Horror Month Roundup

 

Well, horror month is "over" and for the first time in years I failed to finish all 31 games on the list.  Technically, at time of writing I still have one day left but the next game in the list is Murdered: Soul Suspect and there's no way in fuck hell I'm finishing that in one day.

So why did it fail? The first and probably most obvious reason is the fact that I'm a dad now.  Being a dad reduces my stream hours a fair bit even at the weekends so while in previous years I would maybe go from like, 6am to midnight, this year I'd have to do 9am to 6pm and then 6pm to 11pm.  That's a whole bunch of hours, even an entire games worth of hours in some cases to get shit done.  Now while it would be easy to scapegoat my 1 year old if I'm being honest I don't think I could have pulled it off this year anyway because I'm an idiot.  In previous years I have put short indie horror games in the list to account for the fact that Monday-Friday I have to do my 9-6 job but this year I put far too many big boys on there.  Resident Evil 3, Fatal Frame, Bioshock, Fear 2, Manhunt, Disaster Report, what the fuck was I thinking.  Then I also got sort of blindsided by games that I thought would be a bit shorter that ended up taking way more time like Tormented Souls, FOBIA and Hollowbody.  My impression going in was that they were short and they were short in the sort of "6-10" hour definition and not the "1-2 indie experience" that I was thinking.  My fault for not doing the research in enough detail.

But enough about my failure.  More importantly, how were the fucking games?   Well good, mostly.  Stuff like Fatal Frame and Bioshock were in there because I already knew they were good and I wanted an excuse to replay them.  I was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed Resident Evil 3 actually.  Usually when I have played that game in the past its because I've been marathoning 1-3 back to back and by the time I hit 3 I'm burnt out.  Playing it fresh gave me a new perspective on it and while it's still sort of frustrating and feels like an expansion rather than a proper sequel, I liked it a lot more than I usually do.

Then there were the first plays like Disaster Report which I really enjoyed although I have played later games in the series and enjoyed those so I sort of knew I'd like that one.  Crow Country was also a great old school survival horror throwback with a cool visual style.  Tormented Souls I liked less but still thought was pretty solid.  I really enjoyed the fact that someone was doing the modern day "rendered" backgrounds thing because I love pre-rendered backgrounds of old and I wish more people would make really crisp, detailed shit on modern tech.  That technique is seen as "dated" though and isn't used so much so big props to Tormented for doing a take on it.  Of course, I cannot mention the great games from the horror games I finished without mentioning Faith.  Absolute belter of a game despite the fact that it looks like an Atari2600 game.  Interesting plot, actual effective horror, some decent replayability that I'm excited to go back to offline, absolutely a contender for best game of the marathon. 

Finally there were the stinkers.  Moons of Madness was a pathetic and boring foray into Lovecraft.  Hollowbody was a complete snoozefest which is crazy considering how much it was copying the homework of much better games.  Finally there was FOBIA which I won't go into detail on here because that might be one of the contenders for worst games I have ever played in my life and therefore I need to save all my bile for the blog post its going to get soon.

Just because horror month is over, doesn't meat that I'm just giving up on that playlist though.  It's being incorporated into the regular schedule and played to completion.  My weekends will also continue to be long horror streams until it's done so tune in over at Twitch or Youtube to check it out.  The one good thing about failing the marathon is that the last game on the list is Deadly Premonition 2 and while before I was planning to b-line it to the end to make pace, now that I've failed I can kick back and engage with more of it's content, which I think is a much better way to do my first playthrough.  

Good times were had, more to come

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Pathetic Imitations

 I've put some real stinkers on this years horror marathon playlist and one of them that really stood out for having a particular odor was FOBIAL: St Dinfna Hotel.  I'm not going to spend this blog post going into the details of just specifically how terrible it was, that's another post for another time, but not only was it a bad game, it was also a pathetic imitation of something much better.

We live in an age where remakes and remasters seem to be all the rage, constantly barraged with updated versions of shit from games past and when those aren't being shoved into our faces by developers and publishers there are constant talks of what "deserves" a remake (whatever that means) and what "needs" a remake.  Pathetic discourse for pathetic people who have buried deep into their comfort zones and built nuclear bunkers so that they don't have to suffer the torment of playing something new or from an unfamiliar IP.

But one thing we don't seem to pay much attention to is the imitators, the weird malformed cousin of the remaster.  Not part of a well established thing but copying the well established thing closely enough that the people will still clap their hands together like seals and fork out the money for it.  It happens a lot in the indie sphere with a great many games cribbing from things like Zelda, Metroid or even just copying whatever big indie game came out in the last six months.  If I had a dollar for every Vampire Survivor clone that exists then I'd probably have enough money to pay off the rest of my mortgage.  Again, a post for another time but I do feel the indie scene does have a bit of a creativity problem going on.  

Not that this ALWAYS results in terrible bullshit.  Touhou: Artificial Dream in Arcadia springs to mind with it being just a straight up, slightly weebier, clone of Shin Megami Tensei 1+2 but clearly done by someone with a lot of love and passion for the older MegaTen games so the imitation feels sincere.  Not a quick way to make a fast dollar off two established franchises with a fan game but someone who clearly likes Touhou a fair bit making a game in a style that we don't get anymore just because they like it so much.  Go check that game out, it's pretty fukken neato.  

I suppose you would call it a tribute, rather than an imitation

But then there's FOBIA: St Dinfna Hotel, a pathetic attempt to make money off the fact that Resident Evil 7 exists by a studio of inept, creatively bankrupt morons.  Everything about that game from the graphics to the UI to the gameplay feels like a cheap knockoff of what RE7 was doing.  The very epitome of the "we have Resident Evil 7" at home meme that you see so often around the internet.  Unlike the Touhou game, it seems to have been made by not only cynical idiots out to make a quick buck from the back of another IP, but also a group of people who have ONLY played RE7 and literally nothing else. I will, for now, refrain from going into massive detail but FOBIA is the exact kind of game to cause veins to pop in heads with just how hollow it is and it's just one of many offenders that have popped up thanks to platforms like Steam and Itch.

Another, slightly less (but only slightly) offensive example is one I'm currently playing at time of writing called Hollowbody.  A game that at first glance looks like it might be doing its own thing and then quickly devolves into a particularly shallow Silent Hill clone that isn't so much bad as it is just painfully boring.  Usually I say that boring games are worse than bad games because at least anger is an emotion and art should be there to illicit emotions but there's something especially grating about a developer that copies another games format so closely only to still make the interactive equivalent of wallpaper paste.  A group of people who played Silent Hill 2 exactly once, followed it up with a single viewing of 28 Weeks Later and then churned out a low effort game because those two things made money, so surely that will too.  It's pathetic to see developers engaging in this trash behaviour and its even more pathetic to see consumers giving it the thumbs up in a steam review.

Being inspired by another person or studios work can lead to some really great things.  Some Lost in Vivos, some Okami's, some fuckin Undertale type shit but making those kind of games requires not only love for the thing you're imitating, but love for the medium itself.  The two games I talked about here are just recent examples of a problem that has existed since the dawn of games, but I'm begging just a few more indie devs to maybe try at least a little harder.  Play a little more widely, go experience some things that aren't games, draw from many things to make something cool instead of just copying the flavor of the month to try and line your pockets.  Steam is already full of shit, stop adding to it