Khrux

Long before ZA/UM closed, I was certain that we’d never see a new game of that quality again from the same studio.

I’m not confident any of these new teams will pull it off, but I’d rather have four attempts than one.

A good way to tell the difference between a bee and a wasp is hair. Bees are fluffy like a cute little dog. Wasps are hairless and cruel like my father, who I become more like every time I look in the mirror.

I don’t even think the back legs look too weird. One of the things I’ve found when trying to spot AI is that often actual images look weird like this just because of the angle / compression etc.

Ah I use Sync for Lemmy as my main client which sometimes just does this to long vertical images.

It’s normally a long image thing. Because this is multiple full resolution images stitched together vertically, the hosting site compresses it’s dimensions, even if it’s not that large of a file.

If you’re like me and this image is too compressed to read, here’s the tumblr link.

Subnautica is the perfect mesh of several things that work fantastically. It is a good survival game but with it’s upgrade and discovery based exploration limitations, it’s closer to a metroidvania than it is to Minecraft. The thing it does so well is sneak this past you, it’s a mystery driven metroidvania where the downtime is a resource gathering, based building game.

The closest game I can think of of that tried the same mystery metroidvania approach is The Forest, but this feels like one of the many many games from the post Minecraft and DayZ boom that has a certain scrappiness to it that somehow Subnautica absolutely sidesteps, and it’s all from just being a really well made game. The vibrant and often tranquil art style that lends itself to awe inspiring locations, and the level design and overall plot support eachother so well.

That said, I’m not in love with the amount of resources. A 4*8 gridded inventory puts me off a game from a worry of it to getting too grindy, and subnautica is a “I need to build another storeroom” kind of game. With a full survival game like Minecraft, which is endless and about exploration and progress alone, I know my storage will be unweildy and I can forgive it, but I’d have appreciated Subnautica finding a way to require less mindless resource hunting / busywork unless itnwas optional base cosmetics or the like.

My big three are Outer Wilds which at this point barely needs mentioning, Disco Elysium which seems to be getting more famous by the day, and Hollow Knight.

Outer wilds is an exploration game, and if the other comments haven’t been clear, that’s all I’m saying.

Disco Elysium is an unbelievably dense police procedural set in a unique setting, it can also be fantastic to explore without hearing much beforehand but unlike outer wilds, you don’t really need to beat yourself up for looking up the occasional piece of lore.

Hollow Knight is a souls-like metroidvania, so it’s ticking the Sekiro / Dark Souls box well.

I got about 90% through the game with only a rough understanding of the lore before ending up watching video essays about it and I was absolutely blown away. I don’t think the lore is overly difficult to find, and isn’t that complicated, but like FromSoft’s games, it’s not always delivered in a way that you naturally pick it up.

I play a lot of games with the “media literacy” part of my brain firmly switched off, because often games handhold you through the storytelling. With Disco Elysium, you know from the getgo that it’s a pay attention kind of game, but Hollow Knight, it sort of feels like a storyless flash game, and sometimes key lore is delivered in a beautiful set piece or creature design, so I only realised I should have been paying attention when it was too late to catch up.

I got no less enjoyment from it by catching up on the lore later though, these three games are absolutely my top three.

My final bonus suggestion is to bash out all the supergiant games in order, Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades all hit the marks for me to sometimes just stop in awe and let myself get chills, although less tban the three above. I also think Pyre is one of the most overlooked games of all time.

The game is least forgiving in the first few days, after that, it really opens out into people remembering the choices you’ve made in the game. Even if you’ve still been making bad choices, it’s pretty fun from there.

It’s reasonably safe to Google, it’s about this letter where the FBI encourage Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide, using particularly abusive, dehumanising and degrading language. The content of the letter isn’t necessarily hard to read the if you want to read it, particularly as it didn’t work, but it’s still bad to know that this was an official government plot.

Oh man I didn’t actually know about this, it’s enormously fucked up and absolutely unsurprising.

Indie also covers an enormous financial area. People generally group games into AAA, Some nebulous middle ground games that are generally produced by the major studios but aren’t AAA and Indie.

There is a difference between indie games that sell millions of copies vs dozens and this lack of discrepancy makes this complex. I once pirated a game called infernium after seeing a friend play it on switch, then learnt that it’s an absolutely tiny game by a solo developer. I happened to adore the level design and lore of that game so much that I bought it on steam and then bought all of his other games too just to support him.

On the flipside, we refer to a game like Hades as indie. I love supergiant games and have purchased all their titles but I would have felt zero remorse at pirating Hades.

Maybe the only thing that I feel is sad in all of this is that the massive AAA games takes years to be cracked nowadays, which means only indie games are pirateable. I don’t like the unfair dichotomy this creates. There are probably a reasonable amount of people who pirate indie games and buy AAA games for this reason, and that’s bad for industry.

I think the compression has made the lighting feel unnaturally soft. It reminds me of shitty HDR or mid 2010s video game cutscene.

Yeah I absolutely adored the concept and would love.to see it picked up. I discovered it after pitching to a friend Tony Hawk’s Borderlands 4 and gradually realising the proof of concept existed.

The development of the meta of the meme became adding him to more and more outrageous hiding spots, which isn’t really captured on knowyourmeme.

I think this works because it’s a surprisingly good hiding spot because he sort of blends in to the aesthetic of the image, but is silly for obvious reasons to anyone who’s tried hiding inside a forearm.

Also the fact that he was snuck into images like this makes his appearance come with a sort of “gotcha” moment, a little like recognising Loss or similar memes. The humour is for people who’ve seen it before, but not for a while, who go “haha mouse… Oh goddammit” when they see it.

The third one down almost certainly intentionally has the numbers 14 and 88 as a reference to a nazi dog whistle.

I can’t decide if this makes it more likely to be satire or less.

Some people have mentioned that some people with foot fetishes have a habit of trying to get people they find attractive to talk about their feet which makes everyone uncomfortable, to the point that it’s kinda of the main reason I think a stigma has formed against it.

If I met someone who for some reason I suspected was into feet, I’d be a little wary until I felt they weren’t gonna be weird about people’s feet, but I think if i met a knee fetish person, I’d be so surprised they exist that i wouldn’t think about this aspect even though it’s just as likely.

I think Spiderman is a decent example of not being comically ripped but I always believe he’s as strong as he’s depicted due to his powers.

I used sync since it’s inception on Reddit and it’s still my favourite, I’ve tried 5 different apps for Lemmy but Sync is still my preference. I haven’t paid to block ads but I don’t get ads anyway so I just get a panel of empty space in it’s place.

The app is missing a few QoL features however. It’s basically a carbon copy of how it was for Reddit this time last year with all the Lemmy unique functions being on the backend. I also don’t expect the dev to return purely because their revenue from the app must be 1000 times smaller than it was from Reddit and they’re probably having to adjust to a very different financial lifestyle. However, despite the monetisation, I do respect the Dev as when they’re active, basically every rational request gets implemented, and you really get the sense that they enjoithe problem solving of making our ideas work.

I was weirdly forgiving of Fallout 76 (never played it, I’m not too hot for multiplayer games) because it was made so soon after fallout 4. It always felt like one of those DLC that got so large that it got released as a standalone game, which practically any large game studio has done and Bethesda did with Arcane’s Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.

A huge soft spot I have for the elder scrolls comes from the heroic fantasy exploration with enormous orchestral music and adventure in every direction, something people say about Starfield is that it’s large and sparse, which is accurate for a grounded space game but goes against what makes half of Bethesda games fun. Fallout falls in the middle of the pack being far more pulpy than Starfield and in 4, I feel this was a large issue with it feeling bland; it’s pulpy wackiness was toned down when it should have gone up.

I don’t expect Bethesda to give me the video game equivalent of game of thrones but I do expect the Saturday morning cartoon that I’m equally fond of, and they still hold all the ingredients to make that recipe. Unfortunately Starfield was always tonally wrong for that, but ES6 is perfect for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still only buy ES6 a year or so after release, maybe 2-3 if it’s really crap, but I think a fair few of the ways that they’ve deviated from the working formula post Skyrim may not be an issue here.