General Updates

 I've now started a Masters degree, so games might be taking a backseat for a little while.  Since my last post, I've completed quite a few.  I might have mentioned some of these before.  

I finally finished Marie's Room and Gone Home.  The latter inspired the former and The Suicide of Rachel Foster.  They're all walking simulator style games, where you wander around an empty building and find various hints - often diary entries - about what happened there.  Like I said, I feel like The Suicide of Rachel Foster was weakened by not having us hear from Rachel herself in any way, so Marie's Room and Gone Home are better in those respects, as you do actually hear directly from the person the protagonist is interested in.  Those two also have more uplifting endings.  That said, I've been thinking about The Suicide of Rachel Foster recently and considering playing it again.  What I've been thinking about is...the creators explain, very clearly, that some of the plot is implied by the objects in the hotel but not actually stated.  So perhaps they intended to tell a story of madness and obsession and how a victim like Rachel is silenced, and so not hearing from her is a purposeful plot beat and not something that's missing.  It's another terrible thing that was done to her.  I like that interpretation better.

I played and enjoyed Plague Inc although I'm not very good at it despite having a degree in Genetics and literally working in a Covid lab while playing it.  I liked that it provided a lot of context for the current scenario, though that obviously wasn't intentional.  I did find that the best strategy was to get the infection spreading via coughs and sneezes and then suddenly make it deadly once it's spread everywhere.

I played through a lot of the Dark Parables series, specifically The Swan Princess and the Dire Tree, The Thief and the Tinderbox, Return of the Salt Princess, and The Match Girl's Lost Paradise.  This leaves me with only one left to finish, Portrait of the Stained Princess which is the 15th game so far (I think actually 16th, but one appears to have been wiped from the internet entirely?).  What's interesting is that Blue Tea Games, who made the first few games also made the last few, while those in the middle were made by, iirc, Eipix, and some are made by both companies.  This means the last few games get more of the creepy feeling and horror elements that the earlier games had, which I really liked, but they retained some of the things Eipix put in, like having achievements.  Unfortunately, they didn't put in the ability to just replay the main or bonus game after finishing them without having to set up an entirely new player profile, which means, if you missed a single changing object thing or parable piece in the bonus chapter then you'd need to set up a new player profile and replay the entire game from the start - making sure you didn't miss any of the things you got before - in order to find it.  That's annoying.  Return of the Salt Princess was one of the ones made by both, which seems to mean that it had the toughest achievements and so it's the only one for which I don't yet have all the in game achievements.  I'd have to replay it again - for the third time, since the second time I got one of the things I missed but missed one of the things I got - and I just don't have the heart right now.  I've really enjoyed the series, and I hope they realise another one soon.  At the moment, I've played the games for a combined total of 101 hours, which makes the cost about 91p per hour (since I bought them for £91.76 in the first place), but I expect this to drop further as I finish Portrait of the Stained Princess, finish off the achievements in Return of the Salt Princess, and maybe play the games over again someday.  Considering I'll spent £3-4 on a book that takes an hour or two to read, I'd say that's a bargain.  I'll probably try some of the spin-offs, like Cursery or Fabled Legends.  I think only one of those is one Steam.

For my birthday, my friend got me Confines of the Crown, a visual novel romance/palace intrigue game that I really enjoyed.  It deals with some questions of gender identity, and while there are many things there could be improved on, I think they did an okay job (full disclosure; I cis and have never questioned my gender identity, so take that with a pinch of salt).  It took me just under 5 hours to play it through in full - all endings, all achievements - and the game cost £14.99, so I'd personally wait for it to go on sale before purchasing it.  I also played PSYCHO-PASS: Mandatory Happiness, another visual novel, and wrote a guide for it.  While PSYCHO-PASS does have some romance plotlines, it's more of a police procedural than a romance game.  One thing that's really annoying about is that the skip function doesn't work properly.  There are scenes you can see as both characters which are identical but which don't skip unless you've seen both.  Sometimes the game just wouldn't acknowledge that I'd previously played through a segment and let me skip it after reloading, but other times it would?  This artificially inflates the playtime, although there is still a whole lot to do in the game.  There's loads of different endings and scenes to unlock.  I finally finished Lake of Voices as well, another romance visual novel but darker than the others by virtue of the fact that people actually die.  It's very melancholy.

The biggest chunk of my time was taken up with Persona 4 Golden.  I played the original game on the PS2 years ago and loved it, so it was great to play it again.  I really liked the additions to this version, like two whole new social links to get to know.  I played the game through twice, since one bonus boss is only available on a new game plus and I still enjoyed it the second time (though I made a lot of use of the fast-forward button).  I'm considering making a day-by-day guide to maxing all stats and social links, but that would be a huge undertaking and someone else would probably have made one before I was done.

The other games I've finished are Hitman Go and The Turing Test.  I'm not very dexterous so the traditional Hitman games are hard for me (I would assume, I never actually tried them but other games in that style are hard for me).  I like the Go games, like Hitman Go and Lara Croft Go because they change the gameplay to something I'm better at.  It's solely a logic puzzle, not a logic puzzle with added dexterity and I enjoy that.  And I liked that I could play these well-known series' in a style that I enjoyed and so gain some appreciate for what everyone else is playing even if I don't want to play the main games.  Speaking of games I'm not good at The Turing Test is technically the first first-person shooter game I've ever played, though it's really more of a puzzle game that uses a gun, like Portal (which I have played for several minutes with a friend).  It made me a bit dizzy at first, and I did struggle, but most of the puzzles are static logic puzzles, and there's only a few that require carefully aiming while moving or anything like that.  I liked that you could replay any chapter you wanted, so if you missed the optional puzzle you could just go and do that without replaying the entire game.  There's no way to backtrack, each puzzle is in a discrete area, so replaying the chapters was the only way.

Apart from finishing games, I've also been permanently removing games from my Steam account.  I get a lot of games from Humble Bundled which sometimes means they come bundled with other games, which I am less interested in.  I added those games to my Steam account but never played them.  Those, I've been playing a little bit and then deleting them if I don't enjoy them.  I did also delete a few games I bought like Ms Splosion Man, which I bought in 2014 and have played for less than 2 hours, and Layers of Fear, which I got for £2.99.  The latter made me feel sick and dizzy and the plot and gameplay weren't enjoyable enough for that.  If I spent £3 on a coffee that made me feel that way I'd chuck it out, so same logic (if I spent £3 on alcohol that made me feel that way, that would be a lot of alcohol for very little and I'd still need to be in the right mood).  This does throw off my spreadsheet calculations about what I've spent on games and the time spent playing them, but the point of this whole thing isn't really to save money.  I mean, I don't want to spend money on games I don't want, but the biggest goal is to get my unplayed games down.  I've already spent the money anyway, not deleting the game doesn't save me anything.

Anyway, at the moment, I own 225 games and I've completed 109 or 48% of them.  I have 10 in progress, 34 I've played to some extent and 72 I've never played at all.  I'm so close to halfway!

The Suicide of Rachel Foster

Honestly, I regret buying this game.  I would have returned it, but I got it from humble bundle over two weeks ago, and I know at least one of those things makes it unreturnable.  The game cost £11.24 and it took me seven hours to play through it once, unlocking all achievements.

I mostly bought the game because the plot drew me in.  It's about a woman, Nicole, whose father had an affair with a school-friend of hers over a decade ago.  That school-friend, Rachel Foster, went on to commit suicide, prompting Nicole's mother to leave her father.  Nicole never saw her father again.  The game begins shortly after her father's death, with Nicole heading to the hotel her family used to live in, in order to evaluate it for sale.  Trapped there by a storm, she ends up learning more about her family's mysteries.  See, I liked that description.  It sounded intriguing.  I like mysteries, and there are many great mysteries enhanced by a supernatural element or with creepiness, which I hoped this would be.


The first thing I really didn't like was the gameplay.  This game is a "walking simulator", basically a game where the primary method of gameplay is to walk around, occasionally interacting with things in order to unlock more plot.  I don't so much object to that, I've liked other games in that style like The Path.  No, what I object to is that it's all in first person, and that made me very dizzy.  It did add to the creepiness, in the sense that you had to make your character walk forward and look at whatever you didn't want to look at.  That was a huge strength of the Fatal Frame/Project Zero series, but, what that series did differently is that it was only in first person when you were looking through a camera, not 100% of the time.  Also, that game didn't make me nauseous.  Turning the quality of the graphics down did help, but that was partly because the game tended to jolt more on higher settings on my PC.  I did like the fact that you could look around and pick things up while talking on the phone, that felt very natural, and I liked the way that unlocking the next part of the plot also felt like Nicole very naturally wandering around the hotel

I pushed through the initial sickness because I was intrigued by the story, so that wasn't a dealbreaker for me.  However, the story didn't live up to its promise.  While it deals with many themes, it didn't treat any of them with the depth or respect they deserved.  Take, for example, the suicide of Rachel Foster.  Firstly, we never, ever hear from Rachel.  Not in a diary or a letter, not in ghostly whispers, not even in Nicole's memory.  She's a completely empty mcguffin.  The game tries to tease us with the idea that she might still be alive or otherwise still around, despite the fact that they already revealed there was an autopsy, so we know that wasn't the case.  We know she "had an affair" with a man in his forties and that she then killed herself, but literally just those bare facts, nothing about how she felt, how that affected her relationship with Nicole (since Nicole appears to have despised her the whole time anyway), just...nothing.  There's also the "affair" thing.  The game knows how young 16 is.  Nicole is repeatedly told she was "just a kid" at the same age, the game's advertising makes use of Rachel's retainer, the few items we're shown which we're told belonged to Rachel are clearly those of a child...and yet, the game never addresses the disturbing elephant in the room, that this child ended up having a sexual relationship with a man in his forties who was supposed to be tutoring her.  How?  We're told she was "mature for her age" - which, ew, gross - but nothing else.  It's like she and Nicole's father just happened to get hit by a truck or something, rather than that one of them - I'm guessing, you know, the grown-ass adult in the equation - had agency in making this happen.  Nicole never deals with her feelings about this either.  How about, I don't know, when looking through her father's stuff she finds something that triggers her to express her disgust or other traumatic feelings over her father having sex with a child?  Or anything about reconciling her feelings towards her loving father with her feelings toward this child molestor?  And yes, I know that where the game is set the age of consent is 16, it's 16 here in the UK too, that doesn't make it less gross.  All we get is that Nicole hates Rachel - which makes sense, since this event ending up destroying her family, and it's probably easier, for a child, to blame someone who she hated anyway rather than her loving parents - and since she appears to have always hated Rachel, that's just not that interesting.  Nicole also appears to be jealous of Rachel, which is quite interesting.  I mean, her dad literally chose this other sixteen-year-old child over his family, that has to bring up some complicated feelings.  But, again, we don't really get anything about this.

The thing I love about horror, as a genre, is its empathy.  Horror stories don't work if you can't empathise with the characters or put yourself in their shoes.  Horror stories are also used to explore our fears and worries, often with a big supernatural twist, but still in a recognisable form.  Take Get Out, for example.  Sure, it turns it up to 11, but it's fundamentally about white people using black bodies for their own purposes - as slaves, as cheap labour, etc - while ignoring black people, as in, their emotions and feelings, their right to a decent life or bodily autonomy or just to live their lives without constant aggression (micro or otherwise) because of their skin tone.  The movie uses a tight narrative, specific characters, and some supernatural elements to tell us a story that delivers a bigger idea that is fundamentally true and important, even if the specific story is fictitious.  That's why one of the most terrifying moments is that last scene, when [spoiler] a police car pulls up.  We all know what happens to black men when the police show up, even though we know Chris is innocent.  In every other horror movie, we assume that everything turns out fine once the villain is dead and the police show up, but we all know that that isn't what tends to happen for men who look like Chris  [End Spoiler]  The Haunting of Hill House (netflix series as opposed to book or movies) does something very similar, but with the idea of parents as flawed people who might, even with the best of intentions, harm their children, and children as people who cannot be protected from the world however much that terrifies parents, much like The Others.  Stories like Rosemary's Baby or We Need to Talk about Kevin are about the fears of having children, not knowing who they'll be, zombie stories are about plagues, and there are many, many stories about the fear of losing control of your body and/or not knowing what you're capable of, like [Spoilers] The Others, but also Fight Club or anything which uses dissociative identity disorder as a plot point [End Spoilers].  The Suicide of Rachel Foster could have done something like that but it just...doesn't.  It nails the creepy atmosphere - I spent the whole game waiting for a jump scare that didn't come - but it completely fails to do anything else with its material.  It's literally all just there to creep you out, which is, like, the least important part of horror, to me.

More specifically, within horror stories, are ghost stories.  Ghost stories are about regret and past trauma.  That's why the idea of ghosts having unfinished business keeps recurring, because ghosts are unfinished business for the living.  The Haunting of Hill House understands that, and that's what makes it so powerful.  It almost doesn't matter if the ghosts are literally true or not, because the story is about what this trauma did to this family.  Whether that trauma literally has an embodiment is less important.  There are some excellent ghost stories which have no ghosts at all, like the work of Diane Setterfield.   This principle is also why The Good Place is not a ghost story, despite literally being about the spirits of dead people.  While it does talk about their past trauma, that's in the context of moving forward rather than about people who are still stuck.  The Suicide of Rachel Foster doesn't fail as a ghost story due to the presence or absence of ghosts ([Spoiler] personally, I think all supernatural moments experienced by all characters is due to the black mold permeating the hotel [End Spoiler]), it fails because this past trauma isn't dealt with.  We just...learn some dry facts.   We never deal with the dichotomy of Nicole's feelings towards her dad - loving father vs man who destroyed her family and molested a child - we never actually deal with the suicide of Rachel Foster ([Spoiler] Yes, I know it wasn't actually suicide and whoever conducted the autopsy should have known too [End Spoiler]), we never learn about Nicole's mother - except for some dry facts which, sure, are delivered in a creepy way, but completely lack emotional heart - we never deal with how the town reacts to Nicole as her father's daughter.  The story has all the ingredients, but it's somehow still just an emotionless husk.