#tthese eat so much of my storage space

[bitd]

outlast kind of makes my head spin. sorry im autistic and i am thinkng about it now but i fucking hate how badly it declined in quality like . outlast 1 was so fantastic as a game and miles upshur as a protaganist very much compels me. i enjoy how he never once is shitty to the variants on basis of them being variants and 100% of the just anger and upset he has is directed towards murkoff as it should be .       also he’s genuinely just really funny? his notes aren’t a slog to read through and i think the trager juice joke is good enough that whenever i’m streaming it i do open it to show everyone.

whistleblower is like. fine. i care about waylon because i am unfortunately bestowed with camerashipping fan and have been since i was 14/15 but its just sort of nothing. i don’t really enjoy frank he just kind of makes me feel weird and edide is also very uncomfortable as a character to the point where until i banked hard in another direction he was a huge trigger for me and hes kind of wrapped into it again for other reasons. i do think that whistleblower’s got merits w/ the way it handles blair + murkoff and i do like Some parts of it but my favourite part of it is genuinely the super ableist part exclusively because i think it’s fucking funny and i also like that simon is there because simon peacock is my best friend. it’s Fine.

2 is just so. it has more problems than merit whatsoever. i think due to my specific bullshit i’m equipped to speak on the st. sybil stuff and honestly it’s the only part of 2 i actually liked and that is just because it got stuff right. it however is very perplexing to me because i feel it’s handled incredibly well and the way that loutermilch is done is very interesting, it does do a very good job of showing blake’s trauma through his own eyes and i feel gets across a point without being gratuitous (though it almost was over that in an earlier draft, but i guess i can’t ding them for that). the school and the temple gate stuff just genuinely feel like they are written by completely different people and that’s very confusing to me. temple gate is also just fucking boring, all of its actual issues aside. it’s too big, and they fail to use that big space as an effective horror device. the school also further nullifies this by putting us in a smaller space and holding us there, and by making us feel much more trapped. blake’s only reason to stay in TG is lynn which while sweet is just. it’s not scary because he has autonomy in a way. i guess i could probably study him for that and for like, whether or not he really feels like he has autonomy in that situation (he failed jessica, he can’t fail lynn when that wound is fresh again) but i think from a game dev perspective it just really really fails to feel that way and people aren’t necessary playing a horror game for its story. i could talk in depth on all of the temple gate stuff but you know that gets really dicey really fast again due to my bullshit so. you know. 

i also kind of hate that in comparison to 1/wb, you need to read the murkoff account to understand what the fuck is going on in 2? and also have read every single note. without having 100% of the lore memorized you are just fully not going to understand 2 and that’s not... fun. at all. it is way scarier when you understand context and if they’d given us that then i feel like it would have been a bit better. but you should not have to read TMA and every document in 1/wb to figure out that blake is in the engine for the entirety out of ol2, ESPECIALLY because that is such a critical part of the plot. you need to know that the engine a) feeds on trauma and b) hurts people who don’t give it enough food very badly and c) forces you to relive trauma through your own lens in order to understand what the fuck is happening to blake. loutermilch is obviously not a tongue monster but that’s how blakes fears manifest. the reason we end up in the school during downtime is because the Downtime at temple gate is not traumatizing enough and the engine needs to dig up more bullshit. this is also why temple gate is more “realistic” because of all the time between the two. i would also argue it makes it more interesting as it makes blake a somewhat unreliable narrator and i personally Do!!! like blake a lot compared to miles and waylon because he is a deeply compelling protag to me. he isn’t as well spoken as either of them because he’s a cameraman (miles is a journalist and waylon’s in software dev), and he’s naturally not going to be as prepared for these horrors as a journalist who’s beat is murkoff or waylon who whistleblew after seeing that shit. like he’s interesting in that way insofar as he is a protag we haven’t seen before and his narration feels extremely different than either of those two’s even past being voice acted.

overall i think red barrels really failed the more of a budget they got. i hope trials manages to help them claw their way back into the light but i don’t really have high hopes because ol2 was so fucking disappointing other than the school section on all cylinders. i don’t even think i’d like the school section if not for (gestures). it handled everything else very unbiasedly poorly, it was incredibly shitty, and it wasn’t a fun game, it was a fucking slog

sources btw