chulip if chulip was more concerned about like traumacore aesthetics and the sins of the father/mother as narrative propulsion instead of like chibi aesthetics and sins of the business conglomerate as narrative propulsion.
idk maybe I’m like really wrong about chulip but what it’s going for just didn’t grab me like this did, both are equally confusing and confounding and like in some ways basically unplayable, but idk feel like I go into smth like this expecting unplayable. also this just deeply reminded me of my hometown and my mindset from when I lived there. I’m not like that anymore and this really reminded me of just how hopeless that feels and it also made me very happy that life is good. some of the endings feel incredibly hopeful especially when juxtaposed w the game world, would love to know if the more hopeful endings correspond to the nicer (not killing the fox/raccoon and killing the skeleton) you act. same vibes as like any 2010s prog-midwestemo album or establishing shots in flcl or the mysterious voyage of our homer, made me so happy I’m living a different life now. would definitely have liked this more if I hadn’t played lsd dream emulator like a year and a half ago but so it goes. tbh I just think it rocks that there’s a dev room in this and the hidden ending for finding that is just getting a commentary on the making of the game, smth I definitely won’t watch but absolutely appreciate. hope the guy that made this is doing okay.

I think movies have gotten to the point where they are reflective about the inherent danger and evilness of the camera. reflective about the bad shit they’ve been responsible for and the evil they’ve brought into this world. I saw it this year with pearl and nope and fabelmans, I don’t think any of those necessarily are intentionally about the evils of the celluloid camera, but maybe being so in love with film is the same as kind of despising both the medium and the industry. and I really don’t care about movies anymore, I used to watch about a hundred new releases per year and hundreds of older movies every year but tastes change and so does the medium. for a while it was disheartening to see the a24fication of indie films and the marvelfication of blockbusters, everything has became one homogenous blob of certain tropes and certain beats to hit, it’s easier to just not care. it’s easier to just hang up ur hat and accept that after a hundred years this medium died, it was inevitable wasn’t it? it died a sad and uneventful death. I guess that comes off as very cynical which I really don’t think I am nor am I trying to be. I’m just trying to be realistic, that something I once cared about and was passionate about is more or less dead. I’m fine with that, I still saw several new releases I really really loved, saw some older stuff like 1981’s possession and 1985’s smooth talk. this review is all over the place but mostly my thoughts boil down to the fact that Sam Barlow is as in love with the medium of film as he is critical and hateful of it. more than any other movie I’ve seen since maybe 2002’s autofocus and reflections of evil, immortality understands the destruction that films have left in the wake of people who worked on them. it’s impossible to not think of weinstein or spacey or baldwin or morrow or lee when playing through this. how many lives have ultimately been fucked over by this monolith of an industry. whether or not intentional the ‘22 movies I mentioned understand this. pearl with both its exploration of exploitation of young women in the industry and how ultimately escapism via movies is some of the most dangerous escapism. nope with its commentary on how most every movie ever made is built on the suffering of minorities, how it’s an industry built upon this that works every day to put people down. fabelmans is directly about how movies stop people from coping directly with their trauma, a very expensive distraction. immortality is all of this, it’s every piece of criticism on the film industry that’s ever existed, condensed into one of the most beautifully dense things I’ve ever experienced. doing things that are only possible in this medium, not the medium of film but the medium of games, because ultimately this does not work as anything but a game. maybe it’s really cynical of where movies are at and where they’ve always kinda been but at the same time it’s ridiculously hopeful of where games are and where they can go.

(scattered thoughts because I just slugged down a fig apple redbull and wrote all of this in my hour before work lol.
crazy that Barlow actually wrote a competent and not fetishistic portrayal of women here, the story here almost comes off as an apology for how he wrote and treated femininity in her story and most likely everything else he ever worked on.
just insane to see the wide range of influences that Barlow cops from here, I have no real issue with this as it’s just as much an exploration of the problematic themes that the directors he’s borrowing from exhibited as it is a homage to rollin and friedkin, etc.
fucking love how truly skeletal this is, ripped away from anything complete makes this feel much more realistic than her story which worked almost entirely on the gotcha of the plot. stripped away from trying to be cinematic and showing the bones of film production makes this more cinematic in the long run.
I like the costumes ^_^)

-life is like mario kart… be careful - apjvff
-literally so much fun, I love Mario kart sm but I was so damn bored of playing those same tracks and I feel like this dlc will make it like somewhat of a party game staple again for me
-I genuinely think ur like a dunce if u want a new mario kart on the switch after this, what is the point. seems like a series that should only have one entry per system and this is the switch’s game because fucking no one owned a wiiu lol
-genuinely so fucked up that Mario kart is so like universal in that like it’s intuitive. played with my sister in laws friend who has never played any video game that wasn’t a sims and kept calling this a Nintendo lmao and she placed like 5th in a race
-so much cute little like background details I loveee it, got very distracted by a toad in a spacesuit in the rainbow road level ^__^
-this time last year I was so obsessed with rainbow by bladee
-the tour levels are so fucking good, Paris map goes hard
-I need earrings of toad and shy guy…
-hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas :3

Lol y’all remember facade ??

(played like half an hour on my phone while at work. it’s pretty fucking bad lol. idk feel like yeah facade is pretty dated and ugly and very of it’s time but it’s cool as an artifact of it’s time like that had to be kind of impressive back then, it still is to some extent. I think how ugly and amateurish it is almost works in its favor. definitely knew what it was and what it was doing, this like wants to be a game and a movie and a series and a book and a play and it’s none of those lol. I wanna fuck james mcavoy, short bitch.)

very ahead of its time I think, like in the way that it predates modern society’s obsession with true crime via netflix docs and podcasts. really like the option to just be able to quit basically as soon as it starts, but you won’t because there is this weird grip true crime has on us all that makes us for a second think we’re a detective and become truly obsessed for a short period of time. like the way the game is structured is very critical of true crime media, you never need to know the full extent of what happened here, there was a murder and you can choose for that to be all you ever know. but I also feel weird about how barlow approaches femininity here in much the same way that McGee’s Alice and to a lesser extent Taro’s drakengard 3 sisters are portrayed. it’s like weird hang ups on women and specifically female sexuality and it just kinda grosses me out and I really do think the story here would be better and have a bigger punch if not for the psychosexual lean to it and also the ending.
I thought the actress was kate lyn sheil for like years tbh

feel like you either completely get what this game is going for when it opens up with an ariana song or you don’t and you hate it. it’s so light and airy and campy while still managing to be tense and cinematic and that feeling doesn’t stop till the credits roll with a monkees needledrop. whole thing is very of the mid 00s american horror film scene, most stuff from that era has this beautiful corporate gloss and sheen to it that just doesn’t exist in modern film much less so modern horror films. everything now has to be obliquely “about” something and has to be dark and depressing, they want you to feel clever about getting the twist ending. horror movies of the aughts were much less so trying to do anything like this, they were trying to be dynamic with the lens not the pen. and a lot of them managed to say something important about the times we were living in but you could also wholly enjoy them purely as campy escapism. think the quarry is much more so of that era of filmmaking than its creators probably want to admit, deeper themes exist here but it’s not at the forefront nor does the game ever try to make you feel smart for picking up on something like that.
idk played this every night with my boyfriend when I came home from work and for a solid week it has completely replaced tv as a medium in our house which is like unheard of. also was reading david kushner’s masters of doom book while playing this and that kind of just got into my head like the idea of being at the beginning of something not the end. I truly do think film has just been completely replaced with games and television, anyone who might have anything interesting to show or say is doing better work in mediums that are actually constantly progressing and moving forward and doing actually impressive things and not just regurgitating the same values in the same ways.
this whole thing probably comes across as more of an incoherent rant than anything else but I do just wholeheartedly love this and I think it’s coming from a very genuine and real place. this thing is just very impressive and dense I love it and I love CW shows lol

was worried that this was something that could only exist and work in a vacuum of what indie games were like in ‘12. distinctively remember my preteen idiot brain not understanding what I saw when I saw like youtubers hype this up. even more so distinctively remember very racist but neoliberal hippy youtubers I used to watch crying at the end of this which I remember thinking was pathetic and after playing it yeah that’s kind of pathetic. not that games can’t affect people in visceral ways but idk stuff like this or the original walking dead season or last of us are so like emblematic of everything wrong with video game discourse of early 2010’s gaming spheres, just reeks of emotional manipulation. it’s a cute ending though! reminds me so much of the ending of Spielberg’s AI that tbh it cheapens it for me and also is closer to plagiarism than homage imo but yeah it’s good lol. and I think the game overall still holds up after a decade of praise, I basically only really knew the ending and that there was a co-op element at play but I played this solo bitch. something about online play for this comes across as so faux twee and like hollow lol. seems like the game has more to say about our connection with the world and the creatures that surround us everyday and how little we are and how little we contribute rather than like the wholesomeness =-)) of playing a game like this with some random stranger which is what the talk of this game has always centered around in. but idk playing this felt meditative and nice and tranquil and I don’t think I would’ve felt that with a stranger playing alongside me. really gorgeous game, the reflection of the sun on the sand, brutal blinding whites in the snow areas, just gorgeous and I’m happy I finally played it so far removed from its era in video game culture and development :3

Heaven will be mine:
dirty house
hoe
gold digger
stink pussy
5 kids
cheater
AGP

We know the devil:
pray
educated
a job
clean pussy
loyal
faithful
HSTS