Daily Offerings: Deep Carbon Observatory, Outer Wilds

Deep Carbon Observatory

I cracked this open after my recent reading of Yoon Suin. First off, we've got another giant velvet worm and this one is bad because it emerges from a log which is presumably used by a flood survivor to escape drowning. This book is full of nasty creatures and I'll be damned it Patrick Stuart doesn't manage to make cephalopods frightening again. In 2020 Lovecraft-saturation has gotten so bad that tentacled monstrosities don't even get a blip of excitement out of me, but Stuart's squid and cuttlefish are convincingly malignant, particular his grave-robbing cuttlefish, which dart in and out of flooded tombs like "alien ghosts." Cuttlefish are the creepiest cephalopods in my opinion, there's just something greedy and foul about them. I am reminded of a nightmare I had years ago where I was stuck in a spaceship that was equipped with an aquarium that contained a large, sentient cuttlefish, which communicated to me via digital speaker connected by wires to it's cuttlefish head. It told me evil things in it's fuzzy robot voice...

Patrick Stuart's blog can be found here. His books are OSR classics.

thetimes.co.uk

Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds is a video game that gives me big time Relenless: Twinsen's Adventure (Little Big Adventure to my European friends) vibes: it's a light-hearted adventure in charming, toy-like universe. I try not to get to deep in things with these daily takes, so just know that the central conceit of the game is you explore a miniature solar system in a rickety space-lander. The sun explodes after 22 min. of gameplay and you start the whole thing over again like Groundhog Day, except now, due to your previous explorations, you now know solutions to puzzles and shortcuts that make your exploration all quicker this time around. It's an satisfying game play loop that facilitates constant exploration. There are some genius set pieces built around this 22 min. countdown, including a hollow planet that slowly crumbles into a black hole at it's center, making only certain sections accessible at only certain times. There is a lot of Myst in this game, though the humor and art style of OW prevent it from achieving that sort of profound, mature gaming experience...but it comes close.

Outer Wilds just recently came to Steam.

Daily Offerings: Yoon Suin, Amid Evil

Yoon Suin

I finally got around to this OSR classic though I'm not quite finished reading it. It feels to me very Clark Ashton Smith-ish in it's far-flung, East Asian inspired setting and even shares Smith's love of exotic cruelty and unwholesome monsters. I've made it through the book's initial lore dump (a crude way to describe something so beautifully written) and I'm wandering in the more game-y portion of the book. I'm not a "rules guy" but there's so much great world here I may indeed end up pouring over every little encounter. Is it me or does Noisms (aka David McGrogan) have a thing for velvet worms? There are at least three varieties I remember in the bestiary. Don't get me wrong, I COMPLETELY get it—I myself have been fascinated with the things for years. Fascinated in a disgusted sort of way. I find velvet worms to be such completely reprehensible nightmares that I wouldn't want within two miles of me in real life, but watch Youtube videos of them with morbid attention.

Yoon Suin will get a full post in the near future. The authors blog is linked above.

Amid Evil

This a throw-back FPS video game, meaning it was released in 2019 but the graphics look like they are from 1997. It's inspired by the extreme, horror-tinged fantasy worlds of actual 90's games like Heretic and Hexen, where you run around creepy, polygonal labyrinths hunting fiends with melee weapons that can shoot magic projectiles. It is a difficult game and I'm not ashamed to say I played on "easy". Gameplay is usually is the least of my concerns when I play video games these days. I played Amid Evil for one reason: the downright inspired level design. Of all of these visually stunning levels, the final series, dubbed The Void, were my favorite. We've all seen "voids" before in various media—basically "alternative hell"—dark, vacuous places, haunted by abstract, alien intelligences that are usually just grotesque heads floating in the ether. Amid Evil's The Void is a void of precarious and impossibly tilted pathways that seem to end in empty space, only have a new section of path zoom into place at the last second. A void where M. C. Esher stairways meander through a forest of glistening monoliths, ending on a plane upside down to the one you just left. It's not a dull, colorless void, it's full of color...but it's a lurid Suspiria style of color. All of this culminates in The Enigma Gate, the last level before the final boss. It's frantic level where you try to hit all of the switches to a titanic gate while being accosted an ever-multiplying horde of shadow men and void dragons. I found this level to be, at points, flat-out distressing. The the constant scrambling from enemies, the disorienting layout, and the ungodly noise. In other words, the best void ever.

Here's a nice little video of The Enigma Gate with no commentary. Honorable mention also goes to the section of the game referred to as The Forges which for some reason reminded me of those nightmare inducing final levels of the Sega Genesis masterpiece Ecco the Dolphin.

Amid Evil is on Steam and probably most other digital games services. I hope to get a chance to write about it more.