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Videogames can be a uniquely frustrating experience for people. You've been drawn in to being that tiny hero with a sword fighting against all odds, and suddenly you encounter a challenge that feels unfair or excessively punishing, and you might spend hours repeating attempts at overcoming it only to fail, over and over. The nature of the challenge can be anything - a difficult boss, tricky moving platforms, a matter of blind luck, or even other players - but the feeling it produces is the same. Rage. Pure anger directed at the challenge, the game, and at yourself for not being good enough to overcome the difficulty. Occasionally this rage manifests itself as real-world violence - not necessarily against people, but against peripherals. In the only study I'm aware of on the subject , one in four gamers admitted to having destroyed or damaged their own equipment in a fit of rage. With such a statistic, a responsible game developer might ask how they could make their games less frustrating. Enter Bennett Foddy, who is not a responsible game developer, because HE wondered if he could make games intended to evoke frustration and suffering, and proceeded to do just that. I have beaten two of his prior games: QWOP in which you directly control the leg muscles of an athlete trying to run a sprint and Getting Over It where you play as a man stuck in a pot trying to climb a mountain using a sledgehammer and somehow that is even more difficult than it sounds. Lest you think I am exaggerating about Bennett Foddy's personal motivations for these games, let me put that to rest by noting that his own description of Getting Over It is " A game I made for a certain kind of person. To hurt them." Foddy is not the sole developer for Baby Steps but it bears Foddy's signature style - the game is a 'walking simulator' in the sense that you have very direct control over your walking motion and you are intended to use these unusual controls to successfully overcome obstacles. Challenge accepted. Our hero is Nate. He's 35, lives at home, and his parents are calling him down for a 'family meeting'. Shout-out to One Piece For absolutely no reason whatsoever he is teleported out of his depressing circumstances into a pretty good looking forest! I immediately fell down. This is going to happen a lot. Suddenly a man pops out and initiates a very awkward conversation. Uhhh... cave-drawing number 3 seems well endowed Jim is a bit off-putting but he does do his best to try to tell Nate what's going on and to try to get him some shoes, but Nate is having none of it - he isn't terribly concerned about having been transported here and mostly just wants Jim to leave him the hell alone. Jim shows up again just a little ways ahead for another conversation about Nate having to use the bathroom and offers a bush as an option. Nate isn't having any of that either. These are some of the most intentionally awkward conversations I've seen in any videogame, Nate is NOT someone who loves interacting with people. Ahead, the landscape opens up and in the distance I can see a light on the horizon. I suppose I'm intended to head for it? But after taking a look around I see that there's actually another way to go - it appears I have a fair bit more freedom in Baby Steps than the linear climb of Getting Over It. There's a Ferris wheel in the distance so we're going to check it out. I should take a moment to describe the process of walking here, because that's mainly what the game is about. When 3D games were first coming out, it wasn't immediately clear to game developers how you should control your character, and the problem was most pronounced in games that featured an outside view of your character in a 3D space. If you go back and play early games like Tomb Raider and Grim Fandango you'll encounter 'Tank' controls, where regardless of where the camera is (often in a fixed position) pushing 'up' on the controller causes your character move forward in the direction they are currently facing. As games came along with more of a free-moving camera, movement controls became contextualized on your viewpoint - now pushing 'up' would cause the character to first turn directly away from the camera and then start moving forward once they were facing the 'correct' direction, and this intuitive scheme is mainly what we use today to varying degrees of success. Bennett Foddy took one look at that and said that we didn't have enough fine control of our feet and made this game to solve a problem that nobody had. So, Baby Steps' game controls are as follows (For a standard controller, masochists can also use the mouse / keyboard): If you move the control stick in a direction, Nate leans in that direction and leaning too far will cause you to fall down. The L and R triggers respectively cause Nate to lift his left / right foot. Despite appearances Nate is not the definition of poise and grace, so standing on one foot for too long will cause you to fall down. When lifting a foot, the control stick switching from leaning to moving that individual foot so you can place it where desired. Stretching the foot too far from you or placing it on untenable ground or misplacing it or thinking bad thoughts about Bennett Foddy will cause you to fall down. In fact I believe that the only reason they didn't call this game 'Falling Down' is that two other obscure games have already taken that moniker. In any case, I've found it's possible to walk forward simply by tilting the control stick up and correctly timing the left / right triggers so at least on flat terrain it's not difficult to make forward progress (with the occasional tumble). The challenge comes when you try to do anything other than walk over flat ground. Like attempting to climb this rail. I did not succeed. For a game involving falling, I'm happy to report that watching Nate fall is pretty entertaining and both the physicality of it and the sound design make for good entertainment. Especially if a friend is watching and laughing at you. Deeper into this area I've found evidence that this was a long-abandoned carnival or amusement park. The horse did not push me over, I fell all by myself In the carnival area I found signs indicating that someone is missing a cup - as well as another, different light in the distance. Looks like there's multiple options for 'objectives' to find, assuming that's what those lights are. Get up Nate, we've got a cup to find! It isn't long before I locate the cup, in an abandoned carnival wagon. Or at least I assumed it was IN the wagon. Insidiously the damn thing is on TOP of the wagon. There was an attempt to obtain said cup by climbing to the top of a rock next to the wagon and then stepping over to the roof of it. I didn't even get to the top of the rock. If Nate would actually use his arms to help him climb things he might do better, but noooo, it's a feet game so all Nate does is step on things while his arms hang uselessly at his side. I gave up on the cup and decided to head back to the starting area - this is too tough for me at the moment, I need to get better at climbing and I may as well make forward progress while I'm getting the hang of this. On the way back I was immediately distracted by a treasure map. Maybe I'll find shoes! I failed to find the treasure owing to difficulties with determining the intended length of a 'step', since my own steps are highly variable I probably would have gotten off target even if I hadn't fallen over every so often. If I faceplant and slide a bit does that count as two steps? Three? As you can see, I'm getting exceptionally dirty from falling over and over. They spent some time getting the look down. This is for all the sickos that wanted a close-up Having returned to the starting point and begun the journey towards the original light source, I became immediately distracted by a nearby brick building which had a little pole on top. Climbing it rewarded me with a hat! My first reward for doing something! Insidiously, the hat doesn't just stay on your head - if you fall badly enough then you'll lose the hat and it'll roll a short distance away. Thus, trying to keep a hat is going to make the game harder as you need to retrieve it when it's lost - I'm going to try to keep one anyway for the fun of it, though I suspect I'm more at risk of losing it from forgetting to pick it back up rather than being unable to retrieve it. So far, the consequences of falling in most situations has been relatively minor - on flat ground you might even slide ahead and continue to make forward progress. Once in awhile you'll encounter an obstacle which has dire consequences should you fail. That looks like a real long way to slide, but at least here I made it across. After navigating fairly gentle slopes and switchbacks, I'm finally getting close to the mysterious glow. Almost there.... ow ow ow And.... success! The glow comes from a large waxy candle and marks the location of an empty campsite where a pot of... it honestly looks like milk... sits over a fire. Nate checks the place out Out of nowhere there's an odd vignette where you play a disturbing little sequence of events. In this my father asks me to go find firewood and then abandons me. I don't know if this is Nate's past or his fears or has nothing to do with anything and just wants to make the player feel depressed. Then Mike shows up. Jim seemed like he was something of a tour guide for this place, Mike seems like a tourist - he's geared up for hiking and is going on about equipment and having a map. The cutscene even briefly pops up a mini-map to show you they could have put one in the game Nate is still having none of this, turns down all offers of help, including (sadly) refusing a map. I would have absolutely taken a map because I have a terrible sense of direction and get lost easily. I'm getting the sense that these cutscenes are intended to taunt you, to remind you of things that many games have and you ain't getting for this one. The nature of this place has piqued my curiosity. Mike mentions heading for the Poison Swamp, and he seems like he's here voluntarily, hiking and climbing around for the fun of it. For Nate it seems like all he wants is to find a bathroom. We part ways, and I look for the next objective. That next light is very far away and very high above me Very shortly after I begin the next leg of my journey I fall victim to being easily distracted and head off the main trail towards a barn. Hey, an actual human structure! I found a couple animals here - there's a baby chick which starts following me around, maybe I can take it to it's mother? Also I found a donkey. I attempted to ride the donkey. In Mother Russia, Donkey rides You From the barn I see a watchtower in the distance. At this point in the game, if there's something interesting looking, I'm headed for it. At the bottom of the tower - the spot where I'm supposed to bring that cup if I can ever get it. Good to know. At the top of the tower - a viewfinder! Is that.... a large baby doll? With a crown on its head? Also in the distance - another campsite.  I've walked so far away from the one I was originally headed for that I may as well try for this one instead. The non-linearity of Baby Steps is almost jarring after putting myself in the mindset of the one-route Getting Over It. Part of this game is simply looking for and analyzing your possible routes - on the way to that next light I found a couple options for climbing higher, and the first one I attempted turned out to be too difficult so I gave up and eventually found an easier switchback further ahead. Realizing that I was close to that Baby thing that I'd seen earlier, I decided to go for it, thinking it might be an NPC I could talk to. Actually just a large baby doll.. but that crown is another hat if you can brave the cliffside to get it! Hail to the King Baby In many ways this place resembles the Appalachian Trail or other American hiking areas - there's are pretty clearly travelled trails (sometimes even marked by humans), and some are fairly flat with others having steep and rocky slopes. There's also litter, litter everywhere. Who is ordering a pizza out here? Who is delivering it? Approaching the summit, I end up overcoming one of the nastier obstacles I've faced so far, a rocky slope that requires a couple tricky maneuvers to navigate. You may not like it but this is what the process of succeeding looks like There's a Day / Night cycle and by the time I'm walking up to the second campsite that I've reached, the moon is high in the sky. That's an... interesting moon.... There's another little vignette, this time depicting a man going out to get a burger and then finding himself working at the burger place. Maybe these are Nate's dreams? I am rudely awakened by Ethan. Ethan is part human, part Donkey. Two parts Donkey, I think. Ethan wearing a shirt (and only a shirt) makes for a memorable scene Other than his appearance, Ethan's fairly nice and gives Nate the first thing resembling an objective, saying that if Nate reaches the 'castle' then he can have one wish. Ethan wants Nate to wish for cigarettes, since he's fresh out of them. The heart wants what the heart wants. It looked like the castle was way off on the opposite side of the valley, so I'm not going to try to head there now. Instead, I'm going for the closest light I can see. It's through a forest but at least the terrain looks pretty flat. I like how the destination shines through the fog in the distance. The going is pretty easy for the most part, and the harsh barren slopes give way to a lush forest. I think Ethan called it the poison forest but I haven't been poisoned yet. Even though the general path is easy (and I'm sticking to the marked trail where possible, I'm scared I'll lose my crown in the brush if I fall while roughing it through the trees), there are some new and unusual obstacles along the way. Did they put this sign up before or after the bear started sleeping here? Even though this is a 'difficult' game, so far it doesn't seem like you can die, so I figured I'd make an attempt to simply climb over the bear. To my relief, she was a very sound sleeper... but she did prove very difficult to climb over and I fell off the bridge entirely. Sleeping Bear: 1, Nate 0. Fortunately, I wasn't the first person to have to traverse this route, and someone had put up brightly colored climbing assistants nearby. NATE THESE ARE HANDHOLDS USE YOUR GODDAMN HANDS Probably due to limited sightlines in the forest I'm mostly not being distracted from my destination, but I did make a short detour to some nearby ruins and obtained new headwear. Embrace your inner Muppet I reach the light and find that it's practically a castle in it's own right - or at least the ruins of one. The campsite is behind an iron gate. Get used to this pose because I figured out I can use it to get Nate to face the camera for screenshots. Attempting to climb to the top in search of a lever to open the gate, I notice something incredibly helpful - foot shadows! Your feet cast a shadow straight down to help you see where you are placing them. I reached the top of the castle to find no way to open the gate, and a fence blocking my access to the campsite even from this height. Well, mostly blocking, I can't quite step over it... Nate, you're not going to like this one bit. In my first intentional fall of the game, I lean forward and tumble over the fence. Nate slams into the rocky ruins a couple times before plunging over 40 feet downward to slam hard on his back. Worst of all, my Kermit hat flew off and lodged itself somewhere about midway up - I think it's gone for good. Nate just lies there on the ground for a good 20 seconds before moving again. I don't blame him. I guess all donkey-people look the same to Nate because he mistakes Moose here for Ethan. In a first, Nate actually accepts an offer of help when Moose shares his cup so Nate can drink. Nate also finally says what HE wants, which is to go home. Ethan and another donkeyman arrive (somehow opening the gate, thanks guys) and Moose makes himself scarce. It's off to the trail again. It's not far before I spy a very strange glow in a tree. Is that another hat? Or a fruit of some kind? I haven't successfully climbed a tree yet but I give it a shot. Before I can even start climbing this one though, there's a rope swing attached to it that I have to stand on and swing to get close enough to even start climbing, which is a whole new level of insanity. Guess how that turned out. Did I mention this tree is on the edge of a cliff? At least I landed in the water. That's the same tree, way up there. But lo and behold, down here I find something Nate has been wanting for around three days now! An inconveniently located bathroom!!! Finally, finally poor Nate can relieve himself. As Nate is about to find nirvana, Mike shows up to encourage him through the door. It's an extremely frustrated Nate that stumbles away from the outhouse. His day does not get any better trying to climb out of the lake area. A huge rolling boulder? That's just mean, Foddy. Spying another watchtower, I climb it and locate another viewfinder, which shows me a hat on top of a tree. Even with the viewfinder it takes me awhile to find the right tree in the forest, but eventually I'm attempting to climb a tree without using my hands. This took many, many attempts. I'm pretty damn proud of getting this hat, it was not easy. At this point I'm not sure where the next campsite is so I'm wandering and exploring. I found an abandoned well, perhaps? At least it's easy to go down, other than watching Nate suffer there's no real consequences to falling long distances. At the bottom of this well is a cave... with some, ah, interestingly shaped mushrooms. I'm sensing subtle themes in Baby Steps. Baby Steps does a phenomenal job of setting the stakes with any given challenge - you can take a moment and look down to see just how far down you're likely to tumble if you fail. Out here past the forest I'm increasingly finding more and more dangerous 'suffer if you fail' obstacles which will send you a very long way down if you screw up. Gonna traverse this one real careful and reeeal slow I am definitely getting better at walking - noticing exactly how I'm moving Nate's legs and feet and how the balance works when shifting legs. I'm pretty confident that if I were to go back and try for that cup near the start, for instance, I could get to it now. Rather than go back all that way just yet I'm employing the 'ooh what's that over there' strategy and checking out anything that looks interesting. Often this translates into a little (or large) climbing challenge. This looks like an MC Escher house but it's too small for people. Climb to the top of it and.... Oh! It is for little people! I wish I'd gotten a tiny little hat but all I accomplished was to accidentally sit on a 14-inch tall person. He'll probably be fine, assuming he's as robust at Nate is. When I lost the green Muppet hat, it was in service of a greater good - a daring maneuver that accomplished something important. Muppet hat's sacrifice was worthy and noble. I regret to inform you that yellow tree hat has been lost to no good purpose whatsoever, I fell off a wall and ingloriously slid down the slope, leaving the hat somewhere near the top. Try as I might to scale the slope back up to where it was, I merely succeeded in falling further and further down until retrieving it was simply too much effort - especially considering that I had already spied another possible hat in a box-maze nearby. I'm sorry Yellow, this was not the goodbye I hoped for. The box-maze is fairly challenging to navigate, and perhaps the most difficult part of trying for this next hat was simply finding a route I could take that would get me to it. Once found, the climbing didn't relent on the difficulty. This is my second time being up here and I don't want to go down empty handed again I've found another helpful climbing technique - how you move your feet is depending on the camera angle you are using, so you can best climb a ladder by swinging the camera left and right as you take each step, and when the margins are small then exactly how you bend Nate's leg absolutely makes a difference as to whether you can get your foot on the next rung or not. So I very carefully made my way up the ladder, got tantalizingly close to the hat, and I reached for it... and immediately fell off the ladder, caromed off a pile of boxes, and flumped onto the floor of the box maze... BUT NOT BEFORE I HAD TIPPED THE HAT OF ITS PERCH AND IT FELL DOWN WITH ME! Papa's got a brand new hat! I spot another one of those glowing fruits, which turns out to be a bananna. This one is placed atop a much easier climb than some things I've done (aside from some insidiously placed banana peels). It's nice to see Nate experience joy for once, relishing the flavor of his accomplishment. I also found a 'Gopro' helmet that changes your camera perspective to first person view. I won't be wearing it though. I don't get motion sick from playing videogames, but I'd really be putting that to the test if I fell like this. Finding another watchtower, I locate something I didn't expect to find (possibly) - it looks like something I can actually make use of. Binoculars! Those could come in handy. Let's see, now where exactly is that located..... Goddamnit, I think they're on a cliff right below the little people apartments I was at several hours ago. Whelp, guess I'm climbing all the way back up there. Ok, I've painstakingly made my way back to the gate, across broken bridges and the collapsed ledge, and here I am, standing across from my quarry. The binoculars do not look easy to get and you can't climb back up here quickly I wish I could tell you that I made a valiant attempt and fell, but the truth is sadder than that. I dropped a crumb on my keyboard and absent-mindedly went to fish it out, accidentally pressed a key, and tumbled right over the cliff before even making the attempt. There's no checkpoints, no reloading a save, no course of action before me than to either take the long route back up there or give up and do something else. The only 'shortcut' I ever unlocked was to get the gate open. Falling has consequences, and those feel especially painful when you fall purely by accident. Initially, I took a moment to do something else and keep going in the same direction that I'd been heading to see what was over there, when to my surprise I came across a watchtower that I was sure I'd left behind me. I think the world actually repeats itself - go far enough in one direction and you will come back to where you started. I think it was actually quicker to return to the little apartments by continuing forward rather than doubling back. On returning to the apartments, I made a valiant attempt and fell. I was within a step of getting them. Time to climb back up. This time along the way I see a little grotto with a table and check it out to find the Vase, one of the items wanted at a watchtower. This is much easier to get than the Cup! The guy at the table grudgingly let me take it while grumbling that I'd probably just break it. I resolved to be extra careful and try to get it to the tower intact. I broke it anyway. The vase doesn't respawn so that's that. In better news with the binoculars, I got 'em! Third time's the charm! I can actually use them to view distant objects, for what that's worth - thinking about it now I can usually tell if there's something interesting in the distance and the binoculars may not actually help that much. Somewhere along this journey I made the foolish assumption that the binoculars would simply confer unto me the ability to zoom in on things and that would be that. The problem is that they're a carried object (Heaven forbid Nate should tie anything to his waist), and you can drop them and lose them when you fall, same as the hats. In many ways they're now another liability - I've spent more time than I care to admit retrieving various hats after bad falls. It dawns on me that at some point I'm going to lose these, one way or another. At least I'm close to the top of this particular cliffside, and I make my way upward. There's a beach... up here? The next ridge looks imposing, and beyond it, a second, taller ridge rises in the distance. Seeing a column of smoke along the shore, I find another campsite. This vignette is Nate's class reunions (including future ones) and it's very depressing. Ethan and his friends party hard! Seeing the next two huge ridgelines I realize that the further I get from the beginning of the game, the more difficult it's going to be for me to go back and do things like getting the cup to the watchtower so I drop the binoculars and box hat at this campsite for safekeeping and head back down before I go any further. A lot of the challenges in this game are optional - I haven't been required to obtain any of the hats or fruits or watchtower quests or even stop at the campsites. The main path through the game is not easy, you can feel free to skip a lot of the 'very hard' things you can do - and somewhere the masochist in me wants to do them (or at least attempt them). On my way back to the start I came across a cabin, found the set of keys in it that you're supposed to bring to a watchtower, and ended up dropping them in a river about halfway there - those are gone for good. I'm 0 for 2 on watchtowers. In better news, I managed to follow the treasure map from the start and locate it. It's a step tracker! I'll keep it and note step counts. Getting the cup was still fairly difficult but I managed it this time. Let's see if I can manage to deliver it. Unlike the vase it's not fragile, and unlike the keys it's easy to find again when dropped. With these relative handicaps, even I can get it to its destination in one piece. I'm minimally competent! Step tracker: 1692 (I wish I'd found it the first time! I'd love to know how many actual steps I'm at.) One last stop in the starting area: Free shoes! It's a shame they're too big for Nate - or any other human. Step count: 3645 I've confirmed that there was never a second campsite around here as I initially thought - the 'second' light I saw was from the same campsite and the world wrapped back to it. Climbing back out I try some different routes - there really are a lot of options, and I even come across a bucket hat and a Mike 'Just use your grappling hook!' cutscene that I missed on my first ascent. I suspect all roads eventually lead to the second campsite, but there are many ways to get there. The step-tracker has an advanced feature - when you drop it, it flashes a brightly colored light, so you can see where it is even from a distance. That way I can find it again, even though I dropped it wayyy down there. It's a conspiracy to make me take more steps. That's some fancy tech. I would have preferred a wrist strap. I reach the second campsite, the one where I met Ethan, and as an illustration of how much better I've gotten I only have one minor slip while going up the slope that took me about ten attempts the first time. Step count: 6211 I nearly lost the step tracker. It started innocently enough - I found a tower near the edge of a cliff and started to climb it. I met Mike again here, and he told me there was nothing at the top and that climbing it would be a waste of time. I believed Mike, but like mountaineers we climb things simply because it is there. Things went almost perfectly with me navigating some tough sections all the way up until just before the top when I slipped and fell down a shaft in the tower - and I let go of the step tracker and it landed on a high ledge within the shaft. I climbed the tower again - falling three times before making it up to the same spot - only to plummet down the shaft past where the tracker was. It is not easy to fall where you want to go, and every miss is another climb to the top. On my next attempt I managed to land on the ledge with the tracker and pick it up. I then tried to intentionally fall off the ledge with it, but somehow managed to literally scrape the damn thing right out of my hand onto a different ledge , and once again poor Nate slammed into the ground sans tracker. Are. You. Kidding. Me. By this point I'd probably attempted climbing this tower around a dozen times. I was contemplating giving up on the thing and moving on - after all, the game will be easier if I'm not constantly holding on to things and retrieve them. On the other hand, I'm really enjoying having a step count and posting updates to it here, even though it's completely inaccurate since it's not recording all the steps I'm having to take to pick it up again - so if there's a chance I can still get it, I'm getting it. I managed to fall onto the first ledge, and then to my surprise found that there was a narrow path of jutting stones from there down to the second ledge. One thing about Baby Steps that's impressed me is the terrain everywhere in the game feels very carefully crafted - I'm probably one of a very small number of players to intentionally go inside this shaft, and yet even in here there's carefully laid out footholds that allow me to carefully make my way to my objective. I probably should have listened to Mike. After that little nightmare, I hightailed it out of the poison forest and back up to where I left the box and binoculars - which are right where I left them. Step Count: 9,787 Yes it took me this long to figure out I could press A to look at the thing. The slopes ahead call to me, it's time to continue upward. The desert / beach (it's a bit of both) area's tower would like some ice cream. If this happens it's going to be sand-flavored by the time it gets there. I find an empty pool - because why not - and after examining it for a moment it looks to me like it's impossible to climb out of. This, of course, tempts me to go into it. Are Bennett Foddy and his accomplice developers truly that cruel, to put in an obstacle that might really trap you and force you to end the game? I honestly wouldn't put it past them.... but I have to know! Ok, yes - I think it's actually impossible to climb out of... but there's a skateboard here, perhaps I can use that to... Skateboarding with these controls is its own special hell. Fortunately after leaving me in the pool long enough to wonder if I actually am trapped here, Jim shows up and (despite Nate's idiotic insistence that he doesn't need it) gives Nate a stepladder to freedom. There's an unspoken contract between players and modern games that isn't true of older ones - and that is that the game will not allow you to get stuck somewhere that you can't extricate yourself from. There are old adventure games like the early Kings Quests where it's possible - even likely - that you will put yourself into a situation you can't actually escape and must reload an earlier save to continue. As brutal as Baby Steps is, I suspect it won't do that you. Here you go Nate. You need it. There's no such protections for the objects you're carrying. This area has a new hazard - cacti. The very first time I stepped on one and fell, I dropped the step tracker, and the thing suffered a bad physics glitch and zipped off into the unknown. That's gone for good. I think the last step count I checked was somewhere around 10,810. In short order, I dropped the binoculars over a ledge and just couldn't be bothered to go back for them after the step counter incident. This was immediately followed by sliding down a sandy slope and leaving the box hat on a ledge above me. I have chosen the Path of Pain. I will soldier on unencumbered by possessions, for now. Not having to pick up the things you drop is freeing. I really like the aesthetics of this area, the terrain features giant sandcastles that someone built. Is this THE castle? Can I get my wish now? Like the previous areas, there are climbing challenges scattered around. Actually summiting some of these obstacles generally doesn't reward you and often pisses Jim off. I knocked over a culturally significant bucket. I don't know what the hardest obstacle in the game is, I probably haven't run across it yet, but I'd like to call this one out for being a huge problem for me. It doesn't even LOOK difficult but those two cacti have knocked me into that white-sludge slide many times now. The white stuff is very slippery and sounds like a hollow plastic tub when you walk on it, I have no idea what it's supposed to be. I reach the end of the sandcastles and find a deep, dark cave. Jim shows up with lanterns to help light the way. Nate refuses a lantern - he thinks Ethan will make fun of him. I may have missed a cutscene. Fortunately for me (because the area is actually pitch-black and I have no idea if it's possible without a lantern) Moose is just ahead and he has two, and Nate accepts the help this time. I got up this escalator by using the hand-rail, which thankfully wasn't moving like the escalator was. At the end of the cave, Ethan and more donkeys than I've seen before are gathered, waiting for Nate. Nate's fears of being made fun of for the lantern are well justified. To my surprise, this turns out to be the castle - just ahead is the (shitty plastic) angel, and Nate can make his wish. Ethan again asks for cigarette. Nate clearly wants to go home - or so I thought. Nate contemplates the life he'd return to. Nate wishes... that he were dead. Damn. I haven't really been sympathetic for Nate thus far but now I feel for the guy. It doesn't work. You can't die in this place. There's nowhere to go but forward. And forward... is a door. A regular, apartment door. Well sure, of course there'd be an apartment here, why not. Nate follows a woman's voice through the apartment, which repeats and changes until everything is boxed away - and Nate tumbles back into the world he's stuck in. Imposing snow-capped mountains promise me that this isn't going to get easier. At least Nate has made one friend - Moose has been very nice to Nate and unlike everyone else, Nate is actually interested in talking with the guy. Moose somehow found ice-cream and shares it. This 'walled fields' area actually starts off pretty easy, there's a long straightforward 'sculpture walk' if you don't feel like scaling a stone wall. This only encourages me to climb on the things. I don't hate the sculptures, they're pretty interesting to look at and it's nice to find this sort of art gallery here - it's also nice to have a break from the difficulty of climbing things, you can just walk past all of these if you want to. Yeah, I climbed on top of Your Mum. Apparently someone else burned their wish on ruining this area's tower. But the easy walk must come to an end. I'm about halfway to the mountain slopes and I need to find my way up. I can't make them out very well but it looks like there might be a giant spiral staircase I can use. The columns with the red lights are actually the same staircase, you can see more than one because the world repeats. First, I had to cross a gorge. I could fall down and try to find a way back up the other side, but it would be a bit faster if I could use this zipline. I just have to reach it.... To be fair, there WAS a sign warning me not to use the Zipline. Hi it's me here at the bottom of the gorge, zipline is way up there where I fell from. Fortunately all is not lost, down here there's an abandoned rail system for mine carts, and climbing it leads me to an (I assume) abandoned salt mine. Wait... are the trails of white stuff salt? That would be a pretty damn good joke if true. Steps Taken: Who knows. A little ways inside the mine is a campsite, Moose is there once again toasting marshmallows. He tells Nate about the cabin he's built near the summit - complete with a toilet, which Nate has yet to use. I guess in addition to not dying here you also don't have to actually use the bathroom after several days - the miracle of a strange purgatory. Nate is bad at toasting marshmallows. This area features a new obstacle - giant waterwheels! The first one I encounter serves as a timer - you have to cross a narrow bridge before the next paddle knocks you off, making it one of a very few times when you have to complete an obstacle quickly. This waterwheel instead needs to be treated like an elevator - step onto a paddle and then back off again when it takes you higher. It did not go well. Nate has fallen from larger heights and probably suffered more painful falls, but I never felt more sorry for the guy than when I stumbled on the wheel and got Nate's legs caught in it, causing him to be dumped out at the apex, slammed into the hub, bounced off a spoke, and dumped prone back onto another paddle causing the entire traumatic experience to be repeated several times. Why is this sign here? You're in danger of falling in all kinds of places... Ooh, is that a hat? I made it to the spiral staircase, and I notice there's also a stone path rising up to the right of it. I guess it's an alternate route compared to... the stairs with a railing? I don't think I can properly convey just how tall this staircase is. An alternate route to it is just madness, why would I ever- Jim shows up and explain he built the stairs to help people avoid 'The Manbreaker' route. Nate's pride makes him insist he'll take the Manbreaker up. I give the Manbreaker one attempt. It ends like this. No. Nate may have insisted that he'd take the Manbreaker just to prove something, but Nate's not the one climbing it - I am. And you know what? Nate's whole damn problem is that he won't reach out to people and just accept some help. People have offered him shoes, maps, guidance, and he turns them all down, for no reason at all. No, this time Nate doesn't get to make that choice for me. I'm taking the goddamn stairs and Nate can swallow his pride and tell Jim 'Thank you.' when we get to the top. And reaching the top.. is easy. You'd have to make an effort to fall off this staircase, it's really really great. My hat is off to all those who ultimately conquered the Manbreaker - I saw all of it, once, on my way up that stairway to heaven. Looks tough! Mike is at the camp at the top of the stairs, Nate tries to get him to share his map but only manages to get Mike to burn the thing and head off on his own. In the morning, there's a giant woman nearby - I think she may be the one that built the huge sandcastles. I go to talk to her but she just cradles Nate like a baby and puts him up on a ledge. Thanks... Mom? Later on, I hear cries for help. It's Mike - he managed to get crushed by a huge rock. Nobody can die here, so this clearly fatal injury merely causes Mike immense amounts of pain. He begs me to go back down the mountain to get Jim to help (not sure if Jim can move the rock either, it's huge). I go back to the giant woman, but she's no help - she just does the motherly cradling again. I have no idea where Jim actually is - he just pops up every so often, so I turn around again and keep heading upward. The challenge up in these mountains are patches of ice, which are very difficult to traverse without slipping, and a pair of train cars that hang over the side of the slope, forcing you to climb up scattered luggage and seats to ascend. When you're halfway up the phone rings - you'll have to go back down if you want to answer it. Triumphantly reaching the top of the train cars, I look around at the landscape. How things have changed! It's pristine. There's no trash, no random 'climb me' obstacles. Just a wintry mountain slope. There is only one summit. It's still so far away that the repeating world makes it look like four as Nate trudges toward it. Keep walking Nate, we got this. And then, at the base of the summit, I see it - Moose's cabin. Please, please let me use the bathroom. Nate knocks. Moose opens the door, chats a bit about how warm it is inside, how nice the toilet is, how he's been mapping the area, and sends Nate on his way. Nate finally gets the gumption to knock again, and asks to come inside. Moose is happy to welcome him. Nate has found a home, and a friend. Nate can stop walking now. The ending screen is utterly delightful, you finally get to see a map of the whole place and watch yourself wander around everywhere. The tower (South) where I almost lost the step tracker looks like a bloody mess. The white substance was milk, according to the map. And thinking back on it I suspect a couple of the 'hills' that were producing milk were actually giant breasts. Also there was a place labeled 'Avoid this place' that I inadvertently avoided - if I ever replay Baby Steps I'll check it out. Baby Steps was a solid game - my one caveat in recommending it to people is that it is very challenging, both in it's unusual control scheme and that certain obstacles can be quite punishing, and I would completely understand anyone who became frustrated with it. That said, if you avoid various optional challenges I think it's easier than Getting Over It was, and as far as I can tell you are fairly safe from utterly catastrophic 'back to the beginning' levels of falling - plus, falling is just plain funny - this is a great game to watch your friend try to play. As difficult as this game is, it's a kinder, gentler Foddy than in the past - perhaps his fellow devs have made him kinder. Or at least talked him out of hurting people quite so much. Actual steps taken: 60972 I'm pleased the ending screen gave me the final value, even though I lost the pedometer, I appreciate it. Oh, and apologies to Mike - Nate forgot all about him when reaching Moose's cabin. He's still stuck under that rock.

Appropriately enough I'm starting Look Outside on Halloween, and it will conclude the recent series of scary games. I was actually going to play it shortly after I got it in September, but just before starting I noticed that the devs were planning a major update for the game in October, so I decided to wait for that - this is a bigger and (I hope) better version of the game, because good things come to those who wait. Edit: Fair warning - some of this game's images are grotesque, which is impressive given that it's pixel art. Look Outside is a turn-based survival-horror RPG, which is intriguing to me because almost every survival-horror game I've played thus far is in real time. Right away I'm drawn in by the music and sound effects of wind blowing outside, it's haunting. Sure thing voice in the wall, it's the name of the game after all. I went to the window I looked outside I lost the game The cutscene for our Hero on looking outside is... well, faces are not intended to do what I just saw. Let's try this again. This time I have a conversation with the eye through the wall, it's my neighbor Sybil, who immediately reconsiders their advice to look outside and recommends that I not do that. Thanks Sybil, I've figured that out already. This time around I've made it to the point where I can name my character (I suspect getting 'game over' before naming my character is a sad new record for me). We'll go with 'Patt' in honor of the blog. Sybil is perfectly nice and offers to check up on me every so often. I gather that she looked outside and isn't sure what it did to her, but she's confident that whatever is going on will end in 15 days. I assume I need to survive that long I tried using social media on my laptop, and that made me fell less alone but stressed me out (whatever is happening outside, nobody understands and people are freaked out over, and is happening all over the world). This changed my 'social' by +5 and 'calm' by -5, so there's some underlying statistical thing going on. I can't find those on the stats page, they seem to be hidden. I walk outside my bedroom and into the rest of my domicile. Pretty spacious for an apartment! Checking the clock, I note that time is passing but I'm not sure if it's passing in response to my interacting with objects or in real time. I check the fridge - it's got a frozen TV dinner and a couple other things but there's no way I'm surviving for 15 days on what's in there Brush every day, even - maybe especially! - in the apocalypse All right, I've showered - which provided a huge hygiene and morale benefit, so it matters - and it's time to venture outside the apartment. At a minimum, I need to find food to survive 15 days, and since there are combat stats we'll want to make ourselves capable of fighting. This answers the 'how time passes' question, it's based on interacting with things. Hey - this is game 33 and I live in Apartment 33, what are the odds? This may be a really bad idea but I'm going to follow the blood trail. Looks like that was a good idea! I found a baseball bat and some items... and the blood trail's source. I assumed that, like most blood trails, it represented some unfortunate innocent that had been attacked and dragged off by a monster. Nope. No innocents needed - my neighbor has gone batshit crazy I start whacking him with the bat when he turns his knife on me, and I feel even more justified in doing so when this happens. He was cutting himself so that 'he could see', I guess that makes sense now Having killed my neighbor and taken his knife, I explore the rest of the apartment that he was in. There are now lots of monsters wandering around, and they move in real time. I beat this one but it did a fair bit of damage, I can't fight everything and will try to avoid fighting too many I found a key and unlocked the safe in that room and came away with a lot of money and some coins for vending machines. I went back to the hallway, bought some snacks from the vending machine, and avoided the monsters to get back to my apartment. Oooh, this is a 'push your luck on your dangerous excursion' game! A second outing to a nearby apartment yields a bonanza of items - forks and knives that I can throw in combat, a crafting kit for my own apartment, and best of all, some food in the fridge. I take it all back home and make myself a meal, which provides some much-needed HP recovery. The game lets you save in your apartment so I can't lose too much progress if I die. Having scoured all the apartments I can get into on my own floor, I move down to the next one, and that's when things get really interesting. I meet an astronomer who suspects that what's outside is a large, possibly living, alien object Some of these people looked outside but, like Sybil, haven't become mindless monsters... they're just changed a bit. Jeanne just wants her laundry This game is good at crafting a horrifying moment, and I walk past a boarded-up door twice, listening to the screeching inside - and then when I continue down the hallway the apartment doors have disappeared, and I'm in a long, messed up, doorless hallway when the beast breaks free and comes after me. I fled in fear for my life Escaping that monstrosity, I ended up in an apartment with a photographer who's also been altered. Lyle offered me some photo paper in exchange for a kiss.. which I assume I could have turned down and obtained by paying for it, thanks to the safe earlier I have over a hundred dollars. But kisses are free, folks. On the way back to my apartment I was getting disconcerting messages about feeling an itchy sensation and something else going on. Eventually I checked my inventory, and found a stowaway! I am NOT bringing a roach back to my apartment! It's still the first day around 4:30 PM, and I feel like I've accomplished a lot. I briefly tried to access the other floors but the 1st, ground, and basement doors are all locked. I'm curious to see if sleeping will recover my HP so I spend some time in the apartment - I'm tempted to go back to the nearby rooms and kill the various monsters that were there before for the XP but I don't want to get hurt doing it and I need to know how my HP recovers. Before bed I try my hand at crafting, it's pretty intuitive as you select an item and then it gives you a list of valid things to combine it with. This made a Molotov cocktail - a choice weapon for anyone stuck inside their apartment building I also try passing the time by playing videogames. You can choose which one to play and you get a little narrative of what happens in the game as you're playing it. Sounds like my jam! After finishing I'm mentally in a better place and the game hints that if I can beat this game something good will happen, so if we have extra time in a day we'll be using it here. Before going to bed, there's a knock at the door. I have 2 HP left so I really hope it's not a monster. Thankfully it's a kind priest who gives me some food I like that there's a mix of normal, caring humans (and altered humans) as well as horrible monstrosities wandering around. Those of us who are still sane should probably all band together and work to clear out safe sections of the building but since that's not an option I accept some food from Father Andrew and give him a $20 donation so he can keep helping other tenants who are still alive. Sleeping is a partial heal, I'm back up to half health. Survival horror is all about resource management, I want to try to discover as much as possible each day while still taking care of myself. 14 Days Remain I'm going to skip showering / brushing teeth today, I only have one toothpaste / soap left and I suspect that I'll be better off if I save it to clean myself from some gory disaster than if I use it up now. I make a few meals and items and get ready to head out and explore more of the building when there's another knock at the door. It's an innocent, abandoned child! Or... so it claims.... I let her in and she doesn't sprout eyeballs and try to eat me, so I take her along with me and Sophie becomes a party member. Normally I'd never consider bringing an eight-year old child with me into combat with altered humans made of eyes and teeth but I don't want to leave her sitting alone in the apartment, she might wipe out my videogame save files. I manage to find a way down to the first floor, and it looks like the building has been altered - there's now a set of parallel crisscrossing corridors that repeat and form a sort of maze. I find a door with arrows pointing towards it, and inside I find a man named Ernest (and his pet rat Colonel Squeakers) who agrees to help me for the rest of the day in exchange for a sandwich. I'll take all the help I can get With Ernest's help (both he and Col. Squeakers can attack) the party has become pretty decent at fighting, so we clear out a mutant rat's nest and take all the food there, then proceed to do the same to a vine-infested apartment. I'm fighting most of these battles and avoiding enemies less since I have help now I even ran into a terrible monster in the first floor hallways that I felt like I was supposed to avoid, figured I'd give it a shot or die trying. Thanks to using a Molotov and other special skills I managed to kill the Rat King and got his skull Lastly for the day I ended up in an apartment with Frederic the Painter, who apparently painted a picture of the sky that he's hiding away in a back room because looking at it makes him feel uneasy. Apparently he must have painted it while whatever is outside was approaching earth, and even a depiction of it - even one the artist wasn't fully aware of - is enough to affect people. Frederic also has a problem with his other paintings. Assuming I'd have to fight paintings of things, I set off to take care of them... only to find that Frederic was painting self-portraits and they're all claiming to be the real Fred. Even when I somehow clocked him as not being the original he wanted me to kill all the other Freds anyway The next encounter with a Fred variant almost ended the party, and only Patt walked out of it still conscious. I figured that was a good time to return to the apartment for the day, I can come back here later and try to kill the remaining portraits. Back at the apartment I had another visitor. A friendly neighborhood arms dealer He had quite the selection - including a Gatling Gun for $1,600 that I doubt I'll ever be able to afford, but I bought a bunch of shuriken and some army boots - I haven't found a lot of uses for money so once the opportunity came I spent almost all I had. That evening I finished playing Myrmidon, and good things did indeed happen - Patt learned a skill! Don't worry guys, lemme patch you up, I saw it in a video game 13 Days Remain A minor annoyance with this game is that it doesn't save my full-screen setting so every time I start it up I have to go into options and set it again. Yesterday I got an inexplicably bad feeling about killing the roach. Also, there's a new roach in my apartment now - I'm going to choose to take comfort in them not being horrible monsters and be nice to them. With my last bits of bread I can make another sandwich and take Ernest with me again, having an additional party member was invaluable in combat - well worth the 40 HP or so just eating a sandwich would be worth. My neighbor / eye in the wall Sybil warns me that she thinks she heard something invisible running around in our hallway. The plan to go give Ernest a sandwich is temporarily on hold when I step outside the apartment and notice that the next-door is now open with a cryptic sign saying 'Help You'. 'Well', I say, channeling my inner idiot, 'May as well check it out.' The apartment is the home of Edwin, one of the early Astronomers that's gone missing. At first his place appears to be empty other than having a lot of helpful supplies and more food. Disconcertingly, I also find some astronomy gear and implications that Edwin has himself changed into something like a telescope, and he's wandering around unable to see his neighbors or be seen by them. The number of moons around various planets is given undue attention and hints at being necessary for puzzle solving. Saturn needs to lose weight Also of interest here, I can point the telescope outside and project an image of whatever is Outside onto the floor. It's implied that if I turn off the light I can get the image onto a blank disc that I'm carrying, the Astronomers would love that. If it doesn't drive them insane. I'm about to leave when Edwin makes his appearance, putting ectoplasm or something on the walls and indicating the light switch. He seems nice! Edwin is Not Nice. He is indeed a horrible telescope thing, and turning off the light not only lets me see him - and him see me - it also straight-up puts me into Silent Hill territory, warping the world into something more horrible than it already is. This is what MY apartment looks like with the lights off In the case of Edwin and the other creatures here, the game universally and un-subtly warns me that I 'feel a strong urge to run' when I meet them. Even worse, they all seem to know me, existing in places I can't see them but they can see me.... After running around in terror I get back into the room with the telescope, and the one thing I manage to do is get that image of the outside burned onto a disc. I'm in real bad shape by the time I make it back to the light switch, so I limp back to the apartment and fix myself up. The day gets further sidetracked as i find that the 'Ice Melt' I managed to make will let me get into the apartment that was frozen shut across the hallway. Where other games have caves and biomes and such, this frozen hell is across the hallway from where I live I raid some of the rooms and battle some creatures but Sophie takes a nasty hit in the bathroom and falls unconscious. I have a very limited supply of revival items in the form of medkits so rather than burn my last one I retreat back to my apartment and decide to play videogames for the rest of the day - I didn't even make it off of my own floor, there was so much new stuff to explore here. Playing videogames is very worthwhile, I pick up two new skills from it. Not only do you get the narrative of your gameplay but of the NPC reactions to it As the day drags on I get more knocks at the door - mostly merchants and I blew most of my cash on ninja stars. One pair, however, wants to crash at my place. Sure, why not? It's hell out there man. The two new houseguest immediately make themselves at home... and I mean they make my home their home and take over my bedroom. I guess it's my fault for not making this arrangement a little clearer. So, downside - I'm sleeping on my couch, and from my bedroom underneath the game's soundtrack they're playing punk rock music I can hear through the wall. Upside - two new party members to throw at monsters! That's worth sleeping on the couch for! 12 Days Remain Ok, THIS time I'm going down to the first floor, grabbing Ernest, and getting shit done down there with a full party. I still have the sandwich I made yesterday and I don't want it to go to waste, and the party menu holds four so Sophie can chill in the apartment for a day. Sadly Ernest isn't hungry for a day-old pork sandwich, apparently since I have party members now he won't join me (Even trying to fool him by leaving everyone in the apartment and heading down alone didn't work). I guess somebody's eating this sammich! When I started this game I was skeptical that it was going to simultaneously pull off 'survival horror' and 'turn based' - and I'm here to report that that skepticism was unwarranted. On the default difficulty level that I'm playing at, you can only save when you safely return to your apartment, and then only when 'enough time has passed', meaning you generally need to survive a full excursion and return safely to record your progress (and I have died several times, it's dangerous out there!). While combat is turn-based, getting INTO combat is not, as the monsters move in real-time and if they catch you they get a couple chances to attack you before you run away. I've got a cache of healing supplies and food - enough that I can defeat some monsters but not so much that I'm confident that I can kill anything and everything without burning through all my resources. I found a tragic case today, Charlie here did NOT look outside - but some bug flew in the window that had, and it got him. I'm really concerned that he's just going to suffer and die and I spent a few minutes trying to decide whether to kill him (as a mercy) or not. I'm concerned that my decision will end up spawning something awful I'll have to deal with later, but I'd feel terrible if I later find some way to heal him. Charlie thinks he's doomed but he didn't ask me to kill him, so he lives. For now. Back to exploring on the first floor, I come across a baby crying. Or, at least, the sound of a baby crying.... This may have been a baby that looked outside... Or a rat that looked too hard at a baby Unable to bring myself to keep the horrible creature, I walked out - only to find it following me. Guess I'm Mama Rat now. Xaria and Monty may be terrible houseguests but they're solid party members, and they each have their own unique skillset with a lot of character. Monty can craft 'special drinks' in combat and they can be used to calm the paintball-gun wielding Xaria if he freaks out too much. Sometimes Monty 'screws up' the brew and you get a useful healing item. Sometimes it explodes and harms the whole party. I've made an incredibly useful discovery. Last night one of the merchants that visited the apartment sold rings that protect from various status effects, and it turns out that just putting them on after you, say, get poisoned will cure the poison without needing to use a consumable item. Just one Lapis band and I don't need antidotes anymore I make some progress with the Painter's apartment, killing some of his more aggressive incarnations but not others - one just seemed genuinely scared and innocent, and this one just seemed happy and strange. They were nice, they gave me a blessing! I must have killed enough of them though, because the Painter gave me a canvas so I could conceal the painting of the thing and give it to Aurelius the Astronomer. I hope I gave him the right one - I had to guess based on wet paint colors which painting was correct. It... might be a painting of that, I didn't look at it! And then... I ran into a wall. N... no? I noped right out of there... into an infinite liminal hallway. There was no escaping the Mouth, I had to feed it something. It would not accept my food as a substitute. I refused to feed it the poor defenseless rat baby. That left one option. Technically two options, with dire consequences I really hope the Rat Baby appreciates today's sacrifice. On the bright side I got to name the Rat! Seemed appropriate for someone that's here because it wasn't eaten I spend the rest of the day in the apartment nursing the lost arm and playing through the videogame collection (fortunately THAT does not appear to be hampered as much as it likely would be). And then we get a wonderful visitor - Sophie's mother comes around looking for her daughter! He took great care of me Mom I only got knocked out once or twice! Well, I guess it's just me, the punk rockers and Leftover the Rat Thing now. Spending time with Leftover I'm pretty convinced it was indeed a human baby at one point. I'm really enjoying this game, it's one of the most unique and creative RPGs I've ever played - it's set entirely within a single apartment building but each day new stuff keeps happening, the themes and writing are phenomenal, and the game keeps throwing surprises my way. For people who might be on the fence about the survival-horror part of needing to survive excursions, there's a difficulty option that lets you save anytime so you can just scum your way through - you'll still have a great time. And boy, do your decisions ever have consequences. I've lost an arm and it hasn't been a week yet! And SOMEONE is feeling judgmental about it 11 Days Remain I had terrible nightmares - yesterday there was a brief encounter with a scary clown-puppet who was simultaneously very nice and polite but was also utterly and incomprehensively terrifying, and now visions of the puppet Pierre are haunting me. Also, yes, I slept on the couch again. At least with Sophie gone I have some privacy in my living room. Annnnd now there's someone - or something - new in my apartment. Xaria says Juicebox is cool and I shouldn't freak out about him. I'm not the only one having nightmares, they're getting to Sybil too. Given our actual situation, having nightmares is probably par for the course. Once again there are new apartments open on my floor - I think they're ALL open now so I might be able to focus more on making progress later! Yeah it's probably okay that the apartment is a mouth now, let's check it out. The interior of Apartment 32 Teeth is one of the more disturbing areas, culminating in the horrific incarnation of a crying, teething baby crawling out of the darkness to attack us. I didn't WANT to kill it but surely it didn't WANT to live Adjacent to that was a relatively normal apartment full of taxidermied animals in which.... nothing happened except for one Taxidermied Evil Figure appearing and disappearing. I'm sure there will be follow-up there on a future day but for today, easy source of supplies. I burned most of the day searching the two apartments and made some progress on the first floor, which I still can't find my way around in very well. I'm obtaining planetary discs which act as keys - the mouth / arm incident gave me the Earth disc, and I was able to use it to get into a room where I got the Mars Disc. The denizens of said room were not pleased to see me. I revisited some of the first-floor apartments that I hadn't fully cleared out and took a beating from some of the enemies still wandering around, so I limped back to the apartment for the day. The skills I've been getting from videogames are invaluable and while I've been treating them as a thing to do in my spare time, there's a perfectly valid approach where you'd simply want to play them as soon as you obtain them to prepare yourself better for excursions. Staying in the apartments brings visitors, and today Pierre the scary clown puppet paid me a visit. Pierre is super-nice but Patt can't stand them. Patt, it turns out, has a phobia of clowns and is more terrified of Pierre than anything else in the game (despite how utterly nice Pierre has been.) It makes for an awkward conversation. 10 Days Remain Leftover the Rat Thing is now old enough to join the party! They grow up so fast! So much happened today. I started by summoning up the courage to visit Pierre and engage in some exposure therapy to try to lessen my fear of clowns. Then I figured out how to use a projector in a nearby apartment to get an image of the Visitor outside onto a piece of photo paper, and asked Lyle to develop it for me. I'd have done it myself but Lyle won't let me into the darkroom. I visited one of the second floor residents who has opened up a shop. I've been building up my cash reserves and now have a lot of ways to spend the money. Straight outta Nethack for you OG folks Now having the Mars and Earth discs I was able to unlock the ground floor and explore it. I finally retrieved Jeanne's laundry, she's been waiting for days. I went to check out the entrance and a bus slammed through the door, spilling out monsters. Things outside must be insane I visited Sophie and her mother in their apartment, they're doing just fine except for Jeanne having broken through their walls. Jeanne turned into a hydra with killer heads Jeanne can't stand that she's grown lethal heads and asks me to kill her body to end it all, but instead I kill off each and every other head that isn't being nice to me and leave her alive. I forgot to give Jeanne her laundry but I don't think it would fit now in any case. And then... I had had enough of my houseguests, and I don't mean the roaches. Xaria got pissed at nothing and kicked Leftover. Monty and Xaria may be powerful characters, but damnit, they can get the hell out of my room and out of my apartment! I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore! I have Leftover and I can still ask Sophie to tag along if needed (her mother will be thrilled), I think I still have a viable party without those two. Just going to sleep in my own damn bed feels like a big damn accomplishment. 9 Days Remain I was getting ready for the day ahead, showering and considering how bad the loss of Monty and Xaria are to the party's combat capabilities when there's a knock at the door. She may LOOK like an axe-murderer but Hellen is very polite. Hellen needs a place to crash, I invite her in, and she doesn't immediately commandeer my room. Welcome to the party Hellen! Incidentally, despite the ominous nature of the visitors to my apartment, to date none of them have been outright hostile to me - opening the door and chatting with the visiting figures has never been a bad thing (so far) regardless of how frightening they may appear. The one thing about Hellen that gives me pause is that she said she looked outside, and it was beautiful.... Eh, it's probably fine. We've established that some portion of people retain their minds even if their bodies get warped into unconscionable horrors. Speaking of which, I've finally given Jeanne back her laundry. She can't wear any of it of course but at least she feels better. I stopped by Lyle's place to pick up the developed photo and gave it to the Astronomers. Then Lyle invited himself over to my place to join in the fun. This would be a lot less awkward if you'd just asked while we were in your apartment five minutes ago Having gotten more ice-melt I cleared out the frozen apartment and found another planetary disc (for, as it happens, the hottest planet - Mercury). Revisiting the taxidermied apartment, I end up fighting a really nasty patched-together creature there that sends me scurrying for home with one surviving party member. Guess that's all the adventure I'm up to today! This guy kicked my ass. He's especially nasty because when he drops one of your party members the taxidermy wires come out and control their unconscious bodies, which is both thematically awesome and a real pain in the ass to deal with. 8 Days Remain Something huge strikes the apartment and shakes the building, but before I figure out what that was, I have revenge on the brain and take a second crack at RhinoMooseBear, barely beating him with only Hellen still standing at the end. Returning to the apartment and resting, Hellen and Leftover are getting along very well after an initially fraught first interaction. Leftover draws Hellen's face after seeing it and Hellen is so touched that she starts wearing the drawing instead of the hockey mask. Also Leftover picks up a couple stalker-ish skills from Hellen! It's a very sweet scene but Leftover sucks at drawing Returning to the ground floor, the source of the rumbling appears to be that creatures from the bus have busted through the landlord's door and entered his apartment. Mr. Henderson is a wheelchair-bound veteran Together we fight them off but not before a horrible wriggling hand forces itself down the landlord's throat. By the time I run to the bathroom and back with some medication (This situation warrants somethings lightly stronger than Tylenol) the landlord has gone missing and the Landlord's apartment has expanded into a liminal space featuring an entire warzone. Currently regretting not picking up the basement key when I first saw it on the table Battling through twisted soldiers and explosives I eventually find the basement key and hightail it back home just before nightfall. There's an interesting element to this where the Landlord blocks your way forward, demanding progressively higher amounts of 'rent' money to proceed. 7 Days Remain Hellen takes me aside and says that she's noticed me taking good care of my houseplant, and since she's a gardener, there's another plant she wants me to help take care of. Hellen's been a good houseguest and a good party member so I'm happy to help. I'm sad to report that sometime in the days between when we last saw Ernest and Col. Squeakers and now, something bad happened to them. I hope that Col. Squeakers got away Hellen leads me through a foliage-themed apartment that I had partially cleared before meeting her, and unlocks a new room that holds the plant she's caring for. Hellen is adamant that we continue caring for this plant in the days ahead Having done that, I explore the basement now that I have the basement key. There's an apartment down here with an anime Otaku that has to be murdered, and access to a whole sewer system filled with dead bodies. And, tragically, a school bus full of transformed children. I accidentally release a powerful, horrible creature that chases me around constantly so exploring down here isn't easy. While exploring I find there are living ducts to a furnace-creature that I try to clear ticks off of, but one tick strikes up a conversation instead of attacking me. I want it off the duct so in my 'embrace all the things' motif I let Tickle use me as a host instead So far there isn't much of a downside to having a tick ride around on me - it actually gives me a couple extra combat options. The sewers are extensive and use up the majority of my day until the party is battered and beat up, and I make my way home. 6 Days Remain Leftover went through a growth spurt! He's come into his own as a strong party member. Adorably he's got a skill called 'Copy Dad' which lets him repeat Patt's actions for several turns. I've settled into a morning routine - first, we water our houseplant and make food for the party BEFORE we talk with Sybil and save the game, so if anything bad happens those tasks are already in the bank and we can set out again from that point. Sybil thinks the world is doomed, it's been over a week and things are not getting better. After that, it's clown exposure therapy with Pierre followed by plant-tending with Hellen. NO I DON'T WANT TO With that out of the way, I decide to try to take care of unfinished business - I head back to the Landlord's war zone with a bunch of money. The rent here is too damn high Something I've noticed in this game is that in many places you can obtain what you need to progress forward early - such as the basement key here- but if you stick around you can find something important later, such as the planetary disc for Saturn that I located after stomping this mole-man soldier freak. He was blocking the way to the Big and Tall Helmet store The whole party is very powerful now, and I have plenty of items to spare as crafting can produce lots of bandages, plus judiciously returning to the apartment and cooking food can stretch your supplies quite a bit. Back in the basement, I find my way forward past the sewers to meet a group of nice people / monsters that appear to be refugees from a nearby soup kitchen. They're all very polite and happy to share their food. One of them is perhaps generous to a fault. Like me, they were drawn in by the conversational, polite ticks. I'm gonna stop at one. Hard stop there. Eventually I make my way into the parking garage, which has some pretty nasty monsters. I finally get the opportunity to use a car key I found days ago and loot one of the trunks, finding a shotgun and some ammo. Some of these cars have fused with their drivers and will come after you This is the first day I actually spent exploring all the way until nightfall. Things in the building do seem like they're getting worse, these dark ghostlike monsters have started appearing and attacking me. They were really weak at first but they seem to be getting stronger 5 Days Remain Exposure therapy with Pierre went right off the rails. Never, ever getting over my fear of clowns now Hellen's comments about the plant we've been caring for have grown increasingly ominous. As in 'bearing the fruit of a new world' ominous. I found a man's feet sticking out of the ceiling in the basement, so I went back to the ground floor to try to find his upper half. I didn't find it but I did find a whole new cafe / shop full of monsters and exotic items. There's great stuff for sale here, I wish I'd found it earlier. I also found the last Astronomer, Jasper. I suspect one ending for the game involves trying to get all of their various Visitor-related observational items to these guys wherein they conduct a ritual on the roof to try to communicate with it, for better or for worse. Unfortunately I appear to have messed up that possibility because I think I gave the wrong painting to one of them, and even though the game will let me take the painting back from the Astronomer it won't then let me swap the painting with another option in the painter's studio. No dice, Jasper - I don't think that's happening on this playthrough. Back at the apartment around midday, I manage to combine materials I got from the ghosts and some weird mushrooms in the basement to make a 'Catalyst'. No idea if that's something incredibly useful or just another crafting ingredient. I like the crafting system, it's very simple and you get to discover things on your own. As with all time spent in the apartment, visitors continue to show up and say hello. This time a junk dealer, Morton, asks to stay at my place after I give him a bunch of junk. He's easy to please. Welcome to the party Morton! I returned to the basement and at long last finally broke through to something I'd been hoping for all this time - the building's elevator. In one of my favorite encounters of the game the elevator music builds during the elevator ride. Until the beat - and the elevator - drops Now I can travel up and down floors quickly as well as access several areas that are only accessible via elevator. Using my new transport I found the man - the building's janitor, as it happens - that I was trying to help in the ceiling, but it turns out he was merely the tongue of a very deadly monster designed to lure us in... This worm was tough even for my highly experienced and capable party I also checked out part of the 2nd floor that I couldn't access before, and even now the game continues to throw delightful surprises my way - an underwater apartment! The entire party can hold their breath for several minutes. Finally I ran into an Author who looked outside and is now constantly writing about what he saw. Unfortunately he's a bad author - so boring he put my party to sleep That was one hell of day. I still have so much that I can do in this building, with only a few days left there's no way I can do it all, not to mention whatever I missed so far. I'll just have to see what I can manage. Back at my apartment, there was one more surprise in store. Today we found some 'Wizards and Mazes' sourcebooks, and it turns out Lyle is a GM - so tonight doesn't end in videogames. It ends in a tabletop RPG. Let me tell you about my Giant Warrior named Cratt (CRush All The Things) 4 Days Remain The building power has gone out. Honestly, I expected this to happen much earlier in the apocalypse. I'd been prioritizing eating any raw/frozen food I had first and now I'm glad I did (though I still have a lot left and thankfully my gas stove still works). It's time to see what the deal is with Hellen's plant. The way Hellen has been talking about this thing I suspected this might end the game and 'birth a new world'. The 'fruit' turns out to be a sad little purple person. Hellen still wants to eat him. He turns out to be pretty tasty. Hellen gives me her personal gardening shears which are the best weapon I've found so far, except I can't use them because I've only got one arm because I let a wall eat it so I could save a rat-baby named Leftover that is now wearing a baseball cap this game is awesome. What I really wanted to do today was go back to the Aquatic apartment and try to finish it because I suspect that the Neptune disc will be in there, given the theme, but now that the power is out I can't take the elevator there. In fact a lot of routes are cut off today because of the power outage, it's a big problem. Instead, I head back into the sewers and decide to try to take on the big nasty thing down there that chases you around down here. Turns out he's not that bad (at least compared to my current strength) and now I'm free to explore the sewers. This wasn't even the chasing-thing but I forgot to screenshot the other guy I find all the school bus kids and return them to their spider-teacher (They've only been left alone down here a couple days, I'm sure they're fine), and after clearing all the ticks off of ducts I have the option of attacking the central furnace itself. This is clearly an optional fight. Somewhere down here in the basement should be generator that I can use to get building power back on, so I explore and run into a mushroom / mold filled area. You can see trippy stuff breathing the air down here Some people are trapped down here by the fungus and I free them. There's... there's a whole Collectible Card Game I can play in this now? And I can get expansions for my apartment?!? I feel like I'm finding these things pretty late in the game but such are the consequences of having the degree of freedom to explore that Look Outside features. I'd come down here earlier on a future playthrough. There's some difficult fights at the end of the fungus-area and between them and the furnace I burned through a lot of great items today, but with just a couple days left it's use 'em or lose 'em. While I didn't find a generator in the fungus area, I did stumble upon exactly what I wanted today: How is this NOT in the underwater apartment? Things really went off the rails when I ended up INSIDE a car / monster that attempted to drive me into Hell itself. I left it a bad review on Lyft And then, after much searching - success. I found my way to the generator room and got building power switched back on. There's not much time left in the day but I manage to squeeze in a little progress on the underwater apartment and another M&M session with Lyle. I really want to see how the RPG thing plays out so I think I'll set aside time for it tomorrow. 3 Days Remain I wake up late - it's already past 10 AM - to an ominous knock at the door. Thankfully it's only the Priest making his rounds - we have a nice chat, he drops off some spare supplies and I send him away with a generous donation (I've got a LOT of money now). Today, it's Mazes and Wizards until we finish!... or not. Lyle only wants to play in the evenings and needs time to prep between sessions. Damn you realism! Let's see, taking stock of my situation, it looks like I have every planetary disc (which act as keys for door puzzles) except Saturn. I'll try to find it, and my main candidate remains the underwater apartment, so we're diving back in. Yes I have a guinea pig. No, I have no idea what it's for. On my way there I suddenly remember the infested guy on the third floor who was inhabited by fly eggs. I decide to check on him to see if he's ok. He was... not ok. I put him out of his misery. I push my way through the aquatic apartment and defeat the tenant there, Summer, though I'm left wondering if there was another way to handle her situation. She didn't seem hostile, at first. The end of the apartment leads to some strange type of fleshy door requiring a key that I don't think I have. I've actually encountered a lot of such doors in various places - I'm sure I'll be playing this game again in the future, and the second time I'm going to make a list of all of these doors so I can keep track of which ones I still need to open and which keys go where. I traded in some cassettes to hand-man here for an excellent piece of armor Speaking of keys, I have one that leads to a convenience store on the first floor. I killed a horrible centipede-creature in there and looted the place. It LOOKS like there's a lot of stuff on the shelves but you can't take most of it I now have every planetary disc EXCEPT Saturn so it's time to take a crack at this door. I'm glad I wrote down the number of moons around planets. Math time! Obtaining Saturn now means that I should be able to open every planetary-locked door in the place, so I go around doing that. I find the last thing the Astronomers want from me by making a VHS tape of the security feed from outside. Do not look into the light The Astronomers are ready to go to the roof and perform their ritual. I assume this will be the end of the game so I'm going to hold off for a bit. In my explorations I found an unlabeled game cartridge, and unfortunately it's defective and I can't play it. I don't think I have enough time left to play all my games (also true in real life) In the evening, more progress on Lyle's campaign. We're ramping up to the final confrontation with the evil wizard so I have hope that I can finish this! 2 Days Remain I slept past noon. Why am I sleeping so late in these final days? I got stuff to do! Sybil is starting to lose it. I talk her out of it... for now. I'm not really sure what to do next while waiting for Lyle to be ready for roleplaying tonight, so I wander around for a bit and I find this guy in the parking garage - pretty sure he wasn't there before. He has a nasty antennae-whip that hits the whole party And just behind him, in a hole in the wall... an Iris key. Is this what I need to get past that aquatic door? Hell yes it is I step beyond and... I'm in Meat World. The amusement park we neither wanted nor deserved I explore Meat World for a bit but given how late I woke up the evening comes pretty quickly, so I hightail it back to the apartment for the most important thing in the game: Lyle's Mazes and Wizards campaign! I've had that look as a GM.... It didn't earn me anything. It used up valuable time that I probably could have used to help save the world, or at least some of the people in it - but damnit, I wanted this, and I got it. Ding dong the Wizard's dead! 1 Day Remains Time's up. I'm left with a lot of unsolved mysteries. Remember that painter? I never killed all of the other manifested paintings of him because some of them were just scared or friendly rather than hostile. Could I have fixed his brain by killing them anyway? Could I have fixed this blank game cartridge and played it? Could I have saved the guy with bug eggs in him? What lies at the end of Meat World? And where the hell do I actually find cards for that collectible card game or the materials to expand my apartment? These and other mysteries will have to remain so for now. There's so much going on in this game that I don't think it's possible to do everything in one run - and that's ok. I had an incredible time getting here and wholeheartedly recommend Look Outside to anyone who can stomach some visceral pixellated horror. I encountered a wonderful cast of characters, emotional stories of people having to deal with becoming twisted things and possibly losing parts of themselves, and others who's minds were as warped and twisted as their outward forms. I hacked my way through a jungle and soldiered through frozen halls without ever leaving my apartment building. I even (arguably) slew a dragon. What I've learned is that it may be possible to communicate with the Visitor, and if that's possible then it's worth trying. It's done untold damage to the world by now but that may never have been its intention. I'm going to go to the Astronomers and try their plan. It's better than just waiting for the end - even if one of their items isn't correct, maybe it'll still work out. I hope. I hope you guys know what you're doing. Moments later, I'm standing at the doorway to the roof. It's been weeks since I've seen the sky. It's.... beautiful. It's beautiful, and I'm all right - still human, anyway. The Astronomers are too, so I speak with them while they prepare. That was probaby the high point of my day. It went downhill from there. I knew that I'd messed up and gotten the wrong painting. What I did not know was that I had in fact screwed up nearly ALL of the ritual components. He should thank me, he's got bigger eyes to Astronomize with now In fact, only one Astronomer has what he needs and tries to conduct the ritual. He gets sucked up into the Visitor and becomes the Chorus of One, which is not much of a Chorus, and I end up having to fight it. With the Astronomer / Chorus defeated, I stumble back inside. I should have sat on my damn couch and played videogames all day. When I got back to my place, my companions stared at me, horrified. Even Leftover - you don't look so good yourself kid! Joke's on YOU universe, I was beating video games with one hand, wait till you see what I can do with seven! What a game! It feels good to end my scary game streak with an all-time banger, even if I got a 'bad' ending. As though just exploring more of it wasn't enough, now I have even more of a reason to play it again. There are many endings but this one is mine. This time.

The intensity of Golden Light has left me needing something less stressful, but it isn't Halloween yet so 'scary' games time is still on. I own Voltaire the Vegan Vampire entirely by chance - on a whim I got a '25 random games for 25 bucks deal', and this is one of them. It's got Vampires, cutesy graphics, and farming. Let us begin. The story, such as it is, is that I like broccoli and this is bad Voltaire refuses to eat vampire things like blood and intestines and instead runs away to farm veggies for himself. Offended by this, Dracula sends minions every night to destroy my crops and make me hungry enough to go back to the old ways, I think. If I can't grow enough veggies I'll go hungry By day I forage around my little graveyard cottage to get seeds and resources. Apparently sunlight is not a problem for Voltaire By night, the game changes to a tower-defense style game where enemies attack your crops. Leave the eggplants alone you fiends! Combat initially strikes me as a bit lackluster - the enemies aren't really animated, the sprites just wobble back and forth at you. And there's no direct danger to me, the enemies focus entirely on the crops so I just need to kill things fast enough to prevent that from happening. You can obtain soul stones which you can use to acquire permanent upgrades - I suspect I can 'die' if I get too hungry and will need to start over. All the upgrade are incremental boosts On the farming side, various actions increase your hunger, so what I'm able to do when building up the farm is effectively limited by the food I can grow and protect. To grow food, you need to clear fields, plant seeds and water them, each of which requires a separate hunger cost. Getting water in this game involves shaking it off of a 'droplet plant' and chasing the water around to catch it The first thing that strikes me as interesting is that plants do different things - some provide food and simply refill hunger, but others actually act as defense towers and attack or slow enemies. After a disastrous first night of combat where I failed to defend lots of plants, I note that the more plants you put down the more enemies come for you, and having the defense plants makes your life easier when it comes to protecting your crops. I need to find the right balance to keep eating vs. keeping the crops safe. After a week of farming, the first boss shows up. Mr. Skelly ran around outside the farm sending in minions, forcing me to abandon my crops to go get him After defeating him, uncles Frank and Stein showed up to let me know I should head elsewhere via portal. Unfortunately I forgot you needed soulstones to go through the portal and I spent them on upgrades so I'm stuck here for another week. After being stuck in the graveyard for another seven days and repeating my battle against the same boss, I'm starting to suspect that this may not be a great game. I've now reached the next area, which has the environmental effect of not showing me where enemies are approaching from. I have so much food leftover from the last map that I'm not sure I actually need to grow any, but I may as well. I think this could feed me for a week, especially if I didn't expend energy farming plants. My list of irritations with the game continues to grow - your special ability auto-targets enemies, but this is actually bad because the default special ability is an area effect that takes some time to fire and thus auto-targeting places it directly on a moving enemy that it won't hit. Another special ability that you can replace it with is a turret, and I'd rather place that where I want it than on an approaching foe. And whoever thought chasing water around was a good idea should be made to eat vegetables forever For this map I've decided to just consolidate all my crops around a single plot. The only way I lose crops is by trying to defend multiple separated plots, so instead I may as well just farm one - I may not earn as many plants as I could but I don't need them, especially when I'm not spending the extra hunger to maintain and re-plant lots of plants elsewhere. Four defense plants and four food crops still gets me plenty more food than I need and are easy to protect Your ranged projectiles move about as fast as you do so I don't see a lot of point to having them, I switched to melee attacks which seem to at least have an area-of-effect attack. I also got a 'melee attack trail' which seems to trigger often and did a lot of damage to the first boss very quickly. I've gotten through all the tutorial quests and now the game is giving me generic quests to do things like 'harvest seeds from wild plants' and 'craft a plank', which shows us that we've really hit the big time now. Speaking of the Big Time - how about the Big Top? One of the quest rewards is a carnival invitation, and I briefly, blissfully got to try doing something different. Oh joy, carnival games! Having tried each of them, most of them aren't that fun, are easily winnable, and generally produce more carnival tickets than you put into them. At 100 I can fight a boss, so I suppose I'll see what that's about. Special shout-out to 'Yordelus' for being a guaranteed win of at least 3 tickets Having purchased a boss fight, I get to fight this lovely fellow. Please close your cape sir nobody wants to see that Have I mentioned that the boss fights really... aren't? They tend to wander around and send minions at your crops but things in this game never hit YOU, so you're in no danger as you just walk next to them, hitting them repeatedly until they die - I suppose it's a battle between whether you can kill them faster than they kill your crops but there's no element of danger or strategy to it. The only good thing I have to say is that these battles are mercifully short. This warthog rider tried to kill the crops himself, but that really didn't make the fight any different The next area is desert. I suspect each level is a random combination of terrain and weather effect - now, what defines something as being a desert? That would be when it rains all the time, which is the weather effect I rolled for the desert, which means that I don't have to water my crops here. It may not LOOK like it's raining but hey it's hard to see raindrops in real life too At this point, I started to wonder if I could get by without planting anything at all. Sure, I'd get nothing to eat, but there should be fewer monsters if plants attract monsters, and I wouldn't be expending any hunger if I did no work, so theoretically it should work - and if it does I can just speedrun this game and get to the end of my suffering. And it IS a form of tedious suffering - at this point I've seen almost all of the plants in this game and there really doesn't seem to be anything else to it. Each zone requires that you survive 7 waves of enemies for the week to end and the boss to show up and those enemies are getting more numerous, like 80-90 come at you each night. In between nights you wander around the camp chasing water droplets (no you can't just take water from the lakes that are right there) and harvesting seeds. The minor irritations pile up, like you don't cut down a tree to get wood: Instead brushing past a tree has a chance to make it drop wood, and if it does then you have to double back to pick it up. Not planting anything was a mistake Thankfully I don't have to start the game over, so I'm not really sure it actually qualifies as a 'roguelike' in any form. I died because if you have no crops the beasties attack your main building, and without any defensive plants it's pretty hard to protect. I'll stick with the one-garden strategy, it's been working well and doesn't require a ton of effort to maintain. The game offers a couple 'classes', starting you as 'Default Vampire'. This starter class lets you choose between three different abilities each level so there's a bit of variety in how you can customize yourself. Thinking that I might see some interesting alternate options for powers and abilities I decided to unluck the most expensive class, the Pyromancer, under the assumption that most expensive = probably the most powerful. I was surprised to see that this afforded me a bit less customization than the starting class. If your skill tree does not branch, you might be a redneck. Where there were three power options per level for the basic Vampire, the most advanced class in the game just has straight power progression. It's still effective at fighting monsters (thankfully, because it made me restart from level 0), but boy does this contribute to my feeling like this game was never fully baked. The boss of the desert? That classic, though rarely seen desert creature: The Sand-Rhino. Why exactly is he helping Dracula? This is probably the worst game I've blogged so far. I might create a new 'bad games' category just for it, and for whatever future awfulness is in store for me. I'm not enjoying the act of playing it, so I am continuing more because I'm curious as to what else may dwell within this trainwreck. The boss of the snow area, 'Yeetus' (Latin for Yeti) The pattern continues - hang around farming for seven days, fight boss, run somewhere else. Since the monsters always show up anyway on the first night I'm not clear on what we've accomplished by running away, it doesn't keep us safe at all. Have I mentioned that the jokes in the game are all this good The combat / effects in this game are not bad aside from the lack of sprite animations, it'd be easy to mistake this for a fun game at a glance. This looks great but all I'm doing to win is walking in circles mashing the shoot/ability buttons The boss of the forest area is a Treant, which is at least more fitting than a Sand-Rhino or a Vampire Pervert. I guess Vampire Pervert at the circus was pretty appropriate, come to think of it. Aw hell. I did it again. I have absolutely no excuse this time, I grabbed the soul stones from the boss and spent them on upgrades - and now I can't go through the portal to get to the next level (again) and I'm stuck in the forest for another week (again) and I will need to fight the tree boss (again). 'Pay to advance' mechanic takes the top spot on the anger list, above 'chase water droplets'. On the next map I managed to make a garden that doesn't grow very much but it uses 'Nurse' plants so that it self-heals when it kills monsters, it's effectively invincible. Hooray, now I can just do nothing and wait for over a hundred monsters to walk into my garden and die woo Thus far we've faced other vampires, mythical creatures like yetis and treants, and one 'Sand Rhino'. Now we're down to a large bug. I think the creative juices have run their course. Its name - and I am not making this up - is Bugbug There is at least an attempt at making the boss fights have some variety, as in this case Bugbug flies around out of reach and occasionally lands for you to try to beat it up. Gameplay wise the problem is that your course of action remains the same no matter what the boss does - chase it around and beat it to death before it kills your garden (and thus far none of the bosses have proven capable of destroying a houseplant). One of the central tenets of good game design is to give the player choices, and Voltaire does have some. I should have specified meaningful choices The boss of this area is a Pirate. Ghost Pirate. I'm genuinely not sure how the fight works - most of the time I couldn't hurt him, but sometimes I could. Sometimes is enough, eventually. All it did was draw out the battle. Unfortunately he wasn't on his ship for the fight. For the last area we're going to... the castle grounds? We've been running away all this time and we're just going to go home now? The plan is apparently to start yet another garden here at the castle for a week until something happens I've built up so much extra food and water over the course of the game that I don't need to do actual farming here, so instead I fill every garden plot to the brim with angry killer plants. This is a fully armed and operational petunia patch With gardens this dangerous, I genuinely don't need to do anything but wait. When nighttime started I just went back inside the house. This is me battling hundreds of foes on the final level of the game After watching his son dig up the yard for an entire week, Dad has had enough and decides to personally stop his child from eating vegetables once and for all. Braham Stoker would be puzzled Dracula is a terrifying boss... in games like V-Rising and Castlevania. This is a legendary figure of fiction after all, with a degree of presence and intrigue bestowed on him from his first written incarnation to so many depictions of him in film and games. I must sadly report that Dracula's depiction in Voltaire the Vegan Vampire does not add much to Dracula's cultural significance - though I'll actually give them some credit for the boss battle itself, where Dracula focused his attacks on the house and was doing enough damage that it forced me to temporarily stop killing him to repair the house mid-battle, providing at least a hint of a challenge. Dad I live in the shed now, leave it be! After defeating Dracula and attempting (but failing) to reconcile with his father, Voltaire is ready to move on. He knows that Dad respects power, and must now give Voltaire proper respect since Voltaire defeated him. Well, I've certainly had enough with this game, time to move... I'm sorry, what? Uncles Frank and Stein just pop up and tell me I have to go fight the heretofore unmentioned Mother now? What?? Why? I thought I was done! There was pretty much an ending cutscene! It was... fine! Of all the sins committed, Voltaire teased me into believing that it was over and then just has to stick around for one more level. It has earned its rightful place as the first game in the Bad Games category. This is Play All The Things, and I'm going to finish it, but I don't have to like it. It's a 'Lava' level but the lake-creature we've been feeding is perfectly happy in said lava You know, in a way I'm glad the game has continued, because I would have missed out. I would have missed out on seeing a palette-swap of water with lava, and I would have missed out on this incredible ability in my skill tree.... er, skill trunk. I can't make Doppelgangers at all so this ability - that I must take - does absolutely nothing Hold on, we just fought Dracula! What in the world are you going to follow THAT up with? Who's the ultimate boss of this game if not the ultimate Vampire? I've been racking my brain for famous female vampires and I've got nothing in the Public Domain. Maybe Lilith? Sometimes she's the figurehead for a dark, evil mother figure. I guess they couldn't think of anything either She's not just lamer than Dracula, she's also easier, which really leaves me wondering why they tacked on a whole extra level for this. I mean, I suppose it wasn't hard to add since like the rest of the levels it's essentially a sprite / palette swap, but this game jumped the shark somewhere around the Sand Rhino. Please don't hurt the volcano, I live there I am grateful that Voltaire has run out of family members to hurt - having been defeated Mom gives him a hug and Dad shows up for a family photo. A family photo which shouldn't show anyone because we're vampires. Ah well. Dad please let me eat veggies and let Mom buy her own clothes! Somewhere along the way I was asking myself if I was unfairly disparaging this game, if perhaps I wasn't enjoying it mainly because it's a very easy game and someone less experienced might enjoy it more - perhaps, given the silly theme, it's actually a game intended for children and all of these simplistic mechanics were simply designed to appeal to a younger audience. Frank and Stein came to my rescue, unburdening me of these doubts when they dropped a 'Fifty Shades of Grey' reference. Thanks for that, guys.

Continuing in the vein of scary games for Halloween, I've chosen Golden Light , which is a wild-looking FPS roguelike. Things start off perfectly fine. I'm dating a pronoun. And that bike is rusted to hell. I go pick a rose for my paramour and She gets dragged into Hell This was a bad first date Ever the hero, I jump down after here to find myself in the 'Gut', a shifting meaty labyrinth of awful. We're sorry but the real princess is in some other godforsaken room The best way I can describe this game is 'discordant and disturbing', and that goes double for the sound. Random creepy audio while I'm wandering around is keeping me on edge. Strange nonsensical notes litter the room This game has an unusual 'innovation' - you can eat your weapons. Just what I always wanted to eat Like many roguelikes you get a choice of random upgrades for the run you're on - in this case by finding 'mementos' in the form of photographs. Let's see... do more damage or have a meat mole grab me sometimes? My first encounter with a monster is terrifying - many of the monsters in this game just look like furniture until you get close, when they reveal themselves by popping into their normal form and attacking you. This is me getting beat up by an Ottoman I ended up eating my revolver to stay alive when it was out of ammo - it both healed me and caused bleeding, so there's good and bad to putting a gun in your mouth. There's also good and bad when it comes to putting your hand in meat holes. This turned out way better than I expected it to The objective of each level is to find keys, and then use those keys to unlock the door to the next level down. I have no idea how deep I need to go to find Her. Besides weapons there are sub-items like a gold tooth or eyeballs attached to fingers. You can either eat these or throw them at enemies. Throwing the eye-fingers caused a blazing inferno and burned a monster to death. When I descended to the next level I saw Her - possibly the real Her. Our time together was all too brief. There's an interesting variety of weapons. I've found ammo for a thompson, a revolver, a knife, an axe, and.... a camera! Hitting monsters with this stuns them. Also I love the ceiling hands. I died on the second level and I found myself in a small graveyard, in a field of flowers. She's not here, I have to get back in there and find her Interestingly, I can still find ammunition and mementos to upgrade myself in this between-run area. And some of these upgrades are pretty unusual. This made me very short and very fast This outdoor area is very large! It's not your typical roguelike 'room where you spend gold for permanent upgrades' deal, I've kept the gold I had when I died but I haven't found anything to spend it on. I did find a bike that I can ride and get around this place faster with. Also the bike has a skull on it that talks to me I found my way back into the Gut, and interestingly I don't have to start over from the beginning - I'm resuming on the same level that I died on. I also found a guy in a phone booth that, for gold, will start me on an easier level - in a roguelike that may be the way to go, because the upgrades you get earlier will make you stronger and let you become strong enough to get through the harder levels below. The words on this note disappeared as I read it and then the note exploded Not everything in the dungeon is dangerous - there's a couple NPCs down here that trade gold for various favors. A horrible monster just standing around? That's a friend. You have to watch out for chairs and books. There are map stations every so often that sketch out the area for you and put up question marks where items and monsters are. Some of those question marks are the keys I need. Playing this is intense - they really nailed the atmosphere and I'm tentative about approaching any given object because it might just come alive and attack me. Actually, some of these monsters are not mimics after all. Some are just plain horrible instead of pretending to be something they're not I'm finding a lot of gases and other things that cause status effects. Some are intuitive, like poison and bleeding which hurt you. Others are... a bit unusual. I can't fight the monsters if I love them Speaking of love, one of my mementos resulted in having a little friendly mimic wander around and fight for me. I named him Kurt After dying again, I took some more time to explore the overworld. And there is some cool freaky stuff going on in this overworld customed in roguelites to getting currency that persists between runs and spending it on upgrades, but in Golden Light it appears that there are items in the overworld that can increase your overall health and damage resistance and you have to find them. I found a map which helps explore this place immensely, the overworld looks the same everywhere I also found a crazy sword that one-shots the enemies here and got a bunch of gold, which I gave to Piano guy and unlocked additional areas, earning me a couple permanent upgrades to my max health. Then I found a giant typewriter and tried to use it. Doing that caused me to end up here And then I got thrown into Gut and started pretty deep in there. I'm sorry, Floor WHAT? As you might expect, I died without completing the floor - but not before I found a badass tommy gun and slaughtered several foes with it. Toothy Dude I will miss not having you. This thing had triple barrels! The items you find like fish heads, gold teeth and such all have their effects randomized every run, so when you first find an object you won't know what it does. You can either eat them or throw them and I think they have more bad effects than good so it's probably safer to throw them if you don't know what something does. Reading some notes will identify what an item does so they're worth picking up Based on some dialogue from Her I suspect that I need to find all Her parts to win, or at least to progress to something else. I had the option to kiss her (and did) and I suspect that caused monsters to invade the floor when I picked up the last key I'm starting to learn to survive longer and some interesting tricks. I found a Pistol that causes regeneration when it shoots, so if I shoot myself with it I lose some life but over time regain more. I also got better with melee - I ran into a floating ball of arms that attacked me called Carre and managed to get the best of it with a baseball bat. After defeating Carre I found Her Head Sadly the head-bone is not connected to anything, and I don't know if it was beating Carre that caused She's Head to appear at the end of the level or if it was just random - but I have one part of Her! After retrieving her head I was immediately sent back up to the fields without dying or losing my upgrades, and I've now figured out that picking up a rose in the fields is giving me regen. One of the mementos I found on this run gave me a laser-blast out of my eyes so I'm easily able to kill the mushroom people and mimics wandering around on the surface here without expending ammo or weapon durability, and with the rose regen I think I'm in a position to explore up here indefinitely and kill everything that I happen to run into. I love this forehead laser! No ammo required! I'm also picking up mementos out here, I don't see why you can't just make yourself really powerful up in the fields before venturing down into the Gut (except for the time spent doing it when you end up dying anyway - which of course I did. I will miss that head laser.) After obtaining the Head, my entrance back into the Gut is blocked off by a woman named Rose, who encourages me to go elsewhere. She is not the subtle type I suspect that I need to go into other entrances to get into different 'biomes' of the gut - it's been hard to notice because every biome is awful and oppressive, but there are things like cages, empty corridors, somewhere had a library theme. I suspect that there's once piece of 'She' per biome, so I'm going to stop going in the initial elevator that Rose is guarding and use some of the other entrances that take you to down to different floors right away. Down in the cages I found.... a movie theatre! Is this the entertainment district? There's even a movie playing but it's distorted and unintelligible. Two stars. This band may not look good but when you hear them play you'll realize they also don't sound good. I also found a couple 'meat cults' that show up randomly, there are these piles of meat hanging out in bleed or poison areas that offer you a chance to join them and become immune to that particular status until you die. I always wanted to join a cult! I've made an important discovery - the 'Gut' is a living thing that makes life harder for you if you piss it off. Of course I discovered this by pissing it off If this happens the game spawns more monsters (and once you get the last key for a level you have to run like hell because a horde is coming after you). On the overworld I found a tree that you can give gold to in order to make the Gut happy with you again. It takes half your gold but hopefully makes my life easier. This means that I probably shouldn't be playing this like an FPS where I kill everything, I should kill only as necessary and just work on making it down to the next floor - so long as I can complete a single floor in a run that's progress in the bank. Many of my deaths are pretty much because I got lost, so I think the best weapon in the game may be the map After a couple attempts at pacificism I don't think it works as well as I'd hoped - the monsters still want to kill you, the best way to survive is to kill them first, and the Gut doesn't actually get mad at you until you've killed quite a few of them. After dying more times to another boss monster named 'Meall' that was an awful grinding machine disguised as a wall, I finally got past it with judicious use of the map and managed to acquire the second part of Her - Her hand. Her's hand? Other than being detached from Her body it's looking great. Now that I have a couple of Her pieces, it's time I tried putting Her back together. It's not going well Back to exploring the Gut, I'm finding new things as I go deeper. Some of these discoveries are entirely unpleasant, such as the first time I picked up a note and it tried to bite my face off. More like Blank Page Scared the Crap Out Of Me Other things are positively delightful and weird, like an NPC that lives in a toilet and helps you out for some cash. And incredible paintings! I'm finding more survival strategies. Joining a status-effect cult has proven very beneficial in this run which has made me immune to the all-too-frequent clouds of poison gas. I've learned that hoarding Gold is a terrible idea - there's too much chance of getting a 'gold-hunger' effect that just causes you to eat it all. I've learned that I can shoot myself with a handgun with a regeneration effect and gain back more life than I lose by shooting myself. Perhaps most importantly I've learned that the instances of 'Her' that I can find around the levels intermittently produce a regeneration effect, which means that if I find She / Her and there aren't any monsters around I can generally just stay there and heal back to full. She is a welcome respite in a bleak place I've also figured out that since the monsters go crazy and try to kill you when you pick up the last key for a level, so it behooves me to leave a key close to the exit elevator for last. Overall Golden Light is very good at what it sets out to do, which is make you feel uneasy and frightened as you explore its unpleasant interiors. There have been several times when I have made it to safety by the skin of my teeth with a horde of monsters chasing me, and several others where the monsters cut me down before I could reach the exit. And one time where a bunch of monsters all jumped me the moment I set foot in the level - I died fast I do have a couple nitpicks. One is that the maps - especially the overworld maps - are (I suspect) intentionally difficult to read, and navigation for me has been exceptionally challenging. I constantly get lost if I don't carry a map with me at all times, which uses up one of my two weapon slots - I find I really need to have it handy to find keys. Another is jumping. This game has one of the strangest jump mechanics I've ever experienced, and I'm not a fan. Jumping moves you in a way I can best describe as 'swooping' in the direction that you're moving, except if you're standing still you 'swoop' backwards. On forward jumps I've sometimes managed to clear obstacles that appear much higher than normal jump height, so it's often not clear to me at a glance if I'm able to jump over or onto something or not. Thankfully there's no platforming required and it's mainly a dodge mechanic. My last little pet peeve is after you die sometimes the game starts you next to the biome entrance for the place you last came out of so you can start again, and sometimes it puts you back to the beginning so you have to walk back to it. I suppose I should still explore the outside area some more but the gist of the overworld is that it's got a few beneficial items in it but mostly exists so you can choose your entrance into the Gut. Somehow I've gained two permanent abilities, and I have no idea how (and one is Martyr which means I don't hurt myself if I hit myself which is an excellent ability). I've got one consumable item that claims it will let me keep a memento after death so next time I get head-laser I'm going to try it on that. Rose has seen better days I wonder if Rose is trapped here looking for someone, like I am. The dialogue in this game is intentionally incoherent so it's difficult to make sense of. After many attempts, I finally succeeded at killing the third boss, Gut Divers. I ended up grabbing a camera that paralyzes and poisons and using it to freeze him so I could riddle him full of Tommy gun rounds. I've never been so happy to see a disembodied leg in my life. The bosses drop unique weapons and uh.... there's pros and cons to this one. The good news is that it's indestructible and shoots fire. The bad news is... it's a Phallus. I categorically refuse to eat this weapon, and not just because it's a good weapon. The next level set is hunting-cabin themed, with alternating hallways featuring snowy 'exteriors' and log-cabin interiors, though everything is still a maze of corridors. Some of the deer heads on the walls pop right off and attack you On rare occasions I'm finding Golden Amber, the item that lets me make an ability permanent. I used the first to get the head-laser so I always have a weak ranged weapon, and now I've used two more to lock in a nice combination of abilities - one causes me to not damage myself (much) if I hit myself, another lets a weapon pick up an effect from me when I hit myself, and the last one repairs the weapon if I hit myself. Officially changing my name to Mr. Delicious This means that I can now easily start runs with a weapon that never breaks that I can use to regenerate my health whenever I want, so I can top off anytime I find a safe area in a level. It's particularly useful on a low-damage map but I can set it up on any weapon The boss of the Cabin area is a beefy deer named Maneater, who I managed to avoid entirely on my second attempt and find Her second arm. Four parts down, not sure how many are left The levels are getting more elaborate and I need about six keys per level, but I'm making good progress with my handy self-regen - I can no longer suffer a 'death of a thousand cuts', which is usually what's been ending a run outside of the boss monsters. Speaking of boss monsters, the next one to bar my path is Castle, a huge figure carrying a huge sword and causing huge damage. He killed me lots and lots. I think he CAN be killed, but not by me. I eventually managed to sneak around him and find She's torso... and then the game threw me into a very strange vignette. Some wheelchair-bound murder investigation that had nothing to do with anything as far as I can tell Golden Light is an exercise in horrific absurdity. Everything is meat, you eat weapons, my most successful strategy is to find a safe area and hit myself with a map every so often. Let he who has correctly assembled a dismembered woman cast the first stone The next area appears to be corridors of madness, wall after wall are lined with notes. There's some nasty enemies wandering these hallways I've added some speedy abilities to my list of permanents, including one that makes me super short and run around like a dog, so screenshots from here on are going to be from a low perspective. On one level I managed to have one of my minions survive all the way through, and it made getting the last key and getting out trivial. Just keep carrying that key all the way to the door buddy! Who's a good eye-taker? You are! The boss of this level set (the pattern is three levels per area, third level has a boss that makes your life miserable) is Scourge, some sort of wizard with a sword. I lucked out here - I teleported right next to it and then Scourge didn't move while I lasered it to death. Scourge dropped the 'Meatnomicon', which is a spellbook that inflicts random status effects. It's great - most of the boss weapons are - but I died two floors later and lost it, and I don't think it's worth the effort of replaying earlier levels to try to re-obtain them. Scourge was guarding her Heart! The last part! All right, one Heart, one Head, Torso, Two Legs, and a Hand - that's like 95% of a woman, I think we're good to go. Good news! I put Her together and she looks a lot better than you'd expect! Bad news: A tower of arms appeared and a bike whisked her away into the sky. I followed her up to the sky jellyfish Meduse which took me to the final set of levels. Did I mention the game was absurd? My self-regen setup got me through the initial levels with a lot of time and caution, but the final boss, Gutworm, was a hell unto itself. Unlike the other bosses there's no hiding from him, he goes right though walls and chases you constantly. He barged into the starting elevator and ate me After a couple failed attempts to kill him followed by many failed attempts to try to find all the keys while he was chasing me, I finally got fed up and managed to play 'Ring around the Rosie' with a spear until Gutworm was dead. It didn't end well. One of the ways writing about games has changed the way I play them is that I'm more consistent about finishing them, because I want to finish out the story and make a complete entry. Golden Light has multiple endings (indicated by an achievement and the rather depressing final page that you write), but I will end my time with it here. This is a difficult game, and playing it is highly stressful and utterly exhausting. I have to constantly be on guard against ambushes and random horrible sound effects and in all honesty if I were not blogging it there's a good chance I would have moved on sometime around when I was being cut in twain by Castle, and I am most certainly ready to move on now that I've beaten it. That said, Golden Light is an impressive game, it is well designed with a lot of interesting strangeness to it, and being able to acquire permanent abilities over time makes it more of a roguelite instead of a roguelike - I doubt I'd have had the personal fortitude to beat this game without them, but at no point did they make the game anything I'd consider easy. If you want to see something weird and scary, Golden Light delivers. Also, I'm pretty sure She cheated on me, that bitch.

'Tis October, the season for Halloween! To celebrate I'm going to embrace the festivities by playing scary games. CARIMARA looks ominous and that's about all I know, so here we go! I am Carimara. I'm the little old man with a staff walking to this house in the woods The art style is striking, bleak with hints of dull color - but I have to remark on how animated it is. Even when you're standing still, the world is moving and shifting - almost as though it's breathing. I talk to the old woman in the house. Sure sure I'll just go head to your basement, sounds great You can find 'cards' by looking at different objects and these translate into dialogue options when speaking to a character. The basement is a maze of tunnels, and I'm lost when I stumble on a 'Forelore', or ghost. Game feature: creepy wall frogs I speak to the Forelore. It just has three questions for me: "Who was I?", "Who killed me?", "What killed me?" My answers were incorrect The old woman finds my unconscious body and kindly drags me back upstairs for some rest. Looks like this is a solve the mystery game! The old woman doesn't know anything about what this ghost is so I'll have to find out more myself. I wander around the house and see what else I can find. This wise old owl scared the pants off me when her head whipped around Exploring a bit, I find an awful little hole in the attic. The thing inside ate me but fortunately 'death' just means waking back up in bed I managed to coax it out with something that it wanted and immediately regretted doing so PLEASE GET BACK IN YOUR HOLE You progress the story by using the right cards to the right things - the basic system is nice and simple, choosing a card represents either using it on the item or showing it to someone in order to get them to talk about it. My character is mute and uses these cards to communicate. Some characters don't want to talk about certain things Thanks to the Hole-Horror I found my way into the shed. Looks like Hole-Horror's buddy died in here The back plank of the shed was loose so I was able to explore outside the garden a little bit. That's a fancy gravestone From the two-person bed and the owl I'd gathered that Violet, the old woman, didn't always live alone, so I suspect the ghost in the basement is her husband's spirit - and he was murdered. Talking to Violet about the grave gets her to reveal what I assume is an effigy she made of her departed husband. A very sweet memorial - the unpleasantness of the place ameliorated by something beautiful I stand corrected (By the Owl), 'Lavender' was also a woman. Now I'm the bad guy for making assumptions. Something from earlier makes sense now - the frogs in the basement wanted to 'see her again', so I assume the spirit with questions is Lavender. Also, Violet told me earlier that the chest is where she keeps her Lavender, leading me to assume that it was for herb storage. I try just answering the first of the spirit's questions since I'm confident, but that doesn't help - I have to get all three right. Exploring doesn't reveal anything else either. Thinking about what the Owl and Violet are saying about things, I actually have some educated guesses about how Lavender died and why - there's some inferences to be made here.... Nailed it! In a touching scene, the specter of Lavender is reunited with Violet - and that's all, folks! It's a very short game - I think it's the only full game that I've started and finished a blog post on in a single session. There's nothing wrong with short and sweet, and the ending is very sweet Even though our time together was brief, it was time I enjoyed - I'll take a good game over a long game any day.

Ok, let's try this again. I'd like to note that I have to work harder at this than a lot of historical Kings who were born princes and just became King by default (With all due respect to those who earned their Kingship by murdering people). Meet the Beetnicks I have some different starting options, most notably we're going to try being a peaceful clan - make as many friends as we can, including being nice to beastmen and non-humans. I chose the Trolls for our ancient enemy because in my first attempt they never attempted negotiation, nor did they ever appear to pose a clan-ending level threat, so they seem like they might be a 'safer' choice for a longtime foe. Starting a new playthrough gives me some insight into what's the same and what's different. Here's the 'new' map. Actually pretty similar to the old map. The clan names have changed but their actual natures have repeated - I see some that I didn't encounter before but I think the actual nature and personalities of the clans in the game is the same. albeit in different locations.   The Pottery Fanatics are our neighbors again, this time as the Greenwing clan. We have again found the Duck people on our land. This time we're being super nice and not even demanding that they feed us. They even put in a good word for us with their buddies in the swamp In these early days I've ended the initial feud we had with a neighboring clan, I'm exploring both my own territory and abroad to find things (sometimes this results in treasures or valuable trade goods when exploring my own territory), and I'm trying to establish trade deals with other clans to bolster my economy. And I swear I wasn't thinking of this when I named the clan, but a clear opportunity to embrace the essence of the Beetnicks presents itself and will forever guide our future choices. Whenever we CAN use poetry, we WILL use poetry! Overall things seem to be going well. I've had very few raids against me, the extra crop / herd magic has us producing lots of food which I'm alternately trading for cattle, giving away or hosting feasts to improve relations with other clans, I ended the last feud with another clan and I'm starting to make more alliances. I've unlocked the ability to perform the Making of the Storm Tribe quest but I'm thinking I'm going to hold off on performing it until all my neighbors are great friends. Not this time crazy man, I'm waiting until I'm good and ready. I don't know if it's the extra bit of magic or the blessings or what, but the food production is off the charts - we're making double the food we need. I'm giving so much away that my reputation is already at 'King'. My efforts at being peaceful have caused the Warriors of the clan to get bored (despite them still seeing occasional action as horse-nomads and trolls occasionally attempt to raid my village.) You know what's EVEN BETTER than a raid? A poem! My efforts at Poetry have often yielded good results, sometimes been neutral, and never backfired (yet). So far so good. One thing that's very cool about this game is that as far as I'm aware it's a unique fantasy world, and I'm learning about it as I play through the game. Things like Dinosaurs are real (they ate me last game) and Trolls are accompanied by goblin-like Trollkin. This latest event implies to me that Dragonewts have some form of immortality - when they die they're born into a new body with their old memories, and in at least some cases they want their old body back. Super glad I didn't make his old body into a suit of armor, that would have been really awkward Elves are literally made of wood, I think? In this rather grim event one of my Clan Ring has taken it upon himself to kill some. Leikan we are a PEACE clan, damnit. He's off the ring for this and I hope we can placate the elves. All right, I have ample extra cows and goods, and either excellent relations or alliances with all of my neighboring Clans. It's time to perform the Making of the Storm Tribe Heroquest Some of these events run in a long sequence - this feud between two families in different clans is constantly threatening to erupt into a larger conflict. At first Randara stole a prize horse, Glendara got it back and killed one of Rangdara's relatives doing it, now Rangdara has killed one of Glendara's kin. I'm hopeful that a well-composed Poem might end the cycle of violence Having met with almost all of the neighboring clans (I had to agree to not accept one clan to please another, so one of my neighbors won't make it in), I convinced all of them to join us by agreeing to everything they wanted. I even invited a clan that's probably a huge mistake but I can't pass up the opportunity to see what happens. The Hendarti's issue is that they tend to have chiefs that are insane. This is the only time I got an 'Are you really sure about these guys?' message Look man, the Beetnicks are not a judging sort of people, we want everyone to get along! And for the price of hundreds of cows and goods, we form a very, very large tribe - and we're not waiting around to be King! After all, we organized all this! The Poetryslam tribe is appropriately comissioned Poetryslam consists of the Clans Beetnicks, Apple, Gorind, Greenwing (shout out to the Pottery fans), Hendart, Karandoli, Stag Hearth, Tanahart, Vanstach, and White Horse. Now that I'm King, there's two new ways to use our magic - Destiny and Heroism. I should try to figure out how to get more magic overall Not sure what they do yet but I threw a point into Destiny. I get the sense that magic points spent in an area tends to improve your odds when it comes to some internal random determination for the outcome of an event or battle. Poetryslam is about twice the size of the only other tribe, Colymar. Treasures seem to confer permanent bonuses and effects at no ongoing cost so I'm working on trying to find them via exploration or buy them from other clans (which it turns out is VERY expensive) After a year or two I don't think being in a Tribe has helped all that much except for doing Heroquests, where calling upon the tribe gets you lots of additional people to help. That doesn't save me from failing one when I misinterpret the story and choose the wrong option. After awhile the Prophet shows up again and sets us on our future path: Six quests to Honor the Gods Beginning with Ernalda's quest, which I've actually already done, but needs to be done again Even though his leadership is 'Reknown', the man I made king of Poetryslam - Sarotar - is as indecisive as they come. He almost never has a clear opinion and he's not even good at Poetry Internationally, Poetryslam is a big deal. The existence of the Tribe prompts the other clans in the Valley to form their own tribes. Nobody's nearly as large as we are but hopefully we can all be friends and read poetry together Speaking of Poetry, the Warriors of the Beetnicks are unhappy. I don't generally send them on Raids until they complain too much about not being sent on Raids, and since they're not well trained they tend to do poorly when they do go on these raids that they demanded they be sent out on. The third time I read them a poem to assuage their anger I got some cold looks. The fourth time the poem just makes things worse. Maybe they'll like the next one better. Oh hell no. I just lost one exploration party last year to an unknown fate, and now this. A Troll-spider sounds just awful! You know what, Orlev? I know she's big and strong and probably has magic, but Trolls are our ancient enemies and YOU are EXCELLENT in combat! YOU GOT THIS! Orlev... did not got this. I have lost two exploration parties. We will commemorate his brave sacrifice in verse..... Another long-running event series has been Theya's story. As a child our Clan noticed that she had prophetic visions, so we sent her to wise sages to become educated and learn about her abilities. After she returned as a capable seer she was able to complete the Heroquest for Ernalda Feeds the Tribe and grant herself great leadership. Now the time has come for her to marry. Way to spoil the mood Theya Right now I'm in a cycle of trading off excess food for cattle / goods, trading that for treasure, sending out exploration parties, and occasionally just donating excess food to whoever likes me the least to change their minds. The food surplus has really put me ahead of the economic curve and at times it's challenging to spend it all - the food spoils if I just keep it so I don't want to have too much on hand. In between those actions I'm sacrificing to discover Mysteries for more Lore and Rituals of the Gods. One of my exploring parties comes back with an incredibly valuable battle artifact - Humakt's Raven Banner. If used we'll automatically win the battle... at the cost of the banner-bearer's life. Since my warriors are not good at what they do this is priceless I think some poor Dungeon Master's RPG party has wandered into town. They rolled into town, fondled someone's wife, drank themselves silly, got into a fight with us and killed a warrior and injured five others before running off. I'm 90% certain this was someone's roleplaying group. There is trouble in the Tribe, and unfortunately I don't know exactly what I'm supposed to have done to handle it - but this is the second time the other chieftains are angry, and I'm really unclear exactly why they're angry. What oaths have I not honored, my countrymen? Having found out that trying to push through this would utterly shatter the tribe, leaving it with only two other clans plus myself, I've chosen to abdicate the Throne. The King has retired. Long Live the King! Now is the time of Kagradus of the Apples And the bad news doesn't stop there - we lend some magic to a guy doing a Heroquest, and he never returns. By the time the year ends we're down 10 magic and at sacred time we can't allocate anything. And we're still in the red Time to call in favors from other clans to try to get us back up to snuff, hopefully this year isn't too bad. We survived the year, even without magic the harvest was still plenty good and we had food to spare. The years go by and I continue to donate to our nearby clans - I suspect that I was focused on improving relations with other non-tribe clans that still didn't like me and simply wasn't giving gifts to my tribe-mates, so I'm trying to remedy that now. I'm also going on additional Heroquests when possible, I heard rumors of Chaos approaching and so I performed Elmal Guards the Stead to protect against it. Trust me you do NOT want to be the Heroquester for this one Only a few years into his reign, Kagradus resigns due to a pretty rough prophecy. How do you like them Apples The Ring doesn't believe we're in good enough shape to win Kingship yet so I support another candidate (Who loses, oh well). It seems at this point the Heroquests count towards our main objective whether I'm King or not, and I didn't really see much actual benefit from being King so I'll focus on getting the Heroquests done for now and then try to position myself to take back the throne when we're closer to completing the seven or so that we need. Militarily we're a defensive powerhouse - I have a horn that terrifies horses that keeps the horse people from making any headway when they raid us and a stone that turns our arrows to fire that breaks up troll raids, and the two of those are really the only things that have been attacking me with any regularity. Beyond that we've constructed all of the available defenses, and no other clan is actively raiding us - being friends with pretty much everyone is working well. Not everything goes well with the Heroquesting. Sarotar, the first King of Poetryslam, is slain while attempting Humankt's Heroquest. That bad news is quickly followed by more, as someone steals the precious Raven Banner - I offer a reward for its return but it's gone. Then the outcome of a battle of Heroes leaves my best fighter, Kallyr, dead. I hope this Band of One Hundred is worth it. You know exactly what we did in her memory I spend several years in a row unable to successfully perform a fourth Heroquest. I tried Humankt's twice and failed both times on the wrong choice, but even with the correct choices I think there's a chance of failure - I just got beaten up by one of the foes in Orlanth and Aroka even though I tried to fight them, which as far as I can tell is what I was supposed to do. Failing a Heroquest costs you clan magic which needs to be recovered as well as effectively preventing you from re-attempting one for another year or so, which is making my Heroquest progress very slow. For all that, the overall situation remains good - we have plenty of food, a ton of treasures (some of which have broken in battle but that's life), and all the failed Heroquests amount to is a significant delay rather than defeat. One problem that's been nagging at me is overpopulation. The number of our people are growing slowly but steadily, and when I founded this clan in the interests of peace I chose to take no more land than we needed. While we're still producing more food than we need, the higher population is eating more too - and eventually that may become untenable. The only way I know how to get land is to try to raid for it, but every clan next to us is either allied or part of our own tribe. The Queen of Poetryslam dies in a blood feud (I guess that prophecy that caused the last King to resign was not kidding around!), and the Throne is once again up for grabs. During her entire reign we got 0 Heroquests done and Theya doesn't want the throne. We'll continue to wait. I'm learning that I haven't nearly been using the powers of Divination enough. All this time I'm sending food gifts to everyone pretty much randomly because I don't have a great idea of what they currently think of us, and I was pretty close to complaining that there didn't seem to be a way to find out what other clan's opinions of you were. Well, I was wrong - it's in a sub-menu of the God Sacrifice screen The God of Knowledge is about to get a whole lot of cows sent his way so we can get a better idea of the overall diplomatic situation. As I suspected, the other clans in our tribe all have a high opinion of us. Or at least they did until this happened. Now this here looks like one of those game-ending disasters I'm not going to try and put the Beetnicks up against this guy, so I try to buy him off... and it works, with a caveat. The other clans in Dragon Pass view the Beetnicks as traitorous cowards. On the other hand, the Beetnicks didn't get the shit kicked out of us like they all did. And we got our revenge later. Derek, a warrior from our clan dedicated to the destruction of the Prax, takes down Goldentooth After many attempts and me being impatient enough to try a Heroquest only a year after the last failure, I finally pull off Orlanth and Aroka. Four down, three to go. Theya's story has been incredibly tragic - the man she married died and all her children were stillborn. Despite this she is a powerful seer and I have made her leader of the Beetnicks - perhaps we are all her children now. Theya's visions and leadership have seen us through more than one crisis The problem of overpopulation continues to worry me. My options are as follows: 1. Ignore it - Let the population continue to grow until we have so many people that we can no longer use food as trade goods and eventually starve, hoping we can win the game before this happens. 2. Self-enforce population control by getting our own population killed with poor responses to events and failed attacks on enemy clans. 3. Attack another Clan within the Tribe that we are not allied with to try to take their land and possibly wreck the tribe. 4. Attack the Slapfoot Ducks that we made peace with decades ago and haven't bothered us and will likely anger the Beastmen. 5. Attack the one neighboring clan that we're Allied with but that isn't part of the tribe and suffer the reputational consequences of attacking an ally. I'd been learning towards option 5 as our least-bad option when an event pushes me in that direction. I hadn't been able to voluntarily end an alliance whenever I wanted. The Squat Oaks are troll-lovers anyway I hadn't planned on fighting anyone and thus far we haven't proven particularly good at attacking others, but without additional land the Beetnicks will starve. Faced with that dire event, we reorganize as a War clan. The Beetnicks must conquer to survive - or cull their own population by trying. The initial attempt to seize land fails - not because we lost the battle, we won but our warriors saw the Squat Oak mothers and babies weeping and decided not to take their land after all. This is not a problem I am accustomed to having in video games. There we go. We have acquired more living space. After attacking the Squat Oaks over the next several months, they are shattered - we take land from them twice and have significantly expanded our Tula. We have room to grow for perhaps decades. The victory is bittersweet, as the curtain falls on our final attack, Theya dies giving birth to her first living child. A sad day for the Beetnicks We have enough land, we don't need fan the flames of war beyond that. As the clan ring is reorganized and a new leader is chosen, the Beetnicks once again return to being a peace clan. Apologies are made and gifts sent to the Squat Oaks to prevent a long-running feud. Turns out I probably owe the Squad Oaks even more of an apology. A couple years after my brief war of conquest, my own people get pissed off that there are too many of us and some split off to form their own clan. Turns out I needn't have gone to war at all, the people would solve overpopulation on their own accord On the second attempt (on the first attempt the Quester was eaten while pretending to be a cow) I manage to complete Uralda's Heroquest. I've failed Humankt's so many times that I'm going to give up on it and attempt others. When the Kingship of the tribe becomes available again I'm going to try for it, I think I can manage to get the seven Heroquests finished during the reign of the next monarch. My efforts at diplomacy have gotten me back into the good graces of most of the other Clans, even longtime enemies like the Ernaldori which have been an ongoing source of raids for decades are finally settling down and making amends. I've just noticed that some of the Heroquests are intertwined with each other's stories - in Lhankor Mhy's Heroquest he's very busy doing his thing and is annoyed when Issaries comes to ask him 'annoying questions' about making peace between these warring peoples - which is the Heroquest that Issaries is focused on. Meanwhile the 'pointless' thing that Lhankor Mhy is doing right now is retrieving Truth itself I don't know if this is something the game normally does or extremely fortuitous timing, but the moment we complete our sixth Heroquest, the current king of the tribe steps down. Was the dream too terrifying or too embarrassing? This is our time. One Heroquest to go, and Ernaldesta wants the throne for herself. Our best Poet makes our case at the Tribal moot, and I throw in hundreds of cows and goods to seal the deal - this is a chance I do not want to miss. Poetryslam is now ruled by a Beetnick Queen - Long Live Queen Ernaldesta! Something is going on with my cows. Normally their numbers increase slightly overall from breeding and such, but right now they're dropping significantly on their own, season after season, despite blessings and magic spent on herds. I haven't seen an event that appears cow-related, the Ancestors say there is no curse upon my clan.... and yet we lose them. The reason why is an utter mystery, as many things in the world are mysteries to my clansmen. It doesn't help when the Cows fail the basic task of making good calves I am not the only one trying to become Queen of Dragon Pass. The Chief of the Dundalos tribe visited our village, arguing that she should be made Queen. We rebutted her arguments then, and months later she showed up with an army in tow. Thanks to rumors we had heard, the Tribe was ready to meet her - and had a magic clod of dirt ready that caused an earthquake and shattered her forces. Saraska's quest to become Queen ends at the point of our swords I have figured out the mystery of the disappearing Cows. I had bad farming settings Remember when we took all that land from the Squat Oaks? I put it to use as extra farmland and I was adjusting these sliders to maximize the expected harvest. The only warning you get that this is actually a Bad Idea is from Enfrew here - I didn't connect that dots that not having enough farmers to tend our crops and herds would lead to large amounts of cattle escaping, and I wish the game had had a more prominent notification that this was the cause of my cattle woes. In fact the only way I noticed there was a problem at all was in watching the cow count! Thankfully we still grow so much food that I've been able to trade for cows to bring our herds back up, but my more frequent trading partners have actually stopped trading cows with me - guess I've been draining their supply too much. For our seventh Heroquest, I complete The Making of the Storm Tribe again - even though it's the one I did to start the tribe in the first place, re-doing it appears to count towards the quests we need. I hate to appease Trolls since they're our ancient enemy, but I'd rather our ancestors be mad at us than die That... may have worked but it mightily pissed off many of the Clan's Carls, who left in disgust shortly after. I can't appease the trolls, but if I don't I fear the Clan will be crushed. Well, maybe I'm damned if I don't, damned if I do here. If that's the case, let's bash some Trolls. The Tribe gets restless and gives Queen Ernaldesta the opportunity to take the Tribe to war as a distraction. Poetryslam unites and beats the Trolls on the field of battle and writes poems about it afterwards Ernaldesta's reign settles down after that and she continues to rule for many years, during which we end up finishing every available Heroquest. Having reigned over the Tribe for over a decade I'm getting concerned we might not hold the Throne much longer In a fun incident, there's a tribal dispute over a magical Black Spear. The solution we went with was to hide the spear in the forest and whoever found it got to be part of a brand new Clan. This is the second clan we've created over the course of the game And then, at long last, signs and portents of destiny! Finally! The time has come! Our ancestors show up to bless our Queen, and we're ready to begin trying to unite all of Dragon Pass under our rule. UNTIL THIS HAPPENS Ernaldesta honored the Beetnicks like no other, by reciting a grand poem upon her deathbed. This... will be a problem for ruling Dragon Pass. Turns out it was Ernaldesta's time, not ours. She got us to the requisite number of complete Heroquests and then some. From now on I'll be Heroquesting specifically for the various benefits they can offer (and there are many to choose from). As of now the Saga of the Beetnicks has been going on for 50 years - I was right about having a lot of time to accomplish the goal of the game. Looks like it's going to take a bit longer with this setback. Despite throwing my hat in the King ring again, the next Tribal King is from another clan (after the last candidate got shanked by someone!). Actually... it appears that we are simply no longer in the running for rulership. An event featuring the Feathered Horse Queen (which I encouraged, back when I had rulership of the tribe) has proceeded in such a way that none of our Clan are included in the consideration of who's going to marry the Feathered Horse Queen. Wait, who decided that this would be the criteria for Kingship? I take some consolation that Derek is originally from our clan, so we're arguably in the running here? I'm sure that's what our Thanes are telling themselves anyway. Derek, you should have returned to your birth clan! We would have welcomed you back and won the game! We didn't win, but this is a much better outcome than our first attempt - the Beetnicks successfully survived the trials and tribulations of Dragon Pass for over a half a century, completed a bunch of Heroquests and had a real shot at going all the way. And we irritated everyone with lots and lots of Poetry. Stupid snake.

Initially I'm not sure of what sort of game King of Dragon Pass actually is. The start menu had some tips for 'those who don't read the manual', but that's not me so I did read the manual and while I'm glad I did and I feel a little bit more prepared for the game now, I don't think this game falls into any particular genre that comes to mind. I'll be managing a Clan that has recently migrated to Dragon Pass, and the objective of the game (I'll be playing the 'long' game) is to become the King of Dragon Pass and unite the other Clans there under my rule - which sounds like the pitch for a strategy game, but this isn't a game that takes place on a map where I'm going to send units around conquering things, it's a series of choices and selections made on text screens in response to events and changing seasons. Starting a new clan prompts me to answer questions about my Clan's history. My clan absolutely drank themselves into a stupor From the manual I had planned to allow thralls (slaves), since I wasn't too concerned about the moral implications and figured they'd be taken from a people we'd been fighting against. When I saw the story involved a people we were assigned to protect I changed my mind Our Clan is leaving our current area because of Pharoah, who is oppressing everyone and nobody can stand against him. Pharoah must be really bad if this is the better alternative With our choices made, I get to choose the clan name. I don't think there's a character limit on the clan name. Hello, we are Clan Hey Do You Have More Beer We Are Not Drunk Enough We begin in Sacred Time, which is where the clan allocates its magic for the year. Mechanically I'm very unclear about what any of this does, so I'm just going off of general ideas of how it's supposed to work. I haven't even seen a map or have any idea what clans might be around us, but I do know from the manual that the main thing that's likely to destroy my clan is starvation - we've got to keep our food stocks maintained first and foremost. What does a magic point DO, exactly? I've put the most I can into crops and herds for the food supply, and then split 1 among Diplomacy, Health, and War anticipating that we can start interacting with other clans or possibly fend off attacks soon. I keep one point in reserve as many of my Ring of Advisors (that panel of people) advise me to do so. I found a map, looks like we have a lot of clans as our neighbors. Those are the ones we'll mainly be interacting with. I hope this means the Boskovi are fanatical about Pottery I guess there's already been some interactions because Hey Do You Have More Beer We Are Not Drunk Enough already owes and is owed favors by several of the neighboring clans. We already have a couple allies (I guess that's blue), the Blackrock and Hendart clans, though we're not neighbors with either. A lot of the game seems to be about making choices, and the Ring has helpful (sometimes) advice for you. Sadly I can't actually choose to follow Bastakos' suggestion Going through the tutorial, I have to deal with a lecherous little man. Insisting that he marries the woman he slept with does not go over well and we end up raiding another clan despite it being 'Sea season', which is usually the time for planting. I hope following the tutorial doesn't cost me too much food! At least the raid goes well. Combat consists of deciding to commit magic resources and what battle tactics you choose. One sexual encounter leads to the deaths of 8 people The year passes and the harvest isn't as bad as I feared - we'll still be ending the year with more food than we started with. Bastakos goes too far and gets himself in trouble with another clan leader. We're already feuding with two clans, we don't need to add another conflict. We don't want a war on behalf of someone who's idea of a diplomat is Ace Ventura Bastakos, as fun as your suggestions were, you are out of the Ring. Despite that the Herani ended up feuding with us anyway, thanks Tutorial. We are now tutorial-less and on our own. This year we're going to allocate some magic to mysteries and try to learn more blessings / lore from the gods - the shrines you can build for the Gods confer permanent advantages for your clan so I want a lot of them (But not too many as you have to sacrifice goods / cattle to them yearly. I also need to go on 'Heroquests' which are re-enactments of the stories about the Gods - these This year our efforts in Mysteries reveals the story of Lhankhor Mhy finding the truth, and thus gives us clues about how we might go about achieving the Lightbringer's quest. Since the Herani hate us now, I send an emissary to the Blue Spruce clan to end that feud between our clans - it works with a gift of 50 cows. I don't mind feuding with someone - I think it'll be useful to conduct cattle raids and give our warriors something to do - but I definitely don't want to make too many enemies. I love that these events have their own artwork. Varsens, take care of the old man. Apparently the Undead are going to be a problem. I hope you won't think that I've gone senile when I say that the ducks are helping us defend our lands against them. Option 6: Shame everyone else into fighting the undead because right now Ducks are doing that Apparently there are Duck-people in lots of places - including our own territory. The clan is united in getting rid of them - when it came time to choose an ancient foe, I chose Beast Men, and the manual recommends that we will do best if we behave in a manner that would please our ancestors. When I chose 'Beast Men' to fight I was imagining something furrier and more ferocious We are going to embrace the spirit of our ancestors and be extremely cruel to ducks. That valley is ours for the taking! Sing loud the songs of Victory! Our mighty warriors have defeated the Cabbage Ducks! Entering our third year, I have a ton of magic this year and I don't know why - maybe building shrines / temples gives you more. This year we're going to attempt the Heroquest 'Lhankor Mhy Finds the Truth' so I can try to figure out what Heroquesting is about, and it says this one can reveal additional Myths. I have one point invested in 'questing' magic and I have the basic story of the quest but not the 'details', plus I don't know what I'm doing so it's anyone's guess whether I can actually do this yet. Looks like a Heroquest can do a variety of things and you get to pick Once you begin you go on a series of events related to the story. In the story the Storm Bull fought alone, so we go with that option and he murders everything This gets pretty involved so I'm very glad that I kept the text of the story as a handy reference - it's too long to memorize in the detail you need for some of these events. In the end, the Heroquest is successful, and since I chose Knowledge about Dragon Pass as the reward, large areas of the map are now visible to me. This would have taken a lot of exploration parties to achieve! I've built so many shrines that I'm having trouble maintaining them, and one falls apart as I lack the goods to keep it upright. Now I'm working on establishing permanent trade routes with as many clans as I can - it seems to get me more goods at no cost to myself. It's a shame that the clan most interested in trading is the Heran that I'm still feuding with (I keep taking some cows from them every Fire season in cattle raids.) The events seem to be drawn from a random selection and it looks like there's no provision to stop an event happening more than once, because this one happened twice. In a row. They just can't resist beating the crap out of poor Enjossi I guess Some people came to our village seeking refuge - they had been enslaved by a distant clan. Months later, those enslavers on strange horses came after them and demanded that we return the people we had taken in - and haughtily proclaimed themselves lords of our lands, to boot. I attacked them on the spot. It went extremely badly Over a dozen of my clan dead, and three leaders kidnapped by these intruders! This will not stand! Unfortunately, I have no idea where they are. But thanks to Leikan, I know where to start looking. We will be exploring West for the forseeable future. The way events interact with each other is very cool. I had an emissary from another clan ask us to give them some of our magic in exchange for some Thralls. I declined the Thralls since we don't do condone slavery in Clan Hey Do You Have More Beer We Are Not Drunk Enough, and instead asked her to perform a ritual to see into our future. She mentioned that soon a four-legged creature would appear and make us a very good offer. And that is why I'm about to give more than two dozen cows to a fox I think the damn fox got away with enough meat for a lifetime. Diplomatically I'm doing very well, I've been holding the occasional feast and sending gifts of food to nearby clans and we've allied with three others - the Eagles, the Greydogs, and the Isoltings. That makes five with the two we began with. I've been sacrificing to Orlanth and obtained the basic info for the Making of the Storm Tribe quest, which is the one I need to accomplish in order to unite several different clans into a Tribe - a major step towards becoming King of Dragon Pass. I figure it's worth a shot to try the Heroquest for it now, with five allies I expect I should be able to form a decent Tribe and I assume we can incorporate more clans later. The Hurt Everything Clan will not listen to reason I'm enjoying these stories, they have a quaint primitiveness to them that makes me feel as though they were translated from some other language. So Orlanth searched for some good laws, and found the Knowing God, who was head of the Marks On Bark Clan. The Knowing God was trapped inside a great cube. He said that the Stone Tribe had put him in there. Orlanth ruined the cube so that it fell apart. Orlanth gave the Knowing God one of Yinkin's old claws, and said, "Now you must join my Storm Tribe, and help us remember our good laws." The Knowing God agreed to make the Marks On Bark Clan part of the Storm Tribe, so long as this new tribe had fierce warriors. Success! With the Heroquest for forming a tribe complete, we now await prophecies and events to arrive that will let us form a tribe. In the meanwhile we will be generous with our fellow clans and work to get more of them to like us. And there's a lot going on in the meantime. Explorers find a group of dragonewts guarding a silver statue, and we steal it. Alirene joined the tribe earlier, she was a wandering warrior who had killed a Pharoah agent and I made her an honored Weaponthane. She has proved her worth today. The Ancestors showed up, and they are well pleased with us. We've been killing Beastmen just like you did, dad! The Beastmen showed up and they are not so pleased. A war with the Beastmen doesn't sound good. And then one day, a crazy man shows up and says that making a Tribe is not only a good idea - it's destiny! You heard the man, let's do this! With the councilors off to assemble the tribes, I get lucky on the timing and it's Sacred time again. Expecting to form a tribe this year I max out on Diplomacy magic Forming a tribe takes time - I need to contact each of the tribes in our potential confederation and negotiate with them one by one. Some clans like the Greydogs ask too much and negotiations break down, they won't even come to the moot After over a year of visiting other clans, six agree to join. And it almost immediately falls apart Thankfully I think I've been a relatively good steward of my cows (plus many taken from the Herani (who were not invited to the tribe)). Giving away loads of bovines smooths over the rough patches. The time has come to select a King. Just forming the tribe has hurt my supplies, and the King is expected to be generous. Instead of trying for kingship now we support the leader of the Eagle clan to be the First King of the Drink All Things tribe. Our time will come And thus the Drink All Things tribe was born of the clans Eagle, Blue Jay, Boskovi (who are actually pottery fanatics and everyone has to use only their containers now), Gorind, Hiord, Isolting, and Hey Do You Have More Beer We Are Not Drunk Enough. With this many clans banded together this tribe ought to be a force to be reckoned with - but right now that force is commanded by someone else. I'm going to try to use the reign of the first King to restock all those cattle I spent getting everyone together. Exploration has been going badly - no sign of those horse warriors that kidnapped my people and the last scouting party I sent disappeared entirely. It's a dangerous world out there. Extremely dangerous, as it turns out. I had just fired up the game intending to rebuild my clan wealth when this happens. Utter Catastrophe To be fair, this didn't come out of nowhere - the Lizards did send emissaries warning that this might happen if I didn't become nicer to them, and I just sent them away without a lot of gifts to try to mollify their wrath. So much for having the strength of a Tribe to help me here! We will attempt to soldier on to see if this can be salvaged but this is a long fall to try to recover from. We're down to less than a hundred people. Or rather, I may want to soldier on but the remnants of my people do not So... what did I do wrong? The first and most obvious is that I didn't treat imminent threats of destruction with the seriousness they warranted (granted, I didn't know how much real danger these threats actually posed) - I was visited both by beastmen and dragnewt emissaries that threatened destruction of my clan, and while I didn't treat the emissaries badly, both times I simply shrugged and sent them away with vague promises to behave better. For the Dragnewts that clearly wasn't enough. Looking back at the saga of Clan Hey Do You Have More Beer We Are Not Drunk Enough, I'm surprised to learn that it only lasted 8 years (It felt much longer!) - I don't know how many years you actually have in which to achieve victory, but I suspect it's pretty long (I got a prophecy at one point speaking of events over 200 years in the future!). I was probably trying to form a tribe much faster than I strictly needed to, and if I had built up more wealth and relationships before making the attempt I probably could have formed an even larger tribe. So taking these lessons to heart, let's give this another shot. May the next Clan fare better than this one.

Ender Lilies begins with me playing as a much-too-pale girl who wakes up in a ruin somewhere. Doesn't seem like a great place to have gone to sleep. I'm able to make an impressive-looking sword attack, except it's not 'me' swinging the sword - it's being swung by the spirit of an 'Umbral Knight' who is normally a red spark floating around. The girl just sort of cowers and wishes her ethereal bodyguard would venture further than a foot ahead of her. It isn't long before we reach the first boss. So far I'm digging the art style, this is a beautiful game. The Blight has corrupted the people of the kingdom The boss' initial phase isn't too difficult, but then she gets mad. I want to note here that the music, instead of being intense boss-battle music, is actually a rather sedate piano piece - and I'm kind of a sucker for violent scenes set to peaceful music. And being mad makes you very large. Defeating her, I get the chance to absorb her memory and see who she was. I am Lily, and the monster I just killed used to be my guardian Happily, her soul is now released from the corrupted body, and she joins me in the form of an additional spirit weapon I can use. Siegrid acts as a separate type of attack and uses a ball and chain to hit enemies. I like the setting and both the art (especially the backgrounds) and music are top notch so far. I think I'm going to really enjoy this one. Buddy I don't know anything about you The only thing that bothers me so far is Lily's dodge. Mechanically, it's great - you travel a reasonable distance and you're invincible while it's happening. Visually however... Lily belly-flops herself our of harm's way The structure of a game is sort of souls-like lite. Combat is relatively easy thus far. There are benches to rest at that respawn the enemies and you can heal yourself three times between rests. I am leveling up as I fight enemies so my damage has been increasing naturally. Even big scary looking guys like this aren't that hard to beat I've also been finding several additional spirits to help me, sometimes entailing a battle against a significant enemy. I was hoping the Western Merchant would sell me something. No dice. The spirits all become additional attacks for your arsenal - the Western Merchant is particularly great because you just summon him and he floats around shooting ranged attacks the whole time. Free hits from the bird in a boss fight is great I've encountered and defeats the second boss, Gerrod. After defeating a boss you purify them of the blight, and you get to see one of their memories. I think I visited him before too. Am I going to have met all of the bosses I need to kill? I'm getting the sense that these White Priestesses, of which I am one or was training to be one, were these people's best defense against the Blight. And I wasn't the only one. But... I might be the only one now After beating Gerrod I get a new main attack option (a Hammer that's way too slow compared with the sword) and a down-attack that opens new areas. That allows me to reach a forest area where these delightful mushroom wizard people are attacking me. I'm in deep shiitake I've noticed that at rest spots I can access memories, and some of them are 'Purified' memories where I can re-fight the main bosses again, only these fights are significantly tougher than the original battles were. I don't know if the bosses are faster but they are most definitely tougher. I have yet to beat the upgraded bosses but I'm going to attempt them once per rest. After a bit of use I'm coming around on the hammer, it hits like a truck and I was able to upgrade it whereas my sword is still currently stuck at level 1 - the sword requires 'ancient blight' but the hammer requires 'furious blight' that I have some of. The hammer has better range than the sword and now hits hard enough to justify how slowly it swings. It will also slam airborne enemies into the ground, which is satisfying and often lethal The game's map is nowhere near as pretty as the rest of Ender Lilies, but it's functional. I like how it shows you 'incomplete' areas so you know there's more stuff to find there. It's not long before I encounter the third boss, Dark Witch Elaine. Defeating her gets me a projectile weapon as well as the ability to swim underwater. All of the bosses so far have a bench nearby so it's easy to re-try them if you fail I'm not clear on what the long-term goal of this actually is - the world is wrecked, and I can go around purifying the souls of people who have been lost to the Blight, but are we saving the world here or trying to accomplish something beyond that? Maybe it's about the friends we made along the way I'd like to give credit to this game for having one of the most terrifying versions of a Mimic that I've seen. In Mother Russia, Pot smashes you Things are looking grim as I venture deeper into the catacombs, enemies are getting a bit tougher and I'm starting to encounter more of a challenge traversing these areas. The moment when you wonder if you're really supposed to be here at this point in the game You get two 'spirit sets' that you can switch between, so I've changed up my ability sets - one using the Dark Witch's main attack which is a projectile plus other ranged spirits, and then a set more focused on melee. The ranged set has limited use but there's enough 'ammo' to kill lots of enemies before it runs out. Being able to safely stand off and shoot trivializes some encounters The first boss I'd consider hard that I run into is Guardian Silwa. She takes me several attempts and what eventually works is a little bit of melee at the start followed by using ranged attacks to finish her off. She has a nasty ranged attack that can hit you multiple times and take more than half your life if you don't dodge it At the conclusion of the battle, I got an improved dodge so I'm no longer belly-flopping my way to safety. Also, we got some clarity on the main quest - an apparition of an adult White Priestess appeared and told me that there was a spring where the waters still ran clear and I might be able to cure the Blight with it once and for all. Speaking of the Blight.... is my hair turning red? After a look back at prior screenshots I can confirm that yes, I'm purifying these blighted souls by absorbing the Blight into myself to some degree - and I fear it's beginning to corrupt me. I've beaten a couple of the Purified memories of bosses now, they give you a little bit of material for upgrading your weapons but nothing too crazy. Ender Lilies bills itself as an 'action RPG' and that's true insofar as I'm leveling up and getting more powerful, but I'm not choosing stats to improve nor do I have a class or intrinsic abilities. My power comes from the different weapons that spirits grant me and from a selection of Relics that can give me bonuses - very similar to Hollow Knight. The White Priestess status takes up four slots but I think it's worth that for an extra heal. By now I've gotten a whole lot of additional movement and door-unlocking abilities, so I think it's time I revisited old areas and scoured them for things I couldn't reach before. My original Sword guy is at level 1 and it's just not keeping pace with the other weapons, I feel like I may have missed something. Backtracking in Ender Lilies is trivial because you can fast travel from any rest point to any other, and rest areas are frequent, there's one every 3-4 rooms. While backtracking I found an underwater passage filled with mines (which doesn't really feel like it fits in this universe). I think you're supposed to dodge past these mines but I found that the Silva Hammer's charge attack can hurt and kill them. If it bleeds, I can kill it, and these mines bleed. Somehow. At the end of that passage is an area I don't think I'm quite ready for, the enemies are absolutely vicious and tough to kill. I'm not ready for the Stockade yet Similarly, I don't think I'm ready to take on this thing. It hurt me so much Eventually my backtracking reveals a snowy area that I missed, and I think it may be easier than the Catacombs with the skull piles. Aw, the girls are back together! I think it would have been nice if the other spirits would talk more, so far it's just been commentary from the Umbral Knight every so often. This is not a dialogue heavy game. Most of the story comes in from pieces of paper that you find along the way. The need to finish up a game session quickly prompted me to try a tactic that I've often used in other Souls-type games - simply running past enemies. I haven't been doing that because it's better to kill foes to get the XP and level up here, but it turns out to be a very effective way of getting through a level - the dodge lets you phase through enemies without being hit. I may use it more now that rest spots seem to be getting further apart. In terms of level design, Ender Lilies has lovingly embraced the unlock lever and used it everywhere - you need to go through a longer section of the level and enemies to reach one, but doing so then unlocks a shorter path for you to use later. Just reaching a shortcut lever means you've made progress even if you die right after Speaking of dying, there's absolutely no death penalty other than being sent back to a bench - no currency to lose or additional corruption to live with. This is a kinder, gentler soulslike. There aren't even any consumables to manage, all your limited-use spirit attacks fully refill at benches. I have an ultimate attack that I need to use more often, it's great and recharges quickly Of course, I would have the impeccable timing to write that this is a kinder, gentler game moments before venturing into a field of flowers and meeting Ulv. Ulv the Mad Knight likes flowers. He's saving them for someone. Ulv is easily the most difficult boss so far, and I actually made things harder on myself by spending the first several attempts using my usual ranged standoff tactics - he has a couple nasty long-range attacks that are difficult to dodge. Once I switched to nothing but melee I did better, and somewhere around attempt ten I managed to barely pull it off in a nailbiter. In many ways I maintain that Ender Lilies is easier than many of its counterparts, but some of the boss fights like Ulv and Silva are nothing to sneeze at. Defeating him earns me a wall cling / jump ability, so now I can treat all vertical surfaces as ladders. If you happen to be curious about my current setup, this has been working well for me: Spirit wise we're continuing to use a melee set and a ranged set Set 1 is Guardian Silva's hammer, which lets you use charge attacks (or not) to determine if you need speed or power and range for the situation, and it has the best ultimate attack I've seen so far. Complimenting that are Siegrid who attacks in place and I can just throw out when I'm close to an enemy, and Fallen Sentinel that charges forward if the enemy is a little further away. Set 2 is range-focused, with Dark Witch Elein's homing projectiles as the main firepower, complimented by the amazing Western Merchant who is my favorite spirit in the game since he just floats around and does damage for you without having to think about it. It also has Fallen Archer who shoots a barrage of arrows upward to give us another option to hit the games large amount of flying enemies or just enemies hanging out on platforms above us. Now that I know what I like I've been focused on upgrading the main spirits that I use instead of upgrading everything. Having cleared the snowy area / castle, I think I'm ready to try the Stockade again. The Stockade is still very tough, it's the first place I die multiple times attempting to progress through the levels But progress we do, and it's a good thing I took the time to figure out how to fight the enemies here because the next boss spawns a lot of guards to help him. After sweeping Hoenir's guards away he was trivial - the only boss I've beaten on the first attempt After some fancy jumping that I'm not certain I was intended to be able to make at this point, I ended up making my way outside into the rain, and found the pure spring the knight spoke of earlier. The ghost of the White Priestess greets us Beyond lie the flowers - both pure and blighted. I found a note here that talked about the Children of the Ancients - of which we are one (I knew I was too pale!), that's what gives us the ability to absorb the blight. Purifying the flower here prompts the Priestess to try purifying everything herself We're treated to a cutscene where the Priestess takes some degree of responsibility for the blight, and expresses regret that we had to live through it. This is the 'walk away and hope the problem gets better' ending. The game makes it clear that this is one of multiple endings, so we're going to get back in there and try for something better. And honestly, it irks me that I've beaten the game without having managed to upgrade the starting sword! Where the hell is the Ancient Blight? Hoenir's defeat keeps the tradition of the bosses by granting us another movement ability, this time we get a grappling hook that can attach to specific points. Between this and the wall-climbing ability I think it's time to again scour the rooms that still indicate they have goodies left in them. Would you look at that - an Ancient Soul in one of the first rooms I backtracked to. Just lying around on a corpse. Hope I didn't miss any others. My wanderings now bring me to a castle on the northern part of the map - Inside is a smorgasbord of enemies from earlier parts of the game as well as some powerful knightly defenders. These guys are pretty tough so I'm running past enemies more often I can't run past everything though, some of these rooms trap you in with the enemies and force you into battle. At times like this I wish the enemies would hit each other Interestingly there's a bit of a puzzle getting to the top of the castle where you have to climb the castle from two directions in order to enter a room from two different sides to flip two levers and open the way forward. Eventually I reach the throne room - I had assumed I might end up fighting the Blighted king, but instead my foe is the Knight Captain Julius. Mr. King (far right) is not looking well. The last boss was a cakewalk and I'm more powerful than ever, so this shouldn't be too h... JESUS TAPDANCING CHRIST He's up there with Ulv - he's armored so not all of my attacks damage him and that leads to a longer contest of endurance. Similarly to Ulv I end up switching spirits for a close-in melee to take him down. I think you're just dead if you're on the wrong side of him when he whips out the Death Star's primary armament. Persistence pays off, and he falls, revealing that the King was not a good one - he sought immortality for himself, and ended up making his soldiers drink an elixir to make them undying so that they could stand against the Blight. The King sought immortality I'm still piecing together the story but I don't know where the Blight originally came from - was the King defending his people as best he could or is he perhaps responsible for the Blight in the first place somehow? Some notes have indicated that various Dark Executioners and other important personnel ventured somewhere called the Verboten Domain, and I've just found it. Maybe it used to belong to Germany The enemies here aren't too bad - the main hazard is environmental as large parts of the area are covered in poisonous gas. I'm having to run through it as fast as possible to preserve my health. I could really use one of these masks. Would be nice if they had stored them in the entry way. It's touch and go down here, but if any attempt can either obtain some materials or reach a lever to unlock a door before dying, that's a victory. Even by those low standards not every attempt is a victory By the time I reached the bench at the bottom of the area, I was out of prayers, nearly out of spirits, and certainly out of remaining hits I could survive. Rest, little priestess At the bottom of this blight-soaked nightmare, I found Miriel the Beloved. Not sure who exactly Beloved Miriel but they don't share my tastes Miriel is unique among the bosses in that she doesn't move so I ended up bringing the Mushroom Wizard spirit out just for this battle - it leaves a poison gas cloud in place that does continuous damage. Between that and the Hammer's charge attacks I brought her low, you need to stay in the air as much as you possibly can for this fight or you'll die to repeated claws emerging from the ground. Oddly, I didn't purify Miriel - I guess she's a lost cause or maybe she's just a pure blight monster. Instead I purified the King's researcher Faden who was just beyond. Faden's power lets me unlock fancy doors, so there's a lot more exploring to be done - there's one all the way back at the start I've been curious about. And there's some very interesting information there This looks to me like it could be the key to ending the game in a better way than our initial discovery. I don't wonder for long if this is just an interesting note or something we can actually do, because in short order I've found one of the tablet pieces. Six to go. Re-exploring the available rooms is something I probably should have done even more frequently, some of these tablets I could have obtained earlier, and some of them have a lot of weapon upgrade materials with them. A WHOLE LOT Yes, definitely regretting not doing this earlier. I really, really could have used this trying to get through the Verboten Zone It's a good thing I have the mask now though, my search for the last tablet has exhausted the earlier rooms and I'm now plumbing the depths of the abyss to see if it's down here somewhere. This is instant death without the mask, and slower death with it Lo and behold, it was indeed at the bottom of the nightmare. Returning to the start gives me the chance to repair the tablet and form an amulet that will allow me to absorb tons of blight. Didn't know you were good at translating things Mr Knight, I feel like we didn't chat enough along the way. We bring the constructed amulet down to the White Priestess of the Font. Maybe we can save her with it. Sorry I took so long but maybe YOU should hang out somewhere more accessible Or she could turn into a Blight Lord and try to kill me, that's good too. I would like to thank the HP recovery on damage relic for granting me this victory Defeating her, we see her memories of the little priestesses taking on her burden of blight unto herself. She laments at how pointless it all was And in many ways, it was pointless. The Priestess of the Font couldn't save the kingdom. I couldn't save the kingdom - all I could do was relieve people of their undying torment - but everyone is still dead, everything remains in ruins. There's only so much one little Priestess can hope to do, and we can't always save the world. The Blight rain finally stops. The past may be dead, but now a future can be born. And we did save one person. You're welcome I very much enjoyed Ender Lilies, the music and art was wonderful. My sense of difficulty might genuinely be skewed because I'm also currently playing Silksong but I found it to be (overall) easier than other souslike / metroidvania games; the platforming is easy, enemies telegraph their attacks in a blatant and near-universal manner, and you have a pretty ample supply of healing. If you're interested in the genre, you could do worse than choosing this as your introduction to this type of game.

Brigador is an isometric shooter from 2016 - and that's about all I know going in. The first mission description is instantly confusing: Solo Nobre is hiring me and I lose my Solo Nobre citizenship? What? The mission itself doesn't do a lot to alleviate that confusion. There's a bunch of people running in circles with flashlights. I do my best not to step on them because they don't seem to be a threat, and I eventually find some poor unarmed schmuck that's labeled as the mission target and squish him. Couldn't we just sign the contract instead? The intro after this 'learn to walk and shoot' mission sheds a bit more light on the situation. SNC really should have named themselves something else. Ok, so I'm a Brigador, which is someone who accepted a contract to work for the Solo Nobre Concern. The Solo Nobre Concern are NOT the nation of Solo Nobre, which has been taken over by a 'Dear Leader' North Korea-style tyrant type (or so claims the SNC). Even though I am not expected to survive, my likely Heroic Sacrifice is appreciated in the efforts to overthrow Dear Leader. I have my doubts about whether SNC are actually the 'good guys' here or not, and those doubts are not assuaged by the appearance of our main character. I appear to be leaking The combat so far is interesting - it's not super-detailed but you seem to have a mix of shields and health and my initial impression of Brigador is that it's tried for a blend of arcade and simulation game. You have limited ammo so you can't just shoot everything but you can find pickups to restore your shields and ammunition mid-mission - but the ammo pickups act like real objects in that you can accidentally shoot them and blow them up rather than having them add to your ammo supply. I love these textures for destroyed houses, they look great. SNC seems to be paying me a small bonus for stepping on civilians and destroying random non-military property, but hey, a girl's got to make a living. In addition to the campaign mode, there's also a 'freelance' and 'acquisitions' option available from the main menu. SNC found Norman and basically said 'might as well let him drive a truck into battle'. It looks like you can use money obtained from campaign missions to unlock these freelance pilots, and use this money to get equipment for campaign missions rather than it being a larger integrated campaign. The game ALMOST feels too dark but it's not, you can see enemies clearly and the aesthetic feels good. I got a tooltip that recommended I turn on Easter Eggs in settings - and sure, why not? The settings menu also has an option to just turn on invincibility if you feel like stomping through the game unopposed. Continuing the campaign, it looks like you don't get to choose or customize your vehicle / weapons in this mode - these are set missions which change characters / vehicles, but in Freelance mode you can buy additional vehicles and weapons to play with. I may as well do the whole campaign first then since I'm getting a ton of money from it. Money can be used to unlock additional vehicles and weapons, but also the rest of the contract you signed in the lore section! That's quite the termination clause in the event of breach of contract. The combat in Brigador has a great feel to it that makes it more than an arcade shooter - your projectiles inherit your momentum, meaning that if you're running around really fast shooting sideways you need to account for that with slower projectiles. Units have different armor in the sides and front / rear so you'll kill enemies much faster if you can flank them. Enemies aren't just mindless things that come after you, they have awareness and you can take them by surprise if you come around on their side or use abilities like active camouflage or smoke. I'm finding it to be a lot of fun to play. There's a three-dimensional aspect to combat as well - your weapons and vehicle exist at a certain height so you can hit taller foes over short cover. This is especially important when fighting enemy 'agravs' which hover, your shots can pass right under them. Yeah I think SNC definitely aren't the good guys, they're paying bonuses for killing civilians and causing collateral damage! At least they pay well, I'd go to war myself for a million per mission. I've been thinking the game is on the easy side but I now realize that the first... thirteen missions of the campaign have all been tutorial levels to familiarize you with the three vehicle options for going through the campaign. Each pip represents completing the same level with a different vehicle You keep your damage and ammunition through the end of the mission so you need to not get beat up too badly early on. The three vehicles available now are a 'mech' with decent firepower and toughness, a big beefy open-topped slow tank, and an agile 'agrav' hover vehicle. The biggest threat to me isn't the enemies, it's the explosive materials that I sometimes don't see and accidentally blow up when I'm standing next to them. And then they make you pay for your own funeral The campaign is changing things up more than I expected - after just a few missions with the vehicles I got accustomed to in the tutorial, those guys hopped a shuttle and went off planet. After making 15 million dollars I'd leave too. Now my choices are from four vehicles that seem to comprise a small military unit, I like the variety here and I'm glad we're seeing a lot of different options as we move onward. I CAN BE A LITTLE BATTLESUIT I MUST TRY THIS By mission 04 Great Leader is apparently dead (I have no idea how, I didn't kill him) and I'm fighting 'Corvids' who I think are another faction. The lore / story here aren't presented very well and remain confusing - the game wants me to go buy the lore that will tell me additional details but it doesn't say which lore to purchase! These blue Corvid vehicles make me feel like the police are after me The little battlesuit is hard to operate but not because it's fragile - it's not even that underpowered. The reason it's difficult is because the upper torso isn't a full turret so if you're walking directly away from the enemy it has trouble turning all the way around to get a bead on the target. Every mission now is giving me a different selection of four vehicle to choose from and it's delightful. At this point I'm completely checking out of the story and enjoying killing things. This grav-tank is really great, it has a high-powered laser that wrecks everything I cannot in good conscience pass up the chance to use a 'killdozer; Why be one vehicle when you can be 10 vehicles all mushed together The different vehicles provide some nice variation in gameplay. Some really are built for cloak-and-dagger style stealth approaches to missions where you try to stay hidden and pop out from the flanks to quickly kill enemies and hide again. Nice variety in the levels too, facing these strange tall spotters in the cornfields. I'm going to have to crush about 100 gravestones to knock over this statue, which will win the people over Just checking in on the story, let's see what's going on... Aren't WE seditious against Great Leader too guys? I've reached the end of the numbered missions (The mission numbering for the campaign is bizzare - missions D3, *2, D4, E1 are coming up) and it doesn't look like this whole operation went well for the Brigadors. We're the last four left alive on the planet. The missions past 21 are much tougher (and I suspect optional) - it took me several tries to find a way to beat this army of bikes. They just kept swarming me and were followed up by a heavy tank, nasty combination. These levels were where I felt Brigador started to really shine and hit it's stride of being seriously challenging, requiring a change in tactics and vehicles for each level before I found a way through. In one I learned to love using the mortar, which I had previously hated for being so ponderous, suddenly it become extremely useful facing larger, slower groups of enemies - and I started disengaging from the enemy rather than just killing everything in a group, because the enemy groups were becoming too dangerous to beat in a straight-up fight even for the vehicles designed for an all-out brawl. The final campaign levels probably tipped the difficulty scale into the 'too hard' zone, each one was very long and took multiple attempts. One became an exercise in effective mortar usage against tough opponents Another I eventually beat by using chemical gas on chokepoints to kill swarms of smaller foes With all the campaign levels complete, let's take a brief look at Freelance. I have a ton of money saved up from the campaign so I can already buy a lot of the stuff that's available. It looks like in Freelance mode you can be any unit in the game after you buy it, and that includes absolutely useless options. Such as being an infantryman. It did not go well, It also includes this insane thing with a giant head. This is not going to fit on the escape shuttle There's an enormous variety of 'mechs and vehicles to try and a lot of levels, and if I feel the inclination to shoot things I may jump back in from time to time - but for my part those last campaign levels have me feeling like that was enough and it's time to move on.

I recall having a good time with developer Bad Viking's initial foray, Strange Horticulture . Getting into the minutiae of plant identification with invented herbs and flowers was surprisingly enjoyable, and judging from appearances it looks like Strange Antiquities will be following a winning formula. Indeed, what if a powerful artifact were to fall into the wrong hands? Like mine? We begin when Eli, the antiquities shop owner, has to leave town for a couple days and reluctantly leaves the shop in our care. Thanks for the vote of confidence in your apprentice, Eli! He leaves us with a reference book, and I'm enjoying just reading it. Some really interesting - and occasionally dangerous - items are listed in here. Eli departs with an admonishment to not open any of the locked drawers or cabinets. You and I both know that won't be happening. This is my shop now! Right off the bat I notice there's plenty of little objects and doodads to play with. The clock on the wall changes time if you pull on the pendulum and there's a way to get it to flip to show moon phases. There's a little wheel handle behind the counter that raises some sort of puzzle box, and the pedestals at the bottom of the counter seem to be large buttons that can be weighted down by objects. And that's before we actually look at any of the artifacts on these shelves! You can examine objects in detail with various senses and then label and categorize them. One thing that's immediately apparent is that Eli was too lazy to label or attach prices of any of his store's wares, so I'm as much in the dark as any customers that wander in here. Ah well, we'll just muddle through somehow. First customer walks in while I'm trying to figure out if the plants are powerful reality-defying artifacts of yore or just houseplants. I think I'm going to introduce myself this way from now on Thomas Pope wants a replacement for his hunter's boon, so it's off to the book to figure out what that is. No tutorial here, I'm immediately running a shop and rifling through a (delightfully written) reference manual to ensure that I'm giving Mr. Pope top quality customer service. Tom, since YOU want it and YOU know what these things look like how about YOU find it? I start by inspecting the two animal-shaped objects on the right since they seem like good candidates, but end up deciding they're not the right ones because they're made of clay and wood - I was hoping one might be carved out of bone since Hunters Boons are made from trophies. Then I spy a pendant on the left that looks like a tooth. The game doesn't explicitly tell me that it's made from an animal but it seems like it might fit, so when I present it to Thomas I'm still not certain if it's the correct object until I've finalized the choice. One satisfied customer! Success here unlocks another book page, which means that there could be some objects in the store that aren't yet detailed in the book. As I identify items I take care to use the labeling system to note them - unlike Eli I am going to label these things so I don't need to figure out what something is more than once. By customer number three I'm already questioning whether this guy is actually human. Something strange is going on in the town - Ravens have been gathering in great numbers and it's got people on edge. I guess if I wanted normal customers I should have apprenticed at a coffee shop At least all of these people so far can name the thing they want. As the days go by I suspect I'll see people start to give more vague descriptions as word gets out about how awesome I am at artifact stuff and the rubes wander in. Day 1 is complete with no misidentifications. I suspect the gauge in the bottom right is a health bar of sorts and I'll fail if I get too many wrong. I'm going to look around the shop and make a cursory attempt to try to identify each unknown entry from the book - anything I can identify now eliminates possibilities from future requests, and this shop is in dire need of organization. I don't know how I'm going to reorganize it yet but I'll figure something out. The shop is bigger than it first appears. Maybe I'll start with moving everything that's on the side panels into view. Ooooh, I bet Eli keeps the good stuff under lock and key There's more to identifying objects than just the descriptive examinations - I was waving this temperature magnet thing (one side is cold the other is warm) in circles when I noticed that passing it in front of the candles dimmed the light from them. I still have no idea what it is but it's very cool. I also found some weights in an unlocked cabinet as well as scales, so I can determine how heavy things are. I was able to tentatively identify about six more of the objects here, and gave them white labels to remind myself that these aren't positive identifications. Moving on to the next day, I acquired a mysterious card and it showed up on this strange board: I'm utterly clueless on this one. The day starts off with an elder woman dropping off a book that she borrowed from Eli. It sheds some light on what all these symbols around the board mean. I have no idea what to actually use this knowledge for. Yet. I did quite badly on the first customer's request and found out what happens when you fail - you get to place a dice game to restore your sanity. It's actually pretty fun! What happens if you lose all your sanity, I wonder? Game over? Winning the game restarts the day and I figure out what went wrong - I missed that there was a map in the side-drawers of that symbol Ouija board and you can use is to visit other locations in the town to find artifacts there. That's the use for the clue delivered this morning, as well as other notes I've gotten or found. Just visiting random locations will drain your energy so you can't just explore it all at once. This morning's clue isn't too hard to figure out now that I have the map - and I found - something! This is absolutely not what the customer wants but it's cool as hell. The customer service as this shop absolutely sucks, because I'm now repeatedly leaving the shop while I have a customer waiting to bring in artifacts I found that the customer doesn't want. A+ would shop here again. I don't think the customers get to complain though, I don't think they're giving me any money for these things. Maybe we've moved beyond the need for simple currency. Maybe Eli is going to be extremely pissed when he gets back. I just noticed that in a nod to their other game, Strange Horticulture is also a store on the map so I decided to pay it a visit (My first customer of the day is still waiting for their Horned Shackle). To my delight I returned from Strange Horticulture with one of that game's houseplants. Now I've been thrown a curveball. This customer wants a Moon Heart for their grandmother, but crucially I don't have an entry for that in my book so I can't look up anything about one. And instead of a clearly identified object the 'hand thing to customer circle' just says '???' Does this mean I can just give her anything and hope for the best? Turns out the answer is no - the reference book does actually list the correct item under another name, and after one failure I find the correct one. Some of my attempts at pre-identifying things have been wrong. The next customer wants to lay a trap for someone that's been stealing from them, and this time I get a choice - I can present one of two items. I think I've identified both options so it's more about what effect I want to have on the prospective thief. A binding seed amplifies feelings of guilt and shame, whereas a Zeah instills fear and paranoia - and is noted as being very difficult to remove. It would of course be right an appropriate for a thief to feel guilt over their act - but what would that really accomplish? An apology to my customer? Apologies aren't going to pay the bills around here, whereas someone stuck with some sort of paranoia curse just might waltz in here asking for a cure. Madam, here is your Zeah, best of luck. It's the cooler looking of the two anyway, no guarantee the thief would bother stealing a binding seed. As the day comes to a close I look for any symbols on unidentified items to see if that can help discern their purpose, and I try visiting some locations in town with my spare energy still left. One of the locations was mentioned in the book and the visit provides some additional info about the item. Day 3 brings the scales into use for the first time as I try to find an item that weighs exactly one pound. Apparently a Mr. Hungerford has been found and his eyes are completely black, Mrs. Robertson is a doctor and is trying to cure him. It's not great when your doctor walks into a shop like this Oh, oh this so good. I wrote the 'make the thief paranoid so they'll come into the shop and buy something' mainly as a joke, but lo and behold! She's even wearing the Zeah she stole, I am thrilled beyond words. So, lesson learned - sowing discord among the population will increase business. Eli is going to be so proud of me when he gets back. Or not, considering I just figured out how to open up the locked cabinet and get to the good stuff. Hello my pretties, what do you all do? I love a good mystery, and Strange Antiquities is full of them. One of the items behind the cabinet is a compass-like object that points at two other objects in the shop - one that I found exploring town and the other also from the locked cabinet. I have no clue what any of the three actually are, all I know is that they are somehow related. And possibly dangerous. Day 4: Eli actually came back! I had really been expecting some terrible fate to befall him leaving me in control of the shop, but no, he actually returns after a few days just as he said he would. Hey boss, welcome back! I've been trying to label some of these, would you mind help... annnnd he's gone. Most of Day 4's customers want items that I already identified and the day goes pretty smoothly. At the end of it Edmund Bishop returns to invite me to their castle to look for additional things to help with the raven problem. It's a whole new map to explore! In the castle I discover another reference book - by Eli White. He really should have taught me more of this stuff, he's an awful person to be an apprentice for. Remember that claw holding a gemstone that I said was super cool earlier? Looks like it's also super evil. Exploring the castle I try to go down to the Vaults, and there I discover that those are locked (as one might expect of vaults). I need some sort of artifact to open these doors. There's more secrets to unlock than just what's in my shop. Now that I'm understanding the meaning of gemstones and symbols I think I'm beginning to understand some of these artifacts without the benefit of a specific entry in the book. I believe this amulet is for weather prediction, for example. I believe this because the central gemstone of Jade is related to earth and nature (or it might be Malachite which is for 'seeing'), and the symbols carved around it are all weather related like snow, thunder, rain. I'm very confident that it's weather related at the very least. Eli has departed again - he's going to go contact the Order of the Black veil to help figure out this raven / black eyes problem. Since the shop was still standing he figured it was in good hands. So far I've been surprised to be wrong about the identification of a couple objects, and almost always it's because I looked at some obvious characteristic of the object and didn't take the time to look into the minute details or subtle clues that might have told me something was off about the identification. Handing over an object and positively identifying it often reveals another book page, and I'm regularly finding new artifacts at various locations, so even as I identify what I have and check off another possibility, new possibilities arise and I've gotten no closer to identifying the remaining mysteries via process of elimination. So even after several days of identifying objects, the process of doing so remains a fascinating challenge. Clues can be anywhere. This depiction of Holgar holds a wealth of clues and it helped me identify an item other than the Heart Chamber I was paid a visit by a priestess named Audrey Bell. The game helpfully gives you a character profile for important people as well as their conversation history. From the sound of it she might be pro-whatever-is-going-on-with-the-ravens You know what? The author of the artifact identification book did a terrible job. Where there are illustrations, it's almost never an illustration of the artifact! Nice picture of the map you would use it on. WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE? I haven't been able to make much progress on the puzzles inside the shop - I think I only managed to unlock the locked cabinet. At least for the three pedestals under the counter, I needed the correct three items - and a Librarian, Simone Green, has arrived with clues about what they are. Apparently nobody knows who built Strange Antiquities, and not even Eli knows all of its secrets. Easy enough now! The plinths opened up a whole cabinet with a mug set and an artifact that makes me question one of my earlier tentative identifications. I do like the mugs, maybe we can host a tea party. I'm really enjoying the aesthetics of these items, and I wouldn't hate decorating my house with some of them. One of the customers delivered me an entry on what she thinks may be causing the blackened eyes. Seems plausible. I can't see object fields yet so I have no idea if I have one in the shop. A repairman stopped by with a trinket that Eli had asked him to repair. I quickly recognized it as a very fancy answer to one of the shop puzzles, and found a book that Eli had hidden away. It's a book on curses and their effects. We may be playing doctor soon. I perused the book but none of the curses listed cause the black eyes I've been hearing about. The time to play doctor came more rapidly than I thought - though this is for trying to treat the black eyes rather than a known curse. The Witch's finger causes pain and possibly death, so that seems like the more extreme treatment - we'll try her recommendation of the teacup. Plus I have a pretty darn good idea of what item the Witch's finger is, so I can use this to figure out which mug the Restful Mether is from among my mug collection. What I'd really like to do is give her both and tell her to go to town on treatments. The shop is getting cluttered and I'm not even halfway through the game (I think it lasts about 17 days according to the mid-day calendar) - we're on day 8. I really want to organize the shop items better but I'm really not sure HOW to organize them. Alphabetical would be ideal since people usually ask for items by name except I have no idea what letter the unidentified items start with. Francesca is worried that her sister Bonnie blames Mr. Potter for whatever is going on with the Ravens and the black eye curse and she might try to do something dumb. She implores me to not give her anything dangerous if she comes in. Doctor, it's your responsibility to talk to your sister, not mine to make sure she doesn't get her hands on a powerful artifact. At this store, the customer is always right. Artifacts don't kill people, people kill people. Speaking of dangerous - back with the blind artist Rebecca Rose came in, I had a choice to either give her an item that would let her experience synesthesia so she could feel / hear colors, or a spirit eye that would let her see into the other realm (but with some pretty dark side effects. I went with the latter, and she's back now with some insights into what could be going on - something involving the old gods. You have to break a few minds to figure out some mysteries. Keep using that Eye, Rose! Bonnie drops by as the doctor promised. She walks out of the store with that badass claw rock thing. Whatever this is Bonnie please use it responsibly, bye now! The adventurer with an eyepatch dropped by and traded me this map of the catacombs for an item. I say 'Traded' but I guess once I have an item I have a large stock of them, giving a customer an item doesn't actually remove it from the shop. Which is a big part of the reason the place is getting cluttered up. The clutter is not going to get better from exploring these catacombs to find even more items Satisfying customers is getting more elaborate - this gentlemen thinks he's been cursed, which entails figuring out what the curse is from his description of symptoms, and then looking up that curse in the index of the object identification book to see what items, if any, will help. If there isn't an explicit reference to the curse I may have to infer what could work based on item descriptions. And do it all with no degree in medicine or witchcraft. Oh, clever. The plinths (buttons) at the bottom are more than one puzzle - different sets of three items can unlock new finds in the shop. I feel very proud of what I figured out to obtain this skull thing. The sound this makes when you listen to it is spine chilling. At the end of the day I succumbed to my desire to organize the shop and did so alphabetically. Here's how the left-right sides look now - items proceed as A-M, then unidentified items on the middle shelves so I can always see them, followed by N-Z (and a couple more unidentified items below the counter). It took awhile to do this but I'm happy with the result. This will help with a lingering issue which is that I've tentatively identified (white label) many of these items by name but I haven't had the chance to give them to a customer which would confirm the identification (colored label) - and the book entry doesn't get checked off unless you get that positive identification. This system makes it easy to check if I've identified a specific item's book entry or not and it's clear where I should put newly identified items in the future. The unidentified items shelf is still a little cluttered but that will only encourage me to identify them. Adding to my scientific arsenal, I have unlocked the Ouija board-thing and can now view the Thaumic Fields of objects. One of the clues indicates that a certain type of mug has a stronger field than the others. There's a mode for this table which lets you move metal shapes around to form the Thaumic symbols and see what each field type looks like. Thus far in the game I've been avoiding taking external notes - the labeling system on objects has been good enough - but at this point I'm saving a separate folder with screenshots of the field / symbol connections so I can connect the Thaumic symbols to field shapes. A 'Noctic' field associates the object with night time. Once I become a real Thaumaturge I'm going to propose that we ditch the old Thaumic symbols and replace them with these field shapes, might as well cut out the middle man. I'm going through the objects and observing their fields when I find that this creepy one doesn't appear to have a field, or it's got a field that isn't like any of the others - it's sort of an unformed circle. This skeletal bird head was in the locked cabinet and I have yet to identify it but I hope it has a series of smaller skeletal bird heads inside. Day 11 - Eli's off on yet another trip. Meanwhile things are starting to get very concerning in town. I was exploring and ended up stumbling on this. You know I'm not sure I actually want to live here. Rebecca Rose has seen more with the Spirit Eye - she says the Nameless Gods are concerned because what's happening is related to something called the Nalean Casket. They're afraid that some person will open it and waste all of it's power, spilling it out. I almost ended up screwing myself by getting into the locked cabinet a long time ago, because Mrs. Robertson here wants something that was in it - and for the life of me it's been so long since I opened it that I don't remember everything that used to be in it - reorganizing the shop moved everything around. In my case, I can reference my own work here - I took a screenshot back when I was eyeing the goodies within. Suck it non-bloggers. Looks like Bonnie irresponsibly attacked Potter (with the dangerous relic I sold to her, granted) and managed to give him some grey hair - and now he's come in to buy a protective trinket! I'm an incredible businessman! Each day reveals a short part of a story that I assume will help reveal what's going on - a casket features heavily, which matches with Rose's Spirit Eye visions. The Casket appears to infect people's minds and turn their eyes black. A new customer walks in and she's not looking good at all. Between what can happen to people from dangerous plants and artifacts plus the terrifying possibilities of god-knows-what diseases out there, doctors in Undermere must have a really tough job. Game 3 in the series: Strange Maladies? Strange Remedies? Audrey Bell, the priestess (or really feels more like cult leader) wants my help again. I can either sabotage her or give her the strength she wants. She seems pretty evil, but it's wrong to look down on people's religious beliefs so I give her the good stuff. My explorations have yielded two pieces of a torn note that explains what I need to get inside the castle vault. Should be simple now. Like most discoveries this yields just a little bit - a single item and a piece of paper. The most I ever found at once was four items and a tile for the Thaumic board. Can I get a set of these to use as coasters? You don't often get to actually use these neat artifacts, but I'm happy to report that's not true of all of them - some of their powers are required for solving various puzzles, such as accessing the deeper regions of the catacombs. Our resident cult leader is back and she's totally happy with me. She suggests that when the time comes I should perform a ritual for Holgar. I get the sense there are multiple endings to the game. There's probably an ending involving the adventurer with the eyepatch but he bailed earlier, I gave him an item that let him enter a portal and he took one look and noped out. The Holgar ritual doesn't seem too hard, I'll definitely think about it. Holgar seems cool. Warrior god huh? I probably have all these on the shelves somewhere, maybe. Well, this is concerning. Verona Green appears to have lost her battle with the dark forces affecting the town. At least the dark forces that control her mind have more respect for me than my boss Eli. I'm not down with whatever power the Casket represents, so I hand over an item that I hope will cause Verona to win the internal battle and hope for the best. The story is revealing itself both through the characters that come to the shop and the midnight vignettes. It looks like Potter, the adventurer with the eyepatch, found the Nalean Casket along with a partner. The Casket ended up messing up Potter's eye and his partner was killed, and Potter ended up giving the Casket to Eli's brother, the curator of the museum. The casket is there now and its power is seeping out and corrupting the town. The book entry on the Heart Chamber mentions that legend says that Holgar trapped the soul of a great beast in the Catacombs in something called the Wraith Chamber. I'm wondering if that IS the Nalean Casket. (I can confirm that there is indeed a ridiculously large skull of a beast in the Catacombs which lends weight to the legend). The museum curator, Thaddeus White, has come to me and admitted that he has the casket - has had it for years. This feels like a huge choice - either give him at item that will (hopefully) keep the mind-controlled people from getting into the museum, or help him bring the Casket to my shop. Bring it, curator. I am not afraid. As the days wind to a close, we're getting into process-of-elimination identification of items with pretty vague descriptions. Great writeup, very informative, A++ reference book Eli has returned - only to leave again immediately. He leaves me a ritual that can be used to destroy the casket, which is what he thinks should be done. It's actually been a lot of extra work no thanks to you, boss. Come to think of it, I've done a much better job running the shop than Eli ever did. We now carry four, maybe five times as many artifacts as we did when Eli ran the place. And my exceptional business acumen (Letting people run around with very dangerous things) means that business is better than ever! I've reached the final day. It starts with bad news - the Curator can't find the casket. It's gone. I find a note that was slipped into a drawer that used to be empty. The clue leads me to find this: I think I have the Casket now. Eli helpfully returns to tell me that he moved it overnight - it's definitely the casket. He tells me to take to the pit where it can be destroyed. Eli is going to be very disappointed in me. This is Holgar's mess (maybe), and he seems like a cool guy. Let's do this! Unfortunately I don't get to meet Holgar. Turns out this ritual needs a sacrifice. Ok, maybe this was a bad idea. I should have brought a +1 Thanks to some quick thinking the Priestess ends up as the sacrifice instead of me, but things don't turn out great for the town when the followers of Holgar open the Casket. I mean, when you put it THAT way it sounds like I didn't think this through very well. I had a great time with this one - my mind was constantly engaged in a delightful exploration of possibilities right to the end, and if the idea of discovering and deducing the properties of a world of unusual objects appeals to you then I can't recommend this (and its botanical predecessor) enough.

This may be a strange entry. Boyfriend Dungeon begins with a warning. It is not one of the usual warnings that games provide, which are that the game contains scenes that may trigger epilepsy, or that online interactions may change the experience, which is a particularly unhelpful way of saying people on the internet can be jerks. I surmise that there are also characters in this game that are jerks, or worse. This game appears to be a blend of the dating genre, which I have no experience with, and real-time combat, which I have a lot of experience with. In the spirit of playing all the things, we are here to expand our horizons. Basic character creation done, off we go! Ok, so I've arrived into Verona Beach and met up with my cousin Jesse. Jesse thinks that being here for the summer is good for my chances of improving my romantic life, which has been non-existent for Stan. The conversation feel relatively normal until he mentions that the hot new couples activity in Verona Beach is adventuring in dungeons. And also this. To which the answer is 'no', so I'm apparently a 'wielder'. We're off to meet a fencing instructor named Isaac who is also an Estoc for the tutorial 'dunj', as the locals call it located in the mall. Apparently these monsters are created from my own insecurities and they take the form of phones and televisions. We run into another sword that, despite having been kidnapped and not knowing how he got here, immediately asks me out on a date. We also find a dagger named Valeria, but she reacts to the fact that she was also kidnapped more reasonably and stays in dagger form before exiting the dungeon. Still got her number though. I don't know how a dating game is 'intended' to be played, but OneKnightStan is pretty easy to understand - he's not picky, he's not doing 'closed' relationships, and if he's got any standards at all, they're as low as they come. After I got the crap beaten out of me in the dungeon and I was carried away by paramedics (THIS is the new great social activity?) I was able to socialize via texting people. If I were able to transform into a weapon my profile would be a picture of it for sure. You can also wander around the town to dating locations, dungeons and shops. I tried a shop but I'm dirt poor at the moment. Dates are (I assume) standard fare dialogue choices with your date reacting well (or not) to how you respond to them. The benefits of dating increases your 'love rank' which translates into abilities for the weapon, so the more they like you the better they'll be in combat. Our lady dagger friend confuses monsters if we roll out of sight. I'd just like to say that among the people you interact with is your mother who is very worried about you and I love that. I'm fine Mom stop bugging me Most of the people you can date so far are weapons in various forms, but there's also Eric, who can't do that. Instead Eric makes normal weapons, he's a blacksmith. I get the subtle impression Eric hates human weapons. Ah, progression comes from both dating and dungeoning. Dating a weapon unlocks the next upgrade for a weapon, and then your responses during the date give you a bit of 'love progress', but it's using the weapon in the dungeons that gives you the rest of that progress - when you reach the next level, the weapon / person invites you out on another date. Also weapon people are chatty and like to talk during runs I'm finding combat to be fun and well balanced, I've gotten by a lot of these early battles by the skin of my teeth. There's more to find in the dungeons as well, I discovered a secret monster shop. The monsters in the shop bitched about a human being allowed in I made my way down to the fifth floor of the mall and defeated a delightful phone / crab boss. Right now the dungeon lists my 'fear' as 'unidentified', which I guess means I'm supposed to obtain some insight as to what internal insecurity these monsters represent. Pretty sure it's the fear of your phone growing legs and hurting you Sunder, a Talwar (He was mildly offended when I called him a Scimitar), also appears to be a Vampire. He snuck out to bite some other lady but hey, I'm seeing other blades too. One Knight Stan is no hypocrite. Current sneaky links are Sunder, Valeria the Dagger, and Isaac the Estoc (a sort of fencing-style blade, I get the sense we've gone into sword connoisseur territory on these weapons.) With one text conversation Isaac has won me over. Preach it brother! In terms of the dating / dungeoning balance thus far we're doing a lot more dating than dungeon runs - I think I've been in the dungeon three times (including the tutorial) and done well enough each time that multiple weapons want to go on a date afterwards. The blades, they can't get enough of Stan. Eric the non-weapon seems to be the character the game's warning was about, he's starting to exhibit stalkerish behavior, shows up uninvited and creeps around while you date other people. There's not really the option to pursue him romantically if your own personal inclination was also to be racist against weapon people or if stalkers are your thing so I try to let him down as gently as the dialogue options will allow - maybe I can fix him. Also you can't buy his weapons. This game won't let you buy weapons from the weapon shop. The dating scene has broadened beyond swords / daggers and I've met a couple more - the unemployed surfer / Axe Jonah. Jonah has an aversion to violence, which is unfortunate for him because I do not. And Rowan the scythe - Rowan's introduction is really interesting because he accuses me of being the cause of weapons around here being kidnapped and possibly the existence of dungeons (which doesn't make sense since Jesse said that was a thing before I came here), I'd like to see it elaborated on. Rowan barely cleared minimal dating standards by deciding to not kill me You might be wondering who my favorite person is thus far. It's Mom. By a country mile. There's a game option to not have Mom text you and if you chose that you're missing out. The dungeon is getting more difficult as I go deeper and although you can dip out every couple of floors I just go until I fall since there seems to be no penalty for doing so (other than the crushing medical debt I'm racking up from being brought home by paramedics every day). You can continue from the deepest floor you reach so it's not too hard to make progress even if you're not great at combat. This happens so often that I should have made a love connection with a cute EMT by now. Regardless of how I'm singlehandedly ruining the medical insurance industry, I've made it down to the bottom of the Mall dungeon (The technological terrors within represented the fear of Change) and beaten the boss there, which exemplifies change by being a cybernetic caterpillar that turns into a moth. I have conquered my fear of Change thanks to Isaac's parrying ability. The boss fights are fun and the weapon design is solid, each weapon has their own unique feel and set of capabilities that are thematic to their characters. Isaac the estoc is a fencing instructor in their spare time and is the only weapon that lets you parry attacks. Jonah the wandering surfer / axe has wide (mood) swings and sends you wobbling across the screen. I think my favorite weapon so far is the moody Rowan / scythe which creates black holes (of despair, perhaps?) that suck enemies in. Two more weapons have joined my dating pool / arsenal, we have Seven, a professional dancer from Korea that can become a fancy lightsaber: YOU came to the dance club Seven And there's Sawyer, a glaive who's on the younger side. Are you at least 18 Sawyer? Is it even legal for me to wield you? So the combat's great, the dating sections are fun to read, the characters are interesting - I think the only thing they phoned in is the crafting system. Mix 2 sugar, 4 pieces of string until Rose appears With the completion of the Mall, two more dungeons have become available. The first is under Sunder's dance club. I was beaten to death by angry martinis Also one has appeared at the local university. The pens launch little 'F's at you so I suspect this is fear of failure An achievement informed me that I'm now dating all the weapons, so here's the final pair: Leah, an ice hammer And one I'm sure everyone loves, Pocket. This is very awkward because I'm texting with Pocket's owner to arrange meetups even though I've never met the owner. I have conquered the Dance Club dungeon. I overcame my fear of intimacy by slashing things with a lightsaber. Pretty sure that's called aversion therapy. My social life suddenly gets a lot more dangerous when Isaac and I are attacked outside my apartment by this.. thing... Isaac freaked out and we ran for our lives. Way to go fencer, we should have just stabbed it. That's followed up by some concerning texts from Eric. I think Eric has some explaining to do. My cousin Jesse has some bad vibes about Eric and we end up staking out his place. Yeah, Eric's a bit worse than a stalker Eric has been taking pieces of weapons and assembled them into this Frankenstein weapon person, which if you think about it is probably the most impressive thing anyone's done in this game so far. But evil, also pretty evil. I suppose this means that Masamune is sort of the child of Stan's various paramours which is going to make the final confrontration with Masamune awkward. That may take a bit of time because I can't fight Masamune until I've fully ranked up at least one weapon (up to rank 6, the highest so far is 4 because Stan really tries to make time for everyone.) So to get there we're grinding in the dungeons and dating like there's no tomorrow (Summer is almost over, after all). I butted heads with Valeria's creepy ex. Isaac's jerk of a father executed a hostile takeover of Isaac's law firm. Sunder managed to not screw up a grilled cheese sandwich. There IS a relationship that's making me personally uncomfortable. No, it's not Eric. I understand Eric and my character's reactions to how Eric behaves are reasonable (except at this point he should be hauled off to jail but maybe we'll get there). I actually think Eric is a pretty solid addition to the cast of the game - I don't know if clingy stalker types are a normal inclusion in a dating game but since they're out in there in the world I think it's good to feature one here. No, the relationship I'm weirded out by is the cat, where my character's disinclination to ever actually meet Pocket's owner leads to this sort of thing. I am in fact placing your cat in danger and using it to kill monsters. On the dungeon front, I reached the bottom of the university dungeon to find that the boss there is actually a weapon person that's been 'missing'. She utterly crushed me, so this may take several attempts. You may think she's a mad scientist, as I did, but when she's not murdering me in her college she's walking around town hanging out with my paramours like a perfectly normal person. Guess she's got tenure. I was surprised to find that fighting her and not sucking as much as I did the first time raises your love rank with Holmes (who is also a fancy Cat o' Nine Tails), and we ended up going on a date. She whipped me on the first date After beating the professor, all three dungeons in the game have been cleared, so I just did some additional runs of the first dungeon to play out the rest of the relationships, which didn't take long since the first one awards you an item which doubles the progress of all the others. Plus at this point I'm one-shotting all the mall enemies so it goes by quickly. Some of the characters, like Sunder, find they're ready to move on from the relationship or just be friends. Definitely old, as it turns out. Others are interested in something more serious. Sometimes very serious. This is not the way of One Knight Stan. Sorry Isaac, it's not called Husband Dungeon With everyone's stories all wrapped up, it was time to end the summer by ending the monster in Verona. I even dressed up as a real Knight for the occasion And Eric went to therapy, which I suppose would have been the appropriate course of action before he started kidnapping people. As for the cat.... It didn't get any less strange

If you remember nothing STOP and read this before you do anything else!!!! Day 1: I don't know where I am. I have the sense that something may have gone very wrong, because I also don't remember who I am. The first thing I can recall is arriving earlier today. The place appeared to be a building floating in the air - I looked down off the edge and all I could see was a blue haze, I have no idea how far down the ground is. I can see mountains in the distance in all directions, and I wonder if I am above some vast, unseen valley below. I think nobody has lived here for a long time, but someone used to live here. I found notes and a recording of someone's voice, talking about someone named Mirra - the name doesn't bring any memories to mind. Plants have begun to overtake the walkways Almost as soon as I arrived, I heard her - Jesse. I know it's Jesse's voice, though I don't recall anything else about her. I think she knows me, and she can somehow see what I see... but I only hear her. I tried speaking and I don't think she heard me. As I explored, disaster - an old, rotting wooden walkway to the pagoda collapsed under me and I fell about ten feet down. Despite landing badly, I wasn't in any pain, which also feels wrong somehow. Jesse seems to want the best for me but she doesn't know much about this place either. I was trapped - with sheer walls on all sides I couldn't climb back out. I wondered why it was built this way - surely whoever used the table and paints here must have had some egress? I wished that I hadn't tried to cross the bridge before testing it - and suddenly, I felt as though I could make that wish a reality, like finding a muscle I'd never used. I concentrated on that feeling, and words fail me when I try to describe exactly how I did it, but in moments I was back where I'd been, safely out of the pit. At first I thought I had somehow flew, but no - the collapsed bridge was now intact again. I'd somehow un-done the entire event. I tried it again and the bridge re-formed before my eyes. I had found a way of rewinding myself and the world around me... but not everything. Jesse watched it happen and expressed surprise, so SHE wasn't rewound with it. Instead, she commented on the odd photograph nearby. I didn't recognize it so I took a closer look. I took the photo and was examining it, wondering where this was and how the photographer had gotten there. I was holding it close to my face to examine a minute detail that had caught my eye when I found I was no longer holding the photo, but I was still viewing the image - imagine my shock when I found that the photo had become real. Jesse was shocked as well. I paced around the sudden appearance of the photo made real. It was as though the photograph had just been superimposed over reality, with a part of the landscape simply now consisting of what the image had formerly shown. Part of the walkway was consumed by empty space - I am grateful that there were no others present here or they might have been harmed. Most disturbing to me was that in the distance the background must have grown to an immense size. I gingerly stepped onto the road from the photograph and found that it was every bit as solid as it appeared. Despite being in black and white, it was clearly real. I approached the strange device that was the focus of the photo, and Jesse identified it as a teleporter. I peered into it and could make out a few objects there. I probably should have made a more thorough exploration of this building for food and water but, I'll admit, I was curious. I touched the large button on the machine, and I found that I had been transported to the location I saw in. There is another teleporter here but it does not work. I wonder if another teleporter is what brought me to the first building, there appeared to be no way to walk there. I have found a beanbag chair in this new building (which is floating by itself like first one) and I find that I am exhausted - the effort of 'rewinding' has drained me. I am going to sleep here for now. Day 2: I woke up and found another 'Loggagraph'. This one was a recording between Aharon, a painter, and his subject - Hiraya. Something Hiraya said struck me... She called this place a 'digital landscape'. Does that mean this world isn't real? Am I inside a computer somehow? Is that why after a night of sleep (or was there even a night? I fell asleep while it was still light and so it remains now that I am awake). I think I understand the problem with the teleporter - it requires more power, which comes in the form of large batteries. One was already set up and I found another but I think it requires three. I haven't found a third, but I did find a photo with a battery in it. I've been trying to repeat what happened with the first photo but so far it has remained a photograph. Day 3: I tried for most of the day but still no luck with the photo. I'm wondering if the incident with the first picture was actually my doing or not. Perhaps it was a fluke, something Jesse or the photograph itself did, and it's not something I can repeat. If so, I may be trapped here. Between attempts I've been looking at the painting that artist left behind. Is Aharon a bad artist or would his subject not remain in place for him? Jesse has not spoken to me at all today. I hope she will again. Day 4: I DID IT! I also very nearly brained myself. I was lying on my back, holding the photo above me after hours of effort, and I'd simply given up on making an effort. That's when it happened, I was no longer holding the photo, but I could still see the image... and since I'd been holding the image above myself, the battery in it promptly fell and nearly struck me. I don't know if I would have been harmed but I'm not eager to find out. The black and white battery still provides power just as the real ones do. I tried to take the beanbag chair with me just in case I was transported somewhere with no place to sleep, and that was an excellent idea because that place had nowhere to sleep - sadly it is also a failed idea as I appeared there without it. There was naught but a single photograph there. Now that I have a better feel for how the trick is accomplished I was able to manifest it after several attempts. I took care to place it in such a way that I could walk onto it Within this photograph I discovered another, and I was careless - I inadvertently manifested it on my first attempt, and the photograph was oriented badly. Chairs, debris, and a battery that I needed to power the teleporter in the first photo went tumbling off into the void. Without the ability to rewind I would be stuck here forever. I must be cautious when manifesting photographs - I will be more careful in the future. The place I have just teleported to is incredible but I am exhausted, I will write more tomorrow. Day 5: I slept here: Compared to my prior accommodations this hammock was heavenly. This building is more extensive and well furnished than the others. There's a bathtub and large sitting area, it seems like a wonderful place to relax. Jesse has been talking to me again and I'm glad she's back. But some of the things she says only makes me wonder more about where I am. There are multiple teleporters here. One seems to lead back to places I've come from, but I have no desire to head back there. Another seems to be malfunctioning and I can't get it to display a location. The last one leads somewhere new - but I'm not going to use it today. Today I'm going to spend the rest of the day relaxing, right here. Jesse already wants me to move on but she isn't here and doesn't seem to appreciate my fear - what if I teleport somewhere and there's no other teleporter there? I could end up trapped somewhere far worse than this place. Day 6: Spent the day here relaxing. I tried perusing the books, they're mostly art related and didn't hold my attention. Jesse seemed disappointed that I was still here but I am getting one more night in this hammock before I risk the teleporter. I wrote a copy of this diary on the wall here in case someone else eventually finds this place. Day 7: An upside-down bridge works almost as well as one that's right-side up. It did require more climbing but I got across. I found another note that mentioned the need for better 'code' for tea leaves. I think I am indeed in some sort of virtual world, and that made me wonder - can I die here? What if I jump off these islands into the void? I don't have the courage to try it, who knows what's down there? I've found that manifesting photos in the wrong place can be incredibly destructive to the environment - manifesting while simply holding the photo in front of a structure can wipe that structure from existence. Rewinding saved me from stranding myself Just after becoming cognizant of this destructive potential and resolving to use this power responsibly, I managed to slice a battery in half. It did not provide power in this state. There's nowhere pleasant to sleep tonight, not much I can do about it so best I can do is a patch of grass. I wish I could find my way back to the hammock. Day 8: Well that was a hell of a week. Can't believe the damn system wiped my memory like that - what were they thinking? This damn tech probably could've given me brain damage if something went wrong with that process. All in the name of being immersive - hell, something probably DID go wrong with it, who wants to run through a sim not knowing anything about who they're supposed to be or what's going on? Fat lot of help Jesse was too, leaving me to wander around like that. She says she had no idea I was crashed out of my mind in there, couldn't get a good read on what was going on with me. We should've done a trial run, more tests, something - but we're short on money and the world is short on time. Ok, here's the deal - I'm going back into the sim. Jesse says there's a good chance that I'll lose my memory again - so if you're reading this and you don't remember what happened yesterday or who you are, then you ARE me and here's what you need to know: Your name is Calvin Levenworth. You are in Viewfinder , a virtual world that was built almost a century ago. Entering this world (again) wiped your memory. The reason you are in there is because the real world looks like this: Yeah, it's fucked. The climate out there is done for, but you can change that. Maybe. You've known Jesse since college and have a shared love of antique tech. Jesse found out that there are blueprints for a weather control machine somewhere in the virtual world you are in now, and you and Jesse think those blueprints are the real planet-saving deal. She's trying to hack a copy out of there while you run through the damn thing and see if you can find 'em that way. If Jesse talks, you listen. Jesse can't hear you but she can see what you do, so if you need her to pull you out, just write 'EXIT' somewhere in big letters and stare at it until she notices. Do not ask Jesse to get you out unless you really need to, because we don't want this damn thing wiping our brains any more than it has to, and I am resolved to find those blueprints. So do us both a favor and get them on this next dive. If Jesse doesn't get you out for whatever reason, here's how I got out last time - I crashed the system. I put a photo on a photo on a photo This is strictly last resort territory. Jesse says I bypassed the normal memory restoration routine and I'm lucky the failsafe kicked in. Now I have the worst goddamn headache of my life. This diary should make it in there with you. Keep writing in it, every day. I just spent a week not knowing who I was or what the hell was going on, and believe me you don't want to repeat it. Hopefully this is enough. I'm going back in. Go get those blueprints. I made a bet with Jesse that we'd find them first. Day 9: The mountains are beautiful. I wish I could reach them. For all I know the blueprints could be in that tower. Assuming what's written here is true, I lost my memory again when I came back here. I think I was here before, there's a hammock and a bathtub that match up with the entry for the 5th day, but I didn't find any copy of the diary written on the wall as it claimed, so I don't know if the simulation removed it or if this isn't actually the same place. I heard a woman talking to me. I assume that's Jesse, but until I read this I had no idea who she was. She's certainly talking like she already knows me. I should have told her to tell me to immediately read this diary because that didn't happen and I was confused for a long time. Hell, I'm still pretty confused - can I really trust this book? Did I really write it or is someone messing with me? I found some chocolate and other food here so I tried some... and it is delicious. I get the sense that this simulation was meant to be enjoyed. There are a lot of books here so I spent my time looking through them - after all, why wouldn't the blueprints be in a book somewhere? No dice. I also tried 'rewinding' but I couldn't figure out how to do it - I haven't found any photographs either. The hammock looks inviting. I'll try the teleporter tomorrow. Day 10: What a day! Things started off badly as I arrived in a hallway lined with books. There were no photos or teleporters that I could find so I feared I would be trapped, but nonetheless I began searching the books for blueprints - and there were many to search though. Eventually I found a drawing in one of the books. I had no idea if it could work but.... After trying the method described with photos earlier, to my surprise it worked - I found myself able to walk around inside it. There is more to the pictures than meets the eye Behind the walls that I could see I found recordings of a man and a woman speaking - possibly Hiraya and Aharon. They seemed to be enjoying themselves - which, in a way, I suppose I am too - how whimsical, to be able to step inside an imagined world! That was only the beginning. Within the drawing, a painting. Colors vibrant and unfocused Within the painting... a cartoon! Jumping here made a little 'doink' noise. Within the cartoon, a castle. A really low-res castle. Within the castle, a photograph of a teleporter that led back to the place with a hammock. The portal that appeared to be malfunctioning is now showing a location, and a new portal has appeared here. A decision for tomorrow. This virtual world is wonderful. I almost didn't notice that Jesse hardly spoke to me all day, perhaps she's busy. Or perhaps she's asleep - I don't have a good way to keep track of the passage of time. I don't even know if the 'Days' in this diary are actually days - I'll just be making a new entry after I sleep. Perhaps that's what I've been doing all this time. Day 11: I chose the wrong portal. I have been wandering for hours. One photo is contained within another, which somehow again contains the first - shouldn't that be impossible? The photos are impossible, something is upside-down or sideways no matter which way the image is turned but the tables and chairs never fall, should they not fall? An infinite maze of my own mistakes I need to rewind, I never figured out how, I never needed to before but I'm trapped now, if I can't fix this I Day 11 again: I got the hang of rewinding. It happened just when I thought couldn't actually do it, when I felt real fear and the need to undo what I'd done. I took my time again with this place, slowly and carefully trying to orient the images so that I could find another way forward when the pattern began to repeat itself or I found a dead end. Eventually I discovered a photo showing just a piece of a teleporter, clearly taken from above. So I looked down as I manifested it and fell into it. What a relief to again be home with the hammock. There is something new here - it looks like a tunnel in the sky. I don't know what might be causing this place to change but I'm nearly certain it wasn't there when I first arrived. Or rather when I remember first arriving, and there's no mention of it earlier. Jesse also seems to be seeing it for the first time I will see if I can reach the tunnel tomorrow, I think I may be able to grab onto the metal railing that leads into it. Day 12: I fell. I climbed onto the metal railing, had a sudden sense of vertigo, and dropped into the blue. I was about to rewind but I found myself almost immediately back on the island in a sudden, jarring transition. I have since recovered and I have absolutely no desire to repeat that experience, so I headed for the new teleporter instead. There, I found a piece of technology that Jesse says is truly ancient - a "photo copier". With it I was able to make surprisingly low quality versions of existing photos, but it still had some utility. I turned a picture of one battery into three. I found a photo of a person and I tried to manifest it without success - perhaps I can only manifest photos of inanimate things, it was silly of me to hope to conjure up someone I could speak to. I also found a sketch of some sort of water circulation system. It's not instructions for building a weather control machine but it gives me hope that the people who were here before were thinking along those lines. Easy to forget... did this place make you forget too? I returned to my 'home' island to a surprise - a railcar coming out of that sky tunnel. It had a passenger aboard! It's a cat! CAIT the Cat is difficult to look at - I can never quite find the perspective to make it appear whole. It talks though, and told me a little bit about this place - apparently it's some sort of program designed to maintain Viewfinder. CAIT wouldn't give me much detail beyond that but it seemed happy to have me for company. The railcar ride took me to another island - CAIT says this one is Hiraya's island, and it feels different. The centerpiece is a magnificent garden with a large tree - Jesse marveled at it, said she's never been so close to one. I suppose things much be truly awful in the real world if that's the case. Or perhaps Jesse doesn't get out much. There are more sketches and plans here concerning water and possibly weather systems, but from what I've heard of her I'm not sure Hiraya is an engineer. Still, this is the first day I've seen anything like this. The weather control machine must be in here somewhere. Weather and water were not the only thing on Hiraya's mind. I suspect she had quite a sweet tooth. Hiraya's garden has no good places to sleep but it seems I can use the railcar to return to hammock island as needed. The ride home is a nice time to record these entries. Day 13: Hiraya (I assume) developed a new way of 'painting worlds' where she placed them on the walls, disjointed. It must have been difficult for her to get things to line up correctly. I found I could manifest them as with the photographs if I stood in the just the right place and looked at them just the right way. I think Hiraya was shorter than me because I had to bend slightly to get the angle right. This way of manifesting is interesting but much less versatile than the photographs, since with those I can choose where and at what orientation they appear. I'm no longer as worried about being trapped somewhere - since I know this is a simulation Jesse can pull me out if that happens. The people who made this didn't want to be trapped either, they always leave a way to return home. And getting home is just a matter of perspective Jesse called me today, said something is interfering with her regular communication but she was able to contact me through a virtual phone system. And this time I was able to talk back to her I explained the situation with my second memory loss and she sympathized and answered my nagging questions about what was going on. I told her to assume this will happen every time I go into this system so hopefully if I have to go through this again she'll make it easier. On her end she's having no luck on the hacking, Viewfinder is so old that there are compatibility problems every step of the way. One of the Loggagraphs has a new voice on it - someone named Chi Leung. I don't know much more than that, it seemed to be a recording off them playing some sort of card game. Our conversation has snapped me back to focus on the mission - I sometimes get carried away with the whimsy of the place. Manifesting some playing cards and watching the spades / hearts fall out got me no closer to a weather blueprint. Day 14: Good news: I discovered a camera! Bad news: It was anchored in place. If I ever get ahold of a portable camera I will become a very dangerous person in this world. As it is, I was able to perform some mischief by manifesting photos in front of the camera. Somehow this teleporter was still functional. The ability to take my own photos opens up a world of possibilities. A photo of one battery leads to another battery.... And I may have enjoyed myself a little more than I ought to considering the criticality of saving the world. I did not NEED 8 batteries, but I WANTED 8 batteries. Day 15 TOMODATCHI DAY I have made an incredible discovery - an ancient plant-growing simulation. I must discover its secrets. Yes I manifested it. Day 16: Jesse needs to stop calling me this is critical research. Day 18: The plant has died I must begin again. Day 21: The secret... is music. Music lures the bees which makes the plants grow. I finally picked up Jesse's call and she does not understand. She is in fact very angry with me. We'll see who's laughing when I tell the world about this. Day 22: The last few days are a blur. Did I really spend a week playing some stupid plant game I found? What is wrong with me? I'm not thinking straight. I find little paper notes here and there and the ones I found today don't make sense. Did I write these? Surely not... right? I told CAIT about my search for the blueprints and the cat offered to help but wasn't sure if they actually existed, so we'll see if that yields anything. CAIT was more helpful when it came to Chi Leung, which is timely because the tram will now connect to their island. CAIT claims Chi Leung was an incredible engineer that designed the portals, batteries, and other mechanisms on these islands. Chi Leung's island is a model of efficiency and organization. I wonder if Chi recreated their workshop from the real world. I was feeling a bit disappointed that Chi's worlds seemed to lack the whimsy and artistic flare of Hirram's when I found a new toy - one I had been hoping to receive. Yes, it was a camera. Technically I found a picture of a camera but that's an easy fix. It was a joyous occasion, and there was a photo of a birthday cake nearby. Armed with my own camera, I can take a lot of photos - of anything I want. Happy Birthday to Me! Happy Birthday to Me! Every photo can double the number of things that exist if you keep putting the new objects together with the old ones. It's probably good they only let me take 5 pictures. Did you ever want to hear what 32 instances of the same conversation sound like when played slightly offset from each other? Teleporters, batteries, and loggagraphs all still function when copied. Day 23: I may be enjoying this camera too much. I don't remember the 'real' world and I find that it's hard to make myself care that much about it. I realize that's... wrong, maybe even evil to waste time here while people may be dying. But it's all so abstract - I don't know those people, and doesn't climate stuff happen on a long timescale anyway? I haven't stopped looking for the device - if I find it eventually will a few days really matter? CAIT says it searched for it but nothing there yet. If the resident AI cat can't find it, is it really here? What made us believe it was in here in the first place? These are things I should have asked Jesse but it didn't occur to me until now, and last time I found a phone it only had a voice message from her - she says it's getting harder to contact me as I get deeper into the simulation. I don't really mind. Today's entertainment du jour came in the form of a videogame screen with a double-jump powerup. Picking up duplicates of the powerup increased my jump height exponentially. After carefully collecting all of them, I tried to see how high I could go. I was airborne for almost half a minute. Day 24: The camera is dangerous and I nearly trapped myself today. I must take care to never repeat this. Prior to today, I never found more than five rolls of film pre-loaded in the camera, and I often wished I had more. Well, be careful what you wish you. This island had two rolls of film, but they weren't in the camera - they were sitting on a desk. Which meant that if I got creative with the one photo I started with, I could take a picture of both of them. Yes, this means I have infinite film. This seemed like heaven - now I could take and manifest as many photos as I wanted. I imagined whole worlds flowing from this camera. And those worlds were looking pretty cool. The problem was subtle, at first. Just a hitch here and there, a brief millisecond where the world seemed to stutter after yet another photo manifestation. And then the world stopped for at least a full second as I was working on a great wall of film... and I foolishly shrugged and thought 'Eh, it'll be fine.' It was not fine. The next photo I manifested caused the world - and myself - to freeze in place for over a minute. I couldn't move. I desperately hoped that Viewfinder wouldn't crash and leave me memory-less beyond the past several days - or wipe my brain entirely. Even when things un-froze, the world stuttered awfully when I moved - more like lurched - around. And I still had yet to take a photo of the sideways teleporter in order to escape to the next island. Waiting for that teleporter to appear was an eternity of not knowing if I'd ever reach the damn thing; I must have been stuck there just looking at my escape for five, maybe ten minutes, completely unable to move, and I never ever want to relive the experience. Real talk: 2 Frames per second Viewfinder thankfully did not crash and the system recovered when all my handiwork disappeared and I arrived on the next island. That's more than enough for one day. Day 25: Jessie managed to contact me via the phones. It was great to speak to her again but the news was not so good - Jessie told me that the simulation itself is corrupt and it gets worse as I explore it. She said that it could get to the point where she couldn't pull me out safely and I'd have to find a way to extract myself if that happened. She wasn't sure what 'my own exit' would even look like so I'm in the dark. I don't remember if that's something I was aware of when I agreed to do this. Hell, I don't remember agreeing to do this, come to think of it. I guess it doesn't matter. Finding that weather machine thing will save lives - a lot of lives. I'd rather not get my brain fried doing it, but better than sitting around all day playing Tamagawhatsis. Jessie thinks that whole thing might have been because my brain got a bit messed up by the memory routines, maybe they're corrupted too. Still, she thinks I'm our best shot - and I don't want her to come in here and maybe also lose her mind in this place. My mind is still good to go, most days. Today had a particularly fun island to navigate where I took a picture of some flooring and then jumped off into the void and was falling when I manifested the floor under me - this was so I could look up and get another picture of the teleporter along with the whole wire circuit that gives it power. Took about three tries with rewinding because free falling doesn't exactly put me in the nice, relaxing mindset that you need to manifest. Then I fell again and manifested this upside-down so it was right-side-up. CAIT's been following me around, making small talk. Even though it's a program I get the sense that it was lonely without people here. Day 26: I found a proper blueprint today. It's nice to confirm that there are actual blueprints here, somewhere. It was just lying there, discarded. I may have to look everywhere to find the one I'm after. It was not a weather control machine. I don't know if it was on of Chi Leung's little bits of cleverness or a corruption of the system, but I experienced... whatever the opposite of photo manifestation is when I had part of reality go flat on me. Right after I had walked out of there. It was disconcerting I still don't think there's a proper day / night cycle here but on one island that I visited it was night time. I couldn't see any stars but the moon was bright and the place was peaceful. I've thoroughly explored Chi Leung's islands by now - I'm going to try further up the tram line. Day 27: Mirren's island looks like a Victorian observatory. Is that right? How do I even remember the word 'Victorian'? I certainly don't remember where I learned it. It just popped into my head when I was looking at it. Maybe the rain made it feel Victorian? Mirren's islands have a strange purple material that doesn't interact with the camera properly. The purple structure appears to have taken Mirren by surprise too, her notes indicate that she thought it was some sort of infection or error at first, but later she began studying its properties and decided it was worth looking closer at. Camera-wise, it's like CAIT - photographs of the material don't show it. In fact, you can reveal what purple material may be hiding by taking a picture of it. Another interesting property is that manifesting photos on it also doesn't replace the purple stuff, which proved crucial in bridging these gaps. Normally manifesting this photo would have erased the platform in the middle. Caught a message from Jesse near the end of the day - she's very optimistic that the blueprints will be here, weather was Mirren's area of work, moreso than the other individuals that were in Viewfinder. Day 28: I dislike the purple substance. It doesn't seem dangerous at least, but near my feet it shifts into a repeating pattern of squares, and it's slightly sticky, which leads to a tacky, almost static sound when I'm walking on it. That unpleasantness was nothing compared to today's discovery I found confirmation that Mirren was working on the machine Jesse and I are after. I found files on 'Violet Rise', some sort of environmental manipulation project. I confess the actual files here we beyond my understanding but I archived them anyway - they're not machine blueprints but maybe someone smarter than me can get something out of them. Or maybe I'll be able to when my memory comes back. I can't tell if Violet Rise IS the weather machine project or whether Mirren was cooking up the weather machine in response to something wrong with Violet Rise, but for the first time I feel like I'm closing in on the blueprints we came here to find. I'd like to hold on to that particular feeling but it's since been replaced by anger. That fuzzy little shit CAIT suddenly spoke up and said that it knew of the machine I've been asking it about this whole time... and then unhelpfully said I was 'close'. I've been at this for days! I've practically lost my mind and the system AI just... it just sucks! Maybe it's corrupt too, I don't know. I shouldn't get mad at it, it's a program and all. Real helpful, kitty. day 2S caits secret i know it found it in the files shark week on discovery channel Day 30(?): I woke up to find myself lying on the purple substance, and not in the hammock where I'm sure I last went to sleep. Or at least the last place I remember sleeping. I don't remember what happened yesterday, and I don't even know if it was a single day. I worry that my mind might be deteriorating, who knows what this old software has done to my brain. I think Mirren might have been affected by whatever this system is doing to me. Some of her notes don't make sense, something about sound being the key to controlling the weather? That doesn't seem right. Mirren's islands are either more difficult to escape from or I'm just not thinking straight. Some of this stuff would drive just about anyone insane. On the other hand, maybe she's just working through the problem. Scientists are wrong all the time, right? And I'm here because I can't design a weather control machine, obviously, and neither can anyone else or we wouldn't be trying to find one here. I feel ashamed of that. I don't know exactly how old Viewfinder is but... we couldn't figure this out ourselves? None of our scientists from then until now has this thing? It's probably a goddamn wild goose chase. If the damn thing actually works why didn't the plans get released when Mirren made it? Shit. This is probably all for nothing. I stopped for the day when I found the watermelon. Damn tasty. Even the black and white ones still taste good. Day 31: Mirren appears to have created these portals which change the whole world around you into another 'style', they are a delight to traverse. Sadly this island does not have a camera, I would love to experiment with both Day 32: This is hell. The damn blueprints are probably in this damn room, and it's absolute utter hell. I found Mirren's archives. I think it's everything. Her life's work. The culmination of a brilliant scientist's lifetime product of knowledge and research. CAIT says this is all of it, everything she ever wrote or designed, so if there's a weather control machine blueprint at all, it's here - and NONE of it is labeled or organized. I'm going to be here awhile. Day 36: This is impossible. I wish the damn cat would help me search but CAIT got very recalcitrant when we got here and it's just watching me do all the work with a sad expression on its face. It seemed helpful when I first mentioned the weather control machine but now I feel as through it doesn't want me to find the blueprints. There are sequential, numbered pages of the same document scattered across entirely different file cabinets. This level of disorganization doesn't feel haphazard or thrown together anymore - this is maliciousness, not carelessness. Day 40: Paydirt. There's pages and pages more on subsystems and components Somehow it was the one document in the whole mess that was kept together, and writing that sets off warning bells but mostly I feel relieved, this is what Jessie and I have been searching for. She'll be thrilled. I'm over the moon. It's a couple hours on the tram from here back to the hammock and I didn't want to spend the time commuting. Tomorrow I'm getting out of here. Day 41: CAIT wanted to show it to me before I left. Mirren built the machine already I tried to wring that scrawny cat's neck - doesn't work. Can't even get some small satisfaction from that. You know what else doesn't work? CAIT says the machine never worked. Mirren couldn't make it work even in a virtual world. You know what that psycho little feline said? It said it didn't want me to feel how Mirren did, to feel that disappointment. Told me not to even try turning the thing on. You know what would have made me feel less bad, CAIT? Just being straight with me however long ago we met. The damn thing knew all along, but it didn't tell me. I told the cat I was even more disappointed in it than I was in the machine, though I guess that's a lie. It actually looked hurt, if you can believe that. Good. I've wasted a huge amount of time here and that thing is responsible. I found a phone and got in touch with Jessie. She took the news about as well as anyone could. Jessie can't pull me out from this deep, so I went back to the tram to get the hell out of here, but the tunnel back the way it came isn't there anymore. Shit. I gotta find my own way out. Day day day whatever psycho cat cant tell me what to do go where i want pretty sure it sabotages files cat wants to keep me here liar a selfie im not looking good not feeling good fail safe find fail safe its me or the cat the world is breaking the camera is wrong is breaking the world how did the camera ever take pictures and also leave them this is more correct FOUND IT THE CLIMATE MACHINE BLUEPrINT here here it is five minutes five minutes nine worlds 300 seconds water water watermelon watermelon Day unknown: Viewfinder is gone. Mostly. It's just me, CAIT, and a teleporter. I'm responsible - however hazy the memory of the decision is - for destroying it. I crashed the program in order to exit. CAIT is sorry for what I went through here. It didn't want me to leave. It says it just missed humans so much that it was desperate for the company. It doesn't know how long it was alone. I told CAIT that I understood. I'm not angry anymore. I think I've been through a lot to get here. I feel exhausted, burned out. I was trapped - but how long has CAIT been trapped here alone? CAIT is a program that the people here abandoned, a program that could feel lonely, for god knows how long in whatever subjective way it experiences time. I don't remember, CAIT. But I know it's real. And... that was it. I used the teleporter one last time. Epilogue: Where... where am I? Wasn't I in an office building? The world around me was barren, dead. I pinched myself - no pain. I wasn't in the real world yet. CAIT's last little thing it wanted to show me, I guess. I walked to the tree. That's when I found the seed, right before I woke up. The genetic code for a plant that could clean the atmosphere. I don't know if it was from Mirren or one of the others. Hell, if they'd developed it, we'd have known about this year ago. I think it came from CAIT, that cat went on about alternate possibilities and solutions when I mentioned the climate machine, I was too dumb to listen. Too single-minded. That AI cat probably had decades to sit with the research they'd done and make progress on it. My lost memories are coming back to me in their own time. Now that Jessie and I are semi-famous I'm looking forward to the future and less focused on the past anyway - though I do want to set the record straight on this discovery. Jessie and I don't deserve all the credit - the people in Viewfinder laid the groundwork, the cat iterated on that and I really believe it deserves credit for the invention. Me? I wandered around a virtual world whacked out of my mind half the time and was lucky enough to get a gift, that's all. It was a wonderful place, and it's a tragedy that more people can't visit it. There's nothing else quite like it.