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Thanks for reminding me why I refused to watch Hektor playthroughs. I remember watching a part one (don't recall whose) and being so angry with it refusing to continue. An ugly game in every aspect.
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Oct 22, 2015 12:02
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Did Hektor come out sometime after Outlast? Because it looks like they're trying to ape Amnesia but with a tryhard edginess inspired by Outlast. The PC horror genre probably has more Me Too games than any other game genre out there.
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Oct 22, 2015 13:55
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Hektor came out early this year, almost a year and a half after Outlast. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some influence there, certainly, but using rape as a cheap way to raise the emotional stakes is something that plagues all media. Even within the video game industry you can find it as far back as Phantasmagoria and The 11th Hour.
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Oct 22, 2015 16:37
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Silent Hill 2 and Rule of Rose both did it well, mainly because they treated it like the serious poo poo it is and just established enough to get it across through strong inference and the like without making it exploitative and insulting. I bought Outlast a while ago but I don't have much desire to play it anymore, just sounds like its all lovely fetch quests, jump scares, and try-hard edginess. Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Oct 22, 2015 |
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Oct 22, 2015 16:54
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I played about half of Outlast and enjoyed it before it got too repetitive and I gave up. It was okay , really trying way too hard to be edgy though. I did genuinely like how the protagonist's first reaction to the creepy stuff at the asylum is attempt to escape ASAP, rather then go deeper in/solve the mystery/dumb-reason-for-staying.
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Oct 22, 2015 19:23
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Tired Moritz posted:I feel bad for laughing at rape hallway. Yeah, it's alright. Honestly it's not super spooky but Uri does good rpg maker horror games. I enjoyed it.
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Oct 22, 2015 19:55
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I've completed two of the games on my  Spooktober 2015 list!The Walking Dead Season 2  I have mixed feelings about this compared to the last season. While the switch from Lee to Clementine as the player character was neat, the fact that you were a child changes the feel of the game. I feel that Clementine was much more passive in the events of the game, and the flow of the game was more mixed. None the less it was well done, and it was fun picking the choices that made Clementine into a badass. Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse   This is the first Fatal Frame game that I've completed, and barring a few missteps, I enjoyed it. The atmosphere an abandoned island is haunting, and the combat is appropriately hectic. The motion controls works well enough, but it could sometimes be slow in situations where you quickly needed to take a picture of a ghost before it disappeared. It could also be annoying when you fought like five ghosts at a time and kept getting spooked by ghosts under my viewscreen. I was also disappointed that even though Suda51 and Grasshopper helped to make the game, I didn't really feel his influence. Very cool, and now I want to play Fatal Frame 2, which I played for less than an hour and couldn't handle.
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Oct 22, 2015 22:08
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To me, none of the characters in Walking Dead season 2 were likeable, including Clementine (though I did play her as a bitch). Also it's a bit of a retread of content (the same reason I stopped watching the tv show) and the 400 days characters were poorly woven into the story.
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Oct 22, 2015 22:31
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System Shock: Enhanced Edition made it onto Steam today. 20% off ($7.99) until Oct 29th.
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Oct 22, 2015 23:22
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Wow, the backstory revealed in Dead Space 3 is actually pretty creepy. It's like Hellstar Remina, except Dead Space is far less silly. Was this game really poorly-received?
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Oct 22, 2015 23:25
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FourLeaf posted:Wow, the backstory revealed in Dead Space 3 is actually pretty creepy. It's like Hellstar Remina, except Dead Space is far less silly. Was this game really poorly-received?
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Oct 22, 2015 23:44
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Relin posted:To me, none of the characters in Walking Dead season 2 were likeable, including Clementine (though I did play her as a bitch). Also it's a bit of a retread of content (the same reason I stopped watching the tv show) and the 400 days characters were poorly woven into the story.
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Oct 22, 2015 23:46
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Accordion Man posted:I felt that Clem and Kenny were the only good characters and kept the game from being outright crap. Their relationship was like the only part of the game that felt true to Season 1. So glad I played that 500 days game, because all those characters were just goons in season 2 and died like instantly.
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Oct 22, 2015 23:57
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Following up on traditional Japanese ghost stories is Ugetsu Kitan or Mysterious Story of Rain and Moonlight. This one was loving hard to drudge up but I'm glad I did because there's practically zero information on it.   Ugetsu Kitan is based on Ugetsu Monogatari, a collection of Japanese ghost stories considered to be one of the countries most important pieces of literature. It follows a strange anthology format where you go from the modern day, through a circus tent, into a bamboo forest populated by yokai, then view adaptions of classic ghost stories.   There's little to no interaction. You still have to click on things to move forward but where something like Dead of the Brain would present a dozen choices, here you rarely have more than 2. Everything moves at a languid pace, there are no action scenes, no puzzles to solve, just read and move. It jumps around a lot moving from scenes of absolute horror to period pieces. There's not a lot to discuss but there's a lot of DNA here that passed on to Cosmology of Kyoto which did make its way to the West and is far more effective as a work of undeniable terror.     The PC98 version is apparently rare as hell but I'd say most people experienced the game through the PS1 remake. It's ugly as hell, replacing the beautiful sprite work with digitized actors. This was annoyingly common during the CD era where artists took a backseat for terrible lo-res photographs. Sometimes you can even see the artifacts surrounding a model, it's atrocious.     But visuals aside the PS1 game closely follows the source material jumping right into Kibitsu no Kama, the story of a man who runs away with a prostitute and the ghost of his wife that haunts them both. Everything has been streamlined as far as it goes with the mouse cursor being replaced by a snap-on selection. The audio design is also pretty good that's appropriately traditional instruments and atmospheric effects.  
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Oct 23, 2015 01:16
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Niggurath posted:Yeah, but it was mostly cause it left horror behind to focus on forced coop and microtransactions. Say what you will about the microtransactions, but the co-op worked really, really well in the end and aded to the game more than the single player experience did.
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Oct 23, 2015 03:00
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Kokoro Wish posted:Say what you will about the microtransactions, but the co-op worked really, really well in the end and aded to the game more than the single player experience did.
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Oct 23, 2015 03:02
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Accordion Man posted:I felt that Clem and Kenny were the only good characters and kept the game from being outright crap. Their relationship was like the only part of the game that felt true to Season 1. I have to ask, how many people actually tried to pal around with Kenny? Not going to lie but in season one I actually really disliked Kenny. Horrible to say because of what the character goes through but he just handles everything so loving poorly. I felt Clem would have tried her damnedest to steer clear of him when the alternative that she was currently hanging with were just a way, waaaaaaaaay more comfortable for her than the severely damaged man. Hell the reckoning and split that happens in part 5 happens because of him. Alot of people point to Jane as being a terrible person, but she's really just as damaged as Kenny, but Kenny is decending into despair and isolationism while Jane is clawing herself out of it. I will never understand how people could ever side with Kenny at any point in the game's decision making. He's loving terrible at it. I game him a chance at the lodge and he shoots a dude despite Clem telling him that's a really bad idea. Whoops, now hostages are getting executed. Good job, Kenny.. Niggurath posted:Yeah, it worked in the sense that it made it a fun action game but it seemed pretty removed from the horror game it started as. Also that happened in the second game. If you went into the 3rd game expecting the 1st game instead of a continuation of 2 then that's on you. First game is still my favourite. Right blend of action, tension and outright panic momenets. Kokoro Wish fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Oct 23, 2015 |
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Oct 23, 2015 03:05
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Kokoro Wish posted:I have to ask, how many people actually tried to pal around with Kenny? Not going to lie but in season one I actually really disliked Kenny. Horrible to say because of what the character goes through but he just handles everything so loving poorly that I felt Clem would have tried her damnedest to steer clear of him when the alternative that she was currently hanging with were just a way, waaaaaaaaay more comfortable for her than the severely damaged man. Hell the reckoning and split that happens in part 5 happens because of him. My relationship with Kenny in Season 1 was friendly at first, rocky for the middle of the game, and by the end he was a good friend. Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Oct 23, 2015 |
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Oct 23, 2015 03:12
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Accordion Man posted:The writers admitted that they purposely wrote Kenny in Season 2 to try and make you hate him but they screwed up terribly because he's the only reasonable and selfless person in the whole group and his plans always end up being totally right. (The writers also sucked but at as I said they still accidentally managed to get Clem and Kenny totally right.) The writers didn't screw up writing the character, I feel. They misjudged the audience's reaction to the character. Honestly I was surprised too. The character is awful and no, none of the poo poo they want to do works out. He's got that Floridian stand your ground pugnacious mentality and it's loving terrible.
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Oct 23, 2015 03:20
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 RETURN OF THE 31 DAYS OF MOSTLY SPOOKY GAMES 1. Knock-knock 2. CAPSULE 3. DARK 4. System Shock 2 5. Castle in the Darkness 6. Shattered Haven 7. Whispering Willows 8. Frankenstein: Master of Death 9. Kraven Manor 10. Our Darker Purpose 11. Stray Cat Crossing 12. Splatter - Blood Red Edition 13. The Emptiness Deluxe Edition 14. Clandestinity of Elsie 15. The Last Door - Collector's Edition 16. Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space 17. Murdered: Soul Suspect 18. Unholy Heights 19. Claire 20. Belladonna 21. Hektor 22. Neverending Nightmares    You know how sometimes in movies and TV shows, they have these sequences where the main character gets up and everything's a little bit off? They go around and stranger and stranger things happen, and then a big shocking thing happens and they wake up? Neverending Nightmares is an entire game built around that concept. And if that doesn't sound like much of a game to you, well, you'd be right. The game opens with your sister dying and you waking up. You lead your character through a darkened, monochromatic house in search of... nothing, really. You proceed through the unsettling halls because nothing would happen if you didn't. Eventually you'll find your sister again, and something horrible will happen to one of you, and then you'll wake up again. The cycle continues throughout the game, with the environments becoming steadily darker and more unfamiliar. This part admittedly works really well, forming a genuinely tense atmosphere. The gorgeous art and animation sets the tone perfectly, and you never really feel completely safe, even after you divine the flow of the game. Neverending Nightmares does a fantastic job of mimicking actual nightmares, at least in terms of aesthetic. The problem is that there really is no more game to it than that. You'll come across enemies from time to time, but all you can do is hide from them and then scamper past once their backs are turned. There are no puzzles aside from permutations of "find candle to enter dark room" roadblocks. Exploration won't gain you anything aside from some slightly different scenery, as all paths still lead to the same inevitable conclusions. And that's the true killer of Neverending Nightmares, that everything about it is inevitable. Each nightmare is the same hell of wandering dark halls and weathering jumpscares and shambling monsters. Your reward for navigating the gauntlet is some terrible shock scene and a sudden awakening into the next. It's one of those games that seems to do exactly what it set out to do. Neverending Nightmares does indeed trap you in a seemingly never-ending cycle of wandering halls and avoiding monsters. It just does it in a far more tedious and uninteresting way than your own mind would.
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Oct 23, 2015 04:23
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I liked NN but will readily admit that if it didn't have the Gorey-inspired art design I would have stopped playing after 10 minutes.
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Oct 23, 2015 04:26
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You should check out Fran Bow, Zombie Samurai , that's a good horror/dark fantasy adventure game to play for Halloween.
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Oct 23, 2015 04:31
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FourLeaf posted:Wow, the backstory revealed in Dead Space 3 is actually pretty creepy. It's like Hellstar Remina, except Dead Space is far less silly. Was this game really poorly-received? CJacobs did a really nice LP of it recently with Blind Sally and nine-gear crow, and it covered a lot of the flaws. There's the general shift in tone to a more action-packed adventure with fewer genuinely creepy horror moments, but also a lot of little flaws and mistakes like the awkward love triangle and removing a lot of Ellie's badassery from Dead Space 2 and giving her a gratuitous low-cut shirt, making a non-sexualized strong female character from the predecessor into yet another generic sexy love interest. I think she even fucks up and causes more obstacles more than once, which makes her look like a total idiot. And yeah, the microtransactions and co-op were also problematic. Co-op wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, but they locked out missions and dialogue if you didn't have a second player so you got an incomplete experience if you tried to play by yourself.
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Oct 23, 2015 05:40
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Accordion Man posted:You should check out Fran Bow, Zombie Samurai , that's a good horror/dark fantasy adventure game to play for Halloween. Man, I loved the Fran Bow demo. It's high on my list of 2015 horror games to pick up, along with SOMA and Layers of Fear. But as much as I'd like to review new releases, I'm a habitually thrifty gamer. Part of that is having a ton of games to play already, and part of that is having a wife who watches our credit statements like a hawk. I do have two newer titles up for review in the coming days, and they've been less talked about anyway.
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Oct 23, 2015 05:48
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chitoryu12 posted:And yeah, the microtransactions and co-op were also problematic. Co-op wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, but they locked out missions and dialogue if you didn't have a second player so you got an incomplete experience if you tried to play by yourself. To be fair, the stuff they locked out was stuff exclusively related to Carver and his issues. If you played solo, you still got the complete story of Isaac's Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Bad End of the World
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Oct 23, 2015 05:50
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Dead Space 3 suffered from the RE5 dilemma, where the coop completely deflated any attempt at genuine scares, but then it also turned out the coop was loving fun as hell (though not quite to the level of RE5). God drat RE5 was tons of fun.
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Oct 23, 2015 06:40
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Regarding The Walking Dead season 2, what completely turned me off from buying it was reading about the treatment of the character Sarah especially the interviews with the writers who made it pretty clear that they had strong feelings about that particular character. I'm pretty sure I wrote about this before but there's a certain level of nihilism in modern zombie fiction that just pisses me off. It's susceptible of crawling up its own rear end more so than any other genre I can think of. It almost invariably reaches a point where good story telling is tossed aside as the writers try to think of the best ways to shock the audience. It's all kind of poo poo in the end and you can usually see the breaking point where it just becomes pure fan service.
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Oct 23, 2015 11:33
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I understand if you can't afford the game or don't want to wait for a steam sale, but watching a bunch of goofuses play a (nominally) horror game is my absolutely LEAST favorite way to experience a game...
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Oct 23, 2015 12:44
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Kokoro Wish posted:The writers didn't screw up writing the character, I feel. They misjudged the audience's reaction to the character. Honestly I was surprised too. The character is awful and no, none of the poo poo they want to do works out. He's got that Floridian stand your ground pugnacious mentality and it's loving terrible. Gotta agree with you. The poo poo he does in the final episode, like hitting an unarmed, handcuffed child is pretty unforgivable. I think that if you liked him, his ending is probably more emotionally satisfying, but I could never get over him and I liked Jane more.
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Oct 23, 2015 14:29
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Good Lord Fisher! posted:Dead Space 3 suffered from the RE5 dilemma, where the coop completely deflated any attempt at genuine scares, but then it also turned out the coop was loving fun as hell (though not quite to the level of RE5). God drat RE5 was tons of fun. Counterpoint: RE5 was the worst co-op experience I've ever had. Co-op QTE's are literally the worst thing.
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Oct 23, 2015 17:18
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al-azad posted:Regarding The Walking Dead season 2, what completely turned me off from buying it was reading about the treatment of the character Sarah especially the interviews with the writers who made it pretty clear that they had strong feelings about that particular character. Sarah dying was the best part.
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Oct 23, 2015 17:27
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I have mixed feelings in general about season 2, but I overall enjoyed it. Discussion of plot nitpicks follow. I enjoyed Kenny during the season because he'd built up a lot of goodwill for me when he tried to save Ben at the end of season 1, and I was genuinely delighted to see him when he showed up, and felt real bad for him as he started going off the deep end. They didn't do a good job of making it an actual choice of who to shoot at the end because I have no idea how you would look at what's going on and not try to stop him, especially because the ending where he lives is way better.
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Oct 23, 2015 18:22
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RETURN OF THE 31 DAYS OF MOSTLY SPOOKY GAMES 1. Knock-knock 2. CAPSULE 3. DARK 4. System Shock 2 5. Castle in the Darkness 6. Shattered Haven 7. Whispering Willows 8. Frankenstein: Master of Death 9. Kraven Manor 10. Our Darker Purpose 11. Stray Cat Crossing 12. Splatter - Blood Red Edition 13. The Emptiness Deluxe Edition 14. Clandestinity of Elsie 15. The Last Door - Collector's Edition 16. Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space 17. Murdered: Soul Suspect 18. Unholy Heights 19. Claire 20. Belladonna 21. Hektor 22. Neverending Nightmares 23. Decay: The Mare    Back when Flash first became a thing, there were a few websites that had little "adventure" games where you clicked on hotspots in heavily Photoshopped images to move through creepy scenes. It should surprise absolutely no one that they never stopped making those, and in fact started rammming them through Greenlight. I can only assume that's where Decay: The Mare came from, because not a whole lot of thought went into anything beyond the stitching of random scenes together. You play some depressed kid at a clinic in New Jersey, which basically guarantees you're never going to recover from whatever's got you down. Wandering around at night, you end up in some nightmare series of decrepit hallways that you have to escape because... maybe it represents your depression? I beat the drat thing and I'm still not sure. Like I said, it's all static scenes linked by arrows at the edges of the screen, with no animations between them. Some of the transitions make sense, but others are so disjointed you'll have trouble figuring out where you just came from. That's a problem since the game is VERY heavy on backtracking, and there's little aesthetic consistency from room to room, or sometimes wall to wall. Each scene might have one or MAYBE two interactables to fool with, either items to collect or puzzle boxes to open. The developers LOVE number pads, so get ready for plenty of four-digit codes (one hidden behind possibly the STUPIDEST puzzle I have ever seen). Aside from that there's basically nothing to examine, and no notes or files to collect. Oh, there are little collectable coins scattered throughout that unlock "extras", but they blend into the background and only help if you collect every single one, so eff that. For the most part, the scenes you navigate are devoid of interesting features and start to blend together very quickly. The one thing you can look forward to are the infrequent and seemingly random jumpscares the developers decided to throw in. There's some corpse-looking thing in the area, and it likes to bang on windows and scamper past lights at just the right time to make you jump. This thing is never really addressed in the story, which is just as well because the story is stupid as all hell. There's a big twist to it, and some of the spooky bits get tied in, but most of the weirdness in the game goes unexplained, I guess just written off as you being crazypants. I found out the hard way that there are two endings, because I did the thing the game suggested I do and got the bad version. I usually don't like to rag on games too hard, but Decay is just a really dumb game. The gameplay is thin, the environments are low-effort, the puzzles are dead simple except when they're overly complicated, and the story is garbage. I powered through all three episodes in about an hour and a half, but after the first twenty minutes or so I desperately wanted to be doing something more meaningful with my time. There are a few sparks of brilliance buried in there that helped keep me going, I admit. The camera in the second episode makes for some pretty interesting sequences, but that's one decent bit out of 90 minutes. If you're looking for a clever, challenging, or interesting adventure, don't look for it here.
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Oct 24, 2015 04:28
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Accordion Man posted:I bought Outlast a while ago but I don't have much desire to play it anymore, just sounds like its all lovely fetch quests, jump scares, and try-hard edginess. Yeah it's not good. I was doing a lets play of it like 6 months ago, and while I'm a sucker for FPS horror games, once you figure out how the scares work (Set up jump scare, don't have jump scare, push jump scare on second pass) it gets tedious as hell. Not to mention the "Go here and turn this thing on" quests, I'm glad my ex kept the PS4 so I didn't have to finish that poo poo show of a game.
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Oct 24, 2015 04:29
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Zombie Samurai posted:
there's a lack of mares in the game.
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Oct 24, 2015 04:40
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OK I've gotta know, is that actually the code?
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Oct 24, 2015 04:42
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RightClickSaveAs posted:OK I've gotta know, is that actually the code? Yes, but it doesn't work. There's a camera button in the bottom left that flashes the scene and makes things change, like pictures make scary faces and spooky messages appear on the walls. If you flash this scene, the note doesn't change... but the numbers on the pad do. So you have to remember which numbers are moved where, un-flash the scene, and put in the right code with the wrong numbers. Tired Moritz posted:there's a lack of mares in the game. I KNOW RIGHT
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Oct 24, 2015 05:13
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So what you're telling me is that Arise got a big-budget sequel??
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Oct 24, 2015 05:26
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That keypad is ripped right out of Silent Hill 3.
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Oct 24, 2015 07:21
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SkeletonHero posted:That keypad is ripped right out of Silent Hill 3. Holy poo poo it is. If you told me that was a SH3 screen shot I wouldn't have questioned it.
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Oct 24, 2015 18:56
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