#World of wilderness

[hungry-skeleton]

Now that I've had time to process the game properly I've got some Thoughts™ about Into The Hive.. Spoilers under cut for the 2 people on tumblr that play Chicken Police

First things first, I cannot say with a sound mind that this was a bad game because it wasn't. Into The Hive was a fucking blast up until the final act. The gameplay itself was very fun and the visuals were a huge upgrade from Paint It Red. To get it out of the way, yes I understand that it had a rough development due to covid and publisher changes so I can't be too mad about some jank details. However, some of the writing choices were just. Baffling honestly.

For the Hive itself, I was so hyped to finally see it from all the buildup it had in the first game. Unfortunately I don't think this game really delivered? It wasn't an outright disappointment it was just... Eh? The original game made it seem like a lawless wasteland with corpses and cannibals everywhere but all it really turned out to be was a dirtier city with even more depressed people. I was expecting to walk into a purge movie honestly, but maybe that's my fault. For the Hive being the name of the game we barely did any exploring, I feel like we only scratched the surface of the place and didn't even get to see the worst of it.

The exploration of this game in general just felt less in depth than the first. There's no real optional characters to speak to unlike the first game (which makes the Talkative Breed achievement kinda pointless) and it overall felt more cramped and railroaded. There wasn't any limited time events for special dialogue like in the first game unless you count like.. The Bloodboyle birthday thing that's super easy to miss.

While the characters were fantastic as always the only real problem with them was the seemingly shoehorned "romance" between Sonny and Monica. I know haha I'm the "sonny and marty are super gay" guy but speaking entirely about canon, this just doesn't work. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Monica. She and Sonny's one on one interactions in the later half of the game were great, but there's literally nothing about their relationship that is romantic to me. They're good friends, they have been since the first game, and literally nothing about the way they interacted changed. Yet every character was acting as if there was suddenly sparks flying and unmistakable chemistry. They acted the same towards each other as they always have?? I get that the games theme is moving on but I don't think a new relationship is necessary for Sonny to do that, especially not in the way that it was handled.

The final act is where the issues really become prevalent. This games biggest problem is how obviously rushed the conclusion is. Everything was smooth sailing and really enjoyable until the climax. We didn't get to understand the villains and their motivations the way we did Wessler in Paint It Red. In fact we barely got any time with them. Mick was there for a grand total of 2 minutes before fucking vanishing and all we really got out of him was a half baked backstory that he admitted to way too quickly. Everything culminated in the villains being 3 steps ahead of us the entire time and the grand victory just being shooting the bitch (which Sonny once again couldn't do himself). All this did was make me feel like everything I had done was for jack shit. Every clue and lead a trap that was ended with a single bullet. So unbelievably unfulfilling, even if it was still a victory.

Lastly, of course, the elephant in the room. Marty's death was stupid, plain and simple. Writing out of the way, the logistics just didn't make sense? Did Mick only have one bullet or something? Why'd he drive away after a single shot? Marty's death added literally nothing to the story. It was abrupt, thrown in at the last few minutes of the game, and almost felt sort of... passive aggressive in a way? I don't know how else to put it.. There was an air of insincerity to the entire sequence. If you're going to permanently kill a main character there had better be a good reason and there just wasn't one. I literally cannot fathom why this choice was made. So they didn't have to make anymore games? Okay then just don't? Why'd you have to do that? Marty had a family to return to and Sonny had already made up his mind on leaving Clawville, the end of the Chicken Police was already set in stone.. This just felt like an unnecessary jab at no-one in particular.

Some smaller things that bothered me, rather than answering some older questions the last game set up like the shooting incident they instead chose to not answer anything and throw in a few more questions about Sonny's past that will likely never be answered now. Unless they intend on making prequels of some kind? But even that just doesn't feel right now. You see what needlessly killing a main character does? Lmao. Also for the combining feature in the inventory being added we barely got to use it, I wish there was more use in that.

Characters and voice acting were fantastic as always. But otherwise yeah, that's what was on my mind. It's a solid 6/10. I had a great time but the final act really soils so much of the full experience. Lmk what you few other Chicken Police fans on Tumblr think

OK I'm done yapping now, I'm gonna draw Sonny and Marty kissing sloppy style

[thegameyard]

title: Zipp's Cafe

release date: November 15, 2023

developed by: The Wild Gentlemen

[aethersea]

I do think Blazing Saddles handled its one depiction of native americans very poorly, and the full extent of its representation of chinese workers on the railroad is they were literally just there. not even one single speaking line. unclear if this is worse or better than the redface.

it's fucking phenomenal at lampooning antiblack racism though. extremely blatant, extremely funny satire, which is constantly and loudly saying "racism is the philosophy of the terminally stupid at best and morally depraved at worst, and we should all be pointing and laughing at them 24/7"

plus the main character is a heroic black man who has to navigate a whole lot of bullshit but is constantly smirking at the extraordinarily stupid racists and inviting the audience into the joke. the one heroic white character is a guy who was suicidally depressed until he met the protagonist and they just instantly became buds, and he's firmly in a supporting role the whole time and happy to be there. the protagonist saves the day with the help of his black friends from the railroad, and uses the position of power he was given to uplift not only those friends, but all the railroad workers of other minorities too, in an explicit show of solidarity.

anyone saying "Blazing Saddles is racist" had better be talking about its treatment of non-black minorities. it had better not be such superficial takes as "oh but they say the n-word all the time" or "they have nazis and the kkk in there!" because goddamn if that's the full extent of your critique I very seriously suggest you read up on media analysis. there is too much going over your head, you need to learn to recognize satire.

[richea]

I translated Kousuke Fujishima's design commentary for the Symphonia cast!

[aloneinthedark-eagle]

🦅never give up🦅

[downfalldestiny]

The beauty of Freedom 🐎🏞️ !.

[lorebird]

In which Ford struggles so badly to relate to other people that he wonders if he’s really human at all. The more isolated he becomes, the harder it is to reconcile with his own humanity.

[nature-hiking]

Alpine mountain views - Alta Via 1, Italy, August 2023

photo by: nature-hiking

[novelconcepts]

There’s a line from American Gods I keep coming back to in relation to Yellowjackets, an observation made early on by Shadow in prison: “The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.” I keep rotating it in my head in thinking about the six survivors, the roles they occupy in the wilderness, and the way the show depicts them as adults in society.

Because in the wilderness, as in prison, they’re trapped—they’re suffering, they’re traumatized, they’re terrified—but they’re also able to construct very specific boxes to live in. And, in a way, that might make it easier. Cut away the fat, narrow the story down to its base arc. You are no longer the complex young woman who weighs a moral compass before acting. You no longer have the luxury of asking questions. You are a survivor. You have only to get to the next day.

Shauna: the scribe. Lottie: the prophet. Van: the acolyte. Taissa: the skeptic. Misty: the knight. Natalie: the queen. Neat, orderly, the bricks of a new kind of society. And it works in the woods; we know this because these six survive. (Add Travis: the hunter, while you’re at it, because he does make it to adulthood).

But then they’re rescued. And it’s not just lost purpose and PTSD they’re dealing with now, but a loss of that intrinsic identity each built in the woods. How do you go home again? How do you rejoin a so-called civilized world, where all the violence is restricted to a soccer field, to an argument, to your own nightmares?

How does the scribe, the one who wrote it all out in black and white to make sense of the horrors, cope with a world that would actively reject her story? She locks that story away. But she can’t stop turning it over in her head. She can’t forget the details. They’re waiting around every corner. In the husband beside her in bed. In the child she can’t connect with across the table. In the best friend whose parents draw her in, make her the object of their grief, the friend who lives on in every corner of their hometown. She can’t forget, so she tries so hard to write a different kind of story instead, to fool everyone into seeing the soft maternal mask and not the butcher beneath, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the prophet come back from the religion a desperate group made of her, a group that took her tortured visions, her slipping mental health, and built a hungry need around the very things whittling her down? She builds over the bones. She creates a place out of all that well-intended damage, and she tells herself she’s helping, she’s saving them, she has to save them, because the world is greedy and needs a leader, needs a martyr, needs someone to stand up tall and reassure everyone at the end of the day that they know what’s best. The world, any world, needs someone who will take those blows so the innocent don’t have to. She’s haunted by everyone she didn’t save, by the godhood assigned to her out of misplaced damage, and when the darkness comes knocking again, there is nothing else to do but repeat old rhymes until there is blood on her hands just the same.

How does the acolyte return to a world that cares nothing for the faith of the desperate, the faith that did nothing to save most of her friends, that indeed pushed her to destroy? She runs from it. She dives into things that are safe to believe in, things that rescue lonely girls from rough home lives, things that show a young queer kid there’s still sunshine out there somewhere. She delves into fiction, makes a home inside old stories to which she already knows the endings, coaxes herself away from the belief that damned her and into a cinemascope safety net where the real stuff never has to get in. She teaches herself surface-level interests, she avoids anything she might believe in too deeply, and still she’s dragged back to the place where blood winds up on her hands just the same.

How does the skeptic make peace with the things she knows happened, the things that she did even without meaning to, without realizing? She buries them. She leans hard into a refusal to believe those skeletons could ever crawl back out of the graves she stuffed them into, because belief is in some ways the opposite of control. She doesn’t talk to her wife. She doesn’t talk to anyone. It’s not about what’s underneath the surface, because that’s just a mess, so instead she actively discounts the girl she became in the woods. She makes something new, something rational and orderly, someone who can’t fail. She polishes the picture to a shine, and she stands up straight, the model achievement. She goes about her original plan like it was always going to be that way, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the knight exist in a world with no one to serve, no one to protect, no reason propelling the devastating choices she had grown comfortable making? She rechannels it. She convinces herself she’s the smartest person in the room, the most capable, the most observant. She convinces herself other people’s mysteries are hers to solve, that she is helping in every single action she takes. She makes a career out of assisting the most fragile, the most helpless souls she can find, and she makes a hobby out of patrolling for crimes to solve, and when a chance comes to strap her armor back on and ride into battle, she rejoices in the return to normalcy. She craves that station as someone needed, someone to rely upon in the darkest of hours, and she winds up with blood on her hands because, in a way, she never left the wilderness at all.

How does the queen keep going without a queendom, without a pack, without people to lead past the horrors of tomorrow? She doesn’t. She simply does not know how. She scrounges for something, anything, that will make her feel connected to the world the way that team did. She moves in and out of a world that rejects trauma, punishes the traumatized, heckles the grieving as a spectacle. She finds comfort in the cohesive ritual of rehabilitation, this place where she gets so close to finding herself again, only to stumble when she opens her eyes and sees she’s alone. All those months feeding and guiding and gripping fast to the fight of making it to another day, and she no longer knows how to rest. How to let go without falling. She no longer wears a crown, and she never wanted it in the first place, so how on earth does she survive a world that doesn’t understand the guilt and shame of being made the centerpiece of a specialized environment you can never explain to anyone else? How, how, how do you survive without winding up with blood on your hands just the same?

All six of these girls found, for better or worse, a place in the woods. All six of them found, for better or worse, a reason to get up the next day. For each other. And then they go home, and even if they all stayed close, stayed friends, it’d still be like stepping out of chains for the first time in years. Where do you go? How do you make small choices when every decision for months was life or death? How do you keep the part of yourself stitched so innately into your survival in a world that would scream to see it? How do you do away with the survivor and still keep going?

They brought it back with them. Of course they did. It was the only way.

[millidew]

he really didn’t think it’d end like this

[downfalldestiny]

Wilderness 🐎🍃 !.

[adventurelandia]

1971 Fort Wilderness poster

[herbalnature]

Two mushrooms stand side by side, peeking out sturdily from underneath a piece of bark. It's a cozy snapshot of forest life, where even the smallest beings claim their space.

[downfalldestiny]

Nature Never goes out of style 🌅 !.