First Impressions: Goblin Slayer - Another Adventurer - Nightmare Feast (NS)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Goblin Slayer - Another Adventurer - Nightmare Feast through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Goblin Slayer - Another Adventurer - Nightmare Feast

Systems: Windows*, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: November 15, 2024

Publisher: Red Art Games

Developer: Apollosoft Inc, mebius

Time Spent: 5 Hours 17 Minutes

Goblin Slayer -Another Adventurer- Nightmare Feast, from what I've played, is a mashup of two genres: visual novel and tactics RPG.  Which really isn't too far off from a lot of tactics games that I've played, as most games are broken up between tactic battles and story/exposition.  The biggest difference here is that the story elements aren't conveyed using the somewhat standard pixelated characters that are also used in battles. Instead, it is more of a visual novel approach with one to three anime-style characters facing the player and talking while you press the A-button, progressing the dialogue.  The other added piece to the visual novel is that the majority of the dialogue is all voice-acted for the principal characters, with the occasional grunts and snarls for enemies that don't deserve to have their lines spoken out loud.  Thankfully, the tactics RPG side of things didn't seem to take a backseat at all.

When I started Goblin Slayer -Another Adventurer- Nightmare Feast (Goblin Slayer here on out), I was genuinely confused at how much of the game was just a straight-up visual novel.  It's not that there is an over abundance of visual novel exposition scenes that outweigh the amount of time you spend in combat, it's just something that threw me for a bit of a loop when I first started the game.  Even the trailer uses only seven seconds out of 68 to show the visual novel aspect and during that time doesn't specifically reference that genre.  But maybe my perspective is slightly skewed as I do make it a point to listen to all of the spoken dialogue instead of blazing through the text or just reading it faster than it's spoken.

The other thing that threw me was just how the game up-and-out uses the name Castlevania in the English translation.  During the opening sequence, I heard "Akumajō" spoken, which I know can roughly translate to demon castle, or Devil's castle, but Akumajō Dracula is also the title of the original Castlevania in Japan.  I can only imagine that whoever did the English translation, which apparently is currently only available on the Nintendo Switch edition, interpreted "Akumajō" to literally mean Castlevania.  Apart from the setting for game is in an idyllic village that was once in the shadow of a castle inhabited by an evil vampire, I never felt that what I was playing was supposed to be a side-story to any of the official Castlevania games.

Let's get to the meat of the game, which is the tactics RPG.  The mechanics here are pretty standard for a game in the genre.  You play as a group of adventurers, although you start out the game with only one member and slowly grow your ranks to the point where you have more characters than are allowed in a single battle, who fight a group of enemies on a square grid of varying elevations in turn-based fashion.  Like a good tactics game, the direction a character is facing is also important, as attacks to the side and the back can deal higher damage and at least seem to have a higher chance of dealing a critical attack.  Unlike a lot of tactics games I've played in recent years, Goblin Slayer lets you change the direction of your characters at any time during the player phase of the battle, so you don't have to worry about forgetting to rotate someone in the direction of an imanent attack or if you accidentally have someone facing the wrong direction at the end of their turn.  And thankfully, there is no permadeath for your characters, and we'll get to the death of the Guild Master a little bit later on.

One interesting decision that the developers made in the battle mechanics, is that regardless of your enemy, be they humanoid (humans, goblins, vampires, etc) or creatures (wolves, warthogs, gargoygles, etc), not all of the enemies will engage in battle until they're activated by the proximity of the characters.  I found this exceedingly helpful knowledge since when I first started, I played like any other tactics RPG where most, if not all, enemies would move on the grid when it was their turn.  In Goblin Slayer, you can tactically cheese individual enemies to follow a single character who's acting as a sort of scout, back to the rest of your waiting party, so your characters aren't overwhelmed, which can happen with as few as three enemies attacking at the same time.

As far as the list of characters in your party, there are definitely story-centric characters like Guild Master, Blood Princess, Squire, Conan, and Polar Bear Priest, but there are plenty of other characters you can recruit into your budding adventurers guild with names like "Gemstone Lover," "Generous Scales"(he's a lizard man), "Wise Friend," and "Inheritor of Ambition."  I have no explanation for some of the names of these characters, as they're not their titles, although for some, they do seem to be both.  I'm going to chalk it up again to something related to the translation from Japanese into English.  Just like in Final Fantasy Tactics, these recruitable characters are not included in exposition scenes or have much in the way of personality, and it's up to the player to imbue any of these characters with any kind of characteristics found in their character design and skills from their "pre-installed" class.  I actually really love this aspect of the game and wish that more tactics RPGs were like this and not as much like the Fire Emblem series, where every single playable character is the lead character in their own story, complete with a detailed backstory.  Sometimes I just want a faceless grunt to join my merry band of adventurers, whom I mentally develop their backstory for as the game progresses, and I get to know them.  But I recognize that I might be in the minority on that front.

The last thing I want to touch on is one of the things I'm not a fan of in tactics RPGs, and that's the main character during battles.  When the Guild Master dies, the battle is immediately over.  This is something that's bothered me since I first came across this specific mechanic in Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia, although I know the mechanic exists in other tactics games as well as Final Fantasy Tactics.  The difference with FFT, though, is that characters have a death counter when they are killed, and once that counter reaches zero, if they're not revived, they turn into a crystal, so the game is not GAME OVER level if Ramza is killed.  Once again, this means being very conservative with the Guild Master in combat lest you run the risk of them being surrounded and attacked by enemies at any time during a single battle that could last around 30 minutes.  That's a lot of wasted time when you know you're only able to dedicate an hour or so a day to playing video games.

At present, I've only played just over five hours, and I'm only in Chapter II: First Experience Point, but that's mainly because I've been grinding fights that are both side quests and training fights because I am hiring every single recruit who comes through the proverbial doors of our fledgling adventurer's guild.  I haven't been progressing the story very quickly because I am paranoid I'll run into a Wiegraf encounter that I'm not properly levelled for and that will be the end of the game, or at least the end of that save file, which is why I have 2-3 save files as back ups before I go into situations that become points of no return.  I still don't feel as invested in the Guild Master and her backstory being the driving force behind the game, but I do kind of wonder what will happen with Inheritor of Ambition and XXXX.  Like, what's their deal?

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Want Them Shaking in Terror and Shame

MIDI Week Singles: "Yellow Card" - Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 (PSP)

 

"Yellow Card" from Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 on the PlayStation Portable, and Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Game Cube, Windows, & Android (2005)*

Composer: Powerplant

Album: Unknown?

Publisher: EA Sports

Developer: Team Fusion, EA Redwood Shores, Headgate Studios

I think why I enjoy this song so much is simply because it was included in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06.  I can't say if Tiger Woods himself had any say in the music that was selected for the game, maybe he had an intern go over EA's sound library and decided on a song; "Yellow Card" was also used in EA Sports' Total Club Manager 2004 released a few years earlier in 2003.  I also just chortle at this image of a 30-year-old Tiger Woods, at the top of his game, trying to find the beat in a flashing club circa 2004.  I actually couldn't find any videos of him dancing (I'm sure our IT guy at work might have some questioning looks for me the next time I run into him).

But you know, maybe it's end-of-the-game music as you reminisce over your 18 holes and how you could've done better?  It's an overly peppy tune, though, so maybe it plays when you watch your competition cry over their scorecards and trying to fish their $569 driver out of the water hazard they chucked it into when they only came in two under par?

I dunno.  This song just makes me happy in ways that I don't think it was written to do.  

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Game EXP: Silverpine Creek (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Silverpine Creek through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Silverpine Creek
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: March 25, 2025
Publisher: Phantom Toast
Developer: Phantom Toast
Time Spent: 
First Play Playlist on YouTube

Silverpine Creek is a first-person exploration walking sim akin to the Slender games of the early 2010s, with a distinctive Eastern European aesthetic presented in a found footage format with a rather unique take on the mechanic of "lives" in terms of video games.  And the microphone is active.  That's a bit to unpack.

First off, the game is presented as found footage.  When the game starts, the visual is that of loading up a video cassette into a VCR, complete with date stamp and tracking lines.  If you die, ie, are caught by the witch, it presents as an error in the video playback, and you continue from a nearby shed in the village of Silverpine Creek that you're exploring.  What I find odd, is that the text before the game starts says that you have only "three lives" to complete the game, find all of the ritual items and place them at the burn site in the starting area, but there is a counter when you die showing " /5 Footage Error" with the number increasing after each death.  I'm guessing that the original plan was to only give the player three lives to complete the game, but at some point during QA testing, that the lives was increased to five due to how much of the game is a mix of trial and error and fuck around and find out.

I bring up the Slender: The Eight Pages comparison because in Silverpine Creek, you are also tasked with finding a set number of items scattered throughout an enclosed area, and the location of these items is randomized with each playthrough so while you might have a good mental map of the village after an initial playthrough, you are still required to look through plenty of nearly identical houses and huts looking for the specific items to take back to the burn site.  Being able to do this with three lives does seem rather difficult, but that's coming from someone who wasn't able to beat the game, so that should also be taken into account.  In one instance, however, I believe that the bell, the Echoing Chime, is always located within the church since that is where I found it in each attempt while the chicken coop, the alchemist shop might move around and there might be more than one well that the Lantern of Sigil is associated with.

What the game doesn't tell you, or maybe I missed it, is that you're only able to carry one ritual item at a time, with the exception of the three herbs needed to make the Wolfsbane Potion and any gate keys you find along the way; although presumably once you make the Wolfsbane Potion, you're only able to carry it and not another item.  While this does make sense due to an important mechanic that I'll get to shortly, I did find that in my first attempt, the Echoing Chime I was holding disappeared once I picked up the Lantern of Sigil.  I tried looking back at the church, thinking that it would have respawned there since that's where it originally appeared, but it wasn't there, nor was it at the location where I picked up the Lantern of Sigil.  A glitch, maybe?  I would say that I'd need to try and repeat that, but time is too valuable a commodity when playing this game.

Another glitch that I think occurred was during my second attempt, when I could actually see the scarecrow actively moving while looking at it.  In my first playthrough, I noticed the scarecrow closer to me only after I turned around.  I found this method of creeping out the player very effective because you couldn't see it happening.  I could walk backwards while watching the scarecrow and it wouldn't move, but the second I turned around and turned back, it had moved and was noticeably closer, but not so close that I felt threatened.  Jump to my second attempt, and I could watch it actively moving closer to me shortly after unlocking the gate to the main body of the village outside the church.  Once inside the church, I watched in bemused horror as the scarecrow slid into the church, through the corpse pit, and up to the lectern.  I knew that I wouldn't be able to avoid the scarecrow while trying to complete the puzzle in the church, so I walked up to and through it, just to see if anything would happen; maybe it could kill you?  But no, the scarecrow didn't do anything but continue to follow me, which makes me think that it's a glitch and not a feature.

Once you lose the fear of something, a large aspect and functionality of the game is lost.  I found this happening during my first playthrough, as there seemed to be jump scares happening every couple of minutes.  While looking through a hut in the village, a ghostly face would jump out from a darkened corner of the room.  While walking through a field, a skeletal face jumped out from nothingness.  While walking across a bridge, and shadowy pair of hands reached around from behind me, raking its ethereal claws across the screen.  Seemingly at random, a figure jumps out of the ground towards the camera, only to disappear in a burst of static.  My guess is that these events happening are supposed to scare the player so that they literally "yelp" out, drawing the witch to their current location.  This would work well for the active and animated streamer or Let's Play video on YouTube, but when you're playing in the dark with a person sleeping next to you, there's more of a real-world incentive to not yell out, thereby nullifying the microphone mechanic.  Additionally, when you see the same figure jump out at you using the same animation 15 seconds apart, your sense of fear again is severely diminished.

There is a context-sensitive mechanic that happens after you've placed the second ritual item, regardless of how many other tasks you've done (e.g., if you've found other items, completed puzzles like in the church, or photographed bodies of the missing people you were sent to locate).  After placing the second ritual item at the burn site, the time of day immediately transitions to nighttime.  This is surprisingly effective, as evidenced by my first playthrough, where I had gotten a decent grasp of where I was while only glancing at the map, but once the sun went down and my field of vision was nearly limited to only the weak beam of light from the flashlight, I felt that I was easily turned around.  A very effective mechanic, you could say.  The strategist in me thinks that the way of exploiting this, without knowing what happens after you place any more of the ritual items, is that you could possibly gain access to the rest of the ritual items without collecting them, photograph all four of the bodies, then start placing the ritual items at the burn site.  That way, you're not searching aimlessly through areas of the map you only just gained access to in the dark, increasing the likelihood that you miss something.  Let alone trying to find a black building with a red roof in the dark, which I wasn't able to do when it was still daylight.

Presently, I know how to obtain three of the six ritual items (mirror, chime, lantern), and I know how to obtain a fourth (potion), and I'm pretty certain I know where I can find the fifth (tome), but it's just a matter of solving at least one puzzle that I can't figure out.  Finding the sixth (amulet), I'll have to chalk it up to luck and looking in the right area of the village.  I'm pretty sure I can find the bodies again, but I'm not sure if they move around in different playthroughs the same way that some of the ritual items do, too.  That being said, I still haven't finished the game.  The game feels like it takes a time commitment of at least 90 minutes, assuming I'm able to not die five times, and I'm willing to bet that the frequency and intensity of the witch's attacks ramp up the closer you get to placing the sixth item at the burn site.  And that 90 minutes of silent gameplay is a commodity I can't find while at work during my breaks, and playing this kind of game at night after The Squire goes to bed is difficult because it's late (for me), and I'm already kind of tuckered out, and even with the minor adrenaline bursts from the jump scares, I find it's not enough to keep me awake to get to the finish.  Plus, in both of the videos, I quite back to the main menu, coincidentally after dying in the chicken coop, I just felt that I was done playing and I wanted to stop.

Silverpine Creek is a fun game with fairly simple mechanics and an easy-to-understand plot.  The explorable area is just big enough to get lost and turned around at the flick of a switch, but not so large that it feels overwhelming.  I do think that I'll be able to finish it at some point, maybe some time while at my in-laws' house in the high-desert forest while The Squire and Conklederp are both asleep, and I know the espresso I drank 45 minutes before will keep me awake past the witching hour.  And maybe then I'll finally be able to figure out those damnable shrieking chickens.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

MIDI Week Singles: "Menu Theme" FIFA Soccer 96 (DMG)

 

"Menu Theme" from FIFA Soccer 96 on the Game Boy (1995)
Composer: Unknown
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Black Pearl Software
Developer: Probe Entertainment

In yet another instance of "I'm not sure," this music that I've often seen simply as "BGM #1" is the only track that I've found in FIFA Soccer 96 on the Game Boy.  I've listened to five tracks from the game, but each longplay I've watched only has this music play during the opening menus when you choose various gameplay options before heading down to the pitch.  Then nothing.  No music, only minimal sound effects for the entirety of the game.

I was also a bit sad when I couldn't find out the composer who worked on this game.  It looks like Probe Entertainment was purchased by Acclaim in October 1995 and renamed Acclaim Studios London with FIFA Soccer 96 releasing in North America in December.  There are candidates, but I'm not familiar enough with them to be able to tell them apart musically.

But I guess if you're going to only have one playable song in your entire game, and that one song plays in the menus and settings, then this isn't too shabby of a song to represent your entire game.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

It's The Old Give And Take

Game EXP: The Backrooms Game FREE Edition (VSD)

The Backrooms Game FREE Edition
Systems: Windows, SteamOS, Linux
Release Date: July 25, 2019
Publisher: Pie On A Plate Productions
Developer: Pie On A Plate Productions
Time Spent: 76 Minutes
Playlist on YouTube

There are a lot of backroom games.  Like, a lot a lot. So we're not going to compare how The Backrooms Game FREE Edition compares, stacks up, copies, or innovates the genre of liminal space walking simulators and instead focus on my inability to follow and/or remember instructions and how stress can distort perception (albeit without any actual scientific evidence, but actually!).

When I first started The Backrooms Game FREE Edition, I figured I was getting into something similar to POOLS or Dreamcore, where the emphasis was on nearly endless exploration.  What TBGFE really is is more akin to an old-fashioned arcade game where you try to get the highest score possible, or in this case, travel the furthest distance.  To progress further in this game, there are actions you have to perform to keep the world from breaking you and essentially dying, or no-clipping out of the backrooms.  

First, there's the mechanic the game tells you about as you start, to check your watch every 30 seconds.  But when you check your watch, you're also supposed to "Press E" to maintain your connection to reality.  My first couple of times playing, I didn't register this bit at the bottom.  Even on my first playthrough, I didn't check my watch for the first 150 seconds (2 minutes 30 seconds).  And then there are the rules that the game doesn't tell you until after you've failed and you've no-clipped.  Like it can be counterproductive and detrimental to your health/sanity/play time if you check your watch more frequently than every 30 seconds.

And this is where that handy and moderately complicated study from the National Institute of Health comes into play; although I haven't read it in its entirety because I only just found it while writing this article.  My hypothesis was that playing a stressful game, or at the very least being in a stressful situation, can distort your perception of time.  Someone might be pretty good at determining how long 30 seconds lasts if they're just sitting at a desk.  But put them into a stressful situation, and that could distort their perception regarding the flow of time.  What feels like 30 seconds could only turn out to be 20 or maybe 10 seconds.  I had thought about playing with a stopwatch set on my phone next to me, but that felt like cheating in a way I woudln't've felt too good about.

The other mechanics that the game throws out at the player are to "not look at it" whatever it is supposed to be; I'm not sure.  Unless part of it was whatever looked like it was dripping out of the ceiling, and I just walked right up to it.  Also, you're not supposed to look at or focus on the lights.  I only found this out on my third or fourth attempt as I thought that maybe looking at the lights instead of the shifting walls and moving floors would play merry hob with your sanity.  I wouldn't be surprised if there are several hidden mechanics that the game doesn't initially let you know about.  Like maybe you're not supposed to pass through doorways, or be sure to follow paths where you see a power outlet.  Maybe running for more than 3 seconds decreases your sanity?  Maybe running at all is a bad thing.

I really appreciate that in this FREE Edition of a game, there isn't an actual end, I think, and that it's focused on seeing how far you can get before you stop/die/no-clip/etc.  I do wonder how sensitive the rules are as you play.  For instance, is your sanity dinged less at the beginning if you check your watch every 20 seconds compared to if you've been playing for 5+ minutes?  If you check your watch at 28 seconds and the "Press E" prompt hasn't come back yet (presumably it reappears every 30 seconds), is it more beneficial to quickly check your watch again to press E, or should you wait another 30 seconds before checking your watch again?  On one hand, it would be interesting to watch someone who is fluent in this iteration's mechanics to see how far they get, but at the same time, it would be very boring because then nothing much would be happening.

As far as free games go, The Backrooms Game FREE Edition could've been a lot worse by not doing a lot, but the backrooms and liminal spaces as a concept are supposed to be sparse.  Maybe one day I'll fork over some real-world money and find out if there's more to this genre than endless halls, all the while staying true in concept and/or tone without turning it into something that is decidedly not the emptiness of the backrooms.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Your Ominous Presence So Profound

MIDI Week Singles: "Plains Theme" - Super Amazing Wagon Adventure (PC)

 

"Plains Theme" from Super Amazing Wagon Adventure on Windows & Xbox 360 (2012)
Composer: sparsevector
Album: Music from and Inspired by the Video Game Super Amazing Wagon Adventure 
Label: Self-Released
Publisher: sparsevector
Developer: sparsevector

Before writing this article, it had been 12 years since I last played Super Amazing Wagon Adventure although the music crops up every so often when I shuffle my music, and the sparsevector's soundtrack has stuck with me all these years, even if I never completed the game or made it very far.  I remember I could consistently make it from the first stage in the Forest to the second stage in the Plains, but not much further than that.

As for the song itself, there's so much I love about it.  It just exudes the synth pop of the 1980s. From the opening MIDI synthesizers, the popping drum machine, and even the melody sound like they were written 40 years ago, which perfect for a bullet/deer/Buffalo/unicorn shooter take on The Oregon Trail.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental 

Book Review: The Backrooms

 

The Backrooms

Author: Morgan Solis

Publisher: Self-Published

Date Published: July 9, 2021

I'll jump to the quick on this one.  

I enjoyed some aspects of The Backrooms by Morgan Solis, but there was a lot that I didn't like about it.  

I want this article to focus on this novel, and it's surprisingly difficult not to go down the rabbit hole of the history of the concept of "The Backrooms" as well as popular and influential interpretations of what the backrooms are since their inception as the barest of ideas from 2019.  But that's kind of the brilliance, that a single image can invoke an entire pseudo-folklore about something that was just the day before, nonexistent.  There's a pretty good distilled history of the backrooms on CreepyPasta that you're welcome to read rather than have me regurgitate it back here.

The first thing I didn't like about the book was not that it was written in the present tense, but the writing itself.  I'm obviously not claiming to be a literary critic or someone who could actually sit down and write something that wouldn't be panned for being poorly written.  To me, I felt that the writing just wasn't good.  Maybe it does have something to do with the present tense as it does take a while to get used to, but I've read several books in present tense, American Psycho, The Hate U Give, One Flew Over the Cuckcoo's Nest, and sections of Jane Eyre so it's not an entirely foreign concept for me.  I feel like the text comes across as amateurish, as if I'm not an amateur myself.

"Monday rolls around and the weather resembles a scene straight out of a dark film.  Gray skies and swirly dark clouds roll into town, creating the perfect setting for a cozy ambiance." (pg 11)

~

"The friends start compiling paperwork and resume editing, cracking jokes throughout the night about work and co-workers, exes, and their favorite TV shows.

Nancy tries on various potential work outfits and the apartment soon becomes a cheesy montage scene from a romantic comedy, minus the romance." (pg 12)

~

"They meet at the park that is located near Nancy's upcoming interview, she brings Leroy along." (pg 16)

~

"She notices that there are no windows in the entire lobby, yet the room is spacious enough to help one not feel confined.  The room also appears to be remarkably well-lit for having no windows or natural lighting." (pg 22)

~

"She shoots Nina another text venting a bit, it lags sending, but eventually sends." (pg 47)

Something I realized while pulling these lines of text was that most of my critique about the writing is from the first third of the book, mostly before Nancy makes her way to the office building for her interview, and only the last two quotes are from when she is starting to become lost and disoriented when her interviewer doesn't show up.  While Nancy's story about getting lost in the backrooms differs from the formula of no-clipping through walls, I actually prefer Moran Solis' approach here because I find the concept of "no-clipping" to be too video gamey for it to be believable in a psychological-horror story taking place in the real world.  If it's handled as a matter of perspective, as in Labyrinth, compared to a literal wall that you can walk through, like in the Harry Potter series, then I'll be happy.  Nancy being walked through a confusing series of turns through seemingly identical hallways and getting turned around is what I would imagine the transition to the backrooms to actually be like.

That being said, I was disappointed when, after waiting longer than she felt comfortable in an interview room, when no interviewer showed up, she effortlessly found her way back to the lobby where she started.

Nancy follows Fera down a long hall with office rooms on both sides, each marked with numbers but no names or titles... 

She leads Nancy down a long stuffy hallway, appearing to be much more dated than the sleek lobby.  Every door is identical, which Nancy notices is peculiar.

Fera takes Nancy down the hall, then to the left, then another left, then right, then another left.  Soon, Nancy loses track of how many turns they have taken.  She wonders how all those other office spaces could be busy at the moment...

After walking for several more minutes and taking countless left and right turns, Fera comes to a slow and unsure stop. (pg 34)

~

Finally, she gathers up her belongings and heads back toward the lobby, she trips while leaving the room, stubbing her toe rather violently.

Cursing under her breath and slightly flustered, she limps back to the lobby.

She walks for about a minute, then pauses. "Am I, lost?"

She then hears the music coming from the lobby, she speeds up her pace.

Fera's name tag is no longer on the front desk... (pg 35)

 

 I realize that this is still early on in the story, and having Nancy lost in the backrooms after only 35 pages wouldn't leave a lot of room for the story to develop in the real world.  However, events like the one above happen several more times in the story.  Nancy leaves the lobby to look for the interview room, finds it, then finds her way back to the lobby, and even eventually back downstairs to the front entrance, but the entrance is locked, and as she later finds out, people outside cannot see her inside the building.  Granted, finding yourself locked inside a large building as people walk by unbeknownst to your predicament would be terrifying, but it doesn't always come across that way through Morgan's writing.

Another thing that bothered me was the battery life on Nancy's phone.  We're told early on in Chapter 6 (page 43), after returning to the interview room, and sometime after noon, that Nancy is confused upon finding out that "...her battery is already depleted" when she opens her flip phone to play some games.  My reading of that line was that her battery level was probably around 100% when she left for her interview, and now, several hours later, is below 25%, maybe less.  I know from personal experience with a flip phone that if you had your WiFi on, but in a location where you couldn't get either a WiFi or phone signal, your battery would drain faster as the phone was actively looking for a WiFi signal.  I don't know if that was supposed to be the case here.  In Chapter 8, we're told that Nancy "...realizes the battery is shockingly low."  For me, this would be at or below 10% battery life.  In Chapter 9, "...her phone is near the end of its battery life..."  Less than 5%, maybe even as low as 2%?  Four pages later, Nancy closes her phone after checking the battery life so that she can "preserve energy."  Six chapters, 39 pages, and over 12 hours later, "Its battery is nearly dead, she turns its volume and brightness down to preserve energy."  At this point, I just couldn't with Nancy's phone anymore.  Maybe the battery level isn't really as low as Nancy thinks it is, but there didn't seem to be any indication that this was a hallucination; otherwise, the battery level might've been fluctuating and not just decreasing.

Luckily for my sanity, in Chapter 16, Nancy comes across a drawer full of phones seemingly from different eras, including ones that sound like smartphones with a touch display, which seem like they hadn't been invented yet.  This revelation I really liked as it places Morgan's backrooms outside of normal time and space.  That maybe Nancy is from 2003 and is questioning a phone from 2023 in a drawer along with phones from 1993 and 1973.  But because of dehydration, not having eaten for hours, fatigue, stress, and blood loss, Nancy's mental state begins fracturing as she cycles between being scared, angry, upset, frightened, annoyed, and complacent.  Her frequently changing states of being don't come across as poor writing, but more as someone who is unable to adequately cope with their situation.  And during a lot of these scenes, Nancy was not always lost in what we think of as the backrooms, those monotonous yellow walls and damp brown carpets with blinking overhead fluorescent lighting.

It feels kind of wrong to say that I thought that Morgan's writing fit better when Nancy wasn't doing well.  When Nancy begins questioning her own reality about why she was even in the building in the first place, and how the music from the lobby of the 14th floor metamorphoses from being just, "...an old dreamy song that Nancy guessed is from the 1940s era" (pg 32) to "...the only sound she hears...is a familiar tune, not quite familiar enough to sing along, but familiar enough to wonder" (pg174). 

I was satisfied with the end of the story as it felt appropriate.  The image of a woman having gone through the ordeal that Nancy went through, wondering if she should call to reschedule her interview as she walks down a hallway, fits well with the concept and execution of the backrooms.  Sure, if she had escaped and reported her events to any kind of authority, her sanity would be questioned, but it's not like the building and the business weren't already confirmed by her friend Nina, who walked with her when they scoped out the building at the beginning of the book.  And honestly, I would probably read a sequel about Nina becoming lost in the backrooms as she searches for her lost friend*.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

When the Darkness Gets In

*This made me think of the first Resident Evil movie.  I was pretty disappointed with a lot of the decisions that Paul W.S. Anderson made, especially coming off the brilliant Event Horizon.  Then Resident Evil ends with Alice draped in lab coat, armed with a shotgun taken from an abandoned cop car as the camera pulls back revealing an empty city in the midst of a massive zombie outbreak, and then there's a pair of bloody hand smears outside of a window 5+ stories up, and I want to know more about that particular incident.  What happened to that person that they thought climbing up and out of their window was the best option? What did they think was going to happen?  What happened to them?  And with that one shot, I knew that I wanted to see whatever the sequel was going to be.  With The Backrooms by Morgan Solis, Nina is those bloody handprints on the side of the building.

Game EXP: ELISE (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Elise through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

ELISE
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: December 12, 2024
Publisher: Stuart White
Developer: Stuart White
Time Spent: 2 Hours 54 Minutes
First Play Playlist on YouTube

When I first saw ELISE on Keymailer, I recognized that I was getting into a third-person survival-horror shooter with an obvious gameplay homage to the Resident Evil series, complete with visual and design references to Claire Redfield.  In ELISE, you play as the titular character (or is your friend Elise? That's not 100% clear based on the game description and the in-game text) as she awakens in a maze of basement-style tunnels and hallways filled with slow-moving and persistent zombies.  Armed with a handgun, a lead pipe, and disposable single-use daggers, it is Elise's purpose to escape the basement and find out why she was captured in the first place.  And maybe also discover the source of the zombie outbreak?  I didn't finish the game, which we'll get to down the line.

It took me several attempts before I was able to make any significant progress in ELISE, as I first tried playing on the Steam Deck, then on my laptop, and then back on the Steam Deck.  My first attempt led to a horrible failure on the part of the game; I could possibly blame myself, but that hardly seems likely.  Maybe?  I had initially thought about changing the resolution, but then decided that I'd stick with 1280x780, being the closest to the Steam Deck's native 1280x800.  I did change the game from Windowed Full Screen to just Full Screen, but that apparently did something to the overall resolution and messed up the screen resolution overall, and put a black bar through the middle of the screen.  I wasn't able to make any other changes in the settings after that, so I had to uninstall and reinstall the game, all the while hoping that my settings wouldn't be saved, which thankfully they weren't.

Once I got the game running, I noticed that on the "High" graphics settings, the game was only running around 14-18 fps while in the basement and still looked pretty grainy and pixelated.  I lowered the settings down to medium, and the game was able to run between 20-32 fps and seemed to smooth out the visuals, so I left it there.  But there ended up being a whole host of other technical issues that cropped up during my playthrough, both on the Steam Deck and on my laptop (which I already knew wasn't going to run the game very well, if at all).  The most obvious problem was that the game would freeze during loading screens or become unstuck during loading screens by bringing up the menu, but then the menu would be stuck, and I couldn't exit out of the menu and was forced to force-quit entirely.

Game design-wise, there were choices that I didn't enjoy.  I understand wanting to draw inspiration from Resident Evil by having an in-game explanation for having limited saves, so while Resident Evil used typewriter ribbons and typewriters, ELISE uses quarters and arcade machines, which, for some reason, are in a zombie-infested basement bunker complex.  During my entire time playing, I was only able to find one arcade machine and after saving for the last time, using up my last quarter, I realized I was going to stop playing altogether because when I came back to the game, I found that all of the enemies had respawned.  What annoyed the hell out of me, was that I had spent close to an hour exploring the basement, found it connected to a vast complex of interconnected hallways in a connected high-tech laboratory setting without finding another arcade cabinet (to save at), and ran all the way back to the near the beginning.  The thought of having to fight my way back to where I was after having used up so much ammunition and healing kits was the antithesis of fun.  This is why the last video from this playlist series only lasted just over four minutes and at 02:25, as I look through my inventory to make sure that I have keys and healing kits that I picked up during my last game, I feel that you can see me contemplating having to go through everything that I did in Part 3 all over again; mostly anyway.

So I decided to stop playing.  There were some fun moments and I didn't overly mind the less than crisp graphics or having to frequently shoot zombies again after felling them once so that they wouldn't surprise me by popping back up all over again.  I didn't mind the absurd ragdoll physics of the zombies after they died and their bodies turned into fleshy pretzels.  I didn't mind that the knife was a single-use defensive item.  I didn't mind the narrative of finding a massive laboratory system connected to a brick and mortar basement or how long both Elise and Hank must've been out to be taken this deep into such a large complex only be be placed in a dank cell.  I didn't even mind how frequently I was killing a zombie with the same face/body/clothes/skin, and I get it, that unique assets can be expensive when you're kill count numbers in the hundreds.  But what I couldn't get behind was the design choices that ultimately led me to stop playing altogether.  There's some potential here that would need a lot more work, but for me, it was the end of the line.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
When the Stars Lose Their Life

MIDI Week Singles: "Song C" - Gauntlet (NES)

 

"Song C" from Gauntlet on the Nintendo Entertainment System (1988)
Composer: Hal Canon
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Tengen
Developer: Tengen

Memory and the passage of time are a fickle thing.  I could have sworn that I wrote the MIDI Week Single article for "Treasure Room" a year or two back, thinking that I didn't need to feature another song from Gauntlet so close to the previous article.  But that article was from five years ago.  Surely the previous article for "Song A" was more recent than no, that was 11 god damn years ago!  So maybe we're doing Gauntlet music every five-ish years at this point?  

Maybe it's also some kind of commentary on the music itself, and at this point, I don't need to go into my personal history with Gauntlet.  Something that did surprise me while researching this article was that it appears that the music in the game is random, as a couple of the longplays I watched had different songs play for different levels.  In my mind, this is the music that I would hear in Room 2.  Maybe it's something about the layout of the room or the color palette, but something about this music harkens back to that, and I can't fully figure out why if the music is indeed random.  Maybe my memory is faulty as it has been over 30 years since I last played Gauntlet on the NES, but I'll be damned that this game had some great music.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

When I Get Too Drunk To Sing

Monthly Update: May, 2025

 

What have I been doing these last 30 days?  Huh.  Stuff, I guess.

I've been plodding through Fallout 4 and at times wonder how and why I don' just b-line through the main quest and finish the damn thing so I can move onto another 170+ hour game that isn't The Elder Scrolls Online.  Then I finish a quest adjacent to the main storyline, having to do with the Minutemen, and I get an achievement.  Sure, there's the little serotonin boost when that bleep-bloop sound effect pops up and that's nice and all, but it really sinks in after I've turned the game off and look at the Steam Global Achievements page and see that only 29.8% of players of Fallout 4 have gotten the "Old Guns" achievement by creating artillery placements at Fort Independence.  Or that only 14.8% of Steam players have completed the "Far From Home" questline that is the Far Harbor DLC.  Don't get me wrong, it's not the rarity of the achievement that is driving me to play more, but more having to do with that, based on this one number for this one quest, 70.2% of the 15,200,000 who have purchased and started Fallout 4 have ever completed this far into the Minutemen quests; maybe they are that universally hated?  To me, that's wild.  Sure, some of it could be chalked up to people playing offline and the achievement not being recorded/counted, or some other function of the game not working, and that information not being recorded/collected by Steam.  But yeah, wild.

I feel like I'm nearing the end of the main quest in the Morrowind DLC in The Elder Scrolls Online, and I wouldn't be surprised if I take a little break after that happens.  Being able to explore Vvardenfell in a higher resolution than the original 22-year-old classic was one of the primary drivers behind starting that DLC in the first place.  Maybe I'll also start the Elseweyr DLC, too, since that's a region that's never been explored in the mainline series outside of Arena.  The same could be said for the Black Marsh DLC and the Aldmeri Dominion quest line, and it delves into both the Summerset Isles (not counting the Summerset DLC) and Valenwood.  Shit y'all, I think I'm stuck doing another 300+ hours in this game.

As of this writing, no, I didn't snag a Switch 2 pre-order.  I did briefly try when Best Buy went live on the 24th, but I seemed to have been sitting in a queue long enough that my phone timed out, and I got kicked back to the store page.  I wasn't bummed since I really couldn't afford it at the time.  I think if I do order one within the year, it'll likely be once Nintendo sends out their order form for people who signed up to register for pre-orders (although now it looks like they'll just be regular orders at this point), but I guess we'll find out by May 8th when order forms may or may not go out.  I mean, I didn't buy the Switch until it had already been out for four months, so it's not like I've ever felt like I needed to buy a console at launch.  I think it's more likely that I buy a new laptop since this one I'm using I bought back in 2020, although the only major thing wrong with it is that the sound driver is crap; always has been too.

I know I said last month that I wasn't really excited about the release schedule for this second season of Andor, but I would like to say that I've changed my mind on the three episodes dropped every Tuesday for four weeks.  Granted, Conklederp and I aren't binge watching all three episodes at once, instead, we're spacing them out over three nights.  So by the time this article goes to the proverbial printers, we'll have finished episode five (early night on Wednesday so we only watched the fifth episode on Thursday night).  I do really like that each three-episode arc encapsulates a series of events that happen during a year, or at least that's how it's currently established.

Oh, and I just picked up the Watch Along edition of Godzilla Minus One because it contains both the -0 (or minus color) edition and a new commentary specific to the minus color edition.  I figure that if I'm ever going to buy a Godzilla movie, it's going to be the one that nearly brought me to tears while I was donating platelets last year; not because it's not masculine to cry during a Godzilla movie, but because it would've been inconvenient to have one of the phelbologists constantly wiping away my tears while hooked up to the platelet machine.

Let's call it there for now.  I'm sure I could think of more things that have and will happen, but there's plenty of time to mill that over for the next 31 days.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Riding the Grid, Riding the Word