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Notes -
Video game thread!
I'm having fun playing Baldur's Gate 3 with a few mods. WASD movement, camera tweaks (so you can actually see the beautiful environments), the somewhat chud-like Realms Restored 2.0 to de-woke the game world, and I'm switching between the amusing Philomena Cunk as my AI generated narrator voice and the cooler and more serious Christopher Lee. :D
I'm about 7-8 hours deep in the game on normal difficulty; currently making a conscious effort to reduce my savescumming to a minimum. My character is a custom Dark Urge Sorcerer. Which is fun.He apparently just brutally murdered a bard girl from the grove, who showed up in camp, while he was sleep walking. Hmm. I didn't seem to have an option to avoid this outcome. Then "my butler" showed up and gave me a reward of sorts. It will be interesting to see where this Dark Urge story goes, even though I'm not really prepared to be an evil butcher.
I've just respecced Shadowheart to a less crappy build and so far I'm running the party with her, the ever ruthless cunny Lae'Zel, and Gale.
I made sure to uncoverKagha's conspiracy to deliver the Grove to the shadow druids, before I even considered going towards the goblin camp etc. I've confronted her and killed her. Some people don't like that, others really do. because I played most of Act 1 a couple years back and got locked out of the quest back then.
Since it's Halloween, I'm going to shill scriptwelder's excellent point-and-click horror games. The Deep Sleep Trilogy is about a lucid dreamer who finds himself trapped in his own nightmares. It makes excellent use of atmospheric tension, with no gore and very sparse jump scares. As one commenter put it, "holy cow... i never thought 2 white pixels could be that frightening".
The Don't Escape Trilogy, by contrast, is a reversal of typical escape room games. Each title gives you a reason for wanting to lock yourself up (you are a werewolf who is about to go on a rampage, zombies are attacking and you need to dig in, etc.) and grades you at the end based on how well you did. These games are less story-heavy than Deep Sleep, but have better gameplay. On top of collecting items and solving puzzles, you also need to manage your time and make various tradeoffs (e.g., do you use the gas to fuel up the car, or fill up the generator?)
But the crown jewel is Don't Escape: 4 Days in a Wasteland, an epic tale of survival which joins both series together into one overarching canon. The moon has been destroyed, and planet Earth is dying. Each night, you are faced with a different obstacle, and it is up to you to prepare your base and keep the danger at bay. To increase replayability, the nature of the threat you face on a given day varies, as does the appropriate way of tackling it. For example, on the first night, you can face either a cloud of toxic gas, a swarm of locusts, or a pack of giant spiders. If you cover your windows with iron bars (which are available on all three scenarios), that will be great for stopping the spiders, OK at slowing the locusts, and do nothing against the gas. Along the way, you meet a colorful cast of other survivors, and discover that the end of the world is much closer than it appears. But one of your new buddies has a plan...
There's a sequel called Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken, but I'm waiting five years for the price to drop before trying it. The demo looked good, though.
And if you still want more point-and-click pixel art horror, The Last Door - Collector's Edition and The Last Door: Season 2 - Collector's Edition are also worth checking out.
A fun horror game recommendation from someone who hates horror movies and also most horror games: Signalis. More atmospherically and thematically creepy than jump scare-y, with great pixel-ish art reflecting a neat sci-fi Eastern German communist aesthetic, it's got some fun gameplay and some neat psychological light-touch story. It turns out I vastly prefer atmospheric-type games to the outright gross-out or jump-scare or pee-your-pants anxiety scare games. I do kind of wonder if there are many others that count. The point-and-click sounds interesting, though I usually find them far less engaging than more RPG or adventure-type games.
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