*sighs eternally*

In 2024 hyper realistic graphics are no longer impressive. You know what impresses me? A fully complete and functional game at launch

My dearest followers and mutuals and friends and lovers. I am going to extend one deadly serious question to you on this beautiful afternoon.

What is your #1 video game recommendation

you want to know what i'm playing? oh it's a sudoku roguelite with fps elements. it's just a realtime isometric top-down ero vn. you haven't heard? it's a turn-based meet n' fuck deckbuilding dungeon crawler. it's an fps econ sim bullet hell. it's a platformer than can hurt you

Wizard RPG that takes the Vancian "spells are demons made of math that live in your brain" thing to its logical yet absurd conclusion and casts the player character's prepared spells as a Disco Elysium style internal peanut gallery that influences dialogue trees and makes fun of your decisions. I want to get relationship advice from magic missile.

I just love it when video games let you do really stupid shit that kills you immediately. I love being like "oh this is a terrible idea" and being able to do it and then die. It's good game design.

Highlights from the notes:

- Mouthing off to a literal god in Baldur's Gate 3 so badly that she undoes your very existence. Also making out with a mindflayer and letting someone perform an ice pick lobotomy on you.

- The joke endings in Nier Automata, specifically the one where you eat a fish after being told it will kill you which immediately kills you and removing your OS chip for funsies. Gotta say tho, I'm kinda bummed none of you mentioned self destructing on the Space Station, which is my personal favorite Dumb Ending.

- Having sex with an alien that kills everything it has sex with in Mass Effect.

- The seemingly hundreds of you who, upon being given control of Link, immediately ran off the cliff at the start of Breath of the Wild.

- Sierra Games. Just...Sierra Games <3

- Jumping into the toilet in Fear & Hunger. (Huh???)

- Disco Elysium killing you for the crimes of *checks notes* sitting in a chair or turning the lights on.

- Fallout 4 letting you jump into a forge full of molten metal. Also honorary mention to the Fallout series as a whole, aside from Sierra they really are the kings of this. (Shoutout to the legends who take the Black Mountain/Quarry Junction route to Vegas! Sure is a great way to Die Badly!!)

- Whatever the fuck kind of softlock mind games are going on in Sunless Sea. Truly the most "damn bitch you live like this??" shit I've ever heard. 100/10

- The absolute CHADS who mentioned how you can just refuse to try to save the world right at the start of Golden Sun which gives you a unique ending telling you how fucked everything gets bcs you decided to be a lazy piece of shit. (My fiancé is giving you all a fist bump bcs this is one of his favorite games of all time.)

- Eating the jarrin root Astrid gives you to poison the Emperor in Skyrim. (Like yeesh you just hand me poison and expect me not to shove it in my mouth as fast as I can??)

- Minecraft blowing your ass up for trying to sleep in the Nether and the End, specifically for giving you the death message "[Player] was killed by intentional game design".

- Being able to pilot the ship in The Outer Worlds right into the heart of a star bcs you decided you were smarter than the autopilot.

- Portal 2 my beloved for giving you so many chances to just let GLaDOS and Wheatley kill you. You even get an achievement for it!!

Please keep the stories coming these truly are delightful <3

Additional stuff I forgot:

- The Paper Mario series also does the yes/no prompts where no leads to instant death.

- Plenty of people mentioned Soulsborne games, which, for those unaware, are as batshit hilarious as they are brutally hard, and being curb stomped by enemies is absolutely not the only way to eat shit and die. My favorite is the random bottomless pit in the starting area in Elden Ring that is just out of place enough you'll probably jump in it to see if it leads to something cool. It doesn't tho. It just kills you.

- God of War telling you not to jump off the world tree bcs you'll die and then just...letting you do it anyway. Also one of the games apparently has a level where if you deviate from the marked path you will die, and like 90% of you deviated immediately and died.

- They aren't technically deaths but multiple Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games will let you say no to taking over the farm, which sends you back to the title screen. However the best one is Harvest Moon DS(I believe?) where you can straight up let your dog kill the Mayor, which gives you a Bad Ending.

- Red Dead Redemption for letting you jump into a geyser full of boiling water or join a death cult right as it's about to get to the death part.

- Scribblenauts lets you nuke yourself. And also kill yourself about 50 billion other ways.

- The only thing I know about Lethal Company is that it's "die badly" the game.

- The Stanley Parable(my beloved <3) also has many moments where you can kill yourself doing something stupid, and The Narrator usually makes fun of you for it. (This ofc makes the time when you have to do it that's explicitly not funny even more harrowing.)

- Shooting the lake in Resident Evil 4 after being told not to, which summons a monster that kills you.

- MANY horror games that give you a unique ending if you simply choose to immediately hit the bricks rather than go into the spooky forest/building/town.

- Amnesia however is not one of them; if you jump out of the open window you find in an attempt to get the fuck out of there you die.

- These:

Borderlands 2: There's a sidequest where the main antagonist of the game will pay you to kill yourself. If you do it and jump off a cliff he laughs at you and calls you a sellout. (He does pay you though.)

Soulslike with a contemporary urban setting where all the equipment and consumables are random mundane items, but the lore text still treats them with the gravity typically reserved for epic fantasy. There's a weapon called A Metal Pipe whose lore text is like three paragraphs of overwrought prose about time the pipe's former owner used it to fend off a raccoon that was trying to steal their shoes.

That Racoon keeps showing up in other items descriptions.

Later on you find the specific pair of shoes the raccoon stole. Their stats are terrible.

Old Sal's Lead Pipe

Heavy lead pipe originally forged for use in the Old City Water Works. Such materials are dangerous to drink from, but its simplicity and ease of shaping made it a popular choice nonetheless. Once ubiquitous in the Old City, they are now rare and mostly prized as bludgeoning weapons.

Old Sal carried this pipe to guard against the masked scavengers which fed on the refuse piles of the Old City. Once considered minor pests, they became notorious thieves as they learned to navigate the world of humanity.

The masked thieves of the Old City Burbs fear no human, and the boldest will try to steal the shoes from a man's feet. Only the fear of this brutal weapon kept them at bay.

Old Sal's Crocs

Footwear once considered fashionable in the Old City. Their bright colors have long since faded. Despite their lack of protective ability, these shoes were once coveted by both man and beast.

After a weird revelation on my discord, I want to know how many people do this. Please reblog this, I want a bigger sample size.

okay you know those virtual science labs they made you do in high school?

i bet they’d have mad science versions at evil high school

You know what? I’m going to take a stab at making an evil version.

They’re basically glorified slide shows, so I should be able to do it with my current skill set

excited to see where this goes

I’ll probably use the same style that I used here for it:

IT'S HAPPENING

update: you can fuck up

fun fact: it’s basically feature complete at the moment. I just need to make all the art for it

last sneak peek I swear

about 36% done with the art and animations 🙏

My first pass on the graphics is nearly done!

I still want to add some flashy effects, as well as program in some additional text to give more context and information to make it more educational 😈

I might also spend some time doing a second pass on the graphics to re-structure some scenes and add in more hand-pixeled details, but we’ll see how exhausted I am by the time I finish the first pass

The game is now in a presentable state— I just have to wait for PayPal to finish up with its bullshit so you guys can give me tips if you’d like, and so I can offer bonus content

LET'S FUCKING GOOOO

(game is free, but you're welcome to donate! I also have some bonus content if you do)

Would you mind if i streamed this on twitch? Im fascinated by the premise

Please do! Just give me a link to it so I can see

I've been trying for a very long time to understand what is a "video game" but I think I figured it out

Out of pure curiosity and fun!

I am being so serious when I say: if you have the financial and time privilege to get a group of friends together and make an indie project, PLEASE do. Indie games, indie animations, indie comics etc etc

the art industries are kind of in the shitter. It’s not so much because of AI (though that doesn’t help) but because studios just aren’t hiring people and funding projects anymore. People who’ve been in the industry for decades are finding themselves struggling, and once you have a mortgage or kids it’s harder to do something as risky as making something on your own.

completing projects is hard. it takes a lot of time and effort, and most people can’t afford it. so if you CAN afford to make art, even at the risk of no financial gain, I strongly encourage you to be as resilient as you can. We’re at a point where these industries are not going to turn around by themselves, and waiting for jobs to open up again in order to get experience and portfolio work might not be realistic.

people have been making art and telling stories longgggg before we were getting paid for it, and people aren’t going to stop just because no one has hired them to do so.

for everyone else: support indie artists when you can!!!! That person who made that cool indie game or youtube animation or webcomic might be doing this full time! your support might be the only reason they’re able to keep doing it.

and if you have already started an indie project: you’re so brave and I’m very proud of you!!! in fact, drop a link to it in the reblogs if you want! 👇

Play my friend’s haunted house game jam game

The steam library really is the gamers refrigerator. I keep checking to see if there's anything I want to play. I have games. I have plenty of games. There's nothing i want to play

the fact that any video game ever gets made is a fucking miracle, let alone good ones.

whenever someone explains to me how video games work, i feel like ive been exposed to some horrifying cthulu ass shit that i can never unsee.