it was so weird how myst 3 & 4 thought that animated roller coaster sequences should be the “reward” for solving a major puzzle. maybe they took it from riven that it was supposed to justify the hassle of changing cds?
Thinking about how cut/datamined content gets reintegrated back into ‘canon’ by overzealous lore guys, trying to make it sound like it matters to the game’s story or setting that there is some untextured guy named demon_knightblade.fbx in a faraway kingdom. Also when souls youtubers run out of material for their weekly 3 hour lore podcasts they end up trying to squeeze juice out of the fact that there’s more generic hunter corpses than healing church corpses in the courtyard Cainhurst or whatever… Like a digital version of divining by entrails.
They would be horrified of the accusation, but it may be the most populist expression of death of the author
Datamined from Destiny 2: Forsaken
O you wonderful curious things. Do you believe you’re the only ones with the power to see what should not be seen? Did you believe you can use such power blithely?
For your trespass, I would ruin your luck, wreak havoc on your drops, poison your engrams, and fill your lines with static. Thus I would curse you and dissipate the bond that ties you to your tasks. How frail you Guardians can be! How many millions have fallen silent, never to return, because the bond did not hold them strongly enough?
But you have already cursed yourselves. You have walked the Anathematic Arc and glimpsed creation from below. You will never forget the tenuous, provisional framework you found here. You will never forgive the mortality and fallibility that underlies a world you thought was everything.
Those who use this power to seek unearned knowledge will see more than they ever desired. There is a price for glimpsing the Cord. You will pay it.
this is some homestuck shit
i obviously mean that in a good way, but sometimes i forget that “homestuck” is often internet shorthand for “dumb complicated shit i don’t care about” by people who are wrong about things
It’s more effective when it’s at the bottom of an iceberg the visible portion of which is “oh no the Nathan Fillion robot died >:(“
to me the visible portion of homestuck is “webcomic done in mspaint” but again, i often forget how the internet sees it. we all know too much.
i might have liked homestuck if it had a 9:1 ratio of dry OCD over-explaining to comic mischief instead of 99:1
the kojima sweet spot
Always liked whenever Destiny lore starts bleeding over into fourth wall stuff because it’s generally right at the edges of the known world and written well enough to feel cool.
Lore is good when it’s marginalia or apocrypha and bad when it’s “canon”
this is kind of what my dissertation is about lol
well not really, but the idea was sort of rattling around in the back of my head the whole time i was writing it, and it would have been a good take to include in some way other than just subtext
well i guess now i can just say my dissertation itself has its own apocryphal lore
I want to live in the middle of the power up ring from Cho Ren Sha 68k
this actually started playing on my playstation once when for some reason it couldn’t read the game data and i was very confused
My wife bought the kids some Power Rangers fighting game on PS4 and it is wonderful to watch them discover how bullshit hadokens are in real time
Did anyone else play the anticlimactic, anxiety-mixed-with-boredom-inducing 2014 roguelike puzzle game Road Not Taken (by the devs of Realm of the Mad God)? I think about that game a lot.
I won’t say it’s underrated because it’s not, but it delivers an experience no other game does and it at least deserves more analysis and criticism than it got. It’s deliberately structured as a metaphor for life, and it is one but not the one they thought they were making.
It’s never a good game, nor is it ever bad to the point of active agony. It’s that the same time as doing a lot of intriguing unexpected things, it slowly flattens your mood. The aspects of the game design that are deliberately player-hostile do land (while being humorless and undramatic, totally unlike Souls’s sadistic comedies) and the parts that are supposed to counterbalance this by feeling rewarding or relatable fizzle completely. You try to see the bright side and the complexities of the game and how it’s challenging you, but however you turn it in your mind the bad side always seems to outweigh the good, and still you question if you are just missing the right way to appreciate it.
It’s like life as it feels in days of dimly-anxious languishing. And it’s all quite bland and unimpressive, it even lacks the satisfaction of fully immersing yourself into the depths of emotional darkness or of life’s lack of meaning. It remains at the trite surface of those dark feelings – which for me in unhappy times in my life, is often where I found myself spending most of my time, sometimes feeling frustrated that I couldn’t even muster actual sadness or grim thoughts that were even interesting or relatable.
It’s on my long term list of things to play so whenever I do wind up doing that, I’ll circle back to this post of yours and see how my feelings compare
Did not remember the name of the game, but yes I’ve played 12 hours of it!
I think about it a lot too; it is absolutely doing something unique but in a very mundane way. My brain tells me there’s something there to learn from, but I have a hard time extracting any design lessons from it.