Also, great beginning, with the guy just casually going about his business (I imagine him whistling under his breath even before Burt hits it off), like, totally, nothing to see here, before he enters the building.

*Edit* Ah, sod it. I'll just keep it short:

Yeah, the localization for the Persona games is stellar.

Yeah, at first, I thought that this might be not half-bad an idea — train dogs to do things they are not great at! Hilarity ensues!

I found myself unwilling to play anything with violence in it this week, but I also fought that a nice, colorful game could do some good — and I also bought Owlboy. I also only just concluded the first 'chapter', but it definitely radiates a lot of love, and the care put into it is visible on the surface level, too —…

Saint's Row is actually the only game series where I really, really cared about character creation, too. (Maybe it's because it let's you do absolutely everything?)

Unfortunately, that's not true. It's one of the most effective strategies of all right-wing populists everywhere.

Yeah, and I'm honestly not sure how to get my head around that. I mean, if your fatalist leaning, this election has proven a shitload of scary things. (Being a decent human being doesn't matter. Knowing what you're talking about doesn't matter. Facts don't matter. Truth doesn't matter. The opinion of experts doesn't…

I know, right?! I recently even tried to find out how to turn off that ticker in Steam, but, needless to say, even though it should be a totally mandatory option, it's impossible to do (without going offline, which comes with a whole bunch of other disadvantages).

The strongest memory the series left in my mind probably is the eerie feeling I was confronted with when watching the Twin Peaks/Bodysnatchers episode (with a vegan spin)!

You sound just like that guy played by Bradley Whitford in Cabin In The Woods.

I think that's key to the feeling of hostility and vulnerability in the game, much more than all the elements that would nowadays be labelled "survival": I once argued in a paper that while most games do operate under an 'ego-logical' paradigm, in which the player character is always front and center, and the whole…

I actually like Stephen King's distinction of three kinds of terror:

It's interesting that you write this under an article talking about Amnesia, since in my understanding, that game actually did try to make the horror part of the systems. Things like the fact that you are — mechanically, not narratively — discouraged to actually look at the creatures, least you go insane. You could…

Also, whether you like it or not, Five Nights At Freddy's and its many, many iterations would probably have to be included — I figure that for a lot of kids in the last years, that game was the very introduction to horror games. It takes some clues from Amensia's playbook, if I understood that correctly, too, what…

I saw Beautiful New Bay Area Project about two years ago, a short movie in which Kurosowa basically said: Screw it, I'm going full Capcom.

I saw this one at a festival in summer. I did have some problems with the script — as in a lot of horror movies in general and Kurosowa's in particular, I firmly preferred the first part of the movie where things were a lot more ambiguous —, but it's as strong on atmosphere as you might hope for from a Kurosowa movie.

Shinji Aoyama, director of the marvelous Eureka, also worked under Kurosawa early in his career. That guy is influential, and rightly so.

Yeah, it is kind of nice, isn't it?

80 Days is spectacularly good in my opinion. It really points to a bright future for interactive fiction. (I've actually lately gotten a tablet, so I will be playing Sorcery! as well, and, needless to say, Inkle does wonders for the format there again.)