The Prophylactic Predator: Killer Condom Review

Hello once again mortals and welcome to another Halloween movie review! By the forces of collective chanting, or close enough .. a twitter pole, you have collectively commanded me to watch WEIRD monster and spooky movies! The previous review was about a tire that kills called Rubber. However.. Another thing that shares the namesake of that movie spawned a movie of it’s own! A foreign  film. So join me while I review the German movie Kondom Des Grauens, or as it is better known throughout the world…. Killer Condom.

The Big D

Killer Condom had a 1998 (limited)  cinematic release and became available for purchase and later streaming in 2000. The movie is defined as a Horror Comedy and thus is a viable target for me to watch during the Halloween month. Also allow me to reiterate that this movie has indeed seen a cinematic release. It was even a selected candidate for the Berlin Film Festival. It is based on the comic book stories Kondom des Grauens by Ralf König who along with the big man himself the director Martin Walz also wrote the screenplay for this movie. Actors like Udo Samel, Peter Lohmeyer and Leonard Lasink might be unfamiliar names to you all  but I can assure you.. for a movie named Killer Condom they did a mighty fine job! In fact I was really stoked on the acting in this movie! But what I loved more here is the directing.

If it wasn’t already clear… campy movie alert!

The Big man behind the screens or the Big D as we call him in line with this movie’s sense of humor is Martin Walz.  A director who mostly directed short films and a German tv series here and there.  The most  stand out title of him being Apokalypse Pink… I want to see that now. Regardless.. while the movie is absolutely ridiculous the director manages to bring it into frame as if everyone in this movie is deadly serious. Even the plot is fairly serious.. so it never feels Scary Movie like levels of cheap.  This is more of a dry humor and WTF is happening kind of humor. It knows it pulp of the highest level but it leans so heavily into this that it actually feels quite distinct. I was expecting American Pie levels of infantile humor but despite being very in  your face but instead  the jokes feel more clever and flowing. There is this sarcastic undertone in the movie that one would have if  you are dealing with this situation so while I almost never give credit to a director.. I really think this movie makes a lot of good choices! … For what it is of course. This is no masterpiece by any means but it is kind of like midnight kebab. You don’t want some fancy kebab after a night of heavy drinking, you don’t care about the flavour profile.. you just want some greasy meat on a bun with rich sauces.. the greasier the better. Mister Walz here choose to make a midnight Kebab rather than a fancy meal.. unlike Rubber who sold midnight kebab but tried to sell it as luxurious dish.

However this post does not promote unsafe sex! I dislike children anyway!

 While obtaining a copy of this movie, I stumbled upon the movie on YouTube where at the time of writing this movie it is still available for watching. It has been there for almost two years now so it is fair game! Well fair enough!.. I still will try to pick up a copy from Germany if the world goes less gaga because I really enjoyed myself with this movie. I must give you a warning though, I speak a fair bit of german, while I did need the subtitles to guide me, I must say I did thoroughly enjoy the  german dialogue. At times it is sharper there is more cleverness to it than the english subtitles show.So some dialogue I might love , could be a tad less entertaining for you if you lack the ability to understand German. It is  mostly a “modifier” though. Bonus points as I had a lot of fun with the subtitles as well. Fun fact H.R. Giger functioned as a creative consultant for this movie. Hansruedi Giger is known for his work in movies like Aliens and Species. So that is a pretty big name! Finally I would like to confess I have not read the comic. So I will not compare how they hold up next to each other and review the movie as it’s own thing.

That news station really needs a better artist!

One “Nutty” Movie

The protagonist of this story is called Luigi Macaroni..which according to IMDB is spelled differently but we never see the name so I will spell it like this so you hear how it sounds correctly in your head! How sweet am I.. thinking about your heads! Luigi is a detective in New York..which already is incredibly funny because he is super Italian in the movie, super german in real life and acting super american. However Luigi is quite special.. he is your run of the mill gruff “noir” style detecive.. but he is heavily into the gay scene. When he meets a young man named Billy at Hotel Quicky, a love hotel in the seedy underbelly of New York he instantly falls in love. However he also has to work a case. In Hotel Quicky 7 guys have had their penisses bitten off by the hookers..but all of them deny it and say it was the condom.
Luigi decides to investigate and to do so he takes Billy to this room .. where stuff went bad. To have a little fun while he investigates. Then he sees a creature looking like a condom. It bites off his left testicle and after that Luigi swears revenge against the creature because no one bites of the Macaroni family jewels and lives.

I woul make that face as well if someone told me that subtitled line!

Not even kidding that is the basic plot of this movie. It goes even stranger by the end so from here on out you have a spoiler warning. The first part is literally the synopsis in my own words but as we go on… we find out that it definitely earns a spot on the list of weird movies. The plot does go over the top ridiculous but manages to stay clear from normal tropes  like “it’s aliens” or it’s a curse. No this movie is surprisingly original in a plot that dare I say it makes some weird form of sense unlikely as it may be.It is a story that deals with themes as Transgender people , Transvestites, Gays and the Adult companion industry. While it has fun with the scenes never does it ridicule them and strangely enough all characters react very realistically to one another. For example Luigi ends up in a weird form of triangle relationship with the young boy Billy and former cop, gone crossdressing entertainer Bob, who now likes to be called Babette. Babette is in love with Luigi and desperately tries anything to get him.  Babette has a cheap shrink who told them that Luigi sounds like a type that is attracted to people like his mother.. so Babette tries to be that, while Luigi can only see her as Bob still, in part because they had a night together and he is gay.. and loathes the idea of having to be with a woman…as his tradional italian family tried to push it on him very much.

And I don’t care much for either! I like girl’s minds and personalities though!

There never is too much of a joke about being gay, instead it is very solidly done. At one point a cop has to go undercover and he is dressed up in a leather gimpy harness and you think this is where the movie oversteps its boundaries but we find out that it is Luigi having his fun because the other cop Sam has been kind of rude and lame to him before! The two even bond over the weird event. This movie was made in 1996 and the comic is even older but the themes are still relevant today.. and I think they are explored in mostly harmless and sometimes even entertaining ways. In fact speaking about foresight they have a presidential candidate with comb over hair a red tie and a much much younger trophy wife whose catchphrase is ! Let’s make this country strong again! A hypocrite who adheres to old very old values while being quite a sleazeball himself. Huh!…

So it’s not just the Simposon that predicted this!

Regardless of it’s sober tone the movie also dares to go way beyond in terms of plot.  This involves killing the first killer condom in a creative way.. by creating a fake dick out of a gas hose, then when they bring the thing to a coroner’s office they discover it is actually a living creature that seems to have been artificially designed.Research is needed by they discover a link between a missing scientist and elements of this research. The man made organic rubber for military purposes but killed the project and decided to focus on genetics as well but soon after no one heard of the man before.  Suddenly more condoms show up around the city, mostly still targeting hookers and gays…but eventually even the presidential candidate. Who then of course is out of the race because no one would want a president without a male reproductive organ to lead the country!

I bet the camera man who filmed this wondered what he was doing with his life!

Standing Tall

The story goes completely wacky at the end, involving even things like the Millenium Bug into the main part of the plot. There is this very christian hospital director lady who believes the world will end on December 31 of 1999 as the lord will come and judge them all. She wants to have cleansed the city off all all the Sodomy that happens in the city before then. No more homosexuality, no more prositution. So when the professor came to the hospital she kidnapped him and made him use both his sciences ot create the ultimate weapon against Sodomy. To keep him under control she creates a drug filled jelly, which he always craves and he can get in in return for compliance. and by using his genetic skills to splice his living rubber, some sort of pupa and a virus the vil killer condoms were invented. Including a Magnum Queen.

I bet who-ever wears this sleeve drives a Peel P50 car (google it)

The final encounter is not a gunfight but it is this gloomy/old timer cop making a speech about tolerance, about accepting people who make different life choices than what is said in the bible.  He tells us that god created these people as well ,  while he understands that god wants them to live a good live, isn’t loving another person and caring for them what makes you a human in the first place. The rest of the speech is interrupted by a film noir narration of Luigi saying he did not know what came over when he was speaking and that he hoped that annoying Angelic light and Angelic hymn in the background would stop soon.Since this hospital has a big mental ward a person dressed like an angel also walks in and nods at him approvingly as he continues the speech, while we only hear complaining.

Not part of the speech ..but a nice time stamp!

The movie ends incredibly cute as well with the detective going on a small vacation and he gets the boy!  Billy called him Cop as nickname (though in  german it’s a bit more a slangy nickname)  and then Luigi ponders if he wants to quit after this weird case.. he tells Billy he would miss Billy nickname him Cop.. Billy tells him he loves the man and he would call him  Cop for as long as he wants. While the two do a little love play.. “you you say it again” .. Cop.. “again please” Okay.. Cop”  … “One more time please” Kiss me…..Cop.. we pan out for the ending. So while the two also have one of the funniest sex scenes I have seen n a moviie there is also room for cute romance.  In the end i was left with a very weird but strangely engaging movie. I don’t think I could imagine a better story about killer condoms.

The Flacid Stuff

Now this isn’t a perfect movie by any means, it is very one note and rarely veers away from the Killer Condom plot. When we see real live stuff it is mostly complaints about the bitten of Nut.. or how a man with no Penis can not possibly win a presidential election campaign. This movie has no chill or cooldown; it’s 1 hour and 45 minutes of scrotum related jokes.  Oddly entertaining ones but still we never see Luigi kick down with a beer, go watch a game with friends. Either we talk about him being gay, we talk about his transgender friend.. his feelings for Billy, somewhere in between lust and love and of course the Killer Condoms.That can come across as stale…yet they also explain this by making it a Macaroni family trait to get so obessed.Don’t expect deep characters and more so a list of which person slept with another.

Well Babette Identifies as a woman now and we always were known for being able to multi-task!

Of course this movie tells about the seedy side of the gay scene and not your regular run of the mill standard couple. This isn’t Mitchell Pritchett and Cameron Tucker from  Modern family. No this is about the guys who sleep around. I know that here at least those guys are still part of the active gay scene. They are just as real and out there as the monogamous romantic ones but it can be a bit confronting how straightforward they are about this. Love comes into play but Luigi is still “that type”. The stereotype people look down on the most. Given his looks and age though.. it seems very plausible that he would fall in that “seedier” side of things.I should not even count it as seedy as to each their own and if that makes them happy good on them.Still these are not the type of guys you want in the front and center of your picture, these are the guys you kinda try to hide in the back. That might make the protagonist a tad unlikeable.

He is a bit of a sarcastic prick! I kinda love that about him though!

Sometimes the humor goes a bit too far. Luigi for example has a 32 centimeter dick!  The idiotic size is used as a plot device for a few things.. like the existence of the condom queen monster, it is the reason Billy falls so very hard for the man and it is probably the reason why the first Condom could only bite off one nut! So once more it isn’t pointless and I doubt this is a writer self insert..but it does feel a bit cheap. His personality screams out that he is a top and that is very much established throughout the movie so again it oddly “fits’ ‘ as both Babette and Billy have clear bottom persona’s and tendencies..but still it feels like too much.. though I doubt Billy would say that.

Would you kindly subscribe to Pinkie’s Blog?!


Then there is the issue of the condom noises. They make almost gremlin-like noises, with shrill laughs and then yelling “wee” when they are launched.  It  feels really weird in comparison how stoic the rest of the movie is. It is very funny to see no one believe the guy that a condom bit of his testicle even though he saw it and was of sound mind.. and the way he just yells “F you guys t wasn’t Billy who bit it of it was a condom creature”  I love that deadpan humor…but then we get condoms that ride rubber duckies while  humming a cheerful song on their way to their next meal..it clashes so heavy with the dryness of the  rest. I would have preferred if the condoms just growled or had some weird insect like sounds like the thing they were based on. Condooms going Woo, Woo.. Teeheehee is kind of adorable in a strange way, in fact at times they kinda sound like Jawa’s I just think that might be a tad too much. Even for a movie about killer Condoms.

They do swim in blood at their home though so they also have some edge!

You don’t need Protection

I expected to hate the rotten guts out of this movie but for what it is I think we pretty much got the best of what we would have gotten. It’s message is still relevant and it is kind of funny to see a 90’s take on that.. even for that alone it is worth a view. The humor is often cheap but there is a cleverness in both the choice of words and it’s delivery that honestly reminds me a bit of the way dialogue flowed in the anime Keijo!!! Admittedly this is way better in german than in english but even with subtitles it oftenly works. Just .. Germans have a fair bit of extra words that can be combined into a pun. While it really never ever gets scary.. and I don’t think we get more than one fatality this is a funny and unique monster movie to watch. It gets about a 58%  on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5,3 on IMDB but honestly if you can shut off your brain and just enjoy the weirdness this easily provides you a 6.5 out of 10 entertainment.. midnight kebab!

When the Hooker heard “Blow your Nose” she put a condom out of it from habit (not how it happens in the movie.. this is my joke)

Watch this with some drinks and with some friends and don’t take its impact on a community too serious!  This is a 90’s B movie trough and trough but one that is oddly consistent in the world that it builds. You can see it’s comic roots pretty well because the dialogue is very VERY to the point and that in this movie has it’s charm for me. I did not get scared but..as an grey-sexual , homo-romantic female I have little to do with condoms as it is! Oh right I am single as well.. so yeah pretty good movie for me that kept me entertained… I never had to Troyawn during my sitting but it never got Durexciting either. 

I did not expect the movie as much as I did! While it is easy to point out it’s flaws and cast shade at it for the themes and it’s infantile subject matter.. I don’t feel that is justified! This movie is called Killer Condom… we already know it would be THAT which I could arguable hate about the movie! For what it is I think it does a great job! I dont think anyone could do better. And lucky for you this movie is on YouTube! And since I pay for my blog… I can share this with the world now!

Thanks for reading and if you liked this blog please consider supporting my Ko-Fi. My current movie is gaining some extra cash for my move and get some money to give me an actually blogging workspace! That way I can keep reviewing strange movies for you in the future! Of course I will also do that if you just leave a nice comment!

It’s Alive! Alive! Creating Pokémon 1: Halloween Edition

Greetings mortals, welcome back to Paradise! Halloween is all about monsters, creatures and things that go bump in the night! Pokémon are created by Creatures Inc! Yet tonight..or whenever you are reading this..just make it night because that is more haloweeny, we are gonna create life ourselves. Like our friend Average Joe made Pokémom out of Symbiotes or Godzilla creatures so shall I make monsters out of the classic monsters. However We will go one step further and twist their designs into actual Pokémon.

The Rules

So a scientist like me Professor Pinkenstein should make it clear that we are playing with some rules today! My dear people! Not only will I just look at a iconic monster, give them a typing, some moves and an ability! We will all also reshape them into something pokémon like. After all most of the iconic creatures are humanoid in nature and while it can fit pokémon.. I was never one to take the easy way. We will discuss the creature’s biology and pokédex-like information and come up with a new name for it. Of course I can not really draw so these will be college creatures. If you are an artist and want to draw them for real.. I am up on featuring these images in a follow up post…but I don’t think I know anyone who actually draws?! Now let’s create some life.. or in many cases unlife. 

Frankenstein’s Monster

Let us begin with the iconic Mary Shelly Creature..Frankenstein.. To determine what pokémon it has to be we first have to deduce it’s typing. In many cases we are dealing with undead so ghost types can apply basicly to everything.. but we will try to keep it diverse. However since it’s very much interwoven in Frankenstein’s monsters lore it is brought back from the dead.. I think we will keep that typing. The other element should be obvious as of course we go for the Electric type. Most monsters on this list probably would more or less function like a legendary. Narratively it would make sense that Frankenstein’s Pokemonster would follow the same brief. The Pokémon Professor of the Horror Region Professor Manchineel  (Yes that is a tree and it’s super scary) was once the champion of this region . He defended the world against the evil team but in the battle against their leader lost all his pokémon and the evil theme began to rule the region. Trying to bring back his old team his efforts were in vain.. he did not have enough power… but maybe… he could bring one of them back?!

For this design we will create a chimera of dead Pokémon. But how do we decide what Pokémon to pick?! Well we do that with an Easter Egg. Originally in Red and Blue there was a hidden “boss” fight against Oak. Presumably after the Pokémon League based on their levels. This fight was triggerable through glitching but wasn’t activatable anymore in game.  To homage that we are going to build the chimera out of Professor Oak’s team.  That is, Tauros, Exeggutor, Arcanine, Gyarados and the starter that wasn’t picked. Now since the correct answer to pick as your Gen I starter is Bulbarsaur that means the Rival would pick Charmander so Bulbasaur would be the one left behind. Trained up to a Blastoise he will become part of our Chimera. Yes I know more people love Charizard.. and thus Bulbasaur would be the one left behind…..but this is my list…also the head of Blastoise is much easier to cut out  and work with then Venusaur’s or Charizards so there! Tauros would form the main body with Arcanine legs and some Gyarados fins. The extra exeggutor heads  are added as extra heads this time..except.. this time we will use the main head..because that was the professors friend!

With Tauros as a main body we can basically say that it made the rest type neutral and being revived from the death we get the electric ghost monster we know as Frankenstein..but a pokémon version.Alternatively we could look at canonically dead Pokémon..but that’s a bit of a hassle. Using Tauros as it’s main body and a Blastoise head the creature also has the physical bulk you expect of a Frankstein’s monster. The body type makes it more suitable for physical attacks, which also seems to be in line with the classics. So for moves I think it should know Volt Tackle a strong electric physical move. Shadow Punch, Rock Smash and Recover are it’s other moves with Shadow Punch dealing Stab Damage, Rock Smash .. being a symbol for it’s smashing power and hopefully like with a few old moves we can get a base power increase for it somewhere as it would help as a great weakness coverage. As an ability Volt Absorb makes the most sense as it negates the power of electricity. The ability Simple will function as a second and possible hidden ability. State Wise I think the most comparable Pokémon would have to be Golurk, with offence and defence flipped. Chimerstein seems like a nice name for this Pokémon.

Dracula

So making a Pokémon about Dracula should not be too hard? Should it?! Well he is very humanoid so we are going to have to deviate from his design quite a bit here. Let’s start with his typing. He is undead rather than dead, so I think Dark is a fair base typing for him. However.. there is one problem. Dark ..while it does have moves like Bite… doesn’t have any leeching abilities.  In the Alola Region they finally made the move Leech Life Good with a great base power. I think that is Dracula’s de facto move! To use it efficiently however we have to make him a bug type! Dark-Bug seems like an odd typing for Dracula, but in the confines for Pokéon it really works. We will place it in the humanoid body shape and give it some lore to fit Dracula. “A Rich Boy and his Zubat once went on an adventure on a river when they saw strange leech like creature toppled their boat..no one ever saw them again” Leeches haven’t been much of a thing in Pokémon. So for this story.. a leech attached himself to a Rich Boy..while his Zubat tried to pull it off..eventually an evolution much like how Slowpoke evolves into Slowbro ..by having a Shelder bites its tail happens.. only this time a human was involved.

Designwise this puts us a bit in a pickle! Do we make it look very human? No.. people don’t really like that. Do we give it too many clothes.. no, it will have a cloak that will look like it’s made out of spider web.. or some kind of pupa covering some silken cloth or something fancy. .It’s face will be hooded but underneath will be a leechy face.. similar to Digmon’s Nightmare Leech.  Then it will have a crobat like wings but larger. It’s shape is humanoid but only in shape. It will definately be one of the creepier Pokémon you encounter. The mix and match of body shapes will allow for a wide moveset befitting Dracula. Pokédex entries could state that the pokémon is afraid of wooden poles as the last thing the boy part remembers was his raft breaking. Or rumors that you can defeat this Pokémon with a single Solar Beam.
It is so ugly that it can not face it’s own reflection, crying over the handsome face it once had. And so we have designed a Dracula inspired Pokémon.

The Pokémon Ability it should have is Dry Skin. This is a rather complex ability but it gives our Dracula a weakness to fire and actually gives him damage under the direct sun. He absorbs water..which is kind of unfortunate..but Holy water seems more like a Fairy Type thing anyway… and Dracula would be weak to that. The ability of course represents his weakness to the sun.. but it also works well with the moisture rich leech part! So hey I am happy with that.  As moves Bite and Leech Life are a given and I feel Mist or Haze would make a good supportive move.. well not GOOD but flavourful. The last move should be something in the lines of Hypnosis, Charm, Attract or anything of the sorts. Of course he would be able to learn some other things such as Transform, Phantom/Shadow Force and all the Drain moves. Stat Wise I feel it should be something like Mega-Lucario. Good names would be Draculeech, Leechferatu or Tepeech.

The Wolfman

So for this one I have something special planned, the wolfman is a hard one to give a typing too. It seems very much a normal type.  There is no real element to connect it too. We could give it the dark type again but what if you want to run an all monsters team?! Plus Normal Dark isn’t really a good typing at all. So instead for a secondary typing we look at an important element for a werewolf.. the moon. The moon is very much connected to the Fairy Type on numerous occasions.  Many of the Moon stone evolutions are Fairy Types.  The move moonlight and Moon Blast are both fairy type attacks and Clefairy is said to live on the moon. Which again IS a Fairy type. Plus this would make our Pokémon to be weak to steel type attacks.. mimicking it’s weakness to silver! It would also be efficient against fighting types.. and as you all know punching a werewolf is a very bad idea so that makes sense. Most werewolf movies are about the transformation process about being cursed to be a werewolf and for this I think I have a perfect answer.

We came up with a new regional form. Horrorian Ditto, The Ditto from the Horror region.  Being a silverish slime with wolf-eyes, a tuft of fur  and a wolf-fang would form the basis for this pokémon. Normally Ditto has the ability transform, which lets it transform into the pokemon it is facing straight away. However Horrorian Ditto will do the exact opposite. If it hits the opponent with a physical attack.. it’s specially designed ability will trigger. Fur-Curse.. which will transform any pokemon it hits into Horrorian Ditto. This resembles the involuntary transformation aspect about lycanthrophy very well. Regional Ditto would be a great way to take your opponents ace away and force them to have a flexible strategy that doesn’t rely on a single pokemon! With Eviolite you can make sure your variation is much sturdier.. but YES Eviolite! Because we need to add more wolves! When exposed to a moonstone this Ditto will evolve. Taking the shape of an almost liquid werewolf still transforming with some parts being thinner and slimier. He seems to be in constant pain..this new form shares its ability still but now is much more powerful.. but as a trade off you can give your opponent something THAT powerful too.

This new werewolf form of Ditto shall be known as Idemoon. This is a portmanteau of Idem and Moon… Ditto got its name sake from the latin expression Idem dito. A phrase mostly used having the same mindset or wishing them the same you just wished upon them. It also has a bit of a sound like it’sa demon. Idemoon would be a bit like better Slaking. Statwise  it isn’t AS amazing but it can attack every turn, it just changes it’s opponent in itself with a contact move meaning you can never hit it super effectively.  This pokemon however will shine in double battles. You basically force your opponent into a typing you can always bring a counter to. Moves this Pokémon should learn are. Slash, Bite, Play Rough and Moonlight. It has a high stat total but a fairly low defence to make sure it can take itself out without making games needlessly stally. Slash and Play Rough are Normal and Fairy Type moves that get buffed by having the same attack type bonus and Bite… well it’s a wolfman after all.

Dr Jekyll and  Mister Hyde

For now I want to conclude this with one final pokémon the form of the classic by taking a spin on a pokémon that already does this kind of thing. Morepeko is a hamster that can be cute  when it’s full or evil when it’s hangry! It has a move that works very well but I want to do it better. So this monster really works well with that. Better Morepeko doesn’t need to be a Pikaclone so we can get rid of the pretty useless electric type. For the Mister Hyde side of things we can use the Dark Type.. in Japanese the thing is literally called evil type and it would work very well for Mister Hyde. The second typing could be the Fairy Type as more or less it’s natural opposite. However since Dr Jekyll is a scholar and a man of science and of the mind I think the psychic type makes more sense. This will later also come into play with the moves and such. Alternatively Fighting type could work for Hyde as he often is depicted as brawn..but this is not always the case. For the design I am thinking of it being a top hat. and a tophat just. With lore on how it was worn by a man who always doubted himself.. he wanted to help people but he also hated everyone.. one day the hat went mad and attacked its owner then immediately it tried to heal it again.

Why a Top hat? Well  I think it is a nice symbol for the tale and I love object pokémon. It also keeps the humanity aspect of the character but puts it in a monster much more in the vein of pokémon.Plus we can make a wink to the fact that it might be a had of the Mad hatter, and then we can cross this sort of blog over in Fairy Tales some day.  The Jekyll side of the hat would be colourful but simple, clean and gentlemanly.  It features a monocle and perhaps a cross to symbolise it belongs to a doctor so maybe we can add a moustache as well. In Hyde mode the hat would look torn, more chaotic darker.. but also more details… loose stitching, a bearded look and some tokens it can take from it’s victims. One of those things that looks like it will bite your head off. I think Morepeko design wise makes some very smart choices but it could have done more.

And here is how!  Aura Wheel might be cute as a move but I suggest an adapted ability which works as follows.  This pokémon gets the moves. Heal Pulse a Psychic Support move to heal adjacent team members, Dark Pulse an Offensive Dark Special move.. because.. it’s a Hat .. it can’t physically attack. Amnesia , to boost it’s defences and explain the weird memory lapses the character experiences and Milk Drink..I know that last one seems a bit weird but it is the closest move there is to pokemon chugging a potion..since potions in pokemon work as sprays! It provides healing and you will want that on this pokémon because it has an ability similar to Hunger Switch.. just more useful. We will probably call it Potion Chug as well or Face Swap.It comes with an extra. If you use Heal Pulse while in Jekyll form you get a random stat increased.. kind of like Acupressure the move. The same happens if Mister Hyde uses a dark pulse.  Of course this pokémon can forget Milk Drink and Amnesia for moves like Psychic and Bounce..so your Opponent is always guessing when will you buff and when will you go against the grain.Kind of like this duo! Their name shall be……

I don’t know actually! So how about I leave that up to you?! How should we name this pokémon?! Let me know in the comments and the best one gets a shoutout and becomes the official name for this thing! For now the monster making is done and I will crawl back to stir in my cauldron! I could use a new broom to fly on by the way! So if you happen to have broom money laying about consider supporting my Ko-Fi and ensure you won’t be stitched into my next monster! I am probably joking anyway.. but who knows!

Friendship is Magic! Pinkie’s Saturday Anime Adventure 21 (Lite Edition)

Hello lovely Mortals! This sunday we will briefly take a dive back into regular content! Although I say normal! I am doing a lite version of my Anime Adventure as I had so much stuff to do I could not finish the entire block! I am very busy packing , making phone calls and setting everything up for my move! A wall of boxes is in front of my writing spot right now as more and more cabinets slowly become empty storage. My neighbour seems to be moving away as well!  Regardless Saturday Anime Adventure for the time being will just be an episode of the shows airing on CrunchyRoll. At least until I have more time again on my weekends.  In november I will see if I will split Saturday Anime Adventure into additional weekly content (thus  more content per day with one short anime post and a longer post on other subjects). Would you rather see seperate reviews or continue to see them grouped let me know in the comments! Now onto the episodes!

Digimon Episode 9: The Ultimate Digimon Attacks

I still can not believe how good this show is and how much I like it. The show takes a very different approach to the old show but I feel this show could never be so good without the other show. It’s almost as if I am watching an “ultimate” remake of this story.

Plot

The episode begins with Ogremon getting a hologram mission from Devimon! The latter is not amused with Ogremon’s failed attempts to kill the Chosen Ones. Ogremon reacts coldly but once the cal is over he yells in anger over his broken horn swearing revenge. We then move back to the fortress our heroes have invaded in the last episode. Taichi is reading the digiscript and says that the holy digimon are in the hands of darkness. Which leads them to believe they are on the right continent now because these fortresses of evil were meant to kept them out from freeing the holy digimon. Kairi and Takeru are clearly not in the digital world so it seems like this time Angemon and Angewoman might have to be rescued before we even see them.  Ogremon attacks right after the kids finish reading the script and challenges Taichi and Agumon to an honorable match. They agree but as soon as they bein Devimon’s troops attack. Which overwhelms the other chosen ones. Koshiro and Kabuterimon save everyone with the last of Kabuterimon’s energy; he has finally caught up to the group and is welcomed for their rescue. However the evil Digimon won’t stop and that is when they are saved by Ogremon.

Ogremon just wants an honourable fight with the one digimon he fought that managed to claim his horn. An honourable vengeance.. he wants to have fun with their fight!  This chases Devimon’s troops off and the match between him and Greymon continues. Both seem to have great fun and in the end Greymon comes out victorious even going as far as breaking off another horn.  But then a missile impacts and damages Ogremon greatly. An ultimate level digimon steps out of the water. Note that this is an Ultimate in the dubbing sense.. in the original Japanese name it would be called a Perfect. While the name Ultimate in Japan is used for what we call a Mega form! Greymon is a Champion in english and an Adult in Japanese, MetalGreymon is an Ultimate to the rest of the world but a perfect to Japanese while Wargreymon is an Ultimate in Japanese.. but a Mega in English! Confusing right?!  While in english Digimon  digivolve and in Japanese just evolve the subtitle of this series coins the term Evolve.. thus following the japanese rules, when it comes to forms the translation seems to follow the dub rules.  Since I can not verify if they are renamed/reclassified in japanese as a rule I will use whatever my subtitle/translations says. This monster overwhelms the group quite easily and Ogremon uses his signature move to show them the way.. before jumping into the ultimate MetalTyranomon’s attack and detonating it point blank.

Strengths

I love how this show is paced, we know of the existence of Ultimates already so the show makes no real secret of it. It respects that a lot of it’s lore is already established but also doesn’t shy away from addressing it still.  Just without the fluff this time.  I do wonder how this will work with Devimon as it seems we might get Metalgreymon  in the next episode.  Devimon being just a champion, also seems to have control over some ultimate ones so could it be he will evolve into NeoDevimon or heck even evolve into Myotismon? Both are possibilities here and it could tie stories together so well! It has so much potential but is also risking overstepping and fumbling. For now I am super excited. Koshiro joining just before their potential biggest battle is great  and it makes sense as a meet up spot.  It’s nice to see him finally join the gang and get a safe that tops that of Yamato’s. Once again everyone plays their role. 

There is also a good dose of humor in this episode. Joe introducing himself to Koshiro as the leader, Mimi trying to be in the foreground when meeting Koshiro, it feels so much more as if everyone constantly is in character now. Joe feels he is responsible for the group, Mimi much more keeps up with her princess thing and overall the level of consistency is great. This also shows in the battle scene. The group gets pinned down by an aerial bombardment.  However they are in a fortress so they would have cover. However moments earlier Ogremon just trashes the tower they are standing in to make a statement and get their attention.  Thus taking their cover away and creating the next problem. This is much more pleasant than say.. the same digimon also shooting away the roof.. as it would have given a very obvious window! No party was prepared and it resulted in trouble. Yamato and Gabumon managed to get away because they are much more battle-honed and have more of a focus on speed. Reasons are shown why he is slightly ahead of the pack!

The visuals were also very strong! The show does a great job showing the height difference between your average Ultimate and the Digimon as they currently are, making them immediately feel overwhelmed. It is also shown that even at the maximum of his strength Greymon can’t even make a dent against this monster. It is not said or spoken like in most anime.. it is simply shown!  My favourite moment was the fight between Ogremon and Greymon. It uses aura’s , expressions in eyes, wind and other effects to tell a story!  The fact that they don’t use special attack after special attack really shows they are having fun in this contest of strength and it feels like Courage is pitted against the sin of Pride here which leads into an interesting matchup and a great episode!

Weaknesses

Not a lot of noteworthy weaknesses for this episode from me. I slightly dislike how invisible Sora was this time but had Biyoman digivolve here I am sure it should have died so I can see why they did it.. I just feel so far they have put Sora a bit up there with Yamato and Taichi and her being absent from a chance to fight felt a bit of a miss to me. But timing and all. I am also worried about their ultimate villain being a champion level facing off against potential Ultimates plus Omnimon already being a thing. My negatives are nothing directly one this episode but more worries for the future. I would love to see a slower paced episode without a battle in here somewhere soon though.

Overall

Very strong episode! It doesn’t reach the perfect score for me as it is YET another action episode but it at least was one heck of an episode! Despite it’s focus on action the show does introduce some wit and lore each episode  and I haven’t seem to much stereotypical events yet and those that do feel well earned or are explained good enough.   The fact that Devimon seems to have possession over Angemon and Angewoman could lead into an amazing story given how Devimon was beaten with the help of Angemon in the first place and this time that outcome MIGHT not be available. Ogremon turning good early also seems to introduce the group with loss fairly early one as I doubt he can recover from this attack! Raising the tension. Death usually comes fairly late in a series of Digimon making the first half feel a bit “magical girlish”  but here we are constantly learning new things and progressing. The fight between Agumon and Ogremon has Dragonball Z like qualities and I mean that in the good way. It has that Cinematic feel to it. While we can fault Dragon Ball Z for it’s writing the action shots oftenly were quite good so saying this took a page from their book is a very big compliment. This show continues to show it’s charm  trough every episode!

Samurai Flamenco Episode 16: Wandering Hero

I love Moe so much! She is such a great character and she really is to good for this world! I love her!  I might have found another potential Waifu candidate as this episode might have left me smitten.

Plot

Masayoshi is the wandering Hero from the title accused of terrorismn and with a nation wide search going out for him he is scared to turn to Goto. He does not want to endanger his friends now that everything he fought for seems to be worth nothing. Meanwhile the Flamenco girls reunite and we see Mari snap against her two friends telling them she is sickened by Moe’s face for embarrassing her. Moe because she would give her life without a second thought in her mind to save the woman she loves  made Mari look bad because she could not do the same.  She realises Moe was the true hero and not her and it sickens her to the core that she is that bad person.It sickens her she can not be a hero! So she tells Moe to never show her face to her again or take it off if she ever wants Mari to look at her again. Mari runs off to the base of King Torture to reflect on things .Having a mental breakdown where she vommits on the floor crying disgusted by herself .. much more than by Moe. When her two friends sneak up we see Moe wear a paper bag over her head.

Moe knew exactly where Mari would be as she loves her so much and knows her better than Mari knows herself. She .. in the paperbag and all tells Mari that she did not make a heroic choice but a selfish choice just like Mari did.. because she loves Mari so much that there was no way she would want to go on living without her. Bless that girl… Mari reconciles with her and the two begin to violently make out while Mari is covered in vomit and Moe is all teared up. Mizuki is asked to join in the group hug.. and potentially into the kissing as well, I am not sure.  Meanwhile the flamengers are interrogated and we hear how they are doing trough the mouth of Jouji’s wife. She doesn’t acknowledge Sakura as a Flamenger though and doesn’t offer her any support in these tough times. She tells her husband she might have to bake him cake if she has to. We cut away and next we see Masayoshi finding a newspaper saying that Jouji is to be executed for his crimes against Japan. Soon after the desperate former hero passes out from starvation.

He wakes up in a homeless man’s tent and finds out that this in fact is one of the guys that he rescued as Samurai Flamenco when he just got started. It  seems that the man is in the know that he indeed picked up Japan’s most wanted terrorrist who is his hero but not a lot is revealed. The man tells him a story on how is was framed by a buisness associate and friend and then lost all his money.. when his eyesight got bad he could not get his money back and his family left him and he had no one left to turn to. He was unhappy but trough Samurai Flamenco’s selfless risk he began to help others around him, who began to help him in return and now he lived much happier. Reinvigorated by these words Masayoshi gets asked if he has people who support him and he answers yes! He flees the tent when police show up aided by the old beggar man, and goes to Goto’s house who welcomes with open arms.

Strengths

I cried happily in this episode! I was so happy to see Mari and Moe make up.. but I also cried when I saw Moe suffer so much! She is such a amazing person! She is a true little angel! A very gay little angle!  The scene with her with the paper bag over my head was my favourite thing this episode. It felt so unreal to see such a cute voice come from a paper bag and it is great to see Moe despite how much she has been through to choose for Mari still. She chooses her words to comfort Mari but also to defend herself. She reveals that you don’t have to be a hero to do the right thing but also that even in doing the right thing you can still choose for yourself. Moe isn’t a hero who does things to be a hero, she is a hero because others matter to her more than herself and no matter what happens she will always be there for them. Mari before her breakdown was equally a hero but on other terms. Even if she had been trough a lot she always found the strength to get back up on stage or in the Flamenco girl costume and that is something Moe would never be able to do. A hero can exist in many ways!

Masayoshi’s talk with the homeless man who was just a background detail in an older episode was also great. We had this amazing shift in scope when he became an actual Sentai and he had to save the country and to an extent t he world even, but now that he has been tricked It all seems to have been taken away. However this episode shows us how Masayoshi already changed the world as a hero on the smaller scale. It doesn’t matter what you are called or what title you have. It is your actions that  define who you are. If one calls you a villain doesn’t mean you are that to everyone.  A person is bigger than just a title the state slaps onto him. That is what I got out of this at least and it is a powerful message that is much more in spirit with how this show started out than the mediocre Flamenger arc. This is what I want this show to be! It is not a story about people constantly bettering themselves it is people fighting for what they believe in and finding a worth in that belief even if it isn’t widely embraced. Very strong episode!

Weaknesses

I would lie if I said I had none because there was one plotpoint that annoyed me to no end. It was the fact that Jojii’s wife did not acknowledge Sakura as a Flamenger. Yes I get she tries to sleep with your husband but it was shown he never did anything with that..at least to my knowledge. Sure she tries to do something unsavory and harmful to the person who is trying to help.. but these people are scared and might be executed, she still fought for the safety of Japan which I feel is bigger than her trying to snipe your romance. Given  how she is referred to as Lady Axe I feel she should have at least that bit of hero spirit to show Sakura who the bigger person is. Perhaps I am strict here because Sakura is the Pink Ranger but I do feel it is a very poor choice on Lady Axe’s end to make Sakura suffer, given that she already had to live with the fact that her family cast her out for being an adulterer..let alone now that she is a terrorist. In an episode that is all about friendship and reunions this sticks out to me like a sore thumb. Understandable sure.. but bad in this episode.

Overall

Another perfect score for Samurai Flamenco! It is great  to see it return to what made this show so amazing to me in the first place. The fact that the president’s plans are very vague and Lady Axe was super selfish do not ruin the episode for me. Perfection does not exist and if an episode has to be flawed I rather have it slip up with Lady Axe than with Moe and Mari or Masayoshi. This episode me me cry with joy and I feel truly touched.. if that happens I was so invested that minor offences do not matter. Mari’s moment of glory will be in my head for a while! It was really beautiful! Memorable and engaging?! Highest score!

That Time I reincarnated as a Slime Episode 15: The Jura Forest Alliance

Slime has an odd way of satisfying me, in the same way I like building villages in Sim City or maybe more an RTS like scenario like Warcraft 3, growth is an amazing thing to experience in Slime, even though we know how powerful Rimuru is we see the progression of his little town.  I want to see more of that!

Plot

This episode is told in a more narrative shape with Rimuru telling the viewer what happened after the fight with the Orc Disaster. We see him welcome the Orcs in his ranks as well after a meeting with both the Lizardman and the Ogre’s.. of course  Treyni is also there. Since Rimuru took the since of the orcs upon himself everyone agrees that they can stay as long as they make themselves useful to Rimuru. This leads to the great Jura Alliance being formed.  Rimuru names the son of Geld, Geld in honour of his father and that piglike creature then becomes the Orc King instead of the Orc Lord. He also names all the other 15.000 Orcs and goes into sleep mode again. When he wakes up he continues to tell us what new features his now small city has. They have a sewage system, they are making roads , they are establishing trade with other nations and there even is some sort of “government” in place with the Ogre’s having titles. The only thing the village seems to be missing is a name…and roads.. cause they are still just starting to make it.

Then Souei shows up and tells a 100 pegasus knights are almost in the city. They are led by the Hero King of the Dwarven nation Gazel Dwargo.  He wants to find out Rimuru’s motive and while Rimuru offers collaboration from the start the king wants nothing off it. The only way Rimuru can prove his heart is by honourable combat. If Rimuru defends against Gazel’s chain of attack he wins!  The man turns out to be a student of the old man Ogre, who also thought Rimuru so being familiar with this technique Rimuru stops the attack. This convinces King Dwargo that Rimuru is not evil and he offers Rimuru a treaty not only acknowledging his little town but even acknowledging the Jura forest as his domain/country. This forces Rimuru to name his country and decides to call it the Jura Tempest Federation. Benimaru then tells him this town and the nations capital should be called Rimuru..

Strengths

I can be a lot more  brief about this episode as it was a nice and simple episode. It was an exposition episode done well. Not a lot happens yet a lot happens.  We just fast forward to the slow progression stuff and now actually see RImuru’s village becoming more. I still really like the concept of having a nation of monsters and that idea is expanded upon here.  I am also happy to see that Gabiru got exiled for trying to usurp the throne. His father gifts him the magic trident thing though to keep him safe on his journey!  A touching end.. that still gives at least some punishment to the horrible ..but deep down not so terrible Lizardman.  I like how this series feels a bit like the map part of a total war game or the city management aspect of one of those mobile games with alliances and sending armies and such. Just with some spectacular action from OP characters to make it less stale.

I also like how surprisingly the humanoids doesn’t seem to be Rimuru’s enemies. Instead the focus lies on this mysterious demon lord whose eyebrows do not math his hair. The one who wields the crystal ball.  It seems he is being set up as the season finale boss but what do I know! It is nice to see this approach as it does avoid a bit of cliché Warcraft like thinking. I like how Treyni functioned as a judge and it reminded me of an almost pokémon like match when Rimuru fought Dwargo , it gives the combat a more playful element and some good spirit.  A very nice exposition episode and I was proud to see the village grow almost in a manner as if I had build it myself. So I guess Rimuru is “my boy”!

Weaknesses

I had a few gripes with this episode, for example every Ogre’s function is explained except for Shuna’s function she is called a Princess .. most likely because the title was preexisting but what are her tasks?!   Treyni’s role in this alliance is also unclear. Her goal is to protect the forest and Rimuru can do that but the fact that they have to build homes for 15.000 would harm the woods because a city is built in them would it not?!  Also 15.000 orcs that means there are so many orcs that they would take up the major demographic in the city but that is never shown.  There are quite a few elements that seem rather sloppily tagged in in this timeskip.

What is this demon lords goal?! Why do we care about him?! Why does that clown figure that worked with Gelmud teleport out of a conversation while he still has a full glass of wine on the table.  It isn’t exactly bad but a lot of details are glossed over in this episode.  If you want to emphasise a conversation is at an end let him drink his final sip of wine instead of depicting him next to a full glass. If you tell what everyone does don’t skip on one!  Wasn’t the crafting Ogre a leather and hide expert? Why is his rank Sword Smith. or something like that.  Again there are no major flaws, just a series of pinpricks that all seem to address the same little annoying little spot.  It makes sense that these things happen given how this show is paced over days or weeks of development even though there is clearly a bigger story being told that the small story doesn’t matter as much.. but it does stand out.

Overall

I enjoyed myself a lot with this episode but I am not sure I could actually call it a good episode. There are things …. off about it. Not only the inconsistencies but a few plot beats being awfully convenient as well.  Yet while these flaws are clear to me, this really had a good quality! I felt pride.. an emotion that is almost strange to me, that this village has come this far. I liked the idea of roads so much that I was almost disappointed that I did not see it this episode.  For some strange reason the faith of the town of RImuru is something I really care for.

As if it is my own little Minecraft project.  Just more entertaining, better looking.. and without Smash Bros representation. It is a nice change of pace to see a hero shift from protecting a town to establishing one. There is something powerful about forming new friendships and opening your heart to new people and growing because of it that just makes my kokoro swell with satisfaction and pride! That is the way Rimuru! You are the hero we all need!  I never thought Village builder the anime would be for me.. but apparently it very much is!

Berry good is the score based on entertainment value, it would score a Fineapple from a more objective stance.

Unfortunately that was all the time I had for anime this week and probably the next coming weeks. Tuesday will most likely be a skipped post day as my family will come on over to help me pack, clean and move things to the trash all day and with tabletop role-play evening on Monday planned I do not think I have the time to schedule that post ahead. I have a cute little Halloween story readyish but I still need to do image work so you will most likely see my Halloween story in the week of the 19th. For the coming week I will create new Pokémon life, review a movie about a killer condom and I play yet another scary game! Like I said earlier I am considering splitting the Saturday Anime Adventure into smaller individual reviews for extra ..more bitesized content! Let me know how you feel about that in the comments! if they work again! Have a great next week!

Frn ah or’azath ng n’ghft : Call of Cthulhu Review

Hello again my sweet mortals , the weekend has come yet again and for Halloween I have been playing more spooky games!  The one I played seemed straight up my alley. I love horror  games, I love Cosmic horror, I love Tabletop RPG’s and one of my favourite games is Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. So when I found a game that takes elements from all of these I was pretty sure I would have one heck of a game on my hands! That potential diamond was a little game called Call of Cthulhu.

My Investigation!

Call of Cthulhu is based on the short story of the same title but much more based on the 1981 tabletop adventure…also by the same name. It is developed by Cynanide studio which is a great studio name for a game like this but a bit edgy considering that the studio normally develops cycling manager games. I mean A LOT of cycling manager games. They also made the Stealth Game “series” Styx, but all in all it seems fairly unlikely that people really know who these guys are. Gameplay wise obviously this game has very little to do with the studio’s forté of management and  cycling games.Being launched only in 2018 this is also one of their most recent games. Since I don’t like managing cycling games I will not be able to compare the game to their other works or tell if they are a really swell or bad studio so I will have to review the game strictly on it’s own merits.

The game got mediocre reviews averaging about a 6.8 on Metacritic at the moment on writing However unlike most games where everyone is in the same ballpark reviews spread fairly widely.  From 4’s out of 10’s way up until 86% scores. So straight away we know we have to deal with a polarising game. After playing through this game myself I lean way more towards the positive crowd but I do see the points the 4 out of 10 guys made as well and they are extremely valid. I just did not care about those points all that much during my experience. The game is deemed a first person “stealth” game but I do think that is not a correct description. I would sell it as a skill based point and click adventure with stealth and action sequences. When I say skill based I mean  that in a roleplaying sense, that the build of character you decide to have decides your story. It features multiple endings and branching dialogue trees. These trees adapt based on your findings and  skills as well so there are many ways you can experience this story!

Before I start my review of the game I want to make a few things clear, a mindset of which I dived into this.  I think your mindset is extremely important to see if you enjoy this game or not! That is also why it got such polarising reviews. Call of Cthulhu is based on a roleplaying game!  That means the same “boundaries” and mindset went into creating this game.  Yes you have the options for different dialogue and it will impact your journey heavily! HOWEVER the DM has their base story set, it will always gravitate towards that so while your choices have an effect they do not always have “consequence”  in the bigger picture. This isn’t a game that holds your hand and tells a “Sarah did not like that” you make a choice and you will just have to IMAGINE how Sarah feels. The endings show what happens to the main character but not anything else. You IMAGINE their story based on your interactions.

Call of Cthulhu campaigns almost never have a good ending. In fact this is so much so true that later incarnations of the roleplaying game established a rule to label a game Purist.. knowing it will not have a happy end or a Pulp game.. a game that is designed to make the players win. Obviously I would not be warning you for this if the game had chosen the “Pulp” route. No!  Like almost everything in the mythos.. whatever you do, no matter how good you are.. it will feel like you lose in the end. Lovecraft also rarely wrote stories that ended well with only the Dunwich Horror coming to mind. However most who are familiar with CoC know.. winning if even possible..doesn’t come cheap. If you do not mind a “first person visual novel with more active gameplay”  this game can be a true experience.. but if you just want to bonk the lord of darkness on the head, get the girl and the money and be crowned king of the world… yeah .. that will not happen.. by design that goes way further back than the creation of this game.

A Detective in  Darkwater

Surprise surprise, this game revolves around  Eldritch beings and is set in 1924 where you take on the role of washed up private eye, Edward Pierce, detective for hire! He desperately needs a job to keep his license when an old man visits him. He says his daughter, the famous painter Sarah Hawkins, has died in a house fire on the little island of Darkwater , just off the shore of Boston. She always had visions ..but recently they have been getting more disturbed painting mysterious men! So Pierce is hired to look into her death. Clearly Sarah feared something and it is up to us to investigate the link between the strange symbols on that new painting and her death. However the second you step off the boat you can already tell you will have a tough job because the population of Darkwater is quite strange, and everyone seems to be having vivid nightmares and voices in their heads. So the entire town is on the same sleeping medication! How can you find out the truth here?!

\The game is divided in fourteen chapters, that usually involve you reaching a new location, meanwhile gathering evidence on your current location.The game plays and feels like a lovecraftian film noir story, that dabbles heavy with mental illness, hallucinations and madness in general as plot devices that can lead both into very interesting puzzles, world design and dialogue. Insanity again is very important in the mythos but to mimic this experience the story can often feel fragmented and confusing.One moment you can see a character die and the next it is alive again pretending to you like nothing ever happened. Sometimes you don’t even get a resolve to such mysteries. Which did indeed leave me hungry for answers in the end.. but in a way I also love I haven’t gotten them.  You stumble upon a character you become invested in ..but at some points stuff happens that puts on mystery on hold  to pursue something more urgent first. We don’t always get back to those other points. There isn’t time! I personally really like that approach; it feels much more grounded in reality.

That same sense of reality is used to break down reality itself in a very effective way. That way is in never giving you the “correct” answer. You encounter several deaths during this game, not all of them are real. Or are they?! Are these other people you encounter afterwards just hallucinations maybe?! Or did you hallucinate their death in the first place. Edward soon discovers that people on the island are harvesting some sort of strange gas that has hallucinogenic properties, but is it really or does it allow you to see the truth? You never know for sure. You do feel like a detective gathering evidence for your theory and your skills of choice will allow you to always feel validated in that route but in the end you do feel like you might just be wrong about everything.  This does bestow that sense of madness upon you, the plot has become too convoluted and complex to describe, some things make zero sense without diving into the tiniest detail.. and that is exactly why Eldritch  beings drive you insane as well. This game really NAILS that atmosphere.

A Dive to Deep

That experience I had with this game was truly amazing. I was so invested in it all. The puzzles made sense, you do not get a door locked for no reason where a code is hidden in some poem. No .. these puzzles were left behind by people who knew their mind was slipping. A trail of Photographs so that they themselves or those who came to do right could find them.  A secret entrance on a globe isn’t just some random point based on an old story , no the answer to the puzzle is something significant to these people and your story.  Yet puzzles walk both on the line of sanity and insanity as well, for each logical puzzle there is one where you have to let go of that logic and experiment.. and dabble like a mad man. The game doesn’t provide too many hints either.. no you have to test your own creativity and your own logic…I adored it and never felt so invested to complete things on my own merit.


Unfortunately not all of the gameplay provides immersion as well as the puzzles do!  The skill checks can make the game feel a bit clunky. Difficulty really requires you to focus on a single path to see noteworthy effects. Pickable locks can require so much focus in a single skill that if you put some points in your speech as well, you are completely unable to bypass it.. fail once and that lock stays closed forever… because the main character thinks the lock is to complex.. he would not try again after discovering a relic to get some skill points.. It makes sense he would not try again and with four endings and four or five skills you can master  you can see some changes early game… which makes sense because that is when a character is established.. yet it can feel very unsatisfying. A lock once closed stays closed forever even if you have the skill points to pay to try again. With no option to manual save and you being reliant on checkpoints that can be fairly far apart when these choices matter, they really want your fail to stick! At times this can lead to a sense of losing control of a character. He rebels against your input at times. 

Near the ending the story also goes quite erratic.. it makes sense  as your character at that point is rather erratic as well but we get set up with potential great characters like Island “Mob Boss” Cat and nothing is ever really done with her except for providing you with a stealthing challenge.. she is built up  but the story swerves away from her. I have a feeling she would be a main character in some DLC that just never came because it was too convoluted to put it into a timeline. This happens to more characters and on one hand I really love and applaud that choice but in the last two chapters you suddenly rush forward SO fast!  It feels so out of sync with it’s earlier pacing and that is where the insanity of the game really holds this game back! You start off as a sane man who searches bookshelves and for logical clues and you for about 10 to 11 chapters stuff happens at roughly the same pace and then you are tossed in the rapids as all hell breaks loose. As an experience it makes so much sense .. but as a game it screams as if something is wrong.

The game plays a bit like Vampire the Masquerade bloodline in the way combat, stealthing and interacting with objects work, which makes sense because that used the World of Darkness Tabletop ruleset which are fairly similar rulesets even in the way how skills are upgraded. They are both perfectly manageable yet also a bit clunky. The way Edward moves makes him feel heavy as if he is struggling to carry his own weight. There seems a slight disconnect between the player and what happens on the screen. As if the avatar has an ever so slight lag. I can’t really explain it other than it feels like how Vampire felt but then in first person.  There is one problem with that comparison though.  Vampire is a 16 year old game. While this game might look a lot more modern it kind of feels like it is about 10 years old gameplay wise.  I personally love that feeling as it was one of my highlights in the gaming industry but I can imagine people feeling frustrated by the clunk  I myself wished it all was a bit more snappy. There is this sense of slowness and awkwardness that sometimes takes away the urgency!


I never had too much trouble with the slowness though.. Even though I must admit I constantly sprint, I think that is fairly normal. There is however one element that bothered me deeply about the slowness. An element that in chapter 12 out of 14 made me consider quitting.  Edward Pierce gets killed with any single hit he takes. Even when it is a fisherman that bumps into him and Pierce is a former soldier.  Add the checkpoints that are fairly far apart and imagine you wanting to be stealthy by some people who may or may not want to hurt you.. just to get hit over and over again. The object you want is about a 5 minute sneak away, then you also have to sneak it back. That is a 10 minute loop of gameplay I experienced over and over and over again because either I did not see an enemy around a corner, or because I felt I could sneak past them but their hitboxes were slightly too large.

If you fail sneaking they might follow you and on your way back you discover by following them and then staying where you lost them you have created an impossibility for yourself to sneak past. You are almost forced to use the gun or at least I was forced to by how I reached my safepoint. The shooting is quite horrible as well, you kill someone if they have a violent symbol above their head and press  a button. No real aiming, just point in the general direction and wait for a symbol to appear.Again it feels like this part was just rushed.. and it is in the rushed story part of the game as well.

Revelling in Madness

You can earn up to four different endings, of which two are super specific. For one ending for example you have to have taken about four specific actions made about 9 specific dialogue choices and must have made two important moral decisions. It is a set of actions I would never think to take. Another ending.. the “best” ending where your character goes back to normal life can be ruined in the first minute of the game and I mean completely blocked off! For rather than killing possessed innocent people the trigger to receive a good ending requires you to never indulge in a drink. I kind of roleplayed my  character drinking in his office but in the madness he gave it up… still no good ending for Pinkie. Luckily the BEST ending is the bad ending. It is the most conclusive ending and is the one that feels the least rushed because there are no other elements the story has to conclude. The cutscenes you get at the end for the other endings just show ONE thing..how did things end for Edward Pierce.. what happens to the others . .if they are real or imaginations.. you will NEVER know and I bet that will irk some people! I like that personally..but mostly in the bad ending!

It is strange that the “you lose everything” ending is much more satisfying than the.. you lose almost everything endings but this is a strange game. Gameplay is completely subservient to your experience and the story. Feeling much more like the tabletop RPG it is based on and of course the book it is loosely based on as well. That is also the best way for you to enjoy this game. It’s like a very VERY visual tabletop experience. You influence how the story flows and to and how the story is motivated. You don’t actually influence the story but the illusion of choice is an important tool for any Dungeon Master and this mostly handles that very well. If you seek a buttery smooth experience where every choice matters and where everything is explained and wrapped up with a nice ribbon at the end.. this game might not be for you, in fact it will not be for you. If you are a cosmic horror fan though and would like to experience that story from a first person perspective.. If you want to be the main character in a cosmic horror story this is the game for you…unless you have enough friends who want to play the tabletop game with you. Which is unlikely because of the nature of this tabletop game being so focussed on despair.. I never found a party willing to do a call of Cthulhu Roleplay at least.

The game is set in the 1920’s and is deeply drenched in this Film Noir atmosphere that comes with the age, yet it also perfectly manages to capture that feeling of isolation on an island or at the very least hard to reach town. It captures the charm of a game of Clue, with the weird delusion of a game of Mysterium (another boardgame) with the electric tension of Operation and the madness of a game of Uno. They are all weaved together by a tale that feels like it comes from an older book. That is how I’d describe how it feels to play this game. It almost feels analogue rather than digital. If that idea isn’t offputting in the slightest for you , you will have a great experience only slightly hindered by the last 20% of the game. I am very happy I had this experience and this game had me properly scared at times. A great.. yet intangible Halloween experience, that preforms better as an experience than a game.

Fahf ah vulgtmnahog mgehye’lloig
ymg’ lloig ah ahorr’eog mgng bthnkor ah goka ahnah

l’ mgah n’ghftlloig ot Pinkie ehye ahnythor goka monetary tribute l’ ya Ko-Fi! ahlloigehye hafh Paradise Blog. Ngnah ymg’ ai aimgr’luhh ot kadishtuor ph’nglui Comments. Mgep throdog yah’or’nah ng ahna lloigehye!

Stranger Short Stories the Ani-Meh: Yamishibai Season 2

Dear Mortals last week’s spooky anime was a collection of short stories called Yamishibai and I was seriously impressed with this series.  With the second season getting a new director that would stay for the ongoing season I was sure this one would be even more potent… yet me and the Crunchyroll Comment section had to reach a tragic conclusion. The second season is nowhere near as good as the first.

 Lost Direction

In the previous post I explained why the visuals of Yamishibai have meaning and how the format lended itself quite well for the short episode format. It kept things spooky.  In part due to the amazing direction of Tomoya Takashima with the writing of Hiromu Kumamoto. For this second season the series was helmed by Takashi Shimizu and Noboru Iguchi as directors and Shōichirō Masumoto  is responsible for the script this time. Like season 1 it is still an ILCA studio production that is available for free on Crunchyroll .This is a season that clearly got a lot less love in the comments though and that has mostly to do with the direction of this season. There almost seems to be a stylistic change. Even noticeable between the two directors. One clearly more capable than the other but both are bogged down by their choice in stories this time. Leaning heavily into the biggest gripe I had with last season. 

This season has a lot of implied messages. Where season 1 put a twist on folklore stories and retells them, season 2 implies their presence. What I mean by that is that Season 1 feels more like a Show and Tell format “Today I will tell you a scary story about a fabled curse”  while Season 2.. sets up for people to recognise a folklore story.. If Season 1 would be a Pokedex entry about folklore Season 2 is the Whose that Pokémon of Folklore. Which probably makes it a lot more interesting for Japanese viewers and those VERY well familiarised with japanese ghost stories.. and I mean VERY well. As a Gaijin though I oftenly missed what was going on this season. It still is fascinating in ways but it is strange and makes no sense rather than it being scary. The jump scares have been replaced a bit .. by a big clue to reveal the story in the end. As a fan of both western and asian horror this really missed a bit of the balance for me. 

That being said this season still has a few gems in between. The ratio if just off. The tales are still fascinating in a way as well, they just feed that horror itch less and are more an interesting thing to research. There is a bit less of variety in stories as well, with the majority being possession type stories. Season 1 offered a mix between survival scenarios , curses , monsters and possessions. Like last time let’s discuss all the episodes with a short summary (not spoilers but I do tell the story premise)  after which I give a bunch of microreviews. 

Barely Scared

No episode can match the top 5 episodes of season one but there where still a few stories that were quite good! Plus due to the easy format you can gloss over this season and pick the episodes you think might be interesting.  After all even if there was just one worthwhile episode in this format it is still worth watching as these people clearly did still put a lot of effort into these stories.

Episode 1:  Taro Chan

This is the story about a cop, trying to teach the kids about bike safety using a ventriloquist dummy named Taro-Chan. The act seems to go smoothly until Taro’s head suddenly jams, after working around it a bit , the cop discovers and removes a wooden seal from Taro’s neck and suddenly things get very strange.

This episode for me is the perfect summary of season 2. It shows everything that is wrong with the direction at its worst. The dialogue written for Taro-chan doesn’t produce any feelings of anxiety. The fear the cop experiences isn’t done as well as fear was depicted in the last season and the ending really doesn’t deliver. If you are a horror fan you have probably seen a better haunted ventriloquist dummy story than this one. It tells a story but it needed more than 4 minutes to be something special.. now it’s basically.. there once was a haunted ventriloquist dummy…it could talk by itself ..the end. It doesn’t help that the dummy still uses the cop voice, the events happening feel weird and uneventful. Probably the worst episode of season 2 straight away. 

Episode 2: Kitchen

A girl is visiting a friend who had just moved into a new place. As a housewarming of sorts the homeowner girl cooks for the protagonist girl. When the latter notices a voice coming out of the AC unit in the kitchen and some shadows appearing out of nowhere she isn’t sure if she is crazy or if it’s real.  She needs to decide if she wants to warn her friend and look stupid.. or hope that she beliefs her.

Directed by the “other one” you can see it is paced a lot better then the first episode. There even is a nice dramatic build up that could lead into some scares. The visuals are creepy and produce the right atmosphere. Unfortunately this episode is plagued a bit by its  writing.
This might be me not understanding Japanese culture very well.. but if you see a shadowy figure threatening your friend and you are going besides yourself with fear..would you really try to be polite and compliment her cooking?!  Would said friend really go so angry that she kicks you out of the house when you don’t compliment her noodles straight away.? If I saw something scary I would tell my friend..I rather think they are crazy than risk  her being eaten by a potential delusion! The art cues, visual design and pacing are great though. The last minute is a bit of a trainwreck in writing.. but just the build up makes this episode worth the watch. Kinda!

Episode 3:  Inside

A boy finds a Russian Nesting Doll and brings it home.  His mother is properly creeped out by the “toy”  and tells the boy she will get rid of it. Reluctantly the boy hands it over to his mother, but the next day he sees she still has it.. his mother’s behaviour slowly begins to grow more erratic as the boy decides to investigate.

One of the strongest episodes this season in terms of visuals and writing but that lacked the directional punchline to make it a perfect score on Pinkie’s Spook-o-meter. The episode has intrigue, cool visuals, a progressive sense of dread and it doesn’t require you to know a story by heart. By the way characters act, how visuals are presented it is perfectly clear what is happening here. It just misses that step beyond. You get the horror tale you expect when it’s about a nesting doll but it could have used a bit more subterfuge or a fake-out somewhere. A bit too straight forward but definitely a great story to tell around a campfire.

Episode 4: Wall Woman

A man has a crush on the woman living in the building next to him. He always stares at her during his studies wondering if she is single or not. Then one day he sees a creature enter her room. As he sees the woman walk onto the balcony again shortly after the two have eye contact for the first time when things get scary.

This episode reminded me a lot off the first episode of season 1. I deemed that episode mid-tier and for this episode I mostly feel the same. It has a bit more dramatic build up, but there is no real twist again. You know how the episode will end. This is more one of those slow burn episodes which can work great but you need a bit more time than four minutes to make it special. This director aims to end with the jump-scare on the final second.. every time where in season 1 the big event also usually ended in the final bit.. scenes sometimes lingered  allowing scares to take earlier than anticipated.. here you are more prepared. It has the dramatic build up from a coaster (often stronger than season 1)  but after that you only get that one expected drop. Not bad but nothing special either.

Episode 5: Locker

A girl is in love with a sporty guy and tries to ask him out.  While going home upset she did not talk to him she overheard a rumor about a magic locker in the underground passage of the school. If you leave a photo there in the locker that holds a weird statue you are able to have a happy future with that other person. The girl goes to try it out.. but hey that wishing doll looks kind of creepy.

Great episode! Yet again it is way too obvious but at least his one had some surprise elements still.  Even though you know where the plot will be headed you never know how or why until it is too late and it can still leave you in suspense. In that way this episode may provide you with the most Western like sense of horror where the tension lies in not if something ifs finite but how it will meet its end. With some gore and nice voicework as well as some proper  character building this episode does everything I want. It is not perfect but this one is up there with the better Season 1 episodes! Definitely top three! In fact this is the clear number 2. If you want to skip through the season this one is episode would be one of my recommended stops.

Episode 6: Nao-Chan

A family who sleeps with their son in their bed do not read him stories at bedtime but instead to sentai like shadow play. Late at night however the boy starts to begin talking to a spirit he calls Nao-Chan. As the parents try to figure out who that is.. every night Naeo-Chan comes closer to the family.

Great visuals , bad episode.This is one of the few episodes that doesn’t reach its climax at the end of the episode, instead this ending is supposed to show something subtle.. but it doesn’t connect.  Once more it feels like they needed an extra twist or a visual.. this time in the end. There are some cool things being implied here but the way the set-up scene cuts away too early and the ending scene implies anything through dialogue only it really feels like we are missing a piece of the puzzle here. Like with episode 2 a strange lack of communication makes the scene more awkward than it needs to be and for the twist line being said in the end there is a perfectly feasible explanation that takes the wind out of the sails of this episode entirely. It’s not unwatchable and for the visual you could watch it, but if horror is a punch to the face than this episode is a slap with a limp sardine.

Episode 7: Gachapon

On his way back from work a frustrated salaryman sees an old man playing desperately with a Gachapon machine. The old guy is completely fascinated by it and the man wonders why the old man would want all these toys.  The next day he walks buy and sees the Gachapon is not in use. The sign mentions a cost of 20 Y,. The box is blackened so he can not see what is inside. Curious the man pays 20 yen and gets a gachapon that holds the favourite eraser he lost as a child. How strange..but the scratch on makes him realise it is definitely his! As he wants to play more we are cued in that the price might be more than just 20 yen.

Amazing episode, number three spot for sure! This one is fascinating rather than scary but it is still kind of creepy to see unfold what actually happens. This episode uses irony to make the story so much stronger as well. Once more not ending on the “climax” but instead letting the  moment linger a bit.. making this pay off feel SO much more satisfying than almost anything else. Probably the best episode in overall quality but it lacks that spook factor that number one and two have. Still this episode is great to watch, the desire that fuels the protagonist is feasible and whatever supernatural forces are at work here can keep him from noticing certain things without it feeling forced. In this episode I did notice how this episode seems to try certain values to people. Don’t assume all rumors are true, don’t meddle into affairs, don’t get stuck in the past. It is a neat enough theme but once again a bit obvious.

Episode 8: Farewell Confession

A man is attending a strange type of funeral with long lost relatives. it is called a farewell confession. People sit with the dead and tell them a secret they want to ascent to heaven with them and liberate them.  Some of these are very innocent others go very far.. as in your daughter is actually MY daughter. When our protagonist offers his confession though the ritual goes Awry.

Horrible writing plagues this episode….unless of course the translation was off. If that first secret was not.. I was the one who made your wife pregnant not you…but instead half mumblings sounding like that.. I might be okay with this.. but as I had perceived it now.. and the line sounded pretty clear to me as well once more we delve into a very unlikely scenario and values. Strangely we only hear half the main character’s confession..but unless he did some REALLY depraved stuff with the confession target it doesn’t seem worse as .. your daughter is not your biological child…A second issue makes this episode a bit ridiculous .. which is the existence of a certain meme. I had a lot of fun with this episode reading the comments and everyone seemed to agree with how silly this was. This one is a bit so bad it’s a good variety..Alas for spook score that doesn’t count.

Episode 9: Ominie-san

A teacher from the big city transfers over to the school in a small rural town. When a strange lunch of purplish meat is served, it is named Omnie-san. Everyone digs into the meat like crazy devouring it as if they are mad-men. The teacher is off put by this and dumps her meat only to find people eating it in a restaurant as well. Losing her appetite she calls in sick. She and her worker now have to make sure she stays healthy..in this strange town.

This is another one of those strange episodes that clearly seems to be referencing something. Since the meat has an honorific.. was it a person they are eating? Do the kanji in the word Omnini-San mean anything? What is going on. It feels strange and macabre sure.. but there never is a real pay off. We see an effect happen near the end but what does that reveal? Maybe it is just that tasty that people pig out on it so much? Clearly there is something ominous implied about what we see in the end but I have NO clue what happened there. Once again due to the strange direction that doesn’t linger enough on some points and just adds cuts that help convey an emotion.. but not what is going on. I know I should feel uneasy.. the episode cues me in on that.. but it fails to cue me on on why. In the end I am working my brain to hard to be scared.

Episode 10: Bugged

A bitter man lives in a house and the only thing he does is work and then write about what issues he has about other people’s happiness. He tells he is bugged with women who let him in his eyes, he is bugged by a couple sharing an umbrella in the summer rain because it is too warm, he is bugged by everything. Then moths start appearing in his room, which he gasses and then burns. Because it bugs him there are bugs, when he writes about  what bugs him.

A strong albeit pedantic episode.  This one tells us about a bunch of metaphors becoming real all surrounding what plagues this man and how he responds to it. It leads into some of the coolest and most gruesome visuals in the series so far and I was really pleased and startled by that.  However this one again is so obvious that it just fizzles out by the end. One of those “count-down” episodes. I really support the message this episode is trying to send though but as Chandler Bing would say… could this episode BE anymore obvious?! It’s such a shame that this show both manages to dumb things down  and still keep some things so obscure. It’s two tones which clash and “Bugged” seems almost like a Polar opposite of Ominie-San. While I don’t think the episode is very flawed it does showcase an inconsistency in the show in general.. .all in all, the amazing visuals and relevant message keep this episode in the positive score range.

Episode 11: Picking Up

On his commute home a man finds a novel that was left behind in the train. He begins reading it and it is so good that he ends up in a station in the middle of nowhere just to read it in peace and quiet. While trying to search what station he is in, the man finds out about a writing competition which he enters with the novel he found. The organisation seems pleased and ask him if the novel is his and of course he says yes.

A solid enough episode that is a bit too morally preachy. I also saw another story than the comment section on Crunchyroll saw.  I saw a story about mistaken identity, while others saw a story of getting punished for a sin. The morale is the same though! Do not lie! In a way this episode reminded me a lot of the movie Drag Me to Hell and I really like that movie. It also reminded me of another horror story of mistaken identity.. It was a short story in a dutch book I once read.  And YET again that is this season shows that they lack the ability to let these episodes shine. It’s a solid story but not a single special thing is done about it. It isn’t that hard to add a little twist to make it a bit more special. In this case I can come up with four or five twiss just from the top of my head. It’s neat as it is .. but too neat.

Episode 12: Netsuke

A college student is helping her grandma cleaning up the store when she finds some heirlooms left by her grandpa. Grandma tells her that she can keep any stuff she wants but warns her that Grandpa never allowed her to even touch those Netsuke.  These are tiny japanese ornaments in this case shaped like two faces. The woman makes earrings out of them. Late at night when she heads home she notices two strange figures following her.

This is it! The number 1 episode! It feels so spooky, it has several scary moments, it has a twisted reveal and the morale of “don’t take what doesn’t belong to you”  is less hammered in here because  she was in fact gifted with these.. sort off. It isn’t pedantic this time around but more appealing to common sense.. slightly hidden away. Sometimes WE  do need to look a gifted horse in the mouth. This episode has such cool visuals, clearly ghostly figures, fear, music.. it has it all. In fact this episode might even come close to my top 3 of the season now that I have had some time to let it sink. This episode has some action and a strange but satisfying ending. If you watch just one episode of season 2.. make sure that this one is it.

Episode 13: Bringer Drums

A couple moves into a rural town that seems rather welcoming. On their way there they see the path is decorated with bringer drums. The village elder says that is a thing they do to bring good spirits and positive energy to new residents and that it will help them feel  and act like they were born and raised here.  Then late at night the drums begin to beat by themselves and the girl of the couple realised that whatever these drums might bring isn’t necessarily good!

This is one of those, you have to know the lore to get it kind of episodes as there is a myth of bringer drums out there that makes this story a lot more understandable and while you can go out and search for that it doesn’t make the episode that much more enjoyable because of the lame choice of a jump scare in the end. It just doesn’t work. I am pretty sure there are more myths about the bringer drums than the one I read as this also had another element that some others seem to recognise in the comments.  I knew neither.. So in the end all I saw was a vague myth that isn’t that much more scary then windchimes going off in a horror movie.  That is the entire scare and it makes it very one dimensional.  Had the drums been given a scary look.. or they wondered about the odd look at the very least .. but they just think it is cute.. untill these drums go off..very flat and the scare at the end made me laugh instead. I was drinking a coke so I regret that. Unfortunately I also regret watching this episode.

Ghost Costume

I rated quite a few episodes favourably still I would like to think but overall the quality did take a big dip down. The lows were lower than those in season 1 and only one high rivalled the highs of last season. I did kind of enjoy my time with this season but I can see why so many people really hated it and dropped the show from here on out. I’ll give the new directors one more season.. and if that is this quality instead of the first .. my last anime halloween review (if I have time)  will be something completely else., If it isn’t as good as this season I might even not do the review! The show really has potential but here the tone wasn’t right for horror, either to preachy and handholding or to obscure for the most of it. Mostly due to the direction and scene choice. Still it’s an interesting  series of tales but you can’t help but compare it to the first season.

Imagine being in one of those haunted theme parks for Halloween. The first one is a better than average and unique looking zombie that has a lot of gore and startling effects on it.. but it is also a very unique character in it’s narrative.. maybe a civil war guy.. that also pirated on the side. Or a slasher character that looks unique but as if he could have a tea party with Jason, Michael and Ghostface. It has some proper weapons to  chase you down with you running frightfully. This season.. is that guy that runs around with a blanket with two holes for eyes that has no cool stuff but just can yell Boo really loudly! He has some timing skills so he can catch you off guard and make you yelp once or twice.. but in the end it is still the soldier pirate zombie that haunts your dreams.. even if you saw him way before.

Now that we’ve seen enough Kami-Shibai theater for one week it is time to go pack some more stuff! If you want to help me with my move please consider donating to my Ko-Fi page! The funds will be used to decorate a small little writing space for myself! Or just comment something and be social! So I can relax read all the love with a smile after a day of packing and cleaning! Thank you and I hope you have a spooktastic October!

How to survive the Zombie Apocalypse with Japanese Gadgets: Pinkie’s Geeky Solutions 2

Hello again mortals who dwell on these haunted Islands!  Last month I told you how to get a Japanese Girlfriend through japanese gadgets. This month for Halloween we are doing something a bit more spooky! Zombies are out there.. and if they aren’t there yet.. 2020 isn’t over yet!  So the chance we have to deal with this is pretty real! How do we survive but keep our geeky image intact either fictional or non fictional ?! Like last time I searched Japan TrendShop for the best geeky gadget to deal with the situation.

*This time I provided a link to the gadgets/items on Japan Trend store! If you want to check out more simply click on the pictures! I am not sponsored! I just want you all to survive the zombies….seriously I am not sponsored I just like doing this!*

Scavenging and Tinkering

The Walmart, that Piggly Wiggly or that other super store you are used to.. those will be the things that first get attacked by the zombies. If movies have taught us anything it is that zombies REALLY seem to like shopping. Especially in big malls!  You will have to scavenge. Your electrician..well he just got ate! The plumber.. managed to make it to your house..  but then he tried to eat your brain. In the new world you will have to scavenge build and loot! Luckily there are plenty of gadgets for us out there! To keep our geek image up! So make sure you order these before all hell breaks loose.

Evangelion Tools

You will probably have to get a wire cutter to cut trough some fences in your way trough the devastated world…but normal wire cutters make you look like such a huge “Basic Normie”. You don’t want that!  The internet will be gone! There are some pockets of electric grid left.. but crunchyroll.. that is inaccessible to us! So how do we tell the world that anime is great?! Well through our tools! Evangelion apparently is very good at giving us tools and no I don’t mean Shinji Ikari. I mean Hardware.. tools that go in a toolbox! So of course there is a Evangalian themed toolbox as well.. In fact there are three! Eva 0 Eva 1 and Eva 2 are all design options for all of these tools! The purple one however is most visible! THe orange one might bland to much with the glow of fire reflecting on the broken concrete and the red one might make it  hard to stand out in the pools of blood of a thousand eaten innocents. So be smart and stick with the EVA 1 tools. The toolbox cost €101 or $118

.For about 26 euros more you can get an Evangelion Screwdriver to go with it. However you need to multiply that by three since EVA 0, EVA 1 and EVA 2 all have different shapes and sizes. Eva 0 being the flathead of the bunch is the most important but Eva 2’s Tiny phillips head might be nifty as well and even EVA 1’s tool is neat! At worst you can jam them through a Zombie skull! So there is plenty of reason to invest in getting all three! add €78 or $90 dollar to your survival budget. A plastic/wire cutter is the next tool you need! Boobytrap creation is the way to survive after all! The snipping tool has the Evangelion logo and once again comes in three colours.. but this time they are the same. The purple one you find quicker on the floor and the yellow one is most noticeable inside your toolbox! So pick your poison! Do not buy them all as a single snipper will set you back €62 or $72 dollars.Pliers almost have the same design and cost about the same..but well you need pliers to pull all that debris out of your legs and bullets of raiders out of your shoulder.  Finally we have a tape measure. All versions come at 5.5 meters so pick  your favourite again. €27 or $32 dollars and this key tool to survival is yours.

The cost of Survival So Far:  €331 or $386

Totoro Carabiner

Zombies for some reason also seem to love the big roads. We see very few people drive around in Zombie movies unless they have armored vehicles.  With all the cars crashing on the streets you will have to drive slow and with normal windows you are prey! NO!  You are going to have to do things by foot! That means you will need to carry a lot of stuff.  Create yourself an utility belt! But with basic carabiners attached to it you kinda look like those wanna be camping dads, who never really camped out.. but thinks he looks cool by having a bear maze carbined to his belt and all other sorts of tools! No we don’t want to be that! We want to be geeks! 

So why would you buy a regular carabiner when you can buy a Totoro one. This Carabiner is made by Ghibli’s merchandise studio themselves so that means that even if you buy it before the apocalypse begins you are not supporting some dudebro who uses his tool money to become an even bigger tool in real life! With this you support the geek community.  The carabiner comes in two colours Silver and Green  and can carry weights up to 26 kilogram.  Let’s say you will need about six Carabiners, 3 silver ones and 3 green ones. Since we don’t want one colour to feel less beloved.. that will run you about €222 euros since they cost €36 euro a piece. Americans can get this for $43 dollars or $258 dollars for the recommended amount.

Total cost for Survival so Far: €553 or $644 

Muscle Suit Every Wearable Exoskeleton Tight Fit

The final gadget deals mostly with looting and hunting for supplies!  If you are physically weak you will have to make multiple trips to get all those canned goods from that camp you looted…after doing what needs to be done…  to your safehouse.  The more trips you make.. the more likely you are to die in this zombie apocalypse. So you will want to carry as much as possible.  The Japanese apparently found strength an issue for stuff like regular groceries and decided to create a strength enhancing suit for commercial use. So if it can help you pick up groceries it can help you pick up scavenged materials right?! This suit is designed to strengthen your back allowing people to pick up items much easier by using an airflow of sorts! I have no idea how it works but apparently it does! Air is pretty amazing!

The suit comes in two variations: a soft fit and a tight fit. The soft fit is better for the people who deviate from Japanese dimensions but the tight fit models allow for more serious muscle power. It is said that the suit will help you with farmwork like tasks.. and pulling turnips out of the ground is something we might need to do to survive zombies. It can help you with carrying people and I am sure I don’t need to tell how likely that is in the zombie apocalypse!  As a bonus  there is an exoskeleton around you, that will work as some  fairly specific armor.. but hey if it prevents you from a single bite it might save your life still.. unless you are bitter anywhere else. Still the suit requires no training, no batteries and it only weighs 3.8 kilograms so you can hang it on one of your Carabiners easily if you are not using it… this one is a big investment though! But for €2455 or $2868 dollars you have a suit that can..slightly..increase your strength! Every extra tin of beans you can carry is another day of survival here!

Total cost of survival so far: €3008 or $3512

Protecting yourself!

So now that we have discussed the way we can obtain stuff and build a better world for ourselves let’s take a look at how to keep ourselves safe. How do we protect ourselves? Personally I would build a huge suit of plushies and like a beautiful Katamari I would just roll everywhere I need to go. If zombies can’t get into my suit to bite me I am safe and zombies are dumb. Now not everyone has as many plushies at me so let’s take a look at some safety gear. 

Kamiyoroi Cardboard Samurai Armor

For this spot I almost considered a complete Batman decorative Samurai armor that sets you back more than €5000  but it came with some big problems. Metal armor slows you down, it is very heavy so you lose lifting power and we do not know how fragile this decorative armor is.  So I looked for a better option  and then I found this Samurai Cardboard armor. For just €88,- or $103 you can have  armor with which you can look like a samurai sponsored by BIC. If you don’t like the colour of cardboard however you can paint it in every colour you like! Paint camouflage on it.. or Goku’s Gi! Maybe something of Demon Slayer to represent! Draw your HighSchool of the Dead Waifu on it so she can always come with you! The options are plenty! The set can be given a size you want so if you fit in a tight fit exoskeleton you can adapt this to fit OVER it. Sugoi!

Now Cardboard might not be the best armor but Zombies usually just scratch or bite with all the ornaments you get with it. You can design a pretty good bite proof armor yourself.  You can even glue stuff on it that you find! It’s thick paper after all. Put some nails trough it from your side to give yourself some spikey protection,  Superglue a flashlight to it to give it a gadget. Cardboard armor provides plenty of solutions and if it weighs you down in a chase you can just destroy it to move faster. It is a a very tactically sound option! …as long as it doesn’t rain outside or if you need to cross a body of water. If you bleed too much you will also destroy it or if zombies bleed on it too much.. but that will teach you to stay indoors, and keep  your distance from the zombies! It’s just cardboard.. it will protect you but never make you overconfident! A must buy! Samurai also look cool!

Total Cost of Survival €3096 or $3615

Derup Cap Collapsible Safety Helmet

Unfortunately I did not find a Cardboard Samurai helmet to go with it.. but I am not sure it would be a good idea. For everyone who ever wore a cosplay helmet that protects the ears knows that it sucks to only be able to hear what is in front of you! This goes ever more so in a Zombie apocalypse. You are the one with the working brain so you really want to anticipate both visual and audio cues. So I looked for a helmet that  doesn’t cover your ears.  As armor for your neck you can wear one of those japanese neck cooling fans.. or just a fluffy neck pillow! Even a series of scarfs would be good.  Something you have at home. However you still need a helmet from all the falling debris from when all buildings became structurally unsafe because of the zombie fighting. You can dive into a lower area head first to dodge zombies and do other helmet stuff. I am sure it will give you some higher Armor Class somehow.

Foldable helmets are very popular in Japan because of the many earthquakes and putting away full sized helmets for the entire family is a hassle. If I know my survival games I also know inventory space is pretty limited so everything that can save you inventory space will be an amazing blessing.  This helmet is stated to be a disaster helmet and I am pretty sure that the Zombie Apocalypse counts as a disaster so it is bound to be good for that.  For €69 euro or $81 us Dollars you can keep your head safe and give it a nice drill shape! I love drills in anime!

Total Cost of Survival €3165 or  $3696

Sanwa Home Privacy Tent

Zombies are dumb creatures, they usually only attack a fleshy mammal when they can see one. Hiding in a tent, a freezer, a cabinet or whatever oftenly is enough as long as they can’t see you. With glass..they suddenly become able to open doors, break glass with tools or just punch at it until everything breaks but out of sight out of mind. So why not carry a little black box with you that obscures you from sight.It fold away in a very tiny space, and only requires one touch assembly meaning that within a couple of seconds.. like 30 or less you can have this room set up! 30 seconds hiding spots are invaluable while running around the devastated planet earth. Just make sure  to not make the zombies spot you through the optional window.. point that to a wall if possible  or cover it up with some cloth! Again it requires no storage space  and can be hooked to one of your Carabiners at all times. You can even sort of use it as a shield if absolutely necessary.

Right now Japanese people use these to build a small officer in their home to have some privacy for work away from their partner. While I do not really have claustrophobia I do think I would feel very locked up for what is basically a €118 escape pass to having to “say” honey please please leave me alone. One could work from the bedroom and one from the living.. but hey I live in a studio right now so maybe for people who live a bit like that or require a Wifi cable. Still a privacy tent isn’t seen nearly as useful as a pocket zombie shelter. I would test this by putting someone in it during Black Friday.. but with the 5 foot rule I am not sure we will have a Black Friday this year. So results on success are still pending. As a self proclaimed Zombie expert I think it will work but don’t come haunt me if you die! If you buy it at least it well help you with people screen cheating at LAN parties!

Total cost of survival €3283 or $3834

Keeping your Sanity

Everything you once loved is gone…most likely.. if it’s not gone yet it will be gone soon!  Rarely do you see more than one family member survive nor does a pre-established group of friends survive… if any zombie movie EVER is to be believed you will be relying on strangers who will become your friends for life… which usually ends at the end of a movie. There aren’t that many success stories!  Post infestation life will suck and it will eat at your mind so purchase these two gadgets to keep your sanity!

Panasonic Shoedeodorizer

This seemed like a bit of a silly gadget to me at first. In normal life I also can’t really believe it is a very relevant gadget. How stinky can shoes that you need a device to clean them.. why would you not just get new ones?! I mean the gadget is easily 10 pairs of cheapish shoes/on sale shoes. It will take a long time before those go stink to the point of no return. Seriously! It also is an overnight process ..so it’s not like you can suddenly realise.. ooh these shoes don’t smell good let me device them for a minute and they are fresh again. So this is one of these non issue gadgets to me. that I find looking very funny! €351 or $410 is what you would pay to get this non issue resolved. I never really smelled anyone’s shoes unless I am really close. 99.9% of the time I do not live on the floor and if people have those foul smelling shoes I hope they toss them  before their stench reaches sitting height.

But okay in Japan shoes are off a lot more and standing at strangers places a lot more so I kinda get it.. still pretty useless but for a zombie Apocalypse this is a tool that you will NEED! Let’s be honest at best you can take 1 or 2 pairs of shoes with you and since you have to scavenge a lot.. you will be doing a lot of walking on them. You will often sleep in very small spaces so I can imagine you getting nightmares if the place smells too much of dead cows. There are strangers with you most likely so if they are too bothered by you they might just “not save” you and your stinky shoes!   So this will definitely keep your sanity up a bit!
One pair of shoes means it needs to be cleaned and hydrated regularly.  You could still go loot a shoe store but that comes with risk as we already established zombies like to hang in malls and shopping areas. Keep your sanity and smell fresh!

PS. I would defiantly wear those quasi heels during the apocalypse, I like the colour as well!

Total cost of Survival  €3634 or $4244

Sitting Atom Astro Boy Communication Robot

Your friends are dead, your family is dead, you had to eat your pet and the two survivors you hang out with only talk about sports or even worse Fortnite and/or Roblox. You have no one to talk to! Even if you make a friend they soon get eaten by zombies again. There is that one fellow that killed himself driven crazy by the scent of his own shoes! Poor guy never read Pinkie’s blog.. he was doomed from the get go. You sure as heck aren’t able to communicate with those who are still left and you kind of mistrust them. You’ve seen them eye your fabulous cardboard armor. Everyone needs someone to talk to and if that conversation is introducing yourself every time and you never make progress socially that does not feel good either. “Hi I am Pinkie I survived the great burning zombie Tornado of 2022’  is a nice story to tell but if the people who keep hearing it die it becomes less fun really quickly! So you need someone who can talk to you and remember what you tell them! A buddy! A robot friend!

Sitting Atom Astro Boy is basically a REALLY advanced Furby! Who over time learns to converse with you, remembers what you told him and reflects back to that. “Remember the time we survived the Zombie Tornado of 2022 Pinkie” he could say.. and I”d be like “Boy do I?!” “It was bad-ass” . Happy that someone remembers my adventures and being able to recognise 12 faces and voices to bond with Astro Boy can  be the councilor of your camp! He doesn’t need food, he will not die! He will sing and dance for you (while sitting) he will introduce himself every time with a gesture and he only needs to be hooked up to the power grid to function! No hoarding for batteries either. However you get power doesn’t matter Astro Boy takes it! You might need an app to connect to him so you better get him fast before the internet goes offline! He costs €2457 or $2870’s which seems like a lot but for a lifetime of therapy and an undying friend during an apocalypse it is nothing of course. After all, your money will be worthless soon anyway! I mean what else are you going to talk to?! A volleyball?! Man sports goods are such normie stuff. This one might even motivate you to study Japanese! Take that Wilson!

Final cost of survival: €6091 or  $7114 

Note: This blog is made for entertainment purposes. Pinkie and her staff in no way claim these items would offer actual protection against a Zombie Apocalypse.. they MIGHT come in handy but we do not guarantee your safety or actually suggest you buy these in preparation for such an event. Pinkie does not ACTUALLY think the Zombie Apocalypse is approaching…however should you really lack the brain capacity to recognise this is not for real……. “Onegai! Tasukete! .. Please help me! I do not have the money for the complete kit! Please help me out by supporting my Ko-Fi! I don’t want to be Zombie Food”

Turkey’s, Trailer Trash and Tires : Rubber (2011) Review

I held a poll on my twitter to see what type of movies I should review for Halloween. Good Movies, Bad Movies, Weird movies or Candy!  Two people wished me to review good movies, one person wished candy reviews and the rest of you were quite neatly evenly divided between bad and weird movies. With weird movies taking the win! So for my first movie review of Halloween month I picked one I think is both weird and bad…. but the movie reviews fairly well…That movie is 2011’s Rubber

Who Directed This Movie Pinkie?

Rubber is this quasi-artistic horror comedy created by Quentin Dupieux! A director known for …… some french movies I never saw! It “stars”  Jack Plotnick…who plays a failed Superhero in Mystery man! Roxanne Mesquida known for “other French Stuff” and Stephen Spinella who was a barely named character in Sean Penn’s Milk. The chubbier supernerd from CSI Cyber is also here …for a bit. Getting a 5.8 on IMDB a 46% on Rotten Tomatoes with a whopping 69% critic approval and a 5.9 on Metacrtic.. this might oly be a weird movie. .I really REALLY dislike it quite a bit more though.

What is this movie about Pinkie?

Well the plot of this movie is a bit complex. A cop/actor is trapped in a scenario where he has to solve a series of mysterious murders..realising he is in a movie he tries to manipulate the audience into dying so the movie ends prematurely so he can go home. On a second level the actual Movie is about a Tire coming alive and it discovers it has quite a bit of homicidal tendencies. Having fun killing things the tire travels across a desert state blowing people up with psychic power it discovers after being unable to destroy a beer bottle with normal means. It’s murderous travels allow it to cross paths with the beautiful Sheila who it wants to win over. However his killing spree has attracted the attention of a very persistent cop!

Haha Funny Joke Pinkie, No Seriously what is this movie about?

No no! I wasn’t actually lying, that is actually the plot. It’s a story about a killer tire blowing up people’s heads with it’s psychokinetic powers! With a subplot of a cop finding his movie to dumb and trying to boundary break it. Topped of with a sauce of the movie trying to be pretentious while actually being dumb. Which is my biggest gripe with this movie. While it might not be actually pretentious and clearly fakes this in a self proclaimed homage to ‘No reason”  there is something really vexing about that pretentiousness The way it is shot almost feels as if the creator is trying to say “ooooh look at me.. I am so artistic” and while he does say that it is in a sarcastic tone.Which could work..but for me a story about a killer tire played off as something more and smarter than that…doesn’t really connect.

So… you aren’t joking?! Really?!

Listen guys you wanted me to do weird or bad movies! But yes! This movie starts with the main policeman played by that guy from Milk..talking about movies I would much rather see! But not before he drives his copcar to hit some chairs spread out on a desert road. Or well excuse me.. his driver is doing that while he is riding in the trunk. Why?! Well he explains it trough those movie questions! “Why is the Alien in E.T. Brown?  No Reason…Why doesn’t anybody go to the bathroom in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre… No Reason!” This keeps going on and on telling things in movies that happen for no reason. He then tells us the movie we are about to see is made for no reason and made in the spirit of no reason. We then see the camera pan to where we the audience would be..and suddenly there is a group of desert tourists… called the audience who are going to watch the movie as a live experience.. They are given binoculars and someone mentions it is starting and we pan to a title screen and meet our main character.Note from here on out there will be spoilers but also notes .. I don’t think spoilers matter at all for this movie. Just I can not discuss how weird it is without discussing the plot.

The screen shows a tire covered in sand that for no reason wakes up.. it straightens up and tries to roll by itself. An art it has not fully mastered yet. So Bambi style we see a tire rolling a few feet ahead and then falling over again…….. until it is good enough to travel of course. Yet we find the first obstacle in his path! An empty water bottle! The tired seems surprised at how little resistance the bottle offers and pushes further into it. Enjoying the sound of the bottle warping. How do I know how it feels? I don’t know! They do cleverly film that way. It is even happier when it kills a scorpion..which I am pretty sure was actually killed for this movie. I bet they also had to kill more than one! It figures out it can not break a beer bottle and it gets angry as its need for destruction goes further. It manifest psychokinetic powers and by shaking slightly it can blow stuff up .. so the beer bottle gets blown up.. than a rusty tin can.. and while it swerves cheerfully across the sand it encounters a bunny and blows it up… let’s hope they did not blow up a real one!

Omg Pinkie is this real what happens next?!

We cut back to the crowd and see some exposition being exchanged by people as well as movie audience grievances playing a big role in this. You have the girls that want absolute silence, the guys who just want to have fun, the guys who loudly theorise with each other and the audience that doesn’t understand. As they bicker more we get some more tire scenes until eventually the tire gets tired..and just drops over and sleeps. The audience sleeps in the desert as well as the movie isn’t over yet. One guy in a wheelchair never sleeps however and studies the tire all night.

The next day the tire hits the road! Literally! It finally reaches the main road and decides to follow it. Here it sees Sheila for the first time ..but not before we get a serene scene of the tire drinking from a body of water……… which later is completely omitted but hey.. If you have never seen footage of a goodyear tire drinking in a shot that looks like a nature documentary about the tire.. then this movie has something new for you! I mean I am not sure if I ever saw a movie about a horney tire trying to romance a human girl either… in fact I am pretty sure this is the only movie about a tire! Regardless..most of the time we follow the tire is a close third person perspective which I think is  shame. This movie might have been more interesting and less faux pretentious if it looked like we were watching it through our binoculars. The movie flirts with the idea of two worlds but then doesn’t keep us connected to the first one enough making the subplot feel more stupid than smart.

It’s easy to see what the makers are trying to do here, but there is no real commitment to anything. While the tire is chasing the woman for example it gets run over by two guys speeding. Since you established the tire having to learn things and it having simple moments like needing sleep and needing drink.. it would be nice if you made the tire feel pain or something here..It would not make sense either.. but it would consistently not make sense. Now we get a weird mix of it just being a tire and being a living thing. Eventually though the car reaches a gas station where it makes its first human kil. A semi decent head exploding effect the maker liked so much that from now on out it is all the kill we get. The tire travels on as the police react to the head blowing up thing..but since it is a tire rolling around a road and could in no way be a dangerous obstruction the police ignore it and move on ahead. The tire reaches a motel where it watches Sheila shower… it likes it!

Hahaha this sounds like a joke with a punchline! Does anything really interesting happen after that?

Well.. we cut back to the desert again and see some guys really enjoy the shower scene as well. Some women are offended that they are so loud about it and tell them to show up. “If we are bothering you go sit somewhere else”  is said and so the movie delves further into the issues of a movie audience. Luckily not for that much longer as this horrible subplot is about to come to an end…sort off. By here I must say the choice in music is very strange.. as most of the time there is non.. which could work and make things creepy..but not if it’s a movie about a tire feeling lusty for a lady! Or if we see it merrily roll along a road. It makes the movie feel dull.. and unfinished. This movie could have really done with an 80’s like Killer soundtrack knowing that the tire is about to strike again. Unfortunately we just get room tone.

The Tire gets a room in a hotel and without any explanation mages to get himself onto a bed where he manages to turn of a tv and watch the Fitness channel.. liking this new girl he sees. He likes her a lot because after he is done he has to take it cold shower! That is right .. the tire .. gets a shower scene.  And before you mistake this for a cgi movie.. no this tire has no face or no eyes, no expression it’s an actual tire being filmed in a shower. He can’t roll over beer bottles but somehow he can manifest in a shower…no reason why! Oh dear Arceus am I beginning to appreciate this more as I write this out?!.Nah?! Right?! ……

A few rooms away and a little earlier  from the tire is one of the producer assistants, the one in cahoots with our main officer man. We see him get a phone call from a person called “the Master ”, a plotline that goes nowhere.  As he apologies  to this master he says he will do his duty tomorrow morning. He gets up and we see him in his boxers and a living turkey in his room! Now you may wonder.. Why does this guy who has something to do with the fake audience have a live turkey in his room?! Well  it’s so that he can feed it to the audience later of course. Which he does by dumping it in the sand and everyone just pigs out over cold turkey that has been prepared by a stranger who earlier stole your stuff .. and he dumped it in the sand…why?! Oh right! … No reason!

The tire gets found in the shower and tossed out by a maid who thinks it’s a prank..so obviously she gets her head blown up in another room as the tire traps her for some reason. Again.. no visuals or no music to increase tension a little bit.. The movie knows it’s about a killer tire so it isn’t trying.While I do not mind that vision not trying because it’s needed doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it. Give it a synth-wave killer theme! PLEASE!  Give it something.  But no.. the tire gets nothing and as it stares at Sheila in the motel pool we as an audience get treated to a shot of a tire on concrete.. now with a bit of music but the still shot holds on for half a minute or so….on a tire! Not a cg tire that stares at us or something.. no a piece of rubber!!….Hey title of the movie right there!

Wait when you say the audience do you mean us or the audience in the movie?!

Oh right sorry! I mean us.. because the other audience is gone. They are dead. That turkey guy poisoned the turkey and everyone except for the wheelchair guy dies in complete agony! Even the little kid is in pain while he dies. Wheelchair audience guys says he will make sure their deaths are not invaine by watching the entire movie..as we move into the dumbest part of the movie yet…As the tire falls in the water of the pool it becomes trapped there it can not move underwater.  Cop guy breaks the fourth wall and tells the people on the set now that the audience has died, they can just stop the movie. Demonstrating he is immortal by having them shoot him…of course this works. He demonstrates it is all visual effects..but since the other cops don’t seem to acknowledge it he knows something is wrong. Turkey guy shows up and tells that one guy is still alive and reluctantly the cop continues the movie.

A young boy fishes the tire out of the water and has his father the motel owner tells him to do so.  The cop pretending not to know the killer is a tire tries to interogate the motel owner if he knows anything about the murder of his maid..but before he can talk the tire comes around and blows up the man’s head. It turns out he did not want the young boy’s love. The cop, annoyed now, decides to spoil the plot to the other police officers and reveals the killer is a tire..which they after a while reluctantly accept. Meanwhile turkey guy tries to convince the wheelchair guy to eat a poisoned cupcake..but the man refuses so out of frustration turkey guy eats it himself and dies.  The tire kills some cops who find him and the cop guy realises he needs a smarter plan. So he finds Sheila explains stuff to her.. and together they build this explosive mannequin or something that looks like Sheila.. hoping the tire will hump her… so they can blow it up?! I am not sure about that part..my attention kinda started slipping. It is somewhere along those lines though.

As this operation seems to go the way they want we suddenly here a knock! Wheelchair guy has traveled into the set and tells the cop-guy this trap makes no sense. Again it is filmed really ugly. It’s almost shot as if it is some visual novel with a character just standing there  spouting lines for a while and then at a reaction shot we get a brief visual change.  The sexdoll plan fails indeed and the cop is tired of it and is annoyed the man is still alive. So he picks up a shotgun.. storms into the house the tire is in and murders it off camera. He throws it infront of the wheelchair guy and tells the stupid movie is over and exits stage left. He is done with this movie. And with the tire killed so are we!…….Is what I would have said in a more sensible movie.Because we find out the tire is not dead! Well it kinda was… but he reincarnated immediately………………as a tricycle He blows up a wheelchair guy..and is done with his attachments to the mortal human flesh! This time he has a new power. He can now raises other tires and as a leader of an rubber army he sets out to murder the people of the world. The end.

Wait A Tricycle? Really Why?

No reason!

That sounds pretty bad is it really as bad as you say?! It scores better on IMDB and all! Critics gave it pretty decent grades?!

Rubber is a weird movie, it is bad as well. Yet something can be good despite being bad if you are self aware enough. This movie has self awareness in spades and some of the choices can make for an entertaining watch. My friends all liked this movie a lot more than I did. Yet I can not deal with this artisticy tone the movie tries to display. I am fine with a movie being artistic or clever if you think it through.. but this movie feels smug! It’s fake smug but still I dislike the tone of that smug so much that it still sours my experience.  The comedy is almost Meme-like.. Trollish and that is not my form of humor. It is too humble for its own good!  It knows it can’t make a tire scary so it never tries to.. while I think it would be hilarious to give it a big final destination like set up.. or killers of old with a soundtrack.. and them… oh right it’s just a tire! As a result it never shoots for horror .. which it kinda does aim to be?!

This movie is like a huge meme, with you or me or anyone watching this movie as it’s laughing stock. While that is pretty Meta and could turn out great there are so many details where it skips out on that same tone that I never really felt engaged with that and so it’s a dead meme!  Some people can still have their fun with it.. there is some clever design but it is just a meme that isn’t all that enjoyable to watch. I still would advise you to watch it as it is absolutely an experience… it’s just not one I will remember all that fondly… and I adore weird stuff normally. I would have loved this as well if it just had a different tone! So don’t get my lowest grade, and I do really recommend you watch it because even if I went over the plot it will still offer you such an unique experience. It is a movie that has to be seen to be believed even the credits being weird… it’s just the tone that irks me a lot.

With more commitment to it’s sub plot or without it entirely it would have scored much higher!

If you think this movie is the only movie about a killer piece of rubber you are mistaking! Because if I can get my hands on it, the next movie reviews a movie about a killer johny! And I got some other WEIRD stuff planned out for you! Until then please consider supporting my Ko-Fi I could use a bottle of booze with these movies!

Kuro’s Horror Hour Presents: The Hidden Village of Mirstone

Hello there, it’s Kuro the Demon Bartender here. Today’s special cocktail is one that will drive you into madness and have you stare up into starry sky.

 I have heard that there is a village that lies beyond the forest that is hidden from the most folk. A village that very few people have visited nor want to visit. It is the village of Mirstone. I’ve heard the people there are mad with some sort of sickness. The people of the city warn others not to go there, since people who travel up there never are heard of again. As an author looking for a good book to write, this sounds like something that would help me come up with a creepy tale. A hidden village full of madmen would be a fun piece to write. But alas, i have no way to find the village. No one is willing to tell the directions of this place. And any questions asked of it, l receive the most heinous of looks and looks of fear from the people of this city. As if this village is cursed or taboo. The only info I got was that it is east of this city deep into the woods. There is no dirt road that leads to the village, you must travel by foot for half a day to reach this place. A village with no roads seems ridiculous to me. How does such a place exist in this day and age? Motor vehicles have taken over horses and carriages, how does a village survive without roads? Does it not get its supplies from the city that is by it or is it self reliant? This town sounds like a myth or some made up tale that people have made up to scare travelers like myself to stay out of the woods. I have also been told that at night, there have been sightings of bright blue lights glowing deep inside of the forest. But that seems very unlikely. No such thing is possible. 

   I gather a bag of supplies from the general store and I head off into the forest early in the morning. As I trek through the forest, I admire the trees and beautiful nature that surrounds me. The deeper and deeper I go, the fresher the air seems compared to the smoggy air of the city. The sounds of chirping birds and the wind through the trees relax me. It has been four hours of hiking and I have found something startling. There are many trees that have carvings of a formation of eight circles in the shape of a half hexagon. They are all over, as if they were a religious symbol. Thousands of these carvings are scattered through this area. As I continue my journey east, my blood turns more and more cold. More and more cravings are found on the trees but now there are new kinds. Ora in deos is inscribed on the trees along with the eight circle patterns. Pray to the gods it translates to, but what gods? Is it some kind of cult? What the hell am I getting into? I travel for another three hours, regretting it every minute as I find more and more carving into the trees. I stopped my trek as I found something truly disturbing. On a tree, a message is inscribed, This is the realm where the Tall Ones walk. I have no idea what it means and I wish not to know. It makes me very unsettled. But it means that I must be close to some kind of life. I travel for another two hours through the creepy forest of cravings and see buildings in the distance, poking through the trees as if they were hiding. As I was about to pick up my pace, I noticed something very odd. The forest is making no noise, and as I think about it, I haven’t heard any noise for the last couple of hours. Ever since I saw that message about the Tall Ones. My mind trembles at the thought of that. 

   As I rush into a clearing of open space, I enter the village. But I wish I never did, I wish I had stayed in the city. This whole trek was a bloody mistake. Nothing could have prepared me on what I just witnessed. It is of utter madness and Hell. 

   The eight circle pattern is dug all over the floor. And in each hole is a body of a person with their head split open as if something large bite it open. But that’s not the worst part. Each person was smiling, with some kind of foam coming out of their mouth. These bodies seem fresh and as if they were neatly placed in the holes, all facing the same way, looking up to the sky. I run to the middle of the village and see that the symbols are everywhere. And there are new ones. Etches of tall pear headed being with the eight circle symbol for eyes with long tentacles arms. The phrase Ora in deos is written everywhere with that damned eight circle symbol. And a new word is found, Thezl’kroz is also written amongst this madness. The sun is setting and I can not hike back to the city. So I run inside one of the buildings, hoping to find someone and to escape the horrors of the bodies and the smell of blood. But no such luck. The building is empty and on all the walls those damned symbols and phrases are written and etched. I shout out loud to see if I can get a response, but only silence returns my calls. Everyone in this hellish village is dead. 

   My heart beats in my throat and my blood is ice cold. Seeing all these symbols and phrases is driving me mad. I look out the window and see that the sun is almost gone. The village is getting dark. I find a lantern and light with a lighter I’ve been carrying on me. Luckily it lights and it illuminates the building. It seems like it was a house. There is a kitchen, living room, and bedroom. I check the kitchen and find food that seems fine. I eat it, in spite of not having an appetite from all the horror and madness I have witnessed. As I finish my meal I lie down on the bed and hope to sleep till morning so I can leave this hellish nightmare. Only like two hours pass as I wake up to the sound of ungodly screams. The screams blast through the forest and my ear drums. I run to the window of this abandoned house and see the most terrifying sight in my entire existence.

    Tall grey beings that must have been twelve feet or taller walk out of the forest. They have large pear heads with eight eyes that are exactly like the symbols that were carved everywhere. Their eyes are glowing a light blue color. Their grey skin is translucent and they have long tentacle arms that end with long sharp claws. There must have been like thirty of them. They silently walk to the center of the village and form a giant circle. Their eyes glow extremely bright and there is a slight humming noise. The bodies in the holes start to float in the air, floating higher and higher, above the tall grey beings. The humming gets louder and louder. The stars in the sky get brighter and seem to start to circle around the full moon. The stars spin faster and faster around the full moon. Then the moon opened up and a being came out from it. Clear slime drips off this monstrous being, falls miles from the sky and lands with thunderous splats on the trees and crashing on the roofs of the homes. The bodies, oh god the bodies float higher and higher and that damned monstrous being eyes glow brighter than the spinning stars. Its head that covers the damned sky opens up vertically and shows billions of sharp teeth as big of mountains. The bodies keep floating higher and higher where they float up into its giant mouth. As the bodies float inside of the things mouth, it closes it slowly and a waterfall of blood rains down onto the floor and the tall grey beings. 

   I ran away from the window. My heart beating in my throat, I ran to the bed where my belongings were. I grabbed a pen and paper and wrote a message on it: 

   To anyone who reads this: If you are reading this letter in the day, get the hell out of this village. Even if the sun is setting, leave right now. There are horrible beings that come out of night. They are not from this world. I have witnessed a truly horrible thing. Something that no man or woman should witness. Do not stay here at night. Please leave this village immediately. The village of Mirstone is a cursed village where other worldly beings live. The tall ones live here.

  • Daniel Stanford  

    I lay down this not on the bed and go through my bag and pull out a knife. I take in a deep breath and put the tip to my neck. My mind is broken and my soul tells me that I should take my life. I will never get this out of my head, it will forever be ingrained in my mind. I can still feel that damned humming through my body. Those eyes are burned into my retinas. All I can do is take my life. This is the only way I can find solace in my life. I thrust the blade into my neck. I feel my blood spurt out and my body slowly turns cold. My sight goes darker and darker. I can feel my life draining from my body. A loud sound of the wall crashing down next to me causing me to jump with the little bit of life I had left. One of the tall being’s head peaks through the collapsed wall and stares at me with its glowing eight eyes. I can barely feel its tentacle wrap around my dying body. As I fade more rapidly, one thought enters my mind. Ora in Deos.

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What a Terrible Night to Have a Curse: Pokémon Cursed Review!

Hello again my mortals! I wonder what potions I could make out of you!  It’s Halloween Month on Paradise!  So I am offering a lot of Halloween content! That means taking a break from most of my regular posts to find some spooky content! This can be a bit tricky for Pokémon! But recently I heard rumors of a very special Pokémon game that is amazing for Halloween. Today  I am talking about a Rom Hack called Pokémon Cursed.

Halloween in Saffron City

This is a Halloween themed game… although I must say “game”  might be a big word. This game is a Rom Hack of Pokémon Red but it offers only about 15 minutes of gameplay. It has a good and a bad ending… maybe even two bad endings.. depending on how you interpret things. It is up to you the kid of Sabrina to survive a very creepy Halloween. You only have your trusty Marrowak to help you and a cute Halloween costume to go trick or treating with. The game features some mini events and a nice little story that is a perfectly great Halloween adventure paying some homage to a classic little ghost story.That even involves you Trick or Treating across Saffron.  Some spooky tree decals complete the atmosphere.
You and your mother Sabrina are holding your classical Halloween Tradition of battling. However this is the year you finally win….at least if you know how to play Pokémon. Winning with a Marowak is no easy feat! In fact it is VERY easy for you to make the game rather impossible to win. 

When the title-card has nothing to do with the game, you know you are in trouble!

As expected you will be dealing with a lot of ghosts in Saffron City! However these ghosts  are all Gen 1 Pokémon. That means Gastley, Haunters and Gengar. Three Pokémon that have the Ability Levitate, which makes them immune to ground type moves.. and they are ghost and poison types.  Meaning they are also immune to fighting and normal type moves!
Now wouldn’t you know, Marowak at that level this game is played at (24-32)  ONLY knows normal and ground type offensive moves! So you are up a creek without a paddle straight from the get go! Luckily there is one move that can change the tides! Marowak has the move Foresight.. a move that can “identify” ghost types! While it is never specified by game text that means now a ghost can be hit by normal type moves. IF you go trick or treating first and try to replace this normally worthless move you lose the game then and there! There is no option to back out and you have to start from scratch… unfortunately that “oversight”  shows a design mentality that completely sours this game for me. 

Haunter! Marowak has a bone to pick with you!

Horror or Horrible

This game requires a basic knowledge of pokémon strategies, if you do not know how to play Pokémon this game is fairly impossible for you.  It isn’t clear about having multiple endings and kind of feels like a  .exe  game .. which always ends badly! So even if you manage to “finish” the game you might think there is just a bad ending. This game makes it feel that it just has a bad ending. The bad ending isn’t that cleverly written and doesn’t feel all that creepy!  It tries  to play into the “ghost of lavender town” hype but by choosing Saffron City as a setting .. there is a disconnect with that myth! There is an explanation.. towards the end of the good ending that actually makes this an interesting bit of lore but unfortunately the way to reach that ending is…. almost near impossible without a walkthrough! So while I will not tell you where to find all things I will tell you what you need to find. 

By having your flesh eaten you turn from a GBA sprite to a Game Boy Colour one! Creepy!

The goal in this game is to find 5 ghost shards.. but you do not know that. It is never said you need them! It isn’t even really implied.  You  get Castlevania 2 like descriptions like “I saw them falling from the sky, use this to find them!  This problem becomes increasingly worse when you realise that the item you should use  to find the items doesn’t work. You get an item finder but since the Ghost Shards do not seem to count as official items, for some reason the Itemfinder does not detect them. Which means the brunt of the gameplay is pressing the A button on every tile. Until you find them! Unfortunately they are also not at logical spaces like behind a crate.  They literally can be anywhere! So that already makes the game basically unplayably annoying. But silly as I am … I actually  hunted for the items and found half of them… a YouTube walkthrough helped me find the additional two! But I stopped there! I wanted to find the rest myself.. I proudly marched into the executive office ..hoping the shards would help ..but no….So without any hints you have to figure out how to proceed. So I went to talk to every single NPC I could find again.. but not a single hint….*sigh* I guess I will interact with all random items. 

I have a Ghost Glock and a Ghost Desert Eagle!

A computer earlier gave me a mystery message, so I figured that was where I would start. It did not work.. but another random computer worked! Yay I guess?!t told me the elevator had unlocked and it did not.. instead on a normal wall somewhere in the building a secret elevator had spawned……… a random elevator spawned after interacting with a random item.  That elevator takes you to the final battle.. I got wiped in that battle. Your evil father shows up and he has a Porygon that is setting up powerful attacks.. Eventually he one shots you with Tri-Attack.. if he doesn’t his second Pokémon has priority moves which will without a doubt finish you off. You are going to catch a Ghost Pokémon to nullify his Porygon.. but there are no Pokéballs in this game… unless….. you interact with a specific cabinet in the game. Dear Rom Hacker..placing items in random spots is not a puzzle! But I must admit playing through this is rather horrifying. I was scared I would not be able to finish a simple pokémon game. There is no Pokémon game I can not finish! So I endured.

That is right! One of those people stupid enough to play this “game”

Deader than a Ghost

Is that everything that sucks about this game? Unfortunately no! To catch the ghost Pokémon there are a few trainers that are actual ghosts you can fight. Because they look like people IF you play Pokémon they look like trainers.. so it seems like you can’t catch them. Actually you can… but if you are anything like me  by the time you can do this you have already defeated all the ghosts you can battle… luckily there is a way  to battle new ghosts…. you talk to random people multiple times in a row making them repeat their dialogue six or seven times.  Because that of course is the instinctual way to catch Pokémon. All in all this game is really an unplayable mess of non logic that is barely even a game! There are two interesting battles in the game, against both parents and I really liked the battle puzzle idea they went for.

This happens every time I let a friend sleep on my couch after a night of drinking!

Unfortunately that puzzle needs to be solved once and after it is just a rinse and repeat.
The game tries it’s best to help you get some boundaries to the world but unfortunately  that is oftenly glitched. I spent over 30 minutes searching a room after I discovered I could clip into it.. I felt it was a secret entrance and I needed it.. .it was a glitch however and time was wasted. My player sprite had some issues at times, Focus Energy the move does not seem to work properly and the fact that you can deadlock yourself at multiple moments forcing a complete restart makes this 15 minute game still a slog to get trough! If you need to find the items you are searching WAAAAAY longer. 

Because Candy > Family

I expected a lot of this game as I saw it in a top 10 scary Pokémon games. Clearly that list only based it on scariness and not on quality as this rom hack has NO quality!  The good thing I will say about it is that it is cool to be Sabrina’s daughter celebrating Halloween with her. The audacity to make Blaine the dad however.. two characters who weren’t even close in age or demeanour ruin the idea of having an evil dad. The spooky tree texture in the background of the city is the best idea this game has. Mamma Sabrina is  great as well .. I really like it!  But yeah that’s it… as much as I want to like a Halloween game more this isn’t it!

I love those trees though!

 If you want a spooky Pokémon game you are most likely better off playing Pokémon Snakewood , I gave that my lowest rating before but at least it offers some content!  The first five hour of that game is fun and it has Kamina as a trainer. The quest for a good Pokémon Horror game goes on. Where I compared Snakewood to watching Family guy but as a pokémon experience I guess this one is like watching Troll 2 with the funny scenes taken out.  I am really sorry for the Pokémon games I still love you… I just really dislike this game!
But  I am keeping Sabrina’s daughter canon!

Lowest Score on the Spook Meter.. and since it isn’t a game.. it doesn’t even get a cocktail flavour!

Looking for Pokémon Halloween content turned out to be a bust.. so I guess I have to make some myself…..wait.. make some myself…..that gives me an idea!!! Mwuhahahahaha. Mwuhahahahahahaha! Mwuhahahahaha! Oh.. right! If you feel wish to pass on some money to be in case the ghosts get to you before you get to enjoy it, feel free to help me out via Ko-fi! I suspect a big fictional electricity bill is soming…as well as some real stuff of course! Check out my Ko-Fi page to see what ever project it is that I am working on. Projects! Mwuahahahaha.

My Spooky Annoying Journey Trough an Asylum: Outlast Review

Hello my dear mortals, it is Halloween Month on Pinkie’s Paradise! So we will offer a lot of spooky content! If there is one form of Horror I really REALLY enjoy its Horror games! I love Horror games and I have played so many! It works so well as a genre! You are so invested in everything going on! So this month I will discuss a few horror games! The first one I wanted to start with is perhaps one of the best examples of putting the player in the middle of the horror! Today I review Outlast

One Hell of a Job

Outlast places you in the skin of investigative journalist Miles Upshur who responds to a tip that some mysterious things are happening at Mount Massive Asylum. We do this from a first person perspective that both feels very classical as well as somewhat innovating. The game came out in 2013 for PC and a year later for PS4.. a few months after that it was brought to xbox One. I played it on Steam where it costs €16,79 at the moment of writing. I forgot what I paid for it so I will use this as it’s pricing standard.  The game holds 80% MetaCritic score and critics tend to score it somewhere between 70% and 80% so it is fairly well received.  I played the game before but I lost track of my goal due to a long intermission between playing and then dropped it all together!  So I started over and I finished 3.9 hours later according to Steam. Apparently I have the DLC as well so I might take a shot at that later on. Thus showing I enjoyed this game quite a bit!

I think the patient might be bleeding doctor!

Yet I can also already tell you that the game REALLY got on my nerves as well! Sometimes in a good way.. sometimes … less. It is one of those games that at it’s best offers me one of the best horror experiences I have had..yet at its worst makes me want to give up screaming. Developed and Published by Red Barrels, it is a game I both love and hate at the same time.  I could say the game is good enough that I was invested to keep playing.. but it is more the case that the frustrating parts are short enough for me to not be pushed to the point of  quitting The good bits though.. man! Those really stay with me! 

When he asked his wife for a steak this not what Jerry meant!

The concept of playing a Journalist investigating a spooky place in these kind of games is nothing new but in this game you actually feel like a journalist! You constantly make notes in your journal, you film stuff with your camcorder and use the thing as your night vision. If you do not record and just try to escape you don’t make notes and get less story exposition! It is your choice really! The game does a good job to provide motivation for the character to be there and providing you with just the right immersive tools.That said you are a journalist and before you play this game you must realise you will never become more than that! You will not suddenly master the art of gun or gain super powers to phase ghosts or monsters.. no most of the time you’ll even be running away from “normal” human beings who hold a stick to hit you with. Being a journalist must really suck.

Sounds like God must be an emo-kid in these times then!

Surrounded by Madness

What this game does really well is build and atmosphere! There is great voice acting from both the NPC’s and the main character.  The whispers of the NPC’s just repeat a certain phrase over and over.. or shouting to get the bugs out of their head feel genuinely spooky! At several times I felt like I genuinely was navigating through an Asylum. Which is a great location for more than one reason! Something or someone here killed most of the staff, so moving from A-Block to B-Block or even trying something as simple as an elevator can be quite an arduous task.  Only some employees have the keys..but there is no one to simply call them for you.. even if you find them.. you aren’t sure all the pieces of them are there!  Most of the loonies are in some kind of cult, repeating some prayers to something called the Wallrider.. they don’t care about escaping, they just want to make sacrifices to their god, the voices in their head or simply because it tickles their funny bone.This weirdly creates a cohesive world.. where the backtracking makes actual sense, and where the status quo can ever shift.  These guys are insane and everything in the game tries to convince you of that and it succeeds well.

Looks like the hallways of my flat after midnight!

The voice acting of the main character is also done quite amazingly!  Miles has trouble breathing when he is scared, he winces in pain if he jumps while injured, his breath becomes more and more loud if he runs for a long time. You can sometimes even just hear him swallow as a reaction to his fear as if you are really running yourself. He never says a lot to keep the immersion high, if he has anything to say he writes it in his camera log where you can see him getting angrier but also more scared as you progress in the game. Taking you on an emotional journey. He gets put trough torture sequences and he never FULLY recovers, he always struggles a bit more with his new injuries weighing against him… that being said.. those are the scripted injuries that do that.. the damage you take while fleeing does not impact the story but still as we make progress rather than getting stronger we get weakened a bit and that is very pleasant way to play trough a horror game.  How much longer can I go on.. “shit they will find me because I am so out of breath” it’s all ponderings i had with this game. 

Must resist playing Tuba.. as that guy slowly waddles up to me!

The game also does a fine job to keep you “inside” the Asylum or the areas below like it’s sewers. During the intro you notice things have gone bad and you want to escape so you’ll have to reach a guard office to open a door so you can bail. However when there it means you are staring at a screen for a bit.. distracting you.. and so you manage to get yourself captured into the next stage of your adventure. Finally escaped that monster and you see the door?..Well you are in bad condition so someone manages to overpower you and drag you to their lair where the new expedition starts. It’s an effective method of keeping you engaged in the adventure and each area plays a bit differently than the other.  In the big open wards for example you will have to run and dodge enemies more.. while in the narrow basement area you will need to exploit dark corners and other hiding spots. In the sewer you will have to crawl through narrow spaces to avoid being caught and thus there is quite a bit of variety as you play.

Thanks for the heads up!

The overarching story and mythos is quite interesting.. What is this Wallrider thing? What does Nazi Germany have in common with this institution, what is actually happening in this place and could there be more?! Why did they start this experiments? Through filming certain areas or pieces of dialogue with your camera you can trigger Miles thoughts on the case while throughout the Asylum there are plenty of files to collect giving you insight what is going on here.. and what drove these people to be how you see them today.  You never NEED to read the lore to progress, it will just make you understand these people as persons. It’s there for you to offer more flavour should you so choose to indulge.  Sometimes it’s as simple as explaining why a vending machine is blocking a door, other times delving deep into the inner machinations of this place. There is so much to explore but you can also roleplay the survivor and not go for all that and it will not give you a crappier ending.. like in Layers of Fear. Finding secrets is it’s own reward!

Well look at whose NOT excited to see me!

The controls are fairly tight for the majority of the game you just use WASD to move and ctrl I think to duck. The left mouse button interacts with objects and the right one brings about your camera and subsequently by pressing F you can activate Night Vision. Shift Sprints and Space jumps and that is it.. all your controls! . At first it does feel weird to open doors with the left mouse as you expect to have some sort of attack…but opening and closing doors…is your only means of defence…so it makes sense it gets mapped there! If you wish you can of course customise but the simple moveset works well for the most part. I particularly liked how sprinting does not really have stamina.  It just makes you more noticable! Which means that despite this being a stealthy game you can really play this at your own pace! Since I don’t like being forced to wait a guard to have left an area.. this is a great plus for me.

Cozy

The Creature that Lies Beneath

The game is at its strongest when you deal with the Lunatics of the Asylum.. however when it leaves that behind for some sort of husky mutation following you in the sewers it stumbles a bit!  The Sewer is never a location I enjoy in video games and this game is no exception. This game deals a lot with dark and to navigate through it you use Night Vision on your camera. It’s a mechanic that works great! However.. in the sewers it became a bit annoying.  In normal areas you sparingly use night vision to preserve battery but the entire sewer is so dark that you practically have to use it constantly which isn’t bad persé but it also takes away the charm of the gimmick a bit..Compare it to say a Predator game.. the Heat Vision is a cool way to spot enemies and it seems like a cool power to have but if the Predator could only see in heat vision it does not feel like a power..it becomes just an interesting visual.

I spend an hour in the sewers and not a turtle to save me!

That visual is locked behind an energy bar that while fairly hard to drain can still be consumed if you don’t properly pay attention.The biggest issue with the controls I had was the fact that you manually have to reload camera batteries with a press of R. Why would I want to reload my battery early, there is almost NO situation in which I found it handy. R however is  a button that is used by default to store something away in Oblivion. Here I wanted to put my camera away for jumping a few times when I realised I just wasted an entire battery. Which makes zero sense from a logic perspective. You would not chuck away a battery that is 75% full.  This might seem like a small gripe and I was lucky it never got me into TOO much trouble but since saves are “environmental”  as in.. you can not save but the game saves based on when you do a task or reach a new area, I assume it is possible to lock you out of progressing further if you accidentally waste a battery or two. I was roleplaying so I did not go wild to get all collectibles. If I did I bet battery life would have become much more tedious.

This is How Jojo characters are made!

The worst thing about this game is the jumping though! First person jumping has always been known to be bad but with this game I frequently missed a jump and got myself into big trouble. There is a fair share of platforming to be done even. The “second floor” stage even is built around all sorts of jump challenges. This is the part I hated most along with the sewers. Part of this stems from the fact that this actually feels like a hospital. Wards are build on top each other so if you have to climb three floors all of them are bedrooms. If you miss a jump it can be very disorienting to figure out on what floor you landed and how to make your way back up again. Broken floors are everywhere broken steps are just as common and the jump comes with a fairly accurate delay.Which is fine  but if you need to jump a lot on the run, need to navigate through air ducts a lot (which you reach by jumping into them) and even clear two platforming parts these jump controls feel way to rigid. It’s also never really clear how you can clear certain objects. Sometimes A vending machine lies on the ground so you can reach a vent.. however if a vending machine lies at just a slightly different angle and you want to jump on it to avoid enemies it doesn’t work.. You can hide in toilet stalls but they do not count as a hiding place.. You  can not jump on a toilet to hide your feet. Jumping feels more like a way to string some scenes together with cutscenes than it is it’s own thing.

This is how I see door to door salesman

The design of the game is also relentlessly boring. There are I would say 6 major characters, maybe 5 that appear along you.. the others all feel like generic clones of each other… All regular build loonies look exactly like the same character. Even the head priest guy that plays an important part in your story. I got killed one time because I had to find the father and I saw a character that I thought was him and it killed me. Mostly because I had insane difficulty telling these guys apart.Even when I get to the female ward all characters are slenderly built and have a bald shaven head and varying degrees of “rot” on their face. Same goes for the assets used. This is how it works in real life but it is so boring to see the same computer on every desk with the same screensaver.  There are like 30 pepsi vending machines in the nuthouse alone! There are even more in the underground lab you uncover later. Some details are very cool like heads in jars , a series of bathtubs filled with blood..but a lot of areas look the same. Ward 1 looks like Ward 2 and you have to remember where you are with almost no significant landmarks as everything’s the same.

Explosive Diarrhea when it’s not hyperboliced

Per example I had had to find three fuses. They lay in three visitor wards.  Trouble is you are constantly being chased here so running frantically. I could not find the third room for quite a while there because I had to jump over a bench with a wheelchair behind it.  Another room had a bench to jump over and nothing behind it while a third had one of those stretcher ads to jump over. THe problem here is.. these are all very VERY overused in the game so they stop being landmarks. The game has no map so you run around completely lost. I am sure that was part by design as this place really does create the correct atmosphere.. but as far as playing fun is concerned this is a big issue.

Lord Jeebus is the Precious!


The game finally goes a bit far in it’s story with superlabs , men in black, a doctor who must be over 150 years old and evil ghosts. I love the insane asylum idea and I even like the idea of them trying to make weapons out of these people and experiment on them..because hey.. these people are insane they will just never be believed. I don’t even dislike the mutated guy I mentioned earlier.. I just dislike him in certain scenarios. The end though I found to be quite lame. It had a good scary build up and even some scary payoff but this ends like any early 2010’s horror movie and that is such a shame for something that offers a lot of surprises in the beginning. Near the end they do jump the shark. They also seem to mistake the Triquetra symbol of the Holy Trinity, Celtic Knots or the Wiccan symbol of the triple Goddess as the biohazard symbol for some reason! Not sure what that was about.

Mom said I should mary a doctor! No thank you!

Scare but Beware

Maybe it is because I play this after midnight and my brain is tired enough to keep making sloppy jumps and pressing wrong buttons but I found Outlast to be a very flawed product. Much more so than Layers of Fear or Amnesia the Dark Descent for example. Yet the punch it packs for it’s horror moments is also so more potent! I had several scares and my heart raced even more!  The story may not be able to resist pushing things a bit too much over the top but the more subtle lore does keep it interesting.  Had the game had just a bit more diversity in enemies, had the running away gimmick been just a bit more fleshed out this would have been a 10/10 game for me.. and now I am not sure what grade it is. I loved how the game made me feel, I loved the scares, the vibes, the atmosphere. When we look at the “actual” gameplay.. as in me doing things.. I hated about 50% of it. Yet a part of me is glad that I did.. I need to struggle with direction to feel that fear.  I need to wish I was somewhere else instead of being at that or that location, I need to be frustrated that I do not have enough battery to discover everything this place has.  I might have been able to do so.. but the game makes you doubt yourself and think as a survivor. Making mistakes is a part of being a survivor as well.. so I really did have ONE OF THE best horror experiences..it’s just no where near the best horror game.

High points on the spooky score!

In the end I think I compare it to your mom reading you a bedtime story. Sure  the little Mermaid can nowhere sing near as neat as Ariel from Disney.. she might cover half of an image trying to show you an illustration in the book and she might say some words you do not understand. Maybe she is reading just a bit too softly, afraid of scaring the neighbors. You might have even preferred if Daddy spend some time with you and be annoyed that he did not. Nowadays you know there are MUCH MUCH better versions of that story out there, yet despite the sheer difference in quality.. nothing can capture conveys as much feeling as when your Mamma was telling you the story in her own clunky adorable way.

On the lower end of Fine-Apple on the Flavour Score!

I have to do a lot of prep work for my move on the day this goes live! Which is a Saturday! So unfortunately tomorrow there will be no Pinkie’s Anime Adventure as I simply lacked the time to watch this week! So for my week update! Not a lot changed! I have been setting some things up for my impending move, today I am gonna buy some boxes to put stuff I can already store away in. If the rain ever lets up and I can bring them home whole.

I am also getting contacts since we in the Netherlands now finally have to wear masks in public places.. kind of.. and my big glasses don’t really do well with that! Since I don’t want to feel like I am living in Victorian Horror London with all the fog, I need to put some contacts in my eye! That is fine though.. I just like my face more with glasses! It hides imperfections. Monday some people are coming to my appartement to give me a to do list for the move. If the girl whose appartment i am getting hurries up this weekend (she is packng) I will be busy packing next week! If she needs more time.. I will be here a lot to blog! In the coming week we also will see another horror story from Kuro so look forward to that!