSHIP AFTERMATH

Right. Let’s just get this out of the way now: Ghostship Aftermath is very very very very clearly a passion project and I kind of feel like a dick for disparaging such a thing, butttttttt the second you release a game on Steam for money, then regardless of whether you’re a team of one with a passion project or a team of a gazillion churning out some by-the-numbers hit a projected sales figure game you’re accountable for what you release to consumers. And as such, even at $10.99, holy god damn Jesus shit Ghostship Aftermath is the god-damned worst.

Like, it feels like it’s fleecing people kind of worst.

The game, like many a horror game, is set on an abandoned spaceship, and you’re tasked with figuring shit out. That’s about all the story I could get out of the game because this is literally one of the buggiest games I’ve ever played. Ever. Random crashes. Weird hitches. Enemies just stuck wandering into walls. Texture pop-ins. Hanging for literally like ten minutes at a time. I “played” three hours of Ghostship Aftermath, but really about a half-hour was spent trying to fix bugs, another half-hour was spent seeing if the game would ever load whilst I made food, and another hour was spent meandering about slower than a god-damned paraplegic tortoise wandering what the fuck I was doing.

Man, I thought Cry of Fear was bad, BUT I WOULD DO ANYTHING TO BE PLAYING THAT SHIT AGAIN OVER THIS ANAL FISSURE OF A GAME.

The game is rogue-like in nature; or “random”—I assume procedurally generated, actually—which means once you die your run is over and you boot up the game again with the layout of the spaceship being completely different, so no two games play out the same. That is really cool in concept. That’s something you just accept with these types of games. As long as you’re back into the action pretty quickly that’s totally cool—NOPE JUST KIDDING THERE’S AN UNSKIPPABLE MONOLOGUE LITERALLY EVERY TIME YOU START THE GAME AGAIN. 

Or if you can in fact skip this bullshit I haven’t figured out how. I thought this was a massive bug. Then I looked it up online. I watched Giant Bomb’s Qucik Look of the game and watched them lose their god-damned shit because holy fuck you really can’t skip this bullshit diatribe. EVERY FUCKING TIME YOU START THE GAME AGAIN YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO, LIKE, A FIVE MINUTE-LONG, BADLY WRITTEN, BADLY VOICE-ACTED MONOLOGUE.

And then you get to actually play the game. And it doesn’t get any better.

I’ll give the single, solitary creator and developer of the game credit: the atmosphere of the abandoned ship is predictable and flat and boring, but hey, it looks like a derelict spaceship and the level design itself is completely fine. Navigating through said levels? Well, fuck me running.

Character movement is clunky. Like, your shitfaced uncle at Thanksgiving dinner kind of clunky. Times a fucking thousand. For some God-awful reason, you move like you’re stuck in space molasses and you seem to have the spatial awareness of a doofy-ass panda cub because you stumble into every obstacle imaginable and just kinda get stuck on shit forfuckingever.

And if you, I don’t know, can’t move, and need to just restart the mission? WELL FUCK YOU GET READY FOR ANOTHER UNSKIPPABLE MONOLOGUE.

Let’s say, miraculously, you somehow manage to navigate the proverbial minefield of ankle-high detritus clattering the space station. Eventually you’re going to encounter an alien—an alien that juxtaposes everything else in the game because the level geometry and objects look generically okay in the sense that they don’t make your computer explode because they’re so hi-res but they’re not garbageshit-blurry as fuck either. The aliens, man. The aliens are some weird, slapdashed clusterfucks that just kind of aimlessly wander about, seemingly just as lost, confused, and incapable of basic motor functions as you.

You can watch aliens literally just walk into walls for like, a good minute or two straight. And then the game crashes. Or you try to move and you get stuck on a god-damned box again.

So, you boot the game up again, listen to the bullshit monologue, find an alien stuck walking into a wall repeatedly, and go to shoot it.

Well, too bad. Fuck you. The guns are equally as unresponsive as the movement. And when you finally do put the helpless alien out of its misery by ending the cycle of walking into walls, it just kinda keels over limp or glitches the fuck out something fierce and probably crashes your game. Again.

God damn, man. I really do sound like an asshole, but after this month of putting up with some straight bullshit, this game just offended me. I am all for the plucky underdog, but there’ just basic design decisions seem like the work of a god-damned lunatic. And granted, yes, this isn’t from a AAA studio, but EVERYTHING in this game is broken. There isn’t even a kernel of something interesting that can make you look past how much of a technical clusterfuck this game is, especially when people are doing far more interesting things in not only the indie game space, but the horror game space with the same types of resources, and charging a lot less than $11. You can get good games for $11. You can get incredible horror experiences and indie experiences for $11. So I may seem harsh, and much of this is catharsis, but dear sweet Christ this game is Satan’s butthole after Taco Bell levels of bad on every level imaginable.

SCARE-O-METER: Once again it is scary how FUCKING TERRIBLE THIS GAME IS HOLY MOTHER OF PEARL/10

FUN-O-METER: Dear fucking God no I’d rather have my fingernails ripped off for all eternity/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Not even in a “Hahahahahaha this is so shit it’s awesome” kind of way—never never never//10.

Tomorrow I play: Amnesia: The Dark Descent (PC).

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 27, OCTOBER 27TH: CRY OF FEAR (PC)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

CRY OF FEAR

HA. HAHAHAHAHA. HAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA. THIS GAME IS SO WONDERFULLY AWFUL.

Originally a mod for the 1998 game Half-Life—and dear God does it show—Cry of Fear came out as a standalone game that came out a few years ago and my fucking Jesus it is the hottest of steaming garbage.

And I love it.

It is just the doofiest, jankiest-ass bullshit game and I fucking love it. After 26 god-damned days of horror games, a “SO WONDERFULLY BAD IT’S LITERALLY UNBELIEVABLE YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS SHIT!” this is the best palette cleanser ever.

The game is a muddy-ass, blurry shitpoo mess. It really does look like a 1998 game—and a bad one at that. It sounds like someone recorded everything in a garage. It feels like you’re moving through molasses and the shooting is awful. It’s glitchy as balls with characters disappearing or missions just randomly fucking up or enemies just phasing out of existence or the game just crashing.

AND THE ENEMY DESIGN. HA. HAHAHAHA. There’s a giant dude called Sawer for fuck’s sake. There’s an evil bed that just flies at you. It is so wonderfully stupid.

AND THERE’S CO-OP. Which is definitely the way to experience this shit show. Suffering with someone is just wonderful. 

Hoooooooooo boy. This game. I really don’t have anything more to say, because this game is bad in every way, but I fucking love it, because it’s earnest. It’s just a doofy little ridiculous, shitty game that’s just fun to spend a little bit of time with. And it’s fucking HIIIIILARIOUS.

SCARE-O-METER: It is scary how bad this game is but like genuinely the flying bed things are terrifying and fucking weird/10.

FUN-O-METER: Haaaahahahahahahaha/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Why not? Do it/10.

Tomorrow I play: Ghostship Aftermath (PC).

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 26, OCTOBER 26TH: SPLATTERHOUSE (TGFX-16)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

SPLATTERHOUSE (TGFX-16)

Ha. Hahahahahahaha. Look at that dude’s butt. It looks like a melted candle.

ANYWHO. Splatterhouse. It’s a 1988 game for the Turbo Grafx-16. I am not particularly familiar with either the game or the Turbo Grafx. Both were before my time. And as rad and liberal and cool as my mom was, I can very much tell she wouldn’t be about me playing a game called “Splatterhouse.”

So, as much as I am aware of the series and really like the premise and fooled around with the spiritial successor that came out a few years ago, I’d never actually experienced the original game.

I fucking love it, man. And I love the Turbo Grafx for its ridiculous PC-ness. It’s such a weird, of-its-time thing with its 1980s-ass booting.

So, Splatterhouse is a beat-’em-up in the most traditional sense of the mashup word. And you play as a dude that fights a bunch of monsters after your girlfriend is kidnapped and you let THE TERROR MASK possess you to become some hulking monster that looks like Jason from Friday the 13th but totally isn’t Jason from Friday the 13th.

This game is still fun to play. It’s a standard as fuck beat-’em-up, so it isn’t particularly deep, but it still holds up now. It lacks depth, but eh, whatever, it’s still rad to play.

Andddddd honestly, the actual look of the game still holds up. The stuff around the Turbo Grafx-16′s era holds up because 2D sprites—well, it’s hard to make that shit look muddy and blurry and bad. And the monster designs, though derivative as fuck, look great. Splatterhouse takes the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach to things by featuring zombies and bats and aliens and swamp monsters and ghosts tremor worm things and like fucking everything. It’s so god-damned doofy, but as a fan of god-damned doofy things, I love it. There is some genuine inventiveness in how the monsters attack and interact with you, which is awesome. Anddddd still, even now, in 2015, there’s just some gross shit, often involving puke, and the game still looks pretty gruesome. I know for sure this would have fucked me up as a kid.

The music is also high-pitched and appropriately slasher movie-ish, and honestly, is still pretty rad. The Turbo Grafx-16′s sound chips are still solid and crisp and a big ol’ wave of nostalgia for an era that I experienced but a system I never actually played left me with a weird feeling.

Splatterhouse is a great romp for a while and I’m super glad I played it. I’mma totally beat the shit out of this game.

SCARE-O-METER: Still pretty gross which is rad and not scary but all kinds of rad to see all the homages/10.

FUN-O-METER: Genuinely still pretty fun to play/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Fuck yes do it/10.

Tomorrow I play: Cry of Fear (PC).

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 25, OCTOBER 25TH: FATAL FRAME (PS2)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

FATAL FRAME

Man, do I fucking hate ghosts. Despite all logic, despite knowing ghosts ain’t got shit on me, despite being an atheist and thus not even believing in a fucking afterlife, ghost stories freak me the fuck out.

The Fatal Frame series freaks me the fuck out.

The game formula hasn’t changed, really, at all, from the original: you’re a sexy teenaged Japanese school girl tasked with taking pictures of ghosts and you have to let them to get agonizingly close so as to get the highest score despite all logic telling you to get the fuck out of there because of course you are it’s a fucking video game and high scores are very important.

Despite the assbutt textures and crude levels and kinda shitty, clunky-as-fuck controls that really have never been fixed, the main conceit of Fatal Frame still holds up. Photographing ghosts is shitty. It is scary. And that’s because, smartly, this game forces you to interact with something genuinely unpleasant and scary and shitty to move on. You’re rewarded for being scared, and you’re conditioned to want to succeed. I genuinely kept squinting and closing my eyes and yelling “NOPENOPENOPE!” as ghosts—or what I assumed to be ghosts, they kinda just looked like blurry transparent shit—came closer and I was forced to keep my camera shutter open so as to capture said ghosts.

So, that’s the good. There’s a lot of bad. This isn’t so apparent in the original Fatal Frame, but fuck it, I have a platform, and I think that this game series genuinely went off the fucking rails and it ought to be called out on its shit. There was always an insinuation of “sexy Japanese school girls” in this series that made me feel uncomfortable but it was never so explicit, so outright in, say, the first or second games, as it has become. In the newer games, and especially in the new Wii U game, Black Maiden, there’s secret “sexy” outfits out the wazoo and it’s just genuinely fucking ughhhhhhhhh-inducing. To each their own fetishes and all, but it’s not only such a shit stereotype of “gamers” to be into this shit, it’s also just clumsy. It’s so overt. It’s purely for the means of tittilation. There’s no subversion of anything. There’s no subtlety. There’s no celebration of badassery. There’s just underage Japanese schoolgirls being underage Japanese schoolgirls in bras and panties meant to do nothing but objects. And it fucking sucks. It fucking sucks because at some point, it feels like this game series stopped trying to make a game that tried to scare its players and just so happened to have the creepy subtext of scantily-clad underage Japanese schoolgirls. It’s now a scantily-clad underage Japanese schoolgirl tittilation simulation that just so happens to have some ghosts in it.

That’s fucking gross, man.

And I’m fucking sick of this bullshit in games. Take Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. That game is a fucking masterpiece. It subverts everything you know about the series, plays impeccably well, makes an open world work for the series, genuinely is fun to play, has organic, emergent gameplay that makes for awesome “Holy shit what!” moments in every fucking mission, is genuinely hilarious because of said “Holy shit what!” moments and other doofy little throwaway gags LIKE A FUCKING SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN BIONIC ARM and custom helicopter music like John Cena’s theme song, and still has the weirdness the series is known for. It also has the overt objectification and pointless sexualization and fetishization of women that this series has historically been up its own ass about and apologists try to sweep under the rug but honestly is and ALWAYS HAS BEEN just creepy schoolboy wankery bullshit. The scantily-clad sniper known Quiet may eventually have some redeeming qualities as a character, but they’re not enough to forget that she literally exists to sell the game to the most base male populace because “HEY BOOBS!” Fuck your dumb as shit rationalization of “Hey, she absorbs energy like plants so she has to be half-naked literally all the time.” That is dumb as shit, Hideo Kojima. You’re just creepy as fuck. You frame every fucking shit of her to show off her ass. You have her lay naked in her jail cell, LITERALLY PUT ON DISPLAY FOR YOUR MALE GAZE YOU SICK FUCK. And as much as I fucking LOVE MGSV, that genuinely comes close to just ruining the game for me. And I can’t look past it. And that fucking sucks because not only is Quiet fun to play with and a huge asset on missions, the game is, as I said, a god-damned masterpiece to play.

BUT I can almost kind of not really forgive that. I can just be grossed out by it and criticize it but still overall enjoy the game. Even if it is a fucking ginormous problem and Hideo Kojima ought to be called out for being a fucking creepy shitbag with a history of objectification and shittiness in the Metal Gear Solid series, the grossness that is the Quiet situation is not the sole focus of MGSV and thus I can enjoy the game for what it is while still having a lot of hang-ups and critiques.

SORRY. I’M RAMBLING. Point is: I do have a lot of hang-ups, but the sole point of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is not to just be The Male Gaze: The Video Game, even if it feels like it a lot of the time. The Fatal Frame series, on the other hand? Well, yeah, it is now just The Male Gaze: The Video game, and that sucks real bad, because it started off as something unique and engaging and genuinely terrifying that had its problems but was still something worth checking out. Now? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

SCARE-O-METER: Yeah kinda sorta like maybe a bit I dunno it was still effective but then I got sad thinking about where this series has gone/10.

FUN-O-METER: It’s kinda ass to play but the camera mechanic is still really inventive now/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: As a historical curiosity it’s worth checking out the first game but like fuck man fuck this series/10.

Tomorrow I play: Splatterhouse (Turbo GFX-16)

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 24, OCTOBER 24TH: ETERNAL DARKNESS: SANITY’S REQUIEM (GCN)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

ETERNAL DARKNESS: SANITY’S REQUIEM

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is SO 2002. Just look at that fucking name. It is the quintessential screenname circa the MSN roleplaying chat craze. That God-awful name aside, this game is fucking rad. And fascinating.

It started as an N64 game, but that doesn’t show. N64 games were very one note in their level design and geometry simply due to the system’s technological limits, but this game has some pretty damn complex and rad levels for a Gamecube game. But as interesting as all that shit is, you’re not here for the level design, or even the still pretty engaging gameplay. 

You’re here for a super intriguing, ambitious as fuck story that really shouldn’t work at all and at any moment feels like it’s about to collapse under the weight of itself but totally doesn’t and honestly still holds up. I didn’t beat the game whilst playing it today because it’s way too long to do so, but I did beat it back in the day a few years after it came out, and beat it again a few years ago. I read up on the story, and it all came back to me. I fucking loved this game’s story, man. There was a whole lot of “OH YEAH! THAT SHIT WAS DOPE!” moments whilst reading up on this game. This game in which you play as 12 different characters from various time periods and it’s so fucking absurd. Again, it ought to collapse under its own weight, but for the most part, the characters are all well-realized and interesting. And those characters are made that much better by strong voice-acting that still holds up alright, and in 2002, was reallllyyyy fucking good.

And that story, being so ambitious, is a bit slow-moving, so don’t go into this game expecting to get instant gratification. It doesn’t get going for a while, but it’s totally worth sticking it out.

What makes this game is the “sanity effects” mechanic. That shit may not be so effective now because not only have I played the game before, and many another game has subverted player’s expectations and “gamed” them, so to speak, but when this game came out, THIS SHIT WAS MIND-BLOWING. This was some Psycho Mantis knowing what games you played on your Playstation level shit times a gazillion. The TV would just seemingly turn off. Your volume would fluctuate wildly. People’s heads would be missing. It was some crazy-ass, genuinely unnerving shit. And even now, though it may not have the same effect 13 years later, the “sanity effect” system is still fascinating to witness. Within the context of it being created by Shigeru Miyamoto, the dude behind, you know, fucking Mario and The Legend of Zelda, and then developed by Silicon Knights, the studio with a whooollleee bunch of sordid history that went on to make Too Human, one of the shittiest shit games ever that was a trilogy to never be, this shit is even more mind-blowing and fascinating.

As a historical curiosity—honestly, more than that; as a flashpoint in games that proved games can be metafictional—this game is absolutely fascinating to go back to. And it really helps that generally speaking, it still holds up to play. Not only is the story engaging, but the combat is still pretty solid. Yeah, it’s a bit clunky and dated because, hey, it’s a 2002 game, and combat in games has vastly improved, but it’s still totally fine. And the sound design is still great, even if it’s a bit garbled because like hey it was a fucking Gamecube game that used to be an N64 game.

I didn’t get far in my time replaying Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, but it was fucking rad. It was like visiting an old friend—an old, weird as fuck, kinda creepy friend that looks much older than you remember him/her. 

If you’ve never played this game, give it a chance. Stick with it. It’s fascinating to interact with. Or, if you don’t feel like playing it, that’s cool. Check out a playthrough of it, or at least check out it’s fascinating as fuck “sanity effects” mechanic.

SCARE-O-METER: Maybe not scary anymore but absolutely fascinating/10.

FUN-O-METER: Starts off reallllyyy slowly but worth it/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Just engage with this game somehow because it’s so fucking fascinating/10.

Tomorrow I play: Fatal Frame (PS2)

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 23, OCTOBER 23RD: SLENDER: THE EIGHT PAGES (PC)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

SLENDER: THE EIGHT PAGES

NOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPE.

That is basically what I repeated ad-nauseum the entire time I played Slender: The Eight Pages for its entire duration. I got so god-damned terrified that I forgot to take screenshots. I just wanted to get the fuck out.

That, to me, is a sign of a rad game that I very much am all about.

I’ve been dreading playing this game ever since I committed to doing this feature because it is one of the few horror games I haven’t played before and even after seeing countless videos and streams of people playing it, Slender; The Eight Pages fucking got me, man. There is something about experiencing it yourself, instead of from the safety of a Youtube page, that makes this game pants-shittingly terrifying.

I have relayed several stories now about my mom’s questionable parenting skills in allowing me to consume horror-related media at probably inappropriate ages. The Blair Witch Project was one of those things. I watched it when it first came out and that movie fucked me up for a long, long, long time. I still don’t particularly care for camping. I still fucking love found footage movies even if the conceit is so long-dead the proverbial dead horse is withered away back into the earth and been resurrected as another horse only to be beaten to death again.

And the conceit is overdone in horror games, too. But Slender: The Eight Pages was one of the first. It is also born out of a god-damned internet myth and the literal viral nature of things like the Slender Man myth and more contemporarily speaking—lol God that sounds pretentious—the cryptic mythology of the FNAF series just absolutely fascinate me. I love how stories build on the internet.

ANYWHO. 

The actual game. What makes Slender: The Eight Pages so insanely effective at what it does is what, to me, makes The Blair Witch Project so effective: knowing one’s limits. The Blair Witch Project was so revolutionary—seriously, it was, fuck you, I know it’s a cliché word—in the horror genre was its limitation. The crew knew it had no fucking money at all, so it never showed you the Blair Witch. And everything about that movie was constructed was built around a constraint: no god-damned budget to show you a scary witch. And then people’s minds went fucking ballistic because the human imagination is a fucked up thing that did the work for the movie makers.

In Slender: The Eight Pages, the budget, so to speak, is basically non-existent. The game looks like shit, really. The models aren’t great and so everything is dark as fuck. Slender Man is literally just a dude in a suit and up close isn’t particularly scary. So make everything distorted and fucked up when you get close to him to hide his shitty texture. Make the entire game’s purpose revolve around avoiding the Slender Man so as not to draw attention to said shitty texture. Make it the player’s goal to actively avoid your shity-looking enemy and then the player’s imagination runs wild—literally.

And this game is VERY very very very very effective at letting your imagination run wild. Especially with headphones on. I shrieked so god-damned hard every time I caught even a glimpse of The Slender Man, even when my mind knew it was a horrible-looking, low-resolution stick man.

Again, this game sets out to do one thing and it works within its constraints to achieve that goal impeccably well. It isn’t nuanced, but it does exactly what it sets out to do and what it does is make you shit your pants and scream.

SCARE-O-METER: Like fucking 10 easily fuck you Slender Man/10.

FUN-O-METER: Nope not fun at all fuck that shit still glad I did it/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Go for it or watch people on Youtube it’s pretty hilarious/10.

Tomorrow I play: Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (GCN)

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 22, OCTOBER 22ND: RESIDENT EVIL HD REMAKE (PC)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

RESIDENT EVIL HD REMAKE

Right. Arguably the most influential and ground-breaking horror video game of all time—definitely the most influential and ground-breaking survival horror video game of all time. And I played a bit of the original just to re-remember what it looked like. 

BOY DOES THE PLAYSTATION NOT AGE WELL AT ALL.

Anywho, Resident Evil is still just as awesome as it was when I was a kid. 

Story time: Being an only kid with an awesome mom, I was allowed a lot of shit that I probably shouldn’t have been. For example, my mom took me to the South Park movie when I was ten and within like five minutes they dropped the F-bomb and she turned to me, shocked. And we witnessed near two hours of South Park humour together and she fucking HATED it. But we bonded over it. And it’s still hilarious to me now.

Point is: my mom was super rad and put up with my shit throughout my childhood. She figured I was gonna consume horrible shit anyway, so she set pretty loose boundaries for me and she could, for the most part, regulate it. Case in point: Resident Evil. I was only eight years old when it came out, and I had just got a SNES not too long before. So, I had to wait a few years, but I got a Playstation along with NHL 99 for my birthday. And shortly thereafter, I rented Resident Evil. My mom full-well knew what it was and she was cool with it. And ten year-old me was FUCKING TERRIFIED. Yes, this muddy, blurry, garbage-ass looking game made me piss myself as a kid. And that reveal of the zombie turning around is still one of the raddest moments in video games—made even radder after you watch Night of the Living Dead and remember the zombie girl in the basement and oh man it’s so good.

So, the remake, then. 

Yo, the remake looks surprisingly great. Capcom, who not only has been milking this god-damned series for all it’s worth since Resident Evil 4, when it did something rad and inventive with it, but in general has been suckling on the dry-as-fuck teet of nostalgia for quite some time now could have half-assed this remake so hard. But it didn’t. Genuinely, this game looks fucking rad, even for a 2014 game. And that’s because they really smartly made the backgrounds still images, allowing them to be great quality. Add in a fucking awesome lighting system and you’ve got a really sharp looking game.

The design team also did some smart stuff by updating controls and giving you an option to get rid of the frustrating as fuck tank controls—a control scheme in which your movement is dictated by your approximation to the camera, which is all kinds of confusing and unintuitive—that the original game had—which, I admit, takes away some tension, but also alleviates a lot of frustration born out of fighting the controls. You still fight the controls enough simply because of how the combat/controls are designed that shit is still tense and clumsy and charmingly Resident Evil-like. Just now you don’t get all confused about how to run. Which is rad.

Basically, the game is still just as old-school and archaic as it ought to be because, well, this game is from 1996. It just looks and runs really well and controls about as well as it could without getting away from what made Resident Evil unique and engaging: kinda clunky as fuck controls mixed with sparse supplies and narrow, claustrophobic hallways.

Even now, combat is still genuinely tense and harrowing as you fumble about and panic and aim to gank a zombie in the fucking head before it chomps down on you. Andddd you have limited room to move through said narrow hallways, making each shot that much more important. Not only do you have limited space and bullets, but also limited inventory space to hold your limited supplies. This makes every single encounter genuinely matter, and it makes getting packs of zombies fucking terrifying—still. Imagine being 10 and trying to fight off hordes of these shambling motherfuckers with all your lights off.

The imposing mansion becomes a physical force just as much as the zombies. Not only are you closed in by the narrow hallways, but the mansion feels like a god-damned labyrinth. Every door it feels like, is locked, and it’s a nightmare to navigate. It throws you off. And yeah, it’s a bit frustrating, but you ought to feel out of place. You ought to feel lost. It just adds to the tension of the whole game.

The mansion is also riddled with puzzles that genuinely, even now, I still find pretty damned challenging, sooooo kudos to a near 20-year old game.

The sound design goes a long way, too. And it still holds up. Zombies groans echo throughout the halls and often predict an inevitable shitshow waiting for you at the end of a hall. The music is appropriately B-movie esque and it’s rad.

Speaking of B-movie esque, one thing about the original game that was SO FUCKING BAD was its English voice acting. It was stilted and awkward and poorly translated and fucking hilarious. The remake is better, but it is still knowingly stilted and horrible at times in all the best ways.

Honestly, my only complaint about the remake is that they didn’t get rid of the doors that made moving through the rooms in Resident Evil so god-damned annoying, even as a kid. I understand that the remake is trying to be faithful to the original, but they already changed shit, sooooo just get rid of the doors.

Anywho, this game still surprisingly holds up really well—or, the remake makes it hold up. What I love so much about Resident Evil is how fucking insane it was when it came out. IT BLEW MY FUCKING MIND to see a game using cinematic techniques like dutch angles. It blew my mind to see so much blood—or what I assumed to be blood on my 17-inch, shitty tube television. And though the original looks like complete trash, it was designed so fucking impeccably that the game still holds up because EVERYTHING was designed to build up tension. From the deliberately slow, plodding gameplay to the narrow level design to the obvious cinematic inspiration, this game still just bleeds tension and it’s a god-damned riot to play. 

So go play, honestly, a piece of video game history. It’s rad. 

SCARE-O-METER: Surprisingly still pretty fucking tense/10.

FUN-O-METER: Liiiikeee 7 because fuck the doors/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Fuck yes/10.

Tomorrow I play: Slender: The Eight Pages (PC).

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 21, OCTOBER 21ST: FINGERBONES

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

FINGERBONES

Fingerbones is a free piece of interactive fiction on Steam, so it feels a bit strange to be critiquing it, but I’d heard/seen a lot about it and I wanted to check it out.

The distinction between game/interactive fiction becomes more and more muddled with each passing day as the scope of games matures and I’m cool with that. I very much appreciate and welcome the medium expanding. And Fingerbones is very much a piece of interactive fiction. You wander about—dear God, so fucking slowly—and look at some notes. I think my critique comes in choosing to make this piece of fiction interactive.

The crude, almost Minecraft-esque graphics don’t bug me. I’ve seen many an effective horror game/interactive fiction pull off what they’re trying to do with less. Fingerbones demands the player to walk at a maddeningly slow pace to pick up notes and figure out passwords that take a minute or two at most to figure out. And you have to go back and forth so god-damned much. And reading the details of this horrible scene laid out for you simply isn’t worth it. You kind of know what’s happening/what happened by the first or second note, so the whole thing becomes an exercise in frustration as you plod along and find passwords and open doors and backtrack.

Which is super unfortunate, because the story present by the game is tragic, disturbing, and taboo. Seriously, it tackles some really, really fucked up shit. And the game does a great job of making you feel uncomfortable with audio cues. Your skin crawls. It just only crawls for a minute or two and then you have to put up with walking.

I guess my point is that this could have been just as effective as a piece of fiction. It doesn’t need to be a game, and the execution isn’t really interesting enough to make you put up with the “game” part of Fingerbones.

All of that said, I’m glad this game exists. I’m glad that video games can explore subject matter like this. It may not work and it definitely isn’t for everyone, but it is a sign that video gamesrm to not only express one’s self, but tackle some heavy shit in interesting and unique ways—it’s just too bad Fingerbones didn’t utilize the medium that could have made it unique.

SCARE-O-METER: I’ll give it props for tackling such a subject/10.

FUN-O-METER: It is a slog to play even for the like five minutes you’ll interact with it/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I dunno/10.

Tomorrow I play: Resident Evil(PC).

[williamwriteswell]

31 DAYS, 31 HORROR GAMES: DAY 20, OCTOBER 20TH: LIMBO (PC)

RULES:

1:  I am going to attempt to play 31 horror games in 31 days. I am not going to BEAT 31 horror games in 31 days because that is fucking impossible. I’ll play at least an hour or two of each game unless I get so god-damned bored, stuck, or scared that I need to just shut the game off.

2. Some of these games aren’t “scary”, really, or even horror games, but they’re horror-inspired, or they’re supposed to be scary. Whatever, man. Just enjoy.

3. That’s about it.

LIMBO

Playdead’s LIMBO is a game that has come out on virtually everything known to man and I’ve beat it like five times and I still don’t quite get the ending and I love that. The whole game just oozes ambiguity in the best way. I very much adore LIMBO because it came out at a time when there wasn’t too many games doing what it was doing. First off, it is so god-damned stylish. There were very few games that took on the whole monochromatic look and LIMBO is still one of the best-looking games that adopts the stark blacks, white, and grey colour—or, well, shade—palette. The game looks stunningly good even now because the art design is so danged strong. And you would think it might be confusing to figure out where to go/what to do when everything is just different shades of grey, but goals are very, very clear.

What makes the world of LIMBO so striking and engaging is its aesthetic. Because everything is muted and for the most part, in silhouette, everything becomes unclear and unsettling. And you go along with it. Your perception of what the fuck is happening is IN LIMBO GET IT. That’s a common theme throughout the game and the game plays with player expectations exceptionally well.

Being a puzzle-platformer, this game requires a lot of experimentation, and you’re going to die a whole bunch. And you die in some real gruesome ways. You don’t need to see a kid get fucked up by a bear trap in vivid detail to know it would suck. You see enough of a rough outline to know what happened and your’e imagination fills in the details. That’s horror 101, man, and the game knows how to strike a balancing act between implying horrific things and giving you enough to know that shit is bad, and then letting your imagination gallop faster than a gazelle.

This game wouldn’t work at all without a clever and well-implemented checkpoint system, because being a puzzle-platformer, this game is all about experimentation and failure. You’re going to die a bunch trying to figure stuff out, and it would be game-breakingly frustrating if you either were reset back too far after you died or it took too long for the game to load up again—original Bloodborne load times, I’m looking at you—but luckily enough the checkpointing is, for the most part, great, and the load times faster than a 15 year-old boy’s first time.

You’re immediately back into the world so you can bash your head against a puzzle some more—sometimes literally. That said, the game isn’t overly-hard, and though I feel like it relies A BIT too much on its aesthetic, the game is still engaging enough to play that you want to keep playing it. And that aesthetic is so well-realized and engaging that I can kind of forgive LIMBO.

The game is never downright terrifying, but it is very frequently tense as fuck and the ambiguity of everything just leaves you feeling deeply unsettled. You also have to go through some pretty horrific shit as the little dude with white eyeballs on your journey. And it comes to a not-that-satisfying-but-in-a-great-way ending that fits the story. The puzzle-platforming kinda gets stagnant about 3/4 of the way through, but the game is worth seeing it out.

LIMBO is cheap as balls and on everything, so go play it.

SCARE-O-METER: "Scary” isn’t the right word but the atmosphere is fantastic and there is some genuinely disturbing shit and also one real “OHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK” moment/10.

FUN-O-METER: Solid-ass puzzle-platformer/10.

RECOMMEND-O-METER: Absolutely, do it/10.

Tomorrow I play: Fingerbones (PC).