Dan Plays Games 9

In the last installment, Arnold suggested writing some bits of gameable material at the end, and I think that's a pretty good idea. Only got one bit for this one, but that should hopefully change for the next.

 

Date Everything (Update) 

I promised a Date Everything tier list, here is that tier list. 

Open link in new tab to actually read the damn thing

My thoughts on the game are basically the same as in the previous post. I respect the hustle, and when I finally got to the end my feelings were generally positive, but overall I’d point people towards Teenage Exocolonist or Slay the Princess instead. Neither of which, I admit, would be strictly called dating sims.

Further notes:

• Dolly is a gem and her story the one that felt most like an actual romance. I like the anthropologist character, who could have possibly guessed this would happen.
• Tydus Andromache being the off-brand detergent pods + Amazon + speaking in iambic pentameter is the kind of layered gag I live for.
• Bobby is NB and so should be labeled as HELLO, BOSS, of course, but it didn't feel right giving them anything lower than top tier even if they're on the same color grade. Just imagine it's on the right hand side.
• Barry Styles gets an award for most positive surprise: didn't think I would like him at all, but then it turns out he's the ADHD character written by someone who Gets It, and I appreciate that a lot.
• Part of Mac’s storyline involves them asking you to delete  quote "terabytes” unquote of poorly-written self-insert erotic fanfiction. I crunched the numbers on that, and 2 TB of plaintext files (with 40% lopped off for whatever bespoke formatting the Valdivian text editor uses, estimated) is roughly equivalent to the entire career output of Stephen King 8733 times over. All because they want to update to the newer, definitely enshittified corpo operating system. Nah, mate, I’m going to offer Lyric a profit-share editorial job and we are going to make bank.
• Curt and Rod’s storyline is bugged still, and for me was uncompleteable. Thankfully you don’t actually need to get an ending with everyone to finish the game, but I was deep enough in that they where the only ones I hadn’t finished.

Islanders: New Shores

It’s Islanders with a slight/modest amount of new content. One of those sequels where it kinda outmodes the original, but also I don’t know if it does enough to really stand out against it, either. But that’s only an issue if you’ve played the first game, and even then it’s probably not a huge issue.

Silksong

Silksong is what happens when your devs are entirely isolated from anyone who isn’t an absolute freakbeast. It is perhaps the most player-hostile game I’ve encountered in recent memory, and it was made so with intention. I’d be more forgiving if it was jank, but in this case the cruelty was the point. Here’s a run down:

• Lightly nudging a boss with your toe does 2 masks of damage, just like all of their attacks (which is double what a typical Hollow Knight boss does)
• Lengthy boss runbacks are both present and often extremely tedious - even FromSoft got rid of them in Elden Ring, and for good reason.
• Exploration is less rewarding - most of the tools and trinkets are locked behind the rosary bead currency dropped by certain enemies, which favors grinding out trash mobs to afford anything until you hit Act 2.
• There are no real rewards for bosses or enemy gauntlets (which can sometimes be tougher than bosses themselves) - they don’t even drop shards.
• Speaking of shards, I understand that they’re supposed to be a mechanic where you are forced to take a break from a boss to go do something else, but again like…there’s very little incentive to explore. You get so little in the way of exploration rewards, and you’re likely to get frustrated or stuck on some bullshit or another anyway.
• Minor enemies have bloated health pools, and some of them also do two masks of damage. And the flying ones straight-up just read your inputs so you’re stuck trying to hit an extraordinary precognitive little fucker.
• Some environmental hazards also do two masks of damage (which they did not in Hollow Knight) - makes sense for lava, not for anything else. They fixed one of these in a patch.

I managed to beat Widow before I installed the reduced damage and Stakes of Marika mods; there was no satisfaction in overcoming that fight, merely relief that it was over and I would never have to do it again. These mods made it tolerable for a while: the Last Judge fight was actually fun, when I'm certain it would have driven me to uninstall if I had tried to do it clean. 

This lasted until I got to Mt. Fay, played for 10 minutes more, and uninstalled. Putting the technically-optional double jump (something that is helpful for people who are having trouble with the platforming) behind an extremely tough and tedious platforming challenge (of the sort that if you're able to do it, you probably don't need the double jump) is a level of cruelty beyond what mods can solve. My wrists are shit, Team Cherry, throw me a fucking bone.

All the parts I liked of the game - the visuals, the music, the exploration - were constantly up against a compounding set of choices I could probably endure individually but less so all at once and definitely not all the time: it’s a death by a thousand cruel cuts. Difficulty and frustration are different things, a lesson that Silksong does not seem to have internalized.

The game's difficulty is still tuned for "postgame DLC" and there are no options without mods, and that mars what is otherwise a stellar experience, leaving me with an end result that waffles between the extremes of fun and frustration in some kind of quantum superposition. Some moments, like the Lace fight, are downright sublime; but then you spend three times as long fighting the Moorwing and the experience starts to sour. All the fun I had with the game was in spite of the game, not really because of it, and the disappointment is deep.

I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, because anyone with a tolerance for its specific style of bullshit either already owns it or already has it on their wishlist.

Hades 2

The anti-Skong, as far as development is concerned. It’s Hades 2, which means it’s Hades 1 but more Hades, which has worked generally in the game’s favor but also means that my main issue with Hades 2 is the same I had with Hades 1, similarly magnified: shit’s big, and I’m a man liable to run out of steam. Especially here, where the game is quite literally twice as large as the first game. Runs are long and require a lot of sustained focus, and the resource treadmill means you will be making a whole lot of runs.

Some folks had issues with the ending, I dodged that since I still haven’t finished the game.

It’s an extremely slick game and a lot of fun to play, but I find that I have to be in a high-focus state of mind to really settle down and play a run.

Every single new character to show up, even when their inclusion was a foregone conclusion, elicited a “oh shiiiiiiiiiit!” reaction just from the excitement of seeing the new character design, which was a fun thing to work towards. As before, these iterations have more or less become my canonical (or at least primary) versions of the characters.

Binding of Isaac: Repentance (Continued)

I put so many fucking hours into this game since August I had to uninstall and hide it from my library. Wrong game at the right time, and while there are worse things to be addicted to god damn is there a lot of game in this game and it knows how to get the hooks in. I was getting into stuff I didn’t even know existed (the Tainted characters) and overall it was feeling good to be back, but also kind of a checklist treadmill (I literally had an achievement spreadsheet I was tracking progress with) and in retrospect it was very much one o' them maladaptive coping strategies. 

Decktamer

"What if Pokemon but a deckbuilder and also had the fucked-up (positive) monster ecology of Made In Abyss but didn't have all the other, fucked-up shit (negative) of Made in Abyss?"

I was sold on this game from the monster art (your tutorial beast is the Hell Rat, which looks like a naked mole rat with a cookie-cutter shark mouth), and it’s been great fun so far on top of having a killer bestiary of gross-cute beasties. Some issues with difficulty that have since been evened out with patches, and I'm looking forward to what gets added later. There's a lot of room for pulling off some wild combos with abilities and team comps, but to get those you have to be both lucky and good at thinking on your feet.

Hell is Us

“What if Death Stranding was an exploration/puzzle-first Soulslike set in a fictional analogue of the Bosnian War?”

I'd asked some folks, a short while before this game came out, if there was a Soulslike with no boss fights. Something that was wholly set on exploring an interconnected and detailed environment without combat gates (or at least with milder ones). They didn't have an answer for me, but lo and behold, Hell is Us emerges to fill this exact niche. The game is good. Deserves its own post.

Peak

My partner and a couple real-life friends picked it up so I figured why not. Was a good choice. Losing is fun / hilarious and that carries so much of a game. There are just enough moving parts for chaos to creep into a cascading disaster of four people making small sub-optimal choices over time. It's a strong chassis to build on top of.

Not a fan of the Roots area they added, though. Visually great, but the spores are just kinda one difficulty element too far for me. No clear distinction for when you are actually in danger zone vs in the margin of the cloud until you’re actually taking damage.

Picto Quest: The Cursed Grids

Uncharitable reviews would call it shovelware; It was $1.50 on sale, and I have certainly gotten $1.50 of enjoyment out of it. No frills, no extras, just ~120 picto puzzles. I’d never tried this type of game before and ended up really enjoying it for what it is. A very good game when you’re having a shit day and want to think about nothing more complex than some numbers and an unambiguous problem.

 

**

 

The Gameable Content Bonus

Speak with Tsukumogami

 You call up the spirit of an object for a short conversation. Default chance of 1-in-6, add 1 if:

• The object is over 100 years old.
• The object is regularly used or in contact with humans.
• The object possesses some perceived importance to humans.(regardless of actual importance)
• You make an appropriate hospitality offering (ie something the object would like)
• You take 1d6 fatigue damage (healed only after sleep)

Failure does not mean the spirit doesn't exist, only that it isn't interested in talking.

Recent damage to an item reduces the roll by 1, as do insults, general mistreatment, neglect, and so on.

Tsukumogami are basically people, but very lightly two-dimensional people. They have knowledge of their surroundings, their trades, and their personal histories; anything beyond that will be gossip they've heard from the other object-spirits. They do not care one bit about the ramifications of their existence. 

 

Monster Dissection: Gnoph-keh

I recently re-read my old dissection of the Yugg and thought “you know, it’s been a while since I’ve roasted a bad bestiary entry”. So let’s roast a bad bestiary entry, courtesy of the Malleus Monstrorum for Call of Cthulhu 7e. 

(To be fully up front, I don’t think there’s a single good entry in the MM and I don’t expect to ever feel otherwise: Chaosium has both resources and experienced writers at their disposal, but they seem content to squander both and put out work that is consistently outdone by amateurs. I’m disinclined to give them a charitable read.)

Gnoph-keh

Something like a polar bear monstrosity, with six-limbs and covered in shaggy white hair. From its forehead rose a single horn, while its great mouth was filled with wicked and sharp teeth. Cunningly, it may walk upright on two legs or bear-like on four, other times it uses all six limbs to rip across the ice to find its prey.

This is an okay opening description. I think the last sentence is a bit bloated but compared to some other entries it is at least coherent.

Note: the ghoph-keh race of bear-like terrors is not to be confused with the Great Old One known as Gnophkehs.

Now, the great old one Gnophkehs is featured in the deities half of the Monstrorum, but its origin isn’t cited and the Lovecraft wiki, despite having sections directly plagiarized from this very book, doesn’t mention Gnophkehs at all.

Going back to the 2006 edition of the Monstrorum, however, gives us a citation for a story called - and woof, no wonder it seems to be memory-holed - “Nautical Looking Negroes” written by Peter Cannon and Robert M. Price in 1996. Men whose names appear absolutely nowhere in the modern Monstrorum, including the credits page; the Deep Cuts blog (which I discovered during writing this post and will certainly be returning to in the future, it's a very good read) had a write-up, however, which among other things revealed that yeah, maybe there’s a reason Chaosium didn’t want to include Price’s name. (The reason is active, still very-much-alive racism)

This is all to say that:

1. It’s safe to ignore Gnophkehs the Great Old One.
2. Chaosium failed to credit Peter Cannon and Robert Price, instead listing Scott David Aniolowski’s writeup from the 2006 edition of the Monstrorum as the source.

You know, if someone is nasty enough that you don’t want them on the credits page, maybe don’t use their stuff, Chaosium.

Also: If you thought a credits page can’t possibly have bad formatting, I have bad news for you. Look at this:

Anyway, back to the alien polar bears.

The gnoph-keh are a race of beings who appear to inhabit-

 One cannot appear to inhabit; one either lives in a place, or does not. If that cannot be determined, the verb should be “encountered”. 

-cold places, notably Greenland, northern Canada, and other isolated wintry wildernesses. 

I bet they perform a variety of 80s dance moves, too. 

“Cold places” is a weird vagary here, because the only two territories provided are pretty specific: near or above the Arctic circle, not in Eurasia. Antarctica not being included isn’t particularly strange, but the absence of Siberia absolutely is. Disregarding the Doyleist explanation, I can only think of two reasonable in-universe explanations:

Option A: The gnoph-keh have somehow been prevented from migrating to Siberia (or migrated out of Siberia)

Option B: The gnoph-keh are extinct in Siberia.

Option A lends itself to “...because a Great Old One is preventing them”, while Option B is open to more variety, including “...because the Soviets killed them all” and that is a hook with some bait on it (he said, of his own work)

Legend purports-

Whose legend? Given the territory established in the previous sentence the only real option would be Inuit, but that’s something of an umbrella category and you can get more specific. 

-that the gnoph-keh are the remnants of a lost tribe-

The Inuit migrated from Alaska to Nunavut and Greenland from about 1100 to 1500 AD; the earlier inhabitants of the region we just know as the Dorset culture who (according to Wikipedia article about indigenous Americans, bring a second salt lick just in case) remained in the cultural memory of the Inuit peoples as giants called the Tuniit.

I can understand the desire to keep it vague: The detailed version does entail “make up a fake legend for a real indigenous group about another real indigenous group”, but if you wanted to avoid that you can just not include the history. Or say they’re from the Dreamlands, or make up fictional groups that hold these beliefs, or something like that. Like if you say that they were once the Sannikov Islanders that one’s free because Sannikov Island doesn’t exist.

Why are these writeups always so obsessed with the origin of the monsters yet never actually doing anything with it?

-who turned from earthly gods to serve the Great Wind Walker, Ithaqua, and in so doing became something other than human. Other tales-

They’re not going to tell us who, where, or when. 

-speak of the creatures as earthly extensions of alien powers, always at the periphery, waiting and watching in the vast wilderness to pounce on those who would forsake the safety of civilization.

This is not at all exclusive with the first option, I don’t understand why they are listed separately. Still no explanation of where this comes from, so I am going to go with “this is what the Soviets believe, there were definitely some GRU paranatural division guys who believed gnoph-keh attacked people for being insufficiently Marxist.”

Some tomes-

I am going to stop asking questions and just mad-libs this: Pnakotic Manuscript 3756-G07.

 -recall the attack of the gnoph-keh upon doomed Lomar. 

This is Dreamlands material, which should probably be mentioned in the writeup.

Whatever their true origin, gnoph-keh are territorial, individualistic, and rarely encountered. 

“Gnoph-keh are highly territorial solitary predators” should be one of the first things in the writeup, because it will be directly relevant to both players and referees: how does the monster behave?

Seemingly, their solitary existence is broken only occasionally,-

How many qualifiers can we add to this verb?

-when two or more gather to form a pack for unknown reasons- 

I can only presume fucking is involved, stay tuned for my upcoming monograph “Courtship Rituals and Mating Practices of the West Greenlandic Gnoph-keh.”

—perhaps when they sense the arrival of Ithaqua or some other manifestation of the Great Old One.

This entire sentence can be reduced to “outside of the mating season, gnoph-keh gather only during manifestations of Ithaqua.”

Especially harsh winters may bring them down into lowland regions and closer to humanity.

Ambiguous sentence, needs clarification on whether the harsh winters are driving The gnoph-keh into warmer regions (which makes little sense) or if they move south with the harsh winters (much more sensible).

Weird, but expected, incongruity with territory, here. They are described as if they live in mountainous environments, which makes sense, but migrating makes less sense if those mountains are in Nunavut and Greenland - I don’t think an especially harsh winter in Nunavut or Greenland is going to have a marked differential on the “It’s Fucking Cold” scale between the mountains and lowlands.

Feared by those who are aware of their existence, there are a few isolated communities who have turned their fear into a form of worship, venerating the gnoph-keh as harbingers of icy fate and, in doing so, some have been touched by the mind of Ithaqua and turned their devotions to the Great Wind-Walker.

There’s a much easier way to frame this: 

• Community is beset by a gnoph-keh.
• Community attempts to placate the gnoph-keh.
• Gnoph-keh uses human sacrifice as a meal ticket, as it’s much easier than hunting a group of humans with rifles and snowmobiles 
• Close contact with gnoph-keh + the whole ritual murder thing and all the social damage that causes opens community to influence of Ithaqua.
• Shit gets worse until community collapses; any survivors either transform into gnoph-keh or wandering parahuman cannibals.

Monster behavior should serve as the framework of a scenario: how does this thing act and what does it do, and how is that currently going horribly for people around it and how will it react to the PCs? 

Such communities soon turn to the terrible delights of cannibalism and consort with the gnoph-keh in blasphemous ceremonies.

Stop beating around the bush and just say they fuck the alien polar bears, guys.

Also, because I am specifically this kind of pedant:

• Blasphemy = Insulting acts / words / etc directed towards sacred subjects.
• Heresy = Belief that is at odds with the orthodox doctrine of a religion. 
• Apostasy = Renunciation or abandonment of one’s faith 
• Heathenry = The religious practices of Those People Over There Who Aren’t Us

So unless ritually fucking the alien polar bear also involves shitting inside a tabernacle or getting real artistic and intentional with your violations of Qaujimajatuqangit, it’s heathen, not blasphemous.

**

So there we have it. Honestly, I like the tweaked version I made enough that I might throw it in somewhere, though it'd need a name change. I have a grammar of West Greenlandic lying around on my hard drive that would help with that.

Harping on the quality of the entry is a diminishing return, especially if I ever get the itch to do another one of these. I was going to end with a somewhat-relevant Horror Fiction Thought, but then I wrote 1320 words that didn't end up going anywhere and decided to shelve it for another day. Some long ramble about the overton window of the unknown and how modern horror often bypasses the first layer of obfuscation by putting the fragments of the cursed tome (or weird VHS tape, or the paperwork of the shadowy organization) directly in the hands of the readers, thus letting the audience fill the role once held by the Lovecraftian Protagonist. Ah well. Maybe another time.