Gnagghi
4 reviews liked by Gnagghi
Slay the Spire
2019
Shiv
Hypnospace Outlaw
2019
This game perfectly encapsulates what it feels like to fall down a rabbit hole in internet mysteries, in sudden tragedy from a face you'll never see the eyes close forever, let alone see ever, their only appearance to you being a small avatar and a name that represents them in a sea of other similar people.
The innocence of that pre-social media world, the more sincere nerdiness, the closed mindedness of the older generations and their fear of the devil in any product their children consume, the juvenile arguments two kids in their teens get into as well as the fake girlfriends they make, the kids who join the platform even if they're underage and stand out from everyone else, the corny mascots for the teenagers that all the teenagers make fun of, the cardinal sin of pissing off a nerdy community and then they pull the rug out from under you (Long live the freelands!)
Each character feels like a human being, though the story writes the personalities to be a little more indulgent in the problems rather than cowardly or just suddenly disappearing like how it would work in reality.
[SPOILER WARNING]
Dylan is such a well written character, he's just this enthusiastic programmer who gets wrapped up in the speeding away success of MerchantSoft and ends up getting too big for his boots, becoming an egotistical prick, and a hypocrite, to a point where he even punishes you for striking the content that you were told to take down, due to a copyright claim from a music artist, who ignores a poor girl upset that she's getting harassed, who acts snobby and rude to everyone including his coworkers like Samantha, and causes the Mindcrash, killing at least 4 people and putting Tim in jail for 6 years, as well as injuring thousands of others, all because he was overenthusiastic about putting his game Outlaw into the new version of Hypnospace, and has to live with that for 20 years, only coming clean once he's finally been discovered, he had truly become rotten at that point but he at least was finally ready to repent and take responsibility for his crime, with a eulogy that feels half as a tearjerker letter to those poor innocent souls taken away, and half as a nostalgic goodbye to that old internet from Jay Tholen himself, but, hey, wait a minute maybe Dylan's honesty isn't what it seems.
Maybe Dylan is just building himself another safety net, only waiting till the eleventh hour to finally come clean about his crimes, clearly only having a face value idea of those people who's blood is on his hands, he asks you to send things related to MerchantSoft to him in hopes he can get it deleted letting him get away freely, he probably joins the archival project so he can cover up his tracks when news came out that Hypnospace was being explored by archivists, he centers his eulogy around himself and his fucking stupid game that was the cause of all these problems in the first place, and his perceptions into the people he killed are shallow face value tearjerkers, meant to get him into court on a favorable confession rather than being nailed down with the evidence and the story that he ruined a teenagers life by throwing the blame on him, this weaselly worm that represents the worst out of the tech bubble, the Mark Zuckerbergs, The Elon Musks, or what could become that any condescending nerd if you give them the power of god for a moment.
Tim is just tragic, he's just a kid wanting to impress a girl he likes by doing cool hack-y stuff, and ends up getting wrapped up in the mindcrash all because he made a scare to win his love interest back, and ends up going to prison for it, and getting blamed for something he had no responsibility for, getting sent to prison for 6 years over it, all the while M1NX and R3ckoning in particular, were trying to reveal the truth, but they were just too late, Thankfully Tim moved past it (but probably spent years dealing with the guilt, and the remorse over Tiffany) getting a job in Computer Science, and having a loving wife and daughter.
Adrian is a huge hidden big bad, he's a soulless corporate tool, who hired his brother (who are separated by TWENTY YEARS, they hardly know eachother. he's using Dylan's ego as a springboard to get programming work out of him) and barely is seen until LeakyPipes, where you see he's a total bumbling idiot and doesn't know the first thing about tech, and doesn't know the damage he's done by letting a puny, worm of a man play god, and just goes totally hands off, not hiring enough extra staff to do proper work on Hypnospace and letting Dylan move programmers that question his authority off of the programming and onto things like HSPD Dispatch, culling geek forums and putting them on backburner servers because he wanted the product to sell better to general audiences and thoughtlessly allowing malware onto his platform, even punishing you if you try to take it down, due to it being a sponsor.
It's a beautiful story, really, offering a storybook version of these modern/late 2000s social media controversies, mixed with the condescending web admin who shuts down the entire forum because people made fun of him of the 90s, through the lens of Geocities and email chains, wrapped in a bow of hazy dreamlike 90s nostalgia.
Truly one of the best games of all time.
The innocence of that pre-social media world, the more sincere nerdiness, the closed mindedness of the older generations and their fear of the devil in any product their children consume, the juvenile arguments two kids in their teens get into as well as the fake girlfriends they make, the kids who join the platform even if they're underage and stand out from everyone else, the corny mascots for the teenagers that all the teenagers make fun of, the cardinal sin of pissing off a nerdy community and then they pull the rug out from under you (Long live the freelands!)
Each character feels like a human being, though the story writes the personalities to be a little more indulgent in the problems rather than cowardly or just suddenly disappearing like how it would work in reality.
[SPOILER WARNING]
Dylan is such a well written character, he's just this enthusiastic programmer who gets wrapped up in the speeding away success of MerchantSoft and ends up getting too big for his boots, becoming an egotistical prick, and a hypocrite, to a point where he even punishes you for striking the content that you were told to take down, due to a copyright claim from a music artist, who ignores a poor girl upset that she's getting harassed, who acts snobby and rude to everyone including his coworkers like Samantha, and causes the Mindcrash, killing at least 4 people and putting Tim in jail for 6 years, as well as injuring thousands of others, all because he was overenthusiastic about putting his game Outlaw into the new version of Hypnospace, and has to live with that for 20 years, only coming clean once he's finally been discovered, he had truly become rotten at that point but he at least was finally ready to repent and take responsibility for his crime, with a eulogy that feels half as a tearjerker letter to those poor innocent souls taken away, and half as a nostalgic goodbye to that old internet from Jay Tholen himself, but, hey, wait a minute maybe Dylan's honesty isn't what it seems.
Maybe Dylan is just building himself another safety net, only waiting till the eleventh hour to finally come clean about his crimes, clearly only having a face value idea of those people who's blood is on his hands, he asks you to send things related to MerchantSoft to him in hopes he can get it deleted letting him get away freely, he probably joins the archival project so he can cover up his tracks when news came out that Hypnospace was being explored by archivists, he centers his eulogy around himself and his fucking stupid game that was the cause of all these problems in the first place, and his perceptions into the people he killed are shallow face value tearjerkers, meant to get him into court on a favorable confession rather than being nailed down with the evidence and the story that he ruined a teenagers life by throwing the blame on him, this weaselly worm that represents the worst out of the tech bubble, the Mark Zuckerbergs, The Elon Musks, or what could become that any condescending nerd if you give them the power of god for a moment.
Tim is just tragic, he's just a kid wanting to impress a girl he likes by doing cool hack-y stuff, and ends up getting wrapped up in the mindcrash all because he made a scare to win his love interest back, and ends up going to prison for it, and getting blamed for something he had no responsibility for, getting sent to prison for 6 years over it, all the while M1NX and R3ckoning in particular, were trying to reveal the truth, but they were just too late, Thankfully Tim moved past it (but probably spent years dealing with the guilt, and the remorse over Tiffany) getting a job in Computer Science, and having a loving wife and daughter.
Adrian is a huge hidden big bad, he's a soulless corporate tool, who hired his brother (who are separated by TWENTY YEARS, they hardly know eachother. he's using Dylan's ego as a springboard to get programming work out of him) and barely is seen until LeakyPipes, where you see he's a total bumbling idiot and doesn't know the first thing about tech, and doesn't know the damage he's done by letting a puny, worm of a man play god, and just goes totally hands off, not hiring enough extra staff to do proper work on Hypnospace and letting Dylan move programmers that question his authority off of the programming and onto things like HSPD Dispatch, culling geek forums and putting them on backburner servers because he wanted the product to sell better to general audiences and thoughtlessly allowing malware onto his platform, even punishing you if you try to take it down, due to it being a sponsor.
It's a beautiful story, really, offering a storybook version of these modern/late 2000s social media controversies, mixed with the condescending web admin who shuts down the entire forum because people made fun of him of the 90s, through the lens of Geocities and email chains, wrapped in a bow of hazy dreamlike 90s nostalgia.
Truly one of the best games of all time.
Everything hurts. Revachol, Martinaise is, quite literally, dead space. The single vector on the Motorway South is slowly fading away. It's pale. The train leaves the station at 21:00 every evening, shit-pig. You've thought about it before. How much they'll miss you. Fingering the edge of the eject button. Gagging on metal. It's cold.
Load it up, and roll the dice, limp-dick! You have a job to do remember? First, get that body down, and then worry what you're going to do next after. You're not the first in this fuckfest parade, nor will you be the last. Maybe, you could use your superior intellect to conceptualise yourself actually doing your job? Or maybe, you're one of those manipulative bastards who'd get the job done for you! Still no? Maybe you're really good with your hands then. Honed abilities and skills are the backbone of any good investigation. Or, could you be one of those branched-off superior genus of humans that evolved muscles that strap the body like armour, and nudge off pain like sweat?
No. You are an amnesiac dead-drunk cop. Your brain is filled with liquor and your muscles are filled with drugs. But you know what? Fuck it. Fuck that dead body.
Ascend above cop-hood and worry about more important things. Like this sick bug you found out about the other day. It's really cool. I'm sure Kim would really love this one. Tell him about how you want to become homeless, or about your sudden inexplicable urge to adopt both facism AND the feminist agenda to fight off the - ahem - "ultraliberals" (yuck!). Nobody likes the ultraliberals.
Yes!! You've done it!! The locomotive heart of the man-engine is firing up again at full speed. Choo Choo! Strap back the expression and get back out onto the street, superstar! Tonight, Revachol is dancing to DISCO.
Load it up, and roll the dice, limp-dick! You have a job to do remember? First, get that body down, and then worry what you're going to do next after. You're not the first in this fuckfest parade, nor will you be the last. Maybe, you could use your superior intellect to conceptualise yourself actually doing your job? Or maybe, you're one of those manipulative bastards who'd get the job done for you! Still no? Maybe you're really good with your hands then. Honed abilities and skills are the backbone of any good investigation. Or, could you be one of those branched-off superior genus of humans that evolved muscles that strap the body like armour, and nudge off pain like sweat?
No. You are an amnesiac dead-drunk cop. Your brain is filled with liquor and your muscles are filled with drugs. But you know what? Fuck it. Fuck that dead body.
Ascend above cop-hood and worry about more important things. Like this sick bug you found out about the other day. It's really cool. I'm sure Kim would really love this one. Tell him about how you want to become homeless, or about your sudden inexplicable urge to adopt both facism AND the feminist agenda to fight off the - ahem - "ultraliberals" (yuck!). Nobody likes the ultraliberals.
Yes!! You've done it!! The locomotive heart of the man-engine is firing up again at full speed. Choo Choo! Strap back the expression and get back out onto the street, superstar! Tonight, Revachol is dancing to DISCO.
A man wakes up, hungover in a trashed motel room, whatever his old life may be is as dead as disco, with whatever comes after picking up the pieces, He goes on a journey trying to solve a murder while rebuilding his personality from scratch in a dead-end town in a dead-end world.
If the main thing that interested you in BG3 was the branching dialogue and permanence of your choices in the story as well as them being continuously referenced for the rest of the game, then this is the game for you.
If the main thing that interested you in BG3 was the branching dialogue and permanence of your choices in the story as well as them being continuously referenced for the rest of the game, then this is the game for you.