What have we all been playing recently?

I'm mad because I was very hype for Star Wars: Jedi Survivor and it's almost unplayable on PC because of the frame rates dropping.

FIX YOUR SHIT EA

 

somehow cobbled together a deck good enough to allow me to win Slay The Spire for the first time (i still don't know how i managed to pull that off), which unlocked the 4th character. loaded them up for a test run and immediately hit a K6BD reference (reach heaven...through violence!) XD

not what i expected but a fun time nonetheless

 

started signalis and ooh boy it's spooping me out (in a good way)

 

instead of brain there is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

 

Korok Rocket Ga- uh, I mean Tears of the Kingdom

 

I was possessed by an urge to think about indie RPGmaker horror games a bunch for some reason, which led to me playing Lily's Well, my primary response to which was sheer admiration for an incredible trope subversion in the true ending.

 

now that I have a controller I can use with my pc, I've started Hollow Knight again. it's amazing how much better it is than keyboard controls. last attempt I was using a no damage mod for casuals, and it's easier now to play without that but with a controller. (I am still using an easy mode mod, because grinding bosses bores me, but it's a pretty balanced one imo and doesn't feel like I'm breezing through at all.)

the atmosphere in this game is so lovely. I could spend hours just wandering around Greenpath.

 

Fallout: New Vegas! I just started on the first DLC. I intend to get through the game this time but we will see if that occurs. Especially with Baldur's Gate 3's console release nearing...

 

Oooo what's that one about?

 

The titular Lily is a pink-haired little girl at home alone at her house in the woods, and she hears someone calling from the well out back, so she goes to look for things she can use to make a rope to climb down the well. Various terrible things happen. There are different endings every time you go down with a particular amount of rope, and a hidden true ending accessible after going through all of them. I really, really don't want to spoil the twist for anyone who might play it because it's incredible but I also want to talk about it because it's incredible, so I'm going to use nested spoiler tags in case someone decides they want to nope out and experience it themselves partway through.

Spoiler

As you poke around Lily's house and the nearby area looking for rope, you'll find that there's a carefully-maintained flower garden near the house with a big stone monument in it. Some of the flavor text and such also suggests that Lily has almost no contact with the outside world.

Spoiler

As you get deeper in the well, some of the backgrounds start looking like some sort of industrial facility. Instead of Lily just falling to the bottom of the well when the rope runs out, at certain depths something much weirder happens and she dies in a different horrible way, like one where she lands in an incinerator. Also, every time you die, the screen briefly shows "XXX-XXX-XXXX" with a different one of those Xs replaced with a number each time.

Spoiler

One of the most difficult rope pieces to get is by finding a key that unlocks the monument in the flower garden, which reveals that it contains a pool of black slime full of what looks like pink hair. At one of the lowest levels of the well, she ends up in a room with several weird scary mutants with pink hair. So, if you know much about how indie RPGmaker horror games about terrible things happening to little girls tend to go, what you find out when you collect all the available rope pieces and finally reach the bottom is probably not going to be too much of a surprise:

Spoiler

The well is connected to a secret research facility run by her father, who has been trying to create a perfect alchemical reproduction of his daughter, the original Lily. The endings of the game are all canon, and are happening one after another; being sent back to the beginning is him starting over with a new Lily homunculus, because he thinks her running off into the woods when he told her to stay inside, go to bed, and not talk to anyone is a sign that that model is flawed, because a perfect replacement would obey her father. He shoots her, and you return to the beginning as usual.

Spoiler

If you examine the phone in Lily's house before this, the flavor text says you don't know any numbers you'd like to call. However, if you've gotten all 10 endings, you can enter the numbers from those XXX screens to get the true ending. Which is where we get to the real spoiler:

Spoiler

It's Lily's cell phone number.

When she gets a call from a crying child named Lily babbling about remembering dying in a well, she goes, "Oh, that FUCKER," and tells player!Lily to stay inside, lock the doors, and watch her favorite My Little Pony VHS for a while so she has time to drive in from out of state.

No further explanation of the backstory is provided, or necessary. The fact that she walks in the door a 100% alive adult goth is enough to paint the entire picture by itself.

Then they burn down the house. The last image of the game is the Lilies at a restaurant, happily eating a giant stack of pancakes.

 

i've been playing Hardspace Shipbreaker!

it's about shipbreaking spaceships. and also unions and corrupt companies

 

I didn't have the patience to go through all the iterations so I looked up a cutscene and holy shit this rules

 

Right? I saw that and I was like, "We don't need any more horror games about horrible things happening to little girls now. This is the last word on the subject."

 

Spoiler

I know that it's not elaborated on for a reason, but I both want to believe Lily is just a normal girl who left, and that she's like half-Azoth and the stuff about "Mother" isn't entirely a lie, especially given new Lily can remember stuff like her cellphone number.

The game also feels like someone played Mad Father and went wow this sucks, she deserves to leave

 

got rdr2, played through the first little bit of it. the controls feel weirdly clunky and cumbersome compared to what I'm used to. maybe would be better with a controller? and I wish the journal text was easier to read.

haven't yet gotten far enough in to form an opinion on the game itself but it looks damn good.

 

I can confirm that it is at least a little bit better with a controller, but the controls are still going to be somewhat stupid regardless. that one Awkward Zombie comic about how "Red Dead 2 has one button, which is Shoot, and it will occasionally try to trick you into using it for other things" is 100% correct

 

16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonald's is good.

(I am up to 7 ways so far.)

 

i got to 15 and can NOT figure out how to get angry enough to acquire super strength. Let me know if you figure it out???

 

Is that for the "Snicker-SMASH" (or whatever it's called) ending? If I'm not mistaken,

Spoiler

you have to mess up to get the option.

Specifically,

Spoiler

I recall getting it after the vampire bit the cashier.

 

OH

Spoiler

man i forgot there even was an attack option there... thank you!!!