Messages

If you do try Lords of the Fallen, I'd say go in expecting less Bloodborne and more Dark Souls 2 tier combat (so still fun, but on the rougher side -- though also without the odd floatiness of DS2) and Dark Souls level design with Bonus Extra Good Times (so extremely interconnected, densely packed with side paths, with a handful of odd tumorous areas that just hang off the rest -- plus the incredible other-world gimmick).

Also, the one design choice people complain about is that regular enemies are TOUGH and placed in medium-sized groups in ways that support each other (so if you see one lone weakling it's probably an ambush with another weak goon, an elite and an archer or two providing backup, etc). If you don't like having to deal with groups of enemies that back each other up well and that sort of combat priority ordering thing, you might not have fun, which is fine. I personally preferred the encounter design philosophies of Bloodborne, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 2 to the other games, but that's a taste thing. If you DO like it, it's done exceptionally well here and is the backbone of the challenge.

Let me just say, I like you. The thing you linked doesn't appeal to me personally, because I'm old in the way that makes me disdain video content, but you I like. Good signature, great username, fellow queer, good times.

Sorry about all the death around here, forums are basically the sink node of reality these days, but hey, stick around or keep in touch.

I think that can kind of explain Lies of P getting such a strong reception, but I don't think it explains Lords of the Fallen becoming the one to mock and make fun of. One of these games is distinctly better than the other, and it's not the puppet game.

I've been playing this year's two wannabe-Fromsoft entries: Lords of the Fallen 2023, and Lies of P.

My experience is EXACTLY the opposite of the response to those games.

Lies of P has been a slog of an experience outside of bossfights, and bossfights are often so uninteresting that they end up being facetank-and-heal-through-it affairs. Andreus had masterful visual design, but almost no health and an entire military's worth of attacks that will just autowhiff, so it was over in an eyeblink and I hardly fucking noticed. When they aren't, they suck so fucking bad. Puppet of the Future is "what if we made DS2's Last Giant less interesting and put it in a poison poop pool". If you drained the pool beforehand, I'm sorry, you had the worse experience with this fight, because there's almost no positioning, everything has year-long telegraphs and it has little mobility and less reach. Combat in general has the consistency of gravel: rocky and slow with unexpected bursts of hyperspeed that feel totally out of character. You never feel like you need to use anything you don't want to use, which could be a good thing except that the game DESPERATELY wants you to be using Fable Arts and Legion Arms and thrown consumables. I say no. Fuck you.

Lords of the Fallen has been a delight to explore, and the bossfights have been, if too easy, at least very refreshing. They don't just have phases, they have MECHANICS! Knocking the Hushed Saint from his horse. Making sure to stay in the clear lane for Pieta's second phase. Hiding from the Spurned Progeny's nuke. Reinhold's knockdown mechanics. They even spice up the fucking minibosses that end up becoming normal enemies later with mechanics of their own. It's a wonder and a joy, it feels like a step toward a modernized Soul Reaver. The combat mechanics are janky, but overall fluid and consistent, and you really feel like using your whole toolkit when you get to understanding things like using the Lamp to create breathing room, or to stun a heavy hitter so you can mop up the trash in a room. It's designed like a puzzlebox, every encounter becomes manageable once you learn the way to approach it, and they give you a steady evolution of those encounters to teach you HOW to approach it.

Lies of P has the most sickeningly linear level design I've seen in a game claiming to be a "Souls-like". We are talking straight out of the school of Call of Duty. Bethesda does better levels, in the garbage side content they don't care about. If there are shortcuts they're rarely more than perfunctory nods at Fromsoft's use of shortcuts, and quite often there are none. It's like if you turned the progression pathing of Elden Ring's most linear caves into a whole game. Deathtouched Catacombs has more meaningful interconnection of the various parts of it, and I'm not joking. Disgusting.

Lords of the Fallen has a veritable warren of paths that turn its two more or less linear main paths (Pilgrim's Perch->Empyrean, Pilgrim's Perch->Calrath) into a complete maze. Even some completionist players will miss an entire miniboss just hanging out and chilling in the Fen. Paths often diverge and intertwine in ways even Fromsoft can't quite manage. The game is nearly ropy in its level complexity, a million fibers twisting together. Shortcuts are everywhere and make backtracking and dealing with the honestly stellar encounter design into a joyous ride, because you'll find ways to loop around you didn't know were possible your first ten times through. Honestly, the best level design in games right now. People should take notes.

Lies of P has a miserable story that cribs its core conceits from Isaac Asimov, its writing conventions from Ken Levine, and most of its weirder ideas from Nier Automata, all wrapped up in ...fucking Pinocchio. It's shameless in how it rips off better writers, and yet it doesn't even manage to make the results interesting. Yoko Taro and Ken Levine collabing sounds like a recipe for a game whose twists and turns give you violent nausea in the best way, but here they're stealing the existing works and just mashing them together without regard for how well they work together or apart. It feels like plagiarism in the cheapness of it all.

Lords of the Fallen has a main plot ripped straight out of Lord of the Rings and still manages to not only make the characters around that and the evolution of the main plot interesting, but has a dozen or so fascinating sideplots to uncover, deep and rich lore, and it takes time out to try and do right by the original game. It's a 7/10 story but it's the best possible version of a 7/10 story, hiding 10/10 flash fiction in its depths. Truly more than the sum of its parts.

Lies of P has a lackluster art direction that cribs in equal parts from Dishonored, Sir You Are Being Hunted, and either Grim Dawn or Remnant (it's hard to say which because it's the boring parts!) while bringing only dew drops of its own concepts to the table. In the process of mashing these three things together, it sucks the character out of them leaving you with a sparse collection of memorable images that lack any emotional resonance and all inexplicably remind you of better games you could be playing.

Lords of the Fallen has art direction that has noticeable core themes, strong color theory, a cohesiveness, and which borrows from a small handful of aesthetic forebears without actively making me wonder if its legally actionable at any point. It's not the best art direction you've ever seen (call it an 8.5/10) but its very solid and I'm hard pressed to think on approaches for improvement to it.

I do not understand why Lies of P is the critical darling and the fan favorite.

Been busy dealing with shitty life things (like actually running out of food, like for real) but I found the time to do mix feedback for the past two days. It was for the Memorrhage LP2 coming out some time in 2024.

Garry released the first track on LP2 as a single recently, and it's a decent example of what to expect. Really aggressive, unafraid to experiment, maximalist as fuck.

https://memorrhage.bandcamp.com/track/downstone-2

I did vocals on two tracks and synths on another, so expect to hear more.

Taking a moment to just talk shop: I heard one  "hey what the fuck" moment in the entire thing, during my test listen through laptop speakers (I test through a variety of devices to ensure I pick up the biggest balance of listening environments), and it was on something that was kinda strange to begin with. Everything else, my feedback was nitpicking single hairs in a dog kennel. I couldn't even manage that for the headphones listen, that shit sounded magical.

And I don't think a big-bucks, big-name industry-titan producer could have done anything but wreck the fucking thing. All the trends in metal these days are hide the cymbals in a narrow, character-free frequency band, bury the bass guitar in the low end of the regular guitar -- even, especially if the bass is doing its own thing, pump the mids on the guitar track even after the band spends so much time scooping them on their amp settings, compress the drums until the toms sound like kicks and the kicks sound like a training bag in a boxing gym and the snares sound like bursts of white noise, never use reverb for a GOD DAMN THING, I hate it, I hate it all, and this shit is a breath of fresh air.

Musicians, learn to produce your own stuff! It's mostly vibes, it's not hard, and you will do a better job showcasing your stuff than some man who copy-pastes the EQ settings from his last big project for a paycheck.

TST is an entryist neo-Nazi grifting organization run by a man so horrible that anyone choosing to associate themselves with him should be given the same treatment he deserves. We're talking Stormfront-tier levels of bad.

https://queersatanic.com/lucien-greaves-and-the-satanic-temple-have-a-lot-to-answer-for/

In other news, since I'm choosing to finally speak up about your nonsense, how fucking dare you parrot the fucking ADL, the biggest Zionist propaganda organization in the Western fucking world, about anti-Zionism. Multiple rabbis have written at extraordinary length about how Israel as it stands is a project that goes directly against Torah, and how every Israeli soldier and citizen that goes onto the Temple Mount is risking entering the Holy-of-Holies, which given none of these motherfuckers are the right kind of priests (because there currently can't even be the right kind of priests, a whole lot of preconditions are necessary for that!) is an ENORMOUS sin. Like capital punishment sin. Like buddy, you better just convert to another religion, because you're fucked forever sin. Not to mention shit like an IDF soldier touching a Torah parchment (!) with a FUCKING KNIFE (!!!!!!!) ON FUCKING CAMERA. Any Jew can tell you that's layers upon layers of oh god fuck no what the fuck is wrong with you fucking holy shit holy fuck. And Israeli ministers are literally saying shit like "we should turn Gaza into Auschwitz". That's not a misquote or a paraphrase.

The leadership and the upper classes of Israel are all bloodthirsty monsters who have not just forgotten their history but have chosen to repeat it but with themselves in the driver's seat. Their actions will lead to a rise in anti-semitic violence because people will blame Jews as a whole for them, because they claim to speak for all Jews while actively shitting on Torah. Anti-Zionism isn't just okay, it should be the position of any right-thinking fucking person on the goddamn planet.

You are cheering on neo-Nazi entryists and blithely repeating the propaganda arm of a group of genocidal monsters that just so happen to be Jewish. I, a Jew, am saying shut the fuck up forevermore, you politically illiterate dunce. You may speak again when you have the barest fucking understanding of how to check whether the shit you spew is based in anything but the PR wing of a bunch of horse-laughing movie villains.

Finally digging into modern funk rock in an attempt to bolster my theory that funk rock and nu metal are related. Loving this stuff. Howl, you'll love this.

https://theexilemusikmob.bandcamp.com/track/mad-dash

Good to hear things aren't all awful, Scribbly.

I also have issues with work, though it's finding work in my case.

I'm alive.

On Tuesday night, I was driven from the place I was living by one of the people there going on a total power trip because I dared use common spaces to exist when he wanted to eat food. Nothing I was doing would stop him from eating, but because I wouldn't leave the common, shared spaces while he ate, he lost his shit.

The dude wasn't the homeowner. He had a whole table to use, which I used a single seat at (the table seats 3 comfortably, WHILE I'm set up). I did have sound coming out of my laptop -- but only because he disconnected the internet, so I had to switch my headphones to my phone to talk to my partner.

Yes. Really. He disconnected the internet to try to drive me out of common spaces. Then because I wouldn't he locked me out of my bedroom, locked me out of the house (fortunately, I had my keys), and my partner was legitimately worried for my safety staying in his presence. She came to get me at great personal expense and risk, and I am safe now, but I'm far from okay.

I'm hoping this train of nightmares and suffering has ended now.

While struggling to get through this zero-income stretch (this is brutal, I'm not sure I survive this time), my partner, the Orrery, died.

I want it known she beat the fucking brain cancer. She killed it. It was the recovery from that fight that took her down, but she still fucking won.

She got away from her shitty abusive live-in partner, in the end.

My last communication with her was me parsing through the aphasia to understand her, and her KNOWING I understood.

Now I have to pack up everything I own again, and move to Wisconsin (and maybe, if G-d is kind to me and this relationship works out, Sweden some years later), and hope I can find a way to ride out the month or so of complete emotional breakdown I'm going to need just to get back to looking for fucking work again.

There is too. Fucking. Much.

1: I am here because I've been here for ages and some people I like are here. Where the hell else would I be?

2: I am provably weirder than you. Like, it's actually possible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, regardless of context, that I am weirder than you.

Some examples:
--I have 199 people living in my head. Not a joke, this is diagnosed, although using "people" for some of them may be a stretch.
--Actually, example of that: there are not one, but two individual consciousnesses in here that perceive themselves as a hive mind inhabiting a large pack of walking, predatory clams. Like, wobbling around on a fan of geoduck siphons, navigating by sonar using their beards to receive sound and scraping their valves together to make sound, and beating prey to death with their sharpened, beak-shaped valves. They aren't even the weirdest things in here. This isn't lol-random shit, this is literally a fair description of precisely 2 of the 199 beings in my head.
--My actual legal name is "Curse Fraudulence Null". Yes, for real.
--I ask everyone to refer to me as they would an object, an idea, an abstract notion, an unexpected xenomorph folded up in the closet. "It". "That". "Thing". Half of this is that I hate people and being associated with them, the other half is setting expectations.
--I have befriended and worked with multiple successful musicians, videogame developers, film directors, published authors, etc. They see me as one of their kind, even though I have never released work.
--I'm in the process of gearing up to write a queer-plural exegesis of Torah and the Zohar, using the Talmud as a guide, but with the recognition that a being like me would not have been foreseen or understood by the sages.
--I've constructed a half-dozen complete languages, just for fun.
--This list continues.

This, my reaction to your garbage on the floor, is not you being too weird. This is you being too normal. I've seen this shit a thousand times. There are thousands of people exactly like you, speaking only from personal experience, which means there's bound to be millions.

3: Discordianism is not nice. Discordianism is a religion whose goddess is one of chaos and strife. Here, from Wikipedia, is Hesiod describing Eris's children. Parentheticals are the translations of the names of her children, and a fair description of their roles.

"And hateful Eris bore painful Ponos (Hardship),
Lethe (Forgetfulness) and Limos (Starvation) and the tearful Algea (Pains),
Hysminai (Battles), Makhai (Wars), Phonoi (Murders), and Androktasiai (Manslaughters);
Neikea (Quarrels), Pseudea (Lies), Logoi (Stories), Amphillogiai (Disputes),
Dysnomia (Anarchy) and Ate (Ruin), near one another,
and Horkos (Oath), who most afflicts men on earth,
Then willing swears a false oath."

If you don't like that Eris, don't worry, there's another one. From Homer:
"... and Discord [Ἔρις] that rageth incessantly, sister and comrade of man-slaying Ares; she at the first rears her crest but little, yet thereafter planteth her head in heaven, while her feet tread on earth. She it was that now cast evil strife into their midst as she fared through the throng, making the groanings of men to wax."

I should stress, yeah, these two Erises are generally considered to be different goddesses with the same name. I feel kinship with the latter, who I tend to call "Eris Militant". Interestingly, that's also definitely the one who threw the original Apple of Discord. Hm.

"Hippie shit" is a distortion. It's not a wholly untrue one, it's just missing the coat of paint for the filth and shit underneath. Eris is not a nice lady. She's a shit-stirrer and menace. She makes people fight for her own entertainment, and doesn't particularly care if they live or die, so long as it's funny.

Bluntly put: no, you're wrong.

4: There's nothing formal about bumping ancient threads that have nothing to do with whatever the fuck you're doing. "Word salad" is not a valuable addition. It is, by definition, all noise, no signal.

As for the forum being so quiet that they wouldn't ban anyone, don't worry! I can make everyone, especially the admins, sick of my shit in a hot second. And I can 100% take you with me.

Same. I just signed him up for so much Christian fundie and pregnancy newsletter spam it would be impossible to block it all, honestly.

End of the fucking line again.

I was spending so much time focusing on climbing out of the hole I live in that I didn't notice the ground crumbling under my FUCKING FEET.

No income. No rent means no housing. No good money and SNAP actively fucking me over means I will not have food anymore either real soon. I am so fucking tired of struggling for nothing, of fighting so fucking hard and making progress and having EVERYTHING TAKEN FROM ME yet the fuck again. I'm 33 and i have NOTHING

I'm juggling too much shit.

Gluten-free diet, relearning how to prepare foods that don't come in pre-packaged forms, finally have pans that won't hold gluten because no one else will be (no one else had BETTER BE) using them, building a small database of recipes I can prep myself (thinking about shepherd's pie, but with corned beef and frozen-section roast beef since I can't handle raw meat until my fingers stop bleeding, and replacing the gluten-containing gravy with a mixture of bone broth and queso), trying to visit a crush of mine and a friend of mine because it's cheaper that way, trying to get healthcare back (no luck so far...), etc, etc, etc...

I cannot be trying to quit smoking again right now, absolutely not, but I'm zeroed out. Also, I need to come up with 100 dollars for unrelated reasons that relate to maintaining housing and sanity. (If I explained this one, you probably wouldn't believe me, but suffice to say: Wisconsin is currently a better bet for me than Chicago.)

And because of Elon Musk, crowdfunding has all dried up. I'm this || close to being able to hit self-sufficiency, and I have made actual strides toward it. I cook my own food! I wanted a little treat and I had a tiny bit of money for it but realized I had butter and generic gluten-free rice krispies cereal and marshmallows and I made myself a little treat INSTEAD! I'm capable of trading energy in to save money now, where I wasn't before!

But one manbaby's ego has made it so I can't make it the rest of the way up. Well, okay, there's that and the nature of our capitalist hellscape in general, plus the unique awfulness of USAian healthcare, etc, etc, but I would be able to just say "fuck you" to all of that and muscle through... if.

The screaming in my head is around 17 or 18 kHz, and it's not alone.

My brain is full of the THX logo sound, but tuned two octaves lower.