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Our hero certainly has a...unique voice...to his writing. Not sure if I like it better than a blankface hero.
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May 31, 2014 03:31
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Since I'm not getting a PS4 anytime soon, this game has always been a bit of a curiosity to me. I'm excited to see what other fun this madhouse holds--and whether the gameplay ever involves more than sneaking around in the dark.
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Jun 2, 2014 06:05
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It may stand to reason that whoever is aiding Walker in his "containment" procedures may be equipped with firearms to that purpose. I mean, we must assume that there's some big freaky monster buried underneath the place or even more twisted inmates that need the threat of bullets to keep in line.
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Jun 2, 2014 20:09
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More importantly, how the hell does Miles's handwriting not suffer from a lack of an index finger? The ring, sure, whatever, but your index finger is arguably the most important finger next to your thumb, he's writing remarkably clearly holding a pen with three fingers.
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Jun 27, 2014 04:22
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1stGear posted:Its actually possible to kill the water monster by just standing on a box and chucking enough poo poo at it. Amnesia relied heavily on the player playing in good faith essentially and not trying to peek behind the curtain, which is why you get the spiel at the beginning of the game about how its supposed to be more about immersion than winning and the developers did everything possible to keep you moving along. Once you get past the illusion, the game falls apart real fast. Did Penumbra manage to avoid that? Penumbra seemed to have more 'mechanics' than Amnesia seems to (and since I play on consoles exclusively I've not played either game so I'm basing this on Let's Plays). Like you could technically kill enemies with a pick axe, but only the dogs since the alien mutant whatevers were...you couldn't, I guess, I dunno.
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Jun 27, 2014 16:21
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davidspackage posted:I really liked the bit where you fled into a dead-end room to hide from Walker in the one closet that was in there, and he immediately found you. I think I literally said "oh come on, there's just one closet!", but videogame experience still made me expect he wouldn't check the closet. I was also impressed by that, until he just drops you to the floor and lets you run away while bellowing pointlessly. I mean, he's a trained soldier who apparently retains some semblance of a mind--enough to be issuing a containment order, after all. He had you on the floor, why didn't he stomp your brains in? You didn't even hurt him, so there's no excuse.
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Jun 27, 2014 19:45
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DumbRodent posted:Because dying from something like that on a first runthrough would be really frustrating, I guess. Fair enough, but I'd be a lot more terrified of a two minute sequence where I'm struggling to crawl away or get to my feet and a huge man is constantly stamping on my face until the vision splits and blood runs into your eyes and then it goes black and all your hear is CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH as your brain is mashed into goo.
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Jun 28, 2014 02:16
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Crane Fist posted:You're a weird dude, you know that? I'm weird because I want my scary games to be scary?
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Jun 28, 2014 22:53
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Crane Fist posted:You're just a little too... into it? Maybe? Eh, maybe I'm just used to the viscerality of RE4 and Dead Space in that regard? Those games had chainsaw decapitations and Dead Space got plain surgical with its violent deaths. I mean, I'm also a big fan of the classic gore horror flicks too, so it's personal preference. But my point was more that I SHOULD feel into it--I should feel helpless and terrified, not mildly inconvenienced and easily able to escape. Since you have a first-person perspective, that should be worked with as an element of the terror. VVVV--I don't disagree, and I wasn't initially advocating MORE gore, but rather more viscerality and danger to the enemies. Make you have to do more to escape or have more horrible consequences to being caught, to reinforce the sense of helplessness that you face and to force you to have to play better to truly face your fears, yadda yadda. Something better than what we saw, at least. BottledBodhisvata fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Jun 28, 2014 |
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Jun 28, 2014 23:19
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Fatal Frame amps up the fear factor a lot as these games go--the atmosphere is very oppressive (Fatal Frame 2 and 3 especially), and the gameplay requires you to put yourself in greater danger in order to actually be proficient at combat, so the fights are all stressful as well. There's nothing quite like throwing down with a Fatal Frame ghost--the first game especially is probably the hardest in this regard and you will get straight hosed up by weird-rear end ghosts while you struggle to find and photograph 'em. The scariest game I've ever played is Ninja Gaiden on the harder difficulties, because I was literally making GBS threads myself if I took even a single hit, knowing I may be stuck with half a health bar for the upcoming bone dragon boss and also every boss and also every enemy. That game made encounters stressful and reliant solely on skill and if your skill was lasting, even items wouldn't be enough to save you ('cause you'd use them all up).
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Jul 8, 2014 13:36
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Kind of disappointed there aren't any women in the female ward. Ladies can be psychotic stalkers too! Just look at Clock Tower 3!
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Aug 1, 2014 23:49
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resurgam40 posted:Seriously, right? I mean, the notes from Miles in the game proper are pretty good (they add a sense of character to Miles and makes you feel like he's not quite such a blank slate), but the notes in Whistleblower are greatly improved. This is What The Game Is knocks it right out of the park. The steady progression of quality in this area makes me excited for the next project Red Barrels makes. Miles swears a lot, that was basically the gist of his character. The DLC guy has a bit more character to him, you get the sense he's really just a nerd who got a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's Death Camp.
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Oct 1, 2014 06:01
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axelsoar posted:In regards to the 'This is What the Game Is" note, this is a video regarding that proof that is designed for those who are not math-wizards. Ow. Ow my brain.
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Oct 17, 2014 02:33
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Speedball posted:Better never play The Evil Within then... The demo is out for that but I haven't tried it yet. It sort of seems like basically a new version of Resident Evil 4, is it worth playing? It's not actually released yet, is it?
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Oct 17, 2014 05:15
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xeose4 posted:It absolutely would work, if they introduced the supernatural element right at the start of the game, so that the game developers can send the message that "no, we're not preying on stereotypes of the mentally ill, we're clearly telling you that there is a very obvious supernatural thing affecting them." Then you restrict the information on the Walrider Project (the game goes a little overboard with the amount of documents you find mentioning it) and only explain what the project does in the very last part of the game. So you know right from the start that something supernatural is loving up the patients, but you don't know exactly what it is until the end. I can't say I agree though. The whole thrust of good horror is pacing. Like in Friday the 13th, you never see the killer at all for almost the entire film, but occasionally see through her eyes. In The Thing, you don't know what is actually going on at first--the initial explanation for the killings in the Norwegian base were that they had gone insane, and that's a major theme of the film even as it gets into body horror and alien attack territory. If you opened up the game with "Spooky Ghosts are the cause!" then you've already mitigated a very important aspect of building up fear, which is giving you a sense of dread and confusion. Every good mystery loses its impact when it is explained. You don't know if there's something supernatural going on. You have a few suspicions, you see some strange things, but you don't know whether you are losing your sanity or whether there's a real otherworldly threat. This is vitally important to the whole thrust of the game AND its final plot twist--which is that you are not dealing with something supernatural, but rather a horrifying product of mankind's invention gone wrong. Recall, the Walrider isn't a ghost, it's a cloud of nanomachines controlled by a mentally ill man subconsciously. That's the twist, that's the surprise at the end--first it's a spooky Asylum full of crazies, then it's a ghost, then it's actually a science monster. But the uncertainty and the lack of knowledge make it scary. It's why you don't show the monster--because whatever your imagination dreams up in the shadows is a lot scarier than any special effect could be. The lack of knowledge is incredibly vital to this enterprise. If, for the purposes of avoiding stereotypes about the mentally ill, the game basically shot itself in the foot in its attempt to build effective horror, would that really be better?
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Oct 22, 2014 21:22
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xeose4 posted:The problem is that the game is relying on "crazy people being gross and violent" to build up that dread and confusion. That's exactly my problem. The game, by choosing the asylum setting, is putting itself between a rock and a hard place by either playing up to the stereotypes for horror or sacrificing mystery by broadcasting to the player that something supernatural is messing with the patients. This is why the mental institution setting shouldn't be chosen lightly. Not only it's been done to death, but there's virtually no way you can have your cake and eat it too. Either you prey on stereotypes for horror or you shoot your sense of dread and mystery in the foot. Well, preying on stereotypes IS a big part of horror in general--I mean, slasher movies are so formulaic, the formula itself has been satirized twice to great effect! But I can see your point. Do you have an example of a horror movie/game that does succeed in doing this, pray I ask? My favorite horror movie is Phantasm, which I liked primarily because it is a horror movie where the main characters are all incredibly--perhaps too incredibly--competent and there aren't a lot of stock characters or indeed very many characters at all. There's a creepy old gypsy woman who knows magical poo poo or whatever but nobody gets offended at those yet. But my second favorite horror story is Halloween, and that's basically a story of a mentally ill man going on a killing spree (provided we pretend the sequels didn't happen, but even the second one doesn't really make him explicitly supernatural. Michael Myers isn't a ghost monster thing until the 4th movie). Is there a difference in that depiction, or are you primarily focused on just the asylum setting as a horror trope?
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Oct 22, 2014 21:52
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xeose4 posted:Halloween is definitely a case of exploiting stereotypes of mental illness, but it was made in the seventies (unlike Outlast), so it's understandable. It also had a loving dope theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP-jYiuDD9g Outlast doesn't have a dope theme song and suffers for it. YO and Phantasm too like seriously why did awesome theme songs get out of horror movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3ieQxm_M2I Horror sucks now it was super excellent and also groovy back in the 70's. chitoryu12 posted:I think Spec Ops: The Line greatly succeeded in terms of horror related to insanity because it legitimately keeps the player guessing right up until the last minutes of the game and doesn't show its hand so early that everything gets blown wide open before it's supposed to be. Yeah, I love pretty much everything about Spec Ops: The Line and really want to see more of those games come out and less Bioshocks. I think 2K did them both, right?
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Oct 22, 2014 23:32
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DumbRodent posted:And now that they have made a name for themselves as niche developers of games willing to explore the dark corners of a gamer's psychology, they are developing Dead Island 2. If any game needed a little touch of depth, it was Dead Island. A fun concept and visceral graphics engine with a dull story, duller gameplay mechanics, and a meandering pace that took too long to do much of anything. Running around beating the undead with a boat oar was fun, but after awhile it became tedious--perhaps they can do something interesting with it. Dead Island also suffered from having a ridiculously difficult to navigate map. I remember getting lost constantly in the little wooden hut section of the resort and just leveling up all the time trying to slaughter my way out of the constantly respawning enemies.
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Oct 23, 2014 01:19
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I guess variety's important.
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azren posted:Minor Pontypool really interests me so I wanna check it out. I also rather liked Insidious, some people really didn't but I think it manages an interesting plot, good characters, and REALLY solid scares, and it was a horror movie that actually cared to try and build a little bit of its own universe. xeose4 posted:I suppose that is a supernatural element, yes, but it's not really implied that it's what's causing the bedlam. It's entirely possible at that point in the game that the invisible force is just the ghost of a particularly violent patient. Uh...ghosts are pretty supernatural and generally require a touch of explanation if they are going to be featured, since even "real" ghost stories don't have ghosts violently disemboweling people. Sure, you don't know it's CAUSING the bedlam, but that's a bit of a generous handwave. It tells you immediately that something more is happening--it could be telekinesis or it could be ghosts or it could be a Predator, you don't know, but it definitely suggests that there's more than "scary insane people"--and bear in mind, too, that the first and primary Stalker of the game is NOT a crazy person, but instead a rather sane man simply obsessively trying to contain something. In fact, the majority of mentally ill in this game are portrayed as sympathetic and friendly or at least more harmful to themselves than to you. BottledBodhisvata fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 04:12
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counterpoints:
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xeose4 posted:No, I'm pretty sure you find a file that states that he's pretty insane and that his insanity takes the form of strict military protocol and "CONTAINMENT AT ALL COSTS". Is it really prejudice to be alarmed/disturbed by somebody acting strangely? If you see somebody walking down teh street humming and swaying back and forth and acting otherwise abnormal, does that not, I don't know, bother you a little? Like "hey, that's not normal"? That's a completely natural reaction, isn't it? I don't call that prejudiced--I don't think it's at all bizarre to be afraid or disturbed by somebody who is clearly not acting normally or rationally, is it?
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Oct 24, 2014 05:27
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xeose4 posted:The entire point of "horror in a person acting strangely" is a thing that requires intelligence and care to execute. At the end of the day, using the mentally ill as a disposable, dehumanised source of horror is just disrespectful. Mentally ill people are already enduring a stigma and the last thing they need is a horror game that exploits how much the general public is afraid of them. Outlast manages to barely dodge the bullet on this one, thanks to some humanising moments and the supernatural explanation, but like I said, there are definitely scenes that are meant to horrify and disturb not because something supernatural is afoot or because you're in danger, but because crazy people are being gross. Well, I can't argue with that on its face. I think most people are terrified of being locked in asylums, and I think most asylums themselves are responsible for the inmates within being more insane and inhuman than they were previously. I think that's the real horror of asylums and mental illness. I think the most terrifying thing to anybody is being labeled or considered crazy themselves--once you are considered such, you have a nearly impossible time convincing anyone that you are not. Mental institutions have a history of this. Actually, come to think of it, there should really be a game of somebody being wrongfully committed to an asylum and having to find a way to escape or get released. That'd be kind of interesting. Similarly, I think that was a big part of the film Shutter Island--on its face it looks like an asylum horror story complete with ex-Nazi staff performing insidious experiments on the inmates, but the later reveal actually demonstrates that all of the perceived evils in the film were a delusion by the main character, himself a man driven mad by the murder of his children by his wife.. So, I think this is a stereotype that isn't really widely used these days--I can't really think of a modern example of anything that really seems exploitative of asylum patients.
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Oct 24, 2014 14:49
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