#i know it was trader's day and i couldnt have gone anyway

[weirdly-familiar]

That is definitely TF on the left though.

[tumblunni]

Bunni continues to play Richard And Alice! Random thoughts and stuff!

* I’m really not good at point and click advantures, so i dunno if my opinion is very valuable, but this one just seems... not good, gameplay-wise. The sections are all different lengths and difficulty levels in each chapter, and not in a fitting way. Like so far the only one where I had to combine two items was the first chapter, it took me ages to figure out what the game wanted me to do with the bedsheets. And then the second chapter had like zero point and click at all, you just had to find one toy brick and stick it to block one hole, then it was just story cutscenes. And now in chapter three we have a suddenly huge snowfield to explore with your painfully slow walk speed, yet there’s only like one thing you need to find and just... I’m getting surprisingly anxious worrying if I missed something cos i only found that one thing! There was a whole section i didnt explore cos i didnt realise you couldnt go back outside after you managed to open the door. And what was with the misdirect of Alice saying ‘maybe i can reach this window if i have something to stand on’ and then instead she just shot off the lock on the door? Does that mean there were multiple solutions to this puzzle and thats why the place was so huge?

* Anyway, the story continues to be intriguingly good! I continue to be really engaged in poor Alice’s journey through this post apocolyptic snow world with her lil son, and I continue to be really worried what happened to that son, since this is a flashback and Alice met Richard alone... Also I like the continuity that Barney is continuing to talk about the close call they had last time with a monsterous bastard who kidnapped them. This poor lil 7 year old is struggling to keep up and struggling to keep smiling so his mum won’t be sad, and its just SO COLD and he doesnt understand why they left ‘the safe house’ because he doesnt understand they were prisoners there. And god, its so sad cos you can understand how Alice might be getting frustrated with him, and you can understand that she KNOWS she’s being irrational, but she’s just so scared that she sucks at keeping up a brave face for her kid. But I think she’s doing a great job, she’s way more of a badass survivor than anyone else would have been in this situation! And Barney is being incredibly good too, he’s being really patient and obedient to his mum and he’s a really considerate kid, he gave his mum his toy car cos she was getting sad remembering when her husband was alive and they used to ‘go on adventures’. (”But we’re on an adventure now, mummy!”)

* And MAN I am REALLY WORRIED for this poor kid, he’s been showing signs of getting sick as they were travelling the snowy wasteland and I hope they can at least get a break now they’ve found this abandoned house to sleep in. BUT NOPE! Alice finds mysterious scary notes with some sort of log of... people...? It definately doesnt feel like just someone recording visitors or survivors they met, its got a weird sort of... priorities, to what was written down. ‘Fem. caucasian. 20s. Compliant. 65lbs.’ And then what struck me as especially weird was that someone would classify a kid as ‘Female. age 7. 21 lbs’ instead of like.. actually writing that it was a kid. This is someone seeing these people as.. merchandise. You never really get an answer in this chapter but I think it’s someone who was offering survivors fake shelter and then cannibalising them T_T The chapter just ends with Alice finding an ambiguously scary room with a bloodstain, but this is the only shelter they have, so all she can do is lock the door again so her kid doesn’t see, and barricade the front door in case this cannibal cult comes back for their home base... *shudder*

* But also seriously, why did I collect like five other red herring letters as well as the cannibal one? And a rusty saw and ammo for a different gun. Was that JUST red herrings or did I miss an optional puzzle?

* Its actually a weird relief to get back out of the flashback and back to our slightly-less-horrible horrible situation in present times. Sure, Alice and Richard are locked in prison, but in this apocolyptic scenario its a relief to be somewhere where you get daily food and working electricity. There’s even a tv that only sometimes doesnt work! And they have each other, and they’re building up a nice friendship now, and it just feels quite optimistic. Richard’s even getting a bit of a crush on Alice, even though the attempts at flirting between the two of them are failing horribly cos they’re both total goobers. i dunno, if they do get together in the end, I totally wouldnt mind it! I dont think its really necessary though.

* Aww but the more we learn about everyone’s backstory, the more I really wanna hug em! We still dont know very much about Richard, but we’ve learned now that he had an ‘average childhood’, at least, by his definition. And he lived in some sort of small country town, and he joined the army in order to see more of the world. But it went really badly and he got sent to prison for rebelling against a superior officer who made a clearly immoral order. JUSTICE FOR RICHARD, GRARR!! And then Alice continues to be way more well developed and interesting, even though I do still feel sympathetic for richard, yknow. Just a lil frustrated that it took us so long to even hear that lil bit about him, when he’s supposed to be the ‘main character’. Seriously he seems like just a framing device for us to talk to alice and see her flashbacks! Anyway, now we’ve learned that Alice didn’t have much of a childhood, because she was hospitalized for a long time. And she talks about how she felt like a burden and felt suicidal and how she never even got to make any friends til she grew up and became a lil more healthy, and then she sorta ended up in an unplanned pregnancy with the first man she ever dated, and never had a chance to pursue her dream career and just... wow Alice dear god, someone up there in the heavens hates you! God, I hope this game has an actual happy ending, please! And also it makes me EVEN MORE WORRIED about what happened to her kid, now im starting to worry if maybe he inherited her childhood disease and like.. it only first started manifesting during the apocolypse and she wasnt able to find a doctor in time.. or something... MAN THIS GAME IS GIVING ME A MILLION WAYS THIS SWEET BOY COULD DIE

* Oh but one random complaint... much as I care about Barney, he kinda isnt a very well written character. They fall into a lot of super outdated ‘fake movieverse child’ cliches instead of like.. bothering to listen to what actual kids talk like. He’s always using that fake cutesy talk like ‘i made you a waffle but i eated it’. Its rather jarring! ...but still I WILL DEFEND MY VIRTUAL SON FOREVER dont you dare kill him off just because his dialogue is poorly informalized!

* The next chapter is kinda boring, its not really even a chapter but just an intermission to show us some more gameplay and nothing else. Richard and Alice do nothing but have an awkward fetch quest to find enough stuff to make a pole to reach the termostat outside the jail cell, and then after all that it ends up failing anyway. I guess at least we do get a bit of character development cos we get to see them both frustrated and having a bit of an argument, then making up again, and etc. But meh, bring on the next actual plot flashback!

* “Why does Daddy live in the ground?”

* thats it im done this is how bunni is slain fucking hell

* god, I dunno if I made the right choice but I chose to be honest with the kid and try and explain what death is. I got to hear the backstory of how the dad died, so i THINk that was the right choice? It seems he died back when barney was too young to even really know him. It was at the start of the apocolypse and the family was doing semi okay living in a shared shelter with a bunch of other people. But then it was the start of government aid breaking down and society crumbling, and a gang stole the last food ration pack from them and the dad thought he could reason with them. And its just so sad cos Alice is thinking of all the ways it could have been prevented! ‘We’ve gotten used to surviving with less now, what if we’d just let that food go? we could have lasted’ And what if they’d shot first and asked questions later, instead of trying to be diplomatic. And apparantly back then things were a little less abd so there actually was a trader they could have got more food from, but resources were limited so they decided it wasnt worth it at the time. And the after the gang killed the dad and some of the other leaders of the shelter group, it seems like things just collapsed in a power struggle and thats how Alice ended up alone... And you just have this sad sidequest to gather flowers for his grave and then Barney is all ‘i dont really know him and i dont understand so i feel bad that i cant cry’ and then he’s asking if dead people can hear you from down in the ground. And I picked being honest again, and Alice didnt say yes or no, she just admitted that nobody really knows what happens after you die, and you have to choose what you want to believe. So Barney chooses to try and tell his dad about how they’re having a good day playing in the snow on this adventure, and Alice tells him that Barney’s grown up so big and strong, and Barney says ‘Yeah! Strong like a lion! Or you, daddy!’ and BUNNI’S SOUL SHATTERS INTO A MILLION PIECES

* i am gone i am deceased at this deceaseness aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

* And there’s like an optional note you can find that tells the story about some unnamed kid who was living alone with their friend Lucy and they were trying to survive without any adults to help, and its all SCARILY VAGUE and I hope we get to learn more about them later cos it just says how the same gang who killed the dad was just.. ominously circling around the area and Lucy was acting weird and then dissappeared, with a letter saying she chose to leave for [insert name of far away settlement here] but it was really suspicious and the unnamed kid thinks that the gang was threatening lucy and they must have kidnapped her and faked this note and then the diary just ENDS it just ends with the kid talking about how much they love lucy and cant live without her and we dont know if they found her or if she even really was kidnapped?? ITS SO VAGUE! its so vague that honestly im only just assuming the diary writer was a kid too, i mean maybe they were lucy’s parent or sibling or something? or maybe both them and lucy are older? but the way it was written sounded like they were like early high schoolers or something (then again this game is bad at writing kid characters so maybe not) I MOURN FOR YOU, UNNAMED DIARY PERSON AND LUCY OF MYSTERY

* OH GOD DOOM when it went back to modern day, now its got all mysterious and weird and sad too, AAAARRRGH the heroes are still in prison, but the guards have stopped coming to their cell and theyre stuck here scared and worrying and you dont know if the obvious has actually happened... i mean maybe the prison has been abandoned or everyone died and now they’re stuck here locked in their cell and AAAA eventually the cold will start seeping in and kill them too and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

* okay im gonna go get back to playing this game