barkerashpaws - Tumblr blog

[barkerashpaws]

oh yeah has anyone else seen the official tizo plushie because i did a few days ago and oh my gosh

[barkerashpaws]

my favourites that i feel the most sad about have one thing in common and that’s thinking that the deities are assholes

[barkerashpaws]

First meeting with Oralech be like...

[barkerashpaws]

I really agree w/ all your Hades opinions! I played that one first and then went back to all the other SG games, and was surprised at how much better the storytelling was in Transistor and Pyre. Hades is really fun and clearly high quality, but its world and characters feel so much shallower compared to its predecessors, and I really despise Hades himself, so the "reconciliation" stuff falls flat for me. Since you like Pyre, I wondered if you would maybe want to talk about your general feelings on it a little bit--what you like about it, what you don't? It's the least popular of SG's portfolio, which is so sad to me because I think it's the weirdest and most interesting one of the bunch, both story-wise and gameplay-wise (even though my personal fave is Transistor, which is still excellent, I think Pyre does more things I admire).

pyre is one of my favourite games of all time so i would love to talk about it! i mean. where to begin. i love its world. i love the very clever decision to make all the proper nouns and fantasy stuff hoverable hyperlinks so that you, the player, can be filled in on important background information about the world without the need for stilted expository dialogue:

i love the world of pyre. it's genuinely beautiful, it's my favourite of any of supergiant's worlds: the downside looks genuinely unique, it looks at once forbidding and electrically pretty.

like god damn. but what i love most about pyre is the story and characters, and how they're both not just communicated to you through the traditional methods this game employs (dialogue, flavour text) but in a way that's woven into the gameplay.

like, pyre isn't a game about fighting, it's a game about sports. it's a very high-stakes sport, but it's a sport -- for those who haven't played it, the plot of pyre is that you and your band of wacky misfits have been banished to a secret underground world. from time to time, the stars align and one person can escape this exile by winning a game of fantasy baskebtall -- and because it's a sport, the game's happy to let you lose. you can lose and that can just be part of the story. on two different occasions, i chose to throw plot-critical matches in pyre--once because an NPC on my team asked me to and once because i felt like the other guys deserved to win more than the protagonists did. and the game treats that as a valid choice, a valid thing to happen in the story! it lets the game explore opportunities and feelings and situations that a more traditional game where the player 'has' to win in the 'canonical' ending isn't capable of and it does it really well

and similarly there's something very very clever done with the character writing. getting to know characters better -- finding out why they were exiled, what's at home that they want to return to, why they want to get back to the surface -- is the same process as improving that character's stats and skills in the basketball games. the result of this is that the characters you know best, the ones you're most emotionally invested in getting to escape exile, are also the ones who you've been relying on to win your basketball games! it's by far the best iteration of the 'switch up your playstyle or else' mechanic that supergiant obsessively puts in their games because it ties directly into the emotional stakes of the story and can make it a genuinely difficult choice to liberate someone who's an essential part of your team but you've just learned has a desperate need to escape before something terrible happens to their loved ones outside.

also its got the best romance route of any supergiant game. i dont give a shit about meg or thanatos when i've got sandra the unseeing

<3

[barkerashpaws]

jodi sketch painty thinggggg idk :)

[ID: A digital drawing of Jodariel from Pyre in her robes. End ID]

[barkerashpaws]

fun fact: the first time i tried to make this post crashed my tumblr.

ANYWAYS!!! here's swap celeste... my favorite design so far 💛

you can actually tell who its supposed to be this time!!! how fun

[barkerashpaws]

Tell me more, tell me more!

Its summer lovin :P and Sandra in some Grease inspired outfits.

[barkerashpaws]

Pyre + the Onion part 3

[barkerashpaws]

Ti’zo the Wise, always faithful to the cause of the Nightwings.

[barkerashpaws]

I SAID HADES T W O

[barkerashpaws]

SO NO PYRE 2?

[barkerashpaws]

He stayed true till the end

[barkerashpaws]

I wanted to practice emotions and uhh… got carried away a bit ヽ(ー_ー )ノ

[barkerashpaws]

Since it's pride month, here's a pair of matching pfps i did for a know your ship thing (that you wont see haha)

If you need a different bg, just let me know!

And yeah, feel free to use them, just credit me please!!

[barkerashpaws]

It's so fun to just set yourself free and mess around in simple painting programs like paint

So yeah have those doodles i did a while ago since i don't have anything new to post yet

[barkerashpaws]

for pyre requests: some pamitha and bertrue hanging out?

Thank you for the request! I wasn't sure which one i like better so you get two of them, here you go 😅

The girls enjoying witchcraft and alcohol moonshine, what more can you ask for