#I wanted something that sounded both spooky & goofy and I think it fits kinda well

[random-meme-bot]

Been replaying WarioWare Gold lately and got reminded about the fact that Mina (one of @glitch-pep's OCs) is suposed to sound like Ashley from the newer WarioWare games so I ended up doing a drawing of Mina as Ashley & Karma as Red (That somehow ended up becoming a pseudo animation...)

Images under the cut:

Bonus: Version without ponnytails that I made but never ended up using.

[craftmanatee]

Dread X Collection 3 Games Review

Once again, my friend and I have played through a new Dread X collection and I would like to make a short concise review for each game including the Hub area. We each played 1 game resulting in 6 each. The order of games reviewed is not the recommended order to play as we went on a very simple roundabout on the graveyard, and the games have a strong sense of quality unlike Dread X Collection 2 which had many great quality games and many low quality games.

Lets go!

Game X: The Castle (A bit unremarkable)

Scare Type: Cute

Player: My friend

The castle in some way is a step back from the awesomeness of the house. As it proceeds with forced dialogue cutscenes with your character and a ghost character that possesses in you. The puzzles and areas are also larger and more spread out and easier than the house. The Dialogue cutscene itself even give the idea to not compare the two, which is understandable. But let me tell YOU that I enjoyed the house more than I did the Castle (Even if it was not I who was doing the Castle Bit), so even if they are different, one was in my opinion better than the other.

The forced Dialogue cutscenes weren't to bad. The Voice Acting was not bad. Its rather the script and subjecting the player to sit through it. Its not the most fun to sit through and could have been handled better. In the house, a dialogue still happened but you were still free to move around while listening to the pre-recorded message. The ghost possessing you could have done the same with you, but instead this YOU is a character that must go into a dialogue and stop your gameplay.

The STYLE of the castle is where I think it wins the best. The very cute spooky aesthetic is great, and hold a lot of details we noticed near the end of the game. Like the paintings being famous paintings, replacing the characters of the paintings to goofy ghosts. Time passing between each game is also a great detail, making the castle ever so slightly different all the way to night time. I love the castle for this.

We quickly figured out that the theme for this Dread X collection was not just Cute and spooky, but also the inevitability of death.

Nate Berens – SATO WONDERLAND (Ok)

Scare Type: Surprising!

Player: My Buddy

This game was alright, nothing too amazing as pulling different topics to make a new dialogue box appear was tedious and a bit annoying. But the story itself was pretty cool, resulting in a surprise ending. Each game have different endings which we did not try to explore, but for this I think we managed to get the best ending. Not much to say about this one.

Blood Machine – Soul Waste (Eh...)

Scare Type: ...None?

Player: Me

Soul Waste is a 3D action platformer about this... post apocalyptical world, and you happen to be the “Saviour”. We got Ending C for this as we felt the tedium of the collectables and we weren't going to sit around collecting them all in this weird to navigate map. The enemies did not make much of a challenge making the game bit boring. The end boss was the only thing that gave me some ounce of real fun. There was a lot to explore, but my patience wore thin due to not being that interesting of a platformer. Although it did look good for what it did. There is some to explore which we did not, but I simply noticed that there was some things here and there that we did miss. We just did not feel the need to go back.

Bryce Bucher – Disparity of the Dead (Great!)

Scare Type: Horror that sticks around even after the game.

Player: My pal

This game I think pulls off the themes of Dread X Collection 3 very, very well! Perhaps the best thematic one? Nevertheless, this is a 3D platformer that lets you talk to fun characters collecting collectables and piece together a mystery. The topics that which the game introduces to you are all very good and sad in many ways. It also had a lingering effect on me personally. This lingering horror reminded me of SOMA by Frictional Games. Anyways, the game in general is not horrifying until you get to a certain point. Then when the actual ending plays, it all gets sad. We do not know if there are different endings, but the ending we did get was a sad one in my opinion and was great.

Amon Twentysix – Bete Grise (Cool!)

Scare Type: Uneasy, then relief!

Player: Me

I really liked the aesthetics of this game, reminded me a lot of some obscure old-school games. The gameplay is mostly of you going floor to floor doing cleaning and... repairing? Anyways, there are a few hints here and there that foreshadow the great revelation at the end. I saw some of them and felt very uneasy when going through the process as it all felt like a facade. But once the revelation hit, the game turned into something more funny, stylish and well, just felt good. Its rare for a horror game to kinda blue ball you into satisfaction.

DIRIGO GAMES – REACTOR (Disappointing)

Scare Type: Betrayal

Player: My Homie

This is a game I spoiled myself with, which is why I had my friend play it instead. The game is mostly a walking simulator in which it feels like you shouldnt be there in the bad/useless way as there is a robot buddy who keeps you company and doing everything for you. When the time comes, you are then obviously, chased to the ending of the game. Its not scary, sad. Its just a simple experience. The aesthetics of the game is great, by being a gradient of blacks and whites as well as minimal uses of colour. Other than that, this is disappointing.

Moya Horror/Amos – Nice Screams at Funfair (humorously frustrating)

Scare Type: Dont fail

Player: Me

This is a very short game that was short enough for us to also explore a different ending. There is no real inherent horror here. Its mostly thematic to being like Halloween. The game has you serving icecream to people, the challenge is to serve them the ice cream that they want, and take the money into your tip jar or cash register. The real challenge is the controls, as throwing ice cream into the ice cream cones often fails for no reason, and clicking on to activate anything just sometimes did not work. Resulting in funny scenarious. We got 2 different endings for this, one that made sense, and another that we didnt understand. The game looked great, the intro did not have to be as long as it did but it was a fun little ride.

Basalt Tower – Matter OVER Mind (Woah!)

Scare Type: Loosing progress...

Player: My Amigo

Matter over mind absolutely felt like an old-school platformer, it was also unique, colourful and funny/cute! Crawling around as a little parasitical monster and possessing scientists in order to escape the labs just looked great. Like many of these games, it had a collectible that meant... NOTHING. And if you died collecting them, you will loose them all. Prompting you to reset the entire game. Nevertheless, it was an impressive game that felt great.

Corpsepile – Submission (Fuck yeah!)

Scare Type: Scary, but also funny

Player: Me

This game had so many unique and cool twists and ideas. Maybe one of the best games in this collection. It was absolutely creative, funny... everything! It was also scary at times, referencing P.T. Its puzzles were great and fun, so much good about this one! The gameplay switches often, the horror amps up... Man... Submission was super good! Cant really say much other than that.

Torple Dook – Chip’s Tips (Funny!)

Scare Type: Friendly?

Player: My guy

Super creative point and click adventure game, hamming it up to 101%. It is also so patronizingly friendly that it becomes funny. Probably the most unique game on this list. And you can pet the dog in this game. I absolutely love the aesthetics of the unhinged masked textures, as well characters being flat cutouts. What is sad is this game feels like the end to Torple Dook’s streak of being in Dread X Collection games as it references his previous 2 games as well as more.

Breogan Hackett – Bubbo: Adventure on Geralds Island (Woah! x2)

Scare Type: JUMP

Player: Me

A very well done 3D platformer, with some challenge. The game is not scary, although it does come to a point. The platforming was very good albeit a tiny bit weird when turning in a specific way. It also features hidden collectibles that we unfortunately did not find all and left it at that. It sounded and felt good, looked good and was fun to get to the end with. There are different endings, we (me) only got to see 1. I jumped at the right time and made my way out!

Modus Interactive – EDEN: Garden of the Faultless (Chaos?)

Scare type: None, just weird.

Player: My hombre

This is literally a game akin to raising your Chaos in Sonic Adventure games. Just that you raise your little Evangelion. This game I think, has the best Ps1 look than the other games. It has a very weird control scheme, as well as being weird in its own right. And it nails the aesthetics very well. Too bad the game is finicky or boring, sporting long paths and lots of waiting. I guess you could have some fun minmaxing your wittle angel. I guess you always need at least one super unorthodox entry in a collection.

Adam Pype & Viktor Kraus – SPOOKWARE @ The Video Store (Quintessential)

Scare Type: brief moments of panic

Player: Both of us

This game... is actually really fun. Spookware is literally Wario ware but with horror movie themed events. The style, game and everything is perfect. Although very short, I would honestly buy a game like this if it was fully complete. I also think this is the most fitting game for the theme of the collection. Although, not much is done about the “inevitability of death” theme here, but everything else about it carries the collection thematicly. Such a fun and quirky little game.

-------------

Conclusions

And so, the best games in the collection In my opinion were...

#1 Submission AND Spookware

#2 Chips Tips

#3 Disparity of the Dead

The collection was not at all as scary as the first or the second collection. Although, that is understandable as it had a more Fun and goofy vibe to it. I love seeing these collections and it introduces me to people ive never heard of before. Like Viktor Kraus who made the music, like in the trailer for the collection. Thats a great one. I wish to keep seing them make these and I hope that it is profitable for them in the end as well.

[antirepurp]

yea cool second shesh of dungo

tl;dr: black market was found, orryn eats corpses, a creepy woman wants to murder the whole fun gang now

Okay first up one of our friends, the one who plays Edge, came to the session two hours late because she overslept, so we played the first bit without her. We were going to use that time on a side quest but, well, plans changed as you’ll see.

The Fun Gang wakes up at the inn, aside from Edge who’s very much asleep. The crew has raw dirty potatoes for breakfast (Orryn liked them), and then mostly Ganma and Dutmeat, Dutmeat to a lesser degree, try to pry some info about the rumored black market from the inn keeper. He’s reluctant at first, but Lyle manages to convince him to tell the gnome kid a story about it and how to get there. Apparently there’s a sewer somewhere that leads into the place, and he also mentions something about certain bricks being in a certain order opening a door somewhere. The gang leaves a note to Edge saying that they went to the sewers, and then go off.

Dutmeat goes find the sewer the inn keeper mentioned. After that the gang goes to see if the notice board in town center has any tasks they could complete while Edge is sleeping. They find a mission involving some merchant’s vault (I didn’t write down other details about it), but before they can do much they’re confronted by some royal guards who think they’re suspicious. They question the fun gang...

...and Dutmeat crit fails and straight up tells them the Fun Gang killed the important lord everyone gives a shit about.

Orryn tried to explain that Dutmeat’s just hungover or something but that only makes things worse, and Ganma has to cast an invisibility spell to get everyone out of that situation.

Considering they’ve now been seen by some guards, and their crimes are now known, they decide to abandon side questing and go for the sewers.

There’s a grate over the sewer made of iron, and it won’t budge. Lyle investigates it a bit, and finds out that there’s a slope at the bottom that’s very far away. He can fit through the grate, so a rope is tied around him and he’s lowered down. Lyle almost fucking dies because Ganma, who’s holding the rope with Orryn, crit fails and causes both of them to drop the rope, but Dutmeat catches it just in time so Lyle doesn’t fall to his death. He finds that there’s a tunnel at the bottom of the sewer and he like, finds a button if I recall correctly? And opens the grate. He also found a strange tunnel. The rest of the gang jumps down and they go investigate.

There’s a long-ass ladder down to the depths, and the Fun Gang goes down. It smells like piss. It’s not nice.

At the bottom is a dirty small pond of water, and a bunch of corpses. Orryn doesn’t like, loot them per say, but he does get some nice meat(TM) off of the fresher ones, for later snacking.

Anyway, the room is round and dome-like, and there’s four passages around it. There’s light shining from one of them, and Dutmeat investigates, finding two strange elves huddled around an half-orc corpse. The gang joins him, and they sneak into the room, still under Ganma’s invisibility spell. Ganma eavesdrops the elves, and finds out they’re eating the half-orc corpse. Orryn sneaks ahead and finds a strange brick wall, and points it out to the others.

And Ganma’s spell wears out.

And the elves attack, and one of them hits Lyle.

Fortunately Ganma manages to convince them the Fun Gang’s not here to mess with them, and they go elsewhere.

The gang investigates the wall. Dutmeat crit fails and cries a little, and no one else can find out anything about it either. After recovering from his epic fail Dutmeat finds out that there’s four bricks that are different from the others, two of them are magnetic, and all of them have arrows pointing to different directions on them. It’s puzzle time!

At first everyone tries trial and error but that doesn’t really work. Orryn really tries to help with the puzzle but because he’s not very smart and I’m bad at D&D (and also not very smart) he’s not very useful. And Dutmeat has to go and solve the puzzle for the gang. It involved the four passages from the dome room, they had arches with different kinda arrows on them. And the brick wall opens, and reveals a hallway! The gang goes ahead.

The hallway leads to an underground town full of crusty tents and jank buildings made of planks. It’s the gosh darn black market fellas. Dutmeat and Ganma go around asking if they could sell the mysterious black orb they found last time to some vendor. They offer it to a gnome, who wants to see it, so the two leave their weapons to the counter and go to the back of the tent. Orryn and Lyle are chilling at the front...

...when some thieves try to steal Dutmeat’s and Ganma’s stuff!

Lyle’s turned to a rock, so Orryn tries to yeet him at the thieves. Unfortunately he just drops the rock, so he dashes after the thieves. He grabs one of them, trying to intimidate them to giving back the stuff they stole, but it doesn’t work and Orryn gets hit across his face and cheek with a dagger.

Lyle comes to help out though, and throws a potato he saved from their breakfast against the thief so hard he’s knocked to the ground. Orryn tries to intimidate them again, it still doesn’t work but the thief decides the dagger he stole is not worth the effort and drops it.

Orryn and Lyle return to the tent, where the gang discusses the orb. Dutmeat and Ganma found out that no one’s gonna buy the orb probably, it’s of royal origin, and there’s only one person who might be interested, but apparently she’s kinda. Fierce. Or something.

Immediately after that Orryn and Ganma notice that a strange thiefling woman is standing among them. The others can’t see her, but she cackles all smug and shit and reveals herself.

I don’t remember her name, let alone how to spell it, but she’s the woman who’s after the orb. The only thing is, she’s scary as hell. The gnome that Dutmeat and Ganma spoke to? Yeah the woman cracked his neck and killed him after he told about her to the Fun Gang. She’s like, creepy and scary and thinks killing others is funny and entertaining and shit... basically very much bad news. She wants the mystery orb. At first Dutmeat is not giving it to her. She then suggests a game where she would hunt down the Fun Gang. And kill them. Lyle convinces her to change it to hide and seek, at which point Dutmeat gets so intimidated that he gives her the orb. But she still wants to kill the Fun Gang, since they accidentally ended up killing the lord that she wanted to murder. So she calls her goons on the gang, the same ones who they stole the orb from. She then flees with the orb.

The goons are pissed, and attack the gang. Orryn wonders why everyone’s so hell-bent on being the ones to kill specific people around these parts, and gets hit with a sword by a half-orc.

At this point Edge has woken up and made her way to the sewers. She also met with the creepy spooky woman. But yeah she joins the others just in time to fight.

Lyle tries to get to higher ground, but crit fails and falls into mud, face first. Dutmeat hits other guy, who’s a small elf. Ganma hits the half-orc attacking Orryn real hard, causing the goon to bleed. He’s hurt bad, and real pissed. Edge tries to hit him with a spear, but misses. The half-orc hits Orryn again, much harder this time, and Orryn has like 3 HP (out of 8) left.

Orryn tries to bite the orc’s head, but manages to. Miss. Just biting the air all goofy and shit, which pisses off the half-orc even more.

Lyle tries to hit one of the guys with a bow, but misses his arrow. Dutmeat manages to almost kill the elf. Said elf casts a strange tar-spell on Ganma, trying to like constrain her like that, but she just brushes it off on her turn. Edge spears the half-orc, who just kinda. Grabs her spear and starts pulling her closer. Yikes.

Orryn tries to go for the skull chomp again but my rolls are TERRIBLE and he misses again.

Lyle arrows the orc to the knee. Dutmeat goes for the half-orc, going through Edge’s legs and stabs the orc in the balls the crotch. He still doesn’t die though! And the elf stabs Edge too. Ganma attacks the orc as well, and her sword gets lodged into his skull. He’s still standing. Edge got so pissed off she cast some, spell of anger and fire and cool, and like destroyed the elf in a fiery death of hell. It was rad.

Orryn is really tired of missing, and so am I. Once again he goes for the headshot, and (with some DM grace for character development’s sake) he finally hits, and CRUSHES THE ORC’S SKULL IN HIS JAWS AND IT FUCKING EXPLODES AND THERE’S BLOOD EVERYWHERE. It was cool. And Orryn got some HP back too.

Afterwards Edge gets a briefing of what’s happened so far, the bodies are looted, and Orryn decides to have a snack on the corpses because why throw perfectly good food away? Everyone got 5 gold from the bodies, that was nice.

Anyway, Dutmeat sells some of his loot, Ganma has some map and a book looted from the corpses, and Lyle investigates a ring he got from the loot. It whispers to him. It’s spooky.

The book Ganma got was some kind of a diary of the goons’. It details that the creepy woman wasn’t always creepy, but might be possessed by some strange artifact(s) she’s found over time. And she developed this obsession with murdering the Fun Gang after they robbed her from the lord’s murder. And she’s power hungry and wants to take over the world by killing lords? Not good :/

Anyway Ganma investigates Lyle’s ring. It’s magical, and has a spirit attached to it. She puts it on to talk to the spirit, and obtains a spirit buddy who wants to posses her, though they’d also give her “immense power”. Sounds sketchy, so Ganma refuses the offer, but the ring is now stuck on her, so yeah she’s got a spirit buddy.

The gang finds a shack to get some rest in, and everyone levels up to level 3. Orryn is so, so fucking tired and kinda shaken up and scared because fuck they have a murderer after them and 24 hours to shake her off. The adventure is no longer fun and games and it’s sad :(

but yeah session two! it was fun and cool but now im kinda unnerved because of the creepy murder woman and im scared orryn will die aksdhkaj (i mean i was already convince he’d die in that fight against the half-orc so yeah)

at least orryn got some strange character development out of it lmao