YouTube Channel: Bloodborne Let's Play Part 3: Descent into Old Yharnam

Old Lady Ashwick recovers from her last death and continues her journey through Yharnam. Next stop is Old Yharnam, a burned down ruin overrun with poisonous beasts, lethal falls at every turn, and a grumpy old guy trying to kill you with a gatling gun.

YouTube Channel: All Main Game Boss Fights in Bloodborne

Here is Old Lady Ashwick fighting every boss in the main game part of Bloodborne. I'll upload the Chalice Dungeon Bosses at a later time.

Secondhand Opinions: Volume

A very British stealth game.

My last secondhand opinions was about Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a very British interactive narrative set in the British countryside, and made by British developers and now I talking about Volume which is another very British game, set in Britain, and made by British developers. But rather than being an extremely depressing exploration of humanity's desperate desire for connection conflicting with our inability to truly understand one another, Volume doesn't make want to kill yourself out of despair after playing it. Volume is a puzzle stealth game developed by Mike Bithell who had previously made the critically acclaimed Thomas Was Alone. Volume is set in a dystopian Britain ruled over by the vile Gisborne Industries. You play as Robert Locksley, a young man that has gotten his hands on a mysterious VR training program called Volume which is somehow connected to Gisborne Industries takeover of the country. Together with the programs training AI Alan, Locksley streams his progress through the simulations on the internet in an attempt to spark a revolution against Gisborne Industries and the corporatocracy it has set in place. I have not played Volume yet and I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but what I do know is that the story of Volume is meant to be a modern take on Robin Hood. Early reviews have stated that while the story is very good overall it doesn't met its full potential. Mechanically the game is a twist on Metal Gear Solid style stealth while less of a focus of getting to point a to point b and a greater focus on mastering levels by memorizing enemy movement patterns and behaviors. I honestly can't wait to get my hands on this game and aside from the story being not everything that it could be I've been hearing nothing but good things. Check it out if you can because I know I am.

YouTube Channel: Bloodborne Let's Play Part 2: Giant Beasts and Mad Hunters.

Old Lady Ashwick continues her journey through Yharnam and comes across her greatest foes yet. A cleric turned monstrous beast, a fellow hunter gone mad with bloodlust, and a creepy old guy.

YouTube Channel: Bloodborne Let's Play Part 1: The Nightmare Begins

Old Lady Ashwick's journey through the nightmare city of Yharnam begins. Watch as she struggles to survive against insane townsfolk, monstrous werewolves, and rude locals that tell you off when you knock on their door!

YouTube Channel: Killing My Favorite Bloodborne Character

While playing around with the Burial Blade after doing the Henryk part of Eileen the Crow's side quest, I accidentally hit her and turned her hostile. After she killed me I went back hoping she would forgive me. Sadly, she was permanently hostile and I had to kill her. I was bummed out that I was locked out of doing her side quest for the rest of that run. Though maybe it's a blessing in disguise because I didn't have to fight the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst. Fuck the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst.

YouTube Channel: Owning Father Gascoigne In Co Op

Here's a clip featuring Old Lady Ashwich calling upon fellow hunters from other worlds to help fight one of Bloodborne's hardest boss fights...then proceeding to wipe the floor with him. This was captured on New Game Plus by the way.

Secondhand Opinions: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

Never has the end of the world been so...dryly British.

I wrote about a little about The Chinese Room's newest game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture last week and I was planning on getting it for a proper review. However, I am light on money and would rather save up for other games I'm more interested in. So I instead decided to watch a Let's Play of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and the first thing I thought was "I'm glad I didn't decide to buy that at full price." Now I didn't hate the game, but I honestly felt that watching a Let's Play was enough to get the full experience and that is not a good thing. Sadly, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture suffers from the same issues as The Chinese Room's older games in that it simply doesn't value the player's presence in the game world. The player is a passive observer that simply walks around a gorgeously realized 1980s British countryside finding pieces of a very well written story with lots of deep and interesting characters dealing with the end of the world. All while listening to some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard in a video game. But the player is really nothing more than a glorified cameraman, witnessing interesting events while at the same time not really being part of it. The Chinese Room really need to craft something that more deeply involves the player. I know they have the talent to do it I'm just getting tired of waiting. I'm still going to pick up Everybody's Gone to the Rapture when I have some cash, but I'm going to wait for a sale. Because $20.00 for a 5 to 6 hour with no replayability is not what I would consider a smart investment.

Indiana Jones of the Infernal Machine Review: Had Aliens and Soviets Before it was Cool

This is the fourth of five reviews detailing games that defined my early childhood.

Developer: LucasArts
Publisher: LucasArts, THQ(Game Boy Color Version)
Version Reviewed: PC
Price: N/A
Released: November 23rd, 1999

One of my fondest childhood memories is watching my dad play Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. I got so into my dad playing this game that I actually got scared that one of the bosses in it would come out of the game and eat my dad. Eventually I dared to play it myself without my dad's guidance and it became the first game that I truly mastered. While today it is mostly looked backed on as being nothing but a shameless Tomb Raider clone, it will always have a special place in my heart. So let me tell you why this game is so special to me.

Indy looking at an ancient temple.

Set in 1947 after World War II and at the beginning of the Cold War, Indiana Jones gets directed by yet other former love interest Sophia Hapgood towards a devious scheme by the Soviets to unearth an ancient Babylonian machine that could spell doom for the entire world. So Indy embarks on a globe trotting adventure to find all the missing parts of the evil Babylonian machine taking to interesting locations such as Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Mexico, and Sudan. The story is mostly just a framework to give an excuse for Indy to go and explore these amazing places, which isn't a bad thing. Indiana Jones was never known for it's deep, involving stories. It was known just being simple and fun which is exactly what the story of Infernal Machine delivers. There is a fun little plot twist towards the end that makes for an interesting change of pace, but overall the story of Infernal Machine delivers that traditional Indiana Jones experience.

Indy exploring a lava filled ruin.

In terms of gameplay, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine basically plays like a hybrid of Tomb Raider and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. As Indy the player explores the environment by walking, running, climbing, and jumping to where you need to go. The levels also happen to be very big with lots of secrets to find so you are encouraged to explore every nook and cranny. There are also some puzzles scattered around that often require use of the machine parts or Indy's iconic whip to solve. These puzzles really added to that sense of exploration and mastering your environment that all games like this should strive for. There is also combat, but it's not very good. This was before the days of cover shooting and good melee combat in video games. Combat is mostly consists of Indy auto targeting the nearest enemy and using the weapon you currently have equipped until either he or his enemies aren't alive anymore. There are some more exotic enemies you run across, but they are usually puzzle fights that require you use your brain rather then your guns. There are also some driving levels that are extremely hard to control though thankfully they are few and far between. While Infernal Machine isn't very original and has a few issues that really hold it back from true greatness, it is still a very fun game to play.

The driving levels are for the most part not very good, but it's fun to run down enemies none the less.

On the technical side of things the game ran as smooth as silk on my old Windows 98 computer, but good luck trying to get it to run on anything else. I have tried to get it to run on my newer computers, but it flat out refuses to work no matter what I do. The controls are also very clunky and take some getting used too. However, the game has excellent sound design and the graphics were some of the best that 1999 had to offer. There is a Nintendo 64 port of the game developed by Factor 5, but avoid that like the plauge. The N64 port of the game is a piece of crap with badly compressed sound, horrible graphical glitches, and several game breaking bugs that make the game unwinnable. There is also a Game Boy Color version, but I've never played it and frankly it doesn't look good anyway.

King Soloman's Mines, one of the best levels in the game, is locked out in the N64 version unless you have an expansion pack add on for the system.

In spite of all it faults, I would not be the gamer I am today without Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Even thought several aspects of it have not aged well I still thing it deserves to be played, but sadly it currently can't be obtained easily. I hope that it appears on Good Old Games one of these days. It's adventure game prequel Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis and the action game sequel Indiana Jones and The Emperor's Tomb are already available so I feel it's only a matter of time till Infernal machine is as well. This game means so much to me and I want everyone to have a chance to play it. Until that happens, here is a long play series of the entire game.

A Look at The Chinese Room's Body of Work

The Chinese Room is a British independent game developer that gets a lot of flack thrown their way over the nature of their games. Their games are commonly criticized as being glorified "walking simulators" and that the narratives of their games are nothing but pretentious drivel masquerading as something deep and meaningful. To be frank, those are not unreasonable allegations based on my own experiences with their games. However, I do feel that the Chinese Room deserve more credit then they are usually given by their critics and that the issues with their games originate from misguided mindset about player agency rather then mere laziness and incompetence.

The Chinese Room's current company logo.

Their first game was Korsakovia, a Half Life 2 mod that put the players in the role of a man named Christopher who suffers from Korsakoff's Syndrome. It was the start of The Chinese Room's style of walking around a strange environment and listen to some narration that builds the story. However, unlike most of their future projects Korsakovia still had "gamey elements" like combat and a health bar. I feel that Korsakovia still holds up as an interesting experiment today and it can be found for free on most modding sites if your interested. Just be warned that it isn't the most stable technically and will likely crash a lot.

Title Screen for Korsakovia The Chinese Room's first real project.

Their next game was another Half Life 2 mod and probably their most well known project. Dear Esther was released in 2008 and was an evolution of Korsakovia in the sense that it focused on what made Korsakovia unique. It put players in the role of an unnamed protagonist traveling to a radio tower on an abandoned island while a narrator reads letters addressed to a person named Esther. As you progress through the island the narration pieces together a story involving a car crash, a miscarriage, and someone dying of syphilis. Honestly, I have no idea what is going on in this game and the fact the narration changes every time you play results in a narrative that has no substance because there is no core idea it seems to focus on. Dan Pinchbeck, one of the founders of the Chinese Room, has stated in interviews that his goal with Dear Esther was to experiment with creating a void that players filled with their personal own interpretations. But based on my own experiences and those of my close friends it's safe to say that this experiment failed.

Title Screen for the original 2008 version of Dear Esther.

If Dear Esther has stayed an experiment I doubt that The Chinese Room would have become the controversial developer it is today. But then The Chinese Room remade Dear Esther in early 2012 and sold it on Steam for fifteen dollars. They took what many considered a failed experiment, myself included, and were now charging money for it. Now I understand why they did this. The Chinese Room obviously wanted a project out there making money that they could use to fund new projects. They also didn't do a slap dash job either. The remake of Dear Esther meticulously rebuilt the entire island from scratch and if I talked to someone that was interested in playing Dear Esther I would point them to the retail version over the original mod. But even though they built the entire game from scratch they did not change the overall narrative structure and lack of player agency that was the issue in the first place. In spite of its gorgeous visuals, hauntingly beautiful music by Jessica Curry, and its incredible voice work by Nigel Carrington, it was still the same failed experiment.

This is the same area as the above screen in the 2012 remake of Dear Esther.

After Dear Esther, The Chinese Room teamed up with Frictional Games, the studio behind the Penumbra series and Amnesia The Dark Descent, for a pseudo-sequel to Amnesia called Amnesia A Machine For Pigs. I personally consider this to be their best game thus far. It is very dark and disturbing survival horror game that dives into the deepest and darkest parts of the human mind. Its story is one of the single best narratives I have experience in any horror property I can think of. I would be more than willing to call this game a masterpiece if it wasn't for the rest of the elements that make up the game.

Concept Art for Amnesia A Machine for Pigs.

Sadly, Amnesia A Machine for Pigs suffers for the same reasons that afflicted Dear Esther though thankfully to a much lessor extent. The players interaction with the would is highly limited and progression is entirely linear with no real opportunity to go off the beaten path. This is in sharp contrast with the previous Amnesia game developed by Frictional Games which was highly interactive and had a Super Mario 64 style level design that lead you through a linear story, but broke it up by funneling you through non linear hubs that let you piece together your own way through the game. It was with Amnesia A Machine for Pigs that I realized what The Chinese Room's major issue with their design methods are. They do not value the power of player interaction.

More Concept Art of Amnesia A Machine for Pigs.

I remember playing Dear Esther and listening to the narration and I kept thinking "Wow, This would be so much more interesting if I was exploring this island finding these letters that the narrator keeps reading to me." If they would have designed the game like that they would have engaged the player more. The player would have had to pay more attention to the environment and maybe notice a lot more of the subtle details The Chinese Room put into the world they have crafted. But I think they are afraid that they if they give players too much freedom they will not respect the dark, depressing themes their games explore. Based on some of Let's Play's I've seen of their games I can't necessary blame them for feeling that way. Video games are a very young medium, interactive narratives are a very new genre that we have only just started exploring, and gamers in general are not fast to embrace new ideas.

A screenshot of The Chinese Room's latest game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.

The Chinese Room's new game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is now out and I've seen a lot of the same criticisms I've level at their previous works being directed at it. In fact, that is why I decided to write this in the first place. I think The Chinese Room is a very talented studio with lots of great ideas, but they are seem unable to trust their players to respect their work without heavily directing their actions. I do plan on checking out Everybody's Gone to the Rapture at some point which leads me to my final point. In spite of all my criticism towards their works I still feel like there games have value, The Chinese Room are a very creative group of people and their deserves to be supported. If you see them on Steam during a sale I recommend at least giving them a try and if you don't like it just don't abuse the refund system. The Chinese Room aren't hacks they are just artists doing what artists do. Experimenting whether it works or not and I think that is something simply worth supporting.

Here is a link to Jessica Curry's Bandcamp Page: https://jessicacurry.bandcamp.com/album/dear-esther

Albino Lullaby Preview: No Jumpscares, No Gore, Final Destination

I went to Otakon for the first time a few weeks ago. Even though I'm not as into anime as the rest of my friends I still had a lot of fun. The place I spent most of my time in was the game room where hundreds of people hurdled around televisions and tables playing almost every kind of game imaginable. I spent most of my time playing games at the developer booths, a place where fledgling developers show their games off for the first time. Many of these games were fun, but only one really stood out in my mind. That game was a very surreal first person survival horror game called Albino Lullaby. I got to play through the entire demo and I have to say I was very impressed by what I played.

This the first thing you see when you begin the game and it is cryptic as hell!

The demo begins with me being pulled out of a burning Victorican house being engulfed by some stage green energy. Then scene then abruptly cuts to me driving a car down a dark road and swirving to miss something standing in the middle of the road before cutting to back again just as I was about to hit an oncoming tracker trailer. I then awaken in a cage. The room around me is dark and all I can make out are hundreds of eyes looking back at me. The strange green energy from before then engulfs the cage and suddenly the cage falls to the ground and I escaped and thus the game proper began.

The prison facility is filled with bizarre and terrifying contraptions like this one here.

The first thing I notice about playing Albino Lullaby is its incredibly eerie sound design. Muted whispers and distant moans of pain flooded my ears as I began to explore the strange prison facility I'd found myself in. It reminded me a bit of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center from the Portal series with its modular test labs changing form at a moments notice. I eventually was able to find a way out of the prison and into a strange, empty Victorian manor. I spied a cracked door and peeked inside it to see a very strange creature taking a bath. I was told by the developer handling the demo that this creature fingerlike was one of many being collectively called The Grandchildren. I eventually was able to progress and found this room that changed form when I pressed a button in the center of the room. My heart stopped when the room suddenly formed into a church and I was confronted by over a dozen of The Grandchildren at once and outlet feeding power to the button had been unplugged.

This part scared the shit out of me.

I had a split second to react and restore power to the button before The Grandchildren swarmed me. I was able to get it working again and the room changed form saving me from the ambush. But before I could catch my breath another group of The Grandchildren banged down the door behind me. I ran as fast as I could. As I ran I found that the strange place I had found myself in was suppended over a massive underground cliff with not hint of where an exit might be. I eventually found a box of blue matches and used them to light lanterns in a particularly dark part of the facility. I eventually made my way back to the Victorian manor. Only now it was swarming with the Grandchildren. I attempted just to make a run for it, but I was ambushed and killed. After the game reload I took a more stealthy approach. I realized that lighting lanterns with the blue matches that I found would drive away the Grandchildren. I was able to evade the Grandchildren and make into a new asylum like area. I came across a Grandchild watching television and I sneaked up and stole his remote. However, when I turned around I was confronted by dozens of the Grandchildren and before I could even react the demo ended.

The Grandchildren may look kind of dumb and they do. But in large groups they are a force to be reckoned with.

Albino Lullaby is the brainchild of former Irrational Games developer Justin Pappas, who had previously worked on the BioShock games. After Irrational Games closure in early 2014 he left to create his own studio Ape Law. The game is being developed on the next generation Unreal 4 Engine and I have to admit that game looks fantastic and runs beautiful. Thought there was one instance where I fell through the world and had to reload a save. The goal Ape Law had in mind while making Albino Lullaby is to create a horror game that breaks conventions. No blood, no gore, and no jumpscares. Albino Lullaby is a game that seeks to scare you with pure game and sound design. From the demo I've played, I say that Ape Law has succeeded in what it has set out to do. There is no clear release window for Albino Lullaby other then it will be out before the end of the year and that it will be episodic. Definitely keep your eyes peeled for this one.

Here is a link to Albino Lullaby's website: http://albinolullaby.com/ 

YouTube Channel: Bloodborne Death Montage

Here is the first video from the official Gaming Lycanthrope Youtube Channel. Enjoy!

I'm Back Baby

I have an actual head image now. It's great!

Welcome to the new and improved blog. I removed a lot of stuff, but that's alright because a lot of new stuff is coming. I'm dropping news articles to focus exclusively on reviews, previews, and editorials. My Facebook Page is now up and running and will now solely be devoted to my own content rather then relying on RSS Graffiti to post other people's stuff. My new twitter is up and I'm actually using it. And tonight my Youtube channel will start uploading regular content which I will post links to here. I'm very excited and I hope that this is just the beginning of something great. I still have a little more work to do, but I just have to say that it's great to be back on track. Expect my first ever preview of a game later tonight!