man. i'm not sure what changed but compared to the previous chapter/season i'm finding it a lot harder to do well at this game. i consistently lose faceoffs i should not be losing (when i see my opponent's remaining health/shields and their weapon/quality versus what i was using and had aimed directly at their face). the map is a lot more basic and boring than chapter 3's was (at least near its end, when i started playing). i like maybe 3 of the new guns. the giant hammer is fun, but it disrupts things so much that it changes the game perhaps a bit too radically. the worst, maybe, is that i'm also playing against console users who get aim assist, which i can only assume is the busted-ass deciding factor in most of my losses. it feels like an "anyone can win" game for babies, now, and i don't understand how streamers who play this and win consistently do it. i dunno. hopefully it recovers, because i don't think i'd have gotten so excited if this is where i had jumped in.

... and now i love this game and am currently going through the full trilogy with a sorta headcanonish eekeeper-modified party: berserker/cleric dual class mc, shadowdancer viconia for doing crime and backstabs, sorceress imoen, illusionist aerie, jaheira sticking with her natural summoning druid tank style, mazzy on gesen bow (since she comes with shortbow grandmastery despite being a halfling fighter who yearns to be a paladin) and the last spot or two being filled by a rotating cast for guest quests until [redacted] joins for the final stretch in throne of bhaal. playing on core rules difficulty. my current user pic here is a drawing of viconia by ryoko kui (dungeon meshi mangaka), recolored and slightly redrawn by me. so, uh, one could say that i have come around on this game.

i like to keep this at the top of my steam wishlist, where it has sat for years and will persist for as long as this remnant lingers. if you can find the old prototype floating around out there like one of cayce's enigmatic and disjointed viral videos in w. gibson's pattern recognition (you totally can, it's not actually hidden or anything), you'll discover a piece of work abandoned (mostly) by its creator out of frustration with the linearity of its form as it took form (or so the paranarrative goes). it remains a compelling proof of concept nevertheless—an artifact of artefacts struggling to exist within the noise of the digital landscape.

well, i can see that saying nice things about fortnite ain't gonna do much of anything for my credibility on this site, but i started playing it with my nephew last friday (at his urging) and found myself totally loving it. a friend described it as a "billion dollar shitpost" and, i mean, yeah: you can see a terminator dancing to gangnam style or a corn cob making kitty claws... and on and on. all that's just flavor, though, and the core battle royale game is really very good.

i gather the island map and its features are regularly changed—right now its theme is 'chrome', which introduces strange liquid metal to the landscape, allowing players to phase through chromed walls or to become chromed themselves, enabling a speedy metal slime form immune to fall damage. and that's just on top of the systems that apparently already exist... it's just a huge playground lending itself to all kinds of wild combat scenarios. and uhhh i haven't really got a handle on the building aspect yet, which seems important to a higher level of play, but there's so much you can do in terms of mobility, cover, etc even without that.

at the beginning of december there's some sort of cataclysmic event happening (titled fracture; there are currently mysterious cracks in the sky), and in online multiplayer games that is the shit i live for. evidently big changes are coming. i'm feeling the ache of having missed out on some cool stuff, but i'm also glad i jumped in at this point. besides, i'm stoked to have a game to share with my nephew.

👍 compelling and stylish opening, got me excited to finally sit down and play this

😍 seeing lea seydoux here after enjoying her in crimes of the future (my favorite film of the year) is lovely and her (fragile's) spiky black outfit is sick as hell, also she eats a weird floating space grub and seems to be aroused by this

🔥 the bt scene where a necrotic human body triggers a voidout - everything going on here is wild and mysterious and holy shit all at once

😬 uncanny del toro with some other guy's voice

🤡 "make america whole again!" the word "america" appears in dialogue about 600 times in 30 minutes, and i'm thinking this is taking a turn for the very dumb and the already extremely blunt themes of social reconnection should be more universal, in some anonymous earthly setting... but no - america, y'all

😱 are you a bad enough reedus to carry the president's (also your mom's) corpse to the incinerator before she makes neo knot city e-x-p-l-o-d-e

🌧️ long stretch of solitudinous trekking, leaden interactions with npc holograms praising you-reedus and almost a hint at something about the working class and their labor being the lifeblood of a functioning country but this game isn't that subtle and that's probably not even remotely within kojima's wheelhouse

👼 while sam's laconic and distant demeanor is familiar and comfortable to me, i also find myself identifying with his affinity for bb more than i had expected

💩 lol poop grenades

💬 none of the structures i build are getting likes from other players (some of them have tens of thousands) and the gameplay loop of making deliveries is buckling under the weight of kojima's hubris... i'm getting some sort of comfort or fulfillment out of working out the logistics of making deliveries and prepping for each journey, ensuring that i have the blood bombs and repair spray i may need, etc. but if this goes on for 20-30 hours uhhh idk

💀 do i even like this game? it's painfully heavy-handed and none of its characters are particularly interesting, least of all the fucking cool looking golden skull masked villain voiced by a troy baker devouring scenery (going hard, as everyone says too much now) while saying virtually jack shit... right now i would say the phantom pain was actually much better, and death stranding is starting to feel like its inverse - a failure of a game driven by some really cool ideas

🌈 i do feel, still, that i could come out at the end of this feeling all the drudgery and vacuousness were worth it, so i will continue playing (it's a relaxing distraction from my fucked brain anyway) and perhaps say more when i am done

concerning the bones of the game i'm of two minds: signalis avoids puzzle scenarios that end up having me running back and forth wondering what the fuck i'm missing, which is something that tends to interfere with my enjoyment of the older resident evils—though it's also perhaps straightforward to a fault. the puzzles are refreshing in their cleverness, though they will most likely seem a bit too easy to some, and the navigation of each section never even begins to confuse.

my rating is maybe a bit generous, but i don't really care. i'm actually restraining myself, being honest. the presentation and vibes are immaculate. familiar survival horror dosed with traces of BLAME!, nier: automata, blade runner, a little alien 3 (strictly in the bleak feel of its setting), the shining, etc., all steeped in the cosmic horror of otherworldly malevolence plaguing this post-singularity world of ruin. it is by turns coldly alienating and dreamily sapphic. everything feels solid and tactile—this is a game crafted with care, and it feels like it has the integrity of a ps1 or mid '90s pc game with more modern interface and sound design. there's tech everywhere that you want to touch, and it reminded me a lot of alien: isolation in that regard.

signalis is suuuper comfy, and i guess i could be irritated that it never really scared or challenged me, but... again, i don't really care. i just loved being in this haunted sci-fi world.

as a purely sensory experience i found this sublime in a way that took me back to how it felt seeing and hearing doom for the first time in 1994. my computer could only just barely run it well enough to be playable, but one of the college kids living nextdoor had a high end 486 and he let me play it over there for a little bit. doom made me think of games as spaces in a way far more powerfully than anything before it.

scorn isn't the elegant action masterpiece that doom eternally remains, but it is a vivid ontological crawl through the biomechanical macabre which instills feelings of curious awe, revulsion, and anxiety (when i hear that puzzles are a big focus in a game i get anxious regardless, and this unholy paradise of giger and beksinski had me exceptionally filled with queasy dread). a hideous experience i cherish.

flawed... masterpiece? maybe not quite that, but this is a mess of trashy iconoclasm, campy pastiche in the form of action rpg. "rough around the edges" barely says it, as the game is clearly unfinished and a bit rushed in the late game, and some of its most compelling aspects are left only mostly realized. this isn't necessarily a bad thing, however.

i played as a tremere - a vampire clan devoted to thaumaturgy. blood mages, essentially. frustratingly, the sanguine magicks afforded to you aren't really given the time to shine, with guns and bare fists being better suited to most encounters (and the open use of thaumaturgy being a risk to the masquerade). at least blood shield is useful throughout, and looks fucking cool... though of course any mortal who sees a human-shaped mass of blood will run screaming through the streets. with a few more sections enabling creative use of stealth and vampiric abilities, this playthrough could've been extremely satisfying. in fairness, that's only one of the seven clans, and each of them offers a distinct style of play, philosophy, dialogue, and in at least one case experience of reality. so there's quite a bit of depth here. and to be clear, i absolutely did have a great time with abilities like blood boil, which lifts an enemy struggling helplessly into the air before they explode into chunks and obliterate any other enemies within range. combining that with the ability to entrance solo opponents and drain their blood (their blood is your mana), several areas were exhilarating to storm through. i really want to go through the game again as a sneaky nosferatu hacker, a brawling brujah liberator, and perhaps once more as a malkavian weirdo. may or may not look into the unofficial plus patch for those, which mods in some cut content along with a handful of other liberties taken.

what's present and adequately fleshed out here is mostly very good. santa monica, downtown los angeles, and hollywood are all great (downtown being my favorite), while chinatown is a pretty major letdown on a few levels. worst of all, the pastiche descends into really gross racial caricature in a few instances (along with the presence of some really shitty dialogue choices). it's a stain on an otherwise very special and unique game, so i'm inclined to forgive it somewhat, but this stuff absolutely has to be called out. it does help that it's not all othering crassness: there's a gentle beauty and melancholy to the vibes - the sounds of wind chimes and mourning doves fill the air. there's a distinct feeling that you're haunting these spaces, a living apparition... and something about that is both cathartic and serene.

i did have a really good time navigating the politics of the plotting and power struggles between sects - namely, the corpo-fascist camarilla and the anarchic... anarchs. tremere are treated with mistrust, since their 'pyramid' social structure is a selfish and clandestine lot, and they're known to aid the camarilla in service of their own interests. being me, however, i wanted to lend my plasmatic sorcery to the anarchs. how am i not gonna pick the team smiling jack (voiced by jake the dog) is on?! that is my guy. this presented an interesting conundrum or two, and ultimately i felt i was able to carve out the path i wanted to. (also, this is kinda neither here nor there but i wanted to point out that there are some pretty decent mods available, like this skin i used for my vamp's appearance. i love how mean she looks.)

a minor spoiler: one of my favorite moments was when someone runs up to you, recognizing you from before your embrace, and you have a choice: let her call a friend to say you've been found and risk losing stature in the masquerade, or kill her. or...! find a solution that results in neither a loss of humanity nor a strike against the masquerade. what i did was admit to being her lost friend, and then before she could make the call, placed her in a trance and mind-wiped her, leaving her standing there in a daze. vampire life is cold. but it was the most merciful thing i could do.

not unlike morrowind, it took me a long time to find my way into this game after bouncing off it more than once. obviously, it has its issues. what really matters to me is, again, there's just nothing else quite like this. i sincerely hope to see bloodlines 2 one day emerge from development purgatory. i do hope, as well, that if it sees the light of day (rather, the moon) it's reflective of white wolf's nowadays more openly progressive stance on representation, while maintaining that distinctively ragged edge of sordid night life.