#four play

[scrumptiouspersonapaper]

[june1960fan]

Dana's Garage Music Four Play Heartfelt

[imsofansie]

Gregory House the type of guy to say “outta my way, gayboy” to his reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror as he goes for whatever he’s got in there

[lotus-pear]

clowns in court

[thetoyboxs]

We get up to some fun down in the LU Discord Server (I am so inactive the gods were shocked I was there)

[just-null]

wrestling to be the first to greet you (they broke into your house)

[jennaflare]

So Disco Elysium is the only game you've ever really liked

I get it! It's a phenomenal game with superb art and writing, and its themes are consistent and deeply explored. It sets a high bar for video games. But there are other really, really fantastic games out there. This is a list that is 100% my own taste of things that aren't necessarily similar, other than the fact that they're really fucking good. (A lot of these are on sale for the Steam Summer Sale until July 11 2024!)

In Stars and Time

In Stars and Time is a time loop game where you play as Siffrin, the rogue of a party at the end of their quest to save the day by defeating the King, who is freezing everybody in time! But something is wrong: every time you die, you loop back to the day before you fight the King. You're the only one who remembers the loops, so it's up to you to figure out why it's happening, and how to break out.

In Stars and Time is a heart-wrenching dive into mental health, friendship, and love. It's about feeling alone, and how awful it is when the people who love you don't notice (and how awful it is when they do). It's about falling deeper and deeper into your worst self and your worst tendencies, and how to come back from it.

The creator also did one of my favorite Disco Elysium comics ever, which is only tangentially relevant but worth mentioning.

Roadwarden

In Roadwarden, you play as the titular Roadwarden for an undeveloped and "wild" part of the kingdom. Monsters roam the forests and roads, and it's your job to keep people safe. On paper, anyway. Your real mission is to find out what is of value in the area, and how to take it from its people. How well you perform this task is up to you. It's an oldschool text-based RPG, and I take a lot of notes by hand when I play.

Roadwarden explores exploitation and industrialization by making you look in the face of your potential victims. You can only learn what your bosses want you to report on by getting close to the residents, after all. There are mysteries to be solved, secrets to be gathered, and hearts to win.

The Longing

The Longing is an adventure-idle game where you play as the solitary servant of a sleeping king. Your task is to wait for him, for four hundred days. Time in the game passes in realtime (for the most part). There are caves to explore, books to be read, and drawings to make.

The Longing is about loneliness and depression. It's about whether or not you decide to stay in that hole, and if you do, what you do with yourself while you're there. Maybe you'll wander. Maybe you'll stare at a wall. Maybe you'll just sleep until it's all over.

Papers, Please

Papers, Please casts you as a newly hired customs officer in a country that is rapidly tightening its borders as its fascist government tightens its fist. This game is stressful. Sometimes you intend to help out the revolutionaries when they asked, but then you got so stressed out trying to make your quota so you can feed your family and pay your bills that you didn't notice the name of the person they were hoping to contact while going through their papers. Sometimes someone puts a bomb in front of you and expects you to defuse it. Sometimes someone suggests you steal people's passports so you can get your family out, and with the horror you see daily, the idea tempts you more than you'd like.

Papers, Please is all about hard choices and testing your moral fortitude. Everything you do has consequences. Being a good person in this game is hardly ever rewarded, but not in a way that feels overly cynical. Papers, Please asks you what kind of person you want to be and what you're willing to sacrifice to get there.

The Return of the Obra Dinn

From the creator of Papers, Please, The Return of the Obra Dinn is a game where you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Trading Company. The ship the Obra Dinn has just floated back into port, its entire crew missing or dead. It's your job to figure out what happened aboard the vessel. For insurance reasons.

I don't know how to go into the themes of this too deeply without giving away too much, but the mechanics of the game itself make the game worth playing. You have a magic stopwatch that allows you to go back to the moment of a person's death, allowing you to try and figure out who (or what) killed them, and how. And the soundtrack is extremely good.

Outer Wilds

In Outer Wilds you play as an unnamed alien, and it's your first day going to space! Your planet's space program is pretty new still, so there's still lots to explore and discover on the planets within your system. There are ancient ruins from a mysterious race that once lived in your system, long before your species began to record history. Why were they here? Where did they go? How are they connected to the weird thing that keeps happening to you?

The fun of Outer Wilds is in the discovery and answering your own questions. The game never tells you where to go, and it never outright tells you anything. There are clues scattered through the system, and it's up to you to put them together and figure out your next steps. It's about the way that life always goes on, no matter what, even when it seems like the end of everything, forever. I'd recommend NOT reading anything else about this game. Just go play it. Seriously, the less you know, the more fun this is.

If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers

In If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers, you explore the circumstances of the deaths of four individuals.

This is a short one that took me about two and a half hours to play. If for no other reason, play it for the stunning pixel art. The game explores sexism, racism, and homophobia in the Victorian era and leans heavily into horror themes. Best of all: it's completely free!

Pentiment

Pentiment takes you to the 16th century, where you take the role of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working on his masterwork in the scriptorium of an abbey. When someone is murdered, Andreas takes responsibility for finding the culprit.

The game is set over 20~ years and you get to watch how Andreas' actions affect the village in various ways (who's alive the next time you come by, have people gotten married and had children...). It's an exploration of how the past affects the future, and what parts of that past we choose to keep or discard. It has beautiful art, and fans of both Disco and Pentiment often compare them.

Other games you might wanna check out

Night in the Woods, Dredge, Oxenfree, A House of Many Doors, Inscryption, Slay the Princess, Citizen Sleeper, Chants of Sennar, Loop Hero, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, The Pale Beyond, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Elsinore, Her Story, Before Your Eyes, Pathologic (not delved into above because the venn diagram of Pathologic fans and Disco fans is basically a circle)

[onebizarrekai]

random userbase data time

(listed almost every/every game as one option in case you skipped out on some of the multiplayer ones)

please reblog after you vote for Maximum Data, even if you voted no! if you voted for one of the other options, tag your favorite game(s)!

I am just very interested in the presence of the zelda fanbase :>

please note that, for the sake of this poll, remakes count as one game. so like, if you've played the original ocarina of time and master quest and the 3ds version, that counts as one game.

[boilingheart]

CASTING CASTING CASTING CASTING CASTING CASTING

[turtleblogatlast]

I’ve remembered that colors exist

[violet-petals-in-the-rain]

Can yall imagine yourself being wen ning marching towards your death (this time willingly) with your sister's hand in your own, all to protect the people you love?

Watching them burn her to death and hearing that its meaningless and that they still plan to continue and kill everyone, you attempt to break out and rush back, but its not possible, and you're confined before long.

It isnt until time passes and in your confinement you hear of how the people you loved and would give everything to protect have all been killed and its through the guards holding you captive jeering and laughing and that the world is celebrating their deaths.

And you can't even weep because your eyes can't cry

They're all dead. What was it for? What was her death for?! What had his A-Jie been burned to death for?

Little A-Yuan,

Granny Wen,

Uncle Four... everyone is dead.

Young Master Wei....Wei Wuxian, the last sight you remember is him lying there helplessly calling for you to not go and you wish you had listened.

You can only greive now. The only thing you can do is scream, and its not enough.

Then they begin experimenting on you, and no one knows you're kept down here, locked away, all alone with people who don't consider you human.

Then you lose your free will, your thoughts and consciousness, until 13 years later.

13 Years Later, you hear a familiar melody calling for you and a seed of hope grows in your chest

[electricpurrs]

[flashing lights warning]

good news everybody! the full video of Summer, from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, on an analog synthesizer

source

[silkentine]

Anyone else looking to get bit at the beach or?

[samualcheese]

‼ FOCUS ‼

[serendipnpipity]

Thank you for living your truth, @danielhowell. You've helped me live mine, too.

Image Description under the cut:

[illustrated YouTube notification: “Daniel Howell uploaded ‘Basically I’m Gay’”]

Five years ago today, I was lying on the couch in my family home, watching the words of a person I had grown to find pieces of myself in as he bared his soul to the world just to make somebody like me feel a little less alone. 

[girl lying on her stomach on the couch, looking at phone]

He said something at the end of that video,

[Illustrated video screenshot of Dan saying “You are valid. It gets so much better.”]

And I’ll never forget hearing those words. Never forget drying my tears, quickly, before my parents came back. 

[Three panels: girl wiping tears from face, putting phone down, silhouette walking through front door]

See, the girl on that couch was planning far, far away futures. She couldn’t believe his words just yet, but now she could hope to. 

[open shoebox with rainbow flag inside]

Five years later, today, I wish I could tell her:

You don’t have to move halfway across the country to set a flag out on your desk. 

[school building and stack of books]

Your parents are coming over tomorrow to help bring you home for the summer. (They’re only an hour’s car ride away.)

[cartoon sun and car]

And see that?

[rainbow flag in a mug with a cat whiskers design]

Yeah, that’s the one decoration you haven’t packed yet. 

And that something he said at the end of the video, I still quote it to this day. 

[computer playing the Dan birthday livestream with "Misty" on a Zoom call in the corner]

Better yet, I believe it now. 

[same girl, older and with shorter hair, holding mug with flag and looking back at someone off-camera that’s saying “Ready to go home?”]

Happy five years of Basically, I’m Gay!

[spocks-kaathyra]

Spock looking for whales at the Cetacean Institute!