#so I play the long game

[chloesimaginationthings]

This could be a kart if FLAF wasn't fucking around..

[bixels]

In the past, people in the Animal Crossing community would make fun of Tom Nook as a sleazy landlord. Since then, he's really rehabilitated his image as this 'heart of gold' businessman (he's the one who puts bells and furniture in trees for you to find! he adopted orphans! he donates to charity!), but New Horizons genuinely paints the most devious version of him.

He's successfully privatized settler colonialism: you pay HIM to move to a "deserted island" (which apparently the oceans in the AC world are just full of) and start a colony that he is directly invested in. At best he's running a weird vacation package scam (you arrive on the island with no money and in debt for "using his services"). At worst, he's using you to set up company towns. For god's sake, he literally has his own fake currency that he forces you to use to pay off your debt. But don't worry, he's repackaged it in a way that definitely doesn't sound like an MLM scam: the Nook Mileage Program!

You're no longer just his tenant or his temporary part-timer, you're his business lackey. The entire tutorial section of the game has you spending actual weeks running around completing tasks and doing hard labor to set up his colony. You're even tasked with preparing his properties and finding buyers for them. No, you aren't a tenant anymore. You work for the landlord. You are directly responsible for finding tenants for him. And he doesn't even fucking pay you. Not for setting up town hall and museum, or his nephew's shop –– which is the ONLY store on the entire island that sells necessities –– or bringing KK Slider to town, or helping populate his town. Not a single cent. No, actually, you have to pay HIM to BUY infrastructure like bridges and stairs and park benches. And all the while, he's telling you're the "resident representative"; you get to call the shots! That the reward is the community's progress. That what you're doing is in everyone's best interest (but most importantly, his).

Since NH's release, people have done a lot of legwork to say that Tom Nook isn't a capitalist while the game shows him at his very worst. He owns the only general store in town. You're forced to use a phone that he modified and branded as his own. Buy Nook-branded furniture and merchandise at the self-serve kiosk in the town hall, a governmental building! There's no conflict of interest here!

But hey, if you're tired of being the landlord/business mogul's goon, you can also find work as a deluxe resort home designer for a company that also pays you in their special company currency that can only be used to buy their products instead of a real salary! Because that's what the Animal Crossing franchise needs! More vacation homes!!!

[factual-fantasy]

Ya'll.. hear me out-

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The musical episode.

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[jennaflare]

So Disco Elysium is the only game you've ever really liked

I get it! It's a phenomenal game with superb art and writing, and its themes are consistent and deeply explored. It sets a high bar for video games. But there are other really, really fantastic games out there. This is a list that is 100% my own taste of things that aren't necessarily similar, other than the fact that they're really fucking good. (A lot of these are on sale for the Steam Summer Sale until July 11 2024!)

In Stars and Time

In Stars and Time is a time loop game where you play as Siffrin, the rogue of a party at the end of their quest to save the day by defeating the King, who is freezing everybody in time! But something is wrong: every time you die, you loop back to the day before you fight the King. You're the only one who remembers the loops, so it's up to you to figure out why it's happening, and how to break out.

In Stars and Time is a heart-wrenching dive into mental health, friendship, and love. It's about feeling alone, and how awful it is when the people who love you don't notice (and how awful it is when they do). It's about falling deeper and deeper into your worst self and your worst tendencies, and how to come back from it.

The creator also did one of my favorite Disco Elysium comics ever, which is only tangentially relevant but worth mentioning.

Roadwarden

In Roadwarden, you play as the titular Roadwarden for an undeveloped and "wild" part of the kingdom. Monsters roam the forests and roads, and it's your job to keep people safe. On paper, anyway. Your real mission is to find out what is of value in the area, and how to take it from its people. How well you perform this task is up to you. It's an oldschool text-based RPG, and I take a lot of notes by hand when I play.

Roadwarden explores exploitation and industrialization by making you look in the face of your potential victims. You can only learn what your bosses want you to report on by getting close to the residents, after all. There are mysteries to be solved, secrets to be gathered, and hearts to win.

The Longing

The Longing is an adventure-idle game where you play as the solitary servant of a sleeping king. Your task is to wait for him, for four hundred days. Time in the game passes in realtime (for the most part). There are caves to explore, books to be read, and drawings to make.

The Longing is about loneliness and depression. It's about whether or not you decide to stay in that hole, and if you do, what you do with yourself while you're there. Maybe you'll wander. Maybe you'll stare at a wall. Maybe you'll just sleep until it's all over.

Papers, Please

Papers, Please casts you as a newly hired customs officer in a country that is rapidly tightening its borders as its fascist government tightens its fist. This game is stressful. Sometimes you intend to help out the revolutionaries when they asked, but then you got so stressed out trying to make your quota so you can feed your family and pay your bills that you didn't notice the name of the person they were hoping to contact while going through their papers. Sometimes someone puts a bomb in front of you and expects you to defuse it. Sometimes someone suggests you steal people's passports so you can get your family out, and with the horror you see daily, the idea tempts you more than you'd like.

Papers, Please is all about hard choices and testing your moral fortitude. Everything you do has consequences. Being a good person in this game is hardly ever rewarded, but not in a way that feels overly cynical. Papers, Please asks you what kind of person you want to be and what you're willing to sacrifice to get there.

The Return of the Obra Dinn

From the creator of Papers, Please, The Return of the Obra Dinn is a game where you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Trading Company. The ship the Obra Dinn has just floated back into port, its entire crew missing or dead. It's your job to figure out what happened aboard the vessel. For insurance reasons.

I don't know how to go into the themes of this too deeply without giving away too much, but the mechanics of the game itself make the game worth playing. You have a magic stopwatch that allows you to go back to the moment of a person's death, allowing you to try and figure out who (or what) killed them, and how. And the soundtrack is extremely good.

Outer Wilds

In Outer Wilds you play as an unnamed alien, and it's your first day going to space! Your planet's space program is pretty new still, so there's still lots to explore and discover on the planets within your system. There are ancient ruins from a mysterious race that once lived in your system, long before your species began to record history. Why were they here? Where did they go? How are they connected to the weird thing that keeps happening to you?

The fun of Outer Wilds is in the discovery and answering your own questions. The game never tells you where to go, and it never outright tells you anything. There are clues scattered through the system, and it's up to you to put them together and figure out your next steps. It's about the way that life always goes on, no matter what, even when it seems like the end of everything, forever. I'd recommend NOT reading anything else about this game. Just go play it. Seriously, the less you know, the more fun this is.

If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers

In If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers, you explore the circumstances of the deaths of four individuals.

This is a short one that took me about two and a half hours to play. If for no other reason, play it for the stunning pixel art. The game explores sexism, racism, and homophobia in the Victorian era and leans heavily into horror themes. Best of all: it's completely free!

Pentiment

Pentiment takes you to the 16th century, where you take the role of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working on his masterwork in the scriptorium of an abbey. When someone is murdered, Andreas takes responsibility for finding the culprit.

The game is set over 20~ years and you get to watch how Andreas' actions affect the village in various ways (who's alive the next time you come by, have people gotten married and had children...). It's an exploration of how the past affects the future, and what parts of that past we choose to keep or discard. It has beautiful art, and fans of both Disco and Pentiment often compare them.

Other games you might wanna check out

Night in the Woods, Dredge, Oxenfree, A House of Many Doors, Inscryption, Slay the Princess, Citizen Sleeper, Chants of Sennar, Loop Hero, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, The Pale Beyond, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Elsinore, Her Story, Before Your Eyes, Pathologic (not delved into above because the venn diagram of Pathologic fans and Disco fans is basically a circle)

[mokeonn]

I am trying to decide what I want to draw today so I think I'm gonna make the Mane 6 in the sims and see where it goes from there

[onebizarrekai]

random userbase data time

(listed almost every/every game as one option in case you skipped out on some of the multiplayer ones)

please reblog after you vote for Maximum Data, even if you voted no! if you voted for one of the other options, tag your favorite game(s)!

I am just very interested in the presence of the zelda fanbase :>

please note that, for the sake of this poll, remakes count as one game. so like, if you've played the original ocarina of time and master quest and the 3ds version, that counts as one game.

[rotisseries]

pre calamity era zelink was so funny. the legend of miss hatergirl and her one-sided feud with the king of minding his own business

[milkywayes]

GARRUS VAKARIAN: DATABASE IMAGE ACCESS. > PT. 1 : 2160, 2166, 2170. > all files backdated according to user preferences: (terran_coordinated.calendar).

[reengeen]

NEW OBSESSION AQUIRED

[ghost-bxrd]

Prompt:

It’s not that Jason forgot, per se.

But between smuggling a toddler out of the League of Assassins, trekking halfway across the world, and finding a suitable hiding place that’s also child friendly… well, it kind of slipped his mind that he’s supposed to be… dead.

Something that comes back to bite him in the ass when he takes Dami out for some ice cream and just so happens to run into non other than Brucie-fucking-Wayne

[puppyeared]

act 4 :(

@chipper-smol and i came to a realization

[eggnoodles0up]

slay the princess is a very serious and existential game

[benevolenterrancy]

redraw of that ds9 scene

LBH doesn't understand what's going on but wants to impress shizun; MBJ understands it even less but is optimistic about any sport involving a solid wooden bludgeon at least

[dekusleftsock]

I think about this sometimes but I personally love that Horikoshi took the Yandere trope, split it in two, and gave one half to Izuku and Himiko.

Like it’s so fascinating how you can just SEE how purposeful Himiko was as a character in hindsight standing next to him.

Himiko is a really interesting subversion of her trope for two reasons:

She hurts people because she loves them, not for isolation or destruction of the competition (gore/blood is love to her, not necessarily a means to love someone)

She’s not possessive. Like at all.

I’ve seen that hc a few times and it always bothers me. Ochako is for sure a possessive character (we saw that with Hatsume around Izuku way back at the sports festival arc), but Himiko? Really?

You mean the girl who had a crush on a boy AND the girl who also had a crush on the same boy? Her?

You mean the girl who doesn’t hurt people who love who she loves, rather actively encouraging it in the first place? That one? Really?

Like it’s such an integral part to her subversion too. It’s what makes her such a weird and fascinating character. Possessiveness is supposed to be whats ugly about love itself, yet her love remains ugly without it. She is ugly because the fundamental ways in which she sees and feels about the world are considered “wrong”, “dangerous”, and “deviant”.

But Izuku… ohhhh Izuku…

He holds this trait like a badge melted to his skin. My man cannot escape these allegations. It’s to the point where it’s honestly a fundamental to his narrative. Izuku does not act nor feel the same without it.

Izuku holds a cutesy nickname that literally every other childhood friend of Katsuki’s has long left behind, saying his real name instead (this is honestly why I’m also uninterested in a scene where Izuku calls him “Katsuki” instead of “Kacchan”, Katsuki doesn’t represent the same things the name Izuku does, imo at least), izuku “give him back to me” midoriya, holds his dead body to his chest on a cover, freaked out on someone either hurting/offending Kacchan.. 3 times(?), keeping big boy ofa secrets…. The list goes on.

So it’s this main reason that I think their characters are just so. Fucking. Intertwined. I’m glad this has become a more common interpretation because there’s just so much that aligns between them.

Both of them call their “special people” with -chan endings, both by their first names, both deemed deviants/irrelevant by society. It’s no wonder Ochako fell in love with Izuku, just like she did toga, they’re fucking freaks. They’re interesting. They’re weird. They’re overly friendly and socially inept and a little beaten down by the world yet have too much passion to stay on the ground. They’re envious of the ones they love (Ochako of her freedom to be a normal girl, Katsuki for his raw power and harnessed skill), and I guess I just wanted to make this post because I adore how it’s all done.

I LOVE how the yandere trope is used as societal commentary here. Not necessarily as a way to make the main love interest jealous and feel she must protect the main character, nor for some kinky reason surrounding her character, but because the trope is built off of real, ugly feelings that can and do happen. That love can and is considered truly beautiful in all its forms, especially those of queer people.

So I especially love it because it isn’t just limited to Himiko, but Izuku as well. He may never hurt the ones he loves, but he would hurt for them.

A perfect narrative foil on queer and deviant forms of love. Big fan Horikoshi.

[scared-cr0ws]

Einar being romanceable is actually what sold me into playing Palia because look at him. i BETTER be able to give him kisses on the forehead!!