#otherwise we'd break the formula

[maebird-melody]

Conan really is getting a little too bold-faced and reckless with his whole Sleeping Kogoro act.

Literally waxing poetic about the case using Kogoro's voice before he even puts the guy to sleep. Like, c'mon, I know it's old hat at this point, but do you really think no one is going to catch on if you keep pulling stunts like this?!

[prokopetz]

It might still be too early for this kind of question, but what have been your favorite video games you've played in 2022? :3c

Given what the release schedule over the next three months looks like, yeah, it's probably jumping the gun, but what the hell. I'm going to arbitrarily restrict my consideration to games actually published in 2022, or else we'd be here all week, though.

(I make no apologies for the high concentration of sequels on this list. I know what I like!)

Amber City is a spiritual sequel to 2017's Flood of Light, and its gameplay is in much the same vein, being an atmospheric walking sim with light point-and-click puzzle elements. If you enjoyed the idea of The Witness but wish the puzzles didn't hate you personally, this might not be a bad one to check out.

Blossom Tales II: The Minotaur Prince isn't going to break any new ground for those who’ve played its predecessor, though it's somewhat more adventurous in its dungeon design; if you enjoy casual 2D Zelda-likes, you'll probably enjoy this. Fans of 1980s fantasy media may also get a kick out of its pop culture pastiche elements – let’s just say the narrator is definitely taking advantage of the fact that his grandkids have never seen Labyrinth!

COGEN: Sword of Rewind is a Mega Man Zero style hack-and-slash platformer that does one of the first interesting things I've seen in years with the time manipulation formula, essentially merging your "mess with time" gauge with your health bar. The damage-boost routing in the speedrun is something you need to see to believe.

Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils is a retro platformer from the makers of 2020's Zelda-like dating sim Prodigal. Comparisons to Celeste are, perhaps, unwarranted, as the mechanics are very different, but I felt something familiar in the role of momentum in its flow of play. Visually, it's incredibly pink, which is something I always appreciate in a game.

Dungeons of Dreadrock is a short logic puzzler that one could be forgiven for mistaking for an old-school roguelike at first glance. Each level is a set-piece that borrows from the conventions of the grid-based roguelike genre to create situations where only one sequence of actions leads to survival, and challenges the player to find it..

FAR: Changing Tides swaps Lone Sails' landship for, well, an actual ship. The engineering sim gameplay remains largely unchanged in spite of that. Some of its elaborations on the previous game's formula don't work as well as they might have, being challenging more due to the limitations of the physics engine than anything else, but the frustration factor wasn't high enough to ruin my fun.

A Game with a Kitty 1 & Darkside Adventures is me flagrantly breaking my own rules, since everything in this anthology actually came out in 2005–2008 – it's just the anthology itself that's a 2022 release; I'm mostly throwing it in because this list was otherwise light on free-to-play titles. It all held up remarkably well on a replay earlier this year, though.

Gunborg: Dark Matters is a run-and-gun precision platformer that seems to have flown entirely under the radar, having just 11 reviews on Steam at the time of this posting. I'm not sure why – I mean, it's got a great soundtrack, and you play as a woman with a sword the size of a surfboard. What else do you want?

Jack Move is a JRPG-style title that blends self-consciously silly 1980s cyberpunk with contemporary anime aesthetics. I have to confess that I'm cheating a bit by including this one, as it's been out for all of three days at the time of this posting, and is the only game on this list I haven't played; I have, however, followed its development for some time, and I've had a lot of fun with the various demos the dev team has put out over the years, so I'm confident in plugging it here.

Recursive Ruin takes a page from 2019's Manifold Garden and basically asks "what if it was super fucked up?" The recursion here is fractal rather than directional, with progress "inward" eventually leading right back where you started. The story is naturally pretentious as hell; whether that's a criticism is a matter of taste.

RUN: The World In-Between wears it Celeste influence on its sleeve, but really takes more from classic endless runners like Canabalt. The "procedural generation" is just the same dozen or so puzzles for each zone being strung together in various orders, and the story is thinner than the trailer makes it look, but if you're a fan of the "running from left to right set to awesome music" genre, you could do a lot worse.

Submerged: Hidden Depths picks up where 2015's Submerged left off. The gameplay is substantially similar, though with a heavier focus on exploration puzzles and fewer linear set-pieces. Even so, it's not exactly what I'd call challenging – it's better approached as a pretty walking sim with light parkour-puzzler elements.

System Purge is about as basic as it gets for a precision platformer. No fancy moves here: you run; you jump; you get your face melted off by a laser. There's actually quite a bit of blood and gore, which is something I rarely have the stomach for, but the game is short enough that the lurid bits don't overstay their welcome. Fair warning!

Taiji is... well, remember when I said Amber City is a good one to check out if you like the idea of the Witness but wish the puzzles didn't hate you? This is one to check out if you do enjoy it when the puzzles hate you. There's a lot here that will be familiar to fans of the latter, though the puzzles are somewhat more varied owing to the fact that colouring grids is a more flexible game mechanic than drawing lines.

Vain Ascendance is a a roguelite precision platformer whose art style and mechanics put me strongly in mind of 2018's Overclocked, though the dev teams are unrelated. When I've plugged this game in the past I've been teased that my obsession with games about red haired women who can air dash is showing, but this I must protest: her hair is purple.

As for unreleased games available in demo or early access versions that I've tried out in 2022, I'll keep it brief, since these aren't proper recs, but you might have a look at any of Dormiveglia, Garbage Girl Louise, Gigasword, Keylocker, Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara, Little Witch in the Woods, Rebel Transmute, Rose & Locket, Ruin Valley, Shards of Gravity, Star Hearts: Launch Point, Undergrave, Venus Looks for Jupiter, Vermillion Descent or War Girl.

[volgdemagischewinx]

Not sure how I feel about the comics skipping S2... I mean, I think Darkar deserved a bit more spotlight. He's one of my favourite villains; his design is metal as fuck, and he was responsible for Dark Bloom, everybody's favourite source of angst headcanons. But then again, his backstory is somewhat confusing and I question why a Satan-equivalent was the villain of just S2. Wouldn't he have been a more logical final boss than Valtor or the Ancestrals? They were obeying him during the genocide!

That's what I mean when I say the comics are good, but can't stand their own without the show. Too much relevant stuff happens off-screen. They already skipped most of s1, but with that season they did it by occasionally referencing something as having happened already and otherwise leaving you to guess when an issue was supposed to take place. On the rare occasion that they did show their own version of it it was typically a downgrade

It is a bummer not to see more of Darkar, but just skipping to the end of s2 helps avoid a lot of confusion. And honestly s2 wasted a lot of time, while there's a lot I love about the story and its potential, it was in execution basic enough that you don't lose much by just doing a quick recap. Its strength was mostly in its filler episodes, and since the comics are basically all filler episodes they're better off sticking to their own than copying the ones from the show

Anyway, Darkar!

I totally see where you're coming from in thinking he made more sense as the final boss, and I agree that he should be (or have been but I'm always thinking of reboot potential) portrayed as the biggest threat of them all. The thing is that I don't necessarily think going with a more powerful villain every season is the best model for tv shows, and imo there's a lot of reasons Darkar and Valtor work best as the villains for their respective seasons both as the cartoon is now, and in how it could be in reboots

For one thing, I think most of the fandom agrees on Dark!Bloom trauma as something we'd like to see in a reboot. If Darkar was the last villain there would be no time to explore that trauma at all because the show would be over right after it happens. In theory s3 would be the best place to cover all of that as its own plot plays out. After all there's a lot of story beats that could easily be turned into introspective moments*

I also just consider Valtor himself to be the ideal final villain. He's nowhere near as intimidating as Darkar(who scared the SHIT out of me when I was little), but he feels very different from all the villains before him. In the past every villain has had this goal of obtaining the Dragon's Flame: The Ancestrals pre-canon, the Trix in s1, and Darkar in s2. With Valtor that goes out the window because he already has that power to begin with. It makes it so that his goal feels more original, even if it still comes down to world domination in the end. His interest in Bloom comes not from a desire to take her power, but from the connection they share. It's still classic Winx but a departure from what's become the formula at that point. It's a nice way to shake things up that only works if you already have that pattern there to break. Which means you need to put the villains going after the Flame first

Finally, even though Darkar was the guy commanding the Ancestrals during the genocide, Valtor had a much more personal hand in it. In the cartoon as it is he's Bloom's closest connection to her birht parents, and as a result a lot of the season is basically build-up to her reuniting with them(which is part of why, despite it feeling like final season in many ways, the finale itself feels very unrewarding). I tend to favor versions of the story where Bloom's birth parents don't get brought back at all, but in that situation his history with them could help set up a character arc where she finally makes peace with it. If you make it so that he actually is the one that killed them, then you can have the bonus element of her getting justice for them as well

Really, the main thing I would change about Darkar/s2(outside of exploring the lasting effects more) would just be making it so that they never truly defeat him? The final battle takes place in this pocket-dimension no? Just have Bloom land a crazy powerful surprise attack on him once she breaks free from his control, maybe have someone use that moment of confusion to toss one part of the codex into the abyss for him to chase after while they all rush out of the portal and seal him inside. The threat is still neutralized, but he's still framed as a powerful enough enemy that the Winx couldn't actually beat him in a straight up battle. That way Valtor feels like a bigger threat than he did originally because the Winx haven't already defeated someone that's a much bigger deal than him

*To name a few options: Bloom going back to Earth could be about her parents helping her start to work through what happened to her. Their journey to Lynphea always felt like the perfect callback to s1 Bloom's innocent love of the magical world, and could represent a point in the story where she starts to feel that joy again. Bloom's entire Enchantix arc already has a lot of her self-destructive behavior+her being alone with her thoughts that you could easily combine with her angsting over s2. And so much more! There's enough there for a separate post tbh

[petrichorvoices]

Hello! Thank you so much for your message about Cotard's! That was literally what I needed! /pos /gen

But I think i also need some stuff about OCD and PTSD as well, especially which stereotypes to avoid ^^;

please don't use tone tags for us!! not upset, just a boundary

uhhh hm well. there are lots of types of OCD, not just the cleanliness or order ones that everyone knows about. our OCD mostly manifests as a morality thing, by which i mean that most of our obsessions center around whether or not we're a good person. as a result, the compulsions we get relate to like, environmentalism, activism, and similar. like, we HAVE to make sure that the lights are turned off if we're not using them, because otherwise we're wasting power and that makes us a horrible and irredeemable person, or if we tap our left thigh we also have to tap our right thigh because if we don't then it "proves" that we're a disgusting person who can't be trusted to be fair and unbiased about things, and thus we're not a good person

we've heard that someone's obsessions often center around something that they find absolutely horrible or irredeemable, and that they thus get intrusive thoughts about. like, someone with POCD gets intrusive thoughts about that because it's one of the worst things they can think about and so on. we don't have a source for that atm due to low spoons so don't take it as gospel

it'd be nice to see a character with OCD that has a type that isn't "just right" OCD or cleanliness OCD. while they're very common, they're far from the only ones. we didn't realize we have OCD for years because we didn't realize moral scrupulosity OCD or whatnot is a thing. either way depending on what type of OCD your character has, i'd recommend asking someone with that type specifically about what it's like

and i think most of us with OCD know that our obsessions are unreasonable, but it doesn't stop them from being distressing

i think a common misconception to avoid..... there's this post about someone who had a compulsion where she'd constantly check if the toaster or whatever was turned off, and sometimes she'd leave work to check it. so someone suggested she bring the toaster with her so she could check it was turned off all day, and bam, cured! well, not exactly. the thing is if you manage to "solve" one compulsion, you're just going to get another compulsion. ultimately the compulsions aren't what need to be treated, the obsessions and intrusive thoughts are. so i guess my point here is to focus less on the compulsions and more on the obsessions, the root cause

uhhh PTSD. it's....... tbh we've worked through most of our PTSD. we don't talk about it in therapy anymore and we're rarely triggered by things we used to break down over. that's not to say that our PTSD is cured, but that is to say that our current experience with PTSD is that of someone who's sought and gone through treatment for it

that's a thing people don't seem to acknowledge much. PTSD can get better. it takes years, and what the trauma was, when it happened, who it happened to, etc can all affect that, but PTSD can in fact get better

what else..... someone doesn't react to the same trigger the exact same way every time. someone could have a trigger that they normally don't notice, but one day they come across it when they're in a bad mood and they have a panic attack. PTSD is rarely if ever formulaic. something we noticed when we were in the thick of it was that it tended to be unpredictable. hell, sometimes we'd have a bad day and a trigger wouldn't do much to us, but then on a good day the same trigger would ruin us. it's kinda super fucky that way

a thing you can do in therapy for PTSD is to recontextualize and reclaim triggers. one of our biggest triggers used to be music by Keaton Henson. through therapy and personal work, we've managed to turn it back into comfort music. and this doesn't happen by avoiding it. it's kind of a, like. the only way out of PTSD is through it. you don't desensitize yourself to triggers by ignoring them and pretending they don't exist

i guess for stereotypes like. try to make your character more than just their PTSD. even with PTSD it can sometimes be hard to remember that you're more than your trauma but it's really important that characters with PTSD aren't reduced to solely that

sorry this is rambly & incoherent, we've been having one of those days, plus we're slightly tipsy. feel free to ask for clarification at some other point when we'll hopefully cohere better