#no i did not go through ten autosaves to see if i could find the one where i'd completed aratak's challenge in my ikrie photo mode savegame

[tjerra14]

I'm not sure how much you're into Horizon lately, but I've been on an Inatut kick lately so I read through everything on my blog about him, which led me to reading everything on your blog about him. 😆 I just want to take this moment to thank you for creating Inatut Vanguardsman. Not a day has gone by since I saw you first post that without me thinking about it. Whenever my horizon fic reaches the end of zero dawn/ the beginning of forbidden west I will 100% be using that. And of course I will be including Ikrie two days late with starbucksTM in your honor <3

Horizon lives rent-free in my head 24/7 and while I currently might not be yelling as loudly as usual about it on main, the Remaster definitely hasn't done anything about it except make it so, so much worse

I'm... fairly sure someone else brought up Inatut Vanguardsman first but let me tell you, the idea has burrowed itself deeply into my mind and personal headcanon and it has been an honour to share and infect you with that particular bug

You can bet I will be all over that fic 👀👀👀

also have a pic of the one and only

[moralanxietystudio]

Buried In Words - Roadwarden Devlog

(Roadwarden is an illustrated text-based RPG in which you explore and change a hostile, grim realm. It combines mechanics of RPGs, adventure games and Visual Novels, and you can now wishlist it on Steam!)

Since the middle of December, working on Roadwarden is mostly about writing new events, dialogues and quests. There were almost no updates on social media - I don’t have time to draw (aside of some inventory icons), and by popular demand, I try to avoid deeper spoilers. I’ve written quite a bunch of stuff, but the results won’t do for exciting screenshots.

I’m  currently focused on designing and filling up Howler’s Dell, the largest settlement in the game, so there’s a LOT of important character interactions to introduce, including quests, merchants, and lore. But in the meantime, some major changes have also been introduced:

 1. The game over screens

In the original Roadwarden’s Design Document, there were no game-overs. You could get significantly hurt during your journeys, but never to the point where you’d hit a brick wall that would make the further progress impossible. You’d need to rest and heal your wounds to participate in some events, but you could always move forward.

I’ve finally decided to change it. In most situations, reaching 0 HP won’t result in an instant death. But in some scripted encounters - usually when facing an overwhelming opponent while being completely unprepared - your character will be broken.

Still, I hope to make it as player-friendly as possible. Did you forget to save your game? Was autosave ran in an inconvenient spot? You can jump back in time a bit, no strings attached.

In various European cultures, the winged hourglass is an image related to the ephemerality of life, and it has became an important part of the Viaticum fantasy setting over ten years ago. Since there’s no single “canonic” design, I’ve had an opportunity to experiment with various approaches.

 2. New “regular” font

The text has now more space to breathe, the letters have more personality, and thanks to the serifs, it’s going to be easier to keep track of the lines you read. Everybody wins:

While the majority of feedback that I’ve gathered shares my enthusiasm, I’ve also seen some words of criticism. It’s still possible that the font is going to be replaced with a different one, but I’m convinced it’s still a step in the right direction.

Even if the font is going to be replaced again, this little feature will be kept in the game. The good old “select a font” setting now showcases a small frame that explains the most significant traits of the regular font and the pixel one. Even though the pixel font looks cool on screenshots, it won’t be gentle on your eyes.

 3. Updated inventory menu

From now on, pointing at an icon in your inventory will showcase not just the item’s brief description, but also its name.

This update was essential due to the constantly growing number of items added to the game. Usually, the player will keep using or loosing some of them as they complete more quests or take a part in more unique interactions, but you may reach a point when you’ll see a couple of dozen of icons at once, and they may start to get a bit blurry. When there was maybe 20 items in the entire game, clicking an icon to see the broader description wasn’t a large problem, but it became clear that it was a short-sighted, flawed design.

 4. Redesigned armor system

I’m not gonna lie. The gambesons that were present in the demo? They were a placeholder, waiting for a better idea to show up. And here it is.

The original two “types” of armor were related to the character’s class selected at the beginning of the game - the Warrior gets the good stuff, while both the Scholar and the Mage have a piece of trash, since they couldn’t afford anything better.

I was expecting to introduce some encounters “better” armors later in the game, and also script interactions where the better armors help you survive major injuries or even death, but I felt it was not good enough. This approach doesn’t introduce much decision making, and it introduces sort of a boring stagnancy.

The new system offers three “levels” of armor. The level 1 - “A Worn Gambeson” - offers you little to no protection. If you want to be saved during some difficult encounters, or maybe get less hurt when you screw up, you want to get to at least the level 2 - “A Decent Gambeson” - which is given to the Warrior class at the beginning of the game.

Upgrading armor requires getting in touch with a tailor, and paying them to do some fixes for you. However, when the armor “saves” you, it often also gets damaged. Its level decreases.

The 3rd level of your armor - “A Fine Gambeson” - follows the same rules. Wearing it will save you from most wounds, but during this process, it may also get torn, downgraded to level 2. As the player, you have to decide how many dragon coins you are willing to invest to keep yourself in one piece.

So simple, yet so much better. And I can still decide to introduce levels 0, 4, 5... Depending on  what will turn out to fit the larger picture.

 5. Updated journal menu

The journal has received the very needed scrollbars, which appear only when there’s too much text to fit in a single window. From now on, I don’t expect that the player will just “figure out” that they can use a mouse wheel, or drag the text box. Nice and easy:

Also, when you select a chapter (like “Quests”) or a specific entry (like the “Necromancers?” quest), the button is now highlighted, what will help you keep track of what you’ve been clicking through:

Also, unlike in the game’s demo, the “People” chapter is now cohesive with the “Quests” formatting. Originally, these sections had different sizes, what didn’t look as good as I intended.

6. Dolmen updates

Just to make it clear - the game receives a whole bunch of updates and bug fixes every week, and I don’t plan to list dozens of small adjustments just because. But this one is pretty fun for me, since it shows the progressing level of attention to detail, and the evolution of the game’s design. : )

Since the day I’ve introduced this area to the game’s prototype, I was unhappy about the low amount of visual changes it had to offer. No matter what you’d type down to solve the puzzle, the only clues you’d receive were presented in text.

The updated dolmen required some rewrites and a fair bit of drawing, but from now on, once you find something that provides a significant clue, you’ll also see a visual feedback that’s going to reflect your discovery. It will help you backtrack the older information, and focus your attention on more successful guesses. Oh, something new has showed up? I guess it’s important!

7. The world map reworks

Some of those updates are difficult to spot without a looking glass. Some percentage of the “bushes” have different colors now and a couple of new shapes; the forests and trees now cast shadows; the lake nearby the Southern Crossroads has more details; the river in the east is broader; there are new hills nearby Tulia’s Camp...

But it’s the eastern part of the map that has seen some major updates. It’s filled with hills and mountains, and because of it, it provides more limited vision than lands in the west, covered with plains and swamps. Previously, this disproportion was quite a bit larger, and I’ve decided to town it down a bit. I hope that the effect I’ve had in mind is still clear to spot.

 8. More “stable” text boxes

When the player points at an icon, it usually creates a text box with a related description. From now on, more of these text boxes will be anchored to specific parts of the screen, instead of showing up in an area related to the player’s cursor. It should make the information less chaotic, and won’t cover other icons anymore. Also, there will be no more situations when the text box is partially outside of the game’s window.

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

Thank you for taking a look at this devlog, for your support and kindness. Remember, you can also find me on Twitter and Facebook, and the game has a Steam page on which you can add it to your wishlist. Have a great day!

[6qubed]

The Tale of Bluesummer; or That Time I Accidentally Turned My Morrowind Character Into A God

(yes I named my Breton in Morrowind after Legato Bluesummer from Trigun. it was 2004 and I was a teenager, get off me)

this whole post, which ended up running longer than I expected, is dedicated to @quinzelade, who is the one who asked about it.

I’m gonna warn you up front that attempting to replicate what I did will fundamentally alter the way you play the game, assuming they never released a patch or something after the fact. you’ve been warned

okay, so

somewhere in the game (I forget where, exactly. balmora? I dunno) is a place called Wolverine Hall. in there is a guy who sells alchemy ingredients.

what’s important about this guy is that 1.) he sells the two ingredients you need to make a “Fortify Intelligence” potion (henceforth “F.I. potion” for convenience), and 2.) those ingredients restock every time you initiate a transaction with him. not every day, every dialogue. talk to him, buy ingredients, stop talking, talk to him again, more ingredients to buy

side note: I almost said “ingredience”. fuck this website

now because this isn’t Skyrim, you can basically make potions wherever you’re currently standing as long as you at least have a mortar and pestle (there’s other alchemy gear you can use to make your potions stronger, but you don’t strictly speaking need them. maybe. I think. it’s been a while) so you can just stand right next to this guy brewing F.I. potions, buying ingredients from him when you run low, and selling him excess potions you just made from the ingredients to cover the costs

now here’s where things get... mechanical. Morrowind’s skills are each tied to an attribute like Strength, Intelligence, Endurance, and so on. Alchemy is tied to Intelligence. and because this isn’t Oblivion and they hadn’t thought to curtail this nonsense from the jump, if you make an F.I. potion, drink it, and then make another one, the next F.I. potion will have a greater affect, both in terms of numerical increase and duration. you will be smarter, and for longer, and most important of all, there is no upward limit to this

SO

after boosting my Intelligence to Somewhere Roughly Up in the Billions (henceforth “SRUB”), I tried making potions to boost my other stats. Strength was an obvious first choice, as it not only covers carry weight, but also attack damage and, for whatever reason, chance to hit. I also boosted my Agility, Charisma and Endurance, so now nothing could hit me, I could ace any persuasion attempt, and I had functionally unlimited stamina. thus augmented, my next course of action was to stride out into the wilderness and test my new capabilities.

and that’s exactly what the hell I did. looking for the first wild animal to fight, eventually I run across a guar, I take out my trust daedric katana with a custom Soul Trap enchantment (because this game had katanas for some reason so of course I had one; I named my Breton after an anime character what the fuck do you expect), and I attack the guar. it dies in one hit, it’s soul gets trapped... and now I’m looking at my empty hands instead of my sword. puzzled, I punch the air a few times thinking that will bring my katana back, then I actually go into my inventory and look for it. well sure enough there it is, but I can’t equip it because it’s broken. it’s a little weird that it would be broken, because as a daedric weapon it has like 5000 hp. well, I have a repair hammer on me and Armorer is governed by the Strength attribute, and I have SRUB Strength, so no worries. I repair my katana, find another monster, and attack it. I honestly don’t remember what it was, it could’ve been a skrib, it could’ve been a golden saint, it’s really not important. what is important, is that it died in one hit as well, and my daedric katana with 5000-ish hp broke again. in one hit.

here I will divert from the story to explain another mechanic from the Elder Scrolls that they did away with; breakable equipment. see, this was back when Bethesda still thought that having equipment that got shittier the more you used it was a good idea, a delusion they would carry into TES Oblivion and both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. the way this worked in the Elder Scrolls games specifically was that every time you took a hit your armor would get damaged, and every time you would land a hit on an opponent with a weapon, the game would inflict a fraction of that damage to your weapon as well. this was one of the appeals of stronger weapons; not only did they do more damage per hit, but they also were able to dish out more hits before needing repairs. steel was stronger than iron, elvish was stronger than steel, daedric was stronger than dwemer, you understand. I didn’t just have a daedric katana for Cool Points, I had it because not only was it a strong weapon, but it could also go a long time between repairs. and if you’ve been paying more attention than I was back then, you may have noticed The Problem.

see, weapon damage is governed by that weapon’s skill, in this case Long Blades. the Long Blades skill is in turn governed by the Strength attribute, and I had SRUB Strength, in a game that maxed out your base skill and attribute growth at 100 each. every time I landed a hit on something I was doing SRUB damage, and a fraction of SRUB damage was also being done to my weapon. since even a fraction of SRUB damage is still way more than anything the developers of the game ever designed the weapons to handle, even the weapons wrought from the very essence of Hell itself were buckling under the weight of the blows I was dealing. furthermore, since repair hammers have about ten uses before they broke (SERIOUSLY WHY DID BETHESDA THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA) it was taking at least one full hammer to repair my katana every time I broke it, which was quickly becoming A Hassle.

at this point I decided “okay, I’ve had my fun, time to bring this silliness to an end” and decided to reload from a save, but here is where I encountered A New Problem: see, Morrowind didn’t have autosaves, no game really did at this point in history, but what it did have was King Fool of Dummy Mountain playing it, for whom the concept of “multiple save files” was an alien and terrifying thing that one just didn’t bother with. there was no easy way to undo the potions’ effects. I couldn’t dispel them, because it was a potion effect and not magic, and the only other option was to wait them out.

so that is what I tried. I found an inn somewhere, possibly Vivec City or maybe some random rathole of a place out in the middle of nowhere, paid whatever the cost was, jumped into bed and tried to sleep the potions effects off, twenty-four hours at a time. one day, then two. then a week, a month, two months. a year. a year and a half spent in a random bed in a random inn, and still the effects persisted. here was Another Problem; the F.I. potions’ duration was also affected by Intelligence, and I had made and consumed several potions with at least a few million seconds duration on them, and at least one that would last SRUB seconds. I could stay in this bed, doing nothing but sleeping one day at a time, for over a week in real-world time, before this potion even reached half of its maximum duration. I was, for all intents and purposes, Stuck Like This.

so now began the search for workarounds. my first thought was the Unarmed skill; if I just didn’t use a weapon, it wouldn’t break, right? the problem here was that Unarmed was governed by your Speed skill. yes, you had both a Speed and an Agility attribute, and they did different things. but Speed also affected how fast your character could move around in the game world, and giving my character SRUB Speed proved disastrous; the game, you see, was only designed to handle a maximum Speed of 100, maybe more if you boosted it with temporary effects. at least once in a dungeon I ran so fast that I clipped through the walls and ended up floating in an infinite plane of water that apparently served as the water at the lower points of the level. I was not, mercifully, Stuck Like This, because while I was still King Fool of Dummy Mountain I was at least smart enough not to repeat all of my past mistakes, and had thought to save my game before trying this nonsense.

so Unarmed was out. that meant if I couldn’t count on one unbreakable weapon, I’d have to make so with numerous single-use ones. Archery was no good, because the bows were breakable, and thrown weapons were finicky at best, and more importantly I couldn’t get them back if I used them up. I then hit upon the idea of daggers, and set about traveling over Morrowind, finding every merchant I could that sold weapons and buying up every silver dagger or enchanted dagger of cheap material I could find. this was important, because I wanted a way to fight ghosts and other immaterial enemies, who could only be hit by silver or enchanted weapons. or daedric, but for reasons I covered previously those were no use to me. I then developed a fighting style wherein I became adept at fast-equipping weapons mid-combat, allowing me to stab one enemy, then quickly pull out another dagger and use that to kill the next. this also led to one particularly memorable encounter where in my explorations I stumbled across a shrine adorned with six skulls, each with an enchanted dagger stuck in them, and without hesitation I grabbed all six, only to turn around and see a group of six very pissed off ancestor ghosts, whom were no doubt bound to those skulls by the daggers I had just removed. as luck would have it, however, I had just the right amount of daggers to handle this fight. convenient, that

well that covered melee combat, but still left the issue of Magic. being a magic user was less of a tricky issue, since with SRUB Intelligence and SRUB Wisdom came functionally unlimited Mana, so I could cast any spell I wanted without fear of miscasting, because giving spells a chance to fail a casting depending on your skill with that spell’s magical school was another one of those brilliant ideas Bethesda had on the same day they came up with breakable equipment.

since money was no longer an issue, I visited a Mages Guild and crafted a few custom spells for myself. nothing complicated, just a ranged damage spell of some kind with maximum damage over maximum duration with maximum area of effect (and Paralyze and Soul Trap, because why not) and one or two spells that boosted my Speed and Athletics sklll so that even though I couldn’t boost it via Alchemy without disaster, I could still run around fairly quickly, which was handy because fast-travel hadn’t been invented yet, and I was now using my Mark and Recall spells solely to visit the secret scamp merchant that had 5000 gold for buying things, as it was now the only merchant in the game that could handle the monetary value of the goods I had to sell, and even that required a fair bit of back-and-forth juggling with the items that I had sold it previously, especially excess potions

it was here that I finally found A Weakness in my character; my health points. I had up until now coasted by on my ability to dodge any attack and one-shot any opponent; at this point I wasn’t even bothering with wearing a full set of armor or even (being a puerile thing at heart) most clothes. I had some greaves, a mismatched arrangement of gauntlets and pauldrons, and that was it.

but that changed the first time I encountered an enemy capable of Reflecting my own magic back at me. see, I thought that giving myself SRUB Endurance would confer SRUB HP when I first took that potion, but it never happened. and since maximum HP gained through leveling up is calculated from base Endurance, SRUB HP simply wasn’t in the cards. well that was easy enough to rectify, first by going back to the Mages Guild and crafting a spell that both boosted maximum HP and healed the maximum amount, both for maximum duration, as well as crafting a magic ring that could send out some (comparatively) weak bolts of damage, and recharge itself over time

at the end of it, even with all the searching for workarounds to my... condition, the actual game became fairly easy. the “final bosses” of the DLCs, daedric princes and even deity figures proved almost comically nonthreatening, because at the end of it they were all still playing by rules to which I was no longer bound. really the only thing keeping me from beating the game was the fact that my XBox and all my games for it got stolen.

so I guess the moral of this story, if there is one to be had, is when you’re planning to do something stupid, save first or prepare for it being irreversible

that, and don’t bring anything to Job Corps that you wouldn’t mind getting stolen

[moistwithgender]

Monthly Media Roundup (May 2019)

The march of time inexorably proceeds beyond my grasp and so I must write another post. I’ve been a bit burned out, just focusing on one diversion (it was Zelda, you know it was Zelda), but after finishing it I recovered enough energy to get a few more things done in the last half of the month. I didn’t watch any anime or read any manga in May, though I did read some 70s Marvel, which I liveblog in my “curry reads comics” tag. Last time I did an actual capital-P Post about my Marvel reading was a year ago after marathoning a full(ish) decade. If people are interested in more of that I could work at making posts for each year of issues I read, recapping the developments and my thoughts on them (which will become more relevant as Events become more common, I imagine). I’ve just got a few games to talk about this month, but I imagine I have a lot to say about at least one of them.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch): 2 years ago I did something I extremely rarely do: stood in line at a Best Buy at midnight for the release of the Switch so that I could buy it with BotW. BotW was also out on Wii U, which I had, but the promotional material for BotW had struck such a chord in me that it justified making the jump for the new console (this would eventually become troublesome when the first model of joycons failed, but, well). I got home, put some ten odd hours into it, and then put it down for two years. I’ve always had a problem where, struck with the intuition that I will end up forming a deep relationship with a work, I will put it off for years. I put off Persona 3 for five years after buying it at launch, and it eventually became the most personal game experience I would have, even seven years onward. I think the two factors that pushed me to finally play through BotW was wanting to watch a friend stream it (but also not wanting it spoiled for me), and needing a distraction for when I was taking care of my cat.

It’s been about two months now since he passed away, and I finally finished the game at 215+ hours about half a month ago. So, I was playing this game as a coping method while preparing for loss, and in dealing with loss. It’s appropriate that the game is effectively both a fantasy about reclaiming at least part of what you have lost, and a colossal exercise in coping. The game is as much about getting distracted from your responsibilities and fucking off to snowboard in the mountains as it is about being aware of the world around you. The Zelda games have frequently used themes of Shintoism to portray harmony in nature and in civilization. I’m currently replaying Ocarina of Time and the cosmogony myth (is it a myth if a talking tree explains it to you?) specifically words the goddesses as “[giving] the spirit of law to the world” and “[producing] all life forms who would uphold the law.” When I was younger (see: early 20s) I didn’t scrutinize the text much but now I figure it’s reasonable to read “law” as “natural order”. It should be noted that for an N64 game, OoT has remarkably good prose. BotW, in transitioning the series in what may be its third main genre (as opposed to the genres of Zelda 1 and OoT), has taken that Shintoist aesthetic and incorporated it into the entire philosophy of the game’s design. More than just being a game whose narrative concerns an imbalanced world, BotW embraces the trends of open worlds and immersive sims to create an immense, varied space where the coded laws of physics are always impacting the experience. Thunderstorms make metal equipment a liability, while rain covers the sounds of footsteps. Wind can sweep away items, fire and high temperatures affect flammable objects (including yourself), and aforementioned metallic items can conduct electricity, which can be used to solve puzzles in unintended ways. Weather changes regularly based on the region and changes the world in tandem. Rain doesn’t just fall, it actively collects, and ponds become bigger, and surfaces become slicker. Each systemic element (pun not intended) that was incorporated affected everything else in the world, and in interviews there were mentions that changing the volume of wind in one area had a butterfly effect on another, causing pots to fly off of patios in a village. It’s no wonder the game took five years to make, considering how rarely glitches occur in the game (and most that I know of have to be deliberately recreated for exploitation). You’re engaging with enemies as much as you are with the environment, and at times even with your own body, creating and consuming food and drink for the purpose of staving off sunstroke or frostbite. As a result, BotW’s Hyrule is immensely palpable, and easy to lose oneself in from how livable it feels.

When I first started playing at release, I was a bit disappointed to discover that villages existed in-game, as early promotional material and the state of the Great Plateau you start on painted a picture of a lonely world. In the end, the soundtrack and vast amount of uncolonized land does give an understated sense of melancholy that defines the game, though the fact that every five steps you’ll find a Korok micropuzzle waiting to YA HA HA and fanfare at you betrays that a bit (I still love those Koroks and their puzzles, don’t @ me). The NPCs in this are numerous, though, from the occupants of the villages to wandering traders, and their personalities are all distinct and charming, and probably the best I’ve ever seen in a game, or at least in a long time. If this game wasn’t railroading the Link/Zelda relationship so hard, I would have liked a Dragon’s Dogma-style “date any NPC (within reason)” mechanic. I’m just going to have to start a “NPCs you should marry” side-tumblr.

Another defining aspect of the gameplay, and easily what makes the game surpass arguably every other Zelda, is how Nintendo heard the decade or so of complaints about the linear Zelda lock-and-key formula being reiterated to the point of stagnation, and, after great success with A Link Between Worlds’ item rental subversion, just decided to make everything optional. You do the tutorial on the Great Plateau, and, if you feel especially gutsy, you can beeline it straight to Ganon. He’s in horse-riding distance, or running distance, if you’re tenacious. Will you make it to him, survive the hordes of enemies, and take him down? If it’s your first time playing the game and you haven’t learned the systems, probably not. Is it possible? Absolutely. Much like how the monthly cycle of a Persona game is a proverbial Rocky training montage of preparing for The Big Fight, everything you do in BotW is in preparation. A lot of open world games can feel dissonant in that you’re incentivized to be distracted as a player and make your own fun, meanwhile the protagonist keeps saying “I’m gonna get bloody revenge on the mafia boss!” during bowling matches. There is still, unavoidably, a sense of urgency played up for narrative sake in BotW, since Impa insists Zelda is waiting and can’t hold Ganon back forever, but it’s all much more narratively justifiable, if you want that. You know, because Zelda is for hardcore roleplaying.

I couldn’t resist a second playthrough, even after logging 215+ hours, so I went ahead and started a separate file on Master Mode, Nintendo’s weird in-house, in-franchise rebranding of, uh, a hard mode. Previously it was called Hero Mode. Why do you--well, okay, I know why they do it. They’re likely trying to distinguish it from a “we just tweaked the numbers” hard mode, and also want to make it feel less threatening than something labeled hard mode. If they’re going to go to the trouble to make it a distinct form of play, they want to try and appeal to everyone. And it is fairly distinct. All enemies are bumped up one rank, so a red bokoblin is blue, and a blue bokoblin is black, and so on. There is a new strongest rank of enemy, though in my run I did not seek them out. There are enemies (and treasure chests!) perched on flying rafts, which can be one-shot with proper bow aiming, but also carry dangerous elemental arrows, and can alert all other enemies in the area. Stealth is much more difficult, and pointless early in. All enemies regenerate up to a third of their health, including bosses! Though, that can be temporarily interrupted by inflicting any amount of damage on them, so it behooves you to be on the offense. Less autosave slots! This wasn’t a problem for me. Guardians randomly delay the firing of their beams! This was absolutely a problem for me and I avoided them entirely in my run. In the beginning when tools and resources are scare, particularly on the Great Plateau, Master Mode is at its hardest, and its most thrilling. Rather than aimlessly exploring, I was pressured to decide where I knew things were, and beeline it to them. Sometime in-between two of the four main optional dungeons, I had amassed enough valuable resources that the game had settled back into the same kind of difficulty as normal mode. Bosses were a little harder due to regen and my resources being somewhat scarcer, but they were manageable. Competently performing flurry attacks (upon successfully dodging attacks at the last second) was extremely valuable to me, but I imagine with enough food in my inventory, I could have brute forced my way through a lot of the fights (though, uh, obviously thou wouldst like to live deliciously (please hate me for this phrasing)). I chose to forego the Master Sword for the sake of challenge, and beat Master Mode with only seven hearts, in around 25 hours. You should play Master Mode, it’s fun.

Here’s a little gameplay SPOILER:

Something I haven’t done, but would like to eventually do, is avoid the main dungeons and just head straight to Ganon. When I played Master Mode, I wasn’t totally confident, and did the dungeons for the resources. After watching some speedruns I learned that if you skip the dungeons, and therefore the main bosses, you have to fight them all at once immediately before the fight with Ganon, without breaks.

That. Sounds. Great.

Wandersong (PC/Steam): Have you heard about Homestuck?

Okay, wait. Wait. Come back, wait. Stop leaving. PLEASE.

Okay, I got the most inflammatory sentence out of the way. Now that we’re eased into that: Wandersong is unignorably influenced by Homestuck. Homestuck conjured a lot of baggage, from having a really difficult, pretentious, arrogant author (I should know, I gave him the benefit of the doubt for way too long), to having some unfortunate narrative turns, to being a billion words long. Wandersong invokes the vaster-than-God scope, the minute and personal perspective of the heroes, and its inclinations toward emotional intelligence (it still surprises me Homestuck had these moments given the author’s deeply unsympathetic sense of humor), and… condenses it! It also makes it a light puzzle-platformer and is about performing music (note: not rhythm, you don’t have to have ANY rhythm), and looks like a Paper Mario game. It is very charming, very funny, very optimistic, and most surprisingly, uncompromising at times. Wandersong says that you, despite your role, are capable of great things, especially self growth and change, as long as you commit to it. If, faced with the consequences of your bad decisions, you choose to double down and keep at it, you will reap what you sow. This is distinctly different from Undertale’s brand of pacifism route optimism, where “no one has to die!” This brand of optimism is a measured but enthusiastic “you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved, but you can save the rest” and I think that’s a uniquely valuable message.

I was a little confused about the resolution of the communist uprising chapter, but I recall the game bringing my cynicism into question, and the most important thing a work can do is make you question yourself.

(Also, if any of my mutuals are low on funds but interested, I do have a drm-free version I can share.)

Minit (PC/Steam): I don’t think I actually have a lot to say about Minit! It’s very fun and curious and short. You play a little… duck… thing, and you pick up a cursed sword which kills you in one minute. Then you wake up the next day, and die in a minute. Then you wake up the next day. Having only sixty seconds of vitality, you have to optimize your exploration. There’s a slow-speaking old man who you will die listening to, but the hint he gives at the end of his sentence will lead you to something valuable. There’s a guy in a bar angry about the lack of music. If you change the music, he will probably dislike it. If you keep changing the music, you might live to see him like it. There’s a boat ride to a tropical island you have to grit your teeth and wait through. Not all of the events are slow, some are quick bouts of hurried exploration. Most of it is, given the time limit. I’d say more, but given the overall length (it took me about an hour to finish), I’d risk spoiling a sizable fraction of the experience. It’s about $10, though I got mine in a Humble Bundle Monthly subscription. The spec requirements are very low, so your laptop can likely run it.

A Hat in Time (PC/Steam): Heads up, I’m gonna get into a lot of spoilers for this game, including endgame spoilers, but also heads up, the story isn’t really the point in this game. This is a game about tone and platforming. That said, I’m gonna be talking exclusively about the weird ideas in this game, and if you want those weird ideas to be a surprise, then just skip ahead until I put up big letters.

I’m somewhat hesitant to be critical of A Hat in Time because despite a number of weird Things about it, I recognize that it’s quite popular with a lot of people, and that always makes me pause and want to figure out what it is that makes it pass the bar for others. My guess at this point is that it invokes nostalgia through its unmitigated imitation of games that came before. The games it chooses to ape are all your childhood’s Greatest Hits, Wind Waker (which it most resembled in its earliest development), Super Mario Sunshine/Galaxy (which it most resembles now), Banjo-Kazooie, Psychonauts, etc. It never really surpasses those games, for me, and at times cribs from them to the degree that it obscures the game’s own identity. After all, what you enjoy may help define you, but you wouldn’t say it’s your personality. Well. Unless you kin the Gamecube. I guess. There are bonus levels to the game’s different “worlds” (I thought they were different planets, since your hub area is a spaceship, and you access them via different telescopes, but it turns out it’s just one planet?), and you can collect photographs, which sequentially tell a story about the residents of that “world”. Psychonauts did this because each level took place in the mind of a character, and the photos together told a story about the character that fundamentally changed the way you thought about them, and made the whole game feel richer as a result. I collected the photos for all but the DLC levels in AHiT (those are Really Hard), and of those five or so worlds, none of those bonus photos told me anything that changed how I thought about the characters. There’s a dock town run by a mafia (s-sorta) led by a chef, but did you know they all used to work at a processing factory before going there? There are two manipulative bird directors who are fighting over the same studio to produce their own film and win an award, but did you know they… wanted to be directors since they were kids? There’s a devil analogue who steals people’s souls if they wander into his forest, but did you know he was a prince, and the princess was mad he talked to another girl (it was a flower girl, he was getting flowers for the princess), and imprisoned him until they both the prince and princess turned into evil ghosts? That’s the only one that comes close to being an “oh” moment, but I don’t think it does for the reasons the writer was hoping for. In general, these are prologues without substance.

Speaking of substance, the game has a bit of an issue with theming. At least, it does at first. The first town is the previously mentioned dock town, run by a mafia. By “mafia”, I mean a bunch of meatheads who talk about how they like punching people, and refer to themselves individually, in the third person, as Mafia. Mafia loves to punch the poor and the birds. Mafia is a one-dimensional character copy-pasted across 20% of the game. Mafia laughs. They’re run by a chef, but also they can’t cook, so there’s a cat chef in hiding who routinely swaps out their food with his so no one has to eat bad food. I don’t know why, when the town has maybe three non-Mafia character. He does eventually leave and board your ship, so maybe he’s just looking for something to do. The leader of the mafia also boards your ship, for a joke and to sell you an upgrade. The mafia are also afraid of mud monsters, or aliens, or something. There’s a girl with a moustache named Moustache Girl who wants to use your Time Macguffins to overthrow organized crime, and Hat Girl decides that’s a no-go. There are giant faucets around the town that replace all the water with lava. You might be noticing these things have little to no connection. You might be suspecting this level was made first when the dev was inexperienced. I might be suspecting this. It’s fine.

Later worlds do a much better job of theming. There’s the movie studio split between two birds. One of them a penguin, who prefers science fiction, the other a…

...hmmm. I suspect this guy, The Conductor, is an OC the director has had for a while, maybe since childhood, that they just decided Is A Bird, and carried it into the game, since the game occasionally is like... bird?? Alternatively, it’s some sort of corruption of Woodstock from Peanuts. Possibly both. Anyway, this guy just wants to make movies that take place on wild western trains. He has a strong fake Scottish accent, and the penguin, named DJ Grooves, is some sort of disco Elvis. They’ve both hired owls as actors, and some crows have snuck onto the train set (the crows are so obviously the G-Men from Psychonauts’ Milkman level it bothers me a bit). This is already a little busy, but it’s okay! Birds, movies, two distinct genres, and you trapped in-between them, just trying to collect your macguffins. It works. You take part in both of their movies, and your performance in both determines the winner, when suddenly… CORRUPTION WAS AFOOT, and you have to explore the depths of the studio and engage in a showdown.

Another world is a spooky forest where your access is restricted by completing certain contracts for the devilish character. Sometimes it’s murder (reasonable), exploring a haunted mansion in survival horror format (ooh!), fixing the plumbing in a well (wait, what), and doing mail delivery (back up back up). Half of that works. The finale of the forest makes up for it, though. This game insists on most of its bosses having like 4-5 phases and breaks for dialogue and the gall required to get away with that honestly earned my respect. They’re pretty fun times.

The best level to play is, unsurprisingly, the first DLC. I say unsurprising because it’s clear the dev is learning as they go, and the level design improves as they go along. Aside from bonus levels, the first DLC takes place on a massive cruise liner titled the SS Literally Can’t Sink. Ha ha. It’s split into three parts. The first part has you exploring the many interconnected rooms of the ship to find broken shards of a macguffin, the second part has you taking that mental map and using it to frantically complete multiple timed fetch quests at once, and the third part, now that you understand the ship pretty intimately, capsizes the ship, requiring you to traverse frigid waters and overturned scenery to retrieve babies and the ship’s incompetent but adorable baby seal crew (the seals speak in hewwo talk, the game is unforgivably loaded with memes but let me have this). This progression is my favorite in the game, and while I haven’t bought the Nyakuza Metro DLC, I’m looking forward to it.

The ending level had me a bit bewildered at first because in the beginning when Hat Kid refuses to use time powers to stop organized crime, I saw it as a hamfisted way to create tension between Hat Kid and Moustache Girl. Apparently it was working up towards the moral of the story. In the final level, Moustache Girl has stolen all the macguffins, and possessing ultimate power, becomes corrupted ultimately, and summons everyone in the world to her Bowser castle to be judged and die. On first glance, I thought “well, sure, that’s sensible,” but when Hat Kid finds the support of all the villains in the game, I was a little confused. The villains sacrifice themselves to give you infinite health, explicitly stating that they’ll just come back through time magic if you win so who cares (cool stakes), and you overcome authoritarianism with the support of corrupt hollywood, organized crime, and the literal devil. This would be fine if at some point Hat Kid, you know, took them on a Zuko Quest to face turn all of them, but that doesn’t happen. They just all decide “hey yeah, fuck this girl! Also we don’t have time for the nuance this might require!” After all is said and done and you collect all your macguffins, you’re given the choice of leaving the defeated Moustache Girl a single macguffin so she can defeat the mafia (whose side are we on) or just saying nahhh. Neither appears to make a difference, but maybe in a year or two we’ll get a DLC that makes you regret your words and deeds. You try to fly your ship to your home planet, and the villains all grab on to your ship, which is in space, begging you not to leave. I seriously suspect they intended to incorporate face-turn scenes and just couldn’t find the time, because nothing but physical proximity implies these guys would have any emotional attachment to Hat Kid, and that’s a bit of a stretch. Anyway, Hat Kid brooms them off the ship to plummet down to earth and flies away. Sheds a tear about the whole thing. In the end, the moral was that Order good, but too much Order bad, except if you are Hat Kid, in which case Chaos good. Or maybe…

After finishing the game I decided to look into any left over secrets, since my completion score was in the 80s of percents. Turns out that if you use the camera badge to finagle the free look feature into a marginally open armoire somewhere on your spaceship, you can find a shrine to Hat Kid with a couple skulls, a bunch of blurry photos, and some strange symbols. If you doing this while wearing the mask that lets you see the secrets of the dead (for platforming and puzzle purposes, of course), there’s a bunch of alien text you can decode. And then there’s some youtube channels. And a twitter account. All sharing more of those decodable ciphers, all talking about vague dreamy apocalyptic histories and dark betrayals. Or something. That’s right, this game’s got a fucking ARG. I cut things off there. If the developer Gears for Breakfast is gonna make an occultist grimdark sequel to A Hat in Time, they can put up a trailer for it.

OKAY I’M DONE TALKING ABOUT A HAT IN TIME, the short of it is that I had a lot of mixed feelings but had fun.

How did I end up talking more about A Hat in Time than Breath of the Wild? What are my priorities?

Well, that’s everything I finished in May! Will I get back to anime and manga in June? Guess we’ll see! Again, let me know if you want me to do year-recap Marvel posts, since my liveblogging is mostly just shitposts, and the occasional attempt at thoughtfulness among those posts feels kind of out of place. Honestly, I’m probably gonna do that anyway, but it’s nice to see interest. If you read all this, thanks a lot! Go play Breath of the Wild and Wandersong.

[alexithymiawrites]

Walking the Wire

Pairing: Seth Rollins x Reader

Summary: What happens when two close friends realise there might be something more to their platonic relationship?

Warnings: Fluff, Implied Smut

Word Count: 1695 (whoops)

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“Rollins, you’d better not have a girl here, I’ve had a shitty day and need to yell at you!” I called as I came through the front door, dumping my purse on the floor and dropping my keys on the closest table. “Just sent the last three home, Mom.” I heard him reply sarcastically from the other side of the couch. I looked over and saw the top of his head, his dark hair damp from a shower and up in a bun. The TV was on, and he was playing a game I hadn’t seen before; a refreshing change from Madden or any of the WWE 2K games. 

Sighing, I stripped my cardigan off and tossed it at him, the fabric enveloping his head and causing him to flail like he’d been set on fire. “Do you mind?!” He blurted out as I wandered around to where he was sitting, plopping myself down next to him as he managed to free himself from my clothes and focus on the screen again, which had just gone dark.

“Great. I died. Thanks for that, worst roomie ever...” he said coldly, tossing the controller onto the floor and leaning back onto the couch next to me. I just pouted and gave him my best ‘I’m sorry’ face, hoping that he’d take pity on me once I told him about my day.

“You’re lucky that this game autosaves. What’s up?” He asked, wrigging a little closer to me and sitting a hand on my knee, a gesture I was well and truly used to at this point, and always missed when he had to leave for days and weeks at a time for work.  “Would you believe me if I said I got passed over for a promotion, and that guy I was seeing deciding that we’re ‘better off as friends’ in the same day?” I asked, letting my upper half go limp and leaning on my best friend. He pulled his hand from my knee and draped it over my shoulders, pressing a prickly kiss to my temple and sighing.  “I told you from the beginning that dude was trash. If I see him again I’ll superkick his teeth from his jaw for you,” He said, almost happily. “I know, I know. The protective friend and all that,” I conceded.  “It’s more than that, and you know it.”  I looked up at him, confused. “I do?” “Yeah. You deserve so much more than Tinder nightmares,” he said, smiling at me.  “Speak for yourself, you practically own stock in the company, you’re on it so much,” I teased. Neither of us had been in a serious relationship for months; me because I couldn’t find anyone who didn’t ghost me or give me the ‘let’s just be friends’ speech, and Seth obviously was barely in one town for a few days at a time, which made it very difficult to lock down any sort of commitment.  “Choosing to ignore you and your slut-shaming...” Seth said, grinning, “Y’know what else you deserve?” He added.  “Alcohol?” I asked enthusiastically. “Alcohol and pizza. I’ll go order it, you go get comfy and we’ll do horror night,” he propositioned, unraveling himself from me and getting up off the couch.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few hours later, we were huddled on the couch, me in my underwear and one of Seth’s old merch shirts, him in his gym shorts. We were about four beers deep each and had finished watching The Exorcist. I’d kicked his ass at Rock Paper Scissors to determine the next movie, picking American Psycho; something I know would cause us both to want to sleep in the same bed with the lights on. That also had happened before, much to the chagrin of a girl Seth was seeing, who’d decided to FaceTime him first thing in the morning, only to be met with the image of him in bed with another woman. Me.  Oops.  Despite how tipsy and full I was from the Beer and Pizza, I started feeling a little weird once the sex scenes began. If alcohol already made my cheeks feel a little flushed, the sight of Patrick Bateman and his friends made my face turn beet red.  “I’m gonna go get a blanket, you need anything?” I asked, slurring ever-so-slightly. “I knew you’d bail during the sexy bit,” Seth replied, chuckling to himself an crossing his arms across his chest.  “Oh, grow up.” I snapped, gracefully getting up off the couch and disappearing upstairs and away from Seth’s comments. I went into my room and flopped onto my bed, deciding to take a little break from being in such close quarters to my half-naked friend and try to sober up a little. 

Before long, I’d fallen asleep. I had weird dreams, as usual, but when I woke up, I wasn’t alone.  Seth was sound asleep next to me, still shirtless and on top of the covers as I was. He was lying on his side, facing me, with an arm draped on my waist. Usually, when we’d share a bed we’d either be as far away from each other as possible without falling off the edges or draped uncomfortably over each other and one of us would push the other out of the way. We’d never woken up like this, though. Close, but not uncomfortably intruding on each others’ personal space. I closed my eyes again and wriggled a little closer to him, unsure what prompted my brain to do that. Sure, Seth was gorgeous, in very good shape, and was the kindest, most selfless person I think I’d ever met, but he just...he would never go for someone like me. I definitely wasn’t the one for him.  Seth needed a wrestler. Someone who could travel with him and share the same experiences, not the hopeless creature that was half-asleep next to him. 

“You can come a little closer if you want...”  Seth’s voice broke the silence, making my eyes open wide and stare holes into him. He was looking at me with one eye open, his voice tired and croaky. He started moving his hand around on my waist a little, tangling his fingertips in the folds of the oversized t-shirt of his I was wearing.  I felt an unexpected chill go through me with the subtle movements, and I could’ve sworn my heart started to race a little faster than normal.  I didn’t say anything, but I did as he suggested; moving a little closer to him until our faces were nothing more than a few inches apart.  “Did you finish the movie?” I asked, unsure of what else to say in this situation. “Came up here about ten minutes after you. You were dead to the world.”  I nodded, letting a deep breath out of my nose so I wouldn’t expose him to my morning breath.  “Are you alright? This isn’t what usually happens after our sleepovers,” I asked quietly, addressing the elephant in the room as awkwardly as possible.  “Just felt like being close to you, that’s all,” Seth replied just as quietly, shuffling forward until our foreheads were touching. “You’re still drunk, huh?” I asked, my heart racing and my thoughts darting around in my head just as fast.  “Shut up, Y/N,” he whispered, closing the gap between our faces and pressing a kiss to my lips. My eyes fluttered shut, and an unknown force compelled me to reach a hand out and rest it on his cheek.  Seth responded by gently digging his fingertips into my side, deepening the kiss and pulling me flush with his body. I hooked my leg over his hip and his hand traveled from my waist and onto the small of my back, all the while keeping pace with my lips. I gently grazed my teeth against his bottom lip, causing a soft groan to come from his throat. He slid his hand up my side, stopping just short of the curve of my breast, his thumb barely grazing it.  To my horror, he pulled his lips from mine, and I opened my eyes to see something on his face that I’d never seen before when he was looking at me.  He looked like the only thing he wanted to do was tear my clothes off. “What was that for?” I asked, in the smallest voice I’ve ever spoken in.  “Been wanting to do that for years, that’s all,” he replied, moving his hand again and brushing some of my hair out of my face. I just grazed my thumb over the corner of his lips, unsure of what to do or what to say. “Tinder will be devastated if you quit,” I teased. Seth just laughed.  “I, uh...I haven’t been on a date in a long time. Kinda just talk myself up to see how you’d react,” he admitted.  I felt a cold pang in my stomach.  “You crushin’ on me or something, Rollins?” I pressed, not sure if I was about to wake up from a strange dream. “Something like that.” And with that, he leaned in and kissed me again, this time with a little more fire. He anchored his hand on my neck, keeping me close as possible as the already heated kiss deepened again, his tongue grazing the inside of my upper lip.  I moved my hand down to his hip, getting a good grip on it and pulling it closer to my own. I could immediately feel something dense and warm pressing up against me, and that sent a swarm of fireflies into the pit of my stomach, the warm puddle spreading through my body and settling between my legs. Seth pulled away from me again, this time a little more breathless than the last kiss.  “Bit obvious now, huh?” he asked, pushing his hips into mine and setting his hand on my waist again, tugging at the hem of my shirt until the bare skin on my own hip was exposed.  “Guess we’ll just have to lose a layer of clothes to find out for sure, huh?” I asked, more seductively than I’ve ever spoken in my life.  “Thought you’d never ask.”