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)

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

Bloodborne
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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
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"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.

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

Binding of Isaac
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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.

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.

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.

thirty-four reviews

eric andre.

boiling point (1990)

/psychological realism doesn't have much credo and yet I find a definite gap between some director's ambitions and other's. Credit to the filmmaking practices which honor "the dreamy look" or heighten the everyday boredom we all face.

old forester bourbon

originally I thought it had a nutty taste but now I'm not so sure. all whiskey starting to taste like soda to me. tried "angel's envy" at my friend's wedding and it was like, not top shelf? but it had that tasty burn with the flavor in the high notes

dead man, jim jarmusch

my friend (roommate) kept going gaga over the textures in this film, her friend too, talking about how black and white movies often the filmmakers want to bring out the textures, three or four textures in this film, linear, floral, feathers/hair, and a weird beehive one she couldn't place

edward saint albee's "alice"

I just bought this because it was cheap and signed by the author. the bookstore I bought it from was the fence for theft from the library system I work at.

heaven can wait 1948

old style of gentleman which was a sexuality in this face and lips, delicate and gentle. kind of winning presence you immediately feel like you could trust. don ameche takes this trust and abuses it

the paintings of zak smith

I mentioned this in my "frostbitten and mutilated" review but I don't care for portraits drawn from photographs. it's dumb to say that considering how do I know what is, and what isnt, drawn from a photograph. I usually miss the appeal w.e.

squidbillies-- seasons 2&3 are good

tommy tone "bad to to the tone"

listened to this uhh twenty three times

wigle's rye whiskey

rye tastes like flowers and shit but wigle's is good enough to stay appealing. although I hate rye I can get it

stonecutter volume 5

good

kero blaster

bosses are good played 1/2

bayonetta

hate how the scope of the game narrows to be about this generic classical architecture + industrial setting especially since at the beginning it promises to be world-hopping

simpleflips

what's the appeal of simpleflips? he's sorta rotten at the core and always on the verge of falling over. he's not that good despite being talented. watching him is like someone trying to renovate a too-old skyscraper

tfue (a twitch streamer- simpleflips too -ed)

I keep thinking of david foster wallace's tennis youth in "infnite jest" who have nicknames and have a sort of pecking order eaten away by sheer athleticism, that there's something worth pursuing... comradely sort

communism

talked to some maoists who might see this. afai can tell viewing the cultural revolution in a mostly positive lens is bleh, seeing anything but all the usual negative patterns of communism in the great leap forward is eye-and-ear shutting. plus all the stuff about stalin and like, didn't the bolsheviks establish a secret police almost immediately??

did some research on the movement, learned maybe for the first time that some topics are wide enough to encompass several international views. that being said I feel 48% confident that these maoists are relying on conspiracy theories to wipe clean the slates of their heroes

anarchist coffee down the street

it's actually called "artisan's coffee house". zeke is friendly but the coffee's never been good, and even the good stuff, although the chai is to die for I've heard

kraynick's

best bicycle shop in pittsburgh epicenter I wonder if it's the case that as an artist your job is to go find a budding community and sit over it like a fat toad sharing criticism and free talent

barry lyndon

not actually all shot in natural lighting kinda ruins the movie once my friend john told me this. that being said though:

--the scene with the german farm wife
--the scene where barry throws the glass at leonard rossiter
--leonard rossiter is so hype
--the natural-lit scene with the english flag, like the second scene
--steven berkoff


the duelists 1977

fantastic but the ending sucks

johnny depp

johnny always gives the movie something to work with albeit it's often wasted. that's all there is to say

drive (the movie)

I didn't have much appreciation for the film outside the kissing scene and the opening, however in retrospect I like some of the settings, like the pizza shop, I like bryan cranston although he's underused, and I retroactively like oscar isaac because he's my crush

annihilation (the movie)

there's only two good parts, the first scene where natalie portman is grieving, and then the videotape near the end where oscar isaac is talking to his double. I like the interior of the lighthouse, I like jennifer jason leigh although she didn't save the end

the hateful eight

"quentin taratino can just shit out good movies" - the red letter media guys, paraphrased

el topo (already reviewd, albeit this review was written before the previously published review -ed)

quite excellent and jodorowsky gives a fucking excellent performance especially in the last 1/4

fellini satyricon

I watched the opening of this movie like the first forty minutes that my free trial of wondershare file converter managed to convert every third day for about a month

impressionism about anthropology and history is the way to go!!!!!!!!!!!!

the cook the thief the wife and her lover

I watched the first forty minutes of this film an awful lot, too. fellini satyricon just stays really fucking good the whole movie though and this film only knows how to do 2 scenes

the rum diaries (2011)

this movie only knows how to do three scenes and it just vacillitates between three: johnny depp is doing something, aaron eckhart says "sea of money", amber heard blue balls johnny

aaron eckhart

kind of our george clooney if george clooney had to retire

ex machina (2014)

think about this all the time. not bcause of technology but bcause of oscar isaac weird sexiness he imposes on "domhnall". "I put a port in her and if you fucked her she'd like it". modern male tech sexuality dominance stuff like who else doin that???

the tech industry's full of nerds

guardians of the galaxy vol 1-- bad

a woman under the influence (1974)

a bunch of good scenes and can't give enough credit to how it was filmed, handheld with an attention to and somewhat sloppy focus. think about gena rowlands gesticulations. stopped at the 2/3 point never got around to the end

eric andre show

in the eric andre show, isn't he filming himself grabbing at people's genitals or getting his staff to do that? if you watch the series as I have there's a lot of eric reaching for people's genitals or his staff doing that to irritate the guests/people.

lamentations of the flame princess- good but my developing dm style, the harsh stuff, is drawing criticism... is an instadeath trap so inappropriate?

luke kennard's "cain"
Luke Kennard is FUCKING AROUND with this one. "31 anagram poems [of] Genesis 4:9-12". around each of these is a frame of red text transcribing a fictional DVD commentary. can't figure these out

wuvable oaf: blood & metal

wuvable oaf is good and queer baby

marquis de sade's "juliette"

somewhere within this tome is the chapter wherein juliette goes to visit kinda a bluebeard guy who has a castle full of human furniture. read that excerpt in andre breton's anthology of black humor. can't find that part

dark souls: briefly reviewd

anyway dark souls is a game about killing  your opponents with overly slow melee attacks. exaggerated windups! yes ladies and gentleman it's largely inspired by mmos. it's just diablo.

diablo is good and what was always good about diablo was the playerbase around it. how clear it is in dark souls's intentions to create a playerbase. and how generous!

TWO "K/NIGHTS": ACHIEVEMENTS IN "COMPREHENSIVE" GAMING: FORTNITE AND HOLLOW KNIGHT

FORTNITE

• I hate the aesthetics. "It's the ugliest game ever"- my ex 
• tactics
• fortnite is one of the few games in my experience which takes a comprehensive view of tactics. I mean there are territories. you plan and search and decide what your encounters are going to be like. or you get spotted first, if you didn't do enough reconnaissance. 
• if you play squads it's exponentially tacticaller bc mics
• my brain enjoys this sort of comprehensive planning which accounts for long-range decisions. everyone's gathering materials which they'll likely never use but they need them in case they make it to the end game. you think ahead to your future15-20 mins ahead. you have to think about sightlines. you can spend time gathering your kit, getting resources, getting a positional advantage, finding targets, there's a ticking clock, you have to balance many real long-range problems at once.
• there's several different playstyles available so there's always a sense of competing psychological contracts
• nerves
• it's incredible how much making your opponent panic while you don't is a winner in this game
• majorly bc there's so much space between encounters, far more than you'd expect in a deathmatch game, it's an attitude that I saw first with Day Z that has been refined and cartoonified
• servers
• were good when I started, now they're still good enough, a little worrying tho
• sniping
• EXCELLENTLY balanced bc of bullet drop
• it takes a while for the bullet of death to reach you if you're far away and it drops in a way that's hard to predict so it's flat out chancey to take a shot at somebody and if you do you're pretty much giving away your location
• but if you get a headshot with the blue one it's a kill. so it's like playing the lottery resting on your nerves and skill
• you can be mostly secure vs. sniping at distance if you take some precautions but not 100%
• it gives you something to do to pass the time as the storm closes
• finally it's also a great stealth mechanic.
• like a popularly imagined sniper if you're stealthy (at long range!) and patient you can find a target and get a easy or not-so-easy chance at a one shot kill
• if you fuck up tho you've exposed your location to a bunch of people
• so it rewards patience, true stealth, and having the nerves and skill to pull it off :)
• it's a game where I hate the aesthetics but I can't deny it's effectiveness

HOLLOW KNIGHT

I've been saying the word "comprehensive" a lot lately. HK is comprehensive. It feels like a total package, the developers accounted for everything and really had the opportunity to make the crowning metroidvania xperiene they wanted.

• It's a generously big map populated by unique and uniquely behaving enemies and environmental challenges per territory with quite generous portions of environmental assets + storytelling per territory as well as secrets and music tracks
• the boss battles are I'm sure the best in total in any game I've ever played: there are so many of them they are all unique each one has enough mechanics. they're challenging but beatable, "fair" and sometimes tightly scored. good rewards too
• the storytelling is environmental and yeah set in the post-apocalypse but doesn't reveal too much. The survivors don't say much. There's a bunch of elements that reward deduction and flavor the whole experience. You get the sense of a large world with some real dark stuff.
• Something about bugworld makes it simultaneously ok that there are corpses everywhere but still fundamentally creepy. Very watership down
• I still don't like the aesthetics! I don't like the voice acting, I don't like a lot of the music, but they got me with the creepier vibes in the deeper territories and the overall work that's been put into the game: all the mechanics are tight, there's really more than enough stuff to find, yadda yadda

I think with both these games I got the sense of developers working really hard while having the funding to take a lot of care with their product. there is so much and it is so generous and well-apportioned. you sit with the other nervous teens at the feast and everybody eats

Everything I Hate About Hollow Knight

1. the aesthetics

2. how it's a dumb flash game from newgrounds 2005

3. the voice acting

end of list

what do I like about shovel hollow knight?

the boss battles are good.

Ok good night.

VISION'S OF HELL: INFERNIUM and STEPHEN"S SAUSAGE ROLL, bonus: instadeath: nights

Both of these games I found via bennet foddy's twitter. There's a bit of an alternate history of games there, puzzle games, if you're familiar with Increpare you get the general vibe, Stephen Lavelle's puzzlescript, just a few essentials like Getting Over It: one mechanical difficulty, a series of obstacles.

It's easy to assume that brand of games, singular-mechanic-puzzles, has its heyday now as alternative to the mechanically overloaded Assassin's Creed 2 stuff. There is only one way to solve the problem in Stephen's Sausage roll, just about (not actually true -ed), it's a puzzle box everytime, and so you get a very clear, focused message portaled into your brain.

I dunno, what was Portal compared to Infernium? That stock asset vibe, where everything is a self-conscious arrangement of assets, although Portal had surprising departures (as was the point maybe) and Infernium does not. I've talked about that "vision of hell" thing before, what with devil daggers, or really the critical work of Winter K. and Stephen Thecatamites, specifically Winter K:

“I wanted the player to feel the absolute despair of brick labyrinth, the deep cavern with no rope for climbing out. I envisioned a place of infinite width and depth—dark, yet illuminated. The softly glowing walls cast no guiding light into absolute void. They leer, useless. It is life, eternal, on the precipice of a pit, falling into the pit, scaling the pit’s rough wall, becoming irretrievably lodged in the canyon crack, in nowhere. This was my sketch of what I thought might be a 21st Century psychology: a mental world reduced to a skeletal arrangement of a maze-maker’s traps, and the obsessive drive to feed them both body and brain in hopes of purchasing escape. It is indescribably erotic.” - Shigeru Miyamoto (a fake quote by Winter)

Infernium specifically sets out to be prisonworld, as the designers and foddy said it's based on pac-man, "a maze with no exits" and although there is a consistent, jerking jump-scare every time you lose a life and a very real and very difficult "perma-death" system, I find the hellishness of the game to be centered in the sheer volume of work here, accomplished by a thin spread of creative effort, an absolute abandonment of video-game AAA density. If you can imagine Metal Gear Solid 2's reckless application of detail on one end, Infernium is much more on the single-developer unitygame just five assets end. But it's as large and as complex and *more* difficult than MGS2.

There's something obscene in a sheer volume of deathmazes, like one of those puzzlegames where every puzzle is four different colors and there's 299 levels. Moreover Infernium actually asks you to continuously harvest a fresh supply of lives or start all over again. I'll add that all this is mitigated by the unlock system, so there's uhh progression.



I guess the end point of Stephen's Sausage roll's depth came when I was able to visualize and complete the puzzles in my literal sleep. Not because they were easy, but because the sheer regard to mechanical action was enough to solve them, rather than a continuous & difficult visualization (like sweeping all the pieces off a chess board would require). The whole game is the exploration of about five moving parts; they interact in ways that are upsetting and confusing in their deepest as my brain churns and revolts at the ideas; you got to let the stupid shit go heh heh

two games by a solo developer: stephen's sausage roll by stephen lavelle and inferniuim by carlos coronado


* * * * instadeath: nights presents: was Portal (2007) all about stock assets? * * * *


this an essay which would be better done with pictures alone, but, if you can consider an essential stock-assetyness which happens every time you are gripping and pulling and grinding a metal folding chair and it makes the clankityclankityclank source engine sound as it tries to not clip, can you consider how much of that game was carefully re-arranging giant balls of energy disguised as hollow sheetmetal objects?

I think about "challenge" in video games as the reward when you get the thing in the thing. There's a clunk as it slots in. If you had to think it out before hand that's all well and good but there's still the careful, tedious process of slotting it in (especially with 3d controls). The thing so often resists being pulled in.

thunk thunk thunk bezowoop thunk

Then there's that careful, often magnetic attempt by the developers to help you out when you're close . Magnets, tractor beams always the easiest way to handle 3d-space objects . In Sausage Roll you have instead a precise and precisely non-abstract method of handling, non-abstract because the basic methodology of piercing, pushing, and sliding the sausages is so completely and depravedly explored.

You may begin to view 3D games as an arrangement of assets which all share these assety qualities, like, provisional friction. Speedrunning techniques common among several engines expose this. And how much of our imagination of these spaces gets quietly informed by the assetishness of assets. so many times where you're hoplessly sliding around a room full of superlight objects, uhh see lilly zone's geometry falls 

"the magic wand" review

the magic wand

there is some to explore but not much

more of a discrete forward-moving tale than gob grot

like a short story although with novel-length tropes

feels like a condensed novel, condensed via video gaming

interest in art like that

catamite's games feel like soft-boiled renditions on popular academic themes

with the extent to mostly paucify their message

i.e magic wand feels like a sad goodbye to art

nostalgic, making

a meaning relating to slidey boop boop noise rpgs

way these have of expressing scale

the idfference is, catamites is really good at writing

like 'cause he's well read

but also can inhabit these character voices

which draw on bildungsroman-like novels

like it's surprising that enough density is packed into radiget

he's not interested in helping anyone else, but at the same time

there seems to be a larger story behind it all

w/r/t the magic wand. also,

capsule toys. It's not

a zero-sum thing. The capsule toys

are there because

radiget and friends love capsule toys.

"an eroding of authority". while at the same time,

trying to ossify a fantasy for a period. a short story,

somewhat apologetic like the robert walser bit.

but the difference is, however temporary,

thecatamites performs for us, a landscape

some characters, grasps a temporary lunatic vibe,

and a dark scary chilling one, and then a sense of something ominous,

maybe- and then you walk past the giant overworld

maps with a mountain-sized skull of a king.

I think it's designed to be easy

to dismiss-out-hand. Sort of like

Robert Walser. Tinylittle pixelgame,

only 30min long. 

Has a lot of art, not

too much, mostly

it's made out of block art,

stereoscopic 3d thing

lit about $5. "music and colors" "wandering" gamejam games

game element over design... primacy of colors, hooting

but lodged within nostalgia. in a space where everything is filtered through games. memory. childish renumeration. all games = activity of children = things we did when we were young = nostaligia. it's why it all has the veneer, to be true-to-life.

merritk said she broke up with videogames and that like pursuing the "these must mean something" feeling of them was endless, contexualized experience of being an abused or unhappy child playing games, spending hours of time writing games, games being ...

definite links to monsterkillers in some of the art, here (in "space people")... not all innocent either. things occasionally scary, which are innocent. windy the boss monster

there's no secret ending. it's just the real ending. it's a short story - from space people

coping mechanix gamez.

capturing 'n enshrining a nostalgia of private space