FROM: MRS. SAFIYA QADHAFI OF LIBYA.
Wife of the ex-Libyan leader Colonel
Muammar Gaddafi.
Asalam walekum ramatulilah wobarukutuh,
Greetings to you in the name of Almighy Allah.
I pray to Almighty Allah that my email will reach you in good condition;I
got your contact details after an extensive on-line search Via (Network Power
Internet Trust) for a reliable person. I would like to develop a
business relationship with you by establishing a trust agreement where
you shall hold,manage,invest and distribute all assets received from me
in trust and the proceeds there from, under a term of the trust
agreement.
My name is Mrs. Safiya Farkash Qadhafi, Wife of the ex-Libyan
leader Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, the former and late leader of
Libya Colonel Muammar Qadhafi who was betrayed and embattled by Libyan and murdered
by the Libyan rebels which led to his untimely death.
Since then, me and my children has been on travel ban, no access to bank accounts
and we have been rendered homeless and at the same time we are
under threat and we are not allowed to
invest or operate bank account. I wrote this letter because
I need you
to help me to secure some of my family funds amounting to *$2 Billion Dollars* that
is deposited by my late husband in different security
companies abroad which is no longer safe under the name of my late husband therefore
I urgently need your help to transfer the amount to your bank account and ones we start,
first, the beneficiary name should be
immediately changed from my late husband name to your name through my lawyers.
I promise to make you richer by offering you 30% of the total amount that can be
secured through your help and in each transactions succesfully completed by you and
if you can assist me, we must work in confidentiality therefore I want you to please
keep this as a greater secret.
For more details, I want you to contact me
through my private and secured email address (safiya@scurelmail.com) for further
details.
In your response, I want you to provide me with your particulars as listed
below because it will be used by my lawyers to make change of ownership of funds to
your name:
1) Your full name.
2) Home or office Address.
3) Land Telephone and mobile phone numbers.
4) Your Age.
5) Your gender/Sex.
6) Your Occupation.
7) Any form of Identification, example: copy of (INTERNATIONAL PASSPORT or DRIVERS LICENSE).
=======================
Contact me through my private E-mail: safiya@scurelmail.com
I await to hear from you.
Yours sincerely,
Mrs.Safiya Qadhafi.
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Cyberpunk 2077 | Release Date,Trailer, Gameplay, News And More.
Cyberpunk 2077 | Release Date, Trailer, Gameplay, News:
Cyberpunk 2077 is expected to release in 2019 and the publicity is just going to fortify as we take in more about CD Projekt Red's next open-world RPG. Subsequent to taking a profound plunge to discover every one of the points of interest we could in its long gameplay make a big appearance, we discovered that that was only a tip of an iceberg - anticipate that Cyberpunk 2077 will have about the same number of missions as The Witcher 3. Gratefully, you don't need to sit tight for the following enormous information dump from the studio to discover more as Pro-GamersArena has compiled everything you need know about the game including latest news, trailer, gameplay, release date and more...
Quick Facts :
- Release Date: TBA
- Developer: CD Projekt RED
- Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
- Engine: REDengine 4
What is Cyberpunk 2077?
On the off chance that you were expecting a science fiction enhanced variant of The Witcher, you might reel at this moment. Cyberpunk 2077 is an all-new IP from CD Projekt Red, trading Geralt's dream setting for one with a brilliant, neon science fiction stylish. Cyberpunk 2077 utilizations the first-individual point of view to put players solidly in the boots of a low-level weapon for-contract on the cutting edge boulevards of Night City, and it likewise functions admirably with the amusement's propensity for quick paced gunplay. So, 2077 is a long way from a straight first-individual shooter: discourse drains flawlessly into the investigation, hacking and designing abilities can get all of you sorts of spots shouldn't be, and there is even a pack of non-deadly (or just non-weapon) alternatives for battling. In addition, there is still a touch of third-individual amid scripted cut scenes and driving around the city. Remember that all that we've seen so far is liable to change, however, it's all extremely encouraging.
Cyberpunk 2077 trailer – How's it?
The second trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 is an obvious contrast to the main: it was made inside the preoccupation engine and shows scenes from the entire route crosswise over Night City, as opposed to the essential trailer which was worked with CGI and happened generally speaking in one super-moderate development minute. We see distinctive scenes of life, spreading over from a cable car auto to a city street to inside a corporate office, and a storyteller instructs us concerning how things kinda suck around here yet people keep sticking in at any rate. Turns out the storyteller is our principal character 'V' which we will play or one possible shape, and things quickly uplift with scenes of colossal weapons, lifted shootouts, and auto seeks after.
Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay Preview.
The game is set in 'Night City', Located about somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco, a tragic megacity loaded up with flying autos, high rises, and obviously sorted out wrongdoing.
It appears as though the game will depend on you keeping different groups in this city upbeat as you play. From the get-go in the demo, we have demonstrated a group pioneer called 'Drax', who gave us a vocation finding a stolen bit of military equipment and getting it into his criminal hands.
In spite of the fact that we got the impression you could pursue the road group yourself, our demonstrator included a corporate specialist in the mission's story with the end goal to get the assets to only buy the bot from the pack.
We just got a little gander at the gear that is accessible in the diversion, however it would seem that there's a monstrous blend of firearms to purchase, overhauls you can buy for existing weapons, and inserts you can buy to upgrade your very own capacities.
One especially gross and dreadful arrangement of foes had a large portion of their appearances missing with the goal that they could introduce a Splinter Cell-style set of sparkling red eyes. 2077 is a grimy and chaotic world, and it's each piece the grown-up focussed experience we've generally expected from an engineer like Projekt Red.
When we got into the meat of the mission, it exited no doubt as far as we can tell this is a firm mixture among RPG and shooter, as opposed to a shooter with RPG components. which is gonna be F**king cool!!
Cyberpunk 2077 owes a ton to this great science fiction establishment, however the execution of its open world places it in another class completely. So it's entirely evident that everybody is extremely eager to investigate the 'Night City' of Cyberpunk 2077.
That's all we know about Cyberpunk 2077 till now, but as soon as we get any news we will let you know, Till then keep sharing and stay in touch with 'Pro-GamersArena', " THE PRO-BROS ARENA"
ASOIAF: 40Pt Boltons With Ramsay
 |
| You know it's real when everyone else is in armor and you're naked. |
I've been dying to write this piece. Beknownst to some, while Tywin is my favorite character of all time, I also really like Roose Bolton. I think of him as the Tywin of the North because they're so alike in a lot of ways. In fact, when you dig down a little deeper into the origins of House Bolton, you will find many disturbing and interesting things about them. Mechanically, I think they play very close to their book representation and that means a lot of death and terror. For now, I think Boltons' are the strongest when paired with House Lannister because of a lot of their tactics cards and toolkits synergizes with Lannister control elements.
Let's jump straight into a list that I've been messing with lately. Since I'm going to turn this into a 2-part show, let me start with something that I've had quite a bit of success with. To say it's pretty freaking brutal is an understatement.
 |
| I mean, lol, look at this guy. |
Faction: House Lannister
Commander: Ramsay Snow – The Bastard of Bolton
Points: 40 (20 Neutral)
Combat Units:
• House Clegane Mountain Men (6)
with Ramsay Snow – The Bastard of Bolton (0)
and Theon Greyjoy – Reek (0)
• House Clegane Mountain Men (6)
with Dreadfort Captain (1)
• Bolton Cutthroats (5)
with Assault Veteran (1)
• The Flayed Men (10)
with Gregor Clegane – Mounted Behemoth (3)
Non-Combat Units:
• Tywin Lannister – The Great Lion (4)
• Lord Varys – The Spider (4)
Made with ASOIAFBuilder.com
Just so you guys know, I absolutely hated Ramsay in the show. I still can't decide who I actually hated more, him or Joffrey, and that's an achievement in itself. To make things short and sweet, Ramsay's a battlefield commander through and through. He likes to get in there and chop people to bits to spread fear directly. When he pops his Order to Flay Them All! after a unit fails a Panic test, another unit within Long Range has to take a Panic test. This is a great mechanic to have in a unit of MM because of the Vicious inflicting a -2 modifier. The affiliation to House Bolton is something we will talk about once we take a look at his Tactics Cards. Before we forget, let's talk about poor Theon who Ramsay brings along with him. Having Theon dragged around with you basically allows Ramsay to auto-panic an opponents' unit every turn, but the downside there is that if you roll a 5+, Theon dies. Boohoo, I guess.
 |
| Everything is made for killing. |
The biggest weakness to this list is the low activations and deploys, but outwitting the opponent isn't something I'm going after. I'm looking to get in there and murder the enemy in every way possible. When you look at cards like Our Blades are Sharp, you will see that's one of the most damaging tactics cards in the entire game. If you attack a Panicked enemy, your attack gains +1 to hit and +2 dice on the attack. If you're a House Bolton unit, the defender also becomes Vulnerable. This is why I have 2 real House Bolton units in the game and a MM with the House Bolton affiliation. Make no mistake: This one card absolutely sky-rockets your units ability to deal damage. With a plentiful amount of Critical Blows, Vicious, and 3s to hit across the entire army, you will have plenty of chances to inflict maximum hurt on the enemy. Cruel Methods is activation cheating, simple as that. You play this card at the start of the round, regardless of whose turn it is and you get an out-of-turn free attack action. Sure, there are downsides to this card if you don't manage to destroy the enemy unit, but with 3 House Bolton units on the field using max dice and re-rolling misses, you better do some work. An amazing target for this is your Bolton Cutthroats with Assault Veteran. If you pop this on them and that unit is already engaged with something, you will be rolling 10 dice, hitting on 2s with re-rolls, making the Vulnerable, and they have to test Panic with Vicious. If it's going to be your unit activation, you can just cap the Combat zone with Varys and go again if that unit is somehow still alive and your guys are still around. I'm telling you, it's bananas. Lastly, we have Sadistic Games, where at the start of a friendly turn, your opponent has to pick either to have 2 of his units to be Panicked or suffer D3+2 automatic hits. If he understands Ramsay at all, he'll go for the extra hits because at least he has a chance to save them. Having 2 units being Panicked just sets them up to be abused later by Our Blades are Sharp.
 |
| Madness. Madness and Stupidity. |
Let's talk about the unit selection super quick: Mountain's Men should be pretty straight forward. You have Critical Blows and Vicious who works great with Ramsay's tactics cards. Bolton Cutthroats with Assault Veteran is a match made in heaven, and having a Dreadfort Captain on the MMs help spread Panic whenever the opponent fails their Panic test (which should be often due to Vicious). The giant elephant in the room is the fat-stack of The Mountain + Flayed Men. Let's get one thing straight here: This is 32.5% of your army and in most cases, can be considered a deathstar. Now, I normally don't like to do this kind of thing, but I think Ser G + Flayed Men are one of the strongest units in the entire game by far, especially when you have them in damage amplifying list like this one. For me, the best way to get value out of these guys is to take them in a list that will almost guarantee they make their points back. If you think about in terms of points: A 13-point unit better kill at least 13+ points to break even or be considered a unit well-spent. This is, after all, 2 more units of Mountain's Men or even close to 3 units of Cutthroats or Lannister Guardsman. It's a huge investment and I need people to realize that they do have weaknesses, that you can play around them quite easily, that mission objectives do matter, and there are plenty of tactics cards and combos out there that can stifle their damage or end them entirely. I do not consider them over-performing at all, but they are nasty.
So why did I bring them? Well, for one, Gregor applies free Panic that unlocks Our Blades are Sharp automatically and also automatically deal D3 wounds. The fact that you can play Our Blades are Sharp on this unit is something out of this world, because now, on the charge you have 10 attack dice, hitting on 2s and re-rolling, Critical Blows + Vicious, Panic + Spread Fear, you make the unit Vulnerable, and you deal D3 extra wounds from The Mountain just because you can. If that doesn't roll over many people, it will reduce them to almost combat ineffectiveness status and they will then try to retaliate against a unit with 2+ save. If you wipe them out or start the round with Cruel Methods, you can then Overrun into another unit with a free Charge action to start the chaos all over again. I don't know what to say, this unit with Ramsay is absolutely absurd considering how many extra, free combat rounds you can get from it, all the while spreading Panic tokens around because of Spread Fear and Vicious.
Yes, the unit above is ridiculously strong and I would say almost designed for Ramsay to take advantage of. However, it's hugely expensive and that's why a unit like that doesn't perform well in objective-based game modes. With only 4 combat units, one of which is a 13-point unit from hell, you can't possibly dedicate it to capturing points. What you need to do if you're piloting this list is to use that unit to smash everything in its way to smithereens. However, this will require you to have the right cards in hand which is something you should never build your strategy around. Before I forget, that unit, as mighty as it is, has one giant flaw that needs to be called out: It is hugely weak against anything that can blunt the initial assault. A lot of the damage comes from the Abilities that the unit has attached to it so if you take those abilities *cough, Martial Supremacy, cough*, it's pretty much a declawed cat. You can then trap the unit by engaging it from multiple sides (such as Grey Wind) and apply Greataxes to face.
Finally, I'd like to mention that Tywin as an NCU is still amazing. In fact, I think he has one of the best once-a-game abilities in the game because it completely makes an enemy unit worthless for a round. Funny enough, Tywin is also probably one of the best counters to something like the Gregor Flayed Train of Death.
FIFA 18 Free Download
Powered by Frostbite, FIFA 18 blurs the line between the virtual and real worlds, bringing to life the players, teams and atmospheres of The World's Game. Move with Real Player Motion Technology – an all-new animation system that creates a new level of responsiveness and player personality – to unlock dramatic moments in the world's most immersive atmospheres. Then go on a global journey as Alex Hunter along with a star-studded cast of characters, including Cristiano Ronaldo and other European football stars.
GAMEPLAY AND SCREENSHOTS :
♢ Click or choose only one button below to download this game.
♢ View detailed instructions for downloading and installing the game here.
♢ Use 7-Zip to extract RAR, ZIP and ISO files. Install PowerISO to mount ISO files.
FIFA 18 Free Download
INSTRUCTIONS FOR THIS GAME
➤ Download the game by clicking on the button link provided above.
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➤ Once the download has been finished or completed, locate or go to that file.
➤ To open .iso file, use PowerISO and run the setup as admin then install the game on your PC.
➤ Once the installation process is complete, run the game's exe as admin and you can now play the game.
➤ Congratulations! You can now play this game for free on your PC.
➤ Note: If you like this video game, please buy it and support the developers of this game.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
(Your PC must at least have the equivalent or higher specs in order to run this game.)
Minimum:
• OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 – 64-Bit
• CPU: Intel Core i3-2100 @ 3.1GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 965 @ 3.4 GHz
• RAM: 8GB
• Hard Drive Space Required: 50.0 GB
• Minimum Supported Video Cards: NVIDIA GTX 460 or AMD Radeon R7 260
• DirectX: 11.0
Recommended:
• OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 – 64-Bit
• CPU: Intel i5-3550K @ 3.40GHz or AMD FX 8150 @ 3.6GHz
• RAM: 8GB
• Hard Drive Space Required: 50.0 GB
• Minimum Supported Video Cards: NVIDIA GTX 660 or AMD Radeon R9 270
• DirectX: 11.0
Supported Language: English, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Portuguese-Brazil, Simplified Chinese language are available.• OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 – 64-Bit
• CPU: Intel Core i3-2100 @ 3.1GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 965 @ 3.4 GHz
• RAM: 8GB
• Hard Drive Space Required: 50.0 GB
• Minimum Supported Video Cards: NVIDIA GTX 460 or AMD Radeon R7 260
• DirectX: 11.0
Recommended:
• OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 – 64-Bit
• CPU: Intel i5-3550K @ 3.40GHz or AMD FX 8150 @ 3.6GHz
• RAM: 8GB
• Hard Drive Space Required: 50.0 GB
• Minimum Supported Video Cards: NVIDIA GTX 660 or AMD Radeon R9 270
• DirectX: 11.0
If you have any questions or encountered broken links, please do not hesitate to comment below. :D
Monday, March 23, 2020
9 Years, 9 Lessons On Horror
By Thomas Grip
Edited by Kira
It has now been over 9 years since we released Amnesia: The Dark Descent. That is a bloody long time, and feels like we should celebrate that by talking about the craft of horror games.
Horror games are quite a different beast when it comes to the game industry at large. Most other genres revolve around what the player does. In a turn-based strategy you take turns doing strategy:
In a first-person shooter you shoot things from a first-person perspective:
In a Match 3 game you match three thingies:
In a horror game, the activity is not at all as important. What is important is that the experience is a spooky one. This makes designing horror games different from designing within other genres. Many times the standard industry tricks just won't work, which makes one think about game design in a different light.
In the past 9 years we have learned a great deal about horror games, and to celebrate the occasion, I wanted to share 9 lessons we have learned over the years.
That being said, I don't see these lessons as only useful for horror games. There's quite a bit of overlap with other genres, especially any games that aim for a narrative-heavy experience.
And finally – this is by no means an exhaustive list. Still, the lessons here are at the core of the craft of making scary video games.
Lesson 1: Horror is not enjoyable
The basic emotion of horror is not a pleasant one – yet people play horror games wanting to experience horror. This is the paradox of horror as entertainment. This paradox requires game developers to be careful in how they deliver the experience to the player.
You could draw an analogy between horror games and rollercoasters. The basic purpose of a rollercoaster is to simulate the sensation of falling. Under controlled circumstances the experience of falling is thrilling and fun (at least for a good portion of people). But if you put someone in a barrel and push them down a cliff, chances are they will not find the experience fun at all. Even if they survive unscathed, the whole ordeal would be a horrible experience.
The same is true for horror games. If you have a game that only relies on jumpscares – figuratively throwing people off a cliff in a barrel – few people will consider that fun. This became apparent in certain maps in Penumbra. We thought it would be good enough for a scary gameplay section to have a maze and some monsters. Instead of becoming mazes of fear, they instead became mostly... annoying. Amnesia: The Dark Descent had similar issues towards the end, where the monster encounters were just that, not supported by any other aspects. At that point the game no longer felt as entertaining.
Lesson 2: Players are working against you
For a horror game developer, the worst enemy is… the players. Seriously, if we could sit around and make games without having to worry about what the players will do and think when playing the game, life would be so much simpler!
As mentioned before, being scared is not a pleasant feeling. Therefore the players will try to optimize the feeling away, often unconsciously. In the end, the players will ruin the intended experience for themselves.
Take the demon dogs from our first game, Penumbra: Overture. The game takes a bunch of time to build them up as creepy monsters that stalk the dark mines. However their AI has some weaknesses that some people are very quick to catch. Hence the dogs become easy to defeat, and are no longer scary.
And the crazy thing is that the players complain when this happens! They probe the system for flaws and choose to exploit them, yet want the dogs to remain scary. So their behaviour ends up going against their will.
Some games solve issues of player exploitation simply by making the enemies extremely hard (think Dark Souls): they make sure the monsters are just as hard to beat as they look scary. Another approach is to instead skip much of the gameplay (think Dear Esther): if there are no mechanics, there's nothing for the player to exploit – problem solved, right?
I don't think either of these solutions is optimal. Instead I think one should aim for a third route: making the players think about actions in a more narrative fashion. More about that later!
Lesson 3: Scares alone won't make a horror game
Horror is like a spice that defines a dish. You cannot do without it, but you can't cook a dish solely out of spices either. That would be just gross.
As an example, let's take three horror movies I consider to be at the top of their genre: Alien, The Exorcist and Ringu. All three movies deal with very different subjects, have different styles, and are overall different from one another. But there is one thing they have in common: they all have very few scares in them!
Instead each movie is mostly about the characters, the discussions, the anticipation of the horror – building up the atmosphere and the dread of things to come. Very little time is spent actually facing the horror.
Let's get back to our roller coaster analogy. When you think about it, the actual roller coaster ride lasts a very short time. Most of the time is spent doing things like buying a ticket, standing in line, and hearing other people scream. All these actions are not superfluous extras – they build up for the actual ride, and are crucial to the overall experience.
When we first made the study section of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, we implemented a ton of jumpscares. Books fell down from shelves, doors banged, pianos started playing and so forth. But as the map became more complete, it felt like something was off. So we reduces the scares to just a couple, and instead focused on letting the player learn the castle's mysteries. At first we were afraid this would make the level too boring – but as it turns out, spacing the scares apart made players much more scared than previously.
Lesson 4: Fun gameplay is just too… fun
In a horror game more than any other, the players go in expecting to have a bad time. And as designers we want them to feel anxiety, despair, and a whole array of negative emotions. But gameplay – because it's so damn engaging – tends to counteract all these juicy emotions.
Let's use Dead Space as an example. When I started playing it, I was really scared, walking around slowly and peeking around every corner. Then, about an hour in, I learned how to kill the monsters, and what tricks I needed to survive.
Not only did I get good at killing the monsters, I thought it was great fun! The things that used to terrify me now became a source of amusement. Instead of dreading the monster sounds they now made me excited – oh great, another necromorph to dismember!
So where did the fear go? It was simply overshadowed by the rewarding gameplay.
Us humans tend to have this thing called attention, and we only have a limited amount of it. If the game is constantly engaging the player with thinking about their aim, checking ammo, and looking for loot, there's no room left for much else. In other words, the players' brain will lack resources to frighten themselves.
The early designs of Amnesia: The Dark Descent included genre-typical weapons, and even guns. We also experimented with very elaborate puzzle set-ups, everything from swinging chandeliers to redirecting rays of light. All these caused the same issues as Dead Space. They were too fun, and took attention away from what mattered: getting scared.
Eventually we decided to reduce the "fun" elements the gameplay had – and it paid off.
We saw this very clearly when watching Let's Plays of the Amnesia games. Since players didn't have things like combat to pay attention to, they reacted to things they might not have even noticed in other games. A vague sound, almost like a footstep, was suddenly a reason to look for the nearest cupboard to hide in. Had the players minds been filled with thoughts of loot boxes, they would have never reacted like this.
Lesson 5: Narrative is a core element in good horror
So if engaging gameplay can be counteractive to the horror, and you need to be careful with the scares, what do you fill a horror game with?
While no silver bullet, narrative is a big part of the equation.
By building up a narrative, us game designers can make game worlds bigger and more intricate than they actually are in-game. We can prime the player into doing a lot of the scaring for themselves.
In order to explain this, let's take a random image let's take a random image of a quaint town:
This feels like a great place for an evening stroll, right?
Now let's give this image some backstory. Put on some spooky music, like the Amnesia soundtrack, and read the following:
...And now look at the picture again.
Not so cozy anymore, right?
A new context leads to re-interpreting the environment based on this information, and get into a different mindset based on it. While you previously admired the view, you are now scanning it for signs of danger.
A big part of horror takes place inside a player's head. And by fueling their imagination, we can turn a cozy village into a place of terror and despair.
Looking back on which areas worked in Penumbra, this component became apparent. The most loved environments were those where players could use lore and environmental clues to fantasize what happened… and what could happen. The expansion, Penumbra: Requiem, lacked a lot of this background information. So despite us designing some of our best puzzles and implementing interesting visuals, Requiem was received quite badly. Without a strong narrative component, the players didn't get the experience they wanted.
Lesson 6: The world must feel real
In order for a horror narrative to have proper impact, the world it takes place in must be taken seriously by the players. But what does "serious" mean? Grey and brown tones with no cartoonish elements? Not quite.
Let's draw a parallel between real and imagined worlds. If you suffer from nightmares, there's a trick to that: make a habit out of knocking on walls, tables, or whatever is closest to you. Eventually you will start doing the same when you're asleep. However, when you knock on walls or a table in a dream, your hand is likely to go through the surface – that's how you'll know you are in a dream, and no longer need to be afraid of the world around you.
Making horror games is basically a business of creating nightmares. But it's hard to be successful when you have a bunch of players (those damn players again!) constantly doing the equivalent of "knocking on surfaces", simply by playing the game. As soon as they discover some sort of glitch the immersion of a terrifying world breaks, and it takes a long time to build it back up again.
Let's look at an example from Penumbra again. In Penumbra we want the players to imagine that the demon dogs are "real", implying all the traits (demon) dogs possess. So, we want players to be worried about encountering a dog, and hiding from it. However, some players "knocked on surfaces" by messing around with the environments, and figured out that the dogs can't reach you if you camp on top of a box. So, whereas a real dog could jump up on the box and chomp the player up, the AI dog cannot. Therefore the fantasy of dogs as "real" is lost, and the game loses a bunch of its scariness.
Because of this effect, game developers have to be careful about how they construct environments, and what tools they give to the player. There should be enough things to do to make the place feel real. But not so many as to aid players in breaking the illusion.
Lesson 7: Keep it vague
You know creepypasta and scary photos you can find on the internet? Almost always the thing that makes them scary is that they leave a lot to the imagination. Seeing a silhouette and glowing eyes out in the corner of a photo feels threatening. A close-up glamour photo of the same monster does not.
As mentioned before, much of the horror comes from simply not being sure what the hell you're looking at. It's when there is a gap in our knowledge, a certain amount of uncertainty, that horror can really shine. This is especially true when you combine it with some sort of danger element.
It is quite common in games to make sure the player understands the systems in place as clearly as possible. This often results in some really daunting tutorials. Of course for some games, like fighting games, it's important to have in-depth knowledge about the systems to be able to optimise the game. In horror games we actually want the opposite!
A vague and uncertain game system is like a creepy photo. You can make out enough to get an idea of what's going on, but there's still room for the imagination to go wild. Let's use the health meter in Resident Evil as an example. Internally it is an analog property, a decimal number from 0 to some value, but the player will only ever know that it has "three" states. This strikes a great balance between giving information and being vague, and helps crank up the tension.
The sanity system in Amnesia: The Dark Descent is similarly vague. You know scary things – whatever those are – lower your sanity, and bad things – whatever those are – will happen if it drops too low, so you don't want to risk it.
This was not always the case. We started out with a pretty straightforward gameplay system, hoping players would play along with it. However, people either game it or got frustrated by it. When we tweaked it so it was much less clear how it worked, it sparked player's imaginations and it was much more enjoyable.
Lesson 8: Players need a role
All stories are driven by the characters that are contained within it, and how a plot plays out is determined by the characteristics of these characters. Just imagine how different Jurassic Park would be if the annoying lawyer guy was replaced by Judge Dredd! So, in order to get the most of any narrative, it is crucial to establish roles.
Games are no different. The role that a player inhabits will determine what actions they have at their disposal, what their goals ore, and so forth. Knowing the character is a vital component in order for the player to be an active part of the story.
Yet this is one of those components that many horror games forget. You are often thrust into a story as some generic character. Often the thought behind this is that the player would "play as themselves", but this is not how any narrative really works. In order to properly parse a story situation, you need to understand what kind of person is dealing with it.
Say that you come across a corpse. You are playing as Sherlock Holmes, a corpse means a case! You will want to search for clues and try to solve the mystery of how this person died.
Now imagine you're playing as a flesh-eating ghoul. Now the same corpse is suddenly dinner - yum!
In most areas, horror games are well beyond your average game in terms of narrative. But for some reason, a large portion of horror games just fail to set the player role properly. It's strange, relying on a narrative backbone, yet losing so much of the atmosphere by not defining the player role.
Another big reason for defining roles is that it can help with some of the issues addressed earlier. For instance, it can limit the number of actions the player feels is rational to take. For example Penumbra's protagonist Philip is a physics teacher, so while he could perhaps fight some demon dogs, it would be more logical to run and hide from aggressive humanoids.
This lesson we clearly learned in SOMA. At first we thought about having a non-speaking Simon with very little character. However, this made player distance themselves from the events. Things got a lot more personal when they played as a character who was reacting to what was happening. While players previously wouldn't ponder the strange events in-depth, Simon pushing them in the right direction it worked much better.
Lesson 9: Agency is crucial
When I talk about agency, I'm not talking about the CIA. What I mean is agency of the free will kind. A game that has a lot of agency lets the players make decisions and feel like an active part of the narrative.
This is closely tied to the previous lesson. Not only do we want to give players a role, we also want them to own that role. They need to feel like they really inhabit the character they are supposed to play. A game can achieve a lot by combining agency with keeping things vague – and letting players decide to take uncertain decisions.
Say that you are faced with a dark tunnel – dark tunnels are pretty scary!
Now imagine that the game explicitly tells you that your goal lies beyond the tunnel. There's no choice, you gotta go in. And if the game forces you do something, it will also make sure you do actually have the means to complete this quest – in this case get to the other side of the tunnel.
But what if entering this dark tunnel was voluntary, or at least presented as such? The game vaguely tells you that there might be something important there – but you don't know, and might also be a certain death. All of a sudden the tunnel feels a lot less safe. By adding agency and making entering the tunnel an uncertain choice, all sorts of doubts pop up in the player's mind.
There's also a number of other ways to add agency. Say the player needs to do something unnerving, like Amnesia's Daniel drilling into a corpse to get blood out. In the game it is clear that there is no other option. Overall reactions to this was not very strong.
Compare this to similar moments in SOMA, where intended course of action is much less clear. Here players are forced to actually think through what they need to do, and get emotionally involved in the process of it.
While SOMA did do this part better, it also had its shortcomings. In Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the game was divided into hub maps, so there was no one path or right order to do things. These choices increased anxiety. Whereas maps in SOMA were way more streamlined, and we noticed a considerable drop in scariness due to this.
In closing
And them's the rules! As said before, these are not the only ones, but I believe these come out on top when listing the most important ones. You could also go into them with a lot more depth, but I wanted to keep this blog concise. A lot of my previous blogs in the design tag dive deeper into related subjects.
Finally, I want to close by saying that, because of all these special requirements for horror games, I don't think you can approach them like other games. Instead of "finding the fun" and iteratively building upon that, horror game design needs to start with some strong principles.
When designing a horror game, you want to hone into what you've chosen as your core principles, be it atmosphere, theme, or something else. Then, as you progress in development, you don't want to evaluate the game on how "fun" or "nice" it is to play – but in how well it fulfills its set core principles. And a cornerstone for being able to do that evaluation is to keep the above lessons in mind.
This in itself is a huge topic of its own, and will need to be dealt with in some future post. Stay tuned for more!
Edited by Kira
It has now been over 9 years since we released Amnesia: The Dark Descent. That is a bloody long time, and feels like we should celebrate that by talking about the craft of horror games.
Horror games are quite a different beast when it comes to the game industry at large. Most other genres revolve around what the player does. In a turn-based strategy you take turns doing strategy:
Into the Breach
In a first-person shooter you shoot things from a first-person perspective:
Doom
In a Match 3 game you match three thingies:
Candy Crush: Soda
In a horror game, the activity is not at all as important. What is important is that the experience is a spooky one. This makes designing horror games different from designing within other genres. Many times the standard industry tricks just won't work, which makes one think about game design in a different light.
In the past 9 years we have learned a great deal about horror games, and to celebrate the occasion, I wanted to share 9 lessons we have learned over the years.
That being said, I don't see these lessons as only useful for horror games. There's quite a bit of overlap with other genres, especially any games that aim for a narrative-heavy experience.
And finally – this is by no means an exhaustive list. Still, the lessons here are at the core of the craft of making scary video games.
Lesson 1: Horror is not enjoyable
The basic emotion of horror is not a pleasant one – yet people play horror games wanting to experience horror. This is the paradox of horror as entertainment. This paradox requires game developers to be careful in how they deliver the experience to the player.
You could draw an analogy between horror games and rollercoasters. The basic purpose of a rollercoaster is to simulate the sensation of falling. Under controlled circumstances the experience of falling is thrilling and fun (at least for a good portion of people). But if you put someone in a barrel and push them down a cliff, chances are they will not find the experience fun at all. Even if they survive unscathed, the whole ordeal would be a horrible experience.
The same is true for horror games. If you have a game that only relies on jumpscares – figuratively throwing people off a cliff in a barrel – few people will consider that fun. This became apparent in certain maps in Penumbra. We thought it would be good enough for a scary gameplay section to have a maze and some monsters. Instead of becoming mazes of fear, they instead became mostly... annoying. Amnesia: The Dark Descent had similar issues towards the end, where the monster encounters were just that, not supported by any other aspects. At that point the game no longer felt as entertaining.
Well this is a familiar face.
Lesson 2: Players are working against you
For a horror game developer, the worst enemy is… the players. Seriously, if we could sit around and make games without having to worry about what the players will do and think when playing the game, life would be so much simpler!
As mentioned before, being scared is not a pleasant feeling. Therefore the players will try to optimize the feeling away, often unconsciously. In the end, the players will ruin the intended experience for themselves.
Take the demon dogs from our first game, Penumbra: Overture. The game takes a bunch of time to build them up as creepy monsters that stalk the dark mines. However their AI has some weaknesses that some people are very quick to catch. Hence the dogs become easy to defeat, and are no longer scary.
Can't get me. I'm on a box.
And the crazy thing is that the players complain when this happens! They probe the system for flaws and choose to exploit them, yet want the dogs to remain scary. So their behaviour ends up going against their will.
Some games solve issues of player exploitation simply by making the enemies extremely hard (think Dark Souls): they make sure the monsters are just as hard to beat as they look scary. Another approach is to instead skip much of the gameplay (think Dear Esther): if there are no mechanics, there's nothing for the player to exploit – problem solved, right?
I don't think either of these solutions is optimal. Instead I think one should aim for a third route: making the players think about actions in a more narrative fashion. More about that later!
Lesson 3: Scares alone won't make a horror game
Horror is like a spice that defines a dish. You cannot do without it, but you can't cook a dish solely out of spices either. That would be just gross.
As an example, let's take three horror movies I consider to be at the top of their genre: Alien, The Exorcist and Ringu. All three movies deal with very different subjects, have different styles, and are overall different from one another. But there is one thing they have in common: they all have very few scares in them!
Instead each movie is mostly about the characters, the discussions, the anticipation of the horror – building up the atmosphere and the dread of things to come. Very little time is spent actually facing the horror.
Let's get back to our roller coaster analogy. When you think about it, the actual roller coaster ride lasts a very short time. Most of the time is spent doing things like buying a ticket, standing in line, and hearing other people scream. All these actions are not superfluous extras – they build up for the actual ride, and are crucial to the overall experience.
When we first made the study section of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, we implemented a ton of jumpscares. Books fell down from shelves, doors banged, pianos started playing and so forth. But as the map became more complete, it felt like something was off. So we reduces the scares to just a couple, and instead focused on letting the player learn the castle's mysteries. At first we were afraid this would make the level too boring – but as it turns out, spacing the scares apart made players much more scared than previously.
In horror, less is often more.
Lesson 4: Fun gameplay is just too… fun
In a horror game more than any other, the players go in expecting to have a bad time. And as designers we want them to feel anxiety, despair, and a whole array of negative emotions. But gameplay – because it's so damn engaging – tends to counteract all these juicy emotions.
Let's use Dead Space as an example. When I started playing it, I was really scared, walking around slowly and peeking around every corner. Then, about an hour in, I learned how to kill the monsters, and what tricks I needed to survive.
Dead Space 2 promo art
All of the fun, none of the horror!
Not only did I get good at killing the monsters, I thought it was great fun! The things that used to terrify me now became a source of amusement. Instead of dreading the monster sounds they now made me excited – oh great, another necromorph to dismember!
So where did the fear go? It was simply overshadowed by the rewarding gameplay.
Us humans tend to have this thing called attention, and we only have a limited amount of it. If the game is constantly engaging the player with thinking about their aim, checking ammo, and looking for loot, there's no room left for much else. In other words, the players' brain will lack resources to frighten themselves.
The early designs of Amnesia: The Dark Descent included genre-typical weapons, and even guns. We also experimented with very elaborate puzzle set-ups, everything from swinging chandeliers to redirecting rays of light. All these caused the same issues as Dead Space. They were too fun, and took attention away from what mattered: getting scared.
Eventually we decided to reduce the "fun" elements the gameplay had – and it paid off.
We saw this very clearly when watching Let's Plays of the Amnesia games. Since players didn't have things like combat to pay attention to, they reacted to things they might not have even noticed in other games. A vague sound, almost like a footstep, was suddenly a reason to look for the nearest cupboard to hide in. Had the players minds been filled with thoughts of loot boxes, they would have never reacted like this.
Lesson 5: Narrative is a core element in good horror
So if engaging gameplay can be counteractive to the horror, and you need to be careful with the scares, what do you fill a horror game with?
While no silver bullet, narrative is a big part of the equation.
By building up a narrative, us game designers can make game worlds bigger and more intricate than they actually are in-game. We can prime the player into doing a lot of the scaring for themselves.
In order to explain this, let's take a random image let's take a random image of a quaint town:
Aww, I wanna go there. :)
This feels like a great place for an evening stroll, right?
Now let's give this image some backstory. Put on some spooky music, like the Amnesia soundtrack, and read the following:
It has been two weeks since a huge storm cut the town from the rest of the world. All means of communication are down.
Today, our emergency services received a call – it just started out as static, a joke that kids would play, but then the screaming started. The screaming of people, then an otherworldly roar, nothing a man nor beast on Earth could make. I had to find out what happened to these people up the serpentine road from us.
I am now here, yet no one else seems to be. It's like everyone vanished. But as the cold sun sets down over the mountain, I get a sense of unease…
...And now look at the picture again.
The worst monster of all is leaving the lights you've been murdered horribly.
Not so cozy anymore, right?
A new context leads to re-interpreting the environment based on this information, and get into a different mindset based on it. While you previously admired the view, you are now scanning it for signs of danger.
A big part of horror takes place inside a player's head. And by fueling their imagination, we can turn a cozy village into a place of terror and despair.
Looking back on which areas worked in Penumbra, this component became apparent. The most loved environments were those where players could use lore and environmental clues to fantasize what happened… and what could happen. The expansion, Penumbra: Requiem, lacked a lot of this background information. So despite us designing some of our best puzzles and implementing interesting visuals, Requiem was received quite badly. Without a strong narrative component, the players didn't get the experience they wanted.
Penumbra: Requiem, or as we call it, The Marc Game.
Lesson 6: The world must feel real
In order for a horror narrative to have proper impact, the world it takes place in must be taken seriously by the players. But what does "serious" mean? Grey and brown tones with no cartoonish elements? Not quite.
Let's draw a parallel between real and imagined worlds. If you suffer from nightmares, there's a trick to that: make a habit out of knocking on walls, tables, or whatever is closest to you. Eventually you will start doing the same when you're asleep. However, when you knock on walls or a table in a dream, your hand is likely to go through the surface – that's how you'll know you are in a dream, and no longer need to be afraid of the world around you.
Making horror games is basically a business of creating nightmares. But it's hard to be successful when you have a bunch of players (those damn players again!) constantly doing the equivalent of "knocking on surfaces", simply by playing the game. As soon as they discover some sort of glitch the immersion of a terrifying world breaks, and it takes a long time to build it back up again.
Let's look at an example from Penumbra again. In Penumbra we want the players to imagine that the demon dogs are "real", implying all the traits (demon) dogs possess. So, we want players to be worried about encountering a dog, and hiding from it. However, some players "knocked on surfaces" by messing around with the environments, and figured out that the dogs can't reach you if you camp on top of a box. So, whereas a real dog could jump up on the box and chomp the player up, the AI dog cannot. Therefore the fantasy of dogs as "real" is lost, and the game loses a bunch of its scariness.
The intended reaction when encountering a demon dog
Because of this effect, game developers have to be careful about how they construct environments, and what tools they give to the player. There should be enough things to do to make the place feel real. But not so many as to aid players in breaking the illusion.
Lesson 7: Keep it vague
You know creepypasta and scary photos you can find on the internet? Almost always the thing that makes them scary is that they leave a lot to the imagination. Seeing a silhouette and glowing eyes out in the corner of a photo feels threatening. A close-up glamour photo of the same monster does not.
AAH! What IS that?
Oh, just our good friend Terry bringing us a gift. (by ThiccBoiMyers on Discord)
As mentioned before, much of the horror comes from simply not being sure what the hell you're looking at. It's when there is a gap in our knowledge, a certain amount of uncertainty, that horror can really shine. This is especially true when you combine it with some sort of danger element.
It is quite common in games to make sure the player understands the systems in place as clearly as possible. This often results in some really daunting tutorials. Of course for some games, like fighting games, it's important to have in-depth knowledge about the systems to be able to optimise the game. In horror games we actually want the opposite!
A vague and uncertain game system is like a creepy photo. You can make out enough to get an idea of what's going on, but there's still room for the imagination to go wild. Let's use the health meter in Resident Evil as an example. Internally it is an analog property, a decimal number from 0 to some value, but the player will only ever know that it has "three" states. This strikes a great balance between giving information and being vague, and helps crank up the tension.
The sanity system in Amnesia: The Dark Descent is similarly vague. You know scary things – whatever those are – lower your sanity, and bad things – whatever those are – will happen if it drops too low, so you don't want to risk it.
This was not always the case. We started out with a pretty straightforward gameplay system, hoping players would play along with it. However, people either game it or got frustrated by it. When we tweaked it so it was much less clear how it worked, it sparked player's imaginations and it was much more enjoyable.
Alex isn't looking so good.
Lesson 8: Players need a role
All stories are driven by the characters that are contained within it, and how a plot plays out is determined by the characteristics of these characters. Just imagine how different Jurassic Park would be if the annoying lawyer guy was replaced by Judge Dredd! So, in order to get the most of any narrative, it is crucial to establish roles.
Games are no different. The role that a player inhabits will determine what actions they have at their disposal, what their goals ore, and so forth. Knowing the character is a vital component in order for the player to be an active part of the story.
Yet this is one of those components that many horror games forget. You are often thrust into a story as some generic character. Often the thought behind this is that the player would "play as themselves", but this is not how any narrative really works. In order to properly parse a story situation, you need to understand what kind of person is dealing with it.
Say that you come across a corpse. You are playing as Sherlock Holmes, a corpse means a case! You will want to search for clues and try to solve the mystery of how this person died.
Now imagine you're playing as a flesh-eating ghoul. Now the same corpse is suddenly dinner - yum!
An alternate universe where Daniel is turned into a ghoul. Bon appetit!
In most areas, horror games are well beyond your average game in terms of narrative. But for some reason, a large portion of horror games just fail to set the player role properly. It's strange, relying on a narrative backbone, yet losing so much of the atmosphere by not defining the player role.
Another big reason for defining roles is that it can help with some of the issues addressed earlier. For instance, it can limit the number of actions the player feels is rational to take. For example Penumbra's protagonist Philip is a physics teacher, so while he could perhaps fight some demon dogs, it would be more logical to run and hide from aggressive humanoids.
This lesson we clearly learned in SOMA. At first we thought about having a non-speaking Simon with very little character. However, this made player distance themselves from the events. Things got a lot more personal when they played as a character who was reacting to what was happening. While players previously wouldn't ponder the strange events in-depth, Simon pushing them in the right direction it worked much better.
Lesson 9: Agency is crucial
When I talk about agency, I'm not talking about the CIA. What I mean is agency of the free will kind. A game that has a lot of agency lets the players make decisions and feel like an active part of the narrative.
This is closely tied to the previous lesson. Not only do we want to give players a role, we also want them to own that role. They need to feel like they really inhabit the character they are supposed to play. A game can achieve a lot by combining agency with keeping things vague – and letting players decide to take uncertain decisions.
Say that you are faced with a dark tunnel – dark tunnels are pretty scary!
Now imagine that the game explicitly tells you that your goal lies beyond the tunnel. There's no choice, you gotta go in. And if the game forces you do something, it will also make sure you do actually have the means to complete this quest – in this case get to the other side of the tunnel.
What's the worst that could happen? :)
But what if entering this dark tunnel was voluntary, or at least presented as such? The game vaguely tells you that there might be something important there – but you don't know, and might also be a certain death. All of a sudden the tunnel feels a lot less safe. By adding agency and making entering the tunnel an uncertain choice, all sorts of doubts pop up in the player's mind.
There's also a number of other ways to add agency. Say the player needs to do something unnerving, like Amnesia's Daniel drilling into a corpse to get blood out. In the game it is clear that there is no other option. Overall reactions to this was not very strong.
Just petting a guy's head while the drill drills a hole in it.
Compare this to similar moments in SOMA, where intended course of action is much less clear. Here players are forced to actually think through what they need to do, and get emotionally involved in the process of it.
While SOMA did do this part better, it also had its shortcomings. In Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the game was divided into hub maps, so there was no one path or right order to do things. These choices increased anxiety. Whereas maps in SOMA were way more streamlined, and we noticed a considerable drop in scariness due to this.
And them's the rules! As said before, these are not the only ones, but I believe these come out on top when listing the most important ones. You could also go into them with a lot more depth, but I wanted to keep this blog concise. A lot of my previous blogs in the design tag dive deeper into related subjects.
Finally, I want to close by saying that, because of all these special requirements for horror games, I don't think you can approach them like other games. Instead of "finding the fun" and iteratively building upon that, horror game design needs to start with some strong principles.
When designing a horror game, you want to hone into what you've chosen as your core principles, be it atmosphere, theme, or something else. Then, as you progress in development, you don't want to evaluate the game on how "fun" or "nice" it is to play – but in how well it fulfills its set core principles. And a cornerstone for being able to do that evaluation is to keep the above lessons in mind.
This in itself is a huge topic of its own, and will need to be dealt with in some future post. Stay tuned for more!
Friday, March 20, 2020
Gobliins 2 - Meatballs Of Happiness
By Ilmari
Last time I got the impression I would start this section instantly from the throne room. Alas, my journey from the subterranean sea ended somewhere else.
Still, throne room wasn't far away, so let's move there for a while.
Movementwise, there was an interesting trick in the throne room. Usually the exits of a screen have been pretty much fixed. Not here. Whenever my goblins were at the right side of the screen, the exit list showed the kitchen. Then again, I could move the goblins through the various secret passageways to the left side of the screen (and no, moving in front of the eyes of the demons wasn't an option), where instead of kitchen the list of exits showed another room (we'll get back to that later).
On the throne room sat the evil demon Amoniak, and to the left of him was the Prince Buffoon I was here to rescue. But the demon lackey was interestingly called a lover of meatballs. Say, didn't I just see a big pile of those?
Indeed, in the kitchen, a servant was preparing them. He would put them through the window, one by one, suggesting he was feeding the demon lackey. I had been carrying a bottle of kindness elixir for a while now, and my suspicion was that I could spice the meatballs with it. In fact, when I tried to do it, goblins told me that the idea was good but they were afraid it would spill and the cook would throw the spiced meatballs away.
Checking the kitchen a bit more, I found out that pressing the eye of the swordfish would contort the fish, which would hit the goblin, who would fly to the salt shaker, which would drop to a position where it could be taken (remarkable cause-effect chains). Now, I could spice the meatballs with salt, and the cook would be reprimanded for oversalting.
For the couple of seconds cook wasn't sitting, I could interact with the case he was sitting on. What could I do with it? Well, I began by adding some salt in the big pot. Someone was apparently using it as a bath and was glad that we had put some bath salt in it. As a token of gratitude, I received a file, which could be used for releasing bird.
With the cage gone, I could move forward on the shelf and take some thumb tacks. Obviously, these were the things I could put on the case, while cook was being disciplined. When the cook sat on them, he lost the grip on the meatball he had been holding.
This was a most frustrating sequence. Clearly I had to use the elixir with the meatball while it was flying. Problem was that time was so short and the spot I had to click was so small. Worst of it was that I had to do the whole salt-the-meatballs-wait-quickly-apply-the-thumb-tacks routine again, every time I failed in spicing the meatball. After dozens of failed attempts (and agony experienced by the cook), I finally managed to pull it off. Next time I entered the throne room, Amoniak's lackey was having a silly grin on his face
My next target was Amoniak's demon dog that was said to eat cockroaches. This wasn't as intuitive a problem to solve as the one with the meatballs, but involved more of random experimentation. I noticed that if Fingus entered the ear of the demon throne and Winkle at the same time pulled at the tongue of a statue on the left, the left eye of the demon throne would open and Fingus would automatically manipulate the right eye, releasing a cockroach, which would walk toward the dog and be eaten after few seconds (yep, a bit random). The trick was to quickly take the cockroach through one of those magic holes and then to use some elixir on it.
Only one to go! Demon king Amoniak was dealt with a very similar manner as his underlings, that is, by mixing some kindness elixir into his food. I found a painter who told me that Amoniak ate only ladybugs. Since I knew where to get cockroaches, I tried painting one of them with red paint from the painter and adding some black spots from a pepper pot. It apparently was enough to fool Amoniak.
The game wasn't over yet. I still had to escape the castle, but I had no idea how to do it. After a while, I met the real king of the castle, locked inside his armour, hanging from a rope.
Amoniak had turned the king to a small child, and only his crown could turn him back to normal. I had already stolen from Amoniak this crown (one of the goblins could snatch it, while entering the head of the demon throne), which I now gave to the king. The castle scientist noticed this and went to find some help to release the king. With the scientist left, I could tinker with one of his machines.
Finding myself on a desk (what desk actually is this?), I immediately noticed a box with a lock of a shape similar to one one on a seal. Should I use the seal to make an impression from the wax of the nearby candle and use it to open the box? If so, how could I get the wax?
Checking the other items, I noticed a pen knife that one goblin could lift for a couple of minutes. Using the other goblin on the knife during those few minutes moved the knife a few millimetres nearer to a book. Doing that couple of times brought the knife close enough to the book that I could cut from it a piece of the bookmark, which I could use as a wick of the candle.
What next? I picked up a match and used it to pry one glass eye from decorative skull. I tested what each goblin would do with the ball. They all kicked it, but Prince Buffoon particularly managed to break a piece from glasses with it. There was a conspicuous beam of sunlight coming from a window and hitting the candle. Using the piece of glass with that beam, the wick started to burn and a piece of wax dropped from the candle.
It was definitely a silly ending, but just right what to expect from this game. And it wasn't the end, but only an end - the game still continues. What more lies ahead of me, now that I rescued the prince? We'll find that out next week.
But before ending completely, let me advertise a new feature of our blog. Our readers occasionally note that some noteworthy game is missing from our official list. We have been playing such missing games as Missed Classics, but there has been no way for our readers to suggest what to play as a Missed Classic. We admins decided it should be time to change this. Just for this reason, we've set up a simple spreadsheet (you can find the link also on the left column), where you can add your suggestion. We are still not sure how we will add your suggestions to our Missed Classic schedules, but we are working on it.
Inventory: match, file
Session time: 2 h 45 min
Total time: 19 h 15 min
Last time I got the impression I would start this section instantly from the throne room. Alas, my journey from the subterranean sea ended somewhere else.
 |
| In the kitchen |
Still, throne room wasn't far away, so let's move there for a while.
 |
| Note the pepper pot, it will become handy later |
Movementwise, there was an interesting trick in the throne room. Usually the exits of a screen have been pretty much fixed. Not here. Whenever my goblins were at the right side of the screen, the exit list showed the kitchen. Then again, I could move the goblins through the various secret passageways to the left side of the screen (and no, moving in front of the eyes of the demons wasn't an option), where instead of kitchen the list of exits showed another room (we'll get back to that later).
On the throne room sat the evil demon Amoniak, and to the left of him was the Prince Buffoon I was here to rescue. But the demon lackey was interestingly called a lover of meatballs. Say, didn't I just see a big pile of those?
Indeed, in the kitchen, a servant was preparing them. He would put them through the window, one by one, suggesting he was feeding the demon lackey. I had been carrying a bottle of kindness elixir for a while now, and my suspicion was that I could spice the meatballs with it. In fact, when I tried to do it, goblins told me that the idea was good but they were afraid it would spill and the cook would throw the spiced meatballs away.
Checking the kitchen a bit more, I found out that pressing the eye of the swordfish would contort the fish, which would hit the goblin, who would fly to the salt shaker, which would drop to a position where it could be taken (remarkable cause-effect chains). Now, I could spice the meatballs with salt, and the cook would be reprimanded for oversalting.
 |
| Like this |
For the couple of seconds cook wasn't sitting, I could interact with the case he was sitting on. What could I do with it? Well, I began by adding some salt in the big pot. Someone was apparently using it as a bath and was glad that we had put some bath salt in it. As a token of gratitude, I received a file, which could be used for releasing bird.
 |
| Although not from its cage |
With the cage gone, I could move forward on the shelf and take some thumb tacks. Obviously, these were the things I could put on the case, while cook was being disciplined. When the cook sat on them, he lost the grip on the meatball he had been holding.
 |
| Poor cook should have stayed in bed today |
This was a most frustrating sequence. Clearly I had to use the elixir with the meatball while it was flying. Problem was that time was so short and the spot I had to click was so small. Worst of it was that I had to do the whole salt-the-meatballs-wait-quickly-apply-the-thumb-tacks routine again, every time I failed in spicing the meatball. After dozens of failed attempts (and agony experienced by the cook), I finally managed to pull it off. Next time I entered the throne room, Amoniak's lackey was having a silly grin on his face
 |
| One down, two to go |
My next target was Amoniak's demon dog that was said to eat cockroaches. This wasn't as intuitive a problem to solve as the one with the meatballs, but involved more of random experimentation. I noticed that if Fingus entered the ear of the demon throne and Winkle at the same time pulled at the tongue of a statue on the left, the left eye of the demon throne would open and Fingus would automatically manipulate the right eye, releasing a cockroach, which would walk toward the dog and be eaten after few seconds (yep, a bit random). The trick was to quickly take the cockroach through one of those magic holes and then to use some elixir on it.
 |
| The room at the other side of the throne room |
Only one to go! Demon king Amoniak was dealt with a very similar manner as his underlings, that is, by mixing some kindness elixir into his food. I found a painter who told me that Amoniak ate only ladybugs. Since I knew where to get cockroaches, I tried painting one of them with red paint from the painter and adding some black spots from a pepper pot. It apparently was enough to fool Amoniak.
 |
| And then we were three |
The game wasn't over yet. I still had to escape the castle, but I had no idea how to do it. After a while, I met the real king of the castle, locked inside his armour, hanging from a rope.
 |
| He's smaller than I expected |
Amoniak had turned the king to a small child, and only his crown could turn him back to normal. I had already stolen from Amoniak this crown (one of the goblins could snatch it, while entering the head of the demon throne), which I now gave to the king. The castle scientist noticed this and went to find some help to release the king. With the scientist left, I could tinker with one of his machines.
 |
| Honey, I shrank the gobliins! |
Finding myself on a desk (what desk actually is this?), I immediately noticed a box with a lock of a shape similar to one one on a seal. Should I use the seal to make an impression from the wax of the nearby candle and use it to open the box? If so, how could I get the wax?
Checking the other items, I noticed a pen knife that one goblin could lift for a couple of minutes. Using the other goblin on the knife during those few minutes moved the knife a few millimetres nearer to a book. Doing that couple of times brought the knife close enough to the book that I could cut from it a piece of the bookmark, which I could use as a wick of the candle.
What next? I picked up a match and used it to pry one glass eye from decorative skull. I tested what each goblin would do with the ball. They all kicked it, but Prince Buffoon particularly managed to break a piece from glasses with it. There was a conspicuous beam of sunlight coming from a window and hitting the candle. Using the piece of glass with that beam, the wick started to burn and a piece of wax dropped from the candle.
Just like I thought, I could shape the wax with the seal and the use this impression to open the box. Inside, I found some beans. Playing around with them for a while, I finally tried to use them on the map. To my surprise, the seed started to sprout a beanstalk - in the map. Without further ado, I entered the map.
 |
| I am getting confused. Was it a magic map? Did it teleport me somewhere? If so, did I just create a huge beanstalk here? |
It was definitely a silly ending, but just right what to expect from this game. And it wasn't the end, but only an end - the game still continues. What more lies ahead of me, now that I rescued the prince? We'll find that out next week.
But before ending completely, let me advertise a new feature of our blog. Our readers occasionally note that some noteworthy game is missing from our official list. We have been playing such missing games as Missed Classics, but there has been no way for our readers to suggest what to play as a Missed Classic. We admins decided it should be time to change this. Just for this reason, we've set up a simple spreadsheet (you can find the link also on the left column), where you can add your suggestion. We are still not sure how we will add your suggestions to our Missed Classic schedules, but we are working on it.
Inventory: match, file
Session time: 2 h 45 min
Total time: 19 h 15 min
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Spinners Of The Night
The Wild Riders haven't been holding my attention so I switched gears and started on the Night Spinner turrets this past Tuesday. The cockpits and undersides are done while the orange got started. I've since finished that up and got the barrels glued on since this picture was taken.
Falcons, Spears And Revenants, Oh My
I finished the first of the six Falcon turrets last Friday right before NEAT. The next six are going to be magnetised so I can swap them out for Fire Prism turrets (haven't started on those yet though).
I also did some conversion work earlier this week on my Revenants. I did some leg swaps to add some pose variety and magnetized the weapons. I have some Vibrocannon arm conversions to work on and a bit of puttying to do before these see paint.
Finally, I finished up the lances and gems on the Shining Spears last night, and put on their decals as well. They'll need a bit of touch up and bases edges before they get top coated.
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