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Coolguye
Jul 6, 2011

Required by his programming!

Bogart posted:

I like to think Swery has a good heart at the end of the day.
i haven't exactly done a deep dive on the man but everything i've seen of him suggests that he doesn't have a mean bone in his body

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Basticle
Sep 12, 2011


I don't have a dog in this fight but I distinctly remember an awful lot of outrage in the thread for SGF's LP, so to hear "Thomas was mostly fine", especially now is just confusing to me.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Basticle posted:

I don't have a dog in this fight but I distinctly remember an awful lot of outrage in the thread for SGF's LP, so to hear "Thomas was mostly fine", especially now is just confusing to me.
I guess I wasn't paying the thread much attention so I didn't, but that's why I'm asking now and treading hella carefully because can't remember anything sticking out in particular and really have no idea what it exactly it was that set people off so much they're still pointing to it years later. :shrug:

OJ MIST 2 THE DICK
Sep 11, 2008

Anytime I need to see your face I just close my eyes
And I am taken to a place
Where your crystal minds and magenta feelings
Take up shelter in the base of my spine
Sweet like a chica cherry cola

-Cheap Trick

Nap Ghost

Cardiovorax posted:

I mean, it's been ages since I actually watched the LP of Deadly Premonition, but if you ignore the weird clock tower boss fight, I thought Thomas was really kind of unoffensive. It's why the reveal kind of hit me out of the left field - prior to it, he's portrayed as a very normal guy with no weird affectations or mannerisms of the type Japanese video games tend to include for their "camp gay" or "drag queen" style stereotypes. Sure, he likes to cook, but so do a lot of men. Am I missing something?

hes more or less the games version of Andy and Lucy from Twin Peaks for what that's worth

Hemingway To Go!
Nov 10, 2008

im stupider then dog shit, i dont give a shit, and i dont give a fuck, and i will never shut the fuck up, and i'll always Respect my enemys.
- ernest hemingway
I don't know.
People talk about Norman Bates and Buffalo bill as the two big negative influences on how trans people are percieved. But in the movies, they were not trans. Norman had a diassociative personality. Buffalo bill is called out as not trans in the movie. Of course audiences are loving stupid and just associate them with trans people because man in dress is automatically trans.

I don't remember deadly premonition making Thomas out to be anything other than a crazy trans perv stalker. No one says that other trans people are out there that are not like him, or that his psychotic obsession was from other problems, or how he got this way... Or at least I don't remember.

I'm not trans and have only experienced the game through the sgf playthrough, which was a long time ago. I won't say my opinion is authoratative. But that was my impression.

Coolguye
Jul 6, 2011

Required by his programming!
i'll happily admit that it's not a great look for the game but part of the context that i feel like people miss is that everyone is hosed up in deadly premonition. whether it's thomas or sigourney or the whole york<->zach thing, pretty much everyone in that town is a horrifically broken individual and no walk of life is or wealth class is exempt from the :drat:

it's a little different with trans natures simply because nobody painting straight white dudes with an overly large and dark brush irl but i feel like there's a bit of a difference between pointing that out and getting angry at the game and the game creators for being hateful or regressive.

Basticle
Sep 12, 2011


Hey so apparently theres actually a thread for The Missing now https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3871625

Selenephos
Jul 9, 2010

Thomas was portrayed weirdly but considering he's also (ending spoilers for Deadly Premonition) treated as one of the victims of the Raincoat Killer and a Goddess of the Forest who is smiling alongside Emily in the afterlife in the ending, I don't think he's meant to be portrayed negatively either. I think he's just like every other character in Deadly Premonition - weird.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Mr. Fortitude posted:

Thomas was portrayed weirdly but considering he's also (ending spoilers for Deadly Premonition) treated as one of the victims of the Raincoat Killer and a Goddess of the Forest who is smiling alongside Emily in the afterlife in the ending, I don't think he's meant to be portrayed negatively either. I think he's just like every other character in Deadly Premonition - weird.

Yeah, while Thomas is portrayed in a stereotypically effeminate manner the fact that he's included with the "goddesses" in his natural dress and York is even approving of it is respectful to his character. This is in stark contrast to Catherine which has Erica, a trans woman, experience the nightmares (which exclusively affect men) because she had sex with Toby preventing him from being in a relationship where he can have children.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

al-azad posted:

Thomas is portrayed in a stereotypically effeminate manner
Well, his walking animations are, at any rate? The thing that trips me up here is that really nothing else about him is portrayed as stereotypically effeminate or stereotypically feminine. He's not necessarily portrayed as a good person, being party to the murder and all that, but it's not really up to his transness. Aside from being a member in that weird sex cult/club of theirs, there's nothing I can immediately point to as an outright negative portrayal of transpeople in his character as such - and that part is arguable, because you can find perfectly decent people of all orientations or gender identities in those and how negative or shameful you find it is really up to your own judgment.

Accordion Man
Nov 7, 2012


Buglord
Thomas' portrayal isn't perfect but the game is entirely sympathetic to him and it really doesn't treat that he is mostly likely a trans-woman as anything wrong, the game makes it rather clear that it was George's horrible abuse that broke Thomas and drove him do George's bidding.

I'm playing The Missing right now and its real nice so far. The IM emotes are hilarious.

Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 17, 2018

FirstAidKite
Nov 8, 2009

Coolguye posted:

that's precisely why. interactions end up completely valueless based on who or what you're facing, so simply identifying the monster on board makes over half of the things you can do a waste of time. for example, locking doorways is a humongous waste of time when the Brute or the Hunter is active (they'll just destroy most doors), so locking doors is really only even remotely helpful when the Fiend is in play - and even then it's difficult to justify locking doors because it CAN manually unlock doors, so you will just sit there loving with the lock back and forth for way too goddamn long. this can be extended to most items and situations on the ship. fire extinguishers are basically a waste of time unless the Brute is active and even then, there's no way to use it short of spraying the Brute directly, and even then you don't want to try that poo poo from a hallway; the Brute can move loving quick at a dead run, you have to be a few steps back from something that will force the bastard to slow down to safely spray him down - otherwise you may still get nailed because his bull charge will can carry him through the extinguisher stream and right onto your ballsack. there's really no way to use each item beyond its one proscribed use, and no way to be creative, so again, you either do the exact thing you need to do to solve the problem and keep moving, or you don't and pay the price for it - either in terms of lost time and opportunity if you are sprinting away (with no real way to mess that up, unlike the way you can in miasmata), or just flat out dying.

compare this to isolation, which lets you use even 'harmless' things in a way that really fucks up the xenomorph (by, for example, throwing a noisemaker into a dangerous area), or use combinations of gadgets to get an effect after one in isolation stops working and that's what i'm talking about with the difference between feeling resourceful and feeling like a monkey that's solved a test chamber.

Idk, doors aren't useful against the Brute because it's part of his gimmick to just say "gently caress doors" but the hunter has to break through each door and so it's a useful way to escape and hide if you need to. The fire extinguisher is just a defense item that stuns any of the monsters so it does well at its in-game purpose but it is pretty silly that it can't put out in-game fires lol, but fire is also a useful tool for the player since you have a variety of ways of creating flame barriers to impede the enemy (unless it is the brute since he's all like "gently caress fire" and goes through anyway) so you can just dump gasoline around and light it up or fire at it with a flare gun (or just stun an enemy with the flare gun) or use it as a temporary light source to save on resources, stuff like that. Most of the non-escape items are for use against the enemy though, whether it is throwing stuff to make sounds to distract it or planting stuff that makes sounds to distract it.

Backpacks just let you carry more stuff so whatevs.

Duct tape can be used to disable security cameras so they won't detect you anymore and make the beeping noise that tells the monster where you're at, in addition to being an item that gets used up for the life raft escape route.

The fuses are just glorified keys to get around the ship unless you plan on using them for the submarine escape route, but it's a damned useful key and it's up to the player how they want to use it since you lose it when you use it. Fuses can be used to turn the electricity on in some places but while that's useful for the lights when you're dealing with the fiend, but the security room is a big missed opportunity since you can turn the security camera feed on but it doesn't actually display any camera feeds on the screens so you can't see the monster through that room or anything. Plus, at least 2 of the monsters are coded in a way that I don't think the security room would be that useful anyway, the Brute is programmed to hover around whatever area you happen to be in and the Hunter just despawns and respawns out of vents/egg sacs when he's not actively chasing you. I dunno how the Fiend's AI in regards to keeping up with the player. The engine room is cool though since you can power it on with a fuse and use the phones to lure monsters away from you and possibly use it to lure monsters into the room that lets you turn off the steam so you don't have to worry about getting hurt by steam as you run around by pipes. They can be used on power-locked doors too but that's not as useful since those rooms don't always contain a useful item.

Welding kits can be used to cut through the locks on locked doors, which seems useful except the player is the one who locks the doors so chances are if you locked a door, you did it for a reason and can just go back and unlock it yourself.

Monstrum is by no means perfect or even like...great, but I think it's definitely a very rough gem and I think there is a lot there that could be further developed on and I hope the devs will make a sequel some day that smooths over some of the rougher parts and is just monstrum, but with more stuff and more variety.

Cardiovorax posted:

The thing that trips me up here is that really nothing else about him is portrayed as stereotypically effeminate or stereotypically feminine.

IIRC, they had fashion magazines on their desk at work and they'd sorta randomly start doing a very effeminate dance while at work, so there were definitely some hints.

Bogart
Apr 12, 2010

by VideoGames
Alright, someone find the bits in the SGF LP that focused on Thomas and we'll debate it endlessly. https://kotaku.com/i-love-deadly-premonition-but-the-villains-are-a-mess-1822973951 Essentially, Thomas' reveal as a villain is put vis-a-vis with his Otherness as an apparent crossdresser, just before George's villainy is revealed along with his S&M outfit. It's a bad color -- that these people have 'divergent' sexuality, which is revealed as soon as they are shown to be villains.


vv: Firm agreement. Hoping that the nuCatherine will treat her much better.

Bogart fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Oct 18, 2018

Yardbomb
Jul 11, 2011

What's with the eh... bretonnian dance, sir?

al-azad posted:

This is in stark contrast to Catherine which has Erica, a trans woman, experience the nightmares (which exclusively affect men) because she had sex with Toby preventing him from being in a relationship where he can have children.

Even if Catherine had all the rest of it's screwy bits fixed, the way it treats Erica pretty much put the game in the bin forever for me.

Thundercracker
Jun 25, 2004

Proudly serving the Ruinous Powers since as a veteran of the long war.
College Slice

Yardbomb posted:

Even if Catherine had all the rest of it's screwy bits fixed, the way it treats Erica pretty much put the game in the bin forever for me.

Vincent is just a piece of poo poo thru and thru. Like, every single ending was unbelievable to me because he's not a good person, likable, cool, or badass. I just could not empathize with him at all.

Still, it was worth playing the game with friends who were couples just to see exactly what questions created relationship drama.

I got personally stink eyed from an ex on the "Would you date a robot?". Two couples got into it serious on the "Have you ever cheated?" question, even from mere hesitation.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
The thing is, when you look more closely at everything you've described there, a lot of it is very narrowly pre-defined "use item X on object Y" interactions that can be reduced down to various ways of putting a key in a lock. Putting duct tape on a camera isn't functionally very different from putting a fuse in a box to turn on lights. It's something you do, but it's also something you can really only do in predetermined locations that allow you to do so. There isn't a lot of interactivity in that, at least not in the sense of having a dynamic game world that encourages and rewards creatively using the tools you have available.

This doesn't necessarily make it a bad game, but it is a legitimate criticism.

Bogart posted:

It's a bad color -- that these people have 'divergent' sexuality, which is revealed as soon as they are shown to be villains.
For me, those things were kind of lost a bit against the backdrop of George having his dead mother sitting in his living room Psycho-style, but I can see where people would take issue with that sort of thing. Thanks for explaining, everyone.

The_Doctor
Mar 29, 2007

"The entire history of this incarnation is one of temporal orbits, retcons, paradoxes, parallel time lines, reiterations, and divergences. How anyone can make head or tail of all this chaos, I don't know."

Thundercracker posted:

Still, it was worth playing the game with friends who were couples just to see exactly what questions created relationship drama.

I got personally stink eyed from an ex on the "Would you date a robot?". Two couples got into it serious on the "Have you ever cheated?" question, even from mere hesitation.

This is the Bad Place!

Yardbomb
Jul 11, 2011

What's with the eh... bretonnian dance, sir?

Thundercracker posted:

Vincent is just a piece of poo poo thru and thru. Like, every single ending was unbelievable to me because he's not a good person, likable, cool, or badass. I just could not empathize with him at all.

Yeah, honestly all I liked of the game narrative-wise was Toby and Erica's thing, but then even the 'true' (True Katherine) ending kind of tries to ruin that.

Knorth
Aug 19, 2014

Buglord
https://twitter.com/CausticReality/status/1052817190674608129

I don't think I'd heard of this and honestly, it looks very 'Horror Video Game' but hey you never know

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
So my friends and I get together every week to play video games, usually horror games, but mostly just narrative-heavy games that still offer gameplay (so, some walking simulators, stuff from Telltale/Quantum Dreams, Until Dawn, etc), or at least interesting gameplay events, such as Resident Evil 7.

How is Deadly Premonition from a narrative balance point of view? That is, is it an entertaining watch that isn't just all gameplay? I know it's open world, but if we beeline from plot to plot point, will it be interesting? Just kind of curious.

Nohman
Sep 19, 2007
Never been worse.

Morpheus posted:

So my friends and I get together every week to play video games, usually horror games, but mostly just narrative-heavy games that still offer gameplay (so, some walking simulators, stuff from Telltale/Quantum Dreams, Until Dawn, etc), or at least interesting gameplay events, such as Resident Evil 7.

How is Deadly Premonition from a narrative balance point of view? That is, is it an entertaining watch that isn't just all gameplay? I know it's open world, but if we beeline from plot to plot point, will it be interesting? Just kind of curious.

If you just beeline the plot you'll still get 30-minute boring rear end stretches of the worst version of Resident Evil 4 style combat ever conceived down endless gray hallways with a spooky filter fighting the same three enemy models endlessly. These sometimes get punctuated with segments where you hide in a closet for a solid minute straight and press a button to not get instantly killed and then the world's worst chase sequences and instant death QTEs with weirdly tight response times.

Oh and you'll frequently be driving for 5-10 minute stretches across scenery that looks like an early PS2 era game that never learned about fog effects so poo poo is popping in constantly. The car controls all control like rear end that is sliding on ice. There is only one music track for all driving segments unless you go get another car which you wouldn't do while beelining the game.

There's also the issue of the only readily available versions being the PC port which is one of the worst ever made. It has a Dark Souls fix style thing by the same guy who made DSFix to just make it functional. That still won't stop it from crashing constantly without warning unless you perform the proper blood rites beforehand. Or you can get the PS3 version which runs around 20 FPS at all times if you're lucky.

Deadly Premonition is a loving MISERABLE pile of poo poo game to actually play. Hard pass on playing it yourself even with friends.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Morpheus posted:

So my friends and I get together every week to play video games, usually horror games, but mostly just narrative-heavy games that still offer gameplay (so, some walking simulators, stuff from Telltale/Quantum Dreams, Until Dawn, etc), or at least interesting gameplay events, such as Resident Evil 7.

How is Deadly Premonition from a narrative balance point of view? That is, is it an entertaining watch that isn't just all gameplay? I know it's open world, but if we beeline from plot to plot point, will it be interesting? Just kind of curious.
I wouldn't really recommend it for that kind of thing. The gameplay is nothing to write home about and frankly the worst part of the game, but it's also the part that takes up the most play-time and even if you rush, there will be long stretches where (at best) nothing interesting happens at all or (at worst) something uninteresting but difficult happens over and over.

Yeah, there's a reason the game really didn't get the greatest of ratings and why people only ever talk about the plot and the characters, never the actual gameplay.

Catfishenfuego
Oct 21, 2008

Moist With Indignation

Hemingway To Go! posted:

I don't know.
People talk about Norman Bates and Buffalo bill as the two big negative influences on how trans people are percieved. But in the movies, they were not trans. Norman had a diassociative personality. Buffalo bill is called out as not trans in the movie. Of course audiences are loving stupid and just associate them with trans people because man in dress is automatically trans.

I'm not trans and have only experienced the game through the sgf playthrough, which was a long time ago. I won't say my opinion is authoratative. But that was my impression.
People call out buffalo bill because a) the book is unbelievably homophobic and transphobic and they basically just added a single throwaway line to cover their rear end and b) despite that line, the 'would you gently caress me' joke became the de facto way to mock trans people for like, a decade after the movie.

Old Boot
May 9, 2012



Buglord

Bogart posted:

Alright, someone find the bits in the SGF LP that focused on Thomas and we'll debate it endlessly. https://kotaku.com/i-love-deadly-premonition-but-the-villains-are-a-mess-1822973951 Essentially, Thomas' reveal as a villain is put vis-a-vis with his Otherness as an apparent crossdresser, just before George's villainy is revealed along with his S&M outfit. It's a bad color -- that these people have 'divergent' sexuality, which is revealed as soon as they are shown to be villains.

This is really the crux of the issue. But there's more to it than that.

Per example: I'm still mad at BSG2003 for when and how they pulled the lesbian card. Why? Because the lesbian character was the bad guy. The character that could already be labeled as a 'frigid dyke' by the bro audience, even if that's the tip of the iceberg. There was so much wrong with that being some edgy reveal that it killed my desire to keep watching, but that's another long-rear end rant for another time.

'This person happens to be a lesbian' being included in media without a ton of emphasis being thrown on it in one form or another, or of them being Othered, or dying horribly, or being a villain to begin with, was like a loving foreign concept to me. And that's more or less why people talk about representation, much to the eyerolling exasperation of people who see these characters as just another part of a narrative's overall tone-- which itself is a valid point, to an extent, but it misses the big picture view. Thomas is a good example of including a type of person that was rarely seen in media at the time, when compared to other types of representation, much less favorably (with only vague strides made in the direction of 'seen more often' these days), and yes: is shown to be a villain, even if it's under duress.

When that's all the media you've got to point to, with only a tiny fraction of examples that get it right, it gets extremely tiring. And when things do get it right, you feel like running laps around your room. Like when the bit of dialogue in Fallout: New Vegas dropped that Veronica was gay. It completely blew my mind. But that was the long and short of it: here is this character. She is gay. Let's move on now. It's hard to express why that feels like a breath of fresh air.

All of this is to say that I'm not surprised that Thomas got some hackles raised, and still does. And, generally, it's okay to criticize an otherwise good/interesting story for falling into the same bad patterns as a lot of other media, even if their approach was coming from a good place.

Old Boot fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Oct 18, 2018

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Old Boot posted:

Like when the bit of dialogue in Fallout: New Vegas dropped that Veronica was gay. It completely blew my mind. But that was the long and short of it: here is this character. She is gay. Let's move on now. It's hard to express why that feels like a breath of fresh air.
Bioware games have made me learn to dread moments like that, because it's nearly always the cue card for a hackneyed romance subplot that's so blatantly only included for titillation and demography exploitation that it isn't even funny. I breathed a figurative sigh of relief when I realized that it wouldn't ever come up again.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Nohman posted:

If you just beeline the plot you'll still get 30-minute boring rear end stretches of the worst version of Resident Evil 4 style combat ever conceived down endless gray hallways with a spooky filter fighting the same three enemy models endlessly. These sometimes get punctuated with segments where you hide in a closet for a solid minute straight and press a button to not get instantly killed and then the world's worst chase sequences and instant death QTEs with weirdly tight response times.

Oh and you'll frequently be driving for 5-10 minute stretches across scenery that looks like an early PS2 era game that never learned about fog effects so poo poo is popping in constantly. The car controls all control like rear end that is sliding on ice. There is only one music track for all driving segments unless you go get another car which you wouldn't do while beelining the game.

There's also the issue of the only readily available versions being the PC port which is one of the worst ever made. It has a Dark Souls fix style thing by the same guy who made DSFix to just make it functional. That still won't stop it from crashing constantly without warning unless you perform the proper blood rites beforehand. Or you can get the PS3 version which runs around 20 FPS at all times if you're lucky.

Deadly Premonition is a loving MISERABLE pile of poo poo game to actually play. Hard pass on playing it yourself even with friends.

Hahah gotcha, will steer clear of it.

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



So guess what, someone actually made an indie psychological horror game that isn't terrible! And I never would have noticed if the devs hadn't dropped it on me out of the blue.



1. Little Nightmares
2. OK/NORMAL
3. Unforgiving - A Northern Hymn
4. Rise of Insanity
5. Paratopic
6. Rusty Lake Paradise
7. Cube Escape: Paradox
8. INFERNIUM
9. Dead Secret
10. All Haze Eve
11. Welcome to Hanwell
12. Gray Dawn
13. The Last Cargo
14. Observer
15. Dark Deception
16. Cultist Simulator
17. House of Evil

18. Nevermind



Sometimes it feels like every indie horror game on Steam wants to be the next big psychological horror breakthrough. It’s most apparent in all the Silent Hill 2 send-ups, the games where someone in your family is dead and oh no YOU killed them! But it’s hard to get inside a player’s head with that genuine, creeping dread or those troubling thoughts that linger, far harder than stalking someone with a monster. Nevermind takes a rather different tack than a lot of these titles, and while it might look similar the result is far more gratifying than what you usually get. It might not be heavy on the horror, but what you get is likely to stick with you for longer than you might expect.

You are the newest member of the Neurostalgia Institute, a space-age clinic with a bold new treatment for psychological traumas. Instead of laying you out on a chaise lounge and getting you to spill your guts, the Institute maps your subconscious onto a computer simulation that folks like you, the Neuroprobers, can enter. Inside the mindscape, you job is to find fragments of repressed memories and basically jiggle them loose, allowing the owner of said mindscape to experience the recollections they need to confront their traumas. You’ll get clues to what you’re looking for from introductory interviews but each subconscious is its own twisting landscape, and following those unwalked roads will lead you to your goal.

When you enter a mindscape, you’ll find yourself in a hub area with a big, empty board. The key memories you’re looking for appear as terribly artistic photographs, and collecting them returns them to the big board for you to order and resolve the case once you’ve found them all. Finding them, of course, will take you into symbolic representations of the events and traumas that produced them, which are tinged with varying degrees of horror. You’ll witness everything from suicide to war flashbacks, and stage fright to emotional abuse. While there are some spooky and shocking sequences the real horror is in the traumas themselves, very real experiences that more than a few folks have gone through which are represented in rather visceral ways here.

What I’m getting at is that Nevermind isn’t a particularly scary game, but it’s likely to horrify you in the ways a truly psychological horror game can. There are no jumpscares here, and moderate amounts of blood and screams. But you’ll be faced with people reliving abusive relationships, recalling physical traumas, and losing their very grips on reality. The implications are more frightening than the gameplay, and for a game like this I would count that as a success. The levels and memory hunts are pretty simple and hold few surprises, aside from some creative environment design. You won’t find much to interact with, no real side paths to explore, but unfolding the events of these peoples’ lives should be enough to keep you grimly engaged.

It’s also important to note that Nevermind has four cases (plus a tutorial case), and that’s it. They’re wholly independent of each other, with no connective tissue or metaplot to wrap it all up. You’ll solve these cases and end up back in your office, free to play through them again or mess with the recreational sims like exploring a beach or therapeutically flipping tables. You do get the option for Advanced Neuromapping after solving a case, which marks some of the extra details of each area as sorts of collectibles to check off a list. That’s pretty much all you get, enough to last you three to four hours and not much more.

This isn’t the most ambitious or even unique horror title on Steam, but it’s one of the few that succeeds on the psychological horror track. Each case is a carefully-constructed window into a troubled psyche, one you can help smooth out by digging deep into the causes. The voice acting supports this effort admirably, and the graphics are clean and detailed enough to sell it. There are some additional gimmicks like bio-feedback, eye tracking, and VR that you can explore but my concern is the core experience, and it’s a good one. For a different sort of horror experience, one that’ll give you a little more to think about than usual, Nevermind is a title to remember.

Squidtentacle
Jul 25, 2016

This is weirding me out because I played everything in Nevermind like two or three years ago, and I don't recognize any of the pictures you listed for it. I guess I'll have to check it out!

I'll second that it's one of the few things that really executes psychological horror well. As someone who experienced some of the stuff it goes into, it does a really good job of replicating how these situations feel, even if they're not literally accurate, and the feeling that they need to be repressed in order to endure daily life.

YOURFRIEND
Feb 3, 2009

You're an asshole, Mr. Grinch
You really are a cunt
You're as cuddly as a cockring
and charming being a shitheel

FUCK YOURFRIEND!

Nohman posted:

If you just beeline the plot you'll still get 30-minute boring rear end stretches of the worst version of Resident Evil 4 style combat ever conceived down endless gray hallways with a spooky filter fighting the same three enemy models endlessly. These sometimes get punctuated with segments where you hide in a closet for a solid minute straight and press a button to not get instantly killed and then the world's worst chase sequences and instant death QTEs with weirdly tight response times.

Oh and you'll frequently be driving for 5-10 minute stretches across scenery that looks like an early PS2 era game that never learned about fog effects so poo poo is popping in constantly. The car controls all control like rear end that is sliding on ice. There is only one music track for all driving segments unless you go get another car which you wouldn't do while beelining the game.

There's also the issue of the only readily available versions being the PC port which is one of the worst ever made. It has a Dark Souls fix style thing by the same guy who made DSFix to just make it functional. That still won't stop it from crashing constantly without warning unless you perform the proper blood rites beforehand. Or you can get the PS3 version which runs around 20 FPS at all times if you're lucky.

Deadly Premonition is a loving MISERABLE pile of poo poo game to actually play. Hard pass on playing it yourself even with friends.

What turned me off from playing it was like 20 second loading screens every time I went into a menu. I was sitting there thinking how much of my life I was going to waste if I had to wait for 20 seconds every time I looked at the map and decided to uninstall the game.

BlackFrost
Feb 6, 2008

Have you figured it out yet?

Knorth posted:

https://twitter.com/CausticReality/status/1052817190674608129

I don't think I'd heard of this and honestly, it looks very 'Horror Video Game' but hey you never know

John Wolfe played through the demo a little while ago, it has some cool ideas and was actually pretty creepy throughout but who knows how the full game holds up.

GUI
Nov 5, 2005

I played Deadly Premonition on the 360 back when it came out and it was the best Dreamcast title ever made. Haven't heard good things about the PS3/PC ports though.

SelenicMartian
Sep 14, 2013

Sometimes it's not the bomb that's retarded.

The good PS3 port was released only in Japan as Red Seeds Profile. The VA is still in English, the text is in Japanese, but it doesn't have excessive loading issues or weird fps drops. The Deadly Premonition PS3 version is garbage.

Ineffiable
Feb 16, 2008

Some say that his politics are terrifying, and that he once punched a horse to the ground...


I don't think anyone mentioned it. Deadly premonition is backwards compatibile on Xbox one. So the best way to play is the original 360 game on the Xbox one console.

Len
Jan 21, 2008

Pouches, bandages, shoulderpad, cyber-eye...

Bitchin'!


Ineffiable posted:

I don't think anyone mentioned it. Deadly premonition is backwards compatibile on Xbox one. So the best way to play is the original 360 game on the Xbox one console.

Wouldn't it be to play it on an original 360?

mysterious frankie
Jan 11, 2009

This displeases Dev- ..van. Shut up.

Len posted:

Wouldn't it be to play it on an original 360?

The One X runs a lot of 360 games reasonably better. It’s one of a scant few reasons to own The Most Powerful Console Ever.

Ineffiable
Feb 16, 2008

Some say that his politics are terrifying, and that he once punched a horse to the ground...


Yeah if the Xbox 360 has even some FPS issues, the Xbox one (even the base model) will run it smoother.

The up scaling is better and the Xbox one does something different with textures (something like textures that are displayed at an angle are rendered better). It also still supports all the original achievements and such.

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



Today's game is FREE, you can play it right now yourself, which isn't a bad idea if its aggressively lo-fi look appeals to you.



1. Little Nightmares
2. OK/NORMAL
3. Unforgiving - A Northern Hymn
4. Rise of Insanity
5. Paratopic
6. Rusty Lake Paradise
7. Cube Escape: Paradox
8. INFERNIUM
9. Dead Secret
10. All Haze Eve
11. Welcome to Hanwell
12. Gray Dawn
13. The Last Cargo
14. Observer
15. Dark Deception
16. Cultist Simulator
17. House of Evil
18. Nevermind

19. CONCLUSE



I’ve preached at length about the importance of atmosphere and aesthetic in horror games, and the power it has to carry even mediocre gameplay. It can only do so much, though, and at the end of the day you need a game that flows well and is fun to work through no matter how good or creepy it might be. CONCLUSE falls pretty close to that line, honestly, once you get past the overpowering look and feel. As a proof-of-concept it works well enough, but you’ll probably be left wanting even if you get through its rough patches.

Your wife Carolyn up and vanished three years ago, and you were just about over it until you got one of those pesky mysterious messages regarding her. Turns out she’s alive and well in the town of HELL, a remote little burg up in New England. With such a promising lead, you can’t hardly pass up the chance to explore an ominous place like that. Sure enough, upon arrival you find the town a mass of oddities and horrors, with a terrible presence following your progress closely. The further you descend into HELL the less likely it seems you’ll ever escape, to say nothing of finding your lost lady-love.

That’s right, it’s Silent Hill 2 yet AGAIN but this time they put serious effort into their own grim aesthetic. Aping the low-poly majesty of the PS1 era, along with a static filter and a pressed-in camera angle, the developers have succeeded in producing a game that feels like it could have been a unique contemporary of the first Silent Hill. The art style is so jarring that it can even be hard to make out what exactly you’re looking at at times, which lends itself well to the nightmarish mixed reality presented in the game. It doesn’t hold back with this either, introducing you to a dimension of evil and its black trash bag-wearing denizens right when you boot the thing up.

It’s true, you’ll be seeing Latex Head pop up now and then as you explore HELL and its decidedly-less infernal neighbor Cordova, but mostly in cutscenes. They’re just as jarring as the graphics, showing you this creature posturing through choppy VHS effects and then… nothing. I won’t spoil what kinds of things you’ll encounter in your journey but I imagine you might find it less stressful than you might hope from a game of this nature. I recall one really good scare in the hospital, and that was honestly about it. The atmosphere does a lot of work, bolstered by the simplistic graphics and ambient soundtrack, but again it can only do so much.

Instead, most of your wandering is going to be focused on puzzling, and this is one hell of a mixed bag. As with Silent Hill the game leaves barriers like locked doors and… mostly locked doors in your way, and you’ve got to locate items to clear the path. There’ll be some hunting and pecking to find the items you need, and here again the art style crops up to interfere with identifying things you might need. There’s also quite a bit of backtracking and looping around areas, so much so that I got lost more than once in the first hour. I also came across a sewer level in that time that was one big locked door puzzle in and of itself, which about killed my will to continue onward.

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but CONCLUSE sits in a pretty comfortable space for what it is. You’ll find at the end of this short jaunt that it’s not meant to stand alone, but is rather the prelude to something grander. Considering the scope it does what it needs to do, it could certainly do more but the look and feel of playing it are worth the price of admission. I’m eager to see what will be built on the back of this one, and what greater terrors may be contained therein, but until then I’d call this a decent little appetizer so long as that’s all you’re looking for.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Too Shy Guy posted:

the town of HELL, a remote little burg up in New England
Guess now we know why the devil had to go down to get to Georgia.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



BlackFrost posted:

John Wolfe played through the demo a little while ago, it has some cool ideas and was actually pretty creepy throughout but who knows how the full game holds up.

MrKravin has a full playthrough. While he liked it, and the game has some solid scares, it's pretty stuck in the PT inspired explore-the-house-until-something-happens style of games. Within the first 5 minutes the game tells you the plot directly and stop me if you've heard this before: the father of a dysfunctional family murders his wife and is now stuck in his own personal hell. It's far cleverer than its contemporaries but still uninspired because it can't leave the PT shadow.

That said it has really good attention to detail. Like if Silent Hills was released knowing Kojima it would probably have the same level of interactive tchotchkes you could pick up and examine. One of the rare haunted house games where the house feels lived in as opposed to a shiny tech demo.

al-azad fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Oct 19, 2018

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Skyscraper
Oct 1, 2004

Hurry Up, We're Dreaming



al-azad posted:

the father of a dysfunctional family murders his wife and is now stuck in his own personal hell

hate when that happens

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