 So this is e-fap number 100 and who knows what number it is really Oh, wow. You could be anywhere. Thanks to copyright. That's how it works these days. How do it though? Unusual to a meme fap. We're gonna open this one with a little chat On a little game that came out Who knows years ago now who knows if this gets lost in time, right? Cold I love how I'm literally just not even like pre-tensing this like oh, hello. It's just like no, so Come out the other side who knows we'll see if I was not known for delays of any kind in any way get right into it My fucking microphone arm keeps walking around on its own. Stop it. I Need a wait Mel I need I need one to mine mine tends to just go up sometimes. Why is it designed this way? I don't know. It's really weird who helps, but who does this help? I need to actually like go on Amazon and buy a weight Just a small weight Mine is literally just a mic stand It's meant for like people who are actually standing up, but it's like all the way over to my left So all I got to do is just swivel the stand around and it's fine. Hmm. Well Yeah, I've got it to stay still for a second. So that's the guy I've accomplished my one task for the day nice So, I don't know how we're gonna go about talking about this. I guess we'll just Go with the flow. I don't even know that you can talk about this game chronologically Yeah, I'm Amnesia rebirth So I I guess this was five years in the making Allegedly allegedly, which is a shame the pressing So I remember having to It took me a lot of Sittings it probably took me like four or five Probably five ish sittings to finish Amnesia the dark descent because of how spooky and scary it was and I'm not a spooky scary game guy It took me Few were to get through Soma though that was mostly because of real-life scheduling stuff Both of those games were fantastic and incredible. I still haven't finished a machine for pigs fuck that game I've finished Amnesia rebirth in two sittings and I played first I played the like six hours for the first time and then wrapped it up the next time And I just kind of wanted to get it over with Amnesia rebirths not very good. In fact, I'd say it's borderline bad Now now somebody who has never actually played it yet because I just haven't had the chance to Would you say that the biggest amount of gripes come from it as a video game or a story or both? Both Really, you don't think the story is good either, huh? Oh, no, definitely not People that have yeah, I've had a couple of people now that are telling me that the story is Really good and even disturb the shit out of them toward the end I don't know that other friends who just don't think it's good at all It's really split down the middle in terms of my circle so there is a People generally say this about Pity but it applies to a lot of things where you have The amount of pity and grief that you can feel about something isn't based on its Scale but on its intimacy This is why if your mother dies you feel very very sad But a mudslide and Zimbabwe that kills a village. You don't give a shit about right There this is kind of the issue that amnesia rebirth has to a degree and one of the many many issues that it has It sounds to me like they didn't characterize well. No, they didn't toss ease a fucking annoying cunt And you just wanted to shut up so Also and her annoying cunt is a big part of a story as a case maybe however Both narratively and mechanically amnesia rebirth is a regression for frictional Whereas soma clearly builds on Pretty much everything from the dark descent You can clearly tell that they're moving forwards and they're learning and they are They took a game that was really really good and they just made it made a masterpiece afterwards Mm-hmm. I can't say that amnesia rebirth does anything better than the games that came before it Except maybe graphically Yeah, and even that's a bit of a stretch it's it's legitimately hard to tell it looks like a game That belongs ten years ago and the you know the gaming landscape It doesn't seem like a modern game. It doesn't seem like it's pushing their abilities forward. It doesn't even seem like a lateral move for them There's a lot of questionable decisions that they make Then there's a lot of decisions that they make that are just flat out bad I guess we're gonna do the inventory thing because fuck it this annoys me to no end so Let me show you so one of the games that they made a long time ago was a number of Numbra, so yeah penumbra and overture and penumbra black plague and then penumbra requiem Which is basically just a puzzle game that third one But I am I'm very familiar with penumbra and black plague I actually thought they were pretty good aside from the fact that there was an extreme jank like that was their first outing into horror and The janky combat was like a big problem with it in the Overture and then black plague that did away with combat and I think it was pretty pretty good For its time It's a progenitor for sure for dr. San all of the penumbra games. Oh, yeah, absolutely so So you take a look at these inventories from and we're like I shouldn't have to bitch about this This is like gameplay 101. I've never made a game, right never made a game But I played a couple like to think I know a few things that seem to be obvious that apparently aren't so Inventories we got to talk about inventories in your game design So both of these pictures this from like penumbra overture and another penumbra game So you can notice here. I think these are Point being these are the two inventories for two inventories from penumbra, right? um And I'm going to show you the uh amnesia The dark descent inventory So let me copy that and paste this here for you so you can take a look at that All right Are you noticing a noticing a trend noticing a trend? I hope you are your brain certainly is you might not even It it you might not even think to point it out if I was to ask you What's the common thread of these inventories because your brain accepts it so easily that you don't even think to mention it I do kind of want to point out not the thing that you're pointing out right now Which is that that first shot is like very very basic first inventory screen In terms of structure on an indie game on steam Second one is like what have they done now? It's like well, they've actually sectioned off The difference between your shortcuts on your keyboard and the inventory in general and they've got health and uh torchlight I think that is So it's like oh that's an upgrade and then you got amnesia that's like it's looking Like stylized to match the game now and it's got some nice drawings the brain and the heart Your oil the amount Tinder boxes notes I guess a description of whatever you're hovering over in your inventory and of course You wouldn't need shortcuts because it's literally the lantern and then interact So you're like your two things meanwhile in penumbra. There was lots of um Lots of additional sort of interactions they had which led to more bugs of course But um, yeah, this seems like a streamlined sort of run I believe soma doesn't have an inventory right because you hold up your um Your little I'll tell you what it's called your your little data pads sort of at the most but that's mostly contextual You don't really have an inventory. Yeah, if there's anything you need you just carry it around most of the time And it'll have a little icon and bomb right right for what you're carrying Yeah, it'll just if you're carrying a key item, it'll have like a little icon down there But you can't open an inventory and sort it All right then bring in the new one right So this is the amnesia Afterbur, sorry. This is the amnesia fucking Reloaded the amnesia abortion electric Ah, my eyes All right, so so notice instantly how much brighter this is right So amnesia I keep I keep legitimately wanting to say after birth my mind is skipping to amnesia miscarriage So in amnesia rebirth You like the other couple games that they've made you are slinking around in the darkness for about 10 hours of your life You're creeping around slowly not a lot of light sources very very dark Throughout you're going to spend most of your game in relative darkness There's going to be very few moments where it's bright like a normal game So you pull up your inventory And push you get this bright White-ish notepad that fills up your screen your monitor is now you know 80 full 70 full of this bright white light and I have no idea how they didn't catch this and what I assume they had testing for Um, but this is a legitimate physical strain on your eyes Um, I'm surprised not a lot of people are talking about this Maybe they had had to build up their own Instinctive defense mechanisms to this like I did where my brain would know without even thinking that if I'm about to open my inventory I close one of my eyes entirely and the other one is open just a little sliver So that as I'm playing this game about being in the darkness I don't blind myself with suddenly pulling pulling up my bright white inventory on my you know on my monitor right Shockingly stupid of the developers to make this a part of their game. Don't know how this made past Q&A Not to mention like it may be a strain on the eyes too, but the other thing is it's oddly like Kind of takes you out of like the atmosphere of the you know the darkness here You've got this big old clean notepad with a big old bright light on it It's oddly comforting in the sense that it can be jarring in tone Because when you've got these other inventories back here, you've got at least the you've got black background, you know dark colors Uh, or you've got like a blurred background and everything like that of what you've already seen and everything it's It kind of still keeps you in the mood of the spooky atmosphere, but then you've got this Skyrim ask notebook down here And now it's kind of it kind of taken you out of the experience little by little every time you open this thing, you know That's kind of what i'm You know gathering from the differences in inventory in the past I remember definitely preparing my eyes when I knew that it was coming up and uh, sometimes I would accidentally hit Uh, the wrong button to pull it up and every time I would be like, yeah But I didn't wasn't commenting on it that much because I think I'd like subconsciously been like no I gotta this is the inventory screen. That's just how it is. Yeah, this is actually really fucking stupid I do remember though that the first time I opened that was like, huh the hell Yeah, it's something that sounds like a inventory or whatever I think so many so few people are even the idea of complaining about the inventory screen Is not something that you hardly ever see in games at the worst Most games are just like any inventory could be better. It's not flat out bad or physically painful And even though they tried to go with a more narratively appropriate notebook that you carry around Uh, it does draw you out of the game and it does remind you that you are playing a video game even more Um So that's my vision about the inventory Yeah, I feel like what they probably could have done is made it a little just a little more Diogenic in the sense that they would pull the Maybe the character can pull the notebook up and he could have she could have like a little dim flashlight Like hanging flashlight off of her journal or something so the inventory can be like dim Maybe that probably could have helped well the game takes place in 37 so Oh, it does it. Yeah, so it here's thing I the The previous inventories from penumbra and amnesia are so video gaming in a sense that they're just boxes With with your statuses on them that you don't even think of them think of it as playing a video game They're just so you you're you're the mind of a gamer already accepts this as a Normal thing and it doesn't take you out of it in any way. It's almost like if you play with an inventory system that is more Uh, I guess more natural looking like uh alone in the dark or amnesia the uh rebirth here It's almost like oh, hey, look at that. It almost even takes you out almost paradoxically But that's its own conversation inventory shit in this game No clue why they did that and it caused me pain and discomfort. So I feel like I'm I'm entitled to bitch about it Definitely something I would just may not have brought it up without you bringing it up, but I completely agree Because it's just the kind of thing where I'm like I almost gave it a pass when I shouldn't yeah and also the um your your Your notes you take notes and hints essentially in the form of sketches And it comes across as they just wanted to show off that someone at frictional could do cool sketches Instead of actually doing something that's helpful because it ended up confusing me on a part There is a part where It's in the fort where you have to Use the Bench bit on the lever and pull yourself up to the second floor I was I got confused as to what I was actually supposed to do and what I was supposed to gather Because of the way the notes were presented to you and the way that the sketch was done So I spent a lot of time looking for stuff that I didn't actually need And and I don't it's more it's it doesn't give you a hint or an objective It just sketches out what the puzzle looks like to you which isn't helpful in any way Though you're not going to need help on any of the puzzles. They're they're pretty simplistic. They're But not in a bad way. I wouldn't I wouldn't pull this against the game. It's the kind of puzzle where You you you spend a couple of time you send a few moments thinking about it and it's fairly simple And so you get it done relatively quickly and go, huh, okay That was a little thing that I did. All right, and you satisfyingly move on with the rest of your life I don't have any problems with those um But I mean this ain't missed or anything so you're all good um Next up we have a a very a very clear regression from Well, wait well if we're on the drawings, uh, yeah, go for it. Mm-hmm. They they amused me um Because whenever it was like a drawing has been done. I was like why though Why when I'm the scenarios were always in like you're drawing fucking pictures And I know someone could be like why'd you got to take it so literally and I'd be like Because she's presented it so literally. I was like, that's the whole thing. They've they've built a whole thing around this She's that's like her job She like sketches out shit and that's why she's doing this and the most distracting one I'm going from memory here. I feel like this is so stupid that it couldn't have happened But when you're um desperately trying to get to the dark six your water's broke And you're like almost hobbling the your way there is things getting worse and worse. Don't you draw a picture halfway through it Obviously, I think so it's fucking funny One time when you've been like chased It you hear the little Of a pencil on a notebook and you've got a new sketch Which is supposed to be like your hint or your progress or your journal, right? um Is it Are you trying to emulate the idea of an in universe inventory system? Or are you not? You know when daniel has a thought and it's like scribble sound It's now in his notebook and you're just like it's a way for them to try and tell you some stuff in case you're missing it Like oh, maybe if I make something that can destroy that goo that's on the door to get through it And you're like, oh, that's what I gotta do in case you did pick it up already It's like how does how much does it break your immersion of the idea that someone's making a quick note in his notebook? It's like not very much at all but someone's sketching out this whole fucking picture and you're like really And that's supposed to be because it it ties along with some kind of note usually like an objective It's like you've sketched out the forts like we need to escape the fort or some shit like that And i'm just like you want it to have a flourish on there But it it only distracts the hell out of me The The way that your character talks to himself as well, um nightmare It is it kind of is I really want tozzy to shut the fuck up I really do her her input That is given out loud Is worthless a lot of time Yeah, she's she's a really really bad tool tip like a really awkward and bad tool tip And they try and hide it by having it so that she's talking to her kid And like she'll end every sentence with little one until she calls it gives the name Yeah, and the idea there is Maybe I can construct this this this this this and make this and go up there with it. That's this little one Like um Talking to her baby inside of her I I feel like that's over half of her dialogue is her talking to her baby because it depends how many times you hold on x In the beginning. She doesn't even know she has a baby. So in the beginning, she's just talking to herself Yeah, that's what I mean They try and contextualize it later to excuse all of the obvious tool tip bullshit But the first point in the game, she's just she's just talking out loud And it doesn't seem like it's what people would actually say to themselves out loud No, something super awkward There there are segments of the game where you go to essentially an alien world through the use of these portals and gates Um, so I don't know about you, but if this happened to me I'm a guy who talks to himself. You know, I would have a lot I have I'd have a lot to say. I would say much different things than what she says her Her unusual acceptance of the situation and how little commentary she has on this extraordinary phenomenal event Is weird considering how much she won't shut up about her baby and I don't know. Maybe it's a woman thing and talking to your unborn child is Stranger than traveling to alien worlds through portals. I don't know But I feel like her dialogue in the game was super misplaced. It was annoying. It told me things already knew It was not helpful And I kind of wish that she would shut up so that I could be the insert So that what the characters thoughts where we're clearly might like daniel, right? Daniel was perfect in that amnesia. He gets his memory wiped. You start the game with him You have to put it all together and you're pretty much your thoughts are daniel's thoughts both narratively appropriately and and you know as a You know as you playing a game Daniel isn't constantly talking to you um And even in somo when you're talking It's things that feel very appropriate to the situation and it isn't too often So it doesn't take you out of it But in this tozzy will not shut up Her input is worthless um This is the same thing, but then it also leads into a different issue. So um, did you Cue yourselves. I know I think mel did uh rags. Did you Did I what so you can like? uh Mel you actually did it. It's the thing that I didn't do Um, I didn't Did you already say what we did? I thought I missed that as well then Oh, I'll explain in a different way. So um, at one point, um, you enter into the part It's a part of the alien world that you're in And let me just tell you my experience and then you guys can fill in the blanks I think but I think in what you're getting at though. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry So I'm walking around an alien world and I'm like, oh man. I've got I think I had like three directions such fully check And there's like a door I see and um, I check one place And I think I had to open the door manually like it gave me an option to pull the doors apart And I was like, oh, that's kind of just think I wonder if this is like a secret Because that's unusual and I swear we're gonna have to talk about that as well So Open them up go in the doors close behind me and I'm like, oh no I can't get out which disappoints me because um, I've talked about this so many times on e-fab And so many games do this to me where I'm like, I would rather Have some way to discern which way is the narrative and which way is the secrets because sometimes it's unclear And I would rather look everywhere instead of being forced to not be able to look other places This happened like four different times in this game and it drove me insane Trip wires that you set off in games where A point of no return that you couldn't have possibly known is a point of no return It is uncanny how many times I look at two directions and I'm like, right Pretty sure this one is the secret So I'm going to go here first and then it's like you fall down a hole and go I mean like Which happens a lot in this game. Yes, you're narratively you being stopped from Getting to your objective is is It is retarded They love knocking you out and then getting you into wherever position they want you to be Yes, I I can think of like twice or three times where you just like fall through the floor randomly, essentially I think it's both makes the game longer We're like, oh, we're gonna go to where we need to go. Oh no a cave in and I've fallen through the floor I guess we got to play the game more I mean Is some kind of cruel joke that you spend all this time in the fort to get a Cannon shell to fire you fire it and then you fall through the floor and you have to go the other way like thanks and Was it a metal beam or like the the the cannon Of the tank just falling onto your belly and I was like this baby is dead this fucking mush. No, it's uh It's a gloopy demon baby. There's a there's a smoothie baby in my belly, but there's no baby anymore like Jesus Yeah, there there's Yeah, it's just like, oh, you've made progress. Nope. Lol fall through the floor play the game more I like how I describe my issue by the way We're gonna be covering loads of issues along the way Just just know that I'm still not gonna be over and I'm probably not gonna be over for every other thing We mentioned but go ahead Um, I think I was gonna say something along the lines of okay, so Whenever you were we're gonna talk about the fear mechanic So we have to go away and these are the yeah So what I was trying to say is I'm trying to lead to a point But if we hit once along the way, that's totally fine with me So if you're done with the getting knocked out and falling through the floor over and over again Well, I I guess it's sort of segues into how this this game more than any of their other games feels like a Like a almost like a kind of but in a bad way. Oh, of course. That's usually derogatory for games Yeah, you're on a You're on rails But not in the fun sense of oh, I can't wait to see what thrilling thing happens next in my journey It's more you It's it feels very linear It feels very much like you are on rails set there by the developer and it's just like a set piece after a set piece Um, they just want you to see the things that they've done Um Narratively it makes it confusing. You don't get a sense of progress that's being made Um, you often forget why you're doing things at all. You forget what the whole point is um, you don't feel Like a mode like they're like from the beginning of amnesia the dark descent essentially This is your task get to the inner sanctum kill alexander And I okay and then along the way you figure out the context for all of this Um in soma you have a goal You are working toward a goal with someone else and things happen along the way and again you learn more and more and more But in this game the goal seems a lot less Defined your motivations seem a lot less defined Instead of just go forward and don't die It was it was that tied with just from the get go the doctor is acting weird on the fucking phone So I don't believe the plot line that's being presented to me and i'm just waiting for the other shooter drop I'm like, what's the reveal? I'm I'm am I dead? am I uh A demon thing I think in my playthrough when you talk to him after the fort and he says don't get Uh upset or he ends up with like don't get angry, which he um, he actually says early on in the game as well But I guess I missed it because When he says it to me directly on the phone like that. I was like, I'm a fucking demon thing. I guess Yeah, yeah At the same thought when he said that We'll have to come back to that. There's so many more questions to ask but I'm I'm kind of curious if Yeah, I The game sets up stuff that it doesn't ever really justify or explain In terms of narrative. So for starters I know exactly why amnesia the dark descent is called amnesia the dark descent Both figuratively and metaphorically you are descending darkly Um, it is very very clear very obvious very very fitting And again, it's both literal and metaphorical soma is a extremely probably Someone said it was the best name to video game. I don't think I could Really disagree much on that one soma's greek for body Extremely narratively appropriate for what the game is about Um, nice and simple. So amnesia rebirth. I don't know why it's called amnesia rebirth Because she's prego But it's not a re smart That's just a birth She was reborn in monstafolm So here's the thing I don't know why you start where you do The get nobody knows so nobody knows now. That's so Amnesia rebirth starts with you surviving a plane crash and everyone's gone And it's like they've left without you And they've gone forwards and you have to retrace steps that you were apparently a part of Um But you're back at the plane crash Um, and you see the aftermath of all this stuff Which But then as you go through the journey you end up contacting the people Or at least someone that you knew and you see the events of what happened that you were apparently part of But they never explain it. Um I don't know how they explain Like why you even get why you even crashed? Um It creates even more narrative problems. So Fuck it with spoilers. I don't want y'all to play this game. It's waste your time So amnesia rebirth is essentially the story of how you you play tozzy tranon Who's an anthropologist who's going to algeria or something like that someplace in africa? And as you're flying through the desert In this plane For some reason You get these weird flashes of you flying through this alien landscape Yeah, it's there's this big tower in a scary spooky city scape beneath you And it's a totally alien world and you don't know what's going on And there are these weird flashes and then one of the engine stops working and you crash, right? And you come to learn that apparently your involvement in this game Is based off of a a a god queen creature from another planet Has decided that you Have a you have a baby you're you're unknowingly pregnant at the time This god queen This alien god queen from another planet whose connection with earth is Based on their technology with portals and gateways She wants your baby She wants your your baby specifically and she goes through a lot of effort In a lot of risk and a lot of blood sweat and tears And curses and roundabout nonsense to get your baby specifically to the point where she will crash the fucking plane With you in it to get your baby. I guess lucky you didn't perish Uh, do we is is that a thing? Do we know this? I don't even know why it's um I mean, is it is it total because we see the flashes of alien world in the plane? So I assume it's connected with the plane going down. That's the funny thing man I I don't remember being given any exposition for any of this I just I feel like we just got left to the dirt for this All I know is that there's a jet engine They're propellers Oh, really? I think the propeller this is 37. So I assume they'd be propellers if this is a commercial flight It's some kind of plane engine Yeah, the engines break the engines break on the plane. I mean later in the game you see an engine before you leave The alien world I think after the first time Let's see. Did I write that down? Probably because I know during during all of the the gateways There's little tears their world gets into ours ours gets into theirs So I think you're yeah, yeah, you have to the first time you get back you're walking through the big open space Which by the way the little frozen people. I don't know what those were about Nope, true. Can you they never give an X? I think they forget I kind of forgot but until I until I went back through my memories and it was like, well, what's up with all those frozen people? What's that about? What's that for? Where did that come from? I don't know I don't think they ever explained it and I think we just stopped seeing that Um, I guess it was just for spooky imagery. So that as you're crawling through the shadows you get frozen people um But okay, that's the thing But yeah, this this god queen wants your baby because her baby had a sickness and it died and she has the sadds So she wants your baby and in exchange for it. She will save you and your crew Right. Yeah So you crash into you crash in the desert and obviously that's a survival scenario um She appears to you and your group and says hi. What's up? I'm a magic tism Follow me. I'm Huh, she says follow me. I think and then she she she comes to me. She says I will I will Lead you safely through the desert. I will deliver you from this perilous situation If that chick over there if that tazzy lady if she gives me her baby Then all of you will survive and so tazzy is Understandably a fucking asshole and says no I won't change exchange the life of my baby for the life of our entire crew. It's like 10 people by the way Which by the way, I was pointed out. I think by the doctor It's like how is the baby like the idea that you keep the baby and we all die here. Why is this better? Yeah, I'm totally on the doctor side because like the baby's gonna die by the way Yeah, so well, but apparently half of the fucking story is you moping over your dead kid Right, so this works in real life if you have an actual dead kid in games If you're going to convince a random person about a fictional characters fictional Dead child from their past who died tragically You're going to have to work really hard to get me emotionally invested in that And if I don't get emotionally invested in that your story falls flat because I don't really care um, they try really hard to make you care about, uh, alice Who is your your A child that you've had before who died of some mysterious illness Um, she dies. This is all presented to us through flashbacks and random hideo kajima-esque dream sequences of giant floating babies Very very strange Very very odd imagery that they're using here However, it doesn't work because it is difficult to make random players feel genuine sympathy and sadness for eight characters Tragic backstory that happens through quite interesting feeling. It was like I I legit like the scene where the baby is struggling to breathe and she's like trying to sing it a song. I think Uh, when it finished I was like that was sad But like yeah, there were a few little sad points, but these are all in basically these are sketch Yeah, they're like isolated in the same way that you go. This is you know, timmy This is timmy's mother and then you shoot her in the head and timmy starts crying. Have you like damn Don't you feel bad for timmy? Yeah, and I'm like, yeah, I do But I just don't have any context for any of it like you had a kid You really liked the kid the kid died and I I know as we all do The purpose of those is to justify her choice To keep the child, but it's confused because doesn't the child die anyway if you do this Yeah, um, they chose an odd way to get me to to to feel sympathy for this character that I want to shut up It's a lose lose because Your choices are refuse and we all die in the desert I might be wrong about this because it feels so stupid to be this way Or give the baby up to be taken care of by a hyper-advanced alien queen You're like, I guess And we get we all get to live. It's like, I feel like there's there's an obvious choice here. I guess I don't know if you would I mean, I guess the the whole thing and what's weird too is that you only get like In the flashbacks you only hear the input of like two of your crew the doctor who says the doctor Who's correct who says we're all gonna die here if you don't do this I mean by the by the way All of this happens after one of your Like one of your guys has a very bad injury your husband is like missing Um And you don't know where he is and we'll get to saline in a moment But like yeah, you're in a dire situation And one person is severely injured Bad bad stuff is really really bad situation Um One of your the doctor says yeah, give up the baby so that we can all live there's like 10 of us And someone else I forget if it's Malik or Hank Is like, you know, it's your baby. You make the decision. You know, it's up to you Because I don't know if you I if I was there I'd be like, yeah Like I I sympathize with your situation. However, your situation and mine are You know inextricably intertwined Um, I would like for the 10 of us to not die Also, if you don't give up the baby you'll die too um But that part is just sort of glossed over. Uh, it kind of makes me hate tozzy Um, they're trying to make you feel sympathetic with her, but it makes me hate her Yeah, this is all before the events of the game by the way, this is all like yeah, this is all Through like mostly audio flashbacks Um, you just hear it when it sounds like the main drama. It's borked, but it sounds way more interesting than Will you blow up the queen? I guess I will And so we have um, so you your your character has a husband Uh, saline Sorry, oh That's what did you have a question about what we just mentioned or uh, it's slightly off topic Um, if you had have you guys played uh outlast two No, no, I heard it's bad It's extremely horrible. Um, and I it was probably one of the worst games I've ever played But um, okay. Well, my question was going to be which one you thought was worse But since you haven't played it, which I don't recommend you do Uh, I was going to be full split next halloween by everybody wanting me to suffer Uh, yeah, and suffer you shall so I don't know. I was just curious about that, but uh, do continue I was just It was just a thought So in the vein of the the plot is care Half of this game's plot is the personal story of you having the sadds And if the character does not also feel the aforementioned sadds, then your narrative really doesn't work It's a big gamble to rest a lot on you feeling sympathetic of character. Um So you have a husband saline And while you're out in the desert and this is all Before the game starts you've crash-landed. He goes to find help essentially you take shelter in a cave In one of video gaming's most boring and dull intros ever And he goes in the cave and he goes to find help and you're worried about saline And is he gonna die is he gonna come back that's that's pretty darn early in the game You find saline and he's dead Um what I feel like So if you would ask me to recant it, I would have told you He got injured in the crash And then he was given medical attention at the cave and then you guys decided to carry on and he stayed behind to heal and uh, then there's dialogue as you progress with people saying like You know, if we do this we can we can help him And stuff like that I I I the I guess either way Um, I thought he went ahead to look for help no I don't know if you guys picked up on that, but uh, there's two other dead people in the cave one Yeah, and uh, the other one killed herself because there was a husband and she didn't want to live anymore So these three were originally staying back And so like oh, that's fucked. I'm gonna stay here on my own. I'm gonna probably die or something So he went further ahead on his own after that even though the other ones went ahead and they were supposed to stay there waiting for help So that's why I went ahead. All right. I I I guess that was the other way Um But or maybe I missed a piece of paper that explained well, I was gonna say it doesn't really change what your criticism Yeah, it doesn't change. The point is he's separated And he he dies and you come across a dead saline Pretty early in the game He uh hour and a half maybe Yeah, like really soon into the game right before the flutters So It's it's really weird that they would introduce The husband being dead so early in the game Um, he essentially, I mean, I did get a nifty flashlight from him. That's where you get the lantern is from him Mechanically, that's how that purpose is served, but narratively. It's a very interesting decision that you don't Not that he's dead, but that your character discovers that he is dead in the way that you do so soon Thought they would have kept him alive longer, but yeah interesting decision. Yeah, I feel like almost Dare I say old players would have been like, oh Oh Yeah, because when you come across the body I was like, oh, it's a dead guy and then Taz. He's like, oh saline And like, oh, this is oh Oh, wow, like we're doing this now. I think all right. Yeah, okay Like almost the genuine like story teller reaction I'm having in my head when I see that stuff I'm like, why'd you waste this? This could have been a payoff Yeah, they did waste it like as in terms of payoff You could like have him do the thing where you you talked him on a radio And when you finally get to him, something tragic happens. That's the that's the bog standard way of doing it Yeah, so in bio shock when you get betrayed by atla atlas Fuck like the guy on the radio you talked to the whole game atlas. Um atlas. Yeah, that's weird Yeah, like when he betrays you at the end, you're like, oh, fuck like you get more of a Shock from that than you do from there You could list a hundred games with more shocking revelations But very weird does feel wasted feels odd. Um, and you hardly is Well, of course, I assume the defense of that would be like that was the focus of bar shock's narrative while salim's death I mean, it's barely a footnote I think if you think about the grand narrative, but why would it be a footnote? That's the weird part. Yeah Your husband dying Kind of a big deal. You'd think narratively, but Because the memories you get during the In between the levels or sections or whatever you want to call them Like, oh, look, we love our kids. It's all a good family and you're like, uh, yeah, but it's dead already. So Oh, yeah, well Yeah, they they do most of the work trying to make you feel sad about his death, you know posthumously The middle which yeah, it doesn't again. It's like the last us two thing like there is You're really setting yourself up with this challenge here and you don't get any special points for pulling it off this way And there's a reason most people don't do that. Uh, because it's not generally how brains sort of Process all this information um I will say that and and feel free to interject at any point The game is shockingly uninteresting Uh, but there is the the only interesting parts to me Or the alien world that you go to small interjection. I just I was curious to find it. Uh, I discovered he was dead at one hour 17 Oh, so that's quite quite early Yeah, very soon. I probably took longer because I I looked at every nook and cranny because I I played this game like I was looking blind manner And it was not worth my time I I gave this time I gave this game more time than it deserved as well I went around looking for all the things Uh, whenever I could And I just well actually carry on I'm gonna get some sense of it. It was funny. Yeah Uh, let's see, um, we were getting it. Oh, yeah the the only interesting part of the game for me Was the alien world? Um, it doesn't have a name. It will be referred to as probably alien planet or alien world Um, the only interesting thing about the game about the game to me And when I was playing through the game the first time the highlight of my Gameplay experience was when you was the first and the second time you sort of go there the first time is um a Very dull, but at the time it's fairly early in the game. So it's interesting. It's very new to you But in retrospect it was dull. I didn't do anything with it. Um Where you you go to this alien world and you have to find these random portals Um that you use this amulet you have how did you get the amulet? The the the spirit Okay, um That's like that that's in that uh cutscene after you get to the oasis She leads you to somewhere and gives it to you. I don't remember where exactly but she gives it to you Basically sounds like a lot of mystical bullshit that goes on in this game There is a lot of this And it is used to explain. I guess a lot of things But um, what was kind of amnesia the dark descent is it took place in like 18 70 1880 something like that It had this really cool mix of the the the mystical supernatural orb And the shadow yeah, and it makes that almost acted as like this this Alien energy source. It was like this you can you can try to harness the orb But you need a lot of like steampunk crazy level shit to be able to do anything with it It had both a fantasy aspect to it But it also had a very grounded science aspect. He would do experiments. He would brew concoctions Uh, uh, alexander von brennenberg was like a renaissance man He he dabbled in alchemy and all the sciences And they they talked about engineering in it with the castle And there was ways of harnessing the energy of the orb that were that seemed really grounded and it had this Cool mix of fantasy and his 1880s style science that was really kind of cool Um, I mean so much has like hard science. That was super interesting I love that shit and the but but now it sounds like they've completely gone in the other direction with this one It's just like magic amulet from Magic amulet from alien planet magic alien technology that they don't really get in too much Um, the shadow is here, but But the the idea is that you go to the alien world the first time you use your match game Let's open the portals that are just around Um, there are there are these weird rifts That connect the two worlds. Do you remember the rift you find? I don't know if you guys went up to it But I did there's a rift at one point or it looks like one She walks up to it and she says like it doesn't open. She says something like, um, oh this one's been deactivated And I was like what? Yeah Because I wrote down You probably use bottles once but I was never yeah, I I just remember being like, how did you conclude this woman? How do you know this? Yeah, because we have what's weird is that you have those little ones that are scattered around Open up whenever you bring the amulet amulet close enough um But you also have the portal machine um which For starters doesn't get treated by tassie with as much wonderment as you you'd expect she just sort of accepts Yeah, like this is the part where I'd be like holy shit. This is a portal device that connects essentially different planets and universes together Um, but I all of her voice lines got I guess she she got they paid for her voice lines to be talking to her baby Well, I think a little green check when you when you when she finishes a thing on the drawing I just saw that um I want to bolster what rags just said because like it is bizarre looking back that She she gets wowed by these these much smaller things you come across this machine That literally looks as though it's like a scene chooser of worlds once you've got it activated and it's this Big sphere and there is there's several like stations to be able to line up the light for it And I'm pretty sure the first time you see it. She's like this is a portal, right? We got to get it working. It's like what? Woman like you're 1937 era brain It is trying to you just came across an alien a series of vast alien ruins where a A hugely complex inconceivably complex piece of technology a portal device that allows you to Traverse across god knows what vast distances instantly to alien planets and worlds that are Nothing like earth in any way and she's just like You know it's portal, you know as you do I grabbed the thing I was asked by the way So what I did was I was looking at when I found him and I was like I wonder if I take a screenshot of chat how many of these things I can highlight so You want to just read out the boxes All right Oh, no, I was so invested in that character Um an hour in and he's already dead. What the fuck is this passing? I guess Uh, oh, yeah pacing is with a c by the way Too early don't really care for him yet I don't care pog So not to say that a chat's reaction will tell you what's happening I just find it curious that everyone is pretty much like why so early. I don't care. Why why did you do this? Why I'm not invested. Why did you do this? Um So the um Yeah, I this is a little disjointed because the game is disjointed. Yeah, I was gonna I'm sure anyone listening. We're gonna jump Yeah, the The alien world sets up a lot of interesting aspects and a lot of them are callbacks so The alien world has a portal system like they've created these portals That that allow them to go to alien worlds like earth uh to them This sort of ties into the whole alexander making Using the orb to create a portal because that's how they're fueled In this world the big portals are fueled by the orb. You have to have an orb Of which there are like seven. I think in existence uh to As like energy source or power source or navigation or whatever they're essential to using these portals That's why alexander needed the orb to create a portal home We don't know there's there's a lot of things that are appropriately ambiguous Like is alexander's world The one that you're in Is he a native creature of this alien world you go to or are there other alien worlds connected by other portals? Are there other civilization who have their own orbs and they eventually discover that these create portal? You don't quite know that's kind of left up in the air um But they talk about how This whole this alien civilization Is powered by vitae Right, which has horrific implications if you've played amnesia the dark descent because you know what it takes to create vitae Uh is a horrifying process to create this power source and this civilization runs on it Except for the torches that you like with matches Um, those aren't powered by vitae. I guess But I put a put a note on that one. That's a whole topic too We'll note on that one. We'll we'll get back to it Uh, but with the um, I was super invested in learning more about this alien world Who was this god queen the people here? I like the way that they would record things on tablets and the way they kind of talk to each other and their little names for days and Cycles and rises and things like that I was interested in Kind of how their technology sort of worked a little bit. I was I was super interested with where does The shadow come from right? What is this shadow? Do they leave it? Uh, I mean do they give any answers as to the shadow? I think um Keita or keema, uh, he talks about it as the red flesh like ooh very very spooky um that you don't we don't But and it's implied that this thing came through the portals that they had So, um, I only got pieces of information Maybe mel can fill in holes whatever but like we're supposed to assume That in order to try and sabotage and destroy the system of keeping the empress alive and freeing all the people who were suffering They created the red flesh That was designed to be injected into her systems and destroy it all because it'll spread like a virus now On the hand of this game alone I thought it was really fucking weird that the corpse of the dude who tried to do it is right there His his injector is right there and his description of how to do it is right there in the room Where you need to do it like was to this strike anyone else is odd Yeah, the because you come across a guy You come across to he's you come across a guy who's dead He got he got hit by rubble like your character does five times Uh, but he's not as lucky as you are he dies and he's got a note by him that says i'm gonna die You've got to finish what I started uh inject the red flesh into the big vitae Channels that essentially go through the city and lead up to the god queen tower By the way, um, uh, when you you know how you inject that one in that point in the plot and then there's three at the end Yes, um, when I saw that we could do one at the end. I was like, oh man I guess I probably like missed the other two because there's no way like all three are here and then there's one Yeah, that's what can And then it was like no there's three here. I was like, oh, okay Here it's like wait, then didn't say there's like four main lines and then someone chat brought only one is destroyed already. It's like Well, when what I'm saying is one down below in its own chamber out far away from the tower So you assume the others are different. Yeah in different area It's so odd to me that you have the chamber of the queen and three lines are attached to it Also, a fourth one is attached, but from a place you have to destroy from a different area. You're like, that's weird Yeah, why don't have more ghouls there to protect those things anyways. Oh god the fucking ghouls man Um, we haven't gotten to the monster spoogee to them designs. Um, yet But because we're still talking about this weird narrative stuff that they're doing Basically, I was super disappointed by basically everything that they either don't tell me or the that they decide to tell me yeah, um The the none of the idea is really pan out in any interesting way. I thought they were going for some strange cosmic horror sort of angle um But it doesn't really pan out in any interesting fashion I felt extremely disappointed as the game went on and I was not getting answers or explanations as to things Um, that doesn't mean think everything has to be explained There's a lot of horror and spooky tisms that come from not explaining stuff But they toy with the idea a lot and this is the second game in the series. So Uh, I was hoping to get something there um, but I I by the end of the game, certainly I was very disappointed both by the structure of how you choose the endings um, and what they actually sort of were and I mean it didn't Didn't really hit me the first time I went through the game I got one ending But it was not the ending that I wanted to get But I was just confused by the order that you're allowed to do them in like when is When is the point of no return? Yeah, when can you not go through this thing? When can it it's a little confusing as to when you're allowed to choose the actual endings? um Yeah, I guess we could we could talk about that now if you want there's no real reason Not to so my experience of the ending was like I decided early on if I have a chance to blow up this bitch and destroy the whole place. I'm doing it like absolutely That is when you have imagery of like thousands of people screaming in pain to keep this one person going I was like, uh, yeah, I feel like this is pretty obvious. I don't know And then the game is like but I can take care of your kid and I'm like, I don't care Like why would I be kidding me? They The game tries to legitimately sort of convince you that yeah, but your baby gets to live here on this dead planet filled with monsters where I'm the only conscious person Everyone else is stuck in pods suffering for eternity essentially to keep me alive with their vitae What happened this by the way? We'll do this as much as we can but every fucking flaw It's like they did it better every time in the other games soma was like Hey, you can shut down every form of life on this this planet as is and you're like Do you want to and most people would I think knee jerk be like yes But there are creatures in the world of soma and pathos 2 That are not only content, but some of them are like, please leave me alone I'm like I want to just exist this way And and the wow is like constantly evolving and changing and it's like do you think maybe that Some life in the world of soma is worth it if it can eventually Sort of work itself out instead of creating creatures that seem to scream And could be in pain is a complicated question because the whole point of it I would assume is like if you decide no, I've seen too many scary things and and pain and suffering It has to go and it's like so what is the line then how much suffering versus Contentment would you have to wipe out the human race? I wonder what do you think? How much suffering is with who are you exactly? It's like who are you to judge whether or not they're happy and whether or not The wow in that game is an evil. It's just trying to work It doesn't like it just wants to create life and it keeps you know creating all kinds of things and some of them Will lash out and attack you because they don't even understand their surroundings And some of them think they're pleasantly like with their friends and having fun Well, they're actually in a box with little tweezer arms just floating around And I think that is so much more fucking interesting than look at these millions of people who are screaming Would you like to continue this? Like I don't know and it's funny because when I made my choice Which I thought was to to end the suffering and the game played the cut scene and it showed the machine turning off and the guy stopped screaming I was like, oh I guess I did it and then I got told by someone that like oh you got the noble ending. I was like, okay Good, I guess I didn't even realize like obvious like the obvious like there wasn't this thing because they try to leverage it Right like trying to say you could stop all of the suffering on this planet You could free all of these people from their living hell and you could kill this fucking bitch Who did so many terrible horrors thing? so This this god queen lady She's a horrible terrible piece of shit awful person She did terrible things to you terrible things to the people that your character cared about terrible things to this planet. She's a shit person and So you having any sympathy for her? Yeah, like that's fucking not not even close to even happening and It also leverages your kid So you you give birth to your to amari amari at this point as your baby daughter She she grows really really fast for magic alien reasons kind of just on that point like that and Am I not a demon person? Is this something is the baby okay? Yeah Because they they do the things like oh you go into the spooky world go back out Boom three months of baby in my belly. It's like why That's actually why I opened up the game just now because I remember a note It said something about time, but it doesn't say anything about why this happens It's just this time in the note. I thought that might explain something. I think it was Herbert's final note or something But yeah, I don't know why our baby just Grows three months every time we go through spooky worlds Well, this is what I mean In terms of is this a normal healthy human baby. It's like facts it grows at random bursts of speed you're like, okay it was You know In the safety of the womb of a creature that doesn't Drink water or eat food will randomly cannibalize Like human beings in a frenzy of rage has like these flashes of veins of blood and like purpley's Red skin that just flashes all over and and often loses track of time from being knocked out over and over and over again I'm just like I feel like this is a great combination for a baby that might not even exist Then you're just crazy Yeah, um But again the the whole the what's supposed the the good ending is it is the good ending? It's the obvious good ending. It's not even I mean this is just call it the ending This is the ending, right? This is the one that I only didn't get because I was confused about the execution of it based on how they present the ending It's very weird with where the invisible tripwires are Obvious ending. It's the one that you want because it's so clearly the correct one They try to make you not do that obvious ending because You and your daughter will die your newborn daughter will die. It's like listen Friend of baby feel sorry, baby. I do but still clear cut choice. You're still one life. Just gonna be honest here Um, also you're doomed anyway Um, you're doomed. The baby is doomed if you if you don't stay here Um, it very very obvious. They did a really shit job at trying to Do the balancing act of what ending do you choose? Because one ending is taking Because right before you get to the queen's chamber. There's just another portal there that has paris on it Yeah, where you live where your house is and when I got to this point. I'm like, oh This is the end. This is the choice I can make to just fuck off Okay, well That's obvious. Also, there's just another portal here with an or I Of course, it's the queen's personal pull rush. She uses it to get around come on Yeah, hey, you know as as one does um, it's like a little cow because sudden portal right before you think So the the the option when you have you could you could leave here You could fuck right off you could go back to paris or you could even take your baby with you to paris However, you know, your baby will die of this disease Uh, it requires vitae in order to just stall its demise its death Um, and you are like a gonna turn into a weird crazy monster thingy Because that's part of this god queen's plan. I guess it's fucking brilliant Just without your explaining it. You're like, could you've made the choice more weird? Like why why did you do all of this? Yeah, so you're gonna die. Yeah, even worse. You're gonna live as some Hunger-fueled husk of a monster. I think harvesters what they yeah harvester. Yeah Can I just remind you one of the choices in soma is the last human being on earth wants to be euthanized? Will you yeah That is one of the easiest like scenarios ever is so meaningful When when when you just think about what it what it is as a scene and then you got this game That's just struggling to piece together all this crazy shit. That's like, don't you think this is like crazy though? Like in terms of can you really make the choice and i'm like, yeah Not only not only is the choice in soma to To euthanize the last humans alive There's the secondary option afterwards to she asked you to stay there with her so she doesn't die alone And and you're you're a human fucking brain. That's like this is a this is just a game These are just pixels on a screen You are sitting your ass in that chair and you are not leaving until she dies I remember right because of how well it's so presented Because the two last plays I use for my series uh christopher odd. I remember him saying yes I will in like a very Sort of grounded like this is important and i'm pretty sure markiplier was like yes And just just just it's it's a serious moment Even though it's absolutely nothing it's it's it's nothing it's it's you know, it's just ones and zeros it's just it's you can leave she's she's an animation but When you that invested in the game of the narrative you just feel like a sense of respect You're like i'm gonna stay here for a little bit What was your favorite choice? um My favorite choice was whether or not you Kill I think I agree with that. Yeah, I'm in your other simon I think that was the I think that was the most interesting choice that choice big same watching people rationalize Either way is super interesting Yeah, big same big same. Can I just mention? I know we haven't done it already soma's really good. I just wanted to mention Talking master piece In my life also, I chose not to um, you chose not to yeah, I chose not Stop we're gonna tag it and then never stop talking about so because it's really good stuff to get stuff Talking about their last get their other their last game. That was good. Now. We could talk about the shitty one um, yeah, so um Yeah, basically the ending is you're gonna turn into an evil horrible monster and live an undeath that is worse than death Your baby is going to die if you take her home But one of the options is to go home where you're gonna turn into a monster and your baby's gonna die horribly Okay, great The second ending is that you let the god queen Have your baby and the baby gets to Grow up on this dead fucking nightmare alien world. There's not even a civilization. There's just random ghouls everywhere Yeah, it used to be a civilization now It's a dead city and the only people who are alive are this crazy evil god queen these horrific monsters In countless untold thousands of people stuck in pods suffering for what will essentially be eternity So that their v-take can be harvested to keep her alive and you're like, oh, yeah Let me raise your daughter here so she could grow up and have a life. You're like, okay. No Uh, it's dumb. It's not even like it. She's not presented as this Angelic being in some space garden of Eden with their own civilization of people Where you can give up your daughter to to have an actual life Like no, it presents it as like living growing up in a hellscape And then of course the third ending is you sacrifice yourself to inject the red flesh into the vitae of this world Which kills everybody off releases them of their eternal suffering and kills the villain of the game as well You can put it into all the suffering which is the obvious choice of what you do It's the obvious choice So, yeah, oh by the way the writer for this game not the same writer as the last two games by the way I mean the you can see to my playthrough I don't even like have a moment of figuring it out quote-unquote. I'm just like oh an option to kill it cool Yes Like it's not don't even and if someone said like did you even know you had a choice? I'd be like I don't I didn't care if I had a choice That's not like um I I knew what the three choices were The it's just how they presented the choices and the order you have to do them and then you're like, oh, yeah Absolutely iconoclast Button press extremely quickly. We're doing this. This is the ending we're going for. This is the correct ending. It's not even close um so The yeah, I super upset because the the design of the alien world. I thought was very cool Aesthetically it was very interesting um The the the backstory of what happened here could have been really cool. Um, I like the idea Of a civilization that is powered by vitae and knowing how it's harvested and how they deal with that how they rationalize it Um, I think that's a very interesting concept But ultimately I kind of feel like the whole thing was worked I still think it's a problem and we brought this up beforehand and before we played the game Sorry, and we knew it would be a problem and it was uh Daniel described the flashes of like the city as uh having impossible geometry from what I remember I could be wrong about this. Maybe he was referencing something else, but um the world itself I felt like it wasn't alien enough. Um, it was really And I think this is both a pro and a con the fact that you can vaguely understand how things work there in a in a An intuitive sense like things can be in a different language and be different shapes and forms and stuff But you can still be like, oh I can turn and see how this works I don't know if I consider that uh, it's a plus for like In terms of you you getting to work things, but I consider it a con in terms of like I feel like it should be more alien and of course I could You know where I could go to make this more poignant in regards to the light sources Yeah, um on on that note though I felt like the environment was appropriately alien I feel like the the actual creatures who live there were not appropriately alien enough um So I guess that's a little difference of ours. Um, yeah. Well, like I said, I can see the pros Uh, I just I guess this could this could totally be a subjective point. I think um I wanted something more otherworldly even more so than what we got I think And I don't know that I wanted to understand it as well as we did I I can see I I see exactly what you're saying. I thought it was good. Um, but if it was like super duper alien And you had to like actually Like take a moment to try and process They just this navigating buildings Because it's so different from ours. I would have been okay with that as well I think that the big issue for me was oh, these are humans basically Yeah, well, yeah, because in a nose and mouth and you know if we're designing like alien stuff And and the first thought we have is like well, they'll be humanoid. I'm already like, oh, okay. All right, I guess You know, they're gonna have a head arms legs and I'm like, okay I already feel like we're too close to home already But that's fine. I guess. Yeah, if One thing for all the shit that Dead Space three gets, um the aliens and that they were fucking aliens They were terrifying, right? They were their world and their biology was alien um but It's such I think that that I guess we can go into it too So moller mentions like briefly the puzzles and how you piece them together intuitively Um, maybe a little bit too easily put together intuitively um, yeah But it it was dressed up in an alien enough like dressing that I was okay with it But um, let's be a little specific I don't know if it was a security protocol or some shit But you know the paddles that have like, uh, let's say a a seven by seven board of of symbols and you have to move A like piece to represent three symbols and then you can activate a machine to do a thing I'm trying to picture like why would it work that way? Yeah, it is clearly designed as a puzzle first Exactly and it and it doesn't seem to have any actual Um, there's another part of this that I'll get to as well. Um But the puzzles seem like puzzles first not actually trying to figure out a piece of technology Well, let us let us do what I I'm hoping we can do as much as we can to try and Explain why this is not as good as their previous games A puzzle I remember in soma a place is down in terms of electricity You open up a panel you can see that um, there's like little fuse switches And there's on the left side. There's a power source and then on the right side There's where you need to get the power to and the way that it was going is broken and busted And you've got to work away around it just a standard little electrical puzzle To power the unit that you're trying to get powered and it's it's a puzzle But it is also in narrative a perfectly reasonable way to translate an engineering issue To a human player and that's the kind of shit that someone was like that puzzle was easy I'd be like that's not the point I'm making. Okay. Yeah the figuring it out part wasn't the difficult part But this game is weird like I described it as a portal puzzle to rags and I'm assuming you both just be like Yeah, but is it the the first portal puzzle that you find where you move the blocks over it's See the fact that you just described it that way bugs me in a way that that's what it is It's yeah, it's this so very obviously test room thing. It's like you've got a teleporter You've got a bunch of blocks You've got um a source that needs some kind of circular thing And then you've got this board of symbols that you have to match the symbols It's such a like is this made for people to solve like what is this? Yeah, is this made for people just how just yeah, it's it it comes across as a puzzle first in an actual lab experiment second Which makes sense and I like the idea that That this gate technology is like this super hyper advanced shit that this alien race is sort of discovering and it Creates issues for them because I So did the shadow come out of the portals or did they create the shadow? I thought that's what I mean. I thought this shadow was created as a sabotage thing I thought they were going to use the shadow the as the sabotage thing Maybe because because here because I because I guess I can't quite recall exactly And unfortunately the thing is that if you miss the right tablet of backstory, you won't know No, true Oh, yeah, you can read weird tablets that won't work, but you can pick them up So I don't know if there'll be any of this thing. It detects You and translates to I can't make sense of that Yeah, you pick up glowing tablets and you can read them in English They flash in a couple different languages and then it stops on English It's so fucking lame. She picks it up. It does it and she's like whoa It's like that's not good enough game That's not good enough Um, yeah, just to clarify quick about the um The previous point wait quick remind me. What was the previous point? Oh, we're talking about portals and puzzles In gates and the red flesh, right? So Either way it prevents the problem, right? So let's say first scenario They created it in which case what the hell is it doing in amnesia the doctor sent? Like who's did someone send it through a fucking portal and it chases daniel? Like I don't understand. Yeah, why does the orb chase? Why does the shadow chase the orb if it always existed? Does that mean you could like Like chop it up and put it into syringe and inject it into people and then it goes nuts When it hits v take I have because you find key to his lab His little laboratory where he's got the the little red flesh bits and the boxes and the glass The glass things and where they're experimenting with it Which in and of itself makes sense if But you don't know if it was made there or if it came through the portals because either way I think it causes issues I thought That when they were using as a result of them using this this portal technology They this is where I think that I thought the cosmic horror aspect of it They went to somewhere they shouldn't have gone or Through this portal to some because we don't know how far apart this alien world are is from ours It's other side of the universe for all we know. That's what's just kind of spooky about it they Let in this Interdimensional horrific thing That was just drawn to the power of the orbs for whatever reason and killed everything in its way to get there Um to sort of piggyback on that what I was Kind of liking was that we do not understand it and it just heads toward the orbs Or the people who've interacted with them. Um, it is beyond it. It's beyond humans on earth. It's beyond the hominids of whatever alien planets It's beyond all of that it destroys everything That it you've tampered with technologies. You've gone to a place that you're not supposed to go Where there's a horrific thing forever being that it's just it's just big pieces of flash that just They just strewn about everywhere and grows and unlike it pulsates as well It's just it's just like oh what the fuck is all of this? Um, which is why When you find an orb and you click it and you just pick it up in your hand. You're like this will be useful I was like no That's not how this works remember last game Orbs are supposed to be majorly like big a big deal Oh, this one's just lying around The first one you find is just lying around like like to clarify in the doc descent You do like you you find the six pieces of the orb because he said like the orbs pshards alexander that they like They emanate of an an experience that just like amplifies the torture thing And once you piece them all together you put them in the the machine and it like draws the electrical power out of it And it allows you to get into the next place And so it would have been in your inventory But the problem with that to me not being a problem. I mean is that the shadows already after you And the whole game you're trying to run away from the shadow it keeps catching up with you every time You complete areas like you you fucked with the orb you messed with it. You took it from where it was And the the shadow was perfectly content hiding out wherever it was with that orb or whatever But but now it's it's been it almost had like this curse kind of element to it Maybe it's a curse of some kind where you've removed the orb from its rightful place So you are now cursed and the people you touch are cursed because you took something that wasn't yours It really classic horror kind of stuff really mummy vibes Yeah, you know that we got from amnesia the dark descent and then this one is just an energy source Well, you just it's in a room, but you're just like Like no No, it's just like sitting around like remember this So I was just like oh look it's an energy source. Okay. People's like, oh, that's from the first game It's like, oh, they make a big deal out of the orb in the first game. Let's put it that way Energy sources are there as well. I don't know So no one even in chat noticed it at least I didn't notice anyone notice. Let me put it that way. So yeah, yeah Remember there are only eight orbs for all this civilization knows they don't know that one of them is fucking broken So there are now seven We know and the fact is I don't think that these are replaceable Because there's only eight Like I it makes me wonder is there a backstory where they found the orbs? And this is all that they have and they use these did someone come There's so much interesting stuff that could be explored here Is this just a chain of civilizations being built and destroyed? Who knows Do you imagine we had there's only like a story eight in existence and you just find one on a table Yeah, and and imagine we had a story where all of this is super alien We finally toward the end of the game like understand most of it We get context that this civilization was rampaged and destroyed because they reached too far into something that they consider completely alien Being the orbs and the shadow and like how cool it would be that we're looking up at these crazy godlike You know Impossible to understand civilization and it was destroyed because they too, you know reached too far Sort of yeah, that was awesome Yeah, and the and the how we're next you could even have a really bleak ending where it's just like this is Earth's fate coming towards earth or you have to destroy the portal so that it doesn't get to it's your only way home But you have to destroy it because you can't let this thing Go to earth because and you could present an option where you're like you could fight it We we learn about a way to try and repel it, but it's not permanent or something and it's like you could try that You know give yourself a bit of it. We could work harder on this what i'm trying to suggest something better They toy around with the idea of an interesting space cosmic horror story here that is just really not given Well a lot of Meaningful attention. Let's just like three things off top of my head four things off the top of my head that that really hurt this alien civilization Number one, they have random oil canisters that just exist in this world You can pick up and you feel it and yeah, so You're for those of you who don't know mechanically in order to create light you can carry matches and you can carry a A a flashlight a lantern essentially electric lantern that uses oil as fuel um Quick tangents on those the game says you can only carry 10 matches because The reason is because they want to create artificial scarcity And make you feel like matches are valuable when they're all over the place It just for arbitrarily limits you at being able to carry 10 Even though matchboxes have way more than 10 matches, but It annoys me it was one of those it was one of my the first points in this game where I rolled my eyes and said But in amnesia the dark descent I could carry as many tender boxes as I found Because of course I would because this shit's important Um Same for oil by the way, they didn't Yes, because I actually had I actually had to problem throw the game that I was stacked on matches and I found like Yes, another one another one. I'm assuming you had so we can all agree on that. We were all tripping over resources Yeah, yeah For some reason there was no matches to be found anywhere and I had only one but I didn't even need them So I I started even up to the end. I was just lighting shit because I had too many matches Oh, but yeah in addition to finding I used the matches only so I don't have those fucking stupid flashes all the time We'll get there. We're not. Yeah, I want to save that. We're gonna get um But yeah on this alien this otherworldly alien planet That's as far as you know on the other end of the fucking cosmos, right? You find matches you find matchboxes full of matches just lying around they didn't have the fucking Plays where portal might be just in a room They couldn't even have been fucked to retexture them to be alien matches for whatever reason. No It's just Jonathan and company Everlast matchsticks and they're just in these little paper cardboard packs that you just find around lying in the alien world As you fool you don't understand Why would they have alien branded matches? It's not like they have any use in their world, right? So the reason that there's matches in the alien's world is because there are Alien torches on the wall that give off blue flame. I hate those fucking things. They ruin everything for me remember So remember so remember remember how narratively you have the horrific realization that this is an alien world powered by vitae Right and all the terrible implications that come along with that You would expect to see vitae lamps vitae lights everywhere that you go the idea that you wouldn't power something with vitae Seems ridiculous to me if you've gone all this way already for reference. They have I guess a bazillion gas powered Like this lamp. I just want people to understand like the amount that's being produced is Incredibly absurd. There's a huge amount of vitae in this world It is a power grid of vitae a huge portion of this world is Creating the vitae that powers the civilization and keeps their god alive But you come across little bottles of oil And boxes of matches so that you can power your flashlight and you can light blue torches on the wall um Okay, I guess and they have it. Okay. What okay? Sure Whatever that's dumb Okay um Very stupid But as uh as metal alluded to a moment ago and I'm in the same boat as he is Um, I was I found that I was lighting most of the light sources I could come across Was not actually because I was spookied and I wanted light It was because This game introduces a new fear mechanic. I I I want that to be the the end of this Like that's okay. All right. All right. We'll just we've I've got so many other things I want to say before that that's like my that might actually be my main criticism And I want to I want to talk about how disappointed I am that it exists. So Before we I suppose get there. I just want to I just want to make sure we've made it clear like going into an alien you're in a Like a dusty cave-like stuff and you just find some torches here and there's a light up like you do in amnesia side note You cannot pick up the torch that you first find to the game that looks like you could pick it up It looks so obviously like you could pick it up Yeah, it's just a wooden torch that burns forever and you're you're literally in a dark cave But to clarify it's not like like amnesia ones that are on the walls And they like they look as if they're just attached this one I want to try and find a visual for it because it looks in a gamey way Like ah, this is something I pick up a stick. That's just on a rock essentially I'm suggesting not just the way it looks. I'm suggesting that like it's presented to you Unlike many of the other torches in the game which are attached to the walls. This one is like on the floor And standing up. I've nearly yeah, I've got it. Oh my god right at it. Oh, let me give you a picture Yeah, give give us a sec people listening Yeah Because I remember saying like oh man, that would be helpful to be you know to be picked up. Yeah, there it is. Oh, yeah, you got it Um So I just got there This torch It's like it just to me as this isn't some kind of like definitive You just got fucked up criticism by me the the the big brain gamer. I'm just like the way it looks Looks as if you'd like it and then you get a hand symbol and you could pick it up Yeah, yeah, and of course you might be saying like well, you can't so what's the big deal and I'm like Why the fuck can't you? Why wouldn't you pick this one up? Like you're in a cave. Everything is dark as shit Yeah, you have both An extremely good in universe and out of universe reason to take this torch wish you with you and to cherish it wherever you go Yeah, and to give it a name and to raise it as your own son But it does not allow you to take this torch with you because artificial restrictions are spooky um So yeah, that would be obviously the same throughout the whole game I guess we should quickly mention the way matches work And I need to listen to my playthrough again because I've forgotten the specific criticism I had but I'm pretty sure it is The way they've made these matches work makes me Whenever I'm in a location and I like a match to quickly dart around and look for any other possible light ups almost yes Which doesn't help the scare factor It makes it it's a little bit silly to gamey at that point Um, so you press r you light a mat you strike the match and you light a match the light the match That's for eight ten seconds something like that and in that period of eight to ten seconds You can't sprint because it'll go out, but you could light as many lightable light sources That are around you lamps lanterns candles the whole nine yards Why can't you take the candle with you good question? Don't ask um, but it does not allow you to Use the match after that it burns off But what this does is as moller said you light it and you light one thing And then you still got a lit match and you still got eight or so seconds So you start looking around for all the things that you could possibly light because that's only a gameplay advantage Before your match runs out because you might as well Which instantly gives it puts you in this video game mindset Especially when you're lighting things like candles in little carry handles that you could take with you, but you don't or just lanterns hanging around that you could take with you Even though these lights last indefinitely Very much a video gamey thing that they don't explain in game and They I know when they made this they were like hey So before you'd have one tinder box per one light and that's your exchange and that's your resource But now we made it kind of cool one match equals as many things as you are able to light as a player It's almost like a mini game and on the service you kind of like This sounds kind of neat actually. That's how a match works. I guess yeah And but but like I found in mechanics It's just it came across as almost silly and like rather than me focusing on my area and my light sources I was just like oh, what else can I do this this this this sweet sweet I did I got three that time Which as long as if I get if I get like if I get a four. I'm like oh, I'm doing great I got a two. I'm like is all right Three is like yeah, three's a safe number. I did three. I made use of my my match and then it's like Wait I'm not supposed to be lighting things up like because I need it to stay Safe or I desperately need this as a safe spot and I should be concerned about reasons rather than this It distracted me this mini game of getting as many hits as I could with each match And the game has a it's very very liberal with its dispensation of elimination Yes, it's like I I turned that port into a fucking christmas tree man. Yeah, I had so many matches Because I was just like running I was just I just find a box and like well I guess I'll just use the ones I have and I'd light everything around that's how I play Dude the amount of times I pick up a match Book and I don't get one because I was like I'm full and I don't necessarily need to actually Light more stuff up. I'm doing fine So these these things While we had the whole video gamey thing lighting So you have these little altars Trines Trines and there's like candle on it and a little oil lamp thingy And my first race like I'm gonna light it Checkpoint. I don't know the tick tick and nothing happened. It's like, huh I'm I'm glad you brought it up. Yeah, I guess I just wasted a match for no written This creates the issue of a portable Light source that you can carry with you wherever you go. Oh, you just don't Um, but also Yeah, you just it's like thick candle that you could carry with you and a lantern that you can carry with you But for me I thought I was overthinking this was before I realized this game was shit so You early on you hear legends of this goddess that protects travelers and stuff like that And I I don't know if this goddess this god queen from the alien world has come here before Or if the portals to earth are just here So she makes just trips Throughout time that allow many different Like kind of like legends of her being around. I don't know. It's dumb But you see these shrines And so I was thinking well, oh All of these shrines. I have the option to light candles and lamps If if what if I light them all do I get like a secret ending or does it affect the ending or the narrative? If I like honor this goddess if I Yeah, like is this an optional little thing that the game is like, you know If you show this goddess that you want to keep her shrines. Holy she might you know, she might Look with favor at you No, is apparently the answer is no Um, I just thought it was something that you could do that would be kind of nifty narratively So it sounds like we were pretty much on the way the same wavelength if you go to the first altar Or I think it's the second one I found in the game. I said something along the lines of Maybe this is like if you light all of them you get some kind of reward Or if maybe you light enough you get benefits or not enough you don't and then I looked at my resources I see you've kept my shrines. Holy person. And I was like when you see a weird alien Figure head behind it and the cave if I remember correctly. Yeah, something like that. Yeah And so I looked at my resources and when I play resource management games I get very down to like I want to put myself in the absolute best position at all times in case something goes very bad If if ever I can spare light I will and it's because I know that at some point something could go really bad And I'll need light desperately and I don't want to be left with none Um And so like I looked at it and I was like, you know what? I don't have enough incentive to believe this will do anything So I'm going to choose not to and like You know, I felt kind of bad I was like, I wish there was something they could you know signal to me that this would have any kind of purpose But I'm gonna go ahead and guess it does and I'm pretty sure it didn't Yeah, I don't think it did at all. Um I but I I lit all the ones out eventually I fairly early on Because they get achievements Is there a achievement? I'm checking. That's the only thing I there's a good chance that would be it. Yeah Yeah, but I thought there would be like a narrative sort of thing Oh, I think it would be great if she like gave you sympathy to a significant degree if you were like honoring her altars or some Shit Yeah, like after you light the fifth one or whatever like you see a vision of her or a whisper or Like something happens. Maybe Even if it was only visual and purely narrative that would be good and interesting if there was no mechanical benefit whatsoever Like maybe a scar that was always on your hand just isn't there anymore She healed a scar on your hand or something like that, but it turns out this isn't actually some Super natural I she basically is supernatural But turns out she's this alien visitor from another planet who just elopes here On occasion throughout time. I will say there is a chance that this stuff. We don't know That would make us feel a little better about any of the things we've been talking about This is obviously we all played the game once and we're going from memory In case of course that there's some actual thing to these things that we have no idea about and we're talking out of our ass But like Just going from what I experienced and I don't plan to look very far into this game. I'm so fucking disappointed with it Yeah, maybe there's a maybe there's a A ripped up half a page of someone's diary that's hidden underneath a camel somewhere that I didn't find that explains That there's actually an elegant solution to all of this I don't know maybe um, I wish they would have kept That because that's the thing with stories like these i'm some of the notes were legitimately interesting to read and they were almost exclusively in the alien world But there is like I was worried about missing one You know, I was I was exploring I found almost not for exploration sake for the thrill of discovery But I didn't want to miss any of the like the lore or the backstory And I was like the next note that I read might be really useful And because I'd find the memory jars and most of those were fucking worthless But some of the random scraps of notes could have some really interesting info on it or important stuff to the story I was like, man like Apparently I can't find any achievement for shrines. So I don't know. So yeah, well It's an I'm willing to believe there may be something that we've missed about them, but I mean Jesus Christ just saying Yeah, um I guess if we want to see it because we're kind of on the mechanics of the game Um, oh well funnily enough we actually tanged it away from what I was the reason I wanted to talk about the torches was not to talk about what we talked about But it was to highlight the obvious thing that happened when making this game which is embarrassing and that is you make half of your game in Silly desert land you can easily just put torches on the wall and have the player light those up because yeah When people were excavating these caves, they put torches on the wall. There you go. All right, fine Yeah, so when you get to the alien world wait, we've got all these mechanics that apply for like a world with torches on the wall What do we do? This is alien world. It's like the aliens have torches too What? Yeah, they have torches and matches from earth and like oil obviously to just roll it back to where we Mentioned the oil and matches you find this shit in the world of the aliens you literally find pots You open them and there are matchbooks inside it. It is Like I don't understand how anyone says the earth matches just just so that we're very clear the exact same texture The exact same match boxes as you find on earth Um to be super absurd if I were like playing this and thomas grip was sitting next to me I need to prove the entire game and like when I open that pot lid and pick it up. I would look at and be like Who are you? What have you done with him? This is not something Any rational game developer would do you you threw The oilcads are exactly the same as human ones and if you want to like the only argument you have it's like, oh Uh, the alien people people just threw a bunch of human shit all over the alien world when they got there for some reason also Well, that doesn't really make sense. Does it because you need matches to activate the fucking alien torches I don't like why is that the lighting system it infuriates me that they did this Let's let's go back uh back a while in video game history to a game called halo so Halo, right You are on an alien world How do you constantly is like, okay? How do you how are you gonna explain how you could constantly refill your human ammunition on an alien world? It's like well You arrive on this alien world on this big spaceship and it's got all these marines on it and the marines are on the uh They're they're on the halo ring world two and they're scattered around all the place And so, you know when you come across dead marines and things like that you can refill your ammo there from their stashes like, okay Um and all throughout the halo games whenever you're on an alien world Then you need to refill your human ammo. It is done when you come across essentially the dead marines Uh dead humans who have been there before you and have died and their weapons are there by their corpses And this is used as a tried and true method that is often how you refill your human ammo on alien worlds Um, it just goes just goes to show how years and years ago. We solved this issue We came up with narrative explanations as to how you can get resources Uh human resources on alien worlds Um, they didn't do something where there's like a like little v tie Energy packs that you could pour into the lantern and that works somehow dude if they did a thing where you you your lantern is like when you use v tie um Like refills on the alien world, but the lamp light becomes blue Or whatever like that would have been interesting how v tie is almost like a like a one size fits all magical energy source That gives great energy and great potential, but at a horrific cost Right, and so now you got a blue lantern powered by v tie like, huh, that would have been kind of interesting to use But no, it's just the same. It's just the same. This is the thing They they let the cat out of the bag They made it very clear that energy cells are created out of the v tie and it's it's like the power source Fucking every machine on this fucking world Every time yeah, and they don't really do anything with it other than saying this is what powers this planet essentially is v tie I find that so funny the the idea of v tie energy packs like little energizer batteries Kind of like it would it would give v tie this mystical quality It would first off it would show how good v tie is as an energy source because a part of you wonders surely With the cost that it takes to create v tie In terms of the logistics logistics it takes and some of that there are interesting notes in this game about That go into how do they harvest v tie the best? And there's there's a couple just like maybe literally a couple of notes that were legitimately interesting that I wish they explored more but um you with with all the cost and horrific moral issues and the All the work that's clearly put into a v tie energy grid Show me how useful it is You know how how show me that v tie is so incredibly efficient and useful and safe and appropriate to use as an energy source that it's worth all the trouble You know, can you just do a contractor in this world? We are like We go all these different things going on. It's like, oh, you know the hallways in sector a three seven eight and six They're all kind of dark. We need we need some lighting up there Um, what do you suggest and he's like well, we could build these like sort of stone Triangular-ish things. Oh, yes. Thank you for bringing those up Um, oh, I'm not even sure if if you can you haven't talked about them yet Oh, if we're not if I'm not making the point you're gonna make you can go right ahead after um All I was gonna say is we'll have that and then and then What I'm getting at is the concept of trying to explain to one of these fucking aliens like you're gonna light pieces of tree with other pieces of tree that have red Stuff on the ends of them that allow you to strike and light fire Which is probably some of the oldest technology. They even are aware of. Yeah Fire it's it's blue fire here because it's alien fire. It's very very different Yeah, I don't even need to like make this analogy But it's just kind of funny to think about if you were building a house think about primitive a match Really is like Using fire as a light source. Are we getting bulbs? Are we getting like blah blah? We're getting this this is that and then your contract is like fire wood Yeah, like what? We don't use fire as a light source. Did you even see a tree? Like it's Like it the like fire is quaintly primitive to us today to use as a light source You know It's efficient for cooking relatively It is but it's mostly we use it as Like we don't use Like my grandparents house, right? They have a fireplace It it's gas powered because you know modern world But you know, it's it's it's one of those things you'd light up not because you want to stay warm Or light up the room is because it's just for flavor Yeah, well people like use candles for mood rather than for light these days Yeah, absolutely doubles up as light sure, but like the main point is like candles are neat. They provide a mood I mean when I think it was Thomas Edison who said like this this light bulb will be So cheap and easy to use that only the rich will be able to afford to burn candles anymore Like the the idea that an alien world for non ceremonious Reasons or cultural reasons lights their stone palaces up with torches on the wall Fucking hell. It's like quake Like what the hell is happening because they have glowing v-tye lamps? Yes That seemed to be quite efficient But no torches lazy as fuck Um, but when I mentioned stone you said the you clue into something so when it comes to the The applicable technology that you're figuring out for yourself in this alien world Some of the puzzles quote-unquote puzzles Are that you have these little pyramid things that you carry around these little tiny pyramids? And these essentially work is like energy hubs So you have an energy source center. This is very puzzly. It makes no sense how this would be why they're technology Why the fuck would anyone have this? Yeah, well You you have this tiny little pyramid And a room or a zone that will have an energy source And you use these little portable You literally carry them around these little pyramids power pyramids And they link with these power sources over short distances and they go through walls and stuff And this is what you use to get energy to other things So if you have an unpowered door You put this pyramid conductor Close enough to the door and close enough to the power source and it links them But you carry these around and you set them on the ground and That they make no sense at all It makes no fucking sense in any universe that this is how they would power their doors and stuff There you go So think of it like oh, yeah, I could probably uh, I'll put it on screen and then I'll um I'll explain how it kind of how you would picture it working in an irl. So I'm gonna use the loo Yeah, um You you have a power point on your wall and then you plug in a Extension cable and extension cable and then you plug in another thing into that end of the extension cable that leads to your pc Let's say What this acts as is that system, but no cables And so You move those major points So the point on the wall the point in the middle than the than the pc they can all move around And as long as you're in range, I'm pretty sure they can go through walls Um As long as you're in range of the thing it will transfer energy. I do not know Exactly how the fuck this works and it is bizarre that this is how it works in the alien world Also, why aren't these things? It conjuncts with everything else like why Why are the this just creates more problems in terms of like why matches when you have this This Why this when you could have anything else? Yeah, of course like I can't believe like our systems make more sense than this You you would you would expect so alien though. Look at it. It's so alien. It's it's so weird But then they present the aliens as people who think and they have the like they've built a civilization you know The aliens people who think it's like generous rags Huh is generous to say they present the aliens as people who think It's like They they've built this civilization They have all these rooms and they have a power source But how it all works is clearly supposed to be a puzzle for the player and not actually something that exists Yeah, I mean opposed to just uh in the discord because yeah Wasn't that section on my stream anyways. It's like why is this practical? Like what's the point? Imagine going to alien engineering school and then you graduate so that you could use this fisher price toy To power the city Don't give me this because I know someone will make the smart ass comment It's like uh guys, you do realize when you look at like an engineering panel in like a nuclear power plant It will look like this to an alien No, no, it won't Just no There is a complex proceed like An alien can't walk into a nuclear power plant and start producing energy in 20 minutes Fisher price is like the perfect way to describe this honestly. This is like this is fisher prices alien technology where price is nuclear power plant Basically, yeah, we're all you got to do is just oh look three glowing symbols Match up the like imagine the actual aliens the adult aliens at their job at this panel Like well you're doing stuff with this if the symbols, let's say represent Um, I'm trying to I'm trying to be kind to the game here. Let's say they represent like core power core power side power, um, you know Streduous power lx x power and it's like you got to select the right ones in order to power the particular thing I would just be like Why is it this like what? Yeah, why is it not just the options that each have their own button for the outcome not you have to figure out a Puzzle every time you want to change something. This is fucking bizarre Okay, so So yeah the the puzzles in the puzzles and soma and the dark descent they made sense in the world They were puzzles not because they were created as puzzles But they were in universe just problems to solve As simple as you you press a thing And a and a thing starts like to change it's on chains a platform is on chains It's coming down, but it gets kind of jammed And so you you intuitively see some rocks And like if I throw the rocks on top of the the platform Maybe it'll weigh it down so it can come down and it does And you're like that was satisfying Because let's just say physics puzzle that's that's you know calling it a puzzle is is awkward But you you understand like it's yeah a thing that's in your way The other one that's just a classic little frictional games one where it's like oh you need to um Roll this this winch in order to open up a thing, but there's a there's wood that's jammed into the wedge you can Uh pull up a box stand on it and pull the thing out you can throw a box at it to break it Um like like these are all it's it's it's just real life shit. It's like how would you do this in real life? I don't know And then I said somas are a lot more um In terms of their world like just just just more suitable They're all like electrical related or power related because the whole system's falling apart But I can't like I can't tell you what the hell they were doing in uh in rebirth They're just fucking around. They're like, I don't know we need to have puzzles sam neesha His symbols on a panel that you spin around Like again like a fisher price toy. Oh, yeah, sorry. Let me show that one Yeah, the second one the the second one is probably a better picture Because this is like the premium version of the fisher price toy because this one spins Yeah, this is for the this is for the the six year olds when they get really smart Yeah, so Just for anybody who didn't play this game and is interested in this conversation and doesn't know what the fuck we're talking about Normally they're they're static little squares and you have to find the right selection of three And then as many players probably did you figured out at one point? Wait, I can't seem to make the selection It's not working and then you realize you can spin the board So it'll change how the symbols are cut out connected to each other And you you just take a step back like what the fuck is this? What is happening? it's Imagine nuclear power plant controls where you just spin the console Because remember this portal this panel here It's not like a little this is like how you power up an interdimensional portal Like this is this is some serious shit This is argue like remember this technology is argue if we could do this It would be the most important technological invention in the history of human civilization And so on one hand this is supposed to be accessible to anyone who needs to use it And therefore it should just be one fucking button and it's on and off on the other hand It's supposed to be secure to prevent anyone who's not authorized to use it in which case. Why is it a fisher price puzzle? Yeah, maybe so very to complete the retardation of this one specifically Because calibrated you have to move this huge Pillars with symbols on them Like imagine like you know how you know how in the real world we have control rooms. Yes This is it's a big it's it's an important place Where you have a panel with all of the buttons that you need to do your job because You it makes sense to have them all next to each other with little bitty levers and knobs and things that you could But what the fuck is this? Yeah, like the guy who invented this you just want to sit down and be like What the fuck's up with these obelisks made out of stone with the glowing symbols on them Like can you just make some buttons so that I could just do this from my office or yeah Like no no you got to use this thing to turn these big fucking obelisks that light up these certain symbols And then the symbols have to match that. What are you doing? Can I have a list of places I can go and just click the buttons like no No, no if you the more you think about what this is designed for the more it baffles you you're like What the fuck are you guys doing? And also you need to power it up from a floor above somewhere Was the buffer below if it was above but you put the orb that you Alien world I think this is the top and it goes down to the portal below Yeah I think this is the middle you put the orb on top somewhere and the orb goes in the orb goes inside the portal So like the orb goes with you. Yeah All right Oh, yeah, right, right. It's below you do the But you need to yeah the lens is it's lenses below. It's battling. Yeah, it's too much fucking regardless Uh, I didn't even notice what I was playing is this is fucking retarded So they're yeah, it's it's a mess Um, if you're gonna create an alien world, then it needs to be alien There can be familiar aspects like like the buildings, you know, it makes sense that aliens would have buildings That could be similar to ours with you know walls for shelter Doors which act through, you know, the engineering equivalent of a transversal through a wall You could close very just universally Useful things, right? Um, but stuff like this was like man Like it's it's like this was made for children so, um Just one additional thing I wanted to say about the matches. Um, so I'm just gonna shove it in before we find another topic Because there's just so many left even the um The fact that you're limited on 10 is a almost so again it'd be like Ooh, does that remind you of the dark descent soma or something else? It's like well dark descent as we mentioned earlier. You could pick up infinite. So can't be that soma Your light source was a light on your suit. It was infinite and it would Fuck up or flicker according to when enemies were close by Or when like power different things could go down Light management in soma wasn't as much of a thing because again Soma's not the same as dark descent and that's part of why people didn't like it They were they were like you check out reviews. Those people like it's not dark descent. It's not a scariest doctor sent the same boo um So it's like so so what can you compare it to? It's like well back in the day when I did You know dark descent and soma and people were like why why no talk about outlast outlast is great I was like, uh, finally I'm talking about last I completed the game a few times and I remember thinking I don't need to complete it on the hardest difficulty But then my brain was like But what if you find more stuff? Like oftentimes you play a game on its hardest difficulty You can really like it pushes it to its limits in terms of how everything works Because they want to make it really hard for you and you'll be able to find just how broken everything can be And the first thing you realize is I think on the easiest difficulty you get 10 batteries in total possible And then on the hardest one, I believe it's three. I'd have to check it again You'd be like why are they doing that? It's like well to hamper you and that is it Like it's just it's fucking annoying It's it's the shooter equivalent of oh you have you're at the next difficulty enemies have more health Yeah, it's as simple as that It's just tweak a number and then boom the game is now more difficult Because you just tweak the number that has no makes no sense in universe for why it would be more difficult It's just enemies just they take more bullets to kill now And uh, yeah, it's more difficult incredibly fucking disappointing The frictional games went from a superior system to outlast and then they copied outlast What the hell are you doing like? Oh, if the if the matches were infinite you could carry as many as you can carry. I actually think this game only improves Yeah, you just don't give people as many matches Like here's the thing you could have something be valuable because it scares Without hampering how many you could carry at once because again, they're fucking matches They're with tinderboxes and if ever they concluded, you know, that was a mistake. I'd be like why? Well, you know a lot of people had a lot of tinderboxes by the end. It's like, okay, so reduce the amount in the game That's all you have to do. Yeah Yeah, you still want to because here's the thing when you when you can only carry So much and you're constantly dropping you can't Pick up stuff that you find you are Disincentivizing people exploring for more resources because you are limiting the amount that they have Right. I'll tell you what there were certain sections where I ended up using like three matches in a row While I was moving through a place And once I'd done that like one time I was like I don't want to spend my matches because I feel like there may be portions where I have to use a lot of them And so it just like put me in a position where I was just like if I cap out of 10 I guess I cap out of 10. I just I'll try not to use them still Because 10 is just not actually that high when you have a couple of sections in a row We have to use matches and you can't find any to pick up Hmm Compare that to I'm holding 23 matches And I've been finding them pretty regularly. Yeah, I think I'm going to start using them a little bit more liberally now And this also creates another issue So the first thing that happens when you start up the game actually start up playing the game Is you get a message and the message says this was this is a Bigger red flag than I thought it was when I first started playing it It made me raise a brow at the time though It says don't play this game to win Yeah, I was like I remember that oh ha that's interesting And as the game progressed and as I went through the game The game basically doesn't have a fail state um You can't really lose Which by the way is the same as um well So dark descent when you were hit you could you can take one hit and then you hit again and you die And that's dependent on the enemy type as well if you fight the big the the second type of enemy you you can one hit you But uh, yeah, once you die in dark scent you go back to the previous checkpoint, but they'll often Uh, activate a couple of torches or remove the monster that killed you from roaming It's their way of just being like okay. You had some trouble there Uh, here's some here's some bonuses now go again. Soma was um One hit you get knocked to the ground and then you wake up and you've got half health And then if you get hit again, you go back to a checkpoint um And it'll say game over This game it like rewinds you um to the nearest checkpoint It feels weird But they try to but like the game still goes on like there's no Look, there's no game over like there's no You there's never an incontinuity of character You're if you get grabbed by oh by enemies don't hit you anymore You just get grabbed by them and you have to do a quick time event to kick them away or But they don't like hit you and damage you and you have to run away. Um But whenever you get grabbed or you go insane or whatever Um, you you have these flashes Of spooky images and loud noises and your characters like running what? I just I want to avoid that. I want to do all of that. What I think They're running away back to the checkpoints. Um, well, you just said the spooky flashes while you're running Yeah, I just mentioned it briefly You you you trying to say like it's just a combo of No, I I that was that was the the beginning and the end of all I was going to mention of them for now no, um Because I was because we were talking about like game fail states and the game says don't play Oh, you're talking about the fucking I I completely misunderstood. You're talking about the cutscene that plays where it like yeah, Yeah, there's a cutscene that plays when you When when when you get too afraid or when a monster gets you I completely forgot about that Yeah, you have these little flashes of you running through the area And then wake up somewhere different. I think the way it works algorithm wise well, not really algorithm, but um presets or whatever Let's say there are 50 areas in the game They seem to have like recorded you like a like a like a base player running through An area of each of these 50 and depending on where you are in the game. They will play the latest three Um As if to imply something about your memory or I guess they're just like you've you've gone Crazy for a moment and you're just blindly running around now Um Which doesn't make sense in the world because if you have monsters that are trying to kill you then they would kill you They wouldn't just like spook you and then let you go so that you could run away and try again That's the thing. I'm not even I'm not even clear on what that is trying to tell you I think what they're What they're applying or trying to say is you turn into this ghoul state for I don't know X amount of time Run around and then go back to that checkpoint I guess yeah, because like your arms get a little bit tis me for a moment But ultimately I don't think there's a fail state in this game One thing I did notice though at the end you can look in You can look into like a well or something or fountain You can see your your image in there and I noticed that uh mollus face Of tazzy was much more fucked up than mine. So I guess he got caught one more time than I did or something I don't know I'm hold up a second. I just popped in just curiously. Are you telling me you can't die in this game? I don't think I don't think there's a fail state in this game. Let me actually google that Yeah, because I got caught a couple of times, but I never died um At one point actually the the monster that chased me was gone and I could just explore freely. Yeah, that happened to me at one point Well, this is what I want to be cautious about the way I sort of phrased this right so There is no fail state is a criticism that was given to dr. Senton soma as well. Um because There were fail states Well, I would argue that there is as much a fail state in the new game as there is in the old ones Um, it's just contextually. It's weird in well, I would well in In the old games like there would be a point where it would be like you would lose In this game you you can't die. You just have a little cut scene that has your character running back. There's no You know, you died you lost it's over Um, you failed you have to try again It it makes it to where your character is always alive no matter what it's just an inconvenience I'm relatively sure that soma's was the one that had the biggest fail state actually when most people refer to soma's like not having one so From memory again dr. Sent prison area. Let's just say If you're in the process of grabbing the acid to take it to the door and you get killed by a gatherer or brute I forget specific names It'll probably respawn you in that area and the portion that you get respawned in will have a couple of torches lit And they may have despawned the roaming monster that killed you and you'll probably have the acid and you can probably go to the door now um And it's because frictional was I've been on record saying they don't want their players to literally die ever because they believe that Dying in horror games will start to affect your Your ability to be scared Which is true considering that Like outlast and outlast 2 like suffers Horribly for the high amount of deaths that you have the thing about Um, because I think soma nails it right It's like you get knocked over and your screen's all fucky because you're a robot That's just been abused and like cracked screen or whatever else and things are glitching And you need to put your hand in the in the shloopy gloopy to get the wow to like heal the pieces that have you know Broken but if you get hit twice Then you go back to the last save like and it's a game over screen from what I remember It's like a legit like you fucked up. You're going back um This game so the the one I remember vividly was You're in like a hallway and you realize you need to power a cell You go forward and you see someone is in like a weird tortured chambery sort of situation and there's a monster in there So There's other criticisms for this you have to go through so many Yeah, so I go in and um, I don't realize what I'm supposed to do fast enough and um, I I can't remember exactly how I died, but I got hit enough that I died by the creature And so I fall over weird shit happens on my screen. Did they play the um the jumpscare sounds when you When you yeah, they do. Yeah, I thought they did. Um Fuck that shit, man. So anyway, which yeah, they play that and I remember being like in a state of I'm pretty sure I was disillusioned by that point And like it shows me running and then it spawns me back in that hallway just before I saw him for the first time and I was like So really You just annoyed me Like you just moved me a couple meters like okay So this is what I mean I would need to play the game more to be able to finalize exactly what is seriously wrong with their punishment system But that what I just described should probably give you an idea like that that is what is that that's just bullshit So it's not explicitly saying game over but it sort of is it's just a little more veiled kind of like a fake loading screen and an elevator They veil it in a way that doesn't make sense Like there's not a specific screen where you have to say continue. Yes or no If they they want to try and keep it like you didn't fail In a narrative in a way that doesn't make sense narratively. Yeah, I still don't really get what what is happening in that I don't really understand what they're trying to say is happening. You you fell over you you you munged out or you went feral and then you ran Back and forward. I don't know And then you were normal again where you kind of were at the beginning of this section I was like, I just I don't know exactly what they're trying to say with that one Yeah It's weird. It's really weird And unnecessary and yeah, it's annoying I The uh, can we talk about uh, the maze? Yeah, yes I'd love to talk about the maze tomorrow I did talk about this on our on our latest efap in relation to when we're recording this. Um I'm gonna I'm gonna go first on this because I want to do the comparison again. So In my head the maze I'm just gonna call it that for the fuck of it reminds me of the server room I don't know if it's called that in soma and the choir in uh in amnesia now The choir in amnesia since that is chronologically the first one you would have played if you played all of these on release um It's a really big room you've got to get to I believe three different doors in this really big room there's loads of fog And um, there's a there's an enemy in here And it's really fucking spooky and I remember when I was looking into Sort of analyzing it that they said they were very much inspired by I believe it's a silent hill to opening It's a world that's filled with fog and uh, yeah, that makes sense It adds to the creep factor and I'm pretty sure the fog in that game wasn't because that was necessarily what they wanted to do It was to do with draw distance or something. Yeah. Yeah But it ended up Being something of quite the fucking scare because you're just like in this as you move through And amnesia you can hear the noises from the monster and you're not It's not easy to understand exactly where it is And you know that you need to get to three doors in this big place and you start turning around to avoid it And you see a pillar you see a pillar behind you like fuck where am I where even was the entrance like this is getting kind of Yeah, you know it was a good good segment really really good. The cool thing about it was that in narrative, uh, this the torture rooms have little like, uh, You know like gramophone opening things that people are screaming in those rooms and it travels through the little pipes Into the holding cells where other prisoners are and there's a little note you can find from alexander Or i'm pretty sure he's like this Just adds to the insane levels of fear that prison they can hear the other people screaming ahead of time for them getting tortured the same way Like oh, this is just a really good system However, as a result of that you know that if you follow the pipes above you you'll it'll lead you into the torture rooms So it's like a really clever little like way to try and find a way out of this Fog-ridden room and this monster that's chasing you around The really big highlight of the game as far as i'm concerned. It was really well put together Then you have soma With a server room and it's a very simple setup. You've got a room filled with little server blocks They act almost as like, uh obstacles that are all like think of a graveyard and all of the gravestones Are things you can't move into you have to move around them and they're in a nice As they would be in a server room a blocked sort of uh something by something thing There's a creature in there Now your objective is to get to the other side of the room from where you entered press a button That activates like a reset and once it's uh resetting over 30 seconds You press it again and then you leave the problem is You can carefully avoid the monster when you press that button It makes enough noise that the monster will be like what the fuck is that and it'll come toward it You know, you've got to press that button again in 30 seconds But you also know the monster's coming creates a really stressful moment because now you've got to fish him around Maybe throw some things At the right time because if you if you take longer than like 30 seconds after it's done It'll reset again. So you've got to do it right. It's really scary nice and dark You do it. You run the fuck out of there and you're safe the maze In this one and I can just describe my my experience then you guys can go I guess So you enter this place with these Walls that sort of open and close At first it seems like there's no real system to it. You're like, huh? What is this? Is it kind of open and closing? And eventually you sort of realize there are platforms If you stand on them or if you place things on them, it'll either open or close pressure plates Yeah, it's it's like a big grid and There's pillars everywhere and the pillars are the way that it's a maze Is that you could see through all the pillars, but they've all got like metal walls connecting them sometimes That's the maze portion of it. And so I was like this is like visually kind of pretty interesting I don't know. I don't know what's going on here. I was I was interested in trying to kind of figure it out I was looking around and then it was like boom. There's a creature in here I remember it gave a tool tip of stay crouched and you can avoid the thing. I was like, oh gosh There's an enemy in here. Thanks. I haven't figured out that yet about this point of game Yeah, kind of awkward because I don't know if because I I did praise um both soma and amnesia for that in terms of super early game Like early game. They're like, oh by the way crouch to avoid enemies. You haven't met one yet and you're like fuck Yeah, like why are you telling me this now? Is this relevant? Oh my god How many encounters is this when you get to the maze? It's like More than halfway through, right? There's not yeah, there's and there's not really that many encounter actual encounters here Um, yeah, that's actually something we should probably bring out. It's like there's like five or something really dull By the way, yeah, it's really dull so he spawns and and and you're like, oh shit and like I um Kind of accidentally sort of walked up to him and then he grabbed me and he was like, oh my god You're tassie and he drops you and he's like, uh and sort of runs off. I remember saying on stream I'm like, I don't know what's really happening right now He's like afraid of me. Am I the monster and then I was like, but but he's like clearly antagonistic And now it's telling me to run again like what and when he put his face up into the screen I suppose this is a whole other topic. We'll try and get to it Let's just say I wasn't scared. I was more like, oh Yeah, it yeah, it was not so after we played this game a bit We we exchanged a lot of the concept art and screenshots from soma um So the the spook the spook design In amnesia rebirth is really dull and uninspired. Yes They they look silly. I'm sorry. Um, yeah graphically You can't handle what you're trying to do. I'm afraid Um In terms of really making them look scary So you need to keep them in the dark and for some reason they do the outlast thing They grab you and fill your fucking screen with their face Why are you doing outlast things? Stop doing outlast things Um And so anyway, he does that and and I was like, okay Fuck I gotta I guess I gotta figure out how to operate this maze and I kept like getting the sense that he was getting closer and closer So I just started running rather than trying to figure out what I was doing If you watch my playthrough is fucking awkward. I run past him many times I get stuck inside him for a moment where I'm looking around he can like he keeps missing me I don't know why he's clearly like swiping for me And I think I take damage twice or something But I'm just like what the fuck's happening and then it's like, oh Maybe go to the to where he like came out and I was like that probably makes sense I like run toward it and then it's like locked off and so I just go in a circle bump into him again I'm like, oh, sorry. Just trying to find. Yeah, and let's turn around find another thing keep running like Oh, I did it and I jump through and it's then he's like damn you. I'll get you Or yeah, yeah, come back here. I'll get you And like I think that was the moment where I was like who made this game because it wasn't frictional like this is Something's wrong. Something's very very wrong because the first two Encounters I just described from amnesia and soma they really impressed me This maze one left me like deflated. I was like, what the hell did I just even do? I was just running around. I don't know So go nuts both of you. That's my input I the maze part was tedious and dull and there didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it It was just wonder around I it was a very Unappealing part of the game. It wasn't It just wasn't it felt I think the way that he put it was pretty good Is like this didn't seem like frictional at all It feel it felt like it could be a nifty concept Especially with how they explain it in universe And sort of what it's supposed to be but um like It was so dull and unfun to go through There was I know in that section for me. I just ran I just ran around eventually and I found the exit It doesn't seem like an actual maze really I I think if you actually charted the path of where you could go It was Like a vein channel that you would follow Um, I feel like you didn't actually you wouldn't actually go through like 80 percent of the actual maze um I I It was it annoyed me that the pressure plates would activate these like wall things that would pop up That were that would prevent you from moving through even though. There's clearly enough room for you to pass through them um I I I guess I don't know what else I can add to it other than it's just a worse version of all the stuff that came before it Uninsured Yeah, and there's like that that weird cut scene in there was just Like Like is it it threw me off that he was like afraid of me? And then he was also my my enemy to run away from I was just thrown by that I was like I think it was that he wasn't afraid of you I think it was that the little last piece of humanity left in him was like, oh wait I know you uh, and then he drops it, but he can't resist any longer after that Yeah, like it can make sense. It just threw me completely. I was I was so confused in terms of just what I was supposed to be Like he keeps saying no get away from me get away from me. Don't don't come close that sort of thing over and over when you hear him But um Yeah, I'm not gonna put all the blame on the game for that one I just it was bad timing because like that that threw me for a loop and I couldn't take any of it The way that it probably was meant to be but on top of that I still think mechanically it is fucking lame compared to the previous two iterations Yeah, we're just going through it. It's like, oh, I'm going this way Oh, there's a monster and then yeah, I already mentioned with the whole cutscene thingy Uh, it's like, oh, it's you and it's like, okay Oh Like I guess he's not my enemy anymore And then I walk in his generous like no go away, but whether to at least What were there two critters creatures in there? Was he one and was there another one? Was he the The other one was on the end was on the end. I just got disoriented because it's amazing. Maze is a really fun guys You go kind of towards him I was like, oh, I'm looking actually at my stream. Well, it was like I got a little flash there was like, fuck off flash Like I didn't even get scared Yeah We're getting closer and closer to that. I'm running out of notes. So we're we're we're yeah, um, I guess I was looking for a fruit and then after the whole cutscene appears like, okay I guess I have to get out of this maze and walk in and walking is like and then somewhere and realize I have no fucking idea where I need to go. Um, by the way Yeah, I think I found the exit by accident because there wasn't really much of an indication as to where you're supposed to go Just progress through the maze and I was like I don't know if you've changed something but you sound like you're clipping your microphone a lot more now than you were Oh, yeah, you just sound a whole lot louder and worse like Yeah, you're tapping it out a little Actually, I had to turn you down earlier and you're even louder Is this this better? Keep talking. Yeah, I think so. Is this better? Yes, it is. I might have moved the knob while I was Moving my headphones. Sorry. Yeah, that sounds better. Um Yeah, and at some point I was like, what the fuck am I going like? I don't I don't know where I'm going It's like the stores are closing That's sort of the whole game though. Yeah So It's very like I use this word and then I feel like I'm gonna have to really explain myself It feels super linear And yes, and you might be like, what do you mean? There's like portals everywhere. There's all kinds of different worlds There's all kinds of different puzzles at the same time. There's like hub worlds that have different branching patterns Yeah, but I never really addressing Yeah, I never really felt like I was free. It just felt like Like what's next game? I'll press the buttons. I guess Yeah, um So there's also, um There's more reliance on there's certainly way more reliance on cutscenes in this game They even have a little bit of animation for some stuff that you do. Oh once more note about that Uh matches are infinite if you have a cutscene happening Uh, like I if you like a match and then a memory plays or whatever your match doesn't move in terms of its, um Like it doesn't burn anything at all, but it stays as light and you can still move I found that really fucking weird. Yeah, funny enough on the opposite side If you don't have a match on and you're reading something in the dark your meter goes up So I had one I had one time where I was reading a note without a match in my hand And it wasn't the dark and I put away the note and I go insane and walk around Oh, that's fucked up and got reset. I I brought this up I like I can't remember if it was on the previous stream or not if it was interested in a call, but Um cry me if I'm wrong other games But like they dropped notes in places that were safe to read them rather than in dark places So you automatically are like, oh, I picked up a note. I read and it's like, ah You should have had a match lit so that you don't go insane. It's like wait. Why are you doing this this way? Why can't you just put notes in safe places like static light sources? Of course players want to read the note when they pick it up You know that they don't think I'm going to pick this up walk to somewhere safe and then read it I got on my inventory where they go where there's no just catalogs in my inventory Why why did you just do it the same but worse they keep doing it? Yeah And the other funny part about that same scene Tassie walked around in her crazed ghoul maniac cutscene, I guess and I probably you probably go to like three four places and then I I woke I woke up again in the next room Where it just came from So I don't know where the fuck she was walking to but I was like in the next room It just came from so in case anybody doesn't quite follow what we're talking about, right? So you can get hit by the enemies and it'll trigger that thing we were talking about in terms of a fail state quote unquote Also, if you get too much fear, it'll do the same thing So like if you picture your fear as a 100% thing and it chips down for how long you're in darkness If it hits zero it you get that same fail state that all it does is move you to a different room And you're like, okay. Thank you Yeah, you would think that the consequences of failure for what the in-game scenario is would be more dire than an annoyance But you'd be mistake And yeah, you might be thinking to yourselves wait a minute if I can kill you now You're like, yeah in the dark descent the worst fear can do is cripple you for a moment You you in a way that almost seems like it's trying to replicate real life You get so afraid that you curl up and fall over and you're just terrified You're stunned with fear Until if you're able to get closer to a light source or you're able to roll it out You finally get back up And the reason why that mechanic works so well Is because if it triggers while you're in a hallway because you just haven't been keeping things lit up You'll probably be all right But if it got triggered because you're in a dark place you were looking at the monster that's looking for you Which is something they want to discourage because the monsters don't look particularly amazing in 2010s amnesia So it's a double win Then you might fall over while it's already noticed you you cannot run away now and you're gonna die Like that's like the logic is that you can get killed if you're not careful about managing your fear. It is a resource Um, meanwhile in this game, they're just like, ah, fuck it. It'll just reset you like okay Other resets annoying so why even bother? Yeah, the consequences of failure are annoyance not death Okay, um, yeah, uh So and I guess I'm trying to think of because we want to end this all with with the big annoyance But I'm just trying to think more. Oh go for it. Go for it. Go for it So do you remember earlier when I was saying about that the door I opened and then it turned out I'd gone on to the narrative and I'd lost my chance to look at the other doors Yeah, you had like a really extreme version of that that I didn't even know was possible Yeah, so that's leading into some other stuff and again if we find some tangents I'm willing to go on them. It's fine because this is this is going to be one of the things where I was almost Blown away that frictional had made this um So at that point I was like damn I'm going to try and search those other two pathways or whatever that I that I spotted earlier. I hope anyway Um, but I'll just continue on And so I'm gathering up the notes I'm looking around and then I discover that like oh this thing needs a power source and um I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt because this is not where I'm trying to highlight the problem But I remember Tassie being like oh that looks like a transport Like we need to power that up. But I just remember being like it does I remember looking at him being like that's it. Okay like I just yeah, I I assumed it was some transportation system cage thingy. Maybe but like She because once you you don't have time to really think about what it is because once you walk into that room She tells you what it is. It's like, oh How the fuck do you you said you you're saying more about this than the fucking interdimensional portals exactly Um, and so you figure out pretty quickly. Oh, and I think before you get even to that You find the room where it's like you need to get into the chair And you need to it needs to inject some v-tie to do to do something but in order to do that You need a power cell and I remember Looking at the system and thinking well wait this the only way to do that is to make like to torture someone I I played doctor said and I was like I don't even know that I necessarily Want to do that but then I thought In conjunction with my disappointment in the game I wonder if I'll even have a choice and I remember someone In chat was because I think I responded to them They were like, uh, do you need to torture this person in order to progress? Uh, you know like somo with Uh Carl Semkin We'll go I'm gonna bring that up a little bit later actually because that's we're gonna get there But there's another tangent that's coming and I already know what it's gonna be and you guys probably gonna want to jump on it To so yeah, so I was like I need a power source to power up that transport then But I also at some point need to find a fuel cell for that system. I'm assuming I need to do both of these things I was a little bit unsure of exactly what was going on. So you move into the room You look around you eventually find the power source is sitting on a table Do you remember it's like a dining table or some shit? Yes, it's like behind some cloths Uh, there's a cloth separate in the two rooms and it's just the power Do I call it the extension cable? I don't know like a chill area for like people. Yeah, it's really odd It was like a light plant Uh, there was a here's definitely this safe place that you could hang out in. Yeah And the alien extension cable was in there and I was just like this weird whatever picked it up And I was like I need to take it back to that room And then um boom A spooky Dementor spawns And I remember the moment it did I was kind of like jazzed. I was like, oh This is like a new thing And it looks like it's an alien first question that popped in my head though is like What's he is he like is he like a robot or is he like a because the civilization is dead? What is he? Good not necessarily like I'm not looking to find out in terms of law what he is I just mean like what is his is he? Just picture it let's just pretend for a second He's just an alien security card I'd be like, dude, there are bigger problems going on right now than looking at whether or not I've been here Like, you know what I mean? Things are falling the fuck apart. So it was like is he a drone? I guess but then that's I don't know Let's just say though that like I got spooked. I was like, oh, I don't want to die So I like dropped the power cell and tried to move around the room And I thought naturally whichever room he just came out of is probably my goal Like that that's typically how they do it And then I was like, um, I'm gonna have to go back because I need that power cell and I I think mel you're watching me at that point right like because I remember It was shortly after I finished it probably no wait you you you you played the next day, I think right? Uh, well, I'm sure I did that sequence in one either way I was like I gotta go back and like I remember it grabbed me and it was like qte's to escape and I was like All right, um, and I think we've registered already but before you hit maximum fear you can use qte's to escape. It's It's really shit wiggle the mouse that had wasd wiggle What can like I don't know like what the hell? What are we doing frictional? What the fuck are we doing qte's to escape being captured by a monster from your own fuck up? It's just weird but of course, um You have a limit on how many times you can do it, I guess and and and I think the second time I was caught I tried it and he just grabbed me and it was over and I was like, oh And then it just pushed me back to the room before it and I was like, okay And uh, I went in and I was like, right. I'm pretty sure I got the hang of this I know to just stay like I'm almost interested on less a spook level and more of a mechanical level Finally a challenge. There's a creature running around in here. There's an object in this room I need to grab that object and get out of this room without getting captured by the alien who has a cone spotlight It's like that is engagement to me. Like at least there's something to do Yeah, there's something happening. Oh boy to my shock horror. He was despawned. So I was like, oh Like and I think I said oh damn really? Yeah, you get grabbed once and he's despond And I and I said all my street. I was like, okay, I'm like I mean, I wouldn't have minded having a second chance You don't have to baby be a sad face. Um Oh, well, you know and picked up the power thing And started up the transport and so before I carry on with what I'm getting into with that little story Those enemies suck Yeah, they suck. They do suck. I found them to be very inconsistent with how they spotted you. Yeah Can I highlight that they can't capture you they can't catch you hiding in the transport because for some reason there are panels on the transport Yeah, what the fuck's that about they like they are very clearly searching the transport in case there's anyone in there But they have the power to teleport like through little balls of light. So just go inside it and check once Two of them at that point. Yeah, they like invalids. They're just watching this move pass. They're like, oh my god Hopefully nobody's hiding behind these panels that we installed on the transport for no reason What an absurd fucking move it. I was just like why yeah, I didn't know if that was something you were so I just went along with it and hid from them and I was like, oh, I guess that was good enough. All right I guess they didn't see me. Yeah, and again, like if they're robotic droid things Like I can I can I'm just even more confused But the idea that these are like flesh and blood alien creatures that are just like Running the daily routine where their entire civilization is over except for all of the fuel cells with They said that like the shadow would transform them into these wraith like creatures. I'm like, I guess this is them But how they seem to be a part of the system, you know Like they like I thought originally at first they might be like scanning technology to see if it was working Or something like they were maintenance I thought that the whole purpose was security guards Yeah, me too I think that those were like the denizens of this world. Some of them got like corrupted by the shadow Because they got turned in one of the notes refers to I watched my kinsmen like the smartest of us get turned into these Like these these living nightmares. And so I assumed that was what they were supposed to be I assumed I mean The three of us played it Pooling on knowledge here Yeah, what are they? I just I'm not sure Uh, either way mechanically they are adept And it's just another it's another hitch in the In the in the in the story that is the shitty aliens and they retarded backward ass pieces of technology and operations Yeah Yeah, I was just randomly Saw that on my stream where I was clicking through Why why is that one person just sitting there with the I don't remember I'm glad you brought this up because I almost forgot about it because this was a really disappointing thing. So this Is I think on your second foray into the alien world This is really the part where you're in the civilization part of the alien civilization Because it's the first time you're in the quote unquote wilderness um So here apparently this guy is really important in the backstory. This isn't just some alien guy This is this is I think this is kita, uh tomoka's assistant and um he Um is like essentially like a traitor like he's trying to this guy here is apparently he's trying to kill the God queen with the red flesh. He's because he's he's next to a laboratory and That that has all the little the the red flesh in it and the shadow stuff and these boxes and bins and things and there's clearly That's like an alien laboratory And he said The vitae will that will keep you alive So he took a little for himself to keep him on life support And this is a section where you need to get two energy cells that are powered by vitae in order to open a door Essentially to get to progress And one of them you find just lying around Um and the other one is what's keeping him on life support here And you don't really know much about him other than a little note. That's close to him Don't really know too much about him. You don't know a lot of the context So you can't really make a judgment as to whether he should live or die um I spent a lot because this is a frictional game and this happens relatively early in the game I went looking around for a way to to get a different cell because the easy one If the the easy solution is you take the cell from his life support, he dies, but you get your cell You can progress through the game. That's easy However, I was thinking this is frictional I bet there's another cell around here somewhere that's difficult to acquire or take some ingenuity to get That I can use instead of killing this guy because you don't know the context a lot of a lot of the stuff on this alien world yet And I spent a lot of time looking around for an alternative method That this so that this guy could live so I wouldn't have to take the cell but I you're supposed to I guess And what's interesting is that even because he's got this tube that's blue where the vitae is going from the machine to the cell to like his mask You could take the cell out of the life support and the blue Disappears from the tube and when it disappears up to his mask He starts to choke and die you could put the cell back into the life support system And it will as long as he doesn't finally die from choking long enough. It will repower him and he'll be alive They're like, oh, okay. That's the nifty little touch But no, you're supposed to kill him here. There's no real Like you know, it's disappointing for anybody who played so yeah, which really really disappointed me Because it lacks the punch that the other parts of soma did Because this is just some alien dude on some other world that you don't know anything about really um I was like, oh, that's disappointing. It's like, okay. So you just so he's got to die um Also, your character doesn't really have anything to say about it. No, you just killed this alien You just killed this alien So she basically says nothing about it knowing all of what rags just said right keep that in mind when when I describe So my experience was I misunderstood I was like when I was playing it. I thought that it was like I literally read it backwards I thought that this was one of the vtai torture systems in which It was making him get tortured and the connector was was basically drawing it out of him and into the cell And so I was like, hmm if I take the cell it'll stop the torture So this is a win-win and I did and then he just like went and stopped moving and I was like, um I don't know if hmm and I turned around I was like there's another cell I guess I'll take that's my two cells. All right, then I was unsure of what just happened now in in the perfect world It would you know rags we tell be like, yeah, you should have paid more attention And you would have understood there was a really important choice to make because there were three cells in total But I couldn't find a third cell. I don't think there was a third cell That's what I'm getting at is like I Didn't read the situation the way I was obviously supposed to But if I had I would have been really disappointed Well, yeah, because like the only difference is you have to kill them and you feel bad and you have to kill them and it's okay But there's but it not in like a deep moral sense Like I was I spent a lot of time Looking around every nook and cranny and backtracking and trying to fidget with the cells and even try to find a way If there's a way to power one of the cells in some way through one of the machines Because I was like, okay, this game is going to reward me if I Take the hard more difficult longer route, but spare this guy's life Oh, all Tassi has to say is fuck That's that's it. Is it is that all she says? Yeah, I just checked she kills an alien and all she has Oh, but she'll talk to her fucking unborn baby 80% of her dialogue is going shush little one. It'll be okay Or some stupid bullshit that you already know But really impactful stuff like her murdering somebody Like I was standing there waiting for something to happen. It's like like like a little monologue or something and it's always just like Fuck. Oh, okay, cool Yeah, this um It's really disappointing. Um, yeah, so To to because that that's sort of like it's about just power cells choices and stuff. So I was bringing that um extension cable back knowing the Dupled dingus has been de-spawned. So it's just like yeah, just bringing it back And it powered up um the transport quote-unquote and I was like, all right And I realized that by doing that it powered the door that closed behind me and I was like, woohoo That's um, I can go back and check those other places now because that door is open. Yay And as I was moving toward where I wanted to go Um Tassi said should I leave without having found some sort of cure? And I was like wait Oh, I'm I'm doing this wrong. I'm doing this backwards apparently. Oh, that's what happened with you. Okay And I was like, oh, I guess I'm supposed to find the fuel cell and there's a there's a choice I can make And my stupid monkey brain was like Hey, the transport's powered up now. Maybe there's a fuel cell in it that I can use to power that machine And and just I was just curious about what the sort of what what the lay of the land is here Where are my options and where are the doors and what are all the power blah blah blah? And so I was just curious I was like, what is in this transport closed automatically and sent me to the next area and I was like, oh, fuck And then uh, it was like you I think I got an achievement the like the the you know the altruist or something And I was like, fuck and then I was figuring it out in the stream. I was like, so Had I been able to explore everything other than the place I fucking started with out of curiosity I would have discovered the option And I and people were saying to load an old save and I was like, I probably would have decided to spare the dude Like if I if I had a blatant choice to make because of uh I'm not even I'll be honest with you guys If they said like what do you prefer torture a random person or um, or have yourself not be cured I'd be like, I really don't care about me Yeah, that's the thing. I just kind of I did the torture But mostly just because I wanted something interesting to do Like I was really at that point. I just wanted something interesting to happen and to do Um, and I wanted just something to happen mechanically Um, so yeah, I I went through the whole process and it was a little interesting He had to you look put a few things together and put a couple things like that and Yeah, I I don't want to skip an entire section without even having realized That's what was happening outside of a random Piece of commentary from the character that didn't match my experience whatsoever So did you not get the blue lady appearing to you pointing to the to the bed and said, you know Oh, no, so I I knew that was a part of my goal Like I said, I was looking for the fuel cell as well as the power thing But I was looking to go and check the rooms that I had missed because I went through a quest room You know, and I I don't even know what they were anymore closes automatically Well, yeah, so to get to those things I wanted to look at I had to walk past the transport And that's when she said that and I was like, uh, I guess the transport will take me to a new area I didn't realize that walking into it activated. I thought I had to like press a button or some shit Oh, yeah, that was the nat I once I walked in I started looking for a button Then it paused and automatically closed and everything I was like, wait, how do I do this? No, I got to press a button, right? That's and like that just to me just seems like a bad move Because like I said, I was expecting to find like a little enginey thing with a panel Maybe I open it up and there's a little fuel cell in there and I'd be like, uh I can take this one out and use it on the person and of course, that's wrong That's not exactly that's not at all what they were doing But like it's perfectly reasonable for me to curiously check And they have it set so that I can skip the entire section by accident and it's like guys For me it was I thought I had to do it I thought I just thought I had to do it. I didn't even I think a part of me thought that too Because it was the blue chick who was telling you to do it So I thought it was an essential part of the story because the apparition Was saying you need to do this. I love how it just it didn't work for us What they were trying to do just seemed to not work for any of us But something else confusing because I I was going To the dude multiple times Just to see if he says anything or to us is anything to say Then I want to just says, uh, I don't know how to help you. I need to get out of here And I need to get out of here. So oh, I guess that's I just have to do it Yeah Let us compare to soma Where you find a robot And this is a guy speaking to you and he's thoroughly convinced. He's human He's just trapped under something and he needs you to find help for him And then you pull a lever and he starts screaming in pain and he's like, please don't do that again But you understand that you need to do that in order to progress And so if you look around you'll find an alternative That says do not do this one and you're like So there's an appeal to like your your sense of of don't cause this creature pain versus this other This other lever and you're like a lot a lot of people I think can even miss this choice. It can happen I think a lot of people struggle to understand what the hell's even happening to the guy when they pull the lever They're like, I is is he real is he suffering and that's why I'm kind of like happy with it in terms of just It's one of the earlier choices and it's introducing a lot of stuff to you But a lot of people tend to feel guilty When they pull the lever and they get what they want done and they come back to him and you can't un-pull it He's just permanently screaming and it just makes you feel like oh god. What have I done? But if you understand the situation really well, you cause yourself a lot more trouble But you don't put him in a perpetual state of torment And that's a really cool decision to have to make This came like I skipped the moral quandary by accident. I don't even know how you can fuck that up Yeah, it was Yeah, for me. I I just kind of wanted The the part of me that was like, oh, I want to have something interesting happen in this game at this point Basically over read any sense of oh, do I even need to do this? I was just I needed stimulation I don't care if it makes me a horrible person. I I was totally out of the game Like with so much I was engaged 100% With this I was like these these are just pixels on a screen. It doesn't matter. I hate me. I hate everybody I want to finish this game. I want to move on Yeah, I put like all the little spiky things and all the attachments that are in there It's like, oh, yeah, I've got a fucking poke to show that I don't care do something Cruel also they cheap out. I don't even show it. Yeah, the thing just goes down and you hear it's like Yeah, cool. Yeah, he just winds behind a door and you're like, oh, well, okay, that's fucking lame I want to see some torture But I got bad by the way. I got one more note outside of the main one. So And it is when I first encountered the big spookers the the the flinkle flanks the longmans who who look Just weird I remember like thinking like here we are then, you know They're finally doing the thing and it's like you're in a room that seems to be like Maybe sort of like the shape of an eight and he's on the other end You're on the beginning end And so there's room to be able to run around places and you got to get to the opposite ends like all right standard stuff You move through and you can avoid him pretty easily but the next room There's a bit of a trick to it in that I think they they set it up So the you think you can escape through like a little hole but the hole it caves in and then it gets activated And I saw your part of this playthrough metal Um Tassie says something like it could smell me Oh, yeah, which destroys the whole game I like that you brought that up because it's also not true mechanically Not even a little bit. Are you talking about the cistern area? Um, it's it's I think it's just before you get to that area But it's just it's it's one of the first major encounters. I believe in the game for the the longgoids whatever they are Yeah, and the goal Um, yeah, yeah It's not so is it in the fort. Sorry. Yeah, it's after the fort But before the cistern I believe it's like the connecting portion of that Okay, I I think I know what you're talking about. Yeah where um, and yeah, all right after you fall down the tank so She says that and it's funny because I don't even know that I registered that on my playthrough It was only when I watched metal that I was like they can smell you What do you know what no they can't smell because that means that they would always find you Like you can't say that Yeah, and mechanically you throw something somewhere and they go there. So smell does not Matter at all Yeah, this part really annoyed me because I was trying to figure out how it fucking found me after I ran so far away and Crouched behind a in a dark corner that was far away from it Yeah, um so Like mel you try to grab something and throw it meanwhile I and this was something that I It can happen in dark descent and I was hoping that a decade later They may have figured out just better ways to run horror games at this point, but you know, he's coming around I was I was crouched in the corner and I was like, I think he's gonna spot me That I think it's gonna happen He turned and looked at me and like the things are happening. I was like, well, I've got no choice I'm just gonna try and run past him tank the hit and just you know Go through the hole and then you pick me up And I was like, oh, shit. Is it like an insta kill and then it's like press the buttons And I did and then you kick him And I was just like what I this feels so weird. Look what what am I doing? And then it's like, all right, you but you can run again And he's a little bit disabled I guess I run past him because he's still kind of in my way and then I kept running And then I enter a new area and I think is there's another roaming creature And I was like, I guess I just keep running I'm just gonna just find a place to go and like it ends with a little hole And that's the entrance to the first like sort of portion of the system And I was running and running and I crouched and went in there and the music was still kind of playing But then you know the the the cries of the enemy start to like get quieter And because I'm such a cynical fuck, I was like I turned around I was like, can you even chase me in here? Like you should be able to because these are the literal fucking holes they use to move around the world And I was like, you should be able to chase me in here and it should be scary and he was gone He's like, where'd you go buddy? And I actually got out and you can you can see this in my stream I'm like, where'd he go? What's going on? He was right on my tail. Now he's just gone And then the whole room that acts as a sort of like fun little Encounter system where there are things to find but of course you're risking your Your time in the area and your light to find these things. So do you really want to I was like, I guess this whole area is free now Because he's despawned and I'm safe because if ever he pops up I can just run to that little hole that he can't get into for no reason And that was true But luckily I didn't have to use that because he was gone forever. He never respawned. I could search the whole place free And I was like, this is this is some this is some earlier than 2010 shit, man This is some mediocre fucking design Yeah And I like that they tried to put out this as like, oh, we're gonna be reinventing the horror genre again Oh, yeah, okay. This is a total regression for this company Again, if this released in 2010 and amnesia the doctor sent released in 2020 I'd have been like, yeah, they definitely upgraded Mechanically this game seems super dated. Yep So that shit pulls me right out in any horror game when I can manipulate it that easily after one test I'm just like, does this work this way? Oh, it does. Cool And like I said, this one gets even worse like sort of uh points against it because these creatures Their whole scare factor is you find little holes in the walls and it's like, these are what they're using to get around They could get to you at any moment Nope, they're just there to False spook you I guess Yeah, it's just all bullshit. It's all bullshit. The enemy encounters suck in the game And so Unless you guys love anything else I'll plug you into the blue real quick. I'll be right back. I think you're kidding too Such a shame I like the idea that like Tassie purposefully went back to the plane herself I guess In her seat and dropped her book in the thing in front of her For some reason and she took a memory erasing potion for some reason Do we do we know why that happened? Why she went to the airplane. No, no idea. No, why she took the memory erasing potion Did she I said a thing. Well, yeah, she's got amnesia. That's the whole thing Yeah, but we don't know why Is are we settled on that? I thought I thought we were gonna be kind and say that she took The amnesia potion rather than she simply has amnesia Oh, are we talking about why she how she has amnesia? I don't know. I don't know I don't know how I she doesn't remember things. I don't remember how she got she started off on the plane. I don't know You have to attach the handle of the door Which means when she came back in she closed it and then broke it off apparently And then she gave herself Forget me everything potion and then sat in her seat and dropped her notebook in front of herself in a little pouch like Why any of this? I I have no idea. I don't know why the game is called rebirth I don't know how you have amnesia Just come on Like i'm legit. I have no idea why this game is named to what it is this notebook It's the same one. We've had it has to be the same one since we first got our first run through right So why aren't there like a shit ton of pictures in there from your Who fucking knows she would have been drawing shit, right? She draws shit all fucking time She draws shit where she kind of remembers she draws shit Yes, it's dumb. That's really dumb Um, well, there is something we haven't really talked about so there's a mechanic in this game that relating to your pregnancy All right, I'm surprised we haven't talked about that yet one last thing before because it is kind of related to that whole narrative thing Assuming it was her choice to go to the airplane If you remember she's like possibly minutes from finding Selim alive Yeah, yeah, so If she really cared about him She just she just didn't go to the airplane instead went even to the cave. She might have gotten to him in time Why did you know what I mean? There's just so many this is the kind of stuff Where I know there's probably someone out there listening who's like, oh my god They didn't pick up that blah blah blah blah and if it explains it all fine But like literally we have no idea why she has amnesia. I have no idea why well I feel like we just raised like nine different questions that just It's all so fucking bullshit. But anyway Uh, yeah, so I think this will be we're going to address Fear and uh, if you want to go first rags with that that point about um the thing um, okay, so This game narratively is heavily centered around the idea that you're pregnant And you're gonna have a baby and an alien god queen from another planet. Once your baby um It is as dumb as it sounds so In other games your fear was diminished by I'll use fear and insanity interchangeably here They are they're mechanically the same For the most part. So To make yourself less afraid in other games you would stand in the light Like in in the dark descent you'd stand in the light being in the light would restore your sanity would lessen your fear You would be return to normal And you know this game. It's the same way you're gonna say what's neat About that just just as a quicker side is that I mean the It's a pretty common fear to be in complete darkness and so Not only is it mechanically beneficial, but when you're playing a game in a dark room There's very dark and you light up a torch or you hold up your lantern You feel safer because you can see things So not only is it like an in-game mechanic that you have to keep track of usually I'm not saying this is for everybody Usually the player will actually feel safer and less afraid when they have more light and they can see more things So it's a really great standard little Balance. I wonder why you I'm bringing this up. Do you think huh? So yeah, uh in that sense as you stand in the light your sanity increases your fear decreases There you go. Um, however This game it uses the narrative of you being pregnant That the primary function of this other than being a fucking constant annoyance They have to press x and check on your baby Is that whenever you're in darkness and you're getting too scared You can hold down x and you'll kneel and you'll rub your pregnant belly and it will Essentially be a safety button that you can use to prevent yourself from succumbing to your fear at any point No, not at any point. It's uh only when there's like a blue outline on your screen Yes, when the baby kicks or something, right? Yeah, you could hold you could hold down x and uh your fear will subside Um, I I found that it didn't always work and it does seem to be after it. Um A little blue line does like pop up on the bottom of the screen because I noticed those but whenever I used it it would like I I've never Failed to have it not save me Um, it would always diminish my fear whenever I like the sounds and everything would go away Hmm, it's not very good that we're all not even 100 exactly I actually had that mechanic multiple times when I was completely safe anyways It's like, oh, uh, guess I get more dialogue Yeah, yeah, um, you could have full, you know, fear levels or rather Zero fear amounts in you and it would be like you can now use your baby to avoid fear. You're like, uh, I'm good Really? Yeah, I don't I don't need to And I I guess it does the same thing for us just the different degrees But it essentially acts as a safety mechanism to prevent you from going insane that you can use at any time Um, it functions in the same way as like anti anti insanity potion and it refills over time Yeah, um So what this also Does is that your pregnancy is something that your baby's gonna kick all the time and you got to press x and you You say useless dialogue to it And it's really really annoying. Oh little one. We'll be okay We're gonna be okay little one. That's basically how you say is like it's gonna be okay. We're gonna get through this I'm doing this for you little one and that's that Really really repetitious And it creates really annoying scenarios in which you're like Oh boy I'm I'm getting the message that I'm feared right now, which we're we're on the cusp of addressing Um And I'm in light and it's not quite going away very fast better press x to baby It is a bizarre experience and every time I kept doing it I just felt weird and um, there was even a point where I like stopped doing it and was dying from fear or whatever And my chat were like, you're not rubbing your baby enough and I was like, uh It is a really tedious mechanic. It is dull. It is boring. It is just I'm suitable. I'm sorry. It's very unsuitable Oh, did we talk about um Laladnam? I never used mine Me neither neither. I didn't know what it's for uh, but Uh, if I recall correctly In the beginning of the game You chuck a whole bottle of that of that shit Right after you wake up, right? Do I remember that correctly? I'm pretty sure I think so. Yeah And later in the fortress when you when you're in the, uh Uh, step room where that one soldier trapped himself with a grenade Yeah, oh rags go story about that one. Oh, that's where the uh, that's where you Find the bottle of low danum low danum whatever Yeah, that one and the note that says, uh, oh, this is the the the medicine Don't drink it when you're pregnant and my first thought was like down the whole bottle of that in the beginning of the game that baby is toast Yeah, um, you just chugged that bottle of it and I'm like, oh shit. Oh, yeah, uh, yeah, poisons in the dosage I guess but whatever enough I I was going through the endings of the game And uh, when I teleported I was like, I mean the baby is out I might have chucked a bottle of low danum now Didn't do anything as far as I can tell maybe it's like a Thing that helps you against fear, maybe Why is there only one? Yeah, you only get the one you start out with Because I was thinking maybe I can give it to someone at some point like when I'm in this in the city with the other ones on something but It's the same with the with the ring you can take from salim and the bear you just Carry them around I guess until you give the bear to the baby at the end Yeah, I have I have no idea what it does um The okay, so in rebirth lotanum decreases tazis level of fear And is even more scarce than in previous games with only three bottles that can be found throughout the game So yeah, I never found them I don't found me the only the one yeah, I never found them apparently it decreases your fear I never needed to use it. Yeah, I just kept it with me the mechanics. Do not support this Yeah, I I forgot that I had it in a part of me I think I have at one point I asked myself if it was a story a quest item Yeah, I would use in a second senior or something later So, yeah Do you want to tell Well, I'll I'll do mine first right of the grenade room because I'm pretty sure the way I did it was the way It was supposed to work. Um, I think so So I saw the grenade room and I was confused for a little bit So I was trying to figure it out and I was like, oh, I got to go outside and get in And then um, since it's a locked door I'll have to disengage the grenade thing and I can probably unlock it with this guy's key And I like I look around the whole area don't find a key I'm getting a little confused. You can see it on my stream like, hmm I'm not sure how this door is going to open then I was looking around and I was just like, um Well, and then I look outside and I'm like the platforms destroyed that I got here on I was like, so that's that that's a clear signal to me that I'm not supposed to use that then It's like it's gotta be this door And I I honestly can't even remember now because I'm starting to question my own history But I was like either I decided I would set off the grenade or I set it off by accident and while like the moment I did I was like, oh, maybe this will blow the door open better run away. I hope I don't die And it did and I was like, well That's the puzzle. I guess It's like I didn't even feel like I had activated the grenade. But yeah, whatever I was just like, this was a weird experience, but I guess I completed it But you blew up you blew up the door Yeah I what did you do metal? I got a key. Wait, where the fuck did you get the key? Where the fuck did you get a key? It took me a while, but uh, there's another soldier on the side Yeah, I Fuck out of him. It's in his left hand. He's no way Not I mean, I believe you but Like I searched the fuck out of that room. I looked at the soldier. I scan he did I could not find the key Because that was my first instinct was like, oh, these guys have got the key one of these guys has the key on it So I studied them meticulously I think the second time I only saw it. Uh, I need to find the clip but uh, yeah I had trouble finding it, but I was like, there's no other way. I can't find any other way. There must be a key here somewhere. I guess Uh, yeah, I was sure it would be a key too, but I was like, oh, I guess the idea is I actually do set off the grenade It blew the door open. I was like cool And nothing happened to you. Well, I ran to the side of the room And I think I got damaged a little bit and that was about it Um, yeah But I mentioned you can actually get damaged in this game when you follow things, but it doesn't actually do anything Yeah, I I assumed that it wasn't even actually damaging your health. It was just like a Indicator that yeah That you'd been damaged but not in any mechanically relevant way. Um Because it's either basically pass or fail. There's no real middle ground Essentially, which is why the laudanum confused me because I knew what it was in the other game But I didn't know what its purpose was here And indeed the purpose is indeed different laudanum used to restore your health now it Yes decreases your fear, but there's only three of them in the entire game But standing in the light decreases your fear. So you're like, I why would I use laudanum? Why? So, um, so all of our cages. Yeah, go ahead. Also, I got uh I got stuck completely in the fortress like in a wall once Oh, you did. Oh, I noticed an in yeah I noticed a once an enemy got stuck like spinning around in the air And once an enemy was just like frozen in place Like in a weird animation glitch. So yeah, the game is No buggy and I didn't know if it did saves in between So it was a bit scarce like I just played for three hours. It's all lost And then I think emi wasn't just like just try to save in reload. So oh, yeah It's probably checkpoint system that makes sense and I reloaded We're right back exactly That's like, oh Fuck and then it went through the loadings and it did like check that a quick saves by itself was like thank fuck So I lost like 20 minutes, but man I got I got scared. Did I do the fucking That was the scariest thing in the game thinking that your progress was lost and you have to do it again So to be fair this game when if you played through a second time, you'll fucking breeze through it. You can just run past everything Yeah, yeah, I would say so too. It's um, it's shockingly easy to just run past some of these encounters and just breathe through the game However, we we've been talking about this cage room one last thing about my experience with it I've just watched my playthrough because I was curious about me doing it I seem to take like a decent amount of damage, but as you guys know it just sort of It just recovers so it's like, yeah, it doesn't really mean anything Um, but take a note. So I activate the grenade. I run across the other side of the room blows up Whoa screens all funky. I take some damage. Look at the comment from Tassie Uh, oh That's so that's not what I'd be saying. That's some fucking Fourth wall breaking shit, man God come on you got any more careful than this Okay, you know, you don't know what you just did I guess she's referring to herself. She's like, gosh, I've just got to be more careful than this Like so, why didn't you say it like that? She's judging me you see for pulling the grenade what I felt like I tried everything I didn't I honestly didn't give that guy that Mel got the key from it. Good enough search apparently I I sort of looked over him. I swear he was I Searched the fuck out of both of those bodies even Afterwards, I looked at him through the other side of the bars when I escaped and I was I don't know I I don't know if it was a glitch But I searched I was even telling moller about this when we first talked about the cage Before we had beaten the game But I was like I looked everywhere all of those guards because I assumed that they'd have it and I could not find it I love how we we all completed a different way Oh, yeah, so so what I did was um Yeah, I I didn't open the front door Uh, because clearly it's rigged. I got in the normal way through the side window And um So what I did was I thought the game was glitched getting out of that room I had spent ages looking for a key looking for a clue looking for a crevice a lever A cracked wall A a beam or a bar or a hook or something that I could use to get out of that room The idea that the grenade would blow off blow the door off its hinges Didn't even occur to me because that's not how grenades work So it didn't even occur to me To fuck around with the grenade because that makes no logical sense. I was I was looking at me doing it I'm pretty sure that wasn't my intention. I'm holding The trigger mechanism if you will and I'm holding it in such a way that I don't think it was reasonable for me to assume that it would have triggered the grenade I was holding it like a little bit above the dude And I remember I think I was just holding it like thinking about what this room is trying to tell me And then it like made a click sound and then my character's like, oh no, and I was like, oh shit So like what I guess I'm saying is if you would ask me in the moment Do you think activating that grenade would blow the door open? I would probably have been like, I guess only from a game mechanics standpoint Maybe Yeah, because all I would have imagined to do because because it would have just like thrown shrapnel everywhere It wouldn't have blown the the the locked metal door off of its hinges Especially because it's it's their iron bar. So the energy would just pass through the door Yeah, yeah Didn't even occur to me think about that when the thing the well was probably like, oh, yeah, that makes sense Game-wise But what I had to do is I I went outside. I think I got a little I got a achievement for it, but not how you're supposed to So the way that you get in is there's this platform outside that you jump through That's how I got out to um if you Open the the wooden shutter all the way and you sort of like I knew I was not doing the game's intended way I thought it was bugged. In fact, I save save quit and I reloaded And then I learned that it puts you exactly back where you save no checkpoint Um because I thought it was good. I thought the game was glitched I thought there was supposed to be a key and it just wasn't popping up for some reason Or something had bugged it or it had a collision error and flew off into the game geometry someplace um But I I kind of Squeezed my I got myself on a little bitty wooden beam That's a very tip where I knew you were not supposed to really stand and I was able to jump around the the door and get in the way I came um but Yeah, that room was the three different experiences with that room and two of them were basically Like one was semi an accident one was me thinking the room was glitched not seeing the key in his hand Which I swear to god it was not there because I searched those bodies so carefully and um, yeah, it's Yeah, I was getting frustrated. I was like legitimately getting frustrated. So just just to see if I understood that right you basically Opened this door to the left. I stood on the beam on the right there And I opened that door up as why does it could go and I and I jumped And I like turned myself in the air and went through the door. Yeah That's how I escaped. That's a gaming woman right there. What we're describing Unlike many of the cool puzzles in amnesia where you highlight all the different cool interesting and physically Physically accurate ways to defeat the puzzle rather we're like, how did you exploit the puzzle? But yeah, I think I think he's actually pretty hard to spot like it's really dark Well, I was desperate with looking at searching especially the guy in the chair. Oh, yeah Everywhere checking all of his little pockets looking at the textures that were covering him I was breaking all the pots in the room. I was looking behind that. Yeah The first eight thing on top of the shelf or the cover they never explained the uh, why there's um Canopic jars Egyptian canopic jars all over the place. Um, they never they never get into that They never explained that they're just Egyptian imagery and Egyptian gut jars that just They're just around Because you find uh, I think in that room The cage room is where you find the first one behind the altar and um Yeah Cube thingies uh in that cage room, which uh, apparently from the alien world because you see them everywhere on the alien world I don't know. I noticed that. Um, I don't know how The swap happened Because this is a fort and everything But I don't know how they got there. Um but I guess this reminds me I didn't even know how that one ghoul wrecked everything in there because those ghouls are not invincible You get uh, yeah, uh, what's what's her face? Uh, yes, man She just get fucking shot by yeah, she gets shot by a pistol and she's fucking dead All these soldiers with guns and training they're just so here I was I you bring this up I was just what I was about to ask Is the ghoul someone who got changed or is that a own separate monster? That's a good question I'm not sure how what actually really happens or because they're like all fucking Well, they're supposed to be gin, right? That's like they're uh, yeah That's how they're explained in like the earth floor of what they could be and I'm and so I'm my question is is that actually an earth monster Like a like a real like a ghoul a gin that you just happened to stumble across that's totally irrelevant to the rest of the story I thought they were gonna go the direction of actually having Wendy goes as they're called the things that you turn into it when you cannibalize someone else Like there's a horrible like folklore tale thing like when you when you eat your fellow companions, you'll eventually go feral and Turn into yeah, because in real life you have kuru because the yeah if you the the prions and stuff in human flesh They don't mix well with your brain. It's called. It's the laughing sickness. In fact, it's very creepy And the way they look I was like, oh, they kind of remind me of the look of a lot of wendy goes in in whatever They reminded me of the feeders from dead space three Who who turned that way because they ate human flesh that was infected by the Yeah, I remember those so by the way like the only somewhat creepy point of that entire game um but Like I I don't because I don't think that it's a real person who got Because the reason that you are turning and other people are turning is because the god queen alien Like cursed you and is doing this to you infected you with something somehow Um, so I guess it was I guess it was in the fountain water is what they said it was Um, I don't know how she did it Or if it's actual magic or something Um, like how she's able to appear to you from across dimensions in a vision I don't know if that's also supposed to be magic, but I legit don't know if the whole first monster of the game essentially Is just totally a coincidental actual monster that you just happened to run into Yeah, I don't know because if it was if it was one of your guys turning Then how did all the people how did all the soldiers die? Yeah, if it was the soldiers If you go by the memories you you get that that monster is already there when you appear and this When you get to the fortress the first time and and the soldiers are like drawing straws to kill themselves and stuff Because they don't want the because it's going to be a horrific death um the Uh, like I I assumed that it was just a monster Who happened to have attacked the fort because if it was someone turning there would have been notes about it And they would have noticed someone changing over time. Yeah, they would have locked them up it's It's a weird one. Um, and again, like we're highlighting so many gaps in the game And I know that someone out there is like, ah, you didn't read enough not to be like could But like this many gaps for three players, by the way, who are invested in reading every note It's uh, it's a little bit worrying So I guess if I go to the wiki, um So, yeah, they might know the answer Um Oh, that's just a funny thing that happened to me while I was playing. I'd never realized I already picked up the salt peter So I went all the way back because I was oh, that's this whole draw. That's that salt peter on there It's like, oh, obviously there I was searching and I was like, what the fuck is it and I was like looking at my inventory. It's like, oh, I guess I picked it up. Oops I am It shows funny. It just first off it says ghouls or harvesters. So I guess they're the same thing um Are the first enemies encountered in amnesia rebirth attacking tozzy tree in an at any chance they get like no No, that's not true at all They just let you walk like because there are scripted events in the fort where you're running from them and stuff We're and plus when they're teasing the entrance of it or it could clearly attack you and it just doesn't It's fucking around. It's trolling. It is fucking around with you. It is because they're very quick and nimble um, and they're trying to hunt you down and they know you're there. They just don't like um Like they just don't attack you because they're trying to spook you Or as the monsters and the other ones are you know behave like monsters And also it says the job of the harvesters is to extract pain and suffering from humans Which they then deposit into devices that ultimately procure vitae how Yeah, I thought that those extra machines people Because they like they they they they're they're flesh eaters they eat people If they're supposed to extract fear and suffering then like how come they kill you what what are they extracting because vitae is a thing It's not a concept. It's a thing. It's a physical thing that the brain creates Yeah, it seems to me that In amnesia the doctor said it dribbles into like it's from the blood that can be processed from it's like a liquid Of some kind and it's secreted so We've got us we've got a state there that you have to deal with you can't just be like It's whatever um, also Do we do we I don't know if we passed over this or whatever. I just want to make sure we covered it. Um The sequence where you yeah, so there's actually I'm gonna have to roll back a little bit So when we were talking about we found that guy was getting tortured and I remember when I was describing that sequence I said it was it was around the first time we were talking about the uh, the fail states, so I was trying to understand the room and and you walk in and you're like, oh richard shut up I'm gonna save you and you start spinning the wheel And then like it makes enough noise that the little protector security ghoul is like, hey You stop that and then you're like, oh my god and um, it was on my second sort of uh run around I think after I'd been sent back to the other room. I was like, oh, I gotta trap him in the um in the room Okay, I understand now for those who haven't played penumbra That's one of the like the sequences that I remember pretty well because I thought it was really neat There's a room you need to get into Um, but there's a creature inside it you unlock the door And he starts chasing you and you're like, oh my god And you start running around but there's a room It's like a freezer or server room or something You chase him in there or you let him chase you in there You run him around in a circle and then you close the door and lock it He's like, no, how did you piece of shit? And then you can go in the room that he came out of and you know, that's how you're solving it And crazy enough they repeat that exact Puzzle slash scary thing in this game, but they don't do anything different It's like it's almost one to one the exact same thing And so I have flashbacks to thinking about how like they're trying to innovate And it's like you just lifted this like you've done nothing And um, if I remember right, did you say you like Almost not necessarily completed it by accident, but you just sort of completed it The which the part with specifically When you have to trap a ghoul in the room to get to Richard Um, oh, yeah, so that part was weird for me. Um, so I got to that Richard part. Um, I again, I don't really know what they were Doing with them I guess they were trying to extract vitae, but there wasn't like a machine No, he was just it looked like he was just screaming Yeah, so let's think of After the dark descent, there's a huge scientific mechanical process, especially with like the machines in the other world That extracts vitae. And so these gatherer guys you ask like, what's the mechanism that they So I just thought they were fucking around with him because he was a prisoner or something Well, they're keeping alive pods that you find toward the latter parts of the game Where it's like there's clearly a person in it. They're screaming and they're they've got this weird pod around them I have assumed The pod acts as like a harvester and it goes down a tube and then that tube goes Yeah, they're all connected to a network and it's a life support system But this dude was just just chilling. He was just screaming and chilling and the thing is like, I guess I guess something's happening. I don't know but um I got more to say on that I was just wanted to clarify like you kind of you just like completed the puzzle Not by accident, but kind of yeah, I don't know if there was supposed to be a puzzle involved even um So I opened the door with that room that richard was in in the ghoul boy He was in the back just in that one little room doing something And when I opened the door I think the ghoul made a noise that was different So I assumed he was supposed to hear the door opening even though I was very careful to be quiet with it So good job. I need you um So I guess it was scripted once you opened the door across the invisible line. He turns around So I went to a nearby little hidey hole and just hung out there for a moment And then when I looked back around the corner the door had been swung completely open So I assumed he'd come through and he was somewhere else. So I was like, okay, here's my moment to free richard um But the ghoul was right back where he was um as if he'd never moves inside of that room So I'm like, oh um, okay then and so I just closed the door and locked him and that was that Oh, yeah, that's it was the same for me. Yeah, so okay, that's solved Yeah, he saw me I hit once I hit twice because I didn't Realize there was a door to close And then the third is like, oh, I just did to close the door Yeah, it was just you just closed the door. Um, because it just goes in there to I don't have a wank or something. I don't know. I don't know what it's doing but it also is um So that whole part with richard is like confusing Yes, so you you free him and then he goes before I'm assuming you want to move on to the the vitae portion of that in terms of how Mechanically it's weird rather than the yeah. Well, well, I wanted to just before we move to that. Um, the manner in which the the the the sort of Damn it It's one of those things where I'm almost certainly exactly what I wanted to talk about. I'm almost certainly was yes Got it back. Thank fuck so when I was uh Among all of the this is the thing hardcore amnesia fans You'll you'll know what i'm talking about when I say you played the game And then you started downloading the custom stories and you were blown away by some of the custom stories They were like people were working their asses off to make some great custom stories One of the ones that always gets referenced is the great work It's like this It's like a whole campaign that someone made and it's really fucking cool And it has its own really unique scares in it and this is this is another complaint that I have to mention It's like an honorable mention complaint. There's no custom story mode Option in the menu yet and people are fucking baffled even PewDiePie mentions this in the beginning of his playthrough He's like, where is it like the community was obsessed with this shit And they I think they said that it's coming or that they're definitely planning it But it was just bizarre to release amnesia rebirth and not have custom modes already a thing. It's just like, oh, okay Uh, because like that's what kept the game alive. Everybody was playing all the different mods. They were really fucking cool um But the way amnesia worked when a bunch of people play it and then they talk about it They will describe like experiences and encounters that just don't match anyone else's typically um because One of the ones I remember telling my friends was it was in the um storage and uh I was running back because I had gotten everything I needed and you're actually fleeing One of the monsters. It's like a set one that uh spawns when you get the two rods at the end of storage And um, you eventually kind of have to get past him I don't know that he despawns if you wait long enough, but I'm pretty sure you just need to get past him eventually And what happens to a lot of players is you'll try and get past him He might notice you and you start sprinting You're just like, oh fuck fuck fuck fuck and you find like a There's like a litten area and then a bit of like a quake happens because the the shadows chasing you if you keep running You're like, ah, I remember this bit. I came in this way. I'm almost to the exit If you keep running you'll run right into another gara that's just spawned in this in the center of the pathway He's just chilling there and it acts as like a big jump scare and a lot of people would tell That story is being like a huge spook for them One of the ones that got me was the I didn't necessarily do that straight away that other one spotted me And I ran back and I ran into a corner and I stacked some boxes I found and I just looked down and crouched and like he walked into the room Just looked around made some noises and I sort of looked up at the corner of my screen and looked back down And like he eventually walked off. I remember describing it as feeling as though it was just that's what I would be doing in real life It was it was it just felt so like 100 because I can believe that a lumbering Creature that's got dimmed senses and just wants to hit the things it finds or whatever Would have trouble spotting me in a really dark room when I've piled a bunch of things in a corner And you just can't quite spot me. It felt really real. All we've been doing in this fucking recording Is talking about how each of the encounters fail Like they just don't work. They confuse us or they're just like poorly implemented to the point of you accidentally complete them And it just saddens me is where I was going with this like it just Abnesia was cool to talk about this game is embarrassing to talk about this game is just disappointment after disappointment the only The only thing that this game does well is sort of where it starts to set things up That could be interesting that ultimately it doesn't really do anything with Um And I guess that's why this game could have been interesting But if it was me you could take like the skeleton of this concept Um and make it work into a really nifty game But I would have like dropped all the baby shit. I would have dropped the whole love story Just drop all of it that they spend so much time wasting with And um done something else with it. Um, I would have given backstory to the other world I would have maybe you actually do find and have a short conversation with some with like the last survivor of the The alien world who's like, ah, yes, I was you know, I've gone to earth many many times, you know, we harvested I can I know I do know your language And so you meet up with him and he You could decide his fate perhaps after a while or something like that But there's so much you could do that's so much more interesting. This game is nothing but disappointment After disappointment also dream of how we found hibbetts camp well into the place where they would have discovered all kinds of Crazy fucking things and Daniel. Oh, yeah, so For those of you who don't know in amnesia the dark descent Daniel does to some degree He talks about his experience in Algeria at the camp at the at the archaeology expedition And the way that he essentially describes it is just sort of just like old ruins sort of yeah, mostly non-descript Um, the most vivid his explanations get is when he's talking about like the orb itself and what it makes him see Yeah, um But where you find so this game ties in the most With the dark descent and that you find this camp that Daniel and Herbert and all of them had The issue here Is that it is full of insane shit like it is like a stone's throw down the hall from the fucking portal teleporter and Daniel like doesn't mention any of the insane shit that this camp is surrounded by um And and so like when you find the camp you don't think at first that it's The camp that Daniel found the orbits and stuff from but it is Um As we talked about like could have just made the story It opens with Daniel getting hurt and being pushed away back to london and then you're like well What did he find let's go search it out and then you know play as a member of the Excavation team you're you're some no named local who got hired to just Carry a shovel around and you're you're the protagonist of the story and you watch all this unfold and you see what happens in algeria After daniel leaves like oh, you know, you could end up getting transported to that horrible alien world And we could spend the whole game there as far as i would have preferred that i would have literally preferred You spent the whole game in the alien world If they could have devoted all of their hours And time and effort to a story that was focused on the plight and the destruction and the cataclysm That happened on this alien world. I think that would have been so much more interesting I can't believe that they made an amnesia game where it felt like a meme that we had amnesia So it's like i don't know. Fuck it. We had amnesia Like again just to remind everyone. I don't know why our protagonist has the namesake of the game No So I don't know. I don't remember a single note even I'm trying to like imagine it's like did she take the potion to forget why she had the kids so that she might give up the Kid to save her team I don't know. Um, let me um, let me look at the wiki for tazi and see um control f amnesia Let's see Uh With the sacrifice of another crew mate tazi manages to escape the other world and return to the crash site of the kassandra Where it all began. That's all it says That's all the fucking says. Okay. This is the last paragraph of her summary Okay, unaware of their fate the crew prepare to return prepare Return to their world that fuck our come on guys Unaware of their fate the crew prepares to return to their world I had to reword that before they leave however hank begins suffering the symptoms of a harvester transformation Sighting some darkness that clouded his vision As he loses control of his body. He implores tazi to run With the sacrifice of other of another crewmate tazi manages to escape the other world And return to the crash site of the kassandra where it all began But now she has no memory of what had happened from the crash until that moment And this marks the start of the game Tazi eventually discovers that she's pregnant with salim's child and finds him dead in a cave Um, what do we do with that? Uh So I don't Yeah, I don't it literally just says but now she has no memory of what happened from the crash It tazi manages to escape the other world and return to the crash site of the kassandra where it all began kassandra's the plane Yes, uh, why? I don't How Also, how? It's a sudden engine malfunction caused the plane to crash in the desert So that is canonically what happened. They were just unlucky Uh, surely not Because it happens right with the flashes of the other world. Did they fly through a portal? But The alien willed and flashback and crashed is uh, but why Why any of it is I thought at first that they stumbled into some crazy pocket dimension or something Why any of it racks? I don't Why is tazi Forgetful plane white Um, it's like a whole reddit article at the moment or threat some article that was wrong Uh, how's that? How do you have any thing I've seen so far as uh, shit, what was it? like The paraphrasing it was basically I think it's because of the transformation What like she wanted her to forget that she was a ghoul No, no like someone had like Like a thread with a bunch of questions of the story and I'm just looking for the answers here And like because remember how because one of the questions is like, why does she have amnesia? And the only thing I've seen so far is like, I think taz is amnesia is caused by a transformation. What? What say that one more time No, that's the only thing someone could come up with So the transformation from human to ghoul gave her amnesia. Yeah But it didn't give anyone else amnesia, but it also He gave it quite a lot of amnesia Yeah, like she didn't even So, you know, remember how in the first game Daniel gives amnesia to himself so that he will do what he tells his Forgotful self to do in the note. Yeah, like he writes a note to himself. This is part of what I consider to be Uh, a little thin on the doctor's end side, but again, I want to clarify that they wrote the story Like as a last ditch thing to tie every sequence that because it was first a horror game And then they were like, we need a story to match all this So the idea is that once you once daniel has gone down his dark descent with with them, uh, Alexander pushing him the whole way He's so distraught about what he's become because the last lives he takes is like an innocent family And he wants to take revenge on alexander and stop this whole process But um, the idea is that he's so guilt ridden that he can barely like operate And so he decides if I erase all of this from my own head and then tell myself you have to kill alexander I should be able to do it because I won't be crippled by the The horrors of what I've done that to me is good enough. I'm like, okay. I understand that I see what he did And yes, uh, it is kind of cool that we are a brand new player And at the same time that is kind of what he's experiencing in the game. He's like a new slate Losing your memory is essentially the reset button for a person. And so we take what he says He's like, I want you to kill him and then you understand what exactly happened Then you can make one of the four choices There's four endings in amnesia the dark scent and they're all very based on just what you want to do In this game, you just have amnesia Yeah, so It's as far as I can tell nobody fucking knows what she has amnesia. That's great. Uh, yeah I don't know how she has amnesia. I don't know How she got inside the plane And like what was her plan? What how come she got I how come the doctor went through all of this, but he's Totally fine. Oh, can we like as well about the doctor? He shot and killed a ghoul And then he takes another ghoul And hopes to get the baby out of here so that he can save As much as he can to give it to the person and I've seen people defending this by the way So I want to be clear on how stupid this is He's like, I'm going to restrain you with something you can easily break out of because ghouls have like super strength And I'm also not going to execute you once you've given birth Because I just hope that you like the fact that I'm kidnapping your child Even though you have the ferocity to literally rip my head off Yeah, it is bizarre how he just doesn't kill you. Um, And then one pistol shot apparently does the trick, but he doesn't have his gun as well He just he just doesn't have it. It's gone. Yeah, it just disappears Um, he takes the kid and just like runs off instead of shooting you while you're helpless Which would solve all of his problems. Yeah in the game Oh, it's fucking dumb But um, did you do what I did when the game was like you've broken out go chase him? I was like No, I don't think I know because it's a restricted sequence and I can do whatever the fuck I'm Exactly I was like I'm gonna look around the room and then I did and then I looked at him And he's just awkwardly shuffling At this thing. It's just like oof. Oof. And I was like, oh game you disappoint me It's like oof. I just can't do it. Oof Until until you activate the the scripted sequence, which is just You so much you're so much better than this frictional Yeah, I guess we'll bring it up because it's a basically this game's a bitch fest So we have uh, there's an aspect of the game where you go through these So there's like little rifts that you can walk through but they're not portals, right? This is different than the portals, but these are just like apparently random rifts that connect Our world and the other world, which again, they're these are different from the portals These almost are like accidental connections that you can use this essentially this compass amulet to walk through You equip the compass you walk close to this rift It opens up and you walk through and put the compass away and it disappears However in a chase sequence with the doctor You follow him through a rift that leads you conveniently right to the base of the empress the god queen's tower Whereas they didn't seem to have much rhyme or reason before But he walks in way before you get there and inexplicably the rift remains totally open And only closes until you walk in oooohh lucky Lucky you that this one was unlike all the rest and in your favor. It's funny. Um When that sequence was happening on my stream, I was like, oh, it's gonna close right as I get there It's gonna be a tragic like no, and then I walked through it and I was like Oh Okay, this also doesn't make sense, but all right Yeah, that whole sequence is childhood though. You just reminded me as well the This happened to metal. This is kind of a funny story So metal played the game before I did about a couple of hours or whatever And if you remember early game rags when you first discover these portals You're like there's like a point where there's three to open Um at once and right our gamer brains are like, oh well Whichever one I figure is the way way I want to check those other two, you know Just just see if there's some matches see whatever and so metal Checks one of them tins out. It's a floor one and he falls through it and he can't check those other two now Too bad. What what and so he's like, I know I'll watch mauler play the game So when he checks the other two I can see what I missed and there's mauler being like doodly doodly doodly do I'll check this one first. Oh, I fell through the floor rip And the bell is like wow Wasn't it the same one or is it a it's the same one I we both randomly decided to check this particular one first and we both got cut off from the other options Yeah I remember a couple of them being like worthless where you open it up and it's just a like a tiny little Stone closet. This is the thing. Yeah If if it turned out those other two were literally dead ends and had nothing in them I don't care. The fact you didn't let me search annoys me Yes Yeah Um and also of course this is yet another point where you fall through the floor and are uh derailed from your path I think that's At least three that I could remember Honestly, man, I felt like saying there was seven I like I maybe there was a lot less than that and I just it just felt like I can only I I remember three, but I'm almost certain there was more Um, because I just feel like there was more aspects of oh, let's just go over there And then you just get derailed somehow can I give the game one compliment? Yes, that one scare where he was he was hanging out on the little banister pole What do you call them the the things that connect like, um Um Wouldn't uh Pole I'm blanking on the actual name of this A thing a beam a wooden beam beam. Yeah, he was on the beam. Yeah, the ghoul is on the beam as you were escaping the fort I I I cleverly because my big brain Decided that when he chased me out that he came out of a room that I needed something and I was like I'm going back Actually, no, I'm gonna couch a criticism in there. Fuck it So when I was being chased by him and I left the room and he was like banging on the door after the loading screen Had been done. I immediately was like You can't he's not actually there because I that's a loading screen like he's not there He can't be there and then tassie is like it stops banging and tassie goes. I think it's gone now And I was like, oh, um, you're an idiot exactly, but uh, but God is such a fucking cognitive explosion like on one hand I want to go backing some pretty sure there's a quest item in there But that's gonna have to brave the fact that there's a monster on the other end or the other had My stupid fucking character just said like, yeah, it's no it's safe now Like that's an indirect message to me that I had I I need to go back in and that I can go back in And I'm just like god damn it game like seriously, but either way big brain me I'm like, I'm going back in I go to that room and I pick something up That's clearly like a quest item and I'm like whoo And then as I'm heading out, I'm like, oh, they'll spawn him. They'll spawn him And I was looking around everywhere couldn't code questy where he is and then I look up And he's on that uh little beam and it freaked me out and I was like that was awesome. Good job That's my one compliment for the game. Good job. Yeah, unfortunately the the wiki clearly states that they can attack you whenever they want No, they try to attack you at all times Um, which is odd as as spooky as that was I couldn't get over the fact of why are you why is he not? Yeah, no, I completely agree with you. They don't they don't behave Consistently they're strange because you find ones that lumber around like the amnesia monsters But then you find ones that seem to be fucking with you Yeah To go back to where we we were uh, I don't know if you want to do a rise or I can but um The the the the way in which Richard dies and the result of it. Do you want to do it or? Oh, yeah, so, uh, we talked earlier about Oh here, it'll it'll it'll I'll blend together a little like a like a mush I feel like we we've been just picking at this whole game and I feel like we really We've really dug deep now and i'm pretty happy about it. Yeah, uh, so There is a where you find richard. He's been captured by one of these harvester baddies. He's uh He he he obviously doesn't want to be here. He's being he's he's chained up And you have to the first survivor you find and again. Yeah, he is the first living person you find essentially, yeah So you're like, oh my goodness. It's it's a human person. I gotta save him So you lock the ghoul in his closet and you turn For about 10 minutes. You have to turn this little wheel that slowly lowers Yeah, this slowly lowers the chain And then he like attacks you And because he says oh, yeah, take her not me And he runs off because I guess that's his plan Now you now you don't decide this. This is all cutscene everything from that happens from this point on is cutscene Cutscene begin You get upset at richard that he is abandoning you And that he wants the ghoul to take you and not him because he's running off you Case after him catch him And in a blurry mess of black screens and flashes Turns out You regain control of your character And you have killed richard you you have killed him you banged his head against the floor the ghoul is gone by the way um So you killed richard and you have successfully powered up a cell because you have done all of this Somewhat in the vicinity of what appears to be some kind of an alien charging station where you take an empty cell canister And you fill it full of vtai to make it a charged cell Which is the power source that you use throughout the game to power alien technology Do you know what comes to mind first rags? And I think this is because of the conversation we had earlier today Do you know what comes to mind with you have a cell? You have a machine that's attached to the cell and then meters away was somebody You know getting killed and maybe screaming and it got powered up Monsters ink comes to mind huh You scream and it fills the tag um Yeah, um Someone actually said that in my chat. I think we were talking about sick earlier today. It was just on my mind I was like, oh my god. It's just oh, I understand your reference I'm sorry chat person But um, but the way this works is that apparently if you just have someone So remember vtai You don't really want to kill the person. No, you want to harvest them for the fear And the terror and the dread that their brain experiences because that produces vtai which can be harvested The implication is that they're only going to be killed when the torturers go too far And um, and I think alexander has this specifically go into links about you don't want to go too far Yeah, and and I think alexander says like in terms of the best ways to torture the human body in one of the flashbacks Daniel's like, you know, surely that would kill him in a sense that you don't want to and alexander's like Ah, the human body can you know take quite the fucking beating basically And but he does say like once you've decided you do want to end the life Which I assume is at the point where you you think this person has didn't harvest it enough And they're just actually mentally broken. They they're just too broken to even be afraid. They just don't function You can you can end it. You squeezed all the juice out on that you can Um, then after that point you kill them, but uh, essentially, yeah You want to and even in this game before you get to this point there is there are places where The aliens are talking about like the maze the whole point of the maze was that They they release harvesters and people inside and the people get so afraid of the harvesters that they're trapped in the maze with That it makes them afraid so that by the time the harvester gets them They've been afraid long enough to create more vitae and they were saying one of the problems was That they need to adjust the maze because the prisoners get too Afraid too quickly and they start to run and make noise and the harvester finds them that way um So this was the this is the one of those little bitty things about oh learning about how the aliens have found out how to Mass produce vitae and things of that nature and how they do it. Mm-hmm, but um, yeah But in this game, uh, I guess if you just die close to the Machine It just fills it just I don't know it captures the death of the air and just spits it into a Jar, yeah, there's a cool scientific aspect of the vitae that was really cool I want to stress like the implication from the first game is the Killing the subject is once it's once you just give like it's over. It's like, okay time for them to die I guess yeah, you want to keep them alive as long as possible to harvest as much vitae as you can from them Remember the whole point of the amnesiatic drug Was to make prisoners forget about the torture so they don't get familiar enough with it That it's a new experience every time and it's horrifying and that gives you the reason uh, Daniel had access to the amnesia potion Yes, and in this one Again, I don't know where the amnesia comes from but apparently they forgot how vitae works And in in when richard dies from you because you went into a fit of rage You just you wake up and the cell is charged and he's dead Yeah, like it's almost like they're implying you just on autopilot fucking shoved him into a Everything yeah, like it's so fucking weird But he's not connected to anything. No like he's not hooked up to a machine You don't have any syringes in your hand. You he's just dead on the floor and the cells charged and you're like, oh, that was weird Yeah, it's a really weird experience. This is the thing I guess a viewer right now would be like so you're saying that it contradicts the dark descent I'd be like, well Yes, but also just confuses the hell out of me about how vitae is fucking harvested I don't get it Also the game you can see them in like those little pots and everything where it's like been tortured forever uh but yeah, no When you when you say in the dark descent, that's all they have to do the The memory wipes so to forget about everything How effective can the whole harvesting thing be if they're just being tortured forever and ever in this little pod Maybe the pod automatically supplies forget potions periodically. Yeah, maybe Fuck it Maybe I Maybe um, well, do they have any men they do I feel like they do mention it, right? They mentioned some stuff about how they're so I remember one of the notes talks about hope About how you can never make the prisoner feel hopeless And so this is why they trap like memories and stuff I feel is so that so so that the people who are being Contained always have that little glimmer of hope that they can escape Which is where a lot of the terror comes from it's like a cycle of Like pain hope and fear stuff like that where you say if if the prisoner gets hopeless of their situation They'll just accept it and they won't fear as much but when they But when you capture all of their good memories And because they have like some of the prison because I guess they they captured people from earth Some humans and they use those to power vitae um And so they had some like little uh tablets that had records of people they captured of this is a person and they have a Family and as a person they don't have a family and they have some good memories and things like that And that was an important part of becoming a candidate for vitae harvesting Yeah, they even had like a likelihood of like strong extraction or or yield potential, you know Yeah, it was very and this was kind of an interesting part of the game Um, you know how they did it and explaining their process and the logic and stuff and how Assembly line it sort of became with the cages and things um And how these people just became husks that were Just purely There just so that they could be have their fear harvested through torture Really terrifying, but it sets up how much how how obvious it is that the right thing to do is to just destroy all of this was the implication that the aliens and alexander separately realized the giving people amnesia was a good way to Get them to retort you or did alexander know about it because His team had figured it out back in alexander's home world So I don't know if alexander's home world in the world in this is the same. I'm not sure um I am no huge deal. I just I remember it. Yeah, it's not a huge deal I'd I'd be I'd be curious what the canonical answer is Yeah, um Yeah, let me factly alexander on Ren well while you're um, you're looking it up another quick one I just want to mention is um You step in a bear trap in this game rights But another person steps in a bear trap in this game Neither of you bear trap and you're fine by the way Neither of you seem to be that affected by the bear trap if I'm being completely honest I guess because your ghouls you can regenerate your leg. I don't fucking know Yeah You your reaction to being snapped up by a bear trap and held upside down was incredibly underwhelming Yeah, by the The being hoisted up into the air you're like, okay, uh, and then you you step on a fucking bear trap and you're just like It almost doesn't even register And of course this person is able to free you at the exact moment. They're taken over and want to eat you Yeah, lucky because you arrive there and everyone else has been killed by her Yep By the way, how this one person has killed everybody when we establish a single gunshot will kill them I don't fucking know and our character kicks them away all the time Yeah So lame Another Complaint I have I know we mentioned it on the other stream and I'm just going to bring it up here a classic Thing I mentioned with the grabbing and being in your face in the maze They can't just be one example to compare it to outlast, right? So when you're in the some kind of sluice gate factory place There's lots of water and blood and flash moving around And uh, you have to jam a gear system with with a cage and then you could move underneath A thing that's clearly like mechanically meant to you know Squish things up And you're moving through and suddenly Leon grabs you it is leon, right? Uh, yes, um grabs you and he's like And and it's a sudden jump scare and he's in your face and I was like whoo amnesia is out last now Yay, where did you come from doesn't make any fucking sense We would have hit him coming from miles away because you have to splish splash to get to me fast So like don't lie to me Gabe That you like do just And then his arm comes off because Because the thing closes I guess but he's like I'll get you he team rockets you twice You can hear in the in the distance. We're like, I'm sorry. Please come back me Do you remember when you turned the power on rags in that place and it was just a dude who was like tassie Yo Oh, yeah, that was weird. He's just hanging out there Metal was like surprised at how like Undeveloped by reaction was I told him like my brain was fried at that point. I was like, what the fuck is this? I remember staying there and listening to you were just like, oh, yeah, okay And just like left had I been in that situation real life I would have just like my eyes would have just been like, I don't even know it like why How did you end up there? Why are you here? What are you been just like hanging out here? The fact that you know me and you uh, no No, no, no, and I've gone up the stairs like no, fuck you all the ladder I don't even know what's happening now. I guess I'm gonna go. I'm just gonna fuck this planet exactly exactly Uh And that is it for my I wrote down like four new notes and I'm done with all of them So I'm left with the big one. Yeah, uh, let me let me take a The lands but I I think it's everything I can think of there's probably more but I feel like we've done a pretty good job Of getting through a sub of our issues, but we've got one big one left. So Frictional games Really cool in the they were like, hey, you know this horror genre you got there for gaming We're gonna we're gonna try and reinvent it. We hear your concerns. You see We know that you're tired of overt gore and slashing and blood splattering and people screaming and people being in your face and sudden loud noises and sudden Flashes of things Because you know what? That's cheap horror anyone can design a thing so that it goes That's just that's simple, right? So how about we make a game Where we make it incredibly slow In terms of the beginning we set the atmosphere we make it nice and dark We give you control of a light, but it's a limited resource. You better be careful We have these little dudes running around and if you sprint if you don't take your time If you don't make sure you're looking around where you need to go you know where your safe spaces are You don't know where your lights are you don't know how much you have you can be in some serious trouble And that's all you you know where the enemy is is around and suddenly sometimes you can turn a corner And he's right there and you can get spooked the fuck out and dark descent earned itself A title of essentially being the scariest game on pc like it was just like People loved the shit out of it for how scary it was fast forward by 10 years And they've made they've made some decisions We've covered a few of them already. Let's say we've covered about fucking 10,000 of them already But they decided they still they just make this a little addition So when you first play this game, I'm pretty sure They give you it in the intro before anything's really even happened Oh, I guess I I guess if we're doing this part just this is a little this this actually was because this is on the on the wiki So for the dark descent when your sanity gets slow, right? How things sort of change You know things a little bit different. So this is this is alexander von brennenberg's uh his portrait Right there. He is he's looking well, you know, he is But if you have low sanity This is what the portrait looks like Oh shit Yeah, that's really cool To to add on to that in amnesia The you need just sanity high because it helps you operate And you and naturally that's kind of how it works in real life The most scared you are the harder it is to just do everything Campers you In amnesia, you'll you'll hear like sort of noises like there's there's almost like a bug in your ear Things will crawl across the screen i.e. your eyes or face You'll see things on the walls on the floor. You'll hear spooky noises Things won't look right And you'll get more and more scared and then when you hit max your character will go And you'll fall to the ground and be shaking Because you you are so afraid you're essentially crippled. We kind of mentioned this before In this game, they thought you know what fuck that system. It's just not good enough You know it's got so many problems and it's cool now that we're 10 years older. We can innovate so We're gonna have it so so that like black gooey stuff appears around the sides And it's encroaching upon your screen kind of like blood and cool of duty, but black To it to indicate you're losing sanity. It's like all right and I think Other than that and other than the fail state we mentioned which reaches when it's at maximum fear We've only got one last thing to really describe Uh And again, like I said, I'm pretty sure it happens in the intro. It's a part of like I want to is it after the plane crash, but before you gain control. I don't know if you remember mel I uh, I think so But they do this thing and I think all three of us probably would have had almost the exact same reaction Something flashes on the screen kind of like a spooky image pretty bright and there's a loud noise The imprisis mask or some other non-descript image Yeah, and it's like a scream sound and it you know, it gives you a little jolt loud like oh, yeah and and I think the first instinct I would have in any normal setting is fuck you But this was a frictional game. So I was like there's got to be something to this Because they're good at what they do So I'm gonna give them a pass then it happened like again a few seconds later and it's like whoa Okay, and then again And then I think the game starts and it was like jeez Not a great way to begin but Whatever I'm sure There will be some context in which I can say hey those open it that opening is more So just a way to jolt you into the game or oh, it's this look. There'll be a reason. It's fine But then you find in the game Let's say your your sanity is 100 and it can go down to zero as soon as you get to around 50 This shit happens And it just keeps happening it'll keep her happening over and over for the entire game Until you raise above 50 percent again, or you go all the way down to zero and die Well die or whatever. Um And it's it's like the singularly most fucking stupid decision I think I've ever seen any developer make in terms of a horror mechanic. What the hell were you thinking? It's like it's the They had something that was so nifty and cool and they totally threw that out in exchange for Cheap ass jump scares that turn because it only scares you for like the first three times it happens So very very very quickly and very soon Then it becomes a huge annoyance and it is frustrating No, and you start lighting things up just to make the loud noises and the annoying flashes go away Because it annoys you as a player part of why I wanted this one to be the last one is think of everything We've been talking to you about in this whole stream And then add that on top of it any of the sequences we were describing any of those annoying mechanics the puzzles the darkness the Different traversal ways the fucking portals all the enemies think about all those things We were trying to talk about and in the meantime you just have something going black every once in a while Yeah, and it takes up your screen it flashes in front of your screen. It makes a loud noise Sometimes it could happen like a machine gun It's just just so fucking annoying. Yeah and so we all fucking hate it and I only see a talentless fucking developer trying to scare a person because my god This is cheaper than anything I've seen in a horror game and that's saying something Um, it is literally a jump-skate generator that has no context other than You're getting more afraid lol. Yeah. Is this is this number? Is this metric below 50? Oh, okay. It's scary It's poops. It's scary loud noises And um, I guess that's a nice lead into A lot of people didn't like this a lot of people And why would you? Frictional hood A lot of people weren't liking it and I guess mel if you want to post some stuff the rags might be able to read out Uh, I can repost it. Uh, if you scroll up all the way Yeah, yeah, it's repost. Yeah, let me I could I'm on it. I got it. I will repost them so I can I can put them on things All right, there you go This is the this their first update That they released for the game as far as I know of oh This is a second update because when the game launched it didn't have an exe file But you know what? Oh mistakes happen. So before reading this update. I do want to do we have do you have the tweet metal? Tweet I I think the tweet comes before this technically the tweet is them trying to let me search Yeah, it would be the frictional games account. It's probably not too hard to find Let me go to your sir in search I mean the explanation whether what what they say it is is in this as well Oh, well, I I want people to see the tweet and then I want people to see the the update because I feel like it's a good little Um Bear with us Yeah, I I want to find their words. Um, I mean I've got their account on twitter I should be able to find it missing steam. They've they've posted a tweet that has a quote from dual shockers about the game And it says incredibly strong atmosphere and sense of place Sure Incredibly strong sense of place I I don't know. I just see people this is all those Uh websites giving it high numbers Okay, I found it. Let me Link it to you Here it is Okay, so context you got Uh someone saying So so adrian says I generally can't understand why you guys would add cheap jump scares I always thought you were better than that toning them down is definitely a positive thing But it still boggles me that they're present in the first place, which is precisely what I would say Yeah, exactly. Yeah All right. Um, so this is what frictional games said in a reply Please do check out the linked blog post. They were never intended as scares in the first place They are supposed to signal to the player that they are reaching critical fear levels and hopefully instill a bit of panic in the process smiley face Hoping the balance is a bit better now smiley face so Fuck you is the first thing to say. Yeah, what a fuck actually fuck you frictional What a shitty decision And all the people scares they're fucking serious like come on Yeah, I don't believe you when you say they're not intended as scares bullshit. Yeah, and these fucking four Dip shits on twitter afterwards I love the flashes They give me a reason to fan panic and feel pressured about my fear getting too high versus dark descent where low Sanity didn't feel as threatening I also like them for me. They only occurred during particularly intense moments Yeah, to be honest, they make me jump a tiny bit. I don't mind that though Yeah, I actually love them. Hopefully you're not turned down too much Fuck all of you Fuck all of you. Fuck and stop playing video games. Kill yourself. You're literally ruining everything by encouraging this bullshit. Yeah If you just want to have spooky images flash in front of your screen like go fuck off Yeah, you can make it for yourself just cheap horseshit design that shit yourself make a youtube video crank the volume fully Put a picture that's really spooky and just repeat it over and over again and then play it to yourself and go to sleep I don't know what the fuck like why why would you ever celebrate this and I just love the fact that they refer to them as a fear flashes your flash your flashes They're called fear. They're not they're not jump scares guys They're fear flashes. Yeah, the things that just pop up are really loud and uh, always jump scares They're not jump scares to fear flashes. Yeah, those actually I think there's another tweet I was thinking of is the one where they say that specifically to responding to somebody I guess the the term fear flashes is used and what I liked was um in the comments of the recent efab and I think on some of my um the the the the archives of my streams someone said like um Fear flashes has the same energy as um surprise mechanics Is it was it remember how people tried to call was it loot boxes? They try to call them surprise mechanics surprise mechanics They're not loot boxes guys. They're surprise mechanics It fear flashes same energy as surprise mechanics So fucking true and and this is the thing In isolation, I wouldn't be as angry It's the fact that I can see frictional games attached to that statement Yeah What the hell They um This is this is not This doesn't make sense And so everybody You know that I've seen responding to a lot of our criticism is like so, you know, what happened I even um I said I sent a lot of this to to Smiler and some other people and some of the responses I'd be getting I like oh So is it like a different team is a different right a different creative like there has to be It's the only way it can be explained like what is the explanation? I'd like to know in the same way the people do with ds2 They're like, what is the explanation the people who made ds2 couldn't have been the people who made ds1 There must be an explanation for this And uh that shit makes me sad It is It is what a sad day for horror games. What's that game for day for games? That to see a company that we used to be so insanely excited for just Falter in such a substantial way How incredibly disappointing Yeah Now I'm like that now I'm straight up worried. I don't I don't really care about their next game now But like I I'm super worried about it for certain I'm not excited anymore. Yeah, you'll they'll need to pull some shit in terms of like We're releasing a new game in two years from now. It's one we've been working on for seven years I need to rebirth was more of a thing we we gave to a couple of our, you know Bonus teammates that kind of just are less talented people They're very explicit about it like Like we gave this shit to the newbies just to help them with learning things Well, but of course all the media outlets love it A lot of them do there's been I've seen I've seen a decent amount of Love it midway to negative stuff But there there is also a lot of them who say it's so great. It's just so it just the narrative is so amazing It just reinvents the horror genre in bullshit like that I did see someone link one that was like uh frictional release their first dud and it's like Yeah, I can agree with that sentiment. Yeah, this is a dud. Don't play it. It's a waste of your time Play the darkest in play soma play anything else. Just don't play this game Unless you're desperate for some good old-fashioned fear flashes Fear flashes Oh, right. So I guess we should read that blog post, right? I guess um, um, that's from their steam Okay, yeah, uh fear flashes are toned down and various bugs are fixed. This is update 1.04 Today, we released a new patch for amnesia rebirth containing a few improvements worth pointing out The change that will most likely have the biggest effect on the experience is the toning down of the fear flashes So again, fuck you These flashes were never really meant to be scares in themselves But the main purpose is instead to clearly signal to the player that their fear is reaching critical levels Because there's no other way to translate that to the player No, no, maybe they would have had like a previous thing that we're imagining your character Stubbled over in fear Yeah, they've kind of done this before. Hi, I'm still here Hello So it's like as I'm as I'm listening to like this go along. It's it's kind of like at first I was like, oh, they should play the uh, they should play out last too So we can see which one's worse now that I've like listened to this for a while I kind of feel like I already know the answer now the thing about it is like amnesia reloaded is like There's so much to be disappointed with and at least you had high expectations exactly did There was so much expectations and high hopes and you know, everything going for him And it all just kind of fell in its face whereas outlast two I mean hot take here. I know a lot of people like the first outlast Not very good So I'm pretty sure we're all in the community that shits on it I mean, I I started it, but I just got like I only played I didn't play very far far before I was like, oh, it's this kind of game Well, I'm gonna go do something else to it Traeger highlight and then once he's done, that's it. Game's not fun anymore. Oh, yes You can tell even from map design that once they're done Traeger, they were like, right time to end the design. It's like, no, we need more levels Yeah, fine three. We'll have them fucking Screw around with three valve handles. Well, fatty's walking around. How about that? We're already done that like seven times. We'll just do it again. You fuck And yeah, I was gonna say like can't be bothered people who are a fan of my stuff We'll probably have seen my series. I fucking tore that game to shreds because I wanted Joe why I did it. I wanted to have some Decent arguments to show why amnesia the dark descent was such a special game Which is pretty sad to think about right now in it Yeah, so with with all that in mind It's like when you when it comes to talking about outlast two I feel like that's only going to be like an hour long discussion at best because there really wasn't much going for the original outlast and To have it follow it up with a sequel There's really There's just no expectation. The story is so flat. It's like trying to critique that old slender game There's really not much to it. And so it's like listening to How amnesia completely fell from grace. It's like Jesus fucking christ. It's like How uh game of thrones season uh game of thrones episode five season eight came about there was so much to talk about But then it's like you come to talk about season or episode six So like I don't care anymore. Yeah, so I feel like we've kind of reached a consensus already if they might be worse than outlast two if they were like, uh You know five years from now amnesia retribution is coming out. I will actually be angry Like fucking drop it. Okay, like you've done enough Yeah, you you had a good thing and just like everybody else in this fucking industry You just try to keep redoing the thing Oh, yeah, I guess we should mention that. Um, so this is my fears fully realized the thing I was talking to and I think I I feel like I had this conversation with so many different people But I know rags and metal at least My concern was they made amnesia and then it sold 1.4 million copies I believe is if you just do a quick google search Outlast comes out outlast were explicit the developers that they were inspired At least in part by amnesia And I know what it was It was watching those fucking compilations of people getting spooked because they ran into a thing and PewDiePie Markiplier was scream and run and they were like, you know what let's make a game of of just that It's just that Then it's just players have to move through small spaces and then we can lock them into a cutscene We're a horrible person screams at their face. We're gonna get so many fucking reactions, dude We're just gonna get rid of everything except the It just it's only dessert. There's never anything else. It's just dessert all the time ad nauseam And then you have outlast let's play part one dash in all caps the scariest game on earth The scariest game I've ever played I even remember feeling a little sad that um I talked very fondly about toll biscuits coverage of amnesia when he did a little let's play for halloween It's really like it's it's simultaneously a cool sort of representation. How good the game is and wholesome because he's getting all spooked by it Um, we did the same thing for outlast and he was getting utterly spooked by it as well And I was like, oh I was hoping like you would this is because outlet. Oh well, you know, but but at the same time it worked They sold four million copies. They did amazingly and then by the time they released the sequel No one gave a shit because you have to evolve you can't just cheat Um, and so then soma comes out and my god, they fucking knocked it out of the park again and for completely different reasons So cool unfortunately And uh, many people know this story. I was just I was just chilling out and being like hey Hey, other friends that I know at the time in 2015 16 ish on twitch including metal commandeer Why is everybody not like soma? I'm checking these reviews. Everyone's saying like oh, I was fucking lame Now I check reviews from I did a stream with I think it was mr. E me at the time We watched a whole bunch of uh soma reviews could have been smiley A lot of them shitting on the game's story without even remotely coming close to to referencing what happened in it They're just like I was shit. Why manner Yeah And so I was getting really annoyed and then I was like Joseph Anderson soma video Getting pretty popular too Interesting. I will check it out. I kind of remember timeline. Why is exactly when this was I'll have to check the upload date The man when I got done with his video. I was just like Jesus fucking christ. What have you done? Like you've completely misrepresented the game. You've talked for ages about how it doesn't even count as horror and This is the one that's going to get viewed by everyone and then there's loads of comments that are like Oh, thanks for this review. I was thinking of buying it, but I definitely won't know and it's like, oh my god No, no And so I made my series and you could tell in that series. I was a little bit bitter Um, but I worked my ass off to try to explain why soma was so fucking good and then Announces what is announced as amnesia rebirths announced and the first thought I had was like amnesia rebirth Why are you doing amnesia sequel? No Is it because soma didn't sell as well as you wanted because it made him money I read the blog post that's a game where they would lament The people were not liking soma that much and that they wanted amnesia back when they should realize that this just not That's not what it is. It wasn't it wasn't labeled amnesia 2. I don't know why you wanted amnesia 2 when it's called soma People were like, yeah, but soma's not scary. It's like, oh, but it's not it's not overt in your face It's not it's not it's viscerally scary You know like the they knew themselves what they'd built. They were like, this is existential horror the horror comes in far more haunting Understanding the concepts and the ideas that are being translated through the events and story They're supposed to scare you just by thinking about what's happening in the game and they were like damn And I was worried that they took that so far to heart that they were like, I guess we should make an amnesia sequel I guess we should have more jump scares I guess we should have moments that are just filled With things grabbing you and shaking you and lots of like bits of flash and all these sequences that only amount to just Oh, next time you fall away next time you He is shouting. Oh jump scare jump scare jump scare jump scare jump scare This is great, right machine gunning jump scares at your player. This will get all the compilations Unlike why would I have any reason to assume that that's not exactly what happened? Yeah, I think it probably is Well, they for for instance the the writer of dark descent and soma he left frictional Um, they they have a new writer for this one Shit writing it garbage story Um, dude when the wikipedia kind of tell us why the character had amnesia. I am in serious doubt that this is a well written story Yeah, so what are the uh, what are the previous game move on to do? I don't know. I'd have to google and check. Um That dude's going places Well, I mean if you were the guy who wrote soma I would want to shake your hand. So yeah, exactly If you watch this ever like thank you so much Thank you so much for making soma You have made I don't care what anybody fucking says you have made the best horror game story in existence And I say that with not a flinch Oh, yeah, you made a masterpiece Mike really did This is a name Oh, let's see Did I come through? I'm sorry. Yeah Uh, let's see. What's he doing? Writer soma amnesia to doc descent. Well, yeah 288 followers on twitter. Mm-hmm. He has a poster from that account in three years. Maybe it's something else. Um But he's on an imdb um so He wrote amnesia the dark descent the vivarium transmissions Uh Mocking the mockingbird is short Yeah, soma the video game His last credit is 2017 need for speed payback Uh, what the hell? Why would more people want to hire him? Where did this guy go? How did he wow? How did he end up there? Amnesia some of the variants some of mockingbird transmissions Serious deaf Need for speed payback and that's that's it. Yeah, I would have stopped too. Um so uh Mikhail slice line headberg is a game developer at mojang studio since february 1st 2017 Um on may 1st 2019. He announced he'll be working on minecraft java edition um Um No, is this a this has got to be a coincidence Yeah, I think it's just a coincidence the name. Yeah, forget that Oh, because apparently he is a different guy with the same name or he's I guess because um It says he's a he's also a minecraft focused youtuber and twitch streamer and a minecraft um And it doesn't mention anything about soma or anything here. Um, well, this is a weird little mystery. Yeah. Yeah What happened to this man? Well, it's lost. Where is where can we find more of your genius? apparently There's been an additional writer at this need for speed and that's that's where he disappears What a fate for the guy who wrote soma Come back. I want to give you a hug If you were going to ask who's the best writer in the industry I'd be like in the industry is probably Mikhail headberg. He wrote soma and the that's just the best thing ever Yeah I don't know where he went That's insane Yeah, it is please. Please be fine. Please be like really well off Yeah, um Just to rise you you're at uh, sometimes it's difficult on the on the update if you want to You want to carry it on there's probably some more commentary we can provide on some of the statements Yeah, we could take a look here. See what's up Let's see. Um Oh, um Let's see Sometimes it's difficult for us as developers to fully compute how these things will affect the overall experience And it's not until you start seeing them in gameplay sessions by youtubers and streamers And hearing about them and feedback from players that you realize you've taken them a bit too far bullshit Yeah Uh, there's no how did you how did they play this and be like, yeah, this is good Well, how do we have a whole team? and And and you're able to convince them all it's like it's not jump scares. It's fear flashes Like there must be someone it's like bullshit. That's like that's Jump scares and Before the next part is read out. I would like it stated that i'm pretty sure we've all Not only like separately come to this conclusion, but i'm pretty sure we agreed the game improves It simply improves if you completely erase them Yes Like oh, yeah, it's undoubtedly it absolutely improves with that in mind read read the next bit Fixes and improve. Okay. We have therefore now toned down the audio and visuals of these flashes As well as tweak tau and when they appear a bit They are still an important aspect of the game and serve a purpose We'll hope you strike a better balance from now on Fuck off be explicit be explicit. What is this purpose they serve? Yeah, tell me It's like it signals You see it signals to the player that they're in danger No, no Yeah, no, it is the laziest Cheapest it's easy. You did it because it's easy That's why you did it Son I am disappoint Also, yes, this might be The king for me in terms of the most disappointed. I've ever been in a piece of media and it's a very specific feeling disappointment Yeah, I think I just said after I finished it on stream. I was like I don't feel like I've just played a Not a I don't feel the same like I felt when I finished soma Because when I finished so it's like man, that was fucking awesome Oh, yeah, I think I mentioned to you that once I finished soma It was on my mind for a long time and I my mind randomly Finds its way to soma every once in a while thinking about it Meanwhile, I was like we do need to talk about amnesia rebirth relatively quick Because this shit's going to get flushed out of my mind real quick Like I'm not going to remember why this game sucks in maybe even a couple of weeks And this was like, oh, I guess I checked the other endings out. Oh, they're all Shit And boring. Um, we don't yeah, there's very clearly a correct Ending like the others you have to be batshit insane to argue that the other endings were the better ones Yeah, I think I said it when we were talking about it. I was just like at the end. It's like, oh, I guess I'll leave the baby here Or I eat the baby, I guess And I just I didn't care. I don't care about the fucking baby. I don't fucking care about the baby I I wasn't even convinced the baby was human. I imagined this before I was like Is there some kind of weird creature? Is it gonna eat me? I don't know. I'll try to say I wasn't really invested what I do. I was just like, I guess I'll leave it here. I don't care like I like the idea that Otherwise you could destroy her run like to the teleporter that you have an option to just drop the baby before you get At the teleporter that you just do Oh, well Just yeeted off the fucking tower Also, we don't need to read out the rest but the one part that I really just do what a highlight is We're also working on an upcoming patch will focus be In which focus will be lying on things like I don't I don't why does it say focus will be lying on things So because you can go prone in this game It makes you harder to spot but you can't move I don't know what purpose it serves in this game though. In fact, I don't think I ever used it I was about to say I don't think I've I ever went prone in the game I think you have to use it when you go up from the cistern When that guy moves Through the room from the one end to the other Oh, well if I did use it, I forgot. Um, I mean, that's the only time I used it. I think I used it by accident I used it. No, I used it twice. I I checked for a key in the cage room But like how do you how do you go? How do you go prone as a prego? Oh, don't even yeah, don't just don't okay I don't know if it's just because I'm tired, but we are also working on an upcoming patch in which focus will be lying on things like Colon does that sentence not fuck up. Is that not weird? You lying your colon Ha, I don't know what's happening. Anyway, um, I I like stuff like this. We've brought it up with um shitty mobile games before so this should sound familiar ability to skip memories by holding down a button now Normally that's a good thing in terms of replaying a game But this complaint has come in from first plays. I know this because I share the complaint and Nobody they never had to make this addition to the doctor sent the doctor sent has memories that play They can last as long as 20 seconds weird how they never had to update it with an ability to skip those I wonder if it's because everyone found the fucking constant memory shit in this game really annoying And they wanted to be able to skip them which is really funny to me Yeah, hey, do you want to skip parts of the story because you're annoyed by it? Because it's dumb because it's dumb and it makes basically makes no sense and it's just it's shitty All right, we just hired a shitty writer and you want to get past their shitty work Like yeah, I would I would like to skip all of these things that ruin the pacing of the game And give me information that I don't care about when I streamed a doctor's hand on the 6th Um For like and that's like that unironically like possibly the 30th time. I fucking completed the game Didn't feel like skipping the flashbacks Kind of interesting to think about Yeah Um And yeah, I feel like that's probably about it unless unless you guys have got anything else I mean right now I'd have to get a fear flash of something in the game that I didn't like that's just resurfacing in my memory Yeah, I'm gonna say that once more for the road calling it a fear flash is like the least bullsiest thing I've ever seen your coward Yeah, you are a coward. It is absolutely designed to be a jump scare It is a sudden flash of an image in front of your face that takes up the whole screen Accompanying with a loud obnoxious noise and it comes out of nowhere Don't fucking try and tell me that wasn't a just not supposed to be a scare. Fuck you Yeah, don't treat me like an idiot rebranding jump skid We're gonna I hope we use this in future when it comes up in other things when someone says like I found that jump scare annoying We'll be like you mean the fear flash Yeah, I'm gonna see if I could I yeah, I want to mean the shit out of this because it's pathetic It is pathetic. It's insulting And so That's what we think of amnesia rebirth Yeah rebirth Shit fuck it the more I talk I used to think it was pretty mediocre the more we talk about it just the worst Yeah, I'm happy to say no, I think it's shit now that we've gone through everything we've gone through I feel like I'm comfortable in saying it's shit I guess there's another hot take for y'all I don't even know the total complete regression Hey comments underneath this video. Tell us if this is a hot take. Okay. Let us know It's not to be really established. It's not a hot take. It's not a hot take Hey, let them decide you mean No, big mean man Um Yeah, so like I said, any anything else, uh, any of the comments? Uh, no, I think we be covered more than I even put on my list. Yeah This was supposed to be like an hour or two. Yeah, so I mean Yeah, it's it's worth pointing out because of the fact that death's bullshit has been here the whole time We're gonna go ahead and apologize to you. Uh, the intention here was to have a one hour discussion I've called it that several times in other setups for this It is four and a half hours And that's just because of the fact that we kept remembering more problems as we kept explaining problems And uncovered more while we were along the right and sharing stories and backing forthing them Yeah, it just it just happened. This was supposed to be the meme stream recording It is now the amnesia discussion and breakdown Also starring desk bullshit for commentary. Yeah, just kind of hanging around and being all like, uh, you know, uh Outlast two is fucking shit Of course, thank you for being here, but yeah, we're probably gonna close this one out and this will just be its own thing and so Uh, for the people listening. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this would have been live If I knew it would have done this. There's no reason this is off. We did this offline. It wasn't supposed to do this way Okay, this was this call it a very natural conversation Yeah, and to be honest, isn't that why you all listen come on Yeah, us being just toxic for no reason. Yeah, man Get dabbed on. Oh, um, thank you for listening and uh efap. Well, enjoy a bonus efap episode, I guess Hey Later Toodles I think this key goes into that door Shut the fuck up Tossay