I will get to the games in a moment, but…. woo hoo, free pizza!
Seems I have been such a loyal customer to Pizza Hut that I earned myslf not one but two free medium two topping pizzas.
Now there’s a reward program you can really sink your teeth into! *canned laughter*
So right now I am surfing a free pizza high. Right now, I have a free pizza on its way to me and all it cost me was the delivery charge.
Outstanding. Now, on with the games.
True Fear : Forsaken Souls Part 1. Dang, do I love this game.
It has everything I love about Dead Secret and just a little more. A little scarier, a little better thought out, a little more fun, a little more polished, and with slightly better writing.
So needless to say, the game has me hooked. I played through the first chapter with breathless enthusiasm, enjoying it every step of the way,.
One warning, though : some of the puzzles in this game are actual puzzles. Mostly hidden object scenes and the occasional very simply jigsaw puzzle to solve.
That was no issue for me. I love doing jigsaws on the computer (so much less messy than the real thing) and while I am not huge on the hidden object genre (or as I call it, the extremely cluttered room genre) of games, these follow a perfectly logical sequence and do not deluge you in visual clutter.
It’s strictly use the matches to melt the candle to get the key to open the box type stuff, and I am perfectly fine with that.
So consider this a rave review from yours truly. A+ recommend!
Unloved. At first blush, I hated this game.
Why? Because it’s a multiplayer only game (urk) that takes place during a zombie apocalypse (ick) and I don’t like either of those things.
Multiplayer only games piss me off both because I am simply not a multiplayer kind of guy and because I think they have become a modern cop-out excuse for not bothering to make an actual game when you can just throw together an arena and skip all that plot, model building, world building, voice acting, and animation that go into making a real game in the real world.
It must be a very seductive business model. Hire some newbie game devs, pay them to throw together something over a long weekend, spend a couple of weeks in QA, then put it on Steam and let the profits from player purchases roll in.
But Unloved is not the stupid MOBA death arena I thought it would be. For one thing, it’s entirely coop, meaning I am not expected to kill the other players before they kill me.
Instead, it’s us versus the zombies, and that is way more compatible to my particular wavelength then any killsport setup.
Plus, there actually is leveling up, getting better weapons, and other RPG elements that give you a reason to keep fighting besides not dying.
So while the game is still not my cuppa, it’s not the mindless gibfest I thought it was.
For me, personally, it’s a C- at best. But lots of people are more interested in this sort of thing than I am, so I will give it a B- “worth checking out”.
Outside the Bubble
This is one of those times when I am going to write about some half-formed thoughts in order to try to complete their birth.
I had a moment of insight emerge from the darkness of my subconscious mind, like a glimmer in the moonlight, recently.
There was not a lot for my conscious mind to grab on to, just a feeling that there was a connection between the way my mind sees a world full of possibilities at all times and how I tend to feel like I am lost and scared in the dark and how I turn inward in order to avoid seeing something I know is always there.
Actually, that last bit is new. It just came up. Seems pretty important.
SO what is thing thing I dare not face? What is this shadow of shadows, this darkness darker than darkness itself, this frozen phantom with the hollow, hungry eyes?
Damn I am good at images.
One possibility is that this shadow is… possibility. That it is the demon of option paralysis and represents the overwhelming horror and shock I feel when I try to deal with the infinite hallway of infinite doors that is the world to me.
Too many options. Too many possible errors. Cannot cope. Cannot decide. Makes me feel like I am going to die to even try.
And that’s definitely a big part of this shadow of mine.
But I know there is more to it. There is something else lurking there and as frightened as I am – and right now it feels like someone is slowly impaling my heart with an icicle and twisting it on the way in – I know that finding it and figuring out what it is will go a long way towards setting me free.
It could be the memory of being raped. That sounds plausible but it too does not feel like the whole story.
It feels like there is some concrete realization – something much more than merely a memory – that my mind is shielding me from with this whole deep freeze routine.
And that if I broke the shield and experienced the realization, it would blow my mind apart. My mind would shatter from the blow of something made of a pure and holy light, like a mirror shattered by the voice of an angel, and my own personal Armageddon would be unleashed.
Pretty dramatic, right?
Maybe that’s what it would take to bring on the Flood.
All turns quiet. I’ve been here before.
I feel a great and total silence fall within me. The bird in the air and the beasts in the forest and the all the fish in the see are all holding their breaths in anticipation of whatever might happen next.
But I don’t know what happens next. Not yet.
The ice groans. Cracks appear. Something deep and dark and ancient stirs below.
The sleeper tosses and turns, struggling to awaken. Something important is going on and it has to be there when it happens or something terrible will occur.
Swim hard, fast fish. Thrash in your net. Fight to stay alive. Fight to BE alive.
But poetry can only take you so far.
The rest, I suppose, is up to me.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.