October 2020 Channel Update – Games about Hell and Vampires

Hey hey,

It’s the month of spooky horrors. Happy one week before Halloween 🎃

In Western Canada, our case numbers have been spiking up again. I think similar things are happening in many places around the world since everyone’s been cooped up for so long and understandably feel like they need to get out and breathe. I hope you remain careful and safe out there. Silver lining is that now we all have a bigger excuse for staying indoors and playing video games 🤷

TL;DR

• Ongoing: VTM: Bloodlines, Hades
• Upcoming: continuing the status quo, Cyberpunk 2077 next month, Q&A is progressing......

Games Finished Since Last Update

DISTRAINT 2 (4 videos): A sequel to a small psychological horror game I played 2 Halloweens ago, continuing the story of Price's journey to redemption after doing awful immoral things for his job as a realtor. (Spoiler for the general direction of the ending?) The story isn't super groundbreaking but it ends off with hope and optimism, so it's hard to say anything bad about it! 

I also did some first looks:

I Am Dead: A point & click puzzle game about exploration of the afterlife via the use of an x-ray vision-like superpower. Pretty relaxing and everything is voice acted as well. Published by Annapurna (Outer Wilds, Edith Finch, Donut County, etc), which might give you a quick sense for what type of game it is immediately.

Amnesia: Rebirth: A sequel to a classic horror game. The first hour looked promising story-wise but the “match burns out every 5 seconds and OH you also can’t run or jump or it’ll go out even faster” mechanic shaved about five years off my life… But TBH I was less scared than I thought I’d be (AND I played this at 10 PM!!! I had to play the first few hours of RE2 all before 5 PM because I was too scared once the sun had gone down lol.)

Progress on Current Stuff

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines: The Patreon poll winner from last month. An RPG of a newborn vampire making sense of and finding their way through vampire society. Noticeably aged, but very solidly engaging with lots of deep lore behind the world. I’ve just completed the first of the four areas of the game and I can already see why it's hailed as such a cult classic.

Hades: Supergiant Games’ magnum opus, an isometric “god-like rogue-like dungeon crawler” where our goal is to escape hell. This game is outside the realm of stuff I usually do on the channel, but both gameplay + story has been really solid. I’m slightly worried about how to end this off though – usually for a story game I’d just end when the story is complete, but this game’s main focus is on the repeatable roguelite gameplay, and the very last story bits seem like they’ll need multiple dozens of hours to be reached. Not sure how time I’m going to invest in this but as of this post I have about 21 runs done, 8 where I’ve reached “the end.”

Upcoming Stuff

VTMB + Hades will probably continue onto the next month. I have interest in continuing Amnesia: Rebirth too (surprisingly!!) but I need to figure out if that can even work - as much as I love Hades, those 1.5 hr+ videos make it difficult to do much else.)

Then as you all know, Cyberpunk 2077 is coming out in November. I still haven’t gotten that graphics card upgrade yet, so I’ll need to join in on the “F5 every 5 seconds to try to get a 3080” game these few weeks too :’) (Spider-Man: Miles Morales is also coming out but I’ll wait on reviews for this. I liked the Spider-Man base game a lot but the DLCs were kinda lackluster.)

Q&A update: I’ve recorded my answers to about the first third of questions. To make up for taking so long, I thought I’d try to elaborate more wherever I could, but I’ve done that to the point that I couldn’t finish answering the questions in one sit down lol.  But I want you to know Things are Happening...!

My overall progress on........... everything??? is behind where I’d like to be, but rather than chasing maximum speed and productivity, maybe it’s good to slow down a bit to savour things too.

As always, feel free to leave any comments/suggestions below, and have a lovely end of October and/or Halloween.

Welonz