11.45 A Vivid Life lives up to its odd desciption and title. From the game’s download page:
“A short weird tale about a girl who discovered her skeleton isn’t hers, stole an xray machine and fled to the country to investigate her own body.”
So uh, yeah, I was definitely gonna check this one out.
It’s weird! Just like it reads on the box, you play as Laynie, a young girl who drives to the middle of nowhere to find answers to some strange questions.
You’ll use her x-ray machine to examine her insides, and do your best to end up with a bunch of them on the outside. At first I groaned a little because of the game’s resolution giving it such a tiny window, but by the end I was just glad I didn’t have a better view of Laynie ripping out her own teeth to investigate them.
As she checks out different pieces of her(?) body, you’re given a list of explanations, with the one you choose becoming canon. It’s a very Kentucky Route Zero style of building your own storytelling, and I’ve yet to get even remotely sick of it. My decision on whether Laynie’s metal chip in her hand was from an accident or a government implant maaaaaay have driven her paranoia up just a bit.
The developer, Deconstructeam, says that this is a “narrative experiment” that will lead to something secret. I’m hopeful that this project ends up being successful and whatever they make next is just as unique.
If you’re ready to dig… real deep to solve some mysteries, check out 11.45 A Vivid Life on its itch.io page.
Need to get spooky and you’re somehow not in 2018 yet? Maybe this just wasn’t enough spookin’? I’ve got you covered. On with the show!
Halloween is almost over! The spookiness has nearly headed out for another year! I couldn’t find my laptop charger to finish this post earlier this morning! Ahh!
Go ahead and throw on that Rockwell x MJ classic, and let’s do the dang spooky thing.
Welcome to a brand new Getting Spooky! It feels like the world around us is too spooky all the time these days, but now it’s time for a fun kind of spooky, if you have the mental capacity left to do so.
If this isn’t the best kitten since that angry banana baby… I don’t know who is.
Okay, now that we’re all spookily warmed up, it’s time to get genuinely unnerved.
Hereditary is one of my favorite movies of the year so far. I can’t remember the last time a movie put me on edge as this one did throughout the entirety of its runtime. Watching this in a crowded theater of similarly uncomfortable people for two hours is an experience I’m super glad I was able to have. I hope the lady who stood up during the credits and proclaimed “I need to talk to Jesus!” ended up okay.
Enjoy scrolling through @BrianLeeWow‘s tumblr of mirrored photos of Halloween costume models. It’s… something.
On my way home last night (OCTOBER 30th!!!!!!) I saw a brightly lit Christmas tree in someone’s window. That truly instilled horror in me in a way I didn’t expect. Yikesabunga.
You goottttaaa watch Mandy.
The less you know going in, the better. Just know that it’s a VERY hard R rating, and it will make you squirm in your seat. And then… only after you’ve paid your dues, Nicolas Cage delivers his best performance in years.
Oh right, video games.
September 1999 is a short story told in about five minutes. I very much enjoyed those five minutes. You’ll put the pieces together as the scenes progress, if you can focus on something other than just how incredible the visuals are. Seriously, you need to see it for yourself and decide whether it’s real footage or not. Maybe the most exciting thing about September 1999 is that the developer, 98DEMAKE, has spoken about plans to continue making stuff like this. I’ll be right back on day one for whatever comes next.
Another in 2018’s incredible run of horror movies is Annihilation. While not exactly a “horror movie” through and through, there’s enough spooks to go around in this one to qualify.
It’s one of those movies where people obliquely refer to “that scene”, but there’s actually a handful of different things they could be talking about. And they’re each as weird and innovative as the last.
Horror anthologies are one million times my jam, and the finding out that Supermassive is diving into the genre gave my hopes for 2019’s horror output a huge bump. The first one’s on a spooky boat! Sure, why not!
Berat Pekmezci’s art is at its best when his skills with color are used to their fullest. This is one of my favorites.
What a vibe! I love it very much, and you should check out the rest of his stuff. Fall rules.
Here’s your reminder of some of my favorite weird movies you should absolutely watch if you wanna get all spooked and have a fun time:
The Invitation
Pontypool
Creep
It Follows
The House of the Devil
The Ritual
If you haven’t played Just Shapes & Beats, first off, go do that because it’s one of the best games of 2018 by faaaaaaar.
Second, gosh I’m super upset that these aren’t actually in the game now! Ughhhhhhh. They’re beyond excellent.
Hey, you. Yeah, you with the thing. You should totally have a short horror film watch party.
Anthologies are my favorite horror for a reason: they are made to not give you time to get bored. Lots of horror movies drag on too long, or just barely have anything to say in the first place. With short films, though, even the bad ones only waste like 12 minutes of your night!
For starters, check out:
Don’t Look Away, and The Smiling Man are both also pretty weird and good. There’s dozens and dozens of creepy short horror things on YouTube, and the quality ranges pretty wildly. It’s a ton of fun to spend a couple of hours in the dark with friends just blasting through them though.
Fair warning, you’re gonna stumble across Still Life, and it kinda sucks. So maybe go ahead and skip it.
(If you watched it anyway… man, what was up with that ending? I was waiting for some cool twist the whole time, and that was it? Of course they were SPOILERS people. How else was that gonna play out? I feel like I had a dozen better ideas just while watching it.)
Was that spooky enough for you? No? Well… what about…
…
…
NOW!
See it got scarier because I made you wait and then yelled it.
Okay it’s 11pm on Halloween and the spooklocity is leaving my body to build back up through another year.
If you’ve never heard of indie games and really like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, then boy have I got something for you.
Let’s be honest: There might be a few too many devs releasing 2D platformers with pixel art. That’s just a fact of life. Are some of them uninspired? Sure. Is Timespinner the best one? Nope, but I sure had a pleasant weekend with it.
Timespinner is the closest game to Castlevania’s opus since the incredible Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow back in 2003. That doesn’t mean it’s as good, but it suuuuure feels like either one of those games, and you might even confuse it with one of them if you squint hard enough. You run back and forth between a 2D map filled with monsters and upgrades and ledges just a bit higher than your jump and then double jumps. You know exactly what you’re getting here. Oh, also you can stop time but it’s almost useless and comes into play like three times in the whole game.
The best part of Timespinner is its weapon system. Instead of swords and bows, you’re armed with orbs imbued with magic spells, and then you get even cooler spells from there. In my roughly 6 hours it took me to 100% the game and see all of its endings, I ended up with a good dozen or so different spells, and very few of them were useless or not worth seeing. You’ll start off with a basic projectile, then some swords, then lightning powers, and so on. Maybe only twice did I not at least enjoy experimenting with each ability as I found it, as they all offer some unique functionality or are just plain fun to use. For every orb also comes its equivalent super attack that uses mana, and those’re super neat as well. Once you get the gigantic sword slice ability that wipes anything off the screen, you’ll only feel more and more powerful from there.
Timespinner is a Metroidvania-lite if there ever was one. There’s a lot of stuff that’s worth seeing, but it all feels a bit too slight. One of my biggest issues is how samey and forgettable a bunch of the areas are, and that you’ll even begin to notice identical level layouts by the end. I closed in on the end-game and was waiting for the big reveal, SotN style, that maybe I was only seeing the first half before some big twist. And then I watched the credits.
None of this is to say Timespinner is a bad game. It’s not at all. I recommend playing it if you want to see a handful of new tricks that I somehow hadn’t seen in this well worn territory. Pay your 20 bucks, have a solid 5 or 6 hours with it, and then go play Hollow Knight and wonder if the genre can ever recover from being so soundly put to bed.
Are you ready to fill your next fifteen minutes with a helping of pure, unfiltered joy? Well, here he comes… It’s Paper Guy!
It’s Paper Guy is a tiny game that a group of French students submitted as a final project at their university earlier this year. Without knowing much more, I can almost guarantee they passed. You play as the happiest man/boy/guy alive, Paper Guy, as he skips through the forest on his own little adventure. His dark secret, though, is that he can somehow cut through anything around him on a whim. Don’t care for the paper trees? Snip snip. Dog stuck on a leash? Slice that rope; he’s your dog now.
The game consists of a handful of different areas in which you hop and chop your way through some very light puzzles to make the world better for everyone else around you. Help out local office workers, hang out with your new pet, and use your terrible, destructive powers for good.
The game’s aesthetic obviously owes a lot to the Paper Mario games, but it never feels wholly derivative. A pleasant 2D adventure game where you have near complete control over the environment isn’t quite like anything I’ve seen before. It’s Paper Guy! winds up being a combination of clever and wholesome in a way that we really don’t deserve.
If you’re ready to hang out with the happiest guy in town, check out It’s Paper Guy! on its itch.io page.
I wish someone had told me Just Shapes & Beats existed before I stumbled across it a month after release. If you know my taste in games, you’ll know that a weirdly artsy rhythm based bull hell hybrid is going to 100% be up my alley. Just Shapes & Beats nails that combo so hard it’ll be tough to see anybody else even give it a shot. As I played the first hour of Shapes and Beats, I had a bigger smile on my face than from any other game this year. It’s a game that just exudes pure joy even in the face of some surprisingly difficult challenges. I loved every minute.
It plays out like an interactive music video, your tiny little character moves and dashes around the screen avoiding pink obstacles that move in tune with the music. Levels vary wildly, from false 3D effects of bullets spinning around, to caverns filled with musical stalactites. As short as the game is, it crams so much variety into its two or three hours of dubstep and electronica tracks that I was ready to hop right back in as soon as it was done. Luckily, there’s a challenge mode where that exact option is available.
I understand a the main criticism I’ve seen thus far: yes, some of the obstacles and attacks are completely unfair, untelegraphed, and unacceptable in such an otherwise polished game. You have more health than you need for the most part, and I just take the damage from dumb trial-and-error attacks as they come, and remember to avoid them next time if I need to. Moments where damage is almost unavoidable are luckily few and far between, but I understand if those moments turn you off from the experience.
I know it’s a cliche to say a game is like X meets X, but this is one time where it felt like such a strange combination that I needed to get it off my chest. Imagine if the gameplay from Child of Eden and the emotional sincerity of Undertale were rolled into one video game, and you’ll have a slight understanding of the weirdness that this game pokes at by the time the credits roll.
Just Shapes & Beats is a game that I feel very few people are going to play. That sucks. It’s without a doubt the most unique game I’ve played this year, and pretty darn close to my favorite game of 2018. Go check it out!
Enter the Gungeon may have come out in 2016, but 2018 is the year that it finally became that game it was meant to be all along. I played Gungeon back during launch week and found it to be a decent Binding of Isaac riff, but one in need of several improvements if it meant to aim for the rougelike throne. While I still think Isaac is my favorite of the two, Enter the Gungeon’s path of updates over the last few years have made quite a strong argument that Isaac isn’t the only game in town anymore.
After returning to the game two years later with waaaaaaay more content than was there during the initial release, I’d be hard pressed to say that Enter the Gungeon is just an inferior copy. They’re both the current kings of the roguelike genre, and it’s pretty much just up to taste as to which you enjoy more.
If you, like me, tossed Enter the Gungeon to the side as some throwaway toy back in 2016… there really hasn’t been a better time to see why both of us were so, so, wrong.
First off, if you’re unfamiliar with the genre, it goes like this: You run around and dodge scary enemies, manage a small inventory and look for sweet items. You get more powerful the longer that you survive, but as soon as you bite it, you’re all done and have to start over again. You do make small bits of permanent progress by achieving certain tasks so you’re never totally set to square zero. However, if you’re not into mastering a difficult game again and again, this might not be the thing for you. For everyone else, let’s talk about what’s new.
With the most recent Advanced Gungeons & Draguns update, a slew of new content has been released, including a new floor, new bosses, OVER 300 SYNERGIES BETWEEN WEAPONS AND ITEMS, new enemies, new modes, and more stuff that I’m probably forgetting. If you were put off by Gungeon’s individual runs not being as varied as Isaac’s, this is the patch you’ve been waiting for.
A rough estimate I’ve thrown around is that there’s at least double the amount of stuff to find and do in Enter the Gungeon 2.0 when compared to 1.0. Even just the small tweaks to the game speed and smoothing out a few rough edges here and there make Gungeon in 2018 feel almost like a sequel to developer Dodge Roll’s freshman effort. Suffice it to say, I’ll be paying my share of attention to anything they decide to work on next.
Dodge Roll also put this update out for FREE, which is ridiculous if you’re one of the several thousand fans following this update’s development.
Long story short: if you’ve been itching to hop into the roguelike genre or just want another game to play in between Isaac runs, Enter the Gungeon should absolutely be your next stop.
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I can’t believe I got through this whole post without making a bullet heaven joke.
hippochippies 