Game EXP: The Exit 8 (PC)

The Exit 8

Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, Steam OS, Linux

Release Date: November 29, 2023

Publisher: PLAYISM

Developer: KOTAKE CREATE

Play Time: 2.4 Hours

Gameplay Videos on YouTube

I'd been aware of The Exit 8 for a while, probably around the time I was reviewing Dreamcore and POOLS, and the concept of another liminal game combined with a spooky version of 'spot the difference' mechanic was very appealing.  So I picked the game up last week when I saw it was on sale along with The Cabin Factory.  The game is up front with what you have to do to proceed: walk forward and, if you spot an anomaly, turn around and walk the other way, although what specifically the anomalies are and how they manifest vary greatly.  One anomaly might be as obvious as a sign being upside down or the black ooze leaking from an air vent, while others might be more difficult to spot, like the man whom you constantly pass is no longer holding the phone in his left hand.

Your overall goal in the game is to escape the series of seemingly endless hallways by reaching Exit 8.  If you pass through a hallway that doesn't have an anomaly, the number on the large yellow sign will go up by one.  If you see an anomaly and you turn around, when you reach the sign, the number will have increased by one.  If you fail to see an anomaly and continue through the hallway, the number will reset to zero, and you will start back from the beginning.  If you think you see an anomaly but there isn't one there, and you head back the way you came, the number will reset to zero, and you will start over from the beginning.

I definitely went through various stages of emotion with this game.  First, there was the general uncomfortableness that you might experience playing a game in a liminal space.  Then there was excitement about noticing something different in the environment, like a light that wasn't blinking before or a severed foot in the middle of the floor.  Then there was the horror of the situation, and feeling scared when you turn the corner and stop, but continue to hear footsteps from behind you.  Then there's frustration when you enter the hallway after passing the yellow sign, now with the number 7 emblazoned on it, convinced that you don't notice any anomalies, only to see a 0 on the sign when you round the corner at the end of the hallway.  Then there's whatever emotion "fuck all" defines as you start sprinting through the hallways, only giving a haphazard glance around before you decide to continue or turn back (see my playthrough series Part 5).  And at some point, there's paranoia as you first come across the yellow sign with 8 on it, looking no different than all of the other iterations of the sign except the number.  You enter the hallway and begin to second-guess everything, all of the times you were convinced that you didn't see anything, only to have the number reset to zero.

For me, I didn't look up any of the guides on Steam listing all of the known anomalies at first.  I wanted to see how far I could get on my own, convinced that I had a decent memory and an eye for noticing differences.  To me, it would be like looking up all of the sanity effects in Eternal Darkness and not being surprised by the bathtub scene.  After an hour, I did look up a spoiler-free post, just to see if there was a mechanic that I was missing that was causing me to return to zero, and I inadvertently saw a reference to two anomalies.  After two hours and still coming back to that zero on the yellow sign, I gave in and looked up a guide for all of the anomalies.  I saw that, apart from one anomaly, I had already seen most of them, and the two I hadn't seen were somewhat obvious, like the lights in the hallway turning green, or the walking man wearing a baseball hat.  

On my sixth attempt, I finally made it out after several runs where, looking back at my video, I missed some pretty obvious anomalies, but I was just moving too fast to notice what was off about the hallway.  Seeing those stairs at the end of the hallway, I felt a sense of relief, although still cautious that there was going to be a stinger of an ending, which I wouldn't put it past this kind of game to pull.

Since this is a Game EXP article, I wanted to go into more specifics about how I played The Exit 8, but I can't really do that without getting into spoilers, because part of this particular liminal game is discovering how the game works apart from the list of rules that the game gives you at the beginning.  I had thought about not including some of these points, but while rewatching my playthrough videos, I laughed at my assumptions.  So I am going to include those below the spoiler warning.  So, only continue reading if you don't mind spoilers.

~SPOILERS~

One of the first things I started doing, even before reading the rules, was to stay to the left of the yellow line.  There was a sign that said "Keep Left," and I read that as one of the potential rules.  This, in fact, was not one of the rules, but me taking things literally.

Probably like a lot of people who didn't look up a walkthrough before playing, I was fully expecting there to be some super subtle anomalies associated with the posters on the wall.  I didn't think that the developers would have swapped Kanji characters, as this would alienate just over half of Steam's user base.  Likewise, I didn't think that there would be any misspellings or alterations to the date or time on any of the posters.  When the woman in the poster developed longer hair and creepy eyes, that was the kind of anomaly I was expecting.  I was also thinking that there would be additional anomalies, like maybe the dogs in the third poster attacking each other.  In the fourth poster, with all the people milling about, I was expecting there to be someone standing in the middle of that room holding a knife, and everyone else was murdered, maybe with the lone person looking out to the viewer.  Considering how many times I reset back to zero after missing an anomaly, I was convinced that something was happening with the posters that I was missing.

Focusing on the posters was one reason I didn't pay much attention to the walking man at first.  As long as he looked relatively normal, then I didn't need to give him so much of my focus, where there were six posters on the other wall.  Early on, I had experienced his face looking strange, him smiling, and him following me, and that all seemed pretty obvious compared to what my brain was telling me could be wrong with one of the posters.

After a while, I also thought that there could be an anomaly associated with the doors; apart from the door knob placement, and there being a door missing.  I noticed that the far left door was only two tiles away from the electrical box with the red light, and eight tiles away from the door to the left.  The doors were also three tiles higher than the electrical box.  Sadly, another thing I was focusing on turned out to be a self-imposed red herring.

Another thing that I thought might have been an unspoken rule that wasn't was that at some point, I thought you had to be moving the entire time, that you couldn't stop, and that was the reason why I kept failing and going back to zero.  Which I recognize doesn't make any sense, as there were plenty of times I had stopped to notice an anomaly, turned around, and progressed, but for some reason, my brain thought, "Maybe if I kept moving, that might prevent me from going back to zero.

As I mentioned above, after two hours of playing, and always seemingly missing an anomaly or two, I did look up a guide, and that was when I found out about "The Face."  The Face was described as a face that looks like it's made out of smudges of dirt on the ceiling.  There were a lot of people commenting on never seeing The Face, and it likely being the reason that they didn't spot an anomaly even when they were so very thorough.  I only barely saw The Face during my last run (in Part 6), or you can go up and look at the ceiling in the second-to-last picture in this article.  There's The Face between the light closest to the top of the picture and the next light down; the mouth might even be part of that second light.  It's that hard to see, although I think the screenshot from the video is a bit darker than what I saw in the game, but it really was that faint.

One of the more frustrating things about this game, apart from coming back to zero, was when it would happen immediately after seeing a very obvious anomaly, like the poster shaking, or when the walking man was a giant.  Since the game locks that specific anomaly away (put a pin in that for a second), it feels like a wasted use of an anomaly that could have been used to beat the game.  Missing an anomaly was even more frustrating after passing hallway four because it felt like, "Yeah, I'm halfway there, that wasn't too difficult!  Ahhh damn, now I'm back to zero."  So it kind of felt like a waste of time.

I've read criticism of one of the game's core mechanics, that after you see an anomaly and turn around, it removes that anomaly from the pool the game pulls from, which means that the only anomalies you end up coming across after an hour playing are often the ones that are difficult to see, being the whole reason you missed them.  This brings up the question of whether, if you have only one anomaly remaining when you start a run, will seven of the eight hallways be free of anomalies?  There's another mechanic that resets your anomaly queue, which happens if you fail certain anomalies, possibly the false exit, or being caught by the flood.  Other anomalies will "kill" the player, such as the aforementioned flood, but also walking through the open door to the void, or being caught by the tiled man.  Do these events also reset your progress?  In my run in Part 5, I believe I started seeing anomalies repeat, like the lights turning off, the flood, the creepy eyes on poster #3, and the walking man starting to follow you.  Was this because I triggered an event that reset my progress, or was it because I had too few anomalies left in my queue for a complete run?

In the two-and-a-half years since The Exit 8 was released, there have been a lot of games that use a similar mechanic, spot the anomaly while passing through a repeating room. The 18th Attic is a recent example, and I'm playing another VR game that uses the same premise, although in a different underground setting.  I get it, it's a fun mechanic that starts out scary because of the liminal space and the smoothness that anomalies happen within a repeating setting that is uncannily familiar, and can easily turn to annoyance and frustration.  That happened to me with The Exit 8, but I still had a lot of fun, and that's my final takeaway.

~JWfW/JDub/JWfW/Jaconian
They Go On And On Forevermore

MIDI Week Singles: "The Song of the Wind" - Divine Divinity (PC)

 

"The Song of the Wind" from Divine Divinity on Windows & OS X (2002)
Composer: Kirill Pokrovsky
Album: Divine Divinity
Label: GOG
Publisher: cdv Software Entertainment
Developer: Larian Studios

This song has really grown on me in the last couple of months.  When I first listened to it outside of the game, I thought it was alright.  There was nothing inherently wrong with the piece, nothing stood out to me as jarring, and nothing made me pause what I was doing to listen to the song again when it first came up.  However, since that first play, I've been playing a lot more of Divine Divinity, and I've been visiting Rivertown as it's my go-to town for equipment repair and item selling.  Each time I play, I probably spend 5-10 minutes in this town alone, so I hear this song a lot, which is not a bad thing now that this song has really sunk its hooks in me.

As for the song itself, I can't quite tell all of the instrumentation involved.  It sounds like there's definitely a harp there in the background, but the stringed instrument at the forefront, I can't tell exactly if it's a lute, a dulcimer (because of the quick stacatto-esque notes around 0:10, 0:17, 1:14, 1:27, etc.), or if it's just a digital string instrument.  The first 50 seconds kind of blend into the background for me, after the initial four seconds of, "Oh, yay, the Rivertown song."  But then at 0:54 and 1:43, something about that flittering melody there gets me every time.  It's now one of my favorite songs in the game, and I'm going to bring down whatever divine wrath I have if whoever the antagonist in this game is ends up destroying Rivertown and I never hear this song again.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Es war der Tanz mit den lebenden Toten

Game EXP: Organ Quarter (MQ2)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Organ Quarter through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played, and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Organ Quarter
Systems: PlayStation 5 VR, Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3/3S, HTC Vive
Release Date: October 19, 2017
Publisher: AMATA K.K.
Developer: Outer Brain Studios
Time Spent: ~4 Hours 38 Minutes 
Playthrough Videos on YouTube

When I saw that AMATA had published a virtual reality survival-horror game, I was pretty excited.  My time with Last Labyrinth was a good indicator that they knew how to develop single-room-style escape room puzzles in a virtual reality space, so putting their publishing arm behind a game developed by Outer Brain Studios was a pretty decent indicator, before I looked up anything about the game, that this was going to be a wild ride.  However, after four and a half hours, I have officially hit both a skill and technical wall that we will get to after we lay some contextual groundwork.

Organ Quarter is a survival-horror game in the truest sense of the word.  There are slowish-moving humanoid monsters, and there are (currently) different types of guns with limited ammo and health that can be found scattered throughout the different areas.  Of the enemies I've encountered, they all take significantly more damage with head shots (for those that have heads), and take anywhere between three to five shots, while others seem to only take one.  In two instances, I reloaded from a previous save because I felt that I had wasted ammo, the first time being when I first encountered a shambling enemy, and tried shooting from a distance.

One complaint I have that's directly tied to shooting the enemies is the control scheme.  You move with one hand, which also has access to your inventory and map, and the other hand holds a flashlight and your weapon (your weapon takes on flashlight functionality, so there's no having to shoot in the dark), and allows you to snap-rotate.  When I first started, I opted to shoot with my left hand since I'm left-eye dominant, but this meant I was using the right controller/joystick, which felt very awkward.  When I switched to using the left controller/joystick for movement, it became much more comfortable, as did turning with the right controller.  Unfortunately, even in virtual reality, if I try to aim with my right eye, my shots are off ever so slightly.  This has forced me to fire at nearly point-blank range with the pistol, which isn't too much of an issue against the basic grunt-type enemies, Trypos, who just lumber at you slowly.  The faster-moving Pegman is more of a problem as it will also lunge at you when you're in range.  The projectile acid-spitting Retches are terrifying, as their long necks and bobbing heads allow them to look around corners before the rest of their body makes the turn.

The gameplay, up until I decided I was unable to progress any further, was a great throwback to "old school" survival-horror games set in a virtual reality space.  There are no enemies to encounter until after you acquire your first gun, and all of the enemies in the starting area are appropriately frightening while still being easily dispatched with the single-fire pistol.  Once you acquire the sawed off shot gun, you now have the option of a higher-powered gun, but at the expense of far fewer rounds found scattered around.  Do you use three rounds from the pistol to take out a monster, or one blast from the shotgun, hoping that all of your shots hit, otherwise you'll have to fire again, or maybe switch back to the pistol for the killing shot?  Do you shoot at the bouncing spider creature, knowing that it takes only one bullet, or do you try to sprint past the three or four that are currently scuttling around in the hallway between you and what you hope is a door to the next save room?  It can be a pretty fine balance between hoarding your ammo for the end of the stage boss fight and making sure you get through while taking as little damage as possible.

Four and a half hours in, though, I've decided to call it quits.  I'm at the boss fight at the end of the nightclub area, and the game is throwing too much at me while trying to shoot with my non-dominant hand.  It honestly feels like there is just too much going on to take in, and it feels like a jump in skill level that's just too much.  Let me try to break it down.

The boss is a creature inside of a metal shell with eight tubes, four on either side.  There's a fleshy mass that passes between each of the tubes and the round shell body in the center that the creature is in.  Once you shoot one of the fleshy masses, the battle starts, and the entirety of the boss creature starts rotating clockwise.  While the boss starts bobbing up and down and spinning, it fires projectiles at you that you have to move around to avoid.  There is also a rotating platform with a spike blade that sticks out that sweeps the playable area, although it retracts to the opposite side as this circular structure also rotates clockwise.  While the boss is moving, you again have to hit one of the fleshy masses, and in doing so, the whole creature drops to the top of the rotating blade platform, and a cage door opens, revealing the body of the creature within the device.  This is when you shoot it.  After about three seconds, the cage door closes, and the whole boss device thing starts again with its bobbing and spinning, although this time faster if you hit the creature within the device.  So you're moving to avoid the spinning spike blade that's sweeping the floor (and you can't jump over it because there's no jumping in the game), moving to avoid the projectiles, and trying to hit a seemingly random target that's moving up and down and spinning, all the while firing with my non-dominant eye.

In my final attempt, I did try going back to shooting with my left hand and moving with my right, but that felt too awkward.  I also tried changing the moving mechanism from standard to teleporting, but that didn't allow for the quick movement that I would need to be constantly moving around the room while aiming at the boss.  I am willing to concede that I'm missing something about this boss fight.  Like maybe I'm supposed to use the shotgun to shoot at the masses as they randomly move between the tubes, then use the submachine gun when the cage opens up.  But then I'm afraid that I'll run out of ammo, as I don't have much for either of those guns, and I'm genuinely thinking that you have to hit the fleshy masses eight times, each from a different pipe, along with the creature behind the cage.

Unfortunately, this is where my journey with Organ Quarter ends.  I was very much enjoying the gameplay and the terror and thrills of playing a survival-horror game akin to the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill in a VR setting, where an unsettling encounter with a single enemy puts you on edge.  Where a darkened cave with limited visibility is more terrifying than having to go up against a single boss for the 10th time.  I'd like to think that I'd come back and beat the Nightclub boss in the future, but in the meantime, I just need to step away rather than go in and hope that I might beat the boss.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Break the Cycle that I'm in

Monthly Update: April, 2026

 

I feel like I've actually got quite a lot on my plate right now.  I have almost three months of MIDI Week Singles queued up, although six of those articles are related to a Game EXP dump I'm in the process of writing/finishing.  Not really a "dump" per se, more like two short articles covering three games a piece, and since they've all had great music, I thought it would be a perfect excuse to feature some of that music too.  I also have several articles in various stages of being unwritten for cultural bangers like Horses, Mashina, and The Exit 8.  As I look at my list, I also realized I never wrote my article about Resident Evil 6, which wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be, just the evolution of where the game was going since Resident Evil 4, along with the expansiveness of Resident Evil Revelations in the story they wanted to tell and how they wanted to tell it.  But we'll leave that for the inevitable article.

And then I seem to have found myself playing multiple games again.  I'm about 38 hours into Divine Divinity, just over five hours into Outer Wilds, 2.5 hours into Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, and I even started playing Dustforce a little while ago, but I don't know if I'll complete that game, as there seems to be a three-star equivalent mechanic that was prevalent in every other game to come out between 2008 and 2015.  I don't really have it in me to complete that game, or games like it, right now.  And I started another new character in Neverwinter Nights when I remembered that I had the Diamond Edition over on GOG.  But again, I've got that queue nipping at my heels.

We can't really talk about what happened in March without mentioning the Firefly animated series announcement.  A lot of the articles I've read as a reaction to this announcement laud the fact that they're going back to the time between the end of the TV series and the beginning of the movie, and from what I understood, this was supposed to be Seasons Two and Three of the show.  I get it, though, if you do a prequel to the movie, you get to have Wash and Book back, and if you're going to pitch an animated reboot of a show to a fanbase that loves the buhjeezus out of its crew, you might as well jump to a time when that crew was all still alive.  There's still plenty of show there with the development of Book's character and his leaving, as well as Inara.  Plus, the crew needs to have some bad stuff happen to put them in the bad place they're in at the start of the movie, and there're plenty of stories to tell to get them there.  Out of all of the possible announcements about a return to that hill'verse, I feel that this is one of the better routes they could take.

Movie-wise, there were quite a few trailers released in the last week:

• The Masters of the Universe
• Backrooms
• SUPERGIRL

And then there are movies that were released or are releasing within the next week:

• The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
• Exit 8
• Technically, this was released last year, but our favorite theater near us is getting it this weekend, so...
• And speaking of last January, Iron Lung, based on the game from the same name by David Szymanski (Fingerbones, The Grandfather), was released.

Now is the era of small indie horror games, all typically selling for fewer than $10 USD, to get arthouse film adaptations.  And Super Mario Bros too, I guess.

And absolutely nothing else is going wrong with the world.  Nothing.  At.  All.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

And There's No Need I Know

MIDI Week Singles: "Greenhorn Ruins" - Wario World (NGC)

 

"Greenhorn Ruins" from Wario World on the Nintendo GameCube (2003)
Composer: Norio Hanzawa, Minako Hamano
Album: No Official Soundtrack
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Treasure Co., Ltd.

Something about using a song from a Wario game for a MIDI Week Single article on April Fools' Day seemed somewhat appropriate.  The Squire has been playing a lot of Wario World on the Nintendo Switch Online GameCube app on the Switch 2 over the last couple of weeks.  It started out with him playing for a bit, then handing me the system to beat harder areas, but now he's able to play through most of the early stages on his own; he still needs assistance in areas where you need to rotate the camera.

As for the music itself, I'm not really qualified to analyze an early 2000s big band-styled piece.  I mean, you've got your drum kit, guitar, bass, brass section, and a classic MIDI saxamaphone.  There's probably a piano in there for good measure, too.  This song really just stuck out to me as one of the more interesting songs in the first half of the game, as we're currently only in the first area of the third world, and this track happens during the second stage of the first world.

So as Wario says, and is one of The Squire's favorite things to hear Wario say, "Have a rotten day!"

Except don't.  Have a wonderful day full of joy, music, and plenty of bulbs of fresh garlic.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

You're Claiming Victory

One Way Video Games Mimic Personal Preferences, But Not in the Way You Think

 

Yeah, it's a bit of a clickbaity title, and I'll own that.  Let's start off with some context first.

After buying Divine Divinity back on February 4th, I'd been playing it pretty regularly, a few hours every couple of days.  I'd almost cleared out the starting area map, which itself is pretty massive, encompassing a village of healers, an expanse of trees and rocks, farm lands, a castle, a monastery, a Dwarven village, another human settlement, an army encampment complete with multiple orc fronts, and a ruined village.  I'd also discovered a new map to the south, with an even larger open and heavily forested area that was beyond my level.  Then, to the north, I came to the city of Verdistis, and my play time almost immediately dropped off.  Then, a few days later, I found the entrance to a massive sewer system, and after my overly encumbered character came topside to sell my lootz, I stopped playing again.

That's when it really hit me.  I often don't like large cities in CRPGs the same way I don't gravitate towards large cities in real life.

Several years ago, in the Before Times, Conklederp and I went up to Vancouver, BC, to see her youngest brother when he was attending UBC.  We stayed at a hotel in downtown Vancouver, and I remember sitting with Conklederp during breakfast, talking about what we wanted to do that day.  We were kind of lost in that our usual activities centered around getting away from the city, usually to do some kind of hiking.  Since we only had the morning before meeting up with her family, we decided to walk around a section of downtown before walking back over to the University.  Before The Squire was born, if both of us had a free weekend, oftentimes we would head out to the Columbia Gorge to do a hike.  When friends would come in from out of town, we would suggest some places in town that felt like they were "must-see locations," but more often than not, we would also suggest the Gorge as a place to go.  We've also talked about when we'll take The Squire out to see Conklederp's family in Quebec, and we've both agreed that our ideal plan would be to fly into Montréal, then rent a car and drive two hours to a house her family has out by a lake and spend our whole vacation out there.  Skip the city altogether, just spend a week at the house next to a lake by ourselves and with her family; and I know it's not very eco-friendly of me to say, but I really hope the city/county has decided to start spraying again because those mosquitoes they got out there are something nasty.

I've talked with my younger sister, The Kid, frequently about Baldur's Gate, and the talk frequently leads to how much of the game we've played, but how few times we've actually beaten the game.  I've beaten it twice, I think, and The Kid has beaten it once.  We've agreed (yes?) that once the game leads you up to the city of Baldur's Gate, we begin to lose interest.  Part of that is due to in-city quests centered more around talking to one character than talking to another character, then doing a fetch-quest of sorts, and then turning in the quest, assuming you're not caught by the city guard.  Whereas dungeon quests are typically: Go to the dungeon, kill baddies, collect loot, kill the main dungeon bad guy, leave, turn in quest.  They're a lot more straightforward, and you're less likely to dead-end or fail a quest due to an incorrect dialogue choice.

Don't get me wrong, though, I enjoy conversations in video games, although at times I am worried that a wrong dialogue choice is going to close off chunks of the game, like in the Fallout series.  It's conversing in real life that gives me anxiety.  During character creation, apparently Conversations/Small Talk was my dump stat, and I've just never bothered to level it up.

I guess what I'm trying to say, the tl;dr if you will, now that we've already passed the 675 word mark, is that large cities in CRPGs stress me out and apparently make me lose motivation, the same way that large cities in real life (downtown Seattle, downtown Portland, downtown New York, the whole of London, the middle of San Francisco) stress me out; especially if I'm in a car and expected to park.  I'll leave big cities to people who can successfully perform small talk at parties and whose batteries recharge with schmoozing.  Cash me outside and all that.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Game EXP: Forgotten Possessions (MQ2)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Forgotten Possessions through Keymailer, a third-party company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game key was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that it be played, and content be created.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Forgotten Possessions

Systems: Meta Quest 2/3

Release Date: February 26, 2026

Publisher: Glock Software

Developer: Glock Software

Time Spent: 36 Minutes

Playthrough Videos on YouTube

I hadn't thought I was going to be writing a Game EXP article after playing for only 36 minutes, although it turns out that's all the time you need to beat Forgotten Possessions.

The description of the game prides itself on there being no handholding, that you figure out what you're supposed to do as you play, so I was initially a bit confused at the beginning of my first attempt when a hulking creature came out from the front door and began chasing me before I could do anything.  How was I supposed to play the game if it came at me shortly after starting the game?  Was this going to be like a more intense and frustrating Remothered: Tormented Fathers?  How was the player supposed to take in the setting if the game started with a terrifying chase right off the bat?  Where's the player to go from there?  Thankfully, the creature that stalks you throughout the house and the grounds of the graveyard is a lot more forgiving, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

By my third run, I finally gathered the overall objective and primary mechanics in Forgotten Possessions.  You play as a person (whose identity is at the moment unclear), and you enter the grounds of a graveyard keeper.  Nailed to the front door are three items you need to collect that are randomly generated in the house.  When you pick up an item, you can either carry it in your hand or attach it to your Batman-style utility belt.  The game tells you that the more you're carrying, the louder you are when you move/run.  Stalking the grounds and house is a hulking creature that will one-shot kill you if it catches you.  In more than one instance, I was able to run past/around the creature while being in very close quarters, so the creature has to actually strike you and not just come in contact with you.  After you collect an item, or after you collect all three, you place them in a coffin.  After all three items are in the coffin, you have to escape out the front door of the house, after which you are then transported back to the starting cabin.

That's pretty much the gameplay loop.  Avoid the creature, find the objects, place the objects in the coffin, and escape.

There are several in-game mechanics that sound great on paper, but their execution fell a little flat.  The inside of the house is made up of several rooms and a long hallway.  Some of the rooms are interconnected, while others are single rooms.  There is an outdoor area that's accessible through two exits to the house.  When you're inside the house, sometimes a ceiling beam will fall, creating both a jump scare for the player and also alerting the creature to where your general location is in the house.  In a traditional survival horror game, randomized falling objects would be terrifying, but I've found the beams fall when I'm sprinting, and that's when I'm running away from the creature, so my mind is elsewhere.  It probably also doesn't help that the beams don't physically affect the environment, as you can still pass through them, so it's not like it can block one of your avenues for escape.

The falling beams do create sound, though, which does attract the creature to your location, although I don't know if the creature has a limited listening range.  The sound design also doesn't feel as effective as it feels it should be.  In each of my runs, I'd listen pretty intently for the footfalls of the creatures, looking through windows and around corners to know where they were before moving into the next room.    I can hear the footsteps and the general direction they're coming from, but not the distance, eg, louder = closer.  I also can't tell how much noisier I am when I'm sprinting, carrying three objects in the utility belt versus one.  

The last thing I want to bring up is the doors.  I'm not a big fan of how the doors here operate, as I could never get them to open correctly.  I would grab the knob and pull (or push), but regardless of how much I pulled my hand in (or pushed out), the door would always seem to open only halfway.  During my first few runs, I had tried to open the door just to walk through, but that ended up being too cumbersome, especially when being chased by the creature.  Thankfully, I discovered that the doors can move both ways, and that as long as I grabbed the doorknob in the right place and just kept sprinting through, the door would open.  I noticed that sometimes the doors would remain open, and I don't know if that was a result of sprinting through them, but it didn't feel like it was supposed to happen, and at the same time, I couldn't plan for it or really exploit it.

After the last run, the game mentioned starting over with the promise of new item locations and events, but it turned out that it was the same gravekeeper's house and the same selection of items to collect the first time around.  That's when I decided to stop playing.

In the end, Forgotten Possessions was more than just 'alright.'  I liked scouring rooms with the flashlight while being a bit on edge, waiting for the music to become intense, telling me that I needed to run.  I liked the simplicity of the UI as it all felt very intuitive.  I liked the general layout of the house, but by the end of the second run, it began to feel rather small and cramped.  That there were only so many places items could be stashed and where the creature would be at any given moment, meant that there were fewer surprises, fewer places to explore.  For a solo indie developer, I hope that they're able to see some success with Forgotten Possessions to see what they can do with a larger area to explore and possibly more creatures to avoid.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Strange Eyes are Gazing

MIDI Week Singles: "ZX Spectrum: Western Trot" - Super Life of Pixel (NS)

 

"ZX Spectrum: Western Trot"* from Super Life of Pixel on Windows, PlayStation 4, PS Vita, & Nintendo Switch (2018)
Composer: Ashton Morris
Album: Life of Pixel Original Soundtrack
Label: Steam
Publisher: White Moon Dreams, Inc.
Developer: Super Icon Ltd.

I had first planned on writing about the music from Super Life of Pixel six and a half years ago when I reviewed the game for #IndieSelect, but I couldn't find a source for the soundtrack that didn't require me to buy the game off Steam.  Sadly, the most readily available way to buy the soundtrack is still off Steam.  Now that The Squire has gotten into playing the game, I thought it was the right time to revisit this soundtrack, specifically, both mine and The Squire's favorite song (he told me this independently of my influence), "Western Trot" by Ashton Morris.

"Western Trot" is specifically just that.  It's a quick 4/4 with two eighth notes on beat two and quarter notes on the rest, that somewhat mimics the trotting of a horse.  The instrumentation here, while reminiscent of the ZX Spectrum sound chip, which offers gargling-sounding tones, fits in really well with the Western aesthetic, picturing a brightly colored, bustling town with a stranger riding in on a trotting horse.  I don't know, it just works and I love how catchy the whole song is, especially when the main theme comes back with more backing tracks than I think were available on the original ZX Spectrum at the time.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Said into that Great Void, My Soul be Hurled

*P.S.  The other thing I wanted to mention is that on the official soundtrack, this song is listed simply as "ZX Spectrum," because those are the levels where this song plays.  However, in-game, when you select the ZX Spectrum, at the top of the screen, there's text that reads: "Chip Tune Radio. . . "Western Trot" by Ashton Morris.  So "Western Trot" is clearly the name of the song, written and titled by Ashton Morris, but on the soundtrack, only the system is used for the title for whatever reason.  So, as a compromise, I've decided to use both.

First Impressions: Ancient Shadows Awakening (Playtest) (PC)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Ancient Shadows Awakening Playtest through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played, and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Ancient Shadows Awakening (Playtest)
Release Date: 2026
Systems: Windows
Publisher: Petr Najman
Developer: Petr Najman
Time Spent: 2 Hours 20 Minutes
Gameplay  Videos on YouTube

Ancient Shadows Awakening is a solo first-person dungeon crawl in the vein of 30-year-old dungeon crawls like 1989's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Hillsfar and 1991's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder.  You play as Erlan as you set off on a quest to find a way to heal your friend, the ailing blacksmith Armin.  While out searching for a cure, Erlan stumbles upon a sealed door to an underground cavern and, weaponless, decides to head down the stairs to the dungeon.  The story itself is rather flimsy and not really captivating, but motivations aside, Ancient Shadows Awakening attempts to recreate the feeling of the Westwood CRPG dungeon crawlers from the late 80s and early 90s for a modern audience.

While thematically similar to games like Eye of the Beholder, Ancient Shadows Awakening is primarily different as you play as a single character and not an adventuring party.  Erlan, as far as I can tell, doesn't have a class either, in the traditional TTRPG sense, and as you rise in levels by killing enemies throughout the dungeon.  As mentioned previously, you're ill-equippd for your quest as you don't have any weapons and all of the ragity bits of armor you find, provide more armor than the simiple clothes you start the game with.  You're able to raise and customize Erlan's stats to be the type of character and playstyle you tend to favor, although there is not a lot in the way of options outside of maximum health, mana, and a handful of stats that seem to have been imported from the survival genre.

That's right, Ancient Shadows Awakening has integrated several mechanics reminiscent of survival games.  You have a hydration meter that slowly depletes over time, replenishable by drinking water out of fonts, eating food, or from bottles of water.  Taking damage because your health or hydration is at zero as you scour the dungeon for anything else to eat isn't fun.  There is a lantern oil mechanic that slowly drains every time you have your lantern out.  You have a calorie meter that slowly drains over time and can be replenished by eating food.  You have a stamina meter that drains every time you sprint, although it thankfully refills whenever you're not sprinting, so you don't have to constantly sprint and stand still waiting to sprint again.  You also have limited space in your inventory and a limited number of saves per location mechanic (you can only save in a location up to three times before your health is drained each time you save).

Because it's the mid-2020s, there's also a crafting mechanic that allows you to create items from a predetermined list, such as whetstones to repair the durability of your weapons, because of course there's a durability mechanic here too.  There's also soup to replenish health and hydration, but only some types of food, as I've found that eating a cooked steak will actually drain your hydration a few points.  There's alchemical crafting for potions too, but only for recipes that you know, as you're not allowed to mix random ingredients willy-nilly.  There's also some kind of campfire mechanic, but I have yet to figure out how to use it effectively beyond boiling a murky potion into clean water.  I'm sure it has something to do with the bowl or raw soup I crafted.  Maybe I just need an additional bowl to put the bowl of raw soup into before I put it over the fire?

Ancient Shadows Awakening seems purposefully vague on a lot of fronts, in the way a game won't hold your hand, explaining all of the mechanics up front.  I kind of appreciate this figure-out-as-you-go-along, but the calorie and hydration mechanic, along with the limited lantern oil, feels like a lot to manage during your first playthrough.  Even with the multiple save slots, it feels like I could very easily save my way into a corner where Erlan is low on health, low on calories, low on hydration, low on oil, and the last time I saved was 45 minutes ago after traversing another large room of spike and flame traps; and I'm still confused how/why I'm ocassionally getting damage going through that room even when I don't step on spike plates.

I think if this were the final version of the game, I would be worried about the longevity of Ancient Shadows Awakening, or the general frustration of the mechanics being too punishing, even on normal difficulty. Thankfully, this is just a playtest, so there's room to make adjustments and improvements.  Ancient Shadows Awakening does have a lot of good ideas, but it seems like there are just too many irons in the proverbial fire, without a really clear view of what the game is trying to be.  Crafting.  Survival.  Dungeon Crawl. Inventory Management.  Because right now, with so many facets, it's hard for any one mechanic to feel like it stands out and is supposed to be the focal point of the game.  I can't quite tell what the game is trying to excel at, and sadly, that's to the detriment of the game as a whole.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Shattered Hope Became My Guide

MIDI Week Singles: "Cave Story/Plantation" - Cave Story+ (VSD)

 

"Cave Story/Plantation" from Cave Story+ on the Wii, DSi, macOS, Linux, Windows, Steam OS, Nintendo Switch (2004-2018)
Composer: Daisuke Amaya
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Nicalis
Developer: Daisuke Amaya

If you've been perusing our YouTube channel this week, you might've noticed that we've posted two songs from Cave Story, which might've hinted that I've been playing Cave Story.  I've been playing Cave Story, specifically, Cave Story+.  I'll try to be as specific as possible here, since there are several iterations of the same game, and the Cave Story+ that's currently on Steam has two graphical options: the original 2004 freeware game, and the 2011 remastered game.  AND the game also has three soundtrack options: the original 2004 soundtrack, the 2011 remastered soundtrack arranged by Danny Baranowsky, and the "new" soundtrack by Yann van der Cruyssen that was included on all Cave Story+ releases.

All of that to say, that I found I liked the original version of the title screen music, often titled "Title Menu" or "Cave Story (Plantation)", so I decided to go with "Cave Story/Plantation" instead. Considering the somewhat heaviness of the story involving the violent subjugation of a species of anthropomorphized rabbits to fight an army of robots is a bit dark, and this song is the exact opposite of that.  It's the opening title music, so it's supposed to get you in the mood to play.  What I love about this song is how well it works as both a main and a title theme, and in the stage where you see the BBEG's plans coming to fruition.  Daisuke Amaya could have written an incredibly melancholy piece as Quote walks into the cavernous plantation, seeing all of the captured Mimiga forced to work the fields, growing the red flowers that turn them into mindless, raging creatures.  But no.  We are presented with the scene accompanied by this jovial tune that greeted us when we first started the game.

I'm sure there's something deeper to be said here, I just don't know what it is.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Крики жертв темноты

MIDI Week Singles Archive

 

I mentioned this back during our Monthly Update article last week, but I wanted to expand ever so slightly while at the same time recapping.

Back when Dr. Potts and I were starting out the MIDI Week Singles articles at TwoBoysAndTheirBlog, we would simply upload the videos directly to the Blogger portal for songs we already had access to, or link to YouTube videos for songs we didn't have.  After rebranding as Stage Select Start in 2015, I started uploading the videos to my YouTube account, then linking them to our MIDI Week Singles articles.  I had originally kept the videos on YouTube as "Unlisted" so they could only be played through our articles, but over the years, I decided to make those MIDI Week Singles videos on YouTube public.  I figured it would be good for the brand to have article links back to our Stage Select Start site too.

The difference between the MIDI Week Singles Archive and our regular MIDI Week Singles is simply just the songs that we first used over on TwoBoysAndTheirBlog.  I still haven't decided yet if I want to replace the videos in the articles over on our first site to keep everything on our YouTube channel, or to keep the site the way it is now, for posterity's sake.  It's a toss-up because if I update the video, then the linked video will say "MIDI Week Singles Archive" with a video uploaded to an article that was posted 12 years ago.  That being said, I am tempted to replace all of the dead URLs from YouTube accounts that don't exist for one reason or another on TBatB with new videos so that there's something there besides a dead link.  Yet I'm still conflicted.

I've also debated whether I want to include the handful of songs we posted there for Game Scores, but keep them under the MIDI Week Singles Archive banner.  As we were still finding our footing at the time, there were even a couple of Game Scores articles that didn't have any music, and we would just talk about the music itself.  

Until I come to a final decision, you can check out new videos posted to our MIDI Week Singles Archive playlist over on YouTube, updated every Friday for at least the next 45 weeks.  The release order will mimic the original releases over on TBatB.  Thanks for listening.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
We Have Sailed For So Very Long

P.S.  There were even a couple of MIDI Week Singles articles where we didn't use video game music, but arranged video game music, and in one bizarre instance, music from a movie soundtrack.  It was a weird time.