I did but maybe not for long enough or not in the right places?
Well, if you ever revisit that bit it’s worth a couple tries.
Meanwhile!
2 Likes
Act III was so good!
2 Likes
no one told me that there was just going to be a beach house-esque song in the middle of this dang game come on
fantastic
5 Likes
Ben Babbitt did produce the last Angel Olsen
ben babbit did audio mixing on the new taylor swift documentary
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he contains multitudes
This game is like, someone went through my browser history and just put everything relevant to my interests into it. So much of it just lights up the right parts of my brain that I am very willing to forgive some of its issues (pacing, mainly)
2 Likes
Act V was a poignant but sort of unsatisfying. I was not expecting the ending to be so abrupt.
I’m enjoying KRZ, but I can’t do more than 1 or 2 scenes at a time. I started this day last week, and I just finished act ii today.
1 Like
ah geez. ah damn. I really, really like this game
finally finished it and I think it’s perfect
2 Likes
It’s me the snob about this game. I am glad they put the interstials in the game. Une Pableo whatever was my favorite part of the whole thing and wow the last chapter would have made less sense without it.
It does a lot of things. It says a lot about the eternal decay of rural America since the 20th century. I thought about how old my dad’s town felt when I was little and how it feels now.
Glad I played it but that took a lot.
7 Likes
I tried playing this game two times before. This time I was determined to stick with it. I had only gotten as far as the mines before writing it off as i-don’t-even-remember-pretentious and kinda boring? The folly of youth. I was most likely not paying attention and just kinda salty about someone else doing something so pretty.
It really clicked when I kind of just let the game wash over me- the way I do books. I think I play games incorrectly because I tend to tunnel-vision the idea of solving the puzzle and getting real frustrated when I can’t.
I’m near the third act now and I want to post a bunch of screenshots because it really is a gorgeous game, but that would be too much of a spoiler and I have too many. So much of the fun is in drinking in the set pieces. They’ve got Hopper and Wyeth all over the dang place.
What I really, really like is the way that they shift perspectives entirely through text. The scene in the museum, where you’re exploring the houses and it’s told through exchanges between museum staff and the residents, was so neat. It works especially well when half of it is interactive (as opposed to books, where you have to let the author have all the fun), and I’d love to hear of other examples. Also! Another scene that really got me was when you’re waiting in the mine cart for Shannon to come back and you’re just sitting there. It does the thing really good writers do in strictly visual media, where they give you some breathing room to take in and reflect on what’s all happening.
I’m still getting through it and I have too much to say about it, but I have to think about it some more.
6 Likes
This game really did more to toy with my feelings of nostalgia than any 80s pastiche ever did, I feel moved to say now.
3 Likes
it relates to the world of people and what they do with their hands and not the through-the-looking-glass world of the media we consumed
1 Like
I was thinking about the quotation in the OP again and did some reading on the Junebug album.
Did y’all know Junebug is Babbitt’s voice?
“[The Junebug record] feels connected to the other kinds of intermedia outgrowths from the game we’d already done, so it’s not unprecedented by any means,” says Babbitt. But a whole record? I can’t think of many, or any other examples of a character from a video game releasing an album. “It has everything to do with singing for me,” he explains. “And finding the sound of her voice, so to speak. She’s not a human, she’s an android. It sounds super nerdy, but an effects chain popped into my head like an image that I knew I wanted to try. I probably set it up the next day and just started singing things through it, and when I heard the voice coming out the other end I was completely bewildered.”
He’s right, the voice is bewildering. It sounds mostly like a woman, but with aspects of male intonation, creating a tone of expression all of its own. “There really was an aspect of it that had the rush of putting on a dress or make-up for the first time and feeling my body and my self-perception in a different way, but in the invisible voice world – like vocal drag.”
Of course it is.
I like the feeling of finding a new face/ And a new voice/ To learn how to recognise / The static between stations.
I never played Act V because I wanted to be in the right mental state for it and I suppose I am now.
4 Likes
i will not be surprised if my best game of all time was created by a trans woman