Summer of Horror

It wasn't scary. We just watched a lot of horror movies. 

A little over three weeks ago my boyfriend broke his ankle. At this point I still had 1½ weeks left of my summer break. Ironically it happened on the one day I wasn't home because I was out getting my first covid vaccination shot. As luck would have it.

Anyway, during that last week we watched seven horror movies pretty much back to back. It all started with Fear Street of Netflix. All of the movies were on Netflix.

1. Fear Street: Part 1 - 1994. We both really, really liked this movie. It was really neat as a horror movie in that it didn't feel like it fed into all the tropes and yet it had the slasher like in Scream, and the unkillable killer like in Halloween, and the witch/ghost paranormal experience. The fact that it takes place in the mid-90s somehow made it even better as we just sat there and commented on the fashion and the technology and had a great time. The setup of the rivalry between Shadyside and Sunnydale was great, the buildup of the legend around Sarah Fier was amazing, and the reveal that this happens with a set amount of years ebtween each time felt very IT. All the little pieces fit together beautifully. It wasn't too gory (except that one part in the end where one person gets their head chopped to pieces in a fish-chopper), and the suspense was great without actually getting boring. 

2. Fear Street: Part 2 - 1978. This one was very much like a homage to Halloween. It felt like a classic despite being brand-new. There was a nice twist at the end that neither of us expected. Apart from the bits and pieces that continued to build the legend around Sarah Fier, this was a pure slasher movie. But there were several hints in this movie that something else was behind what was going on, and it was an awesome use of foreshadowing for the third movie. Just perfect storytelling.

3. The Bye Bye Man. While waiting for the third part of Fear Street to come out we turned to other horror movies. We had had our eyes on this one for a while and so finally decided to watch it. Loved the buildup of suspense throughout, but boyfriend pointed out that he missed having a background story for the villain (spoiled from Fear Street?) and I very much agreed. There wasn't enough legend surrounding the evil, it was just there doing its thing and people got caught up in it. Still it was a solid horror movie with an ending completely open for more. The internet doesn't agree with us that it was solid, but we both enjoyed watching it. Our only gripe was the lack of detail. 

4. The Ritual. I mean, this takes place in the wilderness of northern Sweden so of course it was a given that we would watch it at some point. Robert James-Collier is in it and I just keep thinking of him as Thomas. He will forever be Thomas. So we have four ridiculously British guys attempting to hike through the Swedish wilderness in Sarek National Park (according to their map), but one of them hurts his knee and can't stop bitching about it so they decide to take a shortcut through the woods instead of continuing along the hiking trail. Bad idea. In the woods they come across runes and wooden idols and a deer strung up on the trees. They spend the night in an abandoned cabin and all wake up from really weird nightmares. After that they all become increasingly aware that something is very, very wrong in the woods and that something is hunting them. Like most horror movies the setup is great, the suspense is amazing, and then comes the reveal and the conclusion and it all falls flat on its face. I really, really enjoyed this movie up until the last twenty minutes or so. But kudos to the film makers for doing a good job with the rendition of the folklore/legend/mythology. 

5. Army of the Dead. This was (for the most part) a pretty standard zombie movie tbh. What makes it stand out is how the infection got loose (an escaped military experiment), the fact that the alpha zombies are sentient and intelligent and basically leaders of a new civilization/race/nation, and that the entire movie takes place after the zombie threat has been contained. The opening credits show the beginning of the zombie threat and how the people fought against them etc etc. But when the movie starts that part is over. The zombies are contained in a sealed off Las Vegas which is set to be nuked. But before that a rich guy tasks one of the fighters from the opening credits to assemble a team to break into a vault inside Vegas and steal a bunch of money. He does and off they go. Inside the cordon the mostly usual stuff in zombie flicks happen; people start dying, there's a traitor, someone has wandered off chasing their own goals, the traitor keeps screwing people over and they don't realise it, and then there's the leader trying to keep the operation smooth despite it all slipping through his fingers. It was fun, fast-paced, neither scary nor especially gory, and a completely standard zombie movie. 

6. Wounds. This whole movie felt like a prelude to something that didn't happen. There was barely any suspense just a slight tickling feeling that something was wrong, but it didn't get to suspense level. I spent the whole movie waiting for something to happen, but the entire thing felt like a buildup until the thing that makes everything happen and then nothing did and the movie ended. Super disappointing. This is like one of those artsy movies that's strange just for the sake of being strange that doesn't really do anything. There was a part in the middle that seemed like the strating point for things to happen, but it just died instead.

7. Fear Street: Part Three - 1666. The end of the story! I loved seeing the pieces come together. The legend of Sarah Fier explored and explained. Everything we learned in the first two movies came to use in this final movie as the ultimate showdown happened in the mall of Shadyside. It was a perfect ending to a great trilogy. Can't really say more than that or I'll spoil the whole thing. Action from start to finish and it was so good. 

Dealing with backlog: We Happy Few

I was interested in this game from the moment it was announced several years ago. It sounded like something out of Bioshock and I love that series. I stayed away from it while it was in Early Access, though, since I've been burned a bit by Early Access before and only bought it once it was properly released. 

I'm being purposefully cryptic and avoid names as I discuss the game below. No spoilers.

The game takes a little while to get into and there's a lot of inventory management. It's like in Fallout 4 where you pick up all the crap you come across because it can be used for crafting. The story and gameplay doesn't pick up properly until you get inside the village. There are side quests in the garden district where you first end up, but the best thing you can do is just focus on the main quest until you get inside the village. You can go back and forth between districts (there are seven) as much as you want later. 

The game is divided into three acts. The first act is the longest and tbh the most tedious, but it introduces the world, the overarching story and the other characters pretty well. For each act you play as a different person, and they all have different reasons for getting out of Wellington Wells. 

Gameplay wise my favourite act was Act 2 because it's more of a puzzle. In the other two acts, if you want, you can just charge straight ahead and fight everything and everyone. In the second act, because you're playing a pretty small person, you have to rely more on wit and cleverness and contraptions to make your way around and it's a lot more fun. 

Storywise I love the third and last act because everything that started in the first act comes to a point and I just love seeing the delicate balance of things come apart at the seams. 

That said, nothing in the second or third acts would've happened if it wasn't for what you do in the first act. The small, seemingly inconsequential thing that happens in the prologue sets everything into motion.

I can understand why people drop the game halfway through the first act because the first character is pretty boring, both as a character and as for gameplay. He can be anything you want basically. Do you want a bull just charging through everything? Fine, you can do that. Do you want to be clever and sneak around and use contraptions? You can do that too. And if you're like me you end up doing a bit of both, which makes a lot of the situations a tad easy. Did the NPC turn around just as you were about to take them down? Fine, just throw a non-lethal shock grenade in their face and then pummel them with your fists. 

That said, if there are a lot of NPCs around when you get discovered for looting a body or punching somebody in the face then a situation can easily get out of hand. The best thing you can do in this game is to always remember where your closest safehouse is so that if you get overwhelmed by hostile NPCs you can just run as fast as you can to the nearest safehouse and jump in. That immediately gets them off your case and eliminates agro.

In the beginning a lot of things are hard. Like if a NPC sees you run or climb they'll get mad at you for not conforming, immediately assume you're a dreaded Downer and starts attacking you. In the village there's also a curfew which makes every police attack you on sight if they catch you outside between 9pm and 7am. And if you want to break into a house it makes a lot of noise to lockpick or to pry open windows so make sure to do it when nobody is around to hear. All of these things can be eliminated with perks as you progress through the game. So towards the end I could run around like a madman and break in everywhere and nobody ever caught me. The first guy has all the perks to make the game as easy as possible and it kind of ruins it tbh. The characters in Act 2 and 3 don't have all the same perks and so it takes a little more to get through those acts. They're definitely more fun. 

After the credits there's a cutscene that makes some pretty obvious and daunting hints towards the role of Wellington Wells, and it's pretty damning. 

As for the DLCs, there are three. The first, called They Came From Below, gave me strong Portal vibes. You don't run around with a portal gun, but you get two separate contraptions that work as guns and they'r eboth used to manipulate the environment to get you past traps and barriers and enemies. It was a lot of fun. Didn't hurt that the protagonists of this DLC were my new favourite gay couple. 

The second DLC, called The Lightbearer, stars our favourite rock star and deals with the aftermath of ending up in the bathtub while drugged out of your mind. I promise that sentence makes sense after having played the first two acts and this DLC. This DLC was outrageous and a lot of fun to play. The end gave me a omg holy shit moment as a piece of the story from the base game fell into place. It was glorious. 

The third DLC, called We All Fall Down, stars the general's daughter and this whole DLC shows the aftermath of what happened in Act 3 of the base game. The end of this DLC coincides with the end of the base game as you can hear the same thing over the speakers at the end of this DLC as you can at the end of Act 3. It's a fitting end to the story of Wellington Wells. I also really enjoyed flying around the roof tops in this DLC.

Gameplay wise this game is sometimes a buggy mess. There was one part of the main quest in the base game that I got stuck at for ages. The Extractor just wouldn't do its thing. The only thing I could find online was to reload the game from that point until it worked. And after a while it did. Another thing was during a side quest that I could've left well-enough alone without impacting the game itself, but I hate having unfinished things in my quest log. Same solution. Just reload until it worked. The last thing I can find from the devs for this game was in 2019, so it appears they have dropped this game altogether. 

Something I enjoyed was that the world and the map are procedurally generated. I only discovered this while I was running around looking for side quests in one district and decided to look up a map to see if I had missed something. And found that there are no maps, because nobody plays on the same map. That's really cool. Even with that knowledge I still didn't expect the map/world to be procedurally generated between acts. None of the three characters have the same map or buildings in the same place. But, when you think about it, it makes sense. Because they're all more or less on some kind of drug and all of their pasts are just half-remembered glimpses. So the maps are basically just how the characters find their way around, who can tell who's got the right of it? Probably, the middle act protag.

The story of this whole game is very clever and there are lots of little things that fit together to create the whole, not just the big, overarching story and seeing the whole story unfurl itself before you is definitely an experience. 

These two songs show the whole mood of the game. Eerie, somehow wrong and yet strangely cheerful. The first is a piece of soundtrack. The second is a fanmade song.

Story Trailer. Launch Trailer. Announce Trailer. 

London bridge has fallen down, fallen down, fallen down
London bridge has fallen down, my fair lady.
Take the keys and lock them up, lock them up, lock them up
Take the keys and lock them up, my fair lady.
Everything is quite alright, sleepy tight, nighty-night
Everything's tucked out of sight, my fair lady.

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition

A couple of years ago I expressed interest in playing Gears 5 and that gave my boyfriend the idea that we should play Gears together on console so that we could be in the same room for once when playing something together. I was wary of the idea since I'm terrible with controllers. When I play on console I usually play QTEs, point-and-clicks and TBSs; things that don't move very quickly because I can't control the camera properly and I never remember where the buttons are and which button does what since the different brands put the buttons in different places and there seems to be no "standard" for button mapping on consoles. Not like on PC. For reference, the games I've played on console in recent years are Until Dawn on PS4, various Telltale games on Xbox 360 and PS4, and various Fire Emblem on DSi Lite, 3DS and Switch. And some of the QTEs in Telltale games and Until Dawn were too quick for me ^^;

But a few days ago we decided to try out the original Gears, but remastered. On Xbox. I've played the most on various Nintendo handheld consoles; DS, DSi Lite, 3DS and Switch, so if I can claim to be comfortable with any console it's Nintendo. Which had the unfortunate result that I pressed B when trying to press X a lot of the time when we played on Xbox :P

So we started the game in couch co-op and chose casual difficulty to make it easy on me. Except casual didn't seem casual at all. And we played through the tutorial hoping it would tell me things I needed to know to play. Except it didn't say shit. I learned what the different buttons do by clicking around on my own and boyfriend doing the same and telling me what he found. The tutorial in this game made me remember the very first time I tried to play Wolfenstein: The New Order back in 2016 or so and the game just kind of assumes you know what you're doing, even on the easiest difficulties, which just makes it a kind of uphill battle from the start for someone new. 

And then we got going. After 30-45 minutes my hands were aching. I have yet to find a controller that doesn't make my hands hurt after less than an hour of playing. The one controller that is the most comfortable for me is the original Switch controller. The one you can attach to the console to make it handheld. 

The first part of gameplay went pretty well. I didn't die as much as I thought I would (even on casual), but that could be because boyfriend usually shot all the enemies dead before I had even managed to aim properly at one. 

In any case I was kind of enjoying myself until we got to the first Berserker and things went downhill rapidly. I had trouble dodging her charges fast enough. It wouldn't have mattered if the game had had checkpoints after each door we got open, but no, if both of us died (or if one got knocked down and then got stomped on by the Berserker) we were forced to restart from the very start of the Berserker encounter. Which is just the kind of gameplay I dislike. I don't mind dying a lot if it feels like I make some progress throughout all the dying. But having to restart from the very beginning every single time just feels too much like banging my head against a brick wall. Not fun at all. Luckily, boyfriend was sympathetic towards my frustration. He had played the game before on 360 and remembered his own frustration at the Berserker encounter. 

We decided to stop there. The entire session lasted around 1½ hours. I still wouldn't mind to give Gears another go, but on PC. I'm a PC gamer and always have been. I didn't grow up with consoles, but I've played games on PC since they were still DOS-based and back before there was a camera involved so no mouse control and the game was usually played with the arrow keys :P The switch to WASD was so strange in the beginning... 

But yeah, Gears was promising story with ridiculously macho characters (like laughably so) and mostly fun gameplay and nice environments. I just suck with the controller x''D

Dealing with backlog: Two indie games

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine 
I watched Dodger play this several years ago and thought it looked like a really cool, cozy game. I'm not sure how to categorize it tbh, but it's definitely a walking sim. I saw someone call it a hobo simulator, and that's very true. Basically you get tricked into betting your life in a card game against a stranger, who then turns out to be a supernatural being who tasks you to travel across the country and find stories, tell them, and watch them grow in the retelling. Going in I wasn't sure if I'd like this game, but it didn't take long before I was way more into it that I ever thought I would be. So you walk/train-hop/hitchhike/take a train like a normal person across continental USA, during the depression. I'd say the setting is thereabouts anyway, some stories and characters are from a much later time and some from an earlier time, and the Stranger (when you meet him again) tells you something about time not really being the way you thought it was. But from the player character's interactions with the environment I'd say it's mainly based in depression-era US, and I've seen more reviews confirming this. 

So your task is to collect stories wherever you go and then share them around a campfire with someone you meet along the way. The people you meet will ask for specific kinds of stories (happy, sad, scary etc) and you have to figure out which story in your inventory fits which category and pair them up correctly. The more correct stories you tell a person the more they will tell you about their stories and their lives. The game ends once you've heard all of these people's stories to the end. My favourites were Quinn, Cassady, Franklin and Jimmy. I really liked the graphics style of the game. Towards the middle of the map there were some lagging issues no matter which direction you came from or in what way you arrived, and I wish there was a way to make the character run and not just "walk faster", but both of those things are negligible to my experience. Strong recommend if you like story heavy games and don't mind casual play. Launch Trailer. Story Trailer. Characters Trailer.

West of Loathing
I watched Markiplier play this a few years ago and it seemed funny so I wishlisted it to play later. Later turned out to be this week. I went in not knowing what to expect. I knew it was funny, but was it my kind of funny and would I like the gameplay? Turns out I absolutely did. To the point where I replayed the game four times to get (almost) all of the achievements. I even did the hard mode. Lucky it's as short as it is... I started one character but then messed up in the prologue so I wouldn't get the one prologue specific achievement. So started over and that became my main playthrough and also my longest playthrough. That one lasted 15 hours instead of 6-7 hours. The style and graphics are stick figure drawings. Literally. The gameplay is semi open world RPG with turn based combat (think JRPG style) and the humour is on point. The world is wild west inspired, but twisted. There are no cowboys since The Cows Came Home. Meaning the cows are demons bent on destroying mankind for eating them for so many thousands of years. The story is that you are leaving home to go west either to "seek your fortune", "help people" or "just to get off this boring farm". After you leave the prologue town there are lots of opportunities to both help people and make a fortune. (The currency is meat btw).

There are several smaller towns where you can help out with smaller things, but there are several over-arching questlines to solve. One is the advanced technology left behind by a previous civilization, another is to find and usurp the Necromancer, a third is a treasure hunt across the entire map, a fourth is to clear the railroad and make it functional again, a fifth is to prevent the cows from destroying the West, and a sixth that has something to do with clowns (cryptic on purpose). It's possible to do all of them in one playthrough. Just don't do things in the wrong order or you may hinder yourself. There's no quest log, but instead you have your helpful "pardner" to remind you of what you have to do. (The quest items tab in your inventory is also very helpful). The puzzles are sometimes annoying and sometimes they make no sense until you finish it and you just sit there like "oooooh, I get it!" This game was so much more than I thought and definitely worth the time! Launch Trailer. Preview Trailer.

"If you don't think about it too much, a pistol is just a more effective syringe."