Monthly Archives: June 2018

Thoughts: Vampyr

vampyr-swansea

Vampire legends have been around for centuries. At first the product of superstition and folklore, they’ve transitioned into the modern age almost seamlessly, and this is thanks to a reinvention of the vampire from monstrous, decomposing bloodsucker to a charismatic, ageless villain. This modern vampire is almost ubiquitous in fiction and has achieved its tremendous success for two reasons. One is the sexy allure of vampirism, which has driven the creation of so many novels that there’s now a dedicated subcategory for them in many bookshops called Paranormal Romance. The other, though, is that being a vampire is increasingly portrayed as A Generally Awesome Experience. Vampires are superhumanly strong and fast, have mind control powers, do not age, and regenerate from almost any wound — and that’s before you start mixing in author-specific traits such as the ability to transform into animals and sparkling in sunlight. It’s no coincidence that a lot of modern vampire fiction tends to gloss over the less salubrious aspects of vampirism, like the blood drinking or the inability to go sunbathing; nobody really wants to spend much time dwelling on the drawbacks when it’s far more fun to treat it as the ultimate power fantasy.

It is something of a shame, then, that nobody told Dontnod any of this when they were developing Vampyr.

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Thoughts: Cultist Simulator

cultist_simulator_cards

The very first thing you see upon loading Cultist Simulator for the first time is a black screen with some white text. The top half of this text is a suitably otherworldly quote from one of Cultist Simulator’s fictional occult authors, but the bottom half consists of the following, far more foreboding statement:

Explore. Take risks.

You won’t always know what to do next. Keep experimenting, and you’ll master it.

In a way I suppose this is at least thematically appropriate. With these four short sentences Cultist Simulator managed to instill a feeling of nameless dread before I’d even gotten into the game proper. Unfortunately it wasn’t the dread of eldritch abominations or unspeakable nightmares, the sort of thing which a game called Cultist Simulator might choose to make its stock in trade. Instead I was assailed with a dire premonition that I was, once again, about to embark upon an unpleasant journey into the waking nightmare that is the Trash Game Dimension.

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