#just a game of sokoban

[just-a-game-of-sokoban]

Maybe we could use the goal to find the old player

...elaborate?

[insertdisc5]

✨COOL THINGS I PLAYED/SAW/READ THIS YEAR, 2024!!!!!!!✨

✨MOVIS✨

Knight of Fortune was such a delight. karl's wife is dead-- he has to go to the morgue. to see her one last time. SURPRISINGLY funny given the theme, and incredibly sweet. AND you can watch it in its entirety on youtube

american fiction! incredible movie that made me think. what does it mean to tell "our stories"? what does it mean to show "representation"? how authentic can you truly be about your own lived experience? funny as hell too

if you havent seen Monkey Man, quite frankly i dont want to talk to you. dev patel i will watch whatever you make for the rest of time

the rest under the cut because this list got long

playtime by jacques tati. just slapstick. oh my god this was so goddamn funny

yeah you know it. i was very strong the whole time and then the credits hit and i started sobbing uncontrollably in the theater

challengers and i saw the tv glow are tied in first place for my favorite movie this year. incredibly funny and SO WELL EDITED. highly recommend watching it with friends so you can scream "OH NO HE DIDN'T" together

✨TV SHOWS✨

SHOGUN!!!!!! oh my god there is so much to praise in this show. the costumes! the actors! the story! how they integrated both english and japanese speakers in a realistic way! so good

korean reality shows are not fucking playing around. the editing and sets are truly top notch

✨BUUKS✨

-Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah! what if black mirror was actually good. AND centered the stories of black people. highly recommend

-Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac! you probably were on twitter when The Whole Thing happened. maybe you dont know the exact details like i do. what if the details were worse i also dont read non-fiction very often, surprised at how fun this was to read!

-The Chromatic Fantasy by H.A.! I've been following their work since forever, and this was a delight to read as always! THE COLORS…………. BITES BITES BITES BITES

-sad girl space lizard. hell yeah (18+ only!)

-Gritli - The Moth Diaries by Sophie Florian und Hanako Emden! this one was just so strange and fascinating. per words of the authors: "Taking on the voices of anthropomorphic animals, the authors write about labour, companionship and crushing."

✨VIDY GAMES✨

skipping balatro, splatoon side order, fields of mistria and webfishing, because you probably know about those. uuuuh

i am too stupid for Void Stranger, but My God if you're smart this game will become your favorite game ever. 2D sokoban with so many secrets

marchen line!!! nth circle never misses. the visuals here are so fun!!! the UI! the plot! the almost-automatic-censoring when you see gore, as if your mecha body took a second to load!! hell fucking yeah

"adrienne, of the devil was this year" OH WORD? THEN EVERYONE SHOULD PLAY OF THE DEVIL'S FIRST EPISODE WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR

life after magic! magical girls are now adults, and magic is disappearing. what now? the art is so cute, and the story was very engaging. thank you for the additional episode with [spoilers]

i started nine sols and i think i might be enough of a gamer to beat it

shadow generations game of the year no contest. thank you for your time

you can also look at my massive list of stuff i played/watched/etc here. i am not posting this whole dang thing

[patricia-taxxon]

stephen's sausage roll has been extremely influential on indie puzzle games, its the reason for patrick's parabox and can of wormholes. it's like a whole new type of puzzle game where the player is empowered to find interesting interactions and consequences, where every puzzle is a wide open space made to grant you 1 epiphany. but as much as i love those 2 understudies of stephen's, they didn't translate the awkwardness. stephen is himself an understudy of david w. skinner, who designed tiny basic sokoban levels that twisted in knots as you solved them, and sausage roll takes after that, with its horrible cumbersome controls, cramped geometry and fiddly multi-step solutions. make me contend with the space and not just the mechanics until it becomes a world my brain can inhabit and touch

[submalevolentgrace]

Yarn Cat is a lot of fun! I'm on Forest 8 so far and enjoying as new mechanics get added.

With games like this I always wonder how people come up with the puzzles. How do you plan them out?

I'm glad you're having fun, and thank you for saying so, hearing that people are enjoying it makes all the anxiety and debugging worthwhile!

I think the most important thing for any part of game design is thoughtful analysis, of games you play and your own development prototypes. I think at its most boiled down, a videogame gives information to a player and asks them to respond, then telling them if they responded 'correctly' or not, and repeat. So whenever I'm playing any game, I ask what messages is the game giving, what do I think is being asked of me as a player, and how well does succeeding at the gameplay feel like it meshes with what was being asked of me? How well achieves that is a matter of opinion, but consciously amassing those opinions gives a developer a point of view for making decisions about their own games. Then you just have to be honest with yourself how that's going when you have a prototype...

I could go on a big tangent here about the huge success of portal and the ensuing ideology of puzzle design that I actively attempted to avoid when making yarn cat, but that's not really what you asked about lol, so

For the yarn cat puzzles, I usually tackled them from one of two directions. The first is having a specific solution in mind; having spent weeks getting the mechanics from nebulous idea to solid code and testing lots of edge cases, I knew there were a bunch of interesting ways to, for example, loop around fairies in non-obvious ways. So I would put the fairies into an empty level in a way that strongly encouraged the desired solution, and then build other elements around to make it more visually interesting and also a little obfuscated - it's not fun as a puzzle if you can see the exact solution as soon as you drop in, so I try to add elements that will make the player reconsider the actions and options available once they've tried the obvious thing.

Secondly, as the entirety of the game takes place on single screens with no scrolling, I also wanted the puzzles to be aesthetically pleasing. You might notice many levels have symmetrical or repeating sections, and for many puzzles this is where I'd start, making the outline of a pretty scene and then see what maneuverability options there are for the player once dropping puzzle elements in. I notice a lot of sokoban / tile grid puzzle games don't really pay any mind to the aesthetics of a level so long as the puzzle is devious, so I put extra focus here to make sure they looked nice as well as being a good puzzle.

Either way I approached it, there was a lot of iteration for every single level, testing and tweaking and redesigning, trying as many possibly solutions as possible so it's neither too simple or insanely complex, verifying it can be done extra bonus yellow heart style... really just iterating until it feels 'right' to my point of view on what a puzzle should be; and then sometimes having my tester come up with a completely different solution I hadn't even considered!

It's a pretty fun process, and honestly, I would love for more people to try their hand at making solve-a-puzzle puzzle games, because I am a huge fan of them and it's an under-served genre these days or speedrunning precision platformers and portal-esques.

[6ad6ro]

my review of each game in UFO 50: BARBUTA - intentionally "hard and obtuse to reflect the era", but imo it works. haven't gotten far but i really appreciate it. BUG HUNTER - kinda hated it at first, but wound up really liking it once i understood the basics. NINPEK - controls great. appreciate the mr goemon inspiration. but sadly way too hard. PAINT CHASE - a fine game. sorta like pacman. MAGIC GARDEN - a really cool take on snake. took a minute to warm up to it tho. give it a chance. MORTOL - what a cool idea! lemmings combined with a platformer. gets hard fast but fine. VELGRESS - inverted downwell? it's neat. super hard but i'm just bad at it lol. PLANET ZOLDATH - an awesome bitesized roguelike. this game is sick, don't skip it. ATTACTICS - i'm too stupid to play this. but also i don't really want to learn. just okay. DEVILITION - seems more interesting than attactics, but i want to play it even less. KICK CLUB - bubble bobble clone, seems amazing at first. but all too quickly turns into tedious bullethell drop puzzles. after world 2 you'll wanna stop playing. too bad. AVIANOS - hard but kickass strategy game. has game customization and difficulty settings! MOONCAT - a big reason to buy ufo 50. weird and great! BUSHIDO BALL - do you like windjammers? this game kicks ass. gets real hard tho. BLOCK KOALA - i've never liked sokoban and i never will. seems fine if you do. CAMOUFLAGE - didn't wanna give it a chance at first, but it seems alright. lil stealth game. CAMPANELLA - it's probably a fine game but i hate playing it. maybe if it had a healthbar? GOLFARIA - amazing idea executed poorly. i wish i liked this more, but it's annoying to play. THE BIG BELL RACE - campanella combined with super off road (or sprint). better than campanella, but that "touch the walls and die" shit makes it way worse than it's inspirations. WARPTANK - seems cool. i def need to spend more time with it. WALDORF'S JOURNEY - good, cute game. hard but small scale, making it very fun. PORGY - an even bigger reason to buy ufo 50. small scale metroidvania. cherried it. ONION DELIVERY - god, what were they thinking? has so much potential but wayyy too hard. CARAMEL CARAMEL - such a good game ruined by a two-hit gameover. booooooo. PARTY HOUSE - this game is just really really good. hard to explain, just try it. HOT FOOT - imagine if super dodgeball had shit controls. why does my player autoswitch? i may never give it another chance… DIVERS - weird swimming rpg. i need to give it more time, but seems ok so far. (skipped over next 5) FIST HELL - a final fight clone? hell yes! but then i realized it was more like playing final fight on hardest setting with a single credit. aka "not fun". another example of a good game mossmouth ruined by making it too hard. (skipped over next 10) PILOT QUEST - tied with porgy for being my fav so far. zelda 1 combined with crafting. but you gain resources even when playing other games. kicks ass, PLAY THIS FIRST. cherried. (skipped mini and max) COMBATANTS - tbh i heard it sucked so i jumped ahead to it. they were right… (yet to play final 4) ??? - awesome but can't talk about it.

i'll update with the rest of the games once i try em.

[junk-lion]

i have to write approximately one thousand words about Void Stranger's bad ending before i explode

i recently started playing system erasure's sokoban masterpiece, void stranger, again after playing it a little on launch before getting distracted. previously, they made zeroranger, one of my favorite games ever, to the point where i got a tattoo.

i reached the bad ending in void stranger 2 days ago, and to say that i have been Affected is putting it lightly. the whole thing is very obviously incredible, but there is one aspect of it that i can't stop thinking about in particular: the song that's used, and how it ties into the themes of the game and the actual gameplay in this ending. so i want to break it down a bit and put down into words what i've been thinking about.

please keep in mind that i haven't finished the game yet, so please don't mention anything that may or may not happen beyond this ending so i don't get spoiled, thank you!

let's talk about void stranger's bad ending below the cut, as this contains heavy spoilers. i will assume that you have played this game before, so i won't go too deep into previous events of the game unless they're particularly relevant. i will also be mentioning some future events, particularly events during and leading up to the other ending, so i would not advise reading if you haven't gone past this sequence, or if you plan to play this game, which you should. please. i'm begging you

when you reach floor b225 while voided, having given up your humanity after death in order to become immortal and live forever, the following sequence plays out very differently than if you'd reached there otherwise by keeping yourself alive. the song that plays during this sequence, Voided, has left a considerable impact on me, and i really, really want to talk about how it did this and why, and maybe how it also has had such an impact on you.

i'd like to examine three different aspects of the song and how it's used: the composition/instrumentation/structure of the song, the lyrics, and how these both tie into what's actually happening on the screen, as there's a lot to talk about in each aspect.

The Composition

the first thing i noticed when i started really thinking about voided: it's in a 3/4 time signature. this is the same signature used in waltzes; the type of song that lily and lady gray dance to earlier in one of the memory sequences. from the very first moment, this song is intrinsically about gray's motherly feelings for lily, albeit in a very subtle manner. voided doesn't feel like a song that's in 3/4 to me, which is part of what made this hit me so hard. subtly and quietly, the song accompanying gray's descent is about lily.

the next aspect that is far more obvious about the song is the fact that it has vocals. this is a totally new element for void stranger, with no songs previously having vocals(i believe). initially, the song presents itself without them, feeling like a very normal, if rather somber, area theme, revealing its vocals around the time you've completed a couple of floors. with the introduction of vocals, voided lets you know that this is clearly a point where something big has changed, and very quickly it becomes apparent that it isn't good.

to begin with, voided begins very simply with a lot of clarity. a bare, quiet droning synth note that slowly gets a little louder, with it cutting out to give way to void stranger's signature basic sine wave providing some blips and bloops. shortly after, the vocals begin accompanied with some occasional bass notes. gray is still focused and determined without much else on her mind, all she's thinking about is lily and reaching her, communicated by the sparseness of the instruments. even in the first chorus, the chord progression is just some simple left hand piano chords. at this point, there is a slight hint that something is going wrong, as some of the notes are chosen very carefully to add tension, which slowly ramps as the song progresses.

at the end of the first chorus, a very tense, unnerving ascending synth note accompanies a break of silence with just echoing delay, which gives way to the song's first percussion, a single kick drum along with heavy bass notes - the song is becoming heavier and darker. when the second verse begins, the piano's left hand becomes slightly more complex, with soft strings in the background providing a sense of melancholy. the kick drum grounds us even as things become tenser and heavier.

the chords used at this point are a fairly simple minor progression, which is a large part of what adds that tension. the 6-7-5-1 used in the first half of the chorus is very, very determined, with the following 4-5-6-7 ascending progression that doesn't resolve itself to the root note until after the brief silence capitalizing on that determination while providing some more tension. the second half of the second verse("in this state of oblivion..."), there's a similar progression, a 1-6-4-6-7, which gives a similar state of tension and determination. however, it does something a little different here. one bar after the 7th chord, right after the vocals on "my walls stay strong" fade out, it ascends by one semitone to a note that isn't in the natural minor scale, one semitone below the root note(note: i am not knowledgeable enough about keys to know if this is in an uncommon minor key, so i'm working under the assumption that this song is in D# minor). this isn't extremely uncommon, especially in the songs in system erasure's games, but it is a move that adds a huge amount of tension to the song, aided by the chord change happening after one bar rather than two as in the rest of the verse. this is further amplified by the song not resolving to the root note as the second chorus begins, going back to the 6-7-5-1.

in the second chorus, a new percussion element is added; a set of sleigh bells. outside of christmas songs, i find these add a very cold, lonely feeling to songs, especially songs like this that are slow, sparse and in a minor key. final fantasy x's "out of the frying pan" is a great example of this. they're also placed exactly halfway between kick beats, subtly increasing the pace of the song along with the left hand piano increasing in complexity in terms of rhythm and melody.

as the breakdown begins, all elements besides the piano fall away briefly, providing a brief moment of quiet and clarity, before the other elements come back gradually. the droning synth in the backround bends up and down, a very uncomfortable sound, as the vocals come back, reusing clips from earlier but with heavy delay and reverb, giving them an otherworldly sense, as though she is calling out from somewhere far away, somewhere expansive yet empty. they're processed enough that you can just about tell which lyrics they are, but the wailing fades in and out and blends into itself. gray is becoming more desperate, losing her clearness of mind as she goes on and on without end. in terms of chord progression, the breakdown starts at the root note and just descends down the scale, repeating that over and over - a literal descent for gray, mental and physical. in the last 4 measures of the first part of the breakdown, there is again a double time chord change - until this point, the chords have changed every bar, but on the last bar of every measure, the chord changes twice, once at the start of the bar and again halfway through. for the first of these, it remains in the scale, but on the last three measures, the final chord change is a single semitone down, mimicking the technique in the second verse, but descending rather than ascending. things are becoming even more hopeless as she descends.

going into the second half of the breakdown, there is another, larger break of quiet, permeated only by the echoing delay of the synth and distorted vocals, with a piercing ascending drone cutting through. then, every instrument comes back at once. contrasting with the calm but distressed silences earlier in the song, it is a wall of sound, abundantly chaotic, and it makes clear how bad things have become. by briefly pulling back and fully reintroducing everything at once, it juxtaposes gray's previous calm and focus with her internal chaos and panic as everything comes back all together.

at this point, the chord progression changes to a purely chromatic descending progression, that is, a progression that descends by one semitone every change(D#, D, C#, C...). it also has the same usage of a chord change halfway between bars at the end of each measure. this progression repeats over and over, almost bludgeoning you with its weight. the percussion also becomes more complex again; the kick pattern intensifies, including triplets for a somewhat offbalance feeling, as thought you're being dragged along by the hand, along with a few different types of cymbals. the contrast between the different types of harsh cymbals add a lot to the chaotic feeling.

going back to the chord progression, the chromatic bass notes and left hand of the piano contrast heavily with the melody, which stays purely in key. notably this is a leitmotif that plays at several points in the game(i'm not quite sure where, but it is definitely one that's been heard a lot at this point). while the chords clash extremely harshly with this, the melody feels like it's barely holding onto what gray once was. both are repeated over and over, the remainder of gray's determination and lucidity fighting with the chaos and her urge to give up.

after several repeats of this, the progression and melody stays the same, but the vocals from the chorus are reintroduced, albeit with more reverb and delay(though not quite as much as the barely coherent vocals from earlier). she cries out from that far away void, literally begging herself to hold on over and over as she descends repeatedly with the chords, out of key, dissonant and chaotic.

as we reach the last line of the chorus, the progression changes to a 6-7-6-7, regaining a little bit of that determination. she cries "my loss is mine" in a new way, a more mournful, forlorn way, almost through gritted teeth with a wavering voice. with the determined, but still chaotic and desperate chords and the declaration of ownership of loss, she is determined to hold onto it as everything falls apart within her. in the very last bar before the lines about her grievance and sadness repeat for the last time, there is again another chord change halfway through, another ascending chromatic note that ascends one more semitone at the start of the next measure, resolving itself before going back to the descending chromatic progression, which plays one more time. they are accompanied by dramatic string chords which cut through now. for the final measure, we get a 6-7 chord progression, one last little bit of determination, before everything except the vocals abruptly cuts out. "my loss", she wails, painful vocals layered on top of each other, transition to a much gentler, painful exhalation of "is mine". it's sang with only one voice. with the distress and chaos cutting out, almost like she has snapped, the very last thing that gray is left with in the silence is her loss of lily, her loss of her life, her loss of self. but, it is hers, and that's all she has left to hold onto.

wow! that's 1592 words about the composition alone! my title is totally fucking wrong now! let's talk about the lyrics and vocals and how they relate to the composition.

The Lyrics and Vocals

i don't think i have a huge amount to say about the lyrics, but i also thought i didn't have that much to say about the composition. let's get started.

"There's a safety locker, inside of me, out of your reach, and I hold the key."

gray has compartmentalised her suffering, and her life before becoming the lady in waiting. so much of what goes on inside her she doesn't let lily see at all. i think this also alludes to the suffering she is currently going through in the void. she has packed it away, keeping it from lily and herself.

"It's sealed with layers and layers of irony, what's within, I refuse to see."

my interpretation of the irony here is the fact that lily has traded her soul to protect gray, and in the process of getting here, gray has died and traded her soul to become voided so she could reach lily again. her protectee has become her protecter, but she's recklessly tossed the protection aside to try and reclaim her position as lily's guardian. the other angle here is that by becoming voided to try and get to the bottom of the void to rescue lily, she ironically cannot reach her, no matter how hard she tries. she literally refuses to see this fact, her suffering packed away inside her safety locker, because acknowledging this would make it all meaningless. yet another angle is the irony that she cannot save lily and her child both, she must make a choice, and ends up saving the child rather than the person she went there for.

"I hold on, I hold on, I hold on, 'cause that's the only thing, the one thing that I can control."

fairly self explanatory - gray has lost it all in her quest. without lily, without being able to protect her, and having failed to protect her, she's lost everything. all she has left now is her refusal to give up, and the pain that comes with all of this.

"My grievance is mine, my sadness is mine, my loss is mine."

grief, sadness, loss. these are the things she has left, the last things guiding her to give her determination to go on, and they're all painful, terrible things, but they are hers, the last thing she has agency over, the last thing the void hasn't taken.

notably, at this point i think there is a sense of deep and desperate denial in these lyrics, especially in the way it's sung. the chorus of the vocals are almost a wail, a literal repeated declaration that she's holding on because that's the only thing she can do now. she denies that the void has taken everything from her, denies her failure, denies that she must give up as she pushes forward endlessly through this bizarre and ever changing labyrinth.

"One toss and I'll forever be blind, toss the key, oh please be kind."

she begs to let go of that compartmentalised suffering and grief. she wants to let go of her failure, begging herself to forget it so that she can "forever be blind" to her inability to protect lily and the impossibility of her task ahead.

"In this state of oblivion, my silence goes on, My bearings stay stored, my walls stay strong."

out of all the lyrics in voided, this sticks out the most to me. gray professes that she is strong, silent, protected internally, her "bearings stay stored" so she knows where she needs to go and isn't lost. but how can that be true with the way she repeatedly professes she's holding onto because it's all she can control? how can she still be strong when all she has left is grief and sadness and loss? you may take it as truthful and her just being that strong, but to me, it reads as a denial of the hurt she feels. she feels she has to ignore it in order to go on, but ironically it is also the one thing keeping her going.

as the music gets heavier and tenser, so does the singing. the vocalist, eevamari, wails slightly more desperately and painfully as we progress. her voice cracks ever so slightly on "bearings", letting the underlying desperation and the lie of her unwavering resolve shine through just a tiny bit. but it's enough for us to know.

the chorus repeats, and the cries of holding on start to feel heartbreaking when combined with the strings, the lonely and cold sleigh bells, the sad and determined piano. she holds the final "mine" for a significantly longer time as the song gets quieter, as though not wanting to let go, clinging on as hard as she can to her loss in this period of relative calm. perhaps she feels that if she lets go of it, she won't be able to bear grasping it again.

as stated earlier, the vocals in the breakdown are repeated clips from earlier, but jumbled, distorted and in a random order. they get more processed with delay, reverb and a filter in the second half of the breakdown, as gray loses herself more but seems to want to hold onto those declarations of strength and agency of her pain to keep her moving forward.

in the last section of vocals, the normal vocals are overlayed with some of those clips, giving a very otherworldly effect to the voice. gray isn't fully human anymore, with the implication to me of her brand earlier that she's become part of the void, and the effects on the voice sell that to us. as well, against the descending chromatic progression, as the song reaches its crescendo of dissonance and chaos, she yells over and over that she holds on again, cries out that her pain is hers. she holds onto all of this in the face of everything falling apart in the worst possible way, internally and externally.

right before the last repeat, eevamari again proclaims "my loss is mine", with what seem to be clips of "my grievance is mine" and "my sadness is mine" vaguely overlaying it. her pain has blended together into one, and is all she has left now.

that's about all i had to say about the vocals. it's a truly stellar performance, full of anguish and desperation and quiet determination that's slowly lost despite her desperate attempts to keep it.

so, this is obviously a fantastically composed song with great regard to the themes of the game. but why has it left such an impact on me that i've spent two and a half hours writing this insane post about a relatively short part of void stranger? let's talk about the most striking part of this sequence, what ties it all together; how it synchronises with the gameplay.

The Gameplay, or how my life has been ruined and I can't stop thinking about this

floor b225 is a brand room - the intermittent rooms with murals that you initially can't decipher. as you examine the brand, the game tells you:

[It is your brand]

ominous. something isn't right. we later learn that the brands belong to each void lord, so the implication is that gray has become one too when she became voided. we don't know this at the time, but something is obviously very off about this immediately. when we progress past b225, the ending sequence begins and voided starts to play. floor b226, where a void lord statue would normally be, contains nothing, and notably there is no void lord encountered on this path, adding to the unease.

on b227, we're given one of the chests that usually contain a locust idol without having to do a puzzle. rare, but not unprecedented. however, this chest is empty. to the best of my memory, the only time this happens earlier in the game is the segment with the thief, and there is no thief encountered here, or any npcs at all in this entire segment for that matter. another anomaly. there are a few accessible chests in this segment, but there's nothing in any of them. the very first chest has a note inside from bee saying that she left the recipient's favorite snack inside. maybe the void gods don't venture to this part, especially since it doesn't lead to the end of the void, and this layer belongs to lady gray now.

the pacing of the song is such that the vocals are likely to begin on b228. this floor is still fairly normal, but something notable happens when the vocals begin: the hud changes to display the lyrics. the hud is a white bar at the bottom of the screen that displays some important information, but all of that is removed with the song's lyrics imposed on the hud bar line by line. this is a huge departure from normality for the game, and our first big clue that Something is happening. when i realised what was happening at this point, i gasped because it was just so unexpected, with no indication there will be vocals until eevamari begins singing. zeroranger contained no vocals at all, so it was doubly unexpected for me.

sometime between the second half of the verse and the chorus, the sound effects disappear completely(i'm unsure whether they gradually fade or just stop suddenly). the music has totally overtaken the focus of the game and demands your attention both aurally and visually, along with the strange gameplay differences that are about to get worse. as the sound effects disappear, gray begs herself to hold on, hold on, hold on, as things begin to change and fade from what she's come to know and expect.

i'm not sure how many floors you can progress here before the game does its thing. at the end of the first chorus, timed with the hit of silence at the end of the ascending synth note, the screen cuts to black and we get a leitmotif played on the sine wave and piano, a somber and lonely moment in the dark. right after this, the first percussion appears with the singular kick drum note, and it becomes quickly apparent that something is very, very wrong.

this puzzle is impossible.

you cannot solve this puzzle. gray has made a significant jump offscreen to floor b288, implying a large degree of time passing from her point of view, and is now faced with an impossible puzzle. the mimic in the room to the right is standing on the stair tile, with the switch to unlock it in the room gray is in. you cannot get to the stairs, no matter how hard you try. this is timed with the music growing more grave, more tense, and seeing this impossible puzzle in tandem with that lends it this air of desperation and shock as the reality of gray's situation begins to make itself apparent. after a little bit, everything but the synth and piano cut out again, there is another black screen, and when it comes back, somehow gray has made progress.

offscreen, gray has progressed to floor b451, a detail you could easily miss in the midst of everything else going on, which is quite frankly overwhelming. a jump of 163 floors. for comparison, getting to floor b225 took me about 6 hours or so. somehow, she progressed through the impossible puzzle above. for reasons that you probably understand if you've done this ending, i don't think we can trust that the puzzle is truly impossible, but to our eyes, it is.

this puzzle is also impossible. the one tile wide hallway means you will only be able to push the rock onto the stairs and never reach them. after a moment, another cut to black.

something strange happens again. it's the same floor, but the rock has been replaced with an enemy. in truth, these "rocks" are eggs. tail, the first resident of the void we meet and a former void lord, tells us they're eggs that fall from above, but to our eyes, they are rocks, and it's reasonable to assume such. gray has spent such an indeterminably long amount of time here that the eggs has hatched. in the previous cut, she progressed 163 floors. how long did she spend here? there's another black screen after a second.

when the game comes back, gray has progressed to b???, a floor that has the exact same layout as the previous one we saw but with a different enemy. gray has either ventured so deep that there's no longer any point in numbering them, or she's forgotten how many floors she's passed. additionally, every impossible puzzle we've seen so far has one of the black statues above them. this adds an extra layer of impossibility to them, as we find out at the end of this sequence that entering stairs in front of one of these statues will reset our progress to the very beginning of the game, and only a simple memory will remain. i'm choosing to interpret this as us no longer being able to trust what we see, as gray's mind begins to fracture and she sees puzzles that appear to be impossible. she is also seeing those black statues above the stairs, a subtle cry for redemption, to start over and do things right. as the vocals come back here, there is no cut to black, but we do cut to another impossible puzzle. the lyrics are back on the hud. we linger for a little bit, and then cut to another puzzle that is even more impossible than the ones before it.

the stairs are gone.

the stairs are just gone. more than not being able to reach them, there is just no way to progress at all, even if we could get to them.

at the line "my walls stay strong", we get to this impossible puzzle. gray is quite literally surrounded by walls. while she professes her walls stay strong despite growing more and more desperate, she is trapped in this tiny corridor with two leeches that will reach her no matter what - to me, a clear metaphor that her silent, strong walls have already been breached by suffering. this is also where we get the first chromatic ascending chord to the second chorus, introducing more dissonance and desperation in the music, as we return to "i hold on, i hold on, i hold on".

we get to another impossible puzzle, but the stairs are back, albeit with the black reset statue above the stairs. notably, as gray professes that holding on is the one thing she can control, the player is quite literally having control slowly taken from them as we're faced with puzzles that we can't complete, and we're rapidly being torn from them and forced into new situations that we can't possibly escape. however, it gets worse.

as the instruments except the piano fall away, we cut to this puzzle(which is, unbelievably, impossible). the hud is back as gray has a quiet moment of clarity amidst her desperation. something is wrong, however. in the top right, there's a piece of the wall that's just missing, with a graphic of the side of a tile floating in the void in its place. more evidence of gray's failing mind and unreliability.

the next puzzle we cut to appears to be possible, but isn't, due to the pit to the left of the stairs actually being a wall. there's a statue above the stairs anyway. quite a few more of the tiles are illogical now. this is where the chromatic descending progression comes in, the music becoming more harsh and dissonant as things become stranger and bizarre.

we cut through a couple more illogical puzzles as the distorted vocals come in, and more and more tiles make no sense. the chromatic descending chords become more dissonant with more offkey notes as gray's desperation and despair grow, and she loses herself more in the internal turmoil.

as we hit the drop in the breakdown where everything pulls away before coming back all together, this is the puzzle that faces us. i think this one is possible, but you have about 8 seconds to see this, process all the information, and find the solution. even then, there's a statue above the stairs - even if you reached it, you couldn't progress. to me, this is a hint that gray's mind isn't totally gone yet, she's fighting to stay conscious in the monotony of these never ending puzzles that she can't properly percieve, but still begs for atonement.

the next three puzzles we see are increasingly bizarre and alien, with odd geometry, enemy arrangements, chests, annd then several sets of stairs, something never seen before. as the music grows more desperate and chaotic, so too do the puzzles.

as the vocals come back and gray calls out that she holds on, we cut to this puzzle where she stands over a pit, with no ground beneath her. surrounded by the denizens of the void who seem to watch, if she takes a single step in any direction, she'll fall. quite literally, all she can do in the darkness, the total pitch black of this ever shifting dungeon that is now beyond any form of reason to her, is hold on.

the next puzzle is a variant of the same concept. stuck on a singular tile along with other creatures in the void and statues. they are all in the same situation. there is no escape, only holding on.

as we cut to the next puzzle at "my grievance is mine", the tiles are now placed totally randomly. on top of this, control is wrested away from the player. we can no longer input anything, and this comes directly after the line "cause that's the only thing, the one thing that i can control". quite literally all that gray and the player can do now is hold on as void stranger drags us quickly by the hand through all of these random, illogical puzzles that are now changing twice every bar. the final part about this section is that gray is flashing from invincibility, implying she is taking damage constantly, as she loses everything, unable to hold on.

as eevamari wails "my loss is mine" for the penultimate time, the puzzles become smaller and smaller, this continuing over and over as the puzzles rapidly change, until gray eventually has only a single tile to stand on. notably, at the end of this, we go straight back into "my grievance is mine", skipping "i hold on". gray cannot even hold on anymore, she has lost all control. all she has left is grief, sadness, loss.

"my loss", eevamari cries as there are no tiles on screen, nothing in this black void, even lady gray, as the only thing we can see is the hud with the lyrics superimposed over it. "is mine", she breathes out as even that disappears, the music falling away, leaving us with just her voice, and then silence in blackness. all that remains is loss, literal loss of the way forward, of any sense of ending, of resolution.

once this segment ends, we rest in silence momentarily before reaching a floor with a birch tree. but unlike every other birch tree, should we rest under it, gray is unable to dream. we know from the end of the void ending that she still has more to recall and dream about, so it's reasonable to surmise that she's lost her ability to even dream by now, or perhaps has forgotten everything before coming to the void. in any case, it has all been for nothing. as noted by the atonement statue ahead that you're forced to reset with, she's lost something important, her promise. she can't even remember lily, her reason for coming here.

all she has left is her loss, but she doesn't remember what she has lost. but the loss is hers nonetheless.

jesus christ i wrote over five thousand words when i thought it would be one thousand

i didn't think i would write for four hours about this. i have been thinking about voided for two and a half full days at this point, and i think it shows. this five minute long sequence has affected me so deeply, because i feel it's a complete masterpiece in synthesis of music and gameplay and visuals, and how music can be used to make us feel things, and compliment other art to make them more than the sum of their parts. i really hope that it helped you understand why you're fucked up and insane about void stranger too.

thanks for reading! show your friends who played void stranger!

thanks to system erasure for making this incredible game that's ruined my life without even having finished it, and to eevamari for her astounding vocals that went a huge way to making this moment as impactful as it was.

[tipsheda]

My favorite games that I played in 2024

Shadow of the Erdtree Receiver 2 (2020) Crockpot Indika Northern Journey (2021) Stone Story RPG (2023) Time Bandit (2023) Deadlock The Exit 8 (2023) and Platform 8 Universal Paperclips (2017) Pools #BLUD

The Elden Ring DLC continues the trend of the base game of sprinkling secrets into little corners of these huge plains of nothingness that just gets tedious to explore. But damn if this isn't the prettiest this world has ever been. The layer upon layer design of the world was a treat to explore.

I had started Receiver 2 back in 2021, but never got very far. Rogue-lites do not hold my interest for very long. But mix it with FPS shootin, some lite stealth, and minute gun mechanics that let you interact with every little bit, and I'm so glad to have revisited this to 100% completion.

Crockpot is a joint effort from Blake Andrews and Emily Koonce. A visual novel-esque experience mixed with a variety of little interactive scenes of different parts of two characters hanging out. Very slice-of-life, deeply personal, and delightful. It nailed what it was going for perfectly.

I played Indika with my two housemates on a whim. I love how well the religious trauma of the main character is intertwined with the actions that you take throughout the game. It's just a delightfully surprising experience. You will not be able to guess what it throws at you.

I had started Northern Journey back in 2023 and fell off until picking it back up towards the end of 2024. I'm glad I went back and finished it. It's a love letter to old PC games that were a little before my time. It has gorgeous environments/foliage, a banger soundtrack, and great pacing.

Stone Story RPG is an idle RPG game with the best authentic ASCII art I've seen in a game. The way everything is animated is fantastic. It's very well designed around it being ASCII art on a defined grid. Was a very enjoyable gameplay loop. I stopped when the grind became more predictable/tedious.

I initially got frustrated and almost quit playing Time Bandit, but I stuck it out and got into the habit of playing every day to move one more crate, compact one more pile of trash, and steal one more time crystal from the big corporation. It was a satisfying and slow loop of Sokoban and stealth.

Now for some more rapid fire thoughts.

Played a lot of good games of Deadlock with friends in 2024. First MOBA I've enjoyed playing in a long time. Lots of fun characters, too.

The Exit 8 and Platform 8 are both satisfying find-the-difference horror games. Highly recommend playing with friends.

Played Universal Paperclips for the first time and had a blast. Love a good clicker game with a defined ending.

Pools is filled with fantastic wet liminal vibes and great sound design.

The animation and visual style might carry #BLUD more than its gameplay, but it was still a great experience.

---------------------------------------------

2024 has been an awful year for game developers with so so many layoffs and a turbulent industry overall due to wanton greed and world-wide circumstances. I hope 2025 will see more unions, stability, and worker-owned game studios. Power to the people fighting the good fight out there.

[falciesystemessays]

so there's this indie game developer who's been a quiet favorite of mine for the past year. Artless Games. they're a chinese developer who specializes in puzzle games. they have a programming game called A=B about working with an esolang, pretty solid takes on The Witness and Sokoban formulas, and the absolutely ridiculous 14 Minesweeper Variants, which is my comfort game and also getting a sequel soon. this developer is really good at making rock-solid puzzle games with good ideas and great execution. if you are interested in puzzle game design at all, and especially if any of these concepts interest you, i highly recommend you check out their work.

The hitch is, of course, the lack of an artstyle. You could call it minimalist, but the name "Artless Games" shows a full awareness that there's a presentational lack in these games. I kind of admire it, honestly, because these games do stand up without the need for visual flair. And as an indie designer who tends to be pretty limited on assets, I deeply respect a game that shows how you don't need those to make an amazing game.

...But it's not that simple, is it?

A few months ago I went to the yearly Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I learned a lot there, met a good few people, and started to really rethink how I approach gamedev. The thing to understand about GDC talks is that they are incidentally about making good games. The real focus is on how to be successful in the game industry. This often does mean making better games, but it's just as much about confronting how making a good game isn't always enough.

Enter Lenophie, an aggressively French game designer who gave my most anticipated talk, 'Bunburrows': How to Break Out of the Puzzle Niche. She speaks to the fact that, despite puzzle games being very popular among indie developers, it's a pretty small niche in terms of players. To make a profitable indie puzzle game, you have to appeal outside of that niche to players looking for other things. In Lenophie's words, "We treated being a puzzle game like something we had to compensate for." It means not relying on mechanics alone as a selling point. It means giving your game a unique style, or even a story. And it means swallowing your pride as a puzzle game designer and giving players hints, or even letting them skip puzzles. It's not enough to make a good puzzle game, she says. You have to make a good game with puzzles in it.

I came out of that talk feeling like the future of puzzle games was just laid out before me. And I was excited. I'm still excited! The idea of puzzle games extending past their current niche status is a really cool one, to me. But it puts me in a weird spot thinking about Artless again. On some level, I have a deep respect for a game like 14 Minesweeper Variants, a game with even less interesting visuals than normal Minesweeper, for standing on its own as a puzzle game. It was a game built just for me. I think it's really important that games like this exist, that game developers can make a game with a sharp focus that knows its audience and appeals to it fully. But the reality of gamedev as a business complicates matters. I hope every developer working in the puzzle space finds their answer. I hope I find mine. And I hope you, whatever rising star developer is reading this, find your balance.

[bubblingbeebles]

something small but incredible about void stranger is how like. a lot of the late game puzzles make you put the controller down and just stare at the screen for ten minutes.

like. if you told me a year ago there's gonna be a sokoban where you have to solve each whole floor in your head before making a single move, i'd say that sounds unplayable. and yet VS somehow boiling-frogs you into loving it. i would never wish for an undo button in VS.

and yeah, the same effect is writ large in how you have to take notes across multiple runs to find the deeper secrets and everyone here knows that's what makes the game truly great but like. the moment to moment gameplay has to feel good too. the large scale and the small scale have to be in harmony. and VS pulls it off with freaking. sokoban.

[snugglesquiggle]

tag reference:

#mini squiggles (for shitposts) #my thoughts (for serious posts), #my writing (for prose),

#maintenance & disassembly (reblogging robot erotica), #robot stuff (reblogging robot art), #my recs (reblogging things people should check out)

the main thing i've been working on lately is Hostile Takeover, a longform murder drones fanfic about a lesbian killer robot torn between her directives and her own needs.

my most extensive work, though, is the many writing about Black Nerve, a dark fantasy setting with giant insects wield magic that dissolves life and matter, mutant bat-blood and of course esoteric fungi. there's a couple of novels and LOT of lore posts

i have a website which is probably the best place to see all of my stuff:

but to get a taste of what you can find on that site, keep reading

most people are probably following me for my murder drones stuff.

as mentioned, i write the critically acclaimed J/Uzi fic, Hostile Takeover:

it's a beyond-novel-length enemies to lovers slowburn, and distinguishes itself by pulling it all off without heavy alteration to canon characterization.

most people are probably put off by the tagged ship, but i've received numerous comments to the effect of "i never liked this ship" or "i didn't think it could be done" followed by "but you somehow pulled it off".

give it a shot!

besides that, i've read a lot of murder drones fanfic, and maintain a page on my website dedicated to indexing and reviewing fics that i'd recommend

several of the people following me are writers, who may be interested in know that i've written several essays on the craft of writing. people tend to find them pretty insightful!

i've written many stories other than Hostile Takeover. you can find them on my site; there's too many to list, but in general, i write nonhuman character near-exclusively. (my friends were only so surprised when i became obsessed with murder drones)

still, HT is my most successful work for a reason, and i'm not certain fans of that will enjoy my earlier writing; i have reservations about recommending most of them. A Chimerical Hope is still cool, i think, though its issues are undeniable

the majority of my site is dedicated its overarching setting: Black Nerve, a dark fantasy world of giant sapient insect ninjas and corrupting fungus and gruesome mutagenic blood magic. there's so much going on there that i just cant get into all of it here. not even sure where you should begin reading

lore posts like "In Dialogue With Plagues", or "Lardsuckers and (What Were) Grubsuckers" give you a taste of just how freaky the setting is, and i think "The Duality of Mantis" is a great look at the weird psychology of the dominant species. but there's so many articles i can't list them all

writing is probably what i've done the most of, but i have other skills :3

i've released four albums of electronic music on bandcamp:

and there's more!

i'm sometimes an artist, and there's gallery on my site with over three hundred pieces i've drawn over the years. i mostly draw these weird alien dudes i invented, plus a lot of praying mantises and dragons and pokemon. quality varies a lot and i'm bad about staying in practice, but here are some pieces i think turned out rather well

ok, now is that it?

well, mostly. i have some poetry that's neat, and i recently produced a game demo that's shaping up into something interesting:

but now, that's probably everything of serious note.

if you read through all of that, i love you. thank you for your time and i hope there's something here you appreciated

[burnoutgxrl]

My gf bought me Void Stranger after I got invested on watching her playing the game and yapping about it and after we spend a night watching Connor's video about this marvelous experience of a game. Don't mind my hour count, I probably have 3/4 of it because the rest is me spending the time off screen and forgetting the game was open because I needed some time on a puzzle. After all of these hours, most of the puzzles become solvable, although hard mode (the second or third playthrough you'll experience) have some pretty nerve-racking puzzles.

I never played a sokoban game before, and I must say that Void Stranger not only does its job perfectly, but it also mixes the puzzles with another instances of games when it comes to boss fights (those exists, and the game basically asks you to look deeper on it to find them, and the rewards are everything). Not only that, but Void Stranger also mixes a charismatic set of characters and an amazing soundtrack that accompanies every moment this game gives you.

I insist, please, give Void Stranger a chance if you're unsure if you should play it or not. Also, after the playthrough in hard mode (when you're playing with another character (I'm trying to keep this spoiler-free)), you enter another playthrough with another character and it's not the puzzles the trickier part, but the story is the thing that pulls you to it.

Also, I happened to get to an specific point where the game basically tells you the only thing you can do is start over again and I kid you not, I thought it was figurative, but nope. It was literal and I was struck by many feelings and then I had to start over again, losing the progress (the game, even if you reset the game, saves the little milestones you get), but what else could I do? Forfeit it all to the void and stop playing? Nah, I'll keep playing, I now entered post-game territory and, this game's lore keep expanding, I definitely love it.

Definitely one of my favourite games. Please, give Void Stranger a chance. Play it blindly or don't, although, when you start connecting dots from here and there, you just get wow in your head time and time and time again. Best game I've experienced this year.

[just-a-game-of-sokoban]

shitposts? on the daily poll gimmick blog?

[ohandcounting]

Void Stranger Turbo Spoilers Lore Google Doc

This has all information in it from what I can tell, except sprite sheets. With info on hidden mechanics and stuff to get them to appear in the game for yourself. The only thing missing really would be what scores you need for each rank image in [REDACTED] I had nothing to do with this I just haven't seen it shared anywhere on Tumblr yet.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mSXK3tSuVPKn7yVYmy0wwuEgNDnjB8ZN?usp=drive_link

Addendum: Here is a link to a video with (almost) Literally Everything In Void Stranger it has excessive timestamps in the pinned comment, and is not being embedded because the video thumbnail is spoilers in of itself. It's unlisted to prevent spoiling people, don't click it unless you truly have seen everything and you're just looking for the small things you've missed. Or I guess if you hate sokoban with a passion and still want to see what System Erasure did?

[patricia-taxxon]

I've been thoroughly enjoying I Wanna Lockpick on from your mention of it a bit ago, and I was wondering if you've played/heard of Arranger? Relatively recent, but it's an interesting little puzzle adventure game that's got a fun gimmick. Not the longest or the toughest, but the visual style is stand-out. I would personally consider it a "sokoban" but ymmv

Oh dear, I was not the target audience for this game! The structure of introducing a new mechanic, tutorializing it, then giving exactly ONE non-trivial puzzle before abandoning the mechanic entirely, it started to feel like the whole game was a huge tease. I went into it knowing it wouldn't be super difficult but my perspective is so skewed that it felt like i went hours before discovering any amount of friction whatsoever. Also, the whole "no undo but none of the puzzles can be softlocked anyways" deal made the game feel like the puzzles just kinda passively yielded rather than being solved.

I tried to meet it where its at, like at some point in the twitter allegory village I realized "wait, this is mario odyssey" and i kinda got into the rhythm of doing little tasks and exploring and talking to people, but unfortunately i also kinda hate the story and characters. i dont care about the special ray of sunshine Y/A protagonist with a maligned supernatural gift finding out she's actually super special and needs to save the world from apathy, I was grinding my teeth by the end. I don't know if this game was actually for kids or if it was just really fucking wholesome, hard to tell these days.

[systemrestart]

Remi's 2024 Favorites!

Did this last year, so here it is again! List under the cut

Like 95% of the the media I enjoyed this year was video games, so there's gonna be more than one entry for that category. lol

[FAVORITE VIDEO GAME(S)]

In Stars and Time

Yeah people probably saw this one coming. I feel a little weird putting it here since I JUST played it, but man, this game had a massive impact on me. It's not without flaws, for sure, but the way the timeloop aspect is interwoven with both the experience of the player and the conflict inside Siffrin, is remarkable. Beautifully handled. And the connections between the characters are very rich and Real.

I also just, connected on a very personal level with Siffrin, for reasons I'm not fully comfortable sharing here, but that also made ISAT resonate deeply with me.

Witch's Heart

Such an incredible amount of effort and care was put into this game, it's impressive!! Full character sprites with lots of variety, tons of special CGs, TONS of areas to explore and secrets to find, and a very compelling story (with an interesting/unique structure, too!). And, of course, the characters. I didn't think much of them at first but they really, really endeared themselves to me and have some surprising depths.

Even though it's not QUITE finished yet, I think Witch's Heart deserves to be in the pantheon of Big RPGmaker Horror Games. I hope more people play it

Void Stranger

A game I haven't talked about nearly enough!! I fucking LOVE sokoban puzzles and this game has some incredibly fun ones, I had an absolute BLAST playing. There's tons and tons of secrets to uncover, and it was incredibly rewarding to discover many of them for myself. "Rewarding" really is the key word I think. I wish so badly I could play it all over again with fresh eyes

Fantastic Danmaku Festival II

This is the best Touhou fan-shmup I've ever played. And I even got to play it on an actual arcade machine at Tekko!!!!! Really hope to clear it on Lunatic in 2025 :^)

[FAVORITE BOOK]

Murder on St. Mark's Place

I discovered the Gaslight Mysteries series this year, and read the first 10 books. Of all of them, Murder on St. Mark's Place was my favorite by far. It's a historical murder mystery set in 1890's NYC, and I felt that this one in particular gave a very interesting perspective on that time period, especially around misogyny and class violence. The mystery wasn't too hard to unravel but was still very compelling, leaving me biting my nails in anxiety by the end, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Very good read.

[FAVORITE MOVIE]

Trainspotting

I'm gonna be real. I watched, like. 2 movies this year, total. Trainspotting and Pink Flamingos. Pink Flamingos was interesting as a piece of weird gay art history, and I enjoyed(?) it, but I think Trainspotting left a bigger impact on me.

Absolutely harrowing look at what addiction can drive people to, and why people still do drugs anyways. Highly recommend looking at warnings before watching, though,,

[FAVORITE ANIME]

I. did not watch any this year. Again. I think that was literally my ONE resolution for 2024, too, I wanted to watch at least 1 anime……. Mission Failed

[FAVORITE MANGA]

The Shinigami's Rowing Her Boat As Usual

Technically not original manga, it's a Touhou doujinshi, but MAN. This is possibly my favorite Touhou doujin I've ever read, it's very........ how do I even put it. Life-affirming? Touching? Idk. God I love Komachi. Please read it

HONORABLE MENTION: LIFE

I also re-read LIFE this year. This manga can be hard to recommend to people due to the (arguably over-the-top) dramatic handling of its subject matter (self injury, SA, EXTREME bullying, suicide, etc), but, it holds a very precious place in my heart. Particularly the bond between the 2 lead girls, Ayumu and Miki.

I haven't read NANA yet but I like to joke that Ayumu and Miki are MY personal Nana and Hachi. lol

------

Aaaaaand I think that's it from me! This year was....... quite a rollercoaster. Left my shit garbage job and made a lot of good memories, but, I began having some pretty scary health issues, and I had some very low lows. 2025 is looking very grim already, in many ways, but I hope that at the very least, I can still find some fun and comfort in there, too. Wishing you all a happy new year.....!!

[talenlee]

Decemberween 2024 — ASMRtists!

Do you know what ASMR is? Yep? Okay, skip to the content warning, I’m just going to talk about some of the ASMR channels I’ve been watching this year.

If you don’t know what ASMR is, it’s a term for describing an experience of a sensation. While causes are highly varied, the effect is usually described as a pleasant, comforting tingling effect across the scalp and shoulders. This sensation does not seem to be experienced by most people, but by a large enough minority that there are general trends in the space that people can experiment with causing. These causes, known offhandedly as ‘triggers’ are sometimes grouped together in forms that make it easy to share them on Youtube or Podcasts, and can be used for relaxation, concentration or, yes, some people use them for a sex thing. Or all three, there’s nothing wrong with concentrating on relaxing sex. Just for the sake of the record, this is the year I heard the idea that it’s possible that the ASMR (autosensory meridian response) experience is a type of synesthesia.

Content Warning: I’m going to share a bunch of ASMR videos and link to their sources. These are straight up videos of people whispering and speaking softly, with amped up background audio to create a ‘fuzzy’ soundscape. Chances are if you don’t know you like ASMR, you might find these videos really unpleasasnt to listen to!

Anyway, these videos, viewed without the context that they literally could be causing a physiognomic response in the audience who experience the effect, can look really weird or ‘cringe’ as the youth say. It’s also a youtube space that’s dominated overwhelmingly by a typical ASMRtist who is an attractive white woman in her 20s to 30s, usually with some cosplay element while the main focus of the video is on her legs, lips, or boobs. And make no mistake, I absolutely know that my ASMR follows include more than a few of those. Too many of them, however, and I feel like a creepy old dude, so I try to ensure there’s a variety in what I give my attention to, and do what I can to fight the algorithmic bias towards more whiteness.

ASMR Wedding Planner Role Play (Soft Spoken)

Watch this video on YouTube

I complain about the algorithm but no lies, it is what put TrashellsASMR on my radar. She makes videos that are small, centered roleplay in very ‘normalised’ experiences. The fantasy offered by these plays is ‘imagine doing something where you are the centre of attention and being listened to, but also, you are not being made to do anything highly demanding.’ There isn’t a reliance on a highly complex narrative (which other ASMRtists I listen to can do), or an alienating oddness (which, again, other ASMRTists I listen to can do).

It’s a reliable, even kind of media that wants to create a sense of place and put you in it, then make you feel okay about being there in that kind of ambience.

Best ASMR show-and-tell of my books to help you sleep

Watch this video on YouTube

I remember finding BillMaxVoxPax‘s videos as a result of not ASMR seeking but listening to math tutorials Decay sent me. Then I wound up on BillMaxVoxPax’s channel watching as he went through his book collection as a near-stereotype of a beardo academic math nerd, whispering his way through a book collection. I started sharing screencaps with Decay, and we had a good time giggling at the idea that this guy is essentially the wizard he would airbrush on his own van.

BillMaxVoxPax does long form plays of sokoban games, which I find challenging to relax to because I’m trying to solve/understand the puzzle while he does. But games that are a bit less complicated to me, like solitaire? He’s good at that.

[ASMR] You Are a Vinyl Record

Watch this video on YouTube

When I do these roundups I try to avoid people I’ve already spoken about just because while I cycle artists out because I don’t find their new stuff compelling, I don’t want new names to push out old names. I am pretty sure I’ve written about the guy called MattasticASMR, in the past, when he did a Walter White roleplay video making candy ASMR.

Still, this past year, Mattastic has undergone a sort of branding update, changing his name to be a little easier to say aloud. Mattastic is also big on novel applications of the camera, such as in this fun video where he positions the viewer as a vinyl record.

ASMR Psychologist Interview | Your Mental Analysis

Watch this video on YouTube

I stumbled on this KarlASMR video — it’s actually quite out of type for his stuff, where he tends towards what I guess I’d call improvisational comedy ASMR? Really good voice, very good ambient sound, and the greenscreen isn’t being used to do anything unnecessarily ambitious.

This is an example of a channel with a small number of great videos but where the majority of what’s there doesn’t appeal to me. Good stuff, not a channel I check everything out immediately.

A Rather Strange™️ Medical Examination | Soft Spoken ASMR Roleplay for Sleep

Watch this video on YouTube

And here’s the ‘one white girl’ slot I gave myself this year. Musing Mira ASMR creates a whole variety of videos on the general theme of ‘pretty lady with a variety of affects gives you personal attention’ space. Sometimes that’s a hairdresser, sometimes that’s a stern artist, sometimes that’s a doctor, that kind of thing. There are some threads though, some plots that go from episode to episode, such as the Rather Strange series. In this, you, the viewer are attending some fairly mundane thing like a hairdresser, a clothes fitting, a medical examination, or a colour sampling, and then the professional you’re dealing with is confused and surprised because of something about you.

The ‘something about you’ is in this case, inevitably supernatural weirdness. She tries to colour match you, and then keeps noticing things you’re doing to mess with her, or out of a desire to please – like she mentions it’d be better if your eyes were a different colour, and you change your eyes while she’s looking elsewhere. Trying to take blood from a vampire, that kind of thing.

This is by no means the bulk of what I listen to when I have been trying to relax my way through complex projects or big things like student marking.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!