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Celebrating All Things Spooky 2020

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, My Games, My Stories, Video games, Writing  4 Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Oct 022020
 

October is here, and so it’s time to begin our annual celebration of all things spooky, creepy, and otherwise fitting for the month of Halloween.

Celebrating All Things Spooky returns this year with a month of sales, contest opportunities, and horror game reviews!

Sales

First up, for the entire month of October, ebook copies of my horror stories The Book at Dernier and It Came Back will be on sale for $0.99 each at Amazon.

The Book at Dernier follows a scholar as his obsessive research leads him into a world of dark rituals, eldritch knowledge, and growing madness. It Came Back sees a young woman return to her childhood home, where she discovers a series of letters that recount her family’s dark secret as a demon begins to stalk her nightmares.

My other stories and my zombie comedy The Zombie Mishap are not on sale, but you can check them all out here.

Next, last October I wrote the script for a horror visual novel called Not It, set on Halloween in a small town where it is said that a serial killer’s spirit returns each Halloween to exact revenge. It’s available for free, so be sure to check it out!

I’ve worked on a handful of other horror games as well, and you can find them all here.

Contest

Moving on, it’s time for our Celebrating All Things Spooky 2020 contest!

This year, the available prizes are:

  • Two Till Midnight (gift sent through Steam)
  • Alien: Isolation (gift sent through Steam)
  • Those Who Remain (gift sent through Steam)
  • Dead Age (Steam code)
  • Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location (Steam code)
  • Lakeview Cabin Collection (Steam code)
  • eBook copy of The Book at Dernier
  • eBook copy of It Came Back
  • $15 sent through PayPal
  • You pick a game for me to review!

If you choose the review option, your chosen game must be something either I already own or is easily obtainable, which you can discuss with me beforehand. It must be a single game, not a collection (although the chosen game can be part of a collection). I will start playing it in November.

Rules:

  • No purchase is necessary.
  • Only comments made between October 2, 2020 at 12:01 AM EST and October 31, 2020 at 11:59 PM EST will be counted.
  • 1 non-spam, non-anonymous comment on any blog post here = 1 point.
  • 1 non-spam, non-anonymous comment on a Celebrating All Things Spooky blog post = 2 points.
  • You must use an email address or website URL (or include another way of contacting you) in your comment so I can contact you if you win.
  • You must have at least 10 points at the end of the month to win.
  • The person with the most points will get their first pick of the prizes. The person with the second most points will pick second, and so on, until all prizes have been given out.
  • The winner will be contacted by November 2, 2020.

Remember, you have between now and Halloween to earn enough points to win a free horror game or one of the other prizes.

Reviews

And as usual, this October will be filled with horror game reviews, so check back throughout the week for 2020’s celebration of horror!

Atelier Ryza is a Fun (Re)Introduction to the Series

 Reviews, Video games  9 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Sep 302020
 

This morning, I beat Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout.

(I played the Switch version because I wanted to play it handheld, although I finally gave up on finding a reasonable price for the physical Switch copy and bought it during an eShop sale.)

Ryza is considered an excellent introduction to the Atelier series, and in a lot of ways I felt like I was trying the series out… even though this isn’t actually my first Atelier game. I played Atelier Firis, which I reviewed for MonsterVine. I wasn’t too captivated by it except for the alchemy system, largely because the time limit for the first part of the game stressed me out. That put me off the whole series for a while, but since Ryza has no time limit, I decided to return.

That turned out to be a great idea.

Atelier Ryza is really fun. The main character, a girl named Ryza, is bored by life in her quiet island community and dreams of going on adventures. When she and her friends meet an alchemist, she discovers she has a talent for alchemy as well and begins pursuing that while exploring the mainland.

The characters and story never became too compelling, but it had some cute moments. More importantly, the gameplay was fun enough that I didn’t mind not being hooked by the plot.

Alchemy requires materials, which you gather using a variety of tools and then bring back to your atelier to craft items. Many recipes have new recipes that can be unlocked from them, so it created a fun gameplay loop of gathering everything in sight, crafting items, unlocking new items that in turn can unlock even more items, and then repeating the progress (with some story progression thrown in to reach new areas and new materials).

Combat took a bit of getting used to. It’s still in the broad category I’d consider “turn-based,” as it uses an ATB system and you pick your moves from a menu. However, it’s a really fast ATB system, and at first it was a bit overwhelming.

Once I adjusted to it, though, I liked it. I would have enjoyed it more with a traditional turn-based or ATB system, but it has a lot of fun features like performing specific actions requested by a character to trigger their follow-up attack. It’s a strange blend, though, to have such a fast-paced combat system in a game that is otherwise pretty laid-back and relaxing.

Overall I enjoyed my time with Atelier Ryza quite a bit and I’m looking forward to the sequel.

It’s also been brought to my attention that most Atelier games with time limits only pass time when you choose to perform an action, rather than the way Firis handled it, so that makes me cautiously interested in trying one of them sometime. Atelier Ryza reintroduced me to the series, and the only question left is which Atelier game I should try next.

Final Fantasy XVI Possibly Rated M, Website Coming Soon

 Video games  No Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 282020
 

Final Fantasy XVI wasn’t featured at TGS, but we did get a tiny handful of new details.

First, there is reason to believe Final Fantasy XVI might be rated M.

Emails sent out by Square Enix about Final Fantasy XVI in PAL regions display an age rating of PEGI 18.

(The email sent in North America just says “rating pending,” but a PEGI 18 rating would most likely mean an M rating from the ESRB.)

This is a provisional rating, so it doesn’t necessarily mean the final game will be rated M. If it is, though, it would be the only M-rated Final Fantasy game besides Type-0.

Now some people are jumping in joy that we’re “finally” getting an M-rated Final Fantasy, as if a higher rating is a sign of higher quality, which I disagree with. Other people are already mad that it will be edgy for the sake of edginess, which I don’t agree with either. People did wonder if certain parts of the Final Fantasy VII Remake (such as the trail of blood scene) were changed because the original couldn’t be done in realistic graphics while still keeping a T rating, so that might explain that.

Personally, I have mixed feelings. I’d certainly play it if it’s rated M, but it doesn’t feel necessary (and the number of people praising it as meaning the series has finally grown up is off-putting). On the other hand, we know from games like Dual Destinies that sometimes an M rating comes from unclear reasons.

Moving on from the provisional rating, there was a Final Fantasy XIV panel at TGS during which Yoshi-P commented briefly on Final Fantasy XVI.

He didn’t say much, but explained that the trailer used in-game footage rather than prerendered scenes to avoid “See you in 2035!” jokes from America (which they got anyway, by the way) and that the graphics aren’t finalized yet. He also confirmed that a Final Fantasy XVI teaser website will open up in October.

The website will only feature information about the world and characters, while the big information reveal is coming in 2021, but that still means we’ll know more about Final Fantasy XVI next month!

How do you feel about Final Fantasy XVI’s potential M rating, and what do you hope to learn from the teaser website?

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