Game EXP: The Shore (VSD)

 

The Shore

Systems: Windows, HTC Vive

Release Date: February 19, 2021

Publisher: Dragonis Games

Developer: Ares Dragonis

Time Spent: 4.7 Hours

The Shore is a relatively short first-person exploration game that combines walking sim with minor puzzles where you occasionally have to run away from whatever is chasing you during a handful of sequences.  That is until you acquire an artifact of cosmic origin that can be used to activate doors and stun certain creatures who would like to erase your existence.  It is also one of the better video game depictions of a whole cacophony of Lovecraftian mythos I have played.

I actually had another article about halfway completed, but then like a lot of articles about Lovecraftian games, they got bogged down in histories of cosmic mythos heavily peppered with my own feelings of inadequacies in writing about the topic.  There were so many references, both implied and explicit, to different stories by Lovecraft (such as The Mountains of Madness, Dagon, A Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Color Out Of Space, The Call of Cthulhu, etc) that I had a hard time trying to find a common thread between them all.  I also found myself being accidentally contradictory praising the developer Ares Dragonis for what felt like a focused story, but at the same time having so many different creatures from so many different stories that the overall story no longer felt as cohesive and coherent as I declared it to be.

So instead of all of that, we are going to limit today's article to a few more words, and then a handful more visuals from the game, which is really what grabbed me for the six or so months that I have been following the Instagram account for The  Shore.

So while I did enjoy about 91% of the game, there were quite a few encounters in the late game that had me seriously questioning if I was actually going to be able to finish.  As mentioned earlier, The Shore starts out as a walking sim akin to Dear Esther, but there is at first a brief event where you have to actually run away from a creature or be killed.  I did die the first time because I was not expecting something to actually run at me, but the second time I was able to escape.  I felt that this was to introduce the mechanic that there are going to be things that will hunt and kill you, and whoo-boy does that become all there nearly is in the last quarter of the game.

Once you enter this section of that game, it feels like all you are doing is wandering in a linear fashion from one strange-looking room to another punctuated by a spawning young from Shub-Niggurath.  While I could not find a way to kill one of the Thousand Young, you could use your cosmic weapon to temporarily stun them just long enough to run away around a corner before you had to stop and stun them again once they were close enough.  Using this cosmic weapon was also how you unlocked doors and I use the term "door" loosely here.  All of this would frequently happen in a maze of hallways and fleshy columns/structures, so when you died and respawned back at the checkpoint/entrance, you had to quickly decide if you wanted to try running the same way where you died in the hopes of finding an exit or attempting another path to find one.

Other than these frantic and frustrating moments of running and dying and running again and dying again, along with a few poorly-placed and designed triggers/buttons that I had to look up a walkthrough for, I really liked what Ares Dragonis has done here with Lovecraft's cosmic horror mythos and successfully managed to create a sense of scale that I don't know if I have experienced before.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Pretty Soon I Can't Fit In My Speedos

P.S.    And it played and looked great on the Steam Deck (as I'm sure that I wouldn't be able to run it on Ultra settings on my laptop).

I'm still not 100% sure what this was supposed to be referencing if anything at all.

Can't have a Lovecraft game with ol' faithful.

This scene alone is why I want to play this game in VR.
Here's what happened in-game.

Game EXP: Inside (NS)

 

INSIDE

Systems: Windows, iOS, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: June 29, 2016

Publisher: Playdead

Developer: Playdead

Time Spent: ~5-6 Hours

I played INSIDE over the course of about 24 hours.  The first night I played from around 12 am until roughly 3:30 am, both a testament to the game itself and the battery longevity of the Switch OLED; and even then it was only down to about 15%.  That next afternoon, I played for a couple of hours (after a brief look-up on how to solve a particular puzzle because I again was overthinking every element of the puzzle except the obvious solution) and then finished it later that evening.  I was a little confused about the meaning of the ending, of which I have since learned that there are two, but I agree with the general consensus of what everything led to and what it meant.

Just a brief warning, the game does involve a child being put into deadly situations not dissimilar to Playdead's first game LIMBO, but less fantastical and more realistically dystopian where giant spiders are replaced by packs of guard dogs and automated machines akin to the Sentinels from The Matrix if they were attached to tracks and rails.  I had suggested to Conklederp that it probably wasn't a great game to watch me play since I am not a pro gamer and there were plenty of times where the boy character was killed over a dozen different ways.  While I will not be showing screenshots of the character dying, it will be brought up to a degree as part of game mechanics and the like.  So just a heads up that if that's not something you want to read about, then there are obviously no hard feelings there.

INSIDE feels like the natural evolution from LIMBO, where you played an unnamed boy looking for his lost sister, here, you play as an unnamed boy running from various antagonists straight out of an episode of The X-Files.  Like LIMBO, you also start out in a forest solving minor environmental puzzles that only require you to move and jump, and pretty early on, the threat comes not from the sides like a typical side-scrolling platformer, but from the background as men with flashlights and guns exit cars and patrol the surrounding woods looking for you.  Why they are looking for you is the primary crux for nearly the first half of the game as you run through various environments like woods, highway offramps, cornfields, pig farms, and eventually to industrial areas filled with your first big jump in puzzle mechanics.

Once you reach this section of the game, you start controlling other human-like creatures called husks (more on them later) through the use of a psychic-like helmet that lets you either move them left or right, or they follow you.  At this point, the puzzles become a bit more complex because not only are you moving around the characters and making sure that they stay out of danger, but you also now have other people to think about and how they interact with the environment.  After this section (which includes the one puzzle I had to look up, although it did not involve the husks) you continue through the industrial-like area although it takes on a more scientific-lab-like appearance and there is a lot of water.

The water stages are where the story starts to get really strange and where I lost the thread of the plot until I finished the game and looked up what actually happened.  Thankfully, these areas were not as problematic as your stereotypical water stage and were actually quite fun.  There was a fair amount of "figure it out as you go," but since there were so few buttons that actually functioned in the game, determining how a submersible worked and its additional functions was quite easy.  There were a couple of sections that required significant amounts of dying to figure out how I was supposed to solve particular puzzles how a black-haired swimming creature moved and how I was supposed to manipulate the environment to block their path.

The last quarter of the game is really where things kind of went off rails, or at least what I thought I understood what actually consisted of the rails in this game.  Without getting too heavy into spoilers (and because I didn't take too many pictures specifically to avoid spoilers).  Most of these areas were in a lab-type setting which I was thankful to actually be in after the water levels and the water-based puzzles which often required a different type of problem-solving process than the first half of the game.  It was here that I felt pretty confused and just pushed forward, solving puzzles not because I understood what was going on, but because I thought maybe I might have a better understanding at some later point.  But, there were a lot of very cool set pieces that I don't think I have experienced before in a game, even if the avenue was some of the strangest I have played and seen.

Then the game ended.  When I looked up the different interpretations of the story, I nodded along thinking, "Yeah, okay, that makes sense."  Then I saw that there was an alternate ending, which again, kind of made sense.  But what are these orbs that everyone is talking about?  I don't recall ever collecting, let alone seeing anything that could have been described as an orb that could have been collected.  And after watching the first minute of a video, I know for certain that I never collected or interacted with anything that looked like that.  Scratch that, I did find the fourth orb but must have forgotten about it because nothing immediately came from doing whatever interacting with the orb did.  And while I do enjoy alternate or hidden endings, I think I feel a little miffed/bitter because of how well hidden these orbs were and that you needed to collect all of them in a single playthrough to see something potentially integral to fully understanding the full story.

Taking INSIDE without the stupidly-well-hidden alternate ending, I really did enjoy the game and think it's a great follow-up to LIMBO without feeling that Playdead is a one-trick pony and I still don't fully understand how/why Polygon could put both of these games together and say that they're "essentially the same experience."  That would be like saying that Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 are "essentially the same experience" because in both games you play as a plumber in a platformer as you rescue a princess from a large cow-like turtle crime boss.  LIMBO might be easier to stomach for some people who would rather not watch a more realistic-looking child be killed in dozens of ways over and over (because I'm a bad gamer), but I enjoyed the storytelling in INSIDE a lot more.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

The Wound In Me Is Pouring Out

P.S.  Oh, and the game played wonderfully on the Switch, with zero crashes, and no noticeable frame rate drops.  I was actually pretty surprised and how smoothly everything ran and looked during the entire game.  Just wanted to throw that out there for people who are looking at various platforms.

First Impressions: Signalis (NS)

Signalis

Systems: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One & Series S/X, and Windows

Release Dates: October 27, 2022

Publisher: Humble Games

Developer: Rose-engine Games

I heard a bit about Signalis from Dr. Potts a while back and so in June, when I saw the game on sale in Nintendo's eShop and not hearing anything about shortcuts and downgrades taken with the Switch version, I thought this would be my preferred platform, although Steam Deck was a close second.

What I love about Signalis is that it feels like a very pure survival horror game.  There is a lot of confusion as to what is going on story-wise, but it feels the same way that Amnesia: The Dark Descent felt, that by the end of the game, everything was going to make sense; or at least nearly everything.  Like the original Resident Evil playing as Chris, there is an emphasis on inventory management, often coming across items that you cannot pick up because your inventory is full so you would need to either run back to the storage box (which functions the same here in that all storage boxes magically contain your items no matter where you access the storage box) or decide to use a consumable to make room.  Ammunition is also in short supply with enemies not dropping additional rounds, which makes every single shot count, but thankfully there is an optional ability to stomp your enemies for the final kill otherwise they pop right back up and you have to shoot them another one to three times (on average anyway).

Being a survival horror game, I knew that this was going to be an enjoyable stressful experience.  I tend to like my survival horror games in this vein as I don't want to be stressed out the entire time either because of game mechanics, difficulty, or any combination thereof.  In the Resident Evil remake from 2002 when the devs first introduced the Crimson Heads, the zombies that would reanimate as more aggressive and faster versions of their previous form, it offered a new take on zombies in this genre.  Signalis does something different with the enemies that you kill.  After a predetermined amount of time, they will come back to life which means you either have to kill them all over again, using up more ammo, or run around them on your way through the next door; and thankfully they haven't figured out how to open doors.  However, unlike the Resident Evil remake, these risen enemies do not stay dead after you kill them a second time.

From what I read online, they continue to come back as a way to prod the player to keep moving and to prevent them from staying in one area too long.  That's all well and good if you know what you're doing and what you're looking for, but if you're someone like me who tends to overthink puzzles (just ask The Kid on a recent conundrum I found myself in Icewind Dale dealing with a suit of armor and some priests of Ilmater) which leads me back-and-forth across the map multiple times for longer than what might normally be prescribed.  Now, I know that I'm not that far into the game, maybe the third or fourth new area (the one with the flooded bathroom that you drop down from) so there might be an additional consumable item you can use to permanently put down the enemies so they don't come back, and I have gotten pretty good at avoiding enemies altogether so I am not really killing every enemy; and I don't think that there is enough ammo in the game to actually do that.

All of this is to say, that I am really enjoying Signalis although I am finding it more stressful than usual because I know for certain that I am going to run out of time and the enemies I killed are going to come back before I figure out how to earn/gain/find all of the keys I need to open the door to find out whatever is beyond that foyer-to-the-boardroom-looking-room.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Bring Corruption to All that You Touch

First Impressions: Remothered: Tormented Fathers (NS)

Remothered: Tormented Fathers

Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: January 30, 2018

Publisher: Darril Arts

Developer: Stormind Games

I admittedly did not know much before going into Remothered: Tormented Fathers, and what I knew was from one of the release trailers on the eShop.  I knew about Clock Tower as a survival horror game but have not played it.  So I watch this trailer featuring all of this third-person survivaliness and am genuinely taken with how much I love a lot of what I saw.  What the trailer does not show you, are many of the game mechanics and the underlying way in which the game operates once you get to Chapter 3.

The first two chapters were fine, depending on what you are looking for in a survival horror game.  There was a fair amount of set-up as far as the characters go and revealing the mystery about Celeste Felton, the adopted daughter of Dr. Richard Felton back in 1981.  There is a lot of walking since the playable character of Rosemary Reed is wearing sensible heels, although she can break into a bit of a slow sprint with the press of the R shoulder button. But Rosemary essentially walks from her parked car down a forested dirt road to the house of Dr. Felton, walks around the grounds of the house, walks around the house after being let inside, and walks back through the house after being escorted outside and waiting until night when Dr. Felton's nurse leaves.  Then she walks around inside until you are discovered at the end of Chapter 2.

Then Chapter 3 starts, where you are being stalked around the house.  You can sneakily creep through hallways and rooms, but if the stalker [unnamed for the moment to reduce spoilers] sees you, they sprint like a madman armed with a sickle, which they are.  Once spotted you have only a couple of options, and none of them are good.  You can run away, but since you're wearing those sensible heels, your running speed is slower than your stalkers.  If you do manage to make it to another room you had better hope that there is a closet to hide in or a bed/couch to hide under before a slightly confusing mini-game (of sorts) starts which decides if your rapid breathing causes you to be found.  You can throw a distractionary object at the stalker, but the throwing mechanic is cumbersome since you have to essentially cock your arm back with the ZL trigger then release with the ZR trigger, and even then, hope you hit your target.

Once you are caught, because you will likely be caught, one of two things will happen.  Either you will be hit with the sickle taking damage but not killing you, and I think you can take up to three hits before you are killed; oh, and your overall speed also decreases after every hit too, so there's that to worry about too.  The other thing is that you enter a QTE where you button-mash your way to safety where you use up your one equipable defense weapon (which is different than your distraction items), which gives you a handful of seconds to run away to try and hide somewhere else.

Knowing what I know now in Chapter 3, I understand the unspoken emphasis on giving the player nearly unfettered access to a large portion of the house in the first two chapters, and why it is up to you to actually find the people you need to talk to instead of having them come directly to you.  The purpose is to have the player familiarize themself with the layout of the house.  To note where hallways and staircases lead.  Where there is an abundance of items used for distractionary purposes.  Where the dumb waiter is located on each floor even though it is currently not in use.  At the time, in Chapters 1 and 2, I was confused as to why there were so many objects littered around the house that were labeled as a distractionary item and what that really meant.  I could open a drawer and see a pair of knitting needles, or more often than not, nothing at all.  There was also no one immediately around to talk to or interact with until I found Dr. Felton up in his study.  Had I only known that I should have been creating a mental map of the layout of the house?

At the point where I am in the game, there is zero horror about trying to sneak around this mansion away from the stalker.  There is no terror when I hear them running and the screen goes red to let me know that I have been spotted.  There is no fear about trying to escape.  There is only annoyance as I wait to be killed so I can start over again trying to get to the door on the first floor because that is where the key I picked up out of a bathrobe will work.  I have tried many times with little success in trying to create distractions like setting a clock alarm to go off to draw the attention of the stalker so that I can get around their location, only to have them seemingly spawn right outside the door of the room I was in and start attacking me.  This isn't fun, and not in the way survival-horror games are supposed to be fun.

I find myself at a mental crossroads right now.  I have the key that leads to another area of the house that I have not been to before and I know where that door is.  The problem is that the stalker always seems to be hovering around that area.  I have tried creating a distraction, like throwing a vase and then hiding in a closet, but the stalker always b-lines it to me and I have a split second to figure out the QTE to not be spotted.  I know that I could probably just create a noise, then hit the stalker with something to stun them, then run to the double doors, unlock them, and then try to find a place to hide, but if that fails and I start back where I was before, it is going to be a very demoralizing experience to the point where I don't know if I will pick up that game again at least for another year or so and at that point I will likely just start the game over from the beginning.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
A Shadow Just As Dark As Your Past

First Impressions: SILENT HILL: Ascension

SILENT HILL: Ascension

Platforms: Android, iOS, Browser

Release Date: October 31, 2023

Publisher: Konami, Genvid Entertainment, LLC

Developer: Bad Robot Production, Behaviour Interactive, dj2 Entertainment

I had another article written that started out as a First Impressions but ended up ballooning into what would amount to a Game EXP article for a serial mobile app online TV series.  By the time I realized that I wasn't going to have that article ready for today, I had decided that I needed to either do a serious rewrite, or just start all over again.  So now we're here, starting over.

The SILENT HILL: Ascension app can be broken down into two components.  First, there is the actual show, where you watch characters do things, you know, like a regular TV show.  Normal and creepy things happen to them and they react.  The show itself, I am actually quite enjoying.  The story follows three different and as yet not fully connected characters as strange events begin to happen around them in a format that wouldn't have been out of place airing on Sunday nights on FOX before X-Files in the mid-late 90s.  Because all of the characters are CG, a fair amount of the physical and voice acting can come across as stilted, but when viewed as a cutscene from a game, it feels about on par with what I would expect out of a survival horror video game franchise in 2023.

How the characters react is the "interactive media" aspect of the show that leads directly into the second component.  Every day, characters are faced with a decision to make that is influenced by people voting for any of the three options using in-game currency called Influence Points (represented by the Norse runes  ᚾ ᚹ, presumably because they look like the Latin letters I and P, not because they represent N and W sounds respectively, otherwise the runes would look like ᛁᛈ), that you earn by completing various daily tasks such as watching new episodes, completing mini-game puzzles, or by giving Konami et. Al. money specifically for more Influence Points or by way of a Battle Pass-type system.  There is a lot that I do not like in this second camp, which ended up being 80.55% of what I had originally written.

What it boils down to for me, is that I like short daily episodes, each one lasting a couple of minutes, and I would hope that a full uncut release of this entire series is released at a later date, separate from the app itself, and I dislike nearly everything else.  I am not a fan of the monetization of basic cosmetics for your avatar like hair type/color and skin color/facial structure.  I have also had a pretty negative experience with the app as cosmetic items that I have unlocked through using IP have disappeared from my account and often the game will not register that I have claimed a goal (by logging in, voting in a poll, etc) and will have to perform the same actions multiple times.

Actual Show: Decent enough to be good.

Everything Else: Bad.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
In the Rivers of Grief We are Drowning

MIDI Week Singles: "The Sewer Snake" - Nightmare Creatures (N64)

 

"The Sewer Snake" from Nightmare Creatures on the Nintendo 64, PlayStation & Windows (1997)
Composer: Frédéric Motte
Album: Nightmare Creatures (Original Game Soundtrack)
Label: elmobo
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Kalisto Entertainment

Nightmare Creatures is a game that I started one afternoon back in 1999 and probably was not given a fair chance as I played for maybe 10-15 minutes before I stopped.  All I remember was that I did not like the control setup and I think it might have been too actiony for what I was looking for in a survival horror game.  With that in mind, I never made it out of the opening area in the streets of London, so I never ended up going up against any bosses, sewers, or otherwise.

When I watched a playthrough of the Sewer Snake boss fight, I was a little disappointed in how the audio mix felt very muted; it could have also been the settings with the music lower than the sound effects.  But it was difficult to hear the amazing organ intro over the sound of the creature roaring and belching fire throughout the stage.  Once the drums and guitars come in, at around 10 seconds, the music becomes even more difficult to discern from all of the other sound effects happening, which is really sad because this is some great high-energy boss music.  And good luck even hearing anything of that baseline in-game either.  

Just a fun theme to play if you find yourself in the sewers and have to battle a 12+ foot tall multiheaded fire-breathing snake.  Just another typical Wednesday night in 1834 London.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Draw the Line in the Horizon

MIDI Week Singles: "Island Theme" - The Shore (PC)

 

"Island Theme" from The Shore on Windows & HTC Vive (2021)
Composer: Thanos Zampoukas
Album: The Shore Soundtrack
Label: Self Released
Publisher: Ares Dragonis
Developer: Ares Dragonis

What I like about this theme is there is a mixed feeling of mystery, wonder, and optimism, which is what you want at the beginning of The Shore when things seem slightly out of place but at least still somewhat normal.  Well, more normal anyway than before things start getting really weird depending on how much you end up exploring.  It's just a nice unobtrusive theme to have in the background, and occasionally comes to the front with an emotional crescendo, all accompanied by the haunting vocals of Andriana Kalochristianaki.

Another reason why I feel like I was drawn to this theme was that the first half really reminded me of the piece "Credit Where Credit Is Due" from the first season of LOST, which has that same sense of mystery and wonder.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Game EXP: Silent Hill, Blasphemous, & Heroes of the Monkey Tavern (PSP & NS)

Silent Hill
Systems: PlayStation, PlayStation Portable
Release Date: February 23, 1999
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Team Silent

Play Time: Unknown

[The Reason:  Well, there are two reasons why this particular article languished, and that is because I actually started it back before we moved over from TwoBoysAndTheirBlog in a partially written state.  The second reason was that I did not really know how to approach this game and to talk about it.  I apparently did not do everything I needed to do thereby not seeing everything in the game, or at least a lot of story elements and so I felt that my experience in Silent Hill was very limited.  I also found that I was frequently comparing the game to the 2006 film.  So let us just gloss over all of the dynasty talk regarding this first game in the franchise and jump right into it.]

I picked up Silent Hill back when it was still available on the PSP through Sony's PSN store; sadly that is no longer the case.  I had wanted to play the original Silent Hill for some time and this seemed like the most feasible way of getting to play this wonderful granddaddy of a survival horror video game from 1999 and unless Konami decides to rerelease this game in some format, this might be the only way I could play it without emulation.  I had previously dabbled a bit with Silent Hill Origins on the PSP, but I gave up after just under two hours; I plan on restarting that game though eventually.  But we're here to talk about the first iteration of the Silent Hill franchise.

Apologies for the poor picture quality.  My other camera cheated on me with my phone.

For the most part I enjoyed Silent Hill, although I was pretty confused on a number of points, most of all why Harry and Cheryl were visiting the town of Silent Hill in the first place.  I did feel that a lot of the time I was simply running from one creature or another while outside and not really able to take in any of the sites to get a feel for the town.  I could not say how much environmental storytelling was going on and I am certain that I missed a lot because when I finished the game, I was notified that I had reached the "Bad Ending."  This apparently meant that everyone was dead at the end of the game.

Assuming that my PSP survives the next decade, I would like to return to the game to play through it again, unless it gets remade or HDified in a way that preserves the experience of visual limiting fog and running away from nearly everything on the screen.  Maybe if the Silent Hill 2 remake from Bloober Team is received well, Konami will give them a chance on the first Silent Hill.  Or maybe give it to another studio who are adept in retro-style survival horror games.

<0>

Blasphemous

Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Linus, Mac OS, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: September 10, 2019

Publisher: Team17

Developer: The Game Kitchen

Time Spent: 31H 30M

[The Reason:  I actually had a fair amount written about Blasphemous that I kept adding to, reworking, editing, and ultimately not being happy with.  When I stopped, I was about halfway through everything I had written, roughly 900 words, before I actually got to talking about playing the game.  There were ramblings about the Kickstarter, what I had heard about the game along with supporting articles/websites, and different builds and patches for the game before I even started playing.  I also got caught up in the world and the lore trying to find all of the correct names and terminology for things so I at least sounded like I knew what I was talking about.  And then, once I actually got to writing about the game, I found myself writing what was turning out to be a very unhelpful and poorly planned out walkthrough]. I would like to think that I am 100% the target audience for Blasphemous.]

I grew up Catholic, but around the age of 20, I decided that the frequency that I was not going to church on Sundays (mainly due to college marching band trips), that I was feeling that I was not missing something from my life.  So I have a bit of a background in Catholicism and Christianity but do not even think of trying to quiz me on Bible lore or character arcs because even while attending catechism, I could not tell you who was begetting whom or what the significance of the mustard seed was.  As a kid, my favorite story in the Bible, and the handful of Bible-lite books I had growing up was the story of the beheading of John the Baptist, mainly because more often than not, there was an artistic depiction of John the Baptist's head on a plate.  Jump ahead to my high school years when I discovered the heavy tome of paintings by Hieronymous Bosch at my Grandma's house and I was very much captivated.  I think it was around this time too that I read The Inferno and loved how creative the book was with the various punishments for the different types of sins.  I got a lot of Bosch and Dante vibes from Blasphemous.

So Blasphemous played a lot like a 2D side-scrolling Dark Souls with different levels of customization.  Instead of different types of weapons, you had Sword Hearts and rosary beads as accessories that could modify your damage given and received, health recovery, movement speed, spells, etc.  Depending on how many rosary beads you had found, and which beads you had equipped could greatly affect your own experience playing the game.  Additionally, there have been several overhauls of the game since its initial release, altering the map, voice acting, color palettes, enemy placement, difficulties, and a lot of other changes.  This made talking about my own experience playing difficult in that I felt that I would have to talk about specific versions of the game being played and what I had equipped while going through specific areas, which would often change depending on what types of obstacles I faced.

There were also a lot of included DLC expansions that were pre-installed in the Switch version that expanded different areas of the maps and often included option bosses.  While I did explore as much as I could and even though I did complete Miriam's challenge, I do not think I took out any of the additional bosses as I found them to be discouragingly difficult.  I probably could have played around with what rosary beads and Mea Culpa Hearts I had equipped to find the best combination (or just looked it up online), but I eventually gave up on them to just go and beat the game.  Overall, there were plenty of times that I felt underskilled and overpowered just making my way through areas taking as little damage as possible, but just like Dark Souls, it was all about actual out-of-game experience that made me a better player and better able to enjoy the game.

So yes, Blasphemous was a fun, albeit very difficult at times game, with an amazing sense of hypocritical religious lore baked into the world that I devoured while not always fully understanding.  the music was great too, but you likely already knew that.  And now there is Blasphemous 2, which I am obviously excited about; but I may need to read a lore retrospective.

<o>

Heroes of the Monkey Tavern

Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch*

Release Date: September 26, 20216

Publisher: Monkey Stories

Developer: Monkey Stories

Time Spent: Unknown

[The Reason: I honestly am not 100% certain why I never published this article.  I think part of it was that I had accidentally deleted or lost a lot of the screenshots I took apart from the two that I have included below and I just got kind of lost in trying to figure out what to write.  So I have decided to include, almost in full everything I had previously written, but since we already did a First Impressions article, I think you kind of get the gist of this game and if it would be something up your alley, or down your dungeon, or up your tower. . .moving on.]

It's been [years since] I finished Heroes of the Monkey Tavern.  If you are unfamiliar with Heroes of the Monkey Tavern, I would recommend reading the First Impressions article we posted at the beginning of the year, which contains most of the pertinent information about the game, graphics, controls, and musings during half of my first playthrough.  In the end, I traveled up 10 floors of an oddly designed tower to face the final boss and be showered in gold coins.

By the time I finished, I admit that I still had not mastered accidentally having characters drink their health or mana potions when my thumb accidentally grazed the left Joy-Con joystick.  There were also times when fighting that I would accidentally hit the wrong left or right shoulder button and rotate 90 degrees instead of selecting the next character.  There were several puzzles that involved spikes, fire, or both that I would probably still be stuck at if I had not lucked out and immediately saved right after making it out of the room alive (before having to head back through the same room.)

*I just wanted to mention that since I bought the game and last played it (2019 I think), the game has been delisted on the Nintendo eShop and I could find no explanation as to why.  It is still available on Steam though.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Bow Down to the Infernal Lord

Game EXP: Alone in the Dark Prologue (PC)

Alone in the Dark Prologue: Grace

Systems: Windows, Steam Deck

Release Date: May 25, 2023

Publisher: THQ Nordic

Developer: Pieces Interactive

Time Spent: 15 minutes

I have some experience with the original Alone in the Dark, originally released on DOS by Infogrames back in 1992, and played that game the agonizing way it was meant to be played, with arrow keys and the spacebar as an action button (which you had to pause to select what action you wanted to perform when you unpaused and returned to the game).  The point is that I am somewhat familiar with the Hartwood family, the Dercerto estate, and the general vibe that this game very successfully was establishing.  I love survival horror games that can convincingly incorporate non-combat gameplay and at the same time, fool me into believing that I am not playing a point-and-click adventure game.

The Alone in the Dark Prologue is a short introduction to this reimagined world from the original game with the full game being released later this year.  Before starting the prologue, I specifically did not look up information about the game apart from it being essentially a remake of the original Alone in the Dark, just to make sure that it was not going the route of the 2008 remake by turning it into a first-person shooter, or the 2005 movie by just being apparently bad (both of which take place in the present day).  Not that I needed the game to take place in the 1920s, but I find that it helps with this kind of story by limiting the types of resources the player can use in the world, although there are obvious exceptions in games like Outbreak and Layers of Fear: Inheritance.  I spent 15 minutes total with this demo, and that was watching all cutscenes, exploring every available room, talking to every person I could find, and interacting with everything that gave me an "A" button.  Sure there was no combat, no equipable items apart from the one key I found that immediately went into an invisible inventory that I could not pull up.  And once it was clear that I was going to be playing as Grace, a child no more than 12 years old, I was not expecting her to be wielding crowbars or touting a six-shooter.

What I found interesting about this prologue is that it really is just a prologue and less like a demo of the full game, designed to set the tone of the full game which releases on October 23rd of this year, so I cannot say if this short story will be included or will be a separate entity altogether.  It is not so much a demo in the traditional sense that you might expect from Street Fighter 6, System Shock, or Gal Guardians: Demon Purge in that all you did here was walk around, talk to people, look at things, and unlock a door.  Sure there were context events that happened, but I would not say that I experienced all of the functions or mechanics of the game enough to say that I know what to expect from the full game.

While the main game does not currently have a Steam Deck rating, the prologue is rated as unknown compatibility, but I did not have any issues playing the game the three times I booted it up; the first time for my playthrough, and the other two times to get a couple of pictures I missed.  The game, by default, set all of the graphical sliders to High and Ultra, so I decided to leave them as such.  The game ran fine, although I probably could have turn down the settings for a smoother experience, but there were no hiccups with long load times or stuttering between gameplay and cinematics.  The graphics were about what I was expecting considering this is not an AAA studio, but I do not know if I would want to trust the Alone in the Dark IP to a AAA studio with the end goal being board member profits and not the customer's experience.  What it really boils down to, is that I was very happy with this prologue and how it ran on the Steam Deck, and if the full game runs as well as this did, I will be very happy come October.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
So It Shall Be Written

P.S.  I just wanted to throw in that it appears that, at least in this one instance, that the developers utilized functioning mirrors, or at least a trick to give the impression that mirrors are functional in this game.  I actually do not know how the technology works for mirrors to be a thing in video games, and I am sure that there are ways around it so that the game is not actually generating a mirror image of what the camera sees based on where both the character and camera are in relation to the mirror in the stage.  Yeah, like I know what I am talking about.