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seconding that northern journey is excellent but with two caveats - the first several areas can be extremely difficult to navigate, and this is not something to play if you're arachnophobic. like not even a little bit. this game loves spiders as much as it hates you
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Dec 26, 2022 17:17
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exquisite tea posted:Okay I just wrapped up Signalis! I got the Memory ending, which kind of makes sense because it's apparently based on how often you save and run past the same areas because I was doing that constantly. I'd say I liked it overall, the story is immediately gripping and there's just enough of a unique presentation to keep it from resembling another SH2 clone. But I think it kind of eventually succumbs to a few survival horror tropes in both gameplay and narrative that irk me. I appreciated the dedicated to the whole Rule of Six gimmick but the inventory limit was kind of a drag, far past the point where it was tense and instead just became irritating. Whoops, you picked up that stack of 2 whole shotgun shells, now you gotta run all the way back to the stash to grab the other 3 mission-critical items we left in this room. It kind of actively works against the whole survival element when you realize it's much faster just to reload your last save and pick up only what you need rather than actually trying to press on. Also, do we need YET ANOTHER horror game in which the ending is this altered reality was in fact the dying dream of your former lover because it all happened in her head!!? It sounds a little harsh because I really did enjoy the experience, but this is like my Number 1 pet peeve in bad game storytelling. Sounds like you may wanna head over to the goon thread and check other people's perspective. I feel it is better and more interesting than you're giving it credit for.
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Dec 26, 2022 18:34
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Oxxidation posted:signalis threads the needle by making ariane bioresonant, which means that her thoughts are capable of warping reality in varied and wide-reaching ways. the game is her dying dream, but it's a dream that's been transmitted to the real-life sierpinski, making the entire station literally cancerous from her radiation poisoning, looping through time and and endlessly shoving elster's consciousness into a stream of duplicate bodies until she's able to go through on their promise of mercy-killing her (which only happens in the Promise ending) I don't think it's that difficult to square away Adler's presence in the story as the subconscious manifestation of Elster's own need to hang onto Ariane at the cost of everything around her. The relationship between Adler and Falke is shown to be just as obsessive, with Adler keeping Falke lying in state in much the same position that we see Ariane coming out of at the end of the story, and the game calls attention to the visual similarities between Falke and Ariane many times, to the point where Falke's own logs can't make sense of where Ariane ends and she begins. To me this indicates that Adler and Falke never really "existed" in the literal sense, but were part of Ariane's own mental projection of her relationship with Elster. I have a harder time imagining how the crew of the Penrose 521 died cold and abandoned in some remote corner of the universe, yet Ariane's bioresonant aura reached far enough to infect a real-life Sierpinski. I think it's more reasonable from the evidence given by the story that this did not happen and Ariane's conception of it comes entirely from an amalgamation of her own childhood memories and the twin fantasy she had of Alina while dreaming in cryo. The main thread being that all the places you visit in the game have some connection to Ariane's past and contain events we know could not happen in physical reality (i.e. falling down a mineshaft onto the planet's surface, reclaiming physical objects from memories, etc.) Maybe it's because I also played Returnal earlier this year, and I'll give credit to Signalis for being a little smarter about it, but the video game structure as cyclical purgatory metaphor is kind of PLAYED OUT in horror games and I would have preferred it had they just played it straight.
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Dec 26, 2022 21:18
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exquisite tea posted:I don't think it's that difficult to square away Adler's presence in the story as the subconscious manifestation of Elster's own need to hang onto Ariane at the cost of everything around her. The relationship between Adler and Falke is shown to be just as obsessive, with Adler keeping Falke lying in state in much the same position that we see Ariane coming out of at the end of the story, and the game calls attention to the visual similarities between Falke and Ariane many times, to the point where Falke's own logs can't make sense of where Ariane ends and she begins. To me this indicates that Adler and Falke never really "existed" in the literal sense, but were part of Ariane's own mental projection of her relationship with Elster. I have a harder time imagining how the crew of the Penrose 521 died cold and abandoned in some remote corner of the universe, yet Ariane's bioresonant aura reached far enough to infect a real-life Sierpinski. I think it's more reasonable from the evidence given by the story that this did not happen and Ariane's conception of it comes entirely from an amalgamation of her own childhood memories and the twin fantasy she had of Alina while dreaming in cryo. The main thread being that all the places you visit in the game have some connection to Ariane's past and contain events we know could not happen in physical reality (i.e. falling down a mineshaft onto the planet's surface, reclaiming physical objects from memories, etc.) bioresonance isn't confined by conventional space, or if it is, then its broadcast range is unfathomably wide given that Eusan's solar system was literally shaped into habitability by their empress's bioresonant powers. there's also a few hints, especially in the hidden ending, that something they dug up beneath leng acted as an amplifier of sorts, assuming that the artifact itself wasn't just another actualized figment of ariane's death fantasy plus there's the fact that ariane had never been to sierpinski to begin with, but it still has an established history and records of the growing wrongness there, indicating that her "signal" found its way to the place because she believes it's where she would have ended up if she hadn't elected to go on the penrose mission. the central motif of radio signals and broadcasts meshes way too well with the station being contaminated by a malignant signal from ariane's dying mind i also saw the returnal parallels and part of the reason i was so stoked about signalis is that it actually succeeded at pulling off the conceit i so badly wanted from returnal, making its nightmarish setting a part of established reality rather than something strictly allegorical
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Dec 26, 2022 21:27
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Lost 3 hours to Inscryption. It is a solidly 8/10 game, like a low budget Hand of Fate without the silly Batman combat and it’s kind of funny how the gravitas clashes with the scratchy art. E: I bounce off card games so hard because they rarely have stories and I need my stories man. That’s why my top 3 card based games look like 1. Metal Gear Ac!d 2. Metal Gear Ac!d 2 3. Inscryption al-azad fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Dec 26, 2022 |
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Dec 26, 2022 21:30
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Inscryption is one of my favorites. It's by the Pony Island dev if you didn't know, which was also excellent.
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Dec 26, 2022 21:31
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to me Inscryption suffers from the basic card game being way more fun than the later expanded one
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Dec 26, 2022 21:43
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Time to rebuy Golden Light for the third time! I am sure I will actually totally enjoy it now.
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Dec 26, 2022 21:45
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TheWorldsaStage posted:Inscryption is one of my favorites. It's by the Pony Island dev if you didn't know, which was also excellent. The Hex is also a pretty neat and spooky meta adventure.
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Dec 26, 2022 21:57
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Honest Thief posted:to me Inscryption suffers from the basic card game being way more fun than the later expanded one I never understood this sentiment at all. I think the later parts are just as good as the beginning.
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Dec 26, 2022 22:46
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Frankly I can’t believe it’s the work of 3 people and the odd freelancer it’s a game that punches above its budget.
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Dec 26, 2022 23:25
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I couldnt help but laugh at Yomawari's tutorial like wtfveni veni veni posted:I never understood this sentiment at all. I think the later parts are just as good as the beginning. I just think the card game was better with less stuff
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Dec 27, 2022 00:44
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FAITH is very obtuse. Game owns though.
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Dec 27, 2022 02:00
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Appalled at how weak the weapons are in RE0. Headshots with the good shotgun are like a 50/50 for a headshot and grenades are just like punching things really hard for how effective they are. Why does it take 2 grenades to kill a giant roach?? So much of this game is doing scouting runs then reloading so you can figure out what not to waste ammo on. I actually had to reload and ultimately knife centurion because whoops we threw a boss at you that disables a character and it takes all the grenades and 7 shotgun rounds equivalent to kill it.
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Dec 27, 2022 02:38
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Honest Thief posted:I couldn'tink the card game was better with less stuff Agree'd, the gameplay is definitely better in Act 1, my problem with it is that everything is so good in Act 1 nothing else after it ever reaches the same heights. Act 2 killed my excitement for the game and by Act 3 I just wanted the game to end.
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Dec 27, 2022 06:00
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So BigPEmu emulator for Atari Jaguar just released, and that means Alien VS Predator (1994) is now available in perfect emulation. Some will say "why would you want to inflict that upon yourself?", but seeing that game blew my mind when I was a stupid kid who couldn't even afford a Megadrive, so I intend to get closure on that. Five minutes of rebinding buttons to Dualshock 4 in a sane scheme, and you can start playing it rather comfortably. It's kind of... nuts? You have a whole ship, with sprawling levels, available to you like a crappy System Shock with full persistence, and all the keycards and vents make it a total maze, and you don't have even the basic tools to figure out your place and cardinal direction. I was gloriously lost so many times, even after breaking out the pad and pencil and snapping photos of maps and PDA logs that give you key information. And there are no mission objectives either! You can find some vague hints as to where something useful can be found, but you can also head to a wrong area and spend the scarily finite resources for no gain. It's so shoddy as a shooter even by the time's standards, but I can't stop playing, gotta conquer this loving place, make it my own! Combat is not scary, considering the savestates and the rudimentary design, but it got that old game creepy factor by the buckets, and you often just don't know what to expect. It managed to really weird me out a few times so far.
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Dec 27, 2022 11:39
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al-azad posted:Appalled at how weak the weapons are in RE0. Headshots with the good shotgun are like a 50/50 for a headshot and grenades are just like punching things really hard for how effective they are. Why does it take 2 grenades to kill a giant roach?? I decided to play through the RE games I never touched in 2020 (I'd only played RE1 and RE2), and I decided to just say gently caress it and cheat with RE5 and RE0. Playing them on PC with mods for infinite ammo made them more of an interactive movie with puzzles which is all I wanted. woodenchicken posted:So BigPEmu emulator for Atari Jaguar just released, and that means Alien VS Predator (1994) is now available in perfect emulation. Some will say "why would you want to inflict that upon yourself?", but seeing that game blew my mind when I was a stupid kid who couldn't even afford a Megadrive, so I intend to get closure on that. Five minutes of rebinding buttons to Dualshock 4 in a sane scheme, and you can start playing it rather comfortably. What's the difference between that and the arcade version? I know we've played that a ton on my arcade cabinet. Never mind, forgot AvP on Jaguar was a FPS Medullah fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Dec 27, 2022 |
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Dec 27, 2022 13:27
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RE0 was the first RE game I played, didn't find it too bad but I didn't really have anything to compare it to. Definitely played through as the buff guy though, as he did more damage with his attacks if I recall. I had a vague notion that Rebecca Chambers existed in RE1 and that there was a mansion, but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of the series.
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Dec 27, 2022 18:21
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Oxxidation posted:seconding that northern journey is excellent but with two caveats - the first several areas can be extremely difficult to navigate, and this is not something to play if you're arachnophobic. like not even a little bit. this game loves spiders as much as it hates you As someone who was unable to finish that old shooter called Blood for this very reason, I'm intrigued... Making my way through The Devil In Me and am liking it so far. The Steam reviews initially said it was a buggy mess, but they just patched it and it's playing fine for now. I like the series and House of Ashes was great.
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Dec 29, 2022 03:59
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Just finished Signalis and loved it, very interesting game. I was taken by surprise to learn it was basically made by 2 people. Incredible work from them. Managed to do the game with no guides, just took a bit to understand some puzzles. Gonna use a guide and get the others endings.
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Dec 29, 2022 04:52
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I think Devil in Me is their best next to Until Dawn. After HoA and this I'll play their next entry for sure.
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Dec 29, 2022 17:19
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Thats your ending Painscreek Killings?
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Dec 30, 2022 01:38
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I asked the devs on a steam forum about their next game, and they said they wouldn't make same mistake Painscreek did with the ending.
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Dec 30, 2022 01:46
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I asked the devs on a steam forum about their next game, and they said they wouldn't make same mistake Painscreek did with the ending. Thats great news. I really, really dug the game until that ending. One of my favorite investigation games so far.
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Dec 30, 2022 02:04
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Disposable Scud posted:Thats your ending Painscreek Killings? Yeah lol
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Dec 30, 2022 02:10
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I know the gameplay spoilers for that game it's a walking/investigation sim up until the very end, where you get chased by the murderer , but not their name/identity. Is the ending satisfying on a story basis at least, or does that suck in addition to the ending's gameplay?
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Dec 30, 2022 04:24
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Outlast 2, despite being gross as gently caress is a pretty fun game, but after replaying it for about an hour of it I feel the same way I felt about it the first time, which is that it's not very scary at all. Which is weird cause the first one scared the bejesus out of me. I have never replayed OL1 though. It leads me to wonder if the first one was actually scarier than 2, or if I it was just novelty and the first one wasn't that scary either and I just already knew all of the tricks they have up their sleeve with this one.
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Dec 30, 2022 04:32
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veni veni veni posted:Outlast 2, despite being gross as gently caress is a pretty fun game, but after replaying it for about an hour of it I feel the same way I felt about it the first time, which is that it's not very scary at all. Which is weird cause the first one scared the bejesus out of me. I have never replayed OL1 though. It leads me to wonder if the first one was actually scarier than 2, or if I it was just novelty and the first one wasn't that scary either and I just already knew all of the tricks they have up their sleeve with this one. I don't think 2 is scary either. I had zero resistance to it like I did with the first, or more recently The Mortuary Assistant (which is actually a good game). I plowed through 2 like a rollercoaster. Read After Burning posted:I know the gameplay spoilers for that game it's a walking/investigation sim up until the very end, where you get chased by the murderer , but not their name/identity. Is the ending satisfying on a story basis at least, or does that suck in addition to the ending's gameplay? I personally didn't care for the killer reveal. It just kinda leaned too much into schlock territory and the VA work in the evidence you find is corny. EDIT: I actually feel bad about the bad VA part because it wouldn't surprise me if it was the dev team doing it for budgetary reasons. CV 64 Fan fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 30, 2022 05:11
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Read After Burning posted:I know the gameplay spoilers for that game it's a walking/investigation sim up until the very end, where you get chased by the murderer , but not their name/identity. Is the ending satisfying on a story basis at least, or does that suck in addition to the ending's gameplay? The drama leading up to the murder is satisfying as is the light supernatural element that the game does not spotlight in the slightest the first ghost sighting at a well behind a gated mansion is so underplayed that it freaked me out super hard but ending the game on a mustache twirling confession and chase wasn’t great.
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Dec 30, 2022 13:28
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So the open-endedness of Alien vs Predator 64 resulted in a rather jumbled end-game where I reached the end boss without the means to kill him, and running back would be suuuch a chore I just hosed around until I got the key item while avoiding the battle. THEN the last place I went to actually had the ultimate gun. With not much left breathing on the ship, all that was left was to proceed to the escape pod. The escape timer is so quick you have to have the route engraved in your brain to have any hope of making it. In conclusion, neat curiosity, but a game like this in a modern engine, and without modern handholding, could be loving GOTY.
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Dec 30, 2022 14:07
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I do appreciate Pentiment for having multiple suspects for the crimes but no canon solution, just a choice on who to finger (no giggling) and a nasty consequence. The game isn't really a detective-game, like The Name of the Rose book it's a portrait of the era that captures every detail like when you perceive a person differently on knowing their education, and grasping a host's financial situation on the dinner they serve you. I'd play it again but it's very emotionally draining.
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Dec 30, 2022 14:28
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Daymare 1998 is free on GOG. So now some of you can try it without having to spend money.
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Dec 30, 2022 15:53
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veni veni veni posted:Outlast 2, despite being gross as gently caress is a pretty fun game, but after replaying it for about an hour of it I feel the same way I felt about it the first time, which is that it's not very scary at all. Which is weird cause the first one scared the bejesus out of me. I have never replayed OL1 though. It leads me to wonder if the first one was actually scarier than 2, or if I it was just novelty and the first one wasn't that scary either and I just already knew all of the tricks they have up their sleeve with this one. I can't speak to how bad Outlast 2 is, because all I played was the demo and that was enough to tell me "Yeah, same poo poo, different location" but Outlast 1 immediately loses its shine the second you figure out how the jump scares work. The first 20 minutes or so of the game were really tense, but once I started thinking like someone who has watched entirely too many horror movies it all fell apart. "Okay, I'll go in here and there's a dude just sitting there..He's going to jump scare me, but not this first time passing through, it'll be the second time because they're faking me out" Exactly what I described happens rinse repeat. Also, why am I supposed to be afraid of naked dudes? Were they just expecting everyone to have the "Eeeeww PENIS!" reaction or something? God drat I hate Outlast lol.
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Dec 30, 2022 16:39
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Outlast is an extremely one trick pony and very simple once you get past the smoke and mirrors. You just have to out last the beginning where it’s new and scary.
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Dec 30, 2022 17:14
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I do appreciate Pentiment for having multiple suspects for the crimes but no canon solution, just a choice on who to finger (no giggling) and a nasty consequence. The game isn't really a detective-game, like The Name of the Rose book it's a portrait of the era that captures every detail like when you perceive a person differently on knowing their education, and grasping a host's financial situation on the dinner they serve you. It's really cool how Pentiment uses font to depict class and I know whenever I see those frusrating S's that look like f I know a dirty peasant is talking. But also like Name of the Rose the mystery is less important than the people and it has a (can't remember the precise word for it) coincidence paradox where your intervention ultimately doesn't matter. Like Rose ends with the protagonist musing that he didn't actually do anything.
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Dec 30, 2022 17:22
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One thing I love about Pentiment is how much of a an arrogant overeducated pedant it allows you to be. Like any time anyone mentions inches you can go "Innsbruck inches or Nuremberg inches?". Not to mention that if you take the Latinist background you can rattle of a million different idioms and famous Latin sayings usually to the bemusement of whomever you're talking to. .
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Dec 30, 2022 17:33
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I went hedonist who went on a sex tour through Italy and was fairly shocked but unsurprised by how many horny repressed people live in the abbey.
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Dec 30, 2022 17:42
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Did you play any horror games while you were there?
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Dec 30, 2022 17:56
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I haven't played a ton but I love being able to say things like correcting someone's usage of decimate and for them to realistically be annoyed as hell at you for doing so.
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Dec 30, 2022 18:00
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SkeletonHero posted:Did you play any horror games while you were there? Pentiment has a ghost, occult rituals, pagan festivals, precognitive visions of doom, grave robbing, and brutal murder... it's at least horror adjacent. Mr E posted:I haven't played a ton but I love being able to say things like correcting someone's usage of decimate and for them to realistically be annoyed as hell at you for doing so. Yeah it rules that you can play Andreas as a nice but naive dude, a complete rear end in a top hat, or just the most insufferable nerd in Christendom without any of it feeling out of character. FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 30, 2022 18:02
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