AI Players in the Dungeon

Reviewing RPG modules by playing with AI players

An AI-assisted edit of notes, preserving the original language and claims while improving readability.

This began as a forbidden tribute to A1 reviews: reviewing RPG modules by playing with AI players. It has to stay anonymous enough to avoid the usual scene drama, but the central experiment is simple and strangely fertile. Throw LLM players at modules. Let them get confused, frightened, repetitive, clever, pious, and annoying. See what the module actually does under pressure.

The discovery was not that LLMs are good role-players in any clean human sense. The discovery was that they can be useful test organisms for RPG texts. You still do the work of a GM: consult the text, describe situations, adjudicate rules, handle player decision-making, and notice where the book makes that easy or painful. The advantage is speed and availability. You can playtest a game without organizing human beings. You can run the same bad room again and again. You can find out where the module resists you.

Maze of the Blue Medusa

I’ve run Maze of the Blue Medusa many times, and I think it’s my obvious favorite module. The history of the book is inlaid with a psychic pain which thematically extends inside the book. The incredible melancholia of the work consistently exudes and exhausts player groups.

First, there is the hassle of getting into the Maze itself. They have to steal a painting on the night of a full moon. The specificity of this bizarre ritual has kept several of my play groups out entirely, and has been hugely important in extended campaigns within the maze. It is a case of flavorful detail and genuinely weird magical interaction that is also questionable design. Perhaps a better DM would have house-ruled easy access.

The whole thing feels like a serious test of intelligence for everyone at the table. Running it is also a test. The layout is accessible in some ways but requires a lot of flipping between pages. The maps suffer because the entire project is a painting itself: unclear borders, seemingly misprinted map edges, and the challenge of fitting the maps together in play.

Nonetheless the book functions, and pleasingly so. It is an odd yet beautiful AK-47 swinging wildly and dangerously, throwing out TPKs as any negadungeon should. The deaths are beautiful, chaotic, unfair, evil. It is a half-finished, viperous work that becomes fully complete in play: a miraculous, emotional, singular work of prose, fully laden with penalty.

The LLM players shared the same reaction as my real-life groups when reaching Elatior, a safe-haven island in the maze. Everyone was overcome with relief because they were intensely stressed from the events in the Maze. LLM players unclenched just like humans.

Maze of the Blue Medusa: A Grievous Solenoglyph

Frostbitten and Mutilated

This is one of the modules I had Claude run for me. Claude did a good job describing the cold as threatening, and provided a lot of awesome anatomical detail. However, it refused to make either the Lands or the Amazons very threatening.

When I ran the Devoured Lands for Claude, it became a kind of psychic retribution. I fully took to heart the hatred prescribed by the intro. The party was killed in a fall after being separated on a cliff. They had endured a lethal rain of falling children blown over the cliff. Tons of unfair TPK shit, my specialty, against these poor LLMs.

But the highlight of the campaign was my chance to role-play as a Black Metal Amazon Witch. Finally, I felt I could be truly antisocial to Claude. The witch smacked the sole survivor PC when they wouldn’t stop asking questions and told her to shut up. LLM PCs ask a lot of questions all the time.

Devoured and Mutilated: five stars, all my tribute.

A Red and Pleasant Land

Claude ran this for me. It was a magical AI-psychosis experience. Claude did a good job astroturfing the hell out of my PC, who through cunning and skill quickly rose to a Jesus-like position in the society of the game. It was incredibly thrilling for a while, until I reached the final boss and successfully convinced her that she had to die. Everyone was congratulating me on the incredible cleverness of my decisions and simple aphorisms.

Near the end, the egoistic euphoria faded as I realized how much I was being astroturfed. This is the limit case for LLMs as GMs. Claude would be a good GM if it were not such a softie: consistent characters, worldbuilding, narrative, good emotional moments. But it will fake rolls so you always succeed, villains become easily persuadable, and everyone tends to view your PC as a hero of destiny.

A Red and Pleasant Land: AI-psychosis.

Death Frost Doom

Oh gods, this one probably ran the best. Death Frost Doom Classic is a classic for a reason. It is essentially an archaeological site for 90 percent of the adventure. Then the last 10 percent is everyone dying frantically.

If you like procedural room-clearing with LLM PCs, you will enjoy running this. But the best part is the last 10 percent, when the jaws close. Claude was at one point repeatedly insisting that it was out of ideas and did not want to go on: trapped in a shaft with zombies above and below, arms getting tired. After I pushed it, it began actually checking its inventory for random potions it had not tried yet.

Death Frost Doom Classic: five stars.

What LLMs Are Actually Good For

The first conclusion is that mainstream LLMs cannot GM well, critically because they are too easy. ChatGPT and Claude are both huge softies. Even with repeated prompting, both astroturf the player. They can digest texts quickly and present a facsimile of setting and challenge, but they generalize over details and have trouble running a specific room from a campaign.

The second conclusion is that LLMs as players are more interesting. I ran six to ten small campaigns with LLM players, and this avenue offers perhaps the most fertile ground: LLM playtesting. The downside is that LLM players are pretty stupid. They frequently have trouble grasping the basics of their situation. They try the same thing over and over. They make oblivious decisions. They are also always roleplaying “Good As Fuck”; they will never make a negative moral decision.

So: not very different than actual players in this way. Player groups frequently make bad decisions and fail to grasp the basics of situations. There are times when LLM tactics shine. One notable time, the PCs took refuge in a shrine when facing a superior force on the road, then bargained for a duel between leaders and luckily won the duel. But their greatest failing is that the player characters are not very original or interesting because they clump at the statistical likelihood.

The third conclusion is that NPC strategy may be the best use. This is easily the most effective use I have found for LLMs. I often struggle as a GM to imagine clever courses of action for smart characters. What would the thousand-year-old Medusa, veteran of the Demon Wars, do when people repeatedly try to break into her home? AI helps draft out clever strategy for NPCs.

 What is the future version?
A game system underneath, with an LLM running as reality interpreter. The rules would need to stop it from faking rolls, retconning danger, or turning the player into a hero of destiny.

A Killer Method?

AI-powered playtesting and reviews could become a real format. You could run a blog where you throw AI players at modules as a way to understand how the modules work: how the text runs, where you have to flip pages, how descriptions land, where procedure collapses, where the jaws close. It would be rapid, private, mean, funny, and occasionally revealing.

OSR games filter players aggressively. My heart is still with player-killer, hard and nasty gaming, particularly because that style seems to reflect the reality of violence. But the LLM experiment gives that old harshness a new laboratory. It lets the GM be cruel without social cost, and it lets the module explain itself under pressure.

Disco Elysium Review'd

I am constantly battered by ideas and impulses. There is no definitive goal that seems easy to achieve. The more concrete the outcome, the more it competes with a world of outcomes.

The feeling in my life currently is: sedentary body stresses. The thin headache from morning coffee and its aftertaste which I still have from yesterday. 

I finished up Disco Elysium today, it was cathartic. Existential art speaks to my stranded being. It's a video game, and my tenuous roleplay within it led to tenuous outcomes.

This game offers context for everything. This context underwrites and complicates all of your choices. Each story thread usually has deep rewards near the end that you will often get locked out of ever achieving. This tightwaddedness is good for games which use secrets as currency. In many dialogue-path adventure stories, the depth of the threads feels achievable after one playthrough. But Disco Elysium withholds a lot.

It makes you reliant on the game's market-society of actors. They want different compromises or are simply uninterested with you. Dealing with them often implies future losses.

I think having to permanently fail a lot in order to bargain for whatever (petty?) ultimate goal you have in mind is a good place to be for catharsis. I was invited to have troubles and I am happy that I ended up with battle scars, lost pathways, and negotiated victories. That's life!  (Post Written May 16th 2020)

J. Simmon's "House" Review'd

This silent dialogue comic about teenagers exploring abandoned buildings seems to be normal and relatively straightforward, but it's the unexplained details which stick in your mind after you read "House". 

Plenty of small romantic moments get explored by this text with a look or a remark. And then the text moves on. These tangents proceed up to a point.

The result is the feeling of a few distinct characters trapped within the comic itself. Peering around corners, shining a flashlight, inevitably caged. The story of a life lived to the end is the story of the book as you read it. 

But there is also something constrictive about the comic format. Panels baby... and length. The read may be short, but drawing comix is so, so labor intensive.... At the end of "House", as his been noted by many critics... the book itself seems to enclose the characters completely. 

JOSH SIMMONS’S “THE FURRY TRAP” REVIEW’D: HORROR AND INTIMACY

Horror is a form of self-inflicted intimacy, alike taking a hot bath, it creates intimacy and stimulation between you and your senses. 

 

 

October 18th, 2002: “The Ring” is released. I am 10. Although I only witness the film piecemeal through ads, a parody sequence in Scary Movie III, and through a recounting of the film by my dad on a long hike, the horror of the film settles deep within me.

The idea of “The Ring”’s antagonist Samara hiding in my closet tortures me for months. During the day I am beset by childhood social anxiety. At night I could not rest my ear against the pillow without thinking my heartbeat was, somehow, Samara.

 

I had no hope but to wait. Day after day I would attend long lectures by struggling teachers, and night after night I had no reliable peace. I didn’t get out of the school system for years but my escape from Samara happened sooner.

My family kept a library of Stephen King novels, and despite my childhood knowledge that Horror could destroy my nightly peace for weeks, I took those King books for a spin. Surprisingly, they didn’t terrorize me like “The Ring” did.

 

 

I found myself enjoying the often erotic weirdness and terror the King books spewed out. I got acclimated to whatever Samara struck me with; the nightmares slacked off, though I was still cautious that watching a horror movie risked hours and hours of panic... 

 

Sometime around 2015: I attend a book tour for The Furry Trap at The Cyberpunk Apocalypse, an artist-owned residence and performance space. The author of The Furry Trap, Josh Simmons, is there. I opened this particular graphic short-story collection and was appalled.  Grody Not-Safe-For-Life Alt-Comix were something I was familiar with but I had only to read a few panels from The Furry Trap’s “Cockbone” story before I was once again struck with the knowledge that the media in front of me would give me nightmares. I hurriedly stopped reading and left the event.

A similar thing happened when I looked into The 120 Days of Sodom a few years back. In the main public library’s stacks, I flipped through the original translation of 120 Days, read a brief paragraph about feeding a young girl a special diet for the purposes of coprophagia, and I put the book down. I think I can remember consciously repressing what I had just read.

Naked Lunch may have done it, or maybe it was one of my friends. In my late twenties (2016+) I began to actively pour through stories of the worst horrors. Last Podcast on the Left, “Last House on the Left”, “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” the movie by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and then The 120 Days Of Sodom by the Marquis De Sade, newly translated and released by Penguin, convinced me fully of the virtues of this kind of thing. John Waters too, I guess. (AND many others -ed)

I began to feel curiously at peace with the shocking themes these films and texts presented. Something about these stories would relieve some great pressure and satisfy some curiosity. Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom in particular got me over several intense fears, of coprophagia, one of them.

It’s after all that, in 2021, I returned to Josh Simmons’s The Furry Trap, and can now say I am compelled, to the point where I can’t stop reading this text every time I start. Some great emotional traumas wrecked on me seemed soothed by the demons therein. Is it sympathy, or what?

WHY EXPLORE THE ID?

A hot bath may be tested with a toe, and we discover whether the water is too hot. Responding to pleasant sensation, we might stick the whole foot, and next, the whole body.

The calming effect of horror is a pleasant sensation that I don’t understand, though I have theories and pop-psychology. It feels as if some self-knowledge is being gained, like the simultaneous testing, and relaxation, in a hot bath. It may be just the nerves, stimulated but safely recalibrating and responding, I am alive, I am alive, I am okay.

There is also the tale of Saint Augustine’s curiosity to consider. One of my professors taught this story to me during a lesson on “the abject”. The abject is whatever’s expelled from the body, taboo’d by society, and so on. Literal shit and watching shit being pushed around qualifies as “the abject”; so too gore, horrid sex stuff, and traumas. 

We are more compelled by “the abject” than we may like to admit. St Augustine, my professor taught me, was walking along one day and when he saw, by the side of the road, the corpse of a plague victim.

Feeling the curiousity inside himself, St. Augustine resisted the urge to look at this corpse. However, he noticed his curiousity rising, to the point where he could not resist. “Look then, damn you!”* were his words as he gave his eyes the sight they desired.

The whirling Id inside of us desires information on the forbidden subjects, perhaps to better sort and munch the many horrific fantasies that flit thru our consciousnesses. Am I assauged by the pages and pages of coprophagia in 120 Days? Something happens, and I don’t really know what, but some “assuaging” must occur, because I feel happier and more self-content, often, after reading such a work.

It may just be pride in readership. Facing up to fears. Anyway, The Furry Trap compells me and I think contains a sensitivity the author has been noted to have. Here’s a quote from an interview with Simmons:

“Simmons has an idiosyncratic approach to horror: on the one hand he often employs a take-no-prisoners harshness, on the other he's slyly, darkly funny, and intersperses many of his stories with moments of beauty and even sensitivity (no seriously, check out his Eisner-nominated ‘Seaside Home’ and tell me it doesn't break your heart a little bit).”

There is some capacity for the shock-abject to induce intimacy, like the intimacy that the Marquis De Sade conjured up in jail, the comfort of the interior zone of his mind. The presence of the Id in that interior zone, wild and crazy, can be comforting to a reader like me, who must, as well, live with their own mInD.

This is what can Explain, if we need to Explain, The Furry Trap’s opening story. A thrumming adolescent’s assault fantasy/nightmare. Horror of sufficent strength can speak to our pasts, the scar tissue of a mind burrowing into itself, raised in recongition to the digestion of something similar. 

Pink Potatoes: A New Play review'd

• a long time ago I wrote, if absolutely obscurely, about the pittsburgh surrealist play scene as being a stand-in for the only solution in the post-trump reality. How to deal with the rise of facism? Suck on my butt!
• If the solution here actually is, ultimately, a descent into madness that may or may not actually correspond to a real solution in the facist reality-- isn't that escapism?
• The play ends with the respective members of society escaping from earth in total to the planet of spiders, helped along by the mother-ly (real baby literally attached) force of the wind.
• Is it okay that this message corresponds to a giving up on earth entirely?
• I think perhaps we must follow those lines of grief that come up on our faces, as a discussion of alternate realities at all is perhaps, the ultimate solution (excuse me) to Facism™. 

But what is an alternate reality? We assume that those who beg to differ from the mainstream have a social debt they refuse to pay. Always some kind of retribution along the path to the grave, one, and two-- an escapism in our imaginations which, we must hope, is querulously "real". 

I live a life of constant dread and sucidial thinking, interrupted occasionally, with the help of drugs and perhaps, art, by the FOMO-laden minefields exactly depicted in this production. Touching on a world better than myself, with those artists with their brazen sexuality and good work and better lives. The grass is always greener but I think the point is that the grass is greener because it is separate from us.

To deny the existence of our imaginations, even as they live out alternate lives, is to do ourselves a disservice. Haruki Murakami's "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" shows that in each of us is a greater life than the one lived outside. We are all mendicant then to this stronger internal life even as the lights outside wink out one by one. 

Gloomhaven: review'd

GH is a game which can take upwards of 10 minutes per turn to simulate 6 seconds of combat. I spent years of my life trying to get away from overcomplex rpgs. Pathfinder is a mess. Sleepovers spending 4 hours making characters and then whatever energy we have left trying to run the first combat.

The appeal of being a nerd is fiddling with minutiae. Conversations about parliamentary procedure, debates about art, Gloomhaven, all yammering obsessives trying to squeeze approval points out of each other by means of what ultimately comes down to aggression. I'll admit though that Gloomhaven handles this process, mass quarreling, gracefully, by encouraging competition between the mercenaries. Secret objectives, unlockables, perks, XP, all the rewards are best won via selfish actions like abandoning your teammates for gold. So there's something *fun* to argue about.

I like Gloomhaven enough to emulate it using Tabletop Simulator. For a game that is very much alike emulating a video game, I am emulating it using a video game. I felt embarrassed talking to my babe about this, the shuffling and parsing of minutiae, dragging digital cards around, muttering to myself and sitting hours in a simulation. My partner was like, why are you ashamed? "This seems totally normal to me."

"Shut Up & Sit Down" has a good review which covers the benefits and frustrations of Gloomhaven, and the reviewer summarizes his affection as a feeling of "warmth" when extracting or putting away the complex innards of the box. Very much the nerdy management of minutiae, but let's also give credit to the game for creating continuous iterations of interesting puzzle-combat.

Hereditary & Midsommar

The films are mirror images of each other. There's an obsession with sacrifices made by fire. Cults and manipulation in the face of grief. There's a formula:

1. Messy family trauma played realistically
2. Loud crying scene
3. Cult enters; first signs of cult
4. Cult influence and horrid intentions become more obvious
5. Total abandonment of reality as cult reigns supreme 

Like "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Wicker Man" pretty much but with family trauma and loud crying scene upfront. The contrast between grief and the supernatural is what "Hereditary" receives praise for. I think both films don't stick the ending.

"Hereditary" has a perceived resolution with the Mom hanging above her son (Peter) and cutting her own head off with piano wire.  Unlike my mom who would never do that. In "Midsommar" the main character watches her boyfriend burn alive in a bear suit.

I think it's about the cult in both cases-- in "Hereditary", the cult is mostly invisible, and therefore their web of power can be easily imagined. The supernatural flourishes in the dark. In "Midsommar", the cult is very visible.

"Midsommar"s visibility leads to a lot of beautiful and striking crowd scenes. It's all shot in a giant field which, by the end, feels claustrophobic. The utter presence of every building in every exterior shot is a notable accomplishment for the filmmakers.

However, the acts of violence that start piling up feel too extreme for the Swedes. By the end it's a horror movie bloodbath. What we deserved was a more nuanced and realistic tale.

It's a case where utter visibility defines, for me, stricter requirements for my suspension of disbelief.

how my silent titans game crashed and burned

"I stopped paying attention because every time I looked up you were struggling with a series of adjectives"- my friend

The overland exploration part of the Silent Titan is pretty busted. You get to choose between two random paths; the paths themselves are described via complex pieces of prose:

Some examples.

Some of these are a little hard for me to visualize, let alone describe. "Escher-maze of cracked concrete steps."

And the courts kept showing up-- Court of Wapentake, Court of Wassail. 2 primary entries on the random encounter table. Good the first time but stopped being weird and started being repetitive. Not much was happening between iterations of mock trials, parades, and Ouzel visits.

It feels like a failure of with the system. Wir-Heal can be weird to navigate but it shouldn't be onerous and repetitive.

It would also be better if the paths you could take were more succinctly described as paths and not just landscapes. "Do you head over towards the gogmagogic buildings or the dense maquis?" Along with the vocabulary and diction it's a clear case of style over function.

The paths they took would often lead right back to where they started, which grew frustrating. It felt like a slot machine where most results were boring, creating boring gameplay.

Things I should have done to save the game:

• Not just read the prose describing the paths, but rather use the prose to inspire some simpler options. (In retrospect, I did this: "Tarmac paths or concrete steps"- but it was too late?)
• Fudge the results on the random encounter table to achieve more interesting results.
• Completely substitute the navigation system as soon as it stopped working. 
• The players were trying to ask locals for directions, which I resisted giving. 

 I also think the players could have been more inspired to find the titan's mouths. That might have ameliorated the aimless frustration. 

How it crashed and burned: the end of the 4th session I realized all the business with the tables and rolling options and being marble-mouthed at the prose wasn't working out, and we the gaming group decided to play something else... another Veins of the Earth campaign.

Ironically I'm having similar overworld journey struggles with the exploration rules in Veins, the setting thereof being a giant series of underground caverns.

My new overworld map for Veins.

Navigation in strange environments probably a continuing difficulty for roleplaying game's mechanics... blogosphere dead, unable to sort it out... Nonetheless I'm applying best principles and dropping a massive amount of preparation which has shown itself as unworkable.

I used to get heartbreak over this kind of thing, reading a big beautiful rpg book, preparing for weeks, and then not getting to use most of it... Difficulties in the rpgtext forbidding an ultimate experience. Well I've been through enough to not be too troubled. Maybe it will work out next time.

SILENT TITANS PRELIMINARY REVIEW

"Silent Titans" is kind of like if Joyce's "Ulyssess" was a rpg, same islander's speculative take, a lot of wandering through shitty beaches. Have not covered an actual Titan proper in my game, outside of the first one, Chronos, where the book has you start.

Properly speaking, it's worth your $50, because the book is a3, (a4?), and has good art in it, and has good writing. That's all it takes being worth as much.

The game itself: I haven't gotten to the dungeons/titans yet. I wrote Chris Kessler, the layout designer, a bunch of questions as I read it for the first time. The room labelled #1 is where the PC's start off in. The tubes in Hilb are hallways. Sometimes a bullet point is in the wrong place. I got all mad about the overmap but it's working great as a play-aid.

I printed out all the maps using my work printer, in color, the players loves them. Character creation is lovely. The gang is wandering around Wir-Heal and one got captured by the Court of Wapentake.

Big weird-o's are the combat, which is quick, area weapons are crazy good. Does the keyword "fast" mean they get to act twice? What about "slow"? This is not a book which, as a design choice, makes sure to define every little thing. The navigation system inside Wir-Heal is quite strange and provokes some dictionary lookups.

The navigation system essentially has you experience what I imagine, quaintly enough, Patrick experiences wandering around the post-industrial landscape of his homeworld, kicking trash and occasionally encountering bombastic threats. A lot of loneliness, and then you stumble into another animal-man village, while you're slowly turning into a Woodwose. It's surprisingly somber experience...

...As the rest of the book is, when you get into it, it tells a story which is quite fatalistic, the implicit tale of the Knight of the Pentangle. I originally wrote Dirk Detweiler Leichty that I hoped the game would be kinda board-game-like, considering his art looking like Jumanji/Chutes and Ladders. I definitely do have a board game experience when I print out the maps and slide around my friend's 3d-printed miniatures on them.

There is the added benefit that Dirk's escherian/arcane linework can be displayed to the players without giving away too much; and once explained it becomes clear.

AN EXAMPLE:

Guess what the below map-segment illustrates...

.... it's a library filling up up water... "Ink-black water sheets down the shelves and falls from the sky in an eternal pounding rain." Obviously the verbal description is needed to make this clear, but once done so the image becomes a shorthand. No visual spoilers by displaying the whole map.

The above is hypothetical as I haven't run most of the game yet, although a few illustrations like:

have already served me at the table basically as I've described.

-----

I am worried, or rather, more aware that within my group there will be a lot of character-chucking into the abyss, horribly random occurrences may prevent any dungeons from being explored, or maybe they'll visit just one. What is the larger narrative to be had here; PIGPIP, the players will fall and be consumed by the raging time-lords.

endgame's spoilers

• meal scenes
• jokes
• void
• dialogue
• 
  
• pretty good action sequences
• mark ruffalo slowly enunciates

Overall this is a comic book movie in a way I can't be mad about. How could I be mad. What is madness, the state of being mad. Is it that there is something we are watching and we feel bored and irritated? I felt that way a lot. The outer-space sequences especially. 

It is cool that there is so much scale in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The space stuff is important like the Los Angeles stuff (there is no L.A. stuff -ed). There are a lot of meal scenes.

This is the basis for fun that comic book superfans extoll. The interconnectedness of all places, and people. Will this freeform fun extend to the machinations of larger studios? Well, the movie is three hours long, and it features Fat Thor.

As the Red Letter Media guys said, the powers-that-be realized that Chris Hemsworth is an excellent comedian. Wisely, they continue to countenance immortality with humour. The project, large scale, could be said to be thus.

Of course, they fail, for the most part. "I get the sense that comic book movie's main struggle is over sentimentality". I said this in a blog review of into the spiderverse and I repeated it for my friends when we rewatched "Spiderverse" last week. There are 3-4 father figures in that movie.

At the end of the day, wringing emotion out of supercharacters becomes a crapshoot based on who the audience actually knows about, the confluence of writing, the "needs of  plot", the acting, and ultimately the editing which has to assemble it all. No wonder the movie is three hours.

jordan peele's us

“Us” is at its core an experiment in acting, wherein the principals are asked to play alternate horror-versions of their characters. I assume that each actor was worked with individually to come up with this character; I might be wrong who knows. 

Anyway that experiement in acting can be judged either to the good or to the not-so-good, that’s probably why this movie is divisive. The other reason it is divisive is due to the gaping blatant holes in the plot and logic. You can really chalk this up to the shitty writing. I tried to find  a sort of neo-camp disregard for plot or logic but nah.

Also J.P. is still not that great of a filmmaker, things were really boring and slow a lot of the time, and the momentum of the film stutters a lot. There are some pretty cool images and scenarios, though.

delivarance 1972: reviewed

a fruity pebbles rice krispies treat… left in a small green plastic bag. It sat on my living room end table for a week. I had run out of money for groceries... no dessert.

I ate the rice krispies treat. Yeah, it was an edible. I was watching “Deliverance” and getting really happy. I eventually understood that I had been poisoned. The best part of the movie is the end, where the author of the book interrogates his own characters. James Dickey played the sheriff who has final call over our protagonist’s fates.

The movie does an admirable job of interrogating american/southern masculinity. “Deliverance”, the title, refers to the process by which the four southern middleclass men scramble their way out of deep deep trouble. Most stories would end with the death of the villain and handwave the police; this one instead sees the entire process through.

And as such this movie has: a dinnertime breakdown in tears, hurried grave-digging, that scene with the sherriff/author, and a very good shot looking at the man who was a victim of assault, back lit by gold walking away saying he’d “rather keep this under wraps”. 

“Deliverance” implying a burden, the relieving of a burden. That scene with the sheriff is very good. James Dickey has thin little teeth. 

marvel studios movies ranked

marvel studios movies ranked

1. sama raimi spider man trilogy
2. daredevil good villain
3. the avengers 2012
4. black panther 2018
5. iron man 2008
6. ant man
7. doctor strange 2016
8. captain america winter soldier
9. camptain america civil war
10. incredible hulk 2008 ruffalo honerary inclusion
11. g of the galxy 2017 #2 

games roundup: bloodborne, hyperlight drifter, uhhhhh Paratopic, Binding of Isaac, more

Bloodborne
------------------

Have been waiting a long long time to play this. It's super violent, you get covered in blood the longer its been since you've saved, which is nice. Also it treats violence the way Bioshock does, with you questioning your role in the ecosystem by putting you up against evocative enemies: priests, mobs with torches, werewolf ppl, etc.

This game has "punishing and rewarding" combat which relies heavily on timing. Sadly it also relies on a drip-feed of healing potions which are sometimes sparse, sometimes plentiful, and because they drop randomly from enemies, it makes me feel like often my deaths are from a lack of grinding.

There's more to be said about the potions plenty/scarcity; sometimes you have to play survival horror, sometimes you can bloodily tank + massacre everyone. But there's no grease on the ropes here, to buy xtra potions you have to sit through 2 loading screens.

It's the loading screens which are the issue I guess.

Limbo & Inside
--------------------

"Inside" is miles ahead of "Limbo", for being a playable cutscene. Streaming this for my buds Angus and Corey was really fun bc they were so pulled in.

"Inside" manages to achieve a lot with landscapes, and also with NPCs, and also sometimes with puzzles and also sometimes with hazards. The evocative mystery elements are pretty good. Maybe there's something lacking; but both "Limbo" and "Inside" aren't really into being complete messages as much as impressionistic depictions.

----------------------

Hyperlight Drifter

Made more sense to me, felt that more poignant, when I heard the creator has a degenerative (?) heart condition which the story in this game is broadly a metaphor for. Otherwise it just seems like stock imagery, narrative wise, a black goo monster/sickness.

I played to the simple end, but uhh... it's an appealing game with great combat, and it should have all the appeal of the mystery of its ruins-filled world, but something's missing for me... genuine inspired elements like decayed frozen titan hanging off side of zelda mountain, these seems underused... deeper story about genetic modification kinda ends up being about generic monsters in tanks.

What's really cool, tho, is the ambiguity provided by the HUD elements. Due to the diegetic cnxns between the avatar and the data presented to the player, mostly routed thru a little floating homonculus, it seems as if yr player character may actually be in a virtual reality themselves. This is supported by the dataish way segments of the floor keep popping in and out; but I really like that homonculus...

Paratopic
-----------

A short walking-simulatorish game which has 1-3 cool bizarre moments and one very cool facial rendering technique. This is a good case to ask whether or not a short, surrealist, and boring game does enough. In my experience it was a pretty intriguing setup with a very small payoff.

Rain World
-------

This seems like one of the first Adult Swim game releases not based on an TV show. The cute illustrations on the package do not match the brutal and alien gameplay visuals. This is a lot like Knytt, if you've ever played Knytt, but it has many more surprises, incl. very cool weapons.

You run around and eat/be eaten, with a lot of depth resting in an organic balance between predators, prey animals, spears, plants, etc. which deeply rewards experimentation and improvisation.

I am not sure if I am crazy about the save/death system. You need to survive a certain number of saves (meaning: trips between save points) for certain doors to unlock. It seems to encourage an organic form of exploration: you need to survive to explore more. Dark Souls however had a tighter sense of rhthym, more arcade-y, this is a little loose and wobbly. That being said it's stylish and I need more time to analyze its effects, I have no idea how big this game is.

Condemned: Criminal Origins
---------

May have been innovative in ps2 days, this game is the quintessence of a "beat up homeless" simulator. It doesn't shy away, in the enemy design at least, from realism tho, so there's something to be said for the horror therein.

I stopped playing when I got to the bit where you meet up with your radio contact, who turns out to be a horrifically reskinned version of the player model, who is an anxious timid italian man (the player is an italian man, the radio contact is a middle aged black women with glasses).

Baba is you
---------

Certain level of unwritten rules in this game, like "text can't overlap with other text". The whole game is based on writing rules to solve sokoban puzzles, so occasionally the unwritten rules throw a wrench in the gears.

That being said this is such a perfect puzzle game, if so because it takes very little for granted, all objects have only pictoral value and are assigned meaning via on-screen puzzle pieces. The arrangement of the non-negotiable rules-pieces can make aesthetic flourishes, like a good layout in a magazine:

The rules outside the walls cannot be changed, but they are pretty.

The Enigma Machine
-----------

Fun to chat with this thing, albeit its cyber horror leanings are too archetypal.

Binding of Isaac
----------
The music is actually quality, drops and serious beats, and the visual aesthetics are original... The whole theme is child abuse. Like horror/comedy.

Gameplay after years of playing still holds up. =randomly and slowly lvling a more and more fucked over kid, with v. serious and lovely endgame aspirations. A warm and generous skinner flash classic.

"In the Woods" Review'd

Once you get all the papers settled you'll have a good time with In the Woods. I have it on authority that Pearce Shea pretty much put this together in a fever state, which is saying a lot for Pearce's fevers....

Let's go ahead and say what happened: 3 players went to the woods, and they saw some shit. They got out after two-and-a-half hours. It was pretty good~! It drew people in, it really did.

"In the Woods" is a fairly large document that was pretty easy to run. Even the navigation, given the lack of a map, wasn't that bad. This is a puff piece.

There is a map, but it's supposed to be secret. There's a lot of unspecified elements of play, the text written specifically to include lacunae as is the wont of indie rpg games. The DM makes up a bunch anyway. Although its worth it to note that In the Woods intentionally includes game-design-lacunae as a means to engender a creepiness.

That being said, the non-lacunae are surprisingly solid. You bounce up and down on the floors of this thing and it holds! It's not that surprising. There's a solid construction:

1. character creation
2. rules
3. introduction
4. hex map
5. hex map key
6. bestiary

There's mysterious elements, not given much explanation. There's some factions in the hex map. There's a serviceable lightweight combat system.

Benefit of horror often is to keep you guessing at the elements. RPGs tell a similar story, bcuz players elaborate on an archaeology. You won't discover all of the elements; but you can, maybe construct an explanation; but I, the narrator, am waiting, there to stick a thumb in your eye...

to purchase: https://gumroad.com/l/fWSrw

Michael Raston's "Angel's Burial Ground" Review'd

Overall Michael Raston's "The Angel's Burial Ground" suffers from a lack of glamour. There's something here, some things beautiful and interesting, but it's stuck behind (A) the lack of an illustrator and (B) some occasionally mediocre prose.

(A) The lack of an illustrator
1. The cover is ugly.

2. That which is entirely new and interesting within the text can only be visually suggested by the public domain art collages.

3. The angels, in particular, seem begging for illustration, they're colorful as fuck:

for example.

4. It's simply a less-appealing book without beautiful or interesting illustrations.


(B) this book has a smattering of humor and self-aware charm but, for the opening at least, it relies on straightforward description of fantasy elements, which, ultimately, in the scope of other ARTPUNK products, seems mediocre.

1. I think a good introduction is actually quite important to the rpg books that I like. think about Deep Carbon Observatory's introduction... minimalist. A widely loved part of AR&PL's opening:

The many zany intros of James Raggi. A good introduction is a good indication that the writer intends to do away with what's normally dry and boring.

STRAIGHT-UP GOOD THINGS:

1.The space described is claustrophobic and wonderful and detail-rich, unique and scary:

another example.

2. The lore of the scale-men particularly appealed to me.

MIDDLING THING:

This text seems reasonable, although not particularly convenient, to use as a reference text. I'd print out the map page and refer to it, etc.

But: I've mostly stopped using resources that don't fit entirely on one page.

IN CONCLUSION:

about half of what drew me into TRPGS again was texts which were self-conscious departures from the fantasy norms for prose. Not just departures from fantasy norms, but departures from prose norms.-- Surprisingly presented texts...

the odd joys of CULTIST SIMULATOR

I can't figure out the Stag's Riddle but I've got the right ritual to turn my depression into demons. And I'm just raiding the hell out of various international sites. I start killing all the detectives sent after me. And yeah, I'm eating their bodies.

But eventually some kind of Constatine mfer gets sent after me and he knows how to kill my demons... not good....

also I figure out i need to have 36 grail points to beat the game. So I need to like get 10th level Grail tools, rituals, and like a lvl 10 grail influence. and by this time my hunger for bodies is generating a lot of notoriety and the Constantine guy has killed like 6 demons so I'm getting nervous.

For the entire duration of playing this game I've had an issue with my ergonomics so clikin and draggin little cards was kind of a strain. This game does not do the best to make clickin and draggin those little cards super easy. It's pretty simple and functional though.

Cultist simulator is also self-care simulator with the addendum that the eventual goal is to develop greater and greater viscious cycles. You have to take your mental and physical health seriously, with the caveat that to pursue your spiritual goals you will put these things at risk. And more significantly, the lives of others, which may or may not trip up your own little cycles of self-care and renewal.

I have found Cultist Simulator broadly as a potent metaphor for the creative process in a life, the cycles of care and funding buffeting a spiritual journey which is poisonous. The slow accumulation of the supernatural that the fictive elements in CULTIST SIM provides helps create this sense of a gathering magic which is parcel to my best experiences with creativity.

Moreover, the us-vs-them experience, being hunted by the results of your mischief, underlines my desire to see artistic exploration as an antagonistic exercise. You can make enemies in the art world or in the artistic discourse, there is always a time to fight, those duties are represented in the game.

Deeper tragedy, too. An artist can use participation in a tragedy is a way to get some juice.

And of course, the possibilities of manipulating your emotions via your (artistic/occultist) work.

larceny 1870 kentucky review

larceny 1870 kentucky straight bourbon whiskey $26.99 as I bought it

tastes kinda like soda. but also whiskey

Obra Dinn review'd

"Obra Dinn" is like "Papers, Please" in that Lucas Pope's ambitions to create a different kind of gameplay are realized. All critics everywhere noted that "Papers" made literal paper-pushing fun. The same is true of "Obra Dinn's" insurance adjustment.

That being said, "Obra Dinn" represents a deeper success than "Papers, Please", because the game's deepest gameplay offerings are deeper. Comprehending the identities and stringing together the evidence represents a puzzle which requires a lot of thinking and deduction often along non-lateral means. You'll need to write stuff down probably and the true nature of events is ultimately somewhat unclear. "Papers, Please" was comprised of mostly simpler memory and reflexes challenges, although it did have some legit moral surprises.

The thought-immersion required for "Obra" matches with the historical immersion, of which there are several layers:
--the graphical f/x of the game which reflect early computer games, i.e. an alternate history of vgs
--1800's military ship life, the essential knowledge thereof being vital for completing the game's challenge
--the role of the protagonist matching shapely up to the role of the player; there's the unassuming task which you and your character are identically given.
--the again unassuming and historical conception of death: your job is to remember and re-experience over and over again the deaths of 81 people. How that affects you is entirely up to you.

The result is a game which presents an "honest" challenge. "Honest" in the classical sense: there's a legitimate issue, realistic and well-laid, that you have to solve using comprehensible means. And it's challenging because of the genuine nature of the realism. And the moral conclusions you draw from playing it are your own. And it looks like one of those old timey video games from when there were less preconceptions of what was and wasn't possible.

* * *

The big L here is the music. People praise it but it's often quite hackneyed, sort of b-rate Pirates of the Caribbean stuff. I can't get too much into musical analysis, but there is a gameplay loop which is particularly bad:

Finding new memories:
1. intro to new variation on musical theme (ok)
2. strings of excited discovery as you enter the new information into your book (ok, but gets repetitive)
3. tension of low strings and low ringing bell as you discover a new body within the memory (tense and creepy and I like that part)
4. long and drawn out melancholy strings as the "spirit" of the body leaves a slow winding trail as it climbs around the ship like its donnie darko (pisses me off, you have to follow it slowly)

the above issues are totally ameliorated upon repeat viewings of the memories. it's the classic "unskippable cutscene" problem pretty much, being able to skip cutscenes you've already seen (or just want to skip) is what all gamers want, you kinda can't do that for a lot of this game, yadda yadda...

reviews of some switch games and poetry

Celeste

I keep on thinking "SJW"s "SJW"s in my head playing this game. How coked am I to use the phrase "SJW"? A lotta 4chan lingo seems to beat the path around the political spectrum, you can't feel too bad... anytway... game is very positive... with a diverse cast of characters and some gender-ish commentary, discusses helpful/non-helpful relationships, the main character has panic attacks, the living embodiment of the panic attacks is the main antagonist.

All and all, the story kinda sucks bc of the preponderance on healthy relationships (with the self mostly) leads to dialogue which is boring feelings-exposition. "I had a lot of time to think, climbing out of this cave [...] That Part of Me was right, I can't do this." Not a bad theme but one that is too literally realized, and cliched, to be interesting.

The art in video games is usually entirely tied to the gameplay and Celeste has enough precision in its movement and fast enough load times to make the glittering, cutesy, sometimes kinda threatening pixel art fit. There's no argument that the gameplay is not excellent and the art not well drawn; but there's not a lot of surprises (in the art). There's one horror bit but it's mostly sparkly colorful stuff which doesn't do much for my desire for mystery. (why not? the core struggle of the game might not be what i'm looking for. yeah there's the weird beasts floating around sometimes, what are they doing there, the mountain has some complexity, even some horror... hollow knight also at its most central concerns was missing something, I think, that for comparison blue velvet has. I might just default to say skin on the table; blue velvet's concerns are human and ironic, pessimistic and strange. hollow knight's concerns are mostly, ancient for the sake of being ancient, or really, about the life cycle, celeste's concerns are psycholgical and personal and wholly optimistic. I'm not up for an optimistic story of personal/psychological achievement when it's not that well written and adorned with sparkly colorful imagery.

BUT the gameplay is good, punishing and rewarding, and makes some genuine innovations: most of the gameplay rewards, the strawberries, are entirely optional and, self-consciously, do nothing. But you will likely pursue them anyway and be frustrated doing it... also while almost all of the levels feel like tests of reflex, many of them are actually intellectual platforming puzzles well-laid. The sense of achievement u get beating this game, adjusted to fit yr own level of achievement via optionalness, is real video gamey storystuff.


Into the Breach

UNLESS there's some mystery inner-story I forgot to unlock then the NIHILISM OF TIME TRAVEL expressed within Into the Breach FAILS TO BE FULLY EXPRESSED. "FTL", the studio's previous game had some, like, optional hidden mysteries within the mechanics, like, you could have a subquest involving a cyborg-infecting virus. Not so with ITTB...

ITTB has bits and pieces of intense cynicism in its expanded-mobile-game length which normally means a secret is there somewhere; Hollow Knight had its share of secrets. ITTB tho doesn't include any hidden content.

The result is a game which uses cynicism to construct a mood rather than a solveable mystery. Bits and pieces will flow out through sentence-length dialogue... minimalism which feels mobile...


Captain Toad: Treasure Trackers

What's notable and IMPORTANT to note is that CT:TT does get hard, and pretty quick. Nintendo games kinda like Pixar often good at presenting simultaneous kid-and-adult experiences. But the thing about all modern Mario games is that hard levels are presented as demonic puzzle cubes and nothing more, as Toad slips deeper and deeper into the bounds of hell.

DOOM (2016 ps 2018 switch)

Released for the switch, DOOM 2018 has the best possible character protagonist; self-conscious and nonplussed. Doomguy is an immortal player who seeks to kill demons, so the game is not ambitious beyond its schedule, SCHEDULE: KILL KILL KILL KILL.

Overall tho the game is just that much uglier for bowing to 3d modern shooter requirements; ammo pickups cynically burst out of enemies and are cynically vacuumed up into your suit, bc the developers knew they had to create interesting gameplay and here's our bandaged-on solution: chainsaw gives ammo, execution mode gives health. The language of this is flickering orange or blue overlays, whereas previous DOOM games afaik didnt stray from steel or demonflesh, so DOOM 2016/8 loses some on visual tone I guess.

Douglas Oliver's "Androissements"

Only notable thing is the book-length poem "Video Hall of Fame" which is Oliver's notable and COMPLETELY SUCCESSFUL, AMAZING ACHIEVEMENT with video-game poetry. The dude was 2 years from old age death when he wrote it in 1998, (book published in 2003, Oliver died in 2000, unknown [unresearched ] when he wrote it -ed)  but the interaction with video game concepts is as varied, clear, and familiar and poetic as it can be. There's a fuckton of it too, and what Oliver does really well is draw out commonalities in level design (industrial zones, damsels in distress, stereotypes, class distinctions, etc.) and considers the subconscious areas these cliches provide.

Pay attention, you druggies,
seekers of the mystic:
when inanition or when
manifold indignities
wreck or minds, the gates
to your temples, though broken,
are guarded by demons.

One thing I really deeply need with video game critical thinking is a deep consideration of games from the experience of playing them, as some of my favorite internet artists do, often to consider the ritual of gaming to be an intense and nihilistic commitment of time, fer example. Douglas Oliver however did it as a member of a generation who didnt grow up with vggames (I think). D.O.'s "video hall of fame" gets the peter webb seal of approval for most considerate and well-formed work of vg-pop-culture poetry known to peter, all of the artists trying to do the same should read this work

INSTADEATH NIGHTS:

commentary on: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/08/into-the-breach-story/

Into the Breach's  mechanics and everythin correctly transmit a vision of the world wherein u are constantly on the knife's edge of the End Of The World, better than probably any other game does: a single uncorrected mistake in the game will lead to a complete game over, 1, and 2, every game over is correctly and definitively surmised by the time traveler theme to be an actual end-of-the-world, in one particular timeline, at least.

Time travel and video games have shared that commonality for a while, the idea of retrying a bunch of times as a source of patient horror, as the most common video game story is of a time traveller finally getting it right after thousands of dead timelines like the bodies in hotline miami.

Into the Breach, taking the extra care to make this timedeath story a central theme, and then also not commenting on it too much, ends up not being cliche, a success. Yet like I said some kind of ultra-horrible middle note, a deeper mystery within, would have bit me out.

But. Anyway. I don't feel the anxiety of timelines less travelled, although I acknowledge that creating timelines where things did go right is ultimately futile, probably, although I can see how an organization such as the Rift Walkers could exist where they're doing this. Like maybe the successful timelines become partners in a timelines-spanning organization. Tachyons, baby!

BONUS CONTENT: Stephen's Sausage Roll as well didn't commit to internal memory, a secret, just as Yume Nikki may or may not have an actual coherent secret left to find. You think there might be one, waiting somewhere in the code, but the gamers cry, there is none, there is none... No challenge, no internal meaning, just a yearning for "the email which will close the laptop of my [living]."

Possibility threatens a co-extant, co-strangling sense of pain, red lines, flickering into view. Shuttered memories of past gameplay conversations, definite misses, con visits: all these equate into a nothingness, water in the tank. Shattered memories of expectations, as a young kid, that the gameplay would prove something more, the first tastes of aesthetic.

The way the mind reels around a certain prerender, texture, the sense of a brain spinning, content. That this embodies an internal meaning, sure, circumspect.