I hope everyone had a good spooky time. I am so tired. But I had a good time celebrating the scary season, so I can’t complain too much.
This month I have: COSMO, TOO MUCH SURVIVAL HORROR.
COSMO time! I have been focusing on aesthetics recently. Possessed by the desire to give Cosmo a proper idle animation I spent some time on the underlying animation systems. Now I have a few Quality Of Life changes, so I’ve started working on combat animations and setting up NPCs to use the same systems. There’s not much to go into detail about here, so instead here’s a quick gif:
this is bullying
I also did a basic environment test to try and shake myself out of my imposter syndrome. I’m going back and forth on a few things but overall I like it! I still find it eternally difficult to balance the values with the dynamic lighting, but that’s just down to a lack of iteration. I’ll get there! Something else I’ve been wanting to try is a Colour Burn filter – a friend suggested it a long time ago and I stubbornly refused in order to preserve the greyscale aesthetic, but admittedly it does look nice. I’ll sit on it for a bit.
It’s no secret that I have absorbed a lot of survival horror this year. Perhaps too much. But in my RESIDENT EVIL fugue state I googled ‘is there a good tabletop system for subjecting my friends to the Spencer Mansion’ and was rewarded with: ENTER THE SURVIVAL HORROR.
It’s built using the FORGED IN THE DARK system, which was perfect as I’d been looking to get into BLADES for a while. However, I was eager to give my friends a more horror focused experience as a special ✨halloween treat ✨, and ETSH is designed to provide exactly that.
I used the premise of RESIDENT EVIL 1 as my base, as it takes place in a single isolated location, and highly customised it to be a bit more casparcore and bit less viral outbreak-y. Because. You Know. In my custom chain of events a bunch of rich people had gathered at an isolated mansion for a big cool rich people party and hadn’t been heard from for three weeks. Instead of S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team, I let my players decide who they were and why they had chosen to enter the estate – giving us an opportunistic thief, a disgraced journalist and a rookie A.S.T.E.R. officer.
I’ll be light on certain details for now as my friends have yet to complete the campaign, but I wanted to post a bit about my pride and joy: the map. I made a physical map. Please gaze upon it:
I went back on forth over whether I should provide a map or ask my players to draw it out themselves, but I think I made the right choice – the map might be their favourite part of the campaign so far. They find it very satisfying to peel away the fog of war (don’t ask me how long it took to cut all those pieces out) and it helps them visualise and plan their next move. Perfect!
Designing a campaign around a fixed map was a challenge and a half but I’m pretty damn proud of what I managed to come up with. RESIDENT EVIL knowers will recognise parts of the Spencer Mansion lurking in the layout (if it ain’t broke don’t fix it) and there are survival horror tropes scattered throughout the puzzles, items and encounters. My players however are not RESIDENT EVIL knowers, so it remains to be seen whether they will escape my cool big mansion in one piece…
RESIDENT EVIL 4 – Terrible news everyone! I have played this game. I briefly mentioned it in a previous newsletter, but I do not like RESIDENT EVIL 4! I find it lacking! But with the remake coming out early next year my brother and I agreed that we should probably play through it at least once. So here I am. I have suffered through it for the sake of science. I realise that this game is the most beloved and celebrated entry in the series and yes, I am having a bit of fun being a contrarian, but I am not being hyperbolic when I say I find it difficult to like or enjoy this game.
The core of the problem is that it doesn’t feel like a RESIDENT EVIL game – I delight in a metroidvania style world where the location itself is a puzzle to be solved, where resources are finite and must be spent wisely and where worldbuilding comes from notes left behind as disaster unfolded. 4 has none of these things. Many of the interesting decisions a player might take in a traditional survivor horror (when to use resources, which routes to take, what key items to bring, whether to deal with an enemy or avoid it) have been diminished, and with the tedium of the combat the experience turns into a slog. The adaptive difficulty is cool in theory but in practice it provides me with a game in which I never want for anything. This combined with the uninteresting and linear level design made for a very hollow and monotonous experience, personally.
Anyway, do I have anything nice to say about this game? I enjoyed the writing, the campness and the ridiculousness of being able to suplex people so hard their heads exploded. That’s unfortunately the most I can come up with right now. Recent trailers and showcases for the remake have shown off features that address some of my complaints however, so I am not giving up hope on a truly enjoyable RESIDENT EVIL 4 experience just yet.
SIGNALIS – Speaking of enjoyable survival horror experiences, I picked up SIGNALIS on a whim after seeing a trailer days before release. It looked promising and I was excited to play a traditional survival horror without prior knowledge provided by childhood memories, let’s plays or the general gaming zeitgeist. It was an incredibly fun experience, enhanced by playing in the dark and one particular bug where my controls became possessed and moved on their own.
My main complaint (SPOILERS BY THE WAY) is that I wish SIGNALIS had felt confident enough in its own premise and aesthetic to ditch some of the more overt SILENT HILL references. In particular, I thought it was a shame that the ‘Nowhere’ segment leaned so heavily on flesh and rust when it had done a stellar job of building up its own style for many hours already. When I dived into the depths of the mining facility I was excited to see what sort of otherworldly nightmare SIGNALIS could provide, and instead I got a slight remix of a game I’d played with my brother earlier this year. Thankfully the rest of the game is solid and the execution of ‘Nowhere’ is still great, so my complaints don’t take away from the overall experience.
Outside of the aforementioned spoiler moments, the game does wear its inspirations on its sleeve for most of the game, but in a way that shows it understands why those things worked so well in the first place. If you’re a fan of old school survival horror and a bit of cosmic weirdness, maybe go check it out? You won’t regret this later.
For no reason whatsoever you can now find me haunting COHOST. It’s nice over there. I’m trying to remember what it’s like to actually engage with social media instead of watching from a distance. It’s still difficult and I still prefer writing sporadic and leisurely updates here, but I despair less in eggbug’s world than I did on Twitter.
Next month’s newsletter is the yearly roundup! I have no idea what it’s going to look like. See you then!
Caspar 👻
