favorite Disco Elysium bit thus far:
“Where the hood, where the hood, where the hood at?”
HAVE A BROTHER IN THE CUT, WHERE THE WOOD AT?
that or “¡Dios mío!” (draw a cross) A LIBERAL!!"
i think its fair to play Harry like a shithead cuz hes a cop (i mean no matter how you play him, he’s canonically a depressed alcoholic asshole) but the RCM is at least nominally distinguished from IRL cops as being a potential force for good (or more accurately, theyre useless & shitty in a different way than real world police). You can directly say to Joyce Messier something like “so wait, we’re just enforcers for capital?” and she basically says “oh no, they hate you guys almost as much as the citizens do”
I mean it’s arguably one of the flabbier leftist critiques in the game (probably partly motivated by wanting your main character to be a detective) cuz it can come off as “if only the police were better funded…!” but the origin story & ineffectiveness of the RCM + the Hardie Boys as the de facto lawmen in Martinaise + the general theme of “the system is broken because it wants to be that way, you can only affect so much” tell me that the point is more like, what people mean when they say “abolish the police”: community self-policing & specialized care for issues that just get fobbed off on the gun-toting racist government-funded mob IRL
speaking of Joyce: i rly like the way she and Evrart Claire are contrasted. Evrart puts you through a dialogue boss battle where he’s holding shit over your head the whole time and will only give you money in the most humiliating way possible. he’s personally very unpleasant to deal with. but he’s also the boss for the Union (the “good guys” in the overall conflict in Martinaise) and his workers generally agree hes got their best interests at heart. Whereas Joyce is personally very polite, agrees to give you a reality lowdown, will freely pay your hostel bill and is even self-effacing about her own shit politics – but is still very much on the side of the bad guys and the bloodsucking evil government/corporate interests that turned Martinaise into a war-torn shithole in the first place. Its not subtle or anything but i like confronting the player with “respectability politics” on a personal level like that
(also i should be clear that i kinda think Evrart rules lol any union boss who would hear the police are coming to question him and purposely set out an insanely uncomfortable chair for them to sit on is cool in my book. plus he’s funny. i love how jazzed he is about his shipping container office being moved around)
its really fuckin weird knowing that Titus Hardie was formerly voiced by Matt Christian. his Final Cut VA is all deep southern vocal fry, not at all bellowing drunk podcast dude. pretty much anytime ive learned an NPC was originally voiced by a Chapo/Red Scare peep ive been like, really?? (except Klaasje, her VA isn’t super different from Dasha)
I won’t go into detail here but I know a union boss who is basically an Evrart. She does do really complex power moves like that on people when she feels she needs to. I would hate to be on her bad side. And her union loves her. The archetype is real!
Played through both of the Alan Wake DLC episodes and they are such an upgrade over the base game in every mechanical way that it leaves me curious as to what the heck the development of them and the base game was like as it feels like this shouldn’t have been the case.
There is a bit less story in them due to… well being after the main story wrapped up, but it is a real Majora’s Mask experience as they seemed to just take the existing assets they had and just went nuts with it. It’s sorta a dream so let’s just jumble existing bits together in odd ways, and put floating words in the environment that you can trigger to cause things to pop up/explode/whatever. Let’s literally stitch together a bunch of internal rooms together in a giant rotating wheel you have to run through while it spins. Let’s have you swarmed by enemies in a mountainy area where you use your flashlight to eliminate giant rocks so a nearby lighthouse can rotate its light periodically by and vaporize them all as long as there is a clean line of sight.
It feels like they dropped every big set piece design they came up with from the main game (sans one) and dumped them into the DLC for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom.
I hope you give Alan Wake’s American Nightmare a shot
I was so pleasantly surprised by it. They just needed that extra bit of mechanical polish to turn it from a middling action game to a great action game
I seemingly got a copy of it free from Epic Games Store some time back, so perhaps for next Halloween. Its got nightmare in the title, surely this will be the scary one…
Dungeons of Hinterberg - A European town’s existence was turned upside down when it was invaded and attacked, but it turns out the invaders are subhuman ghouls and goblins that society has deemed killable without remorse. Therefore their entire economy has reorganized itself around supporting a series of adventurist tourists who come and kill for fun until they get bored and go home. By giving the game this plot, it reminds me of some people I knew who flew to Urkaine to work out their personal frustrations by getting in the way of the military to ‘kill russians’.
I’m not sure if this game is supposed to be a satire or what but it manages to be pretty boring to play while being written like someone wanted to make a Fight Club meets Asterix and Obleix sort of parody. The protagonist is a frustrated lawyer who needs to work out her frustrations with corporate life through murder and casual dating. Like a lot of contemporary game writing we hear every passing thought and feeling of the main character ad nauseum, there is just way too much written on every story beat. A lot of the art is cool when you squint but hideous and thrown together when you look too close. Did not like this one.
Apologies. My comment is directed at some people I know who flew to Ukraine to work out their personal frustrations by getting in the way of the military to ‘kill russians’. I see how that is insensitive.
edit- I am going to edit the wording of my previous post but Tulpa is correct that my original wording was insensitive.
Playing inside a Control-style space but using AW2’s more plodding survival horror-style mechanics is such a beautifully effective way to transmit the feeling of what it must be like being a regular human (as opposed to a superhero like Jesse) in Control-world
In a moment of weakness (actually maybe more just that it was 50% off at launch), I got Assassin’s Creed Mirage on Steam, breaking my vow of “no more Assassin’s Creed til I finish Valhalla and all of its DLC.”
It seems alright. They claimed leading up til launch it’d be a shorter game and from the intro, it sure seems like it (Valhalla’s opening area is like…ten hours long, potentially, if not longer - this one was two).
The one thing that’s really fucking me up now (other than the game running fine on Steam Deck on lower settings but cutscenes skipping constantly) is that I can never remember which d-pad direction is the Batman vision and which one is the whistle that lures guards towards you.
I’m continuing with TRESSELL, the Demon’s Souls character I started back in clear lake. I’ve tweaked the emulator settings and through trial and error resolved the performance problems that made me put it away and find something else to do. I’m getting the hang of the bastard sword (I found it on the ground; the claymore is probably better but it costs 6,000 souls. I’ll probably keep both and give them different infusions) and It feels like this will be the run where I finally make it more than 1/5 of the way through the game.
Consume Me - Holy cow, I know Jenny Hsia and AP Thompson have been working on this for 10 years or whatever, but I played the most recent build for IGF and I was blown away. I was expecting something pretty cool based on earlier builds but everything about this game really crackles. I used to do UI for a living and now I want to show my students this game as a masterclass example. 90% of interactions and buttons convey a lot of meaning and humor while being intuitive enough that they don’t require a tutorial, and I love how every part of the scenes slides like a comic across as you perform actions. You can taste more than a little Tokimeki Memorial in its approach to a lot of things, but as someone dealing with disordered eating myself I think they killed it with this one.
Hour 6… maybe 8 in crow country. I got the flame thrower and nearly emptied it the first time I used it. This game is starting to fuck with me in other ways as well. Supplies are getting tight. I’ve made a few choices I want to go back and do different on a subsequent run. I’m finding non-required puzzles. I think there might be some interesting forks. This is a keeper.
