#esc-ape

[t0mato-dude]

On my way to post more Akira Hikone Fanart

Does.. does anyone else draw this man or is it just me..?

Thinkin of making Nozaki fanart too, they are such duo. (I am mentally scarred from the two. 👍🏻)

[seec-logic]

Welcome to the Mystery SEEC Club

The fandom is pretty active in Twitter with the tag #seectwt , and I thought of bringing the excitement here. Cause, why not?

First thing first,

This blog is dedicated to SEEC ESC-APE games, so that includes:

Alice’s Spiritual Judge | アリスの精神裁判 (JP) | 愛麗絲的精神審判 (CN)

The Caged Garden Cock Robin | 籠庭のクックロビン (JP) | 庭笼的知��鸟 (CN)

The Prison Boys | 監獄少年 (JP) | 监狱少年 (CN)

Yotsume God | 四ツ目神 (JP) | 四目神 (CN)

Tasokare Hotel | 誰ソ彼ホテル (JP) | 黄昏旅店 (CN) | 황혼 호텔 (KR)

Tsumugu Logic | 紡ロジック (JP) \ 纺之逻辑 (CN)

Uyrh no Shohosen | ウーユリーフの処方箋 (JP) | 物语叶的处方药 or 乌尤利夫的处方笺 (CN)

??? Tasokare Hotel - T S U B O M I - ???

SEEC creates other casual games, but I'm not talking about them here. Except for Robin.

Second,

Kei has been wonderful in putting up links: where to download, official social medias, fanwork playlists, and communities. Please do check them out!

We also have a Discord server where you can hang out and ramble about Osoto. Do join us here!

Let me know if the link expires (I hope it won't).

Last but not least,

I'm just a humbled fan. I love discussions and I tend to have ideas or headcanons, but please don't expect much. I ship many pairings and I may not remember to spoiler tag each time, so proceed with caution. . .

Psst psst! By the way, have you heard about Tasokare Hotel Anime (Jan 2025)? Or about Tasokare Hotel Tsubomi?

Anyways, my ask is always open!

Let's be friends and hype together :>

[jotigerjotiger]

Lucy Diamond is back in the States.

I'm writing my thesis on her.

[localceilingdevil]

yolk

apologies for not being active. i should be able to pick up on drawing the upcoming week!

[hiraya-art]

TODAY'S THE BIG DAY!!! Congratulations on the anime release!!! 💜

My beloved game of all time is finally an anime 😭😭😭 Never in a million years would I have thought this would happen. I'm so so happy. Please watch Tasokare Hotel!!! 🥹🙏💜💜💜

[dowhatteverer]

Lost in the woods all alone... sure hope there aren't any volatile slime demons around, that would be just awful!

(Click for better quality)

Full picture under the cut

This was a style experiment, I don't usually color/shade like this, or have the colored line art in places but it was really fun to do.

[sakuplumeria]

@hergan416 tagged me to make a poll with at least 5 of my all time faves and see who wins so... here we are! Have fun!

tagging @amane-kamisama @azuremoonbunny @bunnimew @bijectiveandinvertible @diveintovortex @econometricss @fabiosofabz @indaiwilo @kirathaune @miwhotep @ringletts @rainymegane @tofueggnoodles @ashcadence @methpring and anybody who wants to join!

btw the image is NOT a must, I just wanted people to see how they look, at least. It's just me...

[karasuoc-kai]

More Tasokare OCs

Hello, Kai speaking! Whoa, a Tumblr dedicated for me? This is too good!

How have you liked my stories so far? Do you like the other characters I interacted with? YOU HAVE TO LIKE HISA-CHAN, HE'S THE BEST!

Yes, my friends in Tasokare Hotel are real OCs created by awesome authors! Are you interested to know them? We're all here in SEEC Discord. There are channels for other SEEC games and... OCs!

The number of TasoHote OCs now are, iirc, around 30ish? Crazy, huh? There are many hell creatures too. It's so fun!

JOIN US IN SEEC CULT DISCORD!

[karasuoc-noa]

A little about Noa

I say, she's almost the opposite of Kai. LOL!

Below is the template, please use them for your own tasohote OC :3

[stromcuzewon]

SAM RYDER, HUMAN GOLDEN RETRIEVER

[thedeeriscalling]

DO YOU HEAR IT?

[quiteunpersuadable]

So many contemporary adult gothic horror novels begin with the main character back in their childhood bedroom. Makes you think about what our culture considers horrific for adults.

[seec-logic]

Latest news: Tasokare Hotel 2 ?!?

Who’s excited ????!

[meatball-headache]

So, Caves of Qud is not nearly as complicated as was rumored. It's certainly complicated, but the same argument could be made of anything. Is Warframe complicated? No, you just keep pressing the melee button hold down the melee button and do the next node on the star chart. Now, here's a movie-length video explaining damage types...

Qud is certainly detailed in that it has a huge world with lots of parts. Everywhere I go I find a statue mentioning some "dynamically-generated" lore clueing me in to the location of a hidden ruin or lost artifact, and my quest log is stuffed with them. Everything has statuses for when it's wet, bleeding, bloody; there are puddles of blood generated wherever something bleeding walks, or gets killed, and there are puddles of "dilute salt" whenever I terrify a creature—I think they run away pissing themselves. All these puddles have a volume as well, it's not just "a puddle of blood," it's "a puddle of 7 drams of blood."

It's certainly an extremely hard game. That part lives up to the hype. I made my first character a Pilgrim. They died in about fifteen minutes. I made my second character the same build because I liked it and I wanted to try it some more, and I named them "the Second Pilgrim." They died in about ten minutes. Seeing the writing on the wall, I made my next character in Roleplay mode—so it checkpoints you at towns and you can reload if you die. They're named "the Final Pilgrim." They have died... so many times, mostly at the Malil Coinsquare, depicted above. ...mostly from adventures starting at the Malil Coinsquare, but then I have a spacetime rift mishap and get randomly teleported 30 layers deep below the lake and meet a bunch of impossible-level albino apes who are fighting some robotic mine-layers, but they declare a truce to gang up on me. And then a rogue esper from the outer mind sends their mind-clone to hunt me down.

...see, that sounds complicated, but it's not that bad. It's just flavor. Random encounters happen in many games, this one's just happen have to have this heightened exoticness about it. The game's writing overall is very—well, some of it is the mad-libbed dynamic history, but the stuff that's not, item descriptions and main NPCs, it's very... look, here's some examples:

So the game has this hyperbolic, eerie atmosphere to everything. It's extremely enchanting and captivating. Even though these ruins are essentially randomized, I want to explore and find things because I know it's going to be a challenge to get there, I know I'm going to be challenged when I get there, and I might find a painted flaming iron dagger which is engraved with a scene from Sultan Resheph's past, which the Coiled Lambs will want to know about, and they'll teach me how to make their traditional meal—broken microchips and bandits' feet—if I tell them about it.

I did do the tutorial, after I attempted it myself. It didn't teach me anything I didn't already know, just the basics on opening menus, equipping items, moving around, that sort of thing. Again—nothing complicated here. Something like Wurm, as an extreme example, makes everything from walking to looking in your pocket a challenge with half a dozen spreadsheets and hotkeys on half the keyboard. In Qud, I'm playing totally with the mouse (except I have to press Esc to close the ability menu; other menus close if you right-click) and even then, mostly it's just right-click to get a menu of options.

See, I watched Sseth's video, and he likes to harp on the hypercomplexity and insanity of every game he reviews. "Become an Esper and mutate the power to give your enemies a fatal brain aneurysm from across the map!" Yes, or play FFXIV and become a Blue Mage, freeze your enemies solid, and explode their frozen bodies with a cermet drill! The buttons are the same, it's all flavor. You get these ASCII-art, text-heavy games like this, Dwarf Fortress, Rogue and whatnot, and since you don't have to visually depict everything, you can just have a bunch of @ signs on the screen and make them different shade of red, and then say whatever you want—it makes it seem absurdly complex and intricate. But it boils down to "press A to deal 3d6 damage."

Now, I'm not trying to disparage the game. As usual, I'm talking to myself, thinking out loud, dissuading myself from my original impression that it was complicated as hell. Heck, gacha games are more complicated than this, simply because they have so many menus and daily sign-ins to tick off. But, again, there are a lot of moving parts—and I don't have nearly all of them. I can put a forcefield around an enemy so I can walk up to them and blast them with my shotgun at point blank—and still miss, because I have no agility. I can jump into someone's mind and command them to kill themself—I don't get any exp for that, though, sadly. I can persuade someone to ally themselves with me, and then "accidentally" explode them when I cast Disintegrate to burrow through the cave walls because I "accidentally" teleported myself into a tiny pocket deep underground somewhere. And, yes, I can give enemies an aneurysm from across the map—unless they don't have a brain. You'd be surprised how many hostile plants there are!

This is a wonderful game with the promise of a grand—if somewhat randomized—adventure. And, I can say "somewhat" because there is some kind of MSQ to the game, and there's some level of fixedness: the world map is always the same, the locations of major... locations, is always the same. There's some kind of key thread to it all that I'd like to discover. Meanwhile, locations of minor sites and the contents of dungeons are random, but it's seeded, so if you're on Roleplay mode so you can reload your save, it's going to be the same each time. I don't know if the Malil Coinsquare is in everyone else's game, if it's in the same location, if it has the same contents, if they have that goddamned centipede nest that swarms the map before you can get to it...

And! The music is lovely, too. It's very atmospheric, ambient, and some parts have this primal, tribal kind of vibe to it—which is fitting when I'm in a marsh surrounded by a tribe of salt-encrusted turtles who seem to be at war with dragonflies. And it flows from one song to another without interrupting, it just blends gently and half the time I don't even notice when it changed. I've put a lot of hours into this game in my first week, and honestly a lot of that time is just having it on in the background while I'm working, just because the music is so chill. Usually chill.

Eventually I'll get to the Deathlands where a chrome pyramid surrounded by a forcefield will shoot 100 missiles at me every turn, but, hey, that's a problem for later.

...if I can survive these spacetime shenanigans, that is...

[hiraya-art]

Congratulations on the anime announcement!!! 🎉🎉🎉

I can't believe Neko Tsukahara will be real 😭🙏

Links: Twitter announcement | Official site

[musicjam10]

Cracker Island, Gorillaz, 24. February 2023.

I must say this was a pretty big disappointment from Gorillaz, and it's not a secret that I feel that this album is less than enjoyable. Knowing the extremely powerful creative force of Gorillaz, you would expect from Albarn something more than a rough draft of a rookie artist's first album.

Even the art department got the short end of the stick. Knowing all the great album covers, like Demons Days and Plastic Beach, this one ends up being nothing more than a badly done digital sketch of the final idea.

To start on a high note, the two singles, Cracker Island (featuring Thundercat) and New Gold, were decent. Two totally different songs, but none the less something you would expect from Gorillaz. New Gold is my favourite of the two; the psyhadelic Tame Impala voice perfectly blends with Bootie Brown's more funky-disco rap voice; even Albarn's voice was very nicely complimented in here. A great calm disco beat that is in a way modern but still has the Gorillaz stamp of approval.

The second single, Craker Island, was promising enough, but it didn't deliver as expected. The song overall is great; the instrumental beats were the standout, and if I may say, one of my favourites in general, so it's such a shame when you hear Albarn's not-so-singer voice get into the mix. It was rough and unpolished, and it destroyed the whole song for me. His strong British accent doesn't fit well as a lead disco singer.

But if I had to pick one song where it surely fits, it's Possession Island (featuring Beck). Unfortunately, it doesn't have any connection with the rest of the hyper-beat, disco-esc album and it is easily forgettable.

The rest of the album is all over the place, from Spanish pop-rap to slow orchestral baleds to, personally, one of the worst Gorillaz songs, Skinny Ape, which is a hyperbeat mashup of everything and anything. It's every ear's worst nightmare.

Even though genre mashup is what you expect from Gorillaz, you would at least think that it all has a certin flow to it and not the feeling that they threw everything on the wall and saw what sticks. If you are unable to produce something coherent, is it even worth it in the long run, not only for the artist but for the fans as well? It's hard for an album to just stand with two singles holing it up, but it's not the first time Gorillaz has done it.

I would love to have a different view on this album, but maybe at the moment it's not the right time.

I would give it a: You can skip this album easily. It's not even close to their best work, and for me, it's a waste of time. I would much rather recommend Plastic Beach if you haven't heard it and want to feel the full Gorillaz magic.

If you found my review worth discussing in any way, I'm happy to do so.

Yours trully,

MJ.10.