Outlast 2

I bought the Outlast Trilogy for PS4 new for $12 on clearance and I played through all three back to back. I'm going to focus on the last one, Outlast 2 And because it's on PS4`I get to take my own screenshots. Yay! I love the disclaimers in these games. It’s like “You know why you’re here. Enjoy the game, sicko.”

Outlast 2 is a run and hide survival horror game just like its two predecessors. You have no weapons or flashlight but a trusty camcorder with a night vision mode that allows you to see in the dark with clear atmospheric conditions. This mode uses batteries which you have to collect to keep it functional. Some differences between this and the first two include now taking damage and needing to heal yourself with bandages which you can find. The run button is now L3 instead of L1 which is now the look behind button and let me tell you that was hard getting used to after playing two games with it the other way around. The other two games took place in the same asylum and secret testing facility but this one has the distinct setting of rural Arizona so it’s outside or underground for a majority of the game. Now I haven’t been to ALL of Arizona but I find it hard to believe that there’s a part of Arizona looks like this. Yosemite in California yes or somewhere in the Pacific Northwest maybe but this just seems like too much granite and too many trees for Arizona. Where are the red rock formations, sagebrush and Joshua trees?

The premise is that you’re a cameraman for a reporter, (your wife,) going to investigate the disappearance of a young woman when your helicopter crashes rather abruptly from unseen forces. You arise from the crash with a dead pilot and a missing wife so you set off to find her which takes you straight into the heart of a backwater commune of cultists. Their religion has loose connections to Christianity but kind of runs afoul being centered around rape and human sacrifice.

There appear to be a lot of different horror influences here all melded into one. It’s a lot of Children of the Corn and The Hills Have Eyes. And then there’s some Blair Witch Project and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And then at the end there’s even some The Descent and even one iconic death scene that was straight out of The Omen.

The enemies in this game are all over the place in breed. They’re all humans I think but there’s insane religious zealots which inhabit the ramshackled farm and village areas. They’re like The Ganados from Resident Evil 4. There’s sick people who have been quarantined to a shanty town on the outskirts. There’s weird tribal bush people in the deep wilderness and a couple of guys resembling Master and Blaster, (let’s see how many pop culture references we can do,) who hunt you down with flaming crossbow bolts. There’re mud people in the caves. It’s like a whole freak ecosystem. There’s also no way to tell who’s going to try to kill you on sight, who’s only going to try to kill you if you’re up in their face and who just wants to puke on the ground and be left alone.

There are chase segments where you have to crawl away from pursuers through a tight spot either under a house or through a cave and you move so damn slow I’m constantly thinking there’s no way they’re not going to catch me but they don’t because they’re moving just as slow I guess. it’s almost comical that it’s a dire life or death flight measured in feet per minute.

The hiding places have been significantly downgraded. Not many lockers or beds around. Instead you mostly have water or containers of water which are hard to see out of and leave your vision blurry when you come out and oh my God, is that blood? I can seriously submerge myself in a drum full of blood to hide? Wouldn’t I have to spend the rest of the game running around looking like Carry after prom night?

Ignoring the big recurring baddies, guys with flashlights are the worst enemy. If you have to go within ten yards of them they will eventually spin around and spot you if you aren’t behind something. Considering you can’t hurt your enemies, the convention that you can essentially see in the dark while they’re effectively blind in it makes it a level playing field but guys with flashlights just screws you. However you are granted another tool which wasn’t in the first game, the camera microphone. Switch it on when using the camera view and you get a sound reading on your HUD. You can eavesdrop but that’s not that important. It works kind of like a geiger counter. Depending on where you aim the camera the bar goes up when you center on a noise source which is usually a person. The higher the bar, the closer the person to your proximity. This thing works at a good distance and through walls so it’s almost like you can see through objects in a crude sense.

Like the other games there are backstory or exposition documents scattered around that you can collect and specific events or objects that you can record with your camera. I like how your camera shows a timeline of everything you’ve gathered and shows blanks when you missed something not that you can do a damn thing about it. In the other games you could flick on your camera and the thing in front of you is recorded but in Outlast 2 you have to stand there for 10-15 seconds shooting what is usually a static object and if you move at all you risk interrupting and resetting it. Really? Come on. If it’s an event, you sometimes need to immediately turn the camera on and begin recording before whatever it is ends and you never see it again. But there’s so much crazy shit happening all the time it’s impossible to tell what you’re supposed to document and what’s just another Christmas tree decorated with entrails. Why am I recording this? It’s like the hundredth… one of these I’ve seen tonight.

The segment where you have to go rafting down the river sucks. When I started out and had to paddle across the lake I kept getting hung up on an invisible wall with no way to tell that I wasn’t moving at all. In the river the raft handles like shit but it’s basically made like the door to a wood cabin so kudos on making a door that floats like a door I guess. There are two places on the river where you are scheduled to get wrecked and lose your raft but somehow on my first try I maneuvered past both of them and made it to my destination with significantly less sidetrack and hassle. However when I got there there was no way to dock and get off either by climbing up the ladder or getting on the pier because it’s only supposed to happen as part of a triggered event. I was just stuck floating around on the worst raft ever. I went past the dock and down river to a place you’re not supposed to be able to go, (still unaware things were amiss even though I’d been clipping through objects in the environment,) and I found where the river terminates in a low res pond which I actually think is creepier than the regular textures.

You periodically switch back and forth between the twisted nightmarish present reality and a twisted nightmarish version of your flashbacks from something that happened to you in Catholic school. These sections kind of remind me of FEAR (the haunted office simulator game.) When you’re at the school sometimes the Upsidedown leaks in and the Demogorgon appears and chases you. (Yes, that’s actually the most efficient way to describe it.) But seriously this monster is crazy. It’s a guy with a bunch of arms. I didn’t get a good image because he’s kind of ethereal and teleports and kills you on touch so it’s hard. Initially I was okay with this but I got increasingly annoyed with being continually transported here because I wasn’t seeing the relevance to the actual storyline I was invested in and so it just feels like I have to do busy work until I’m allowed to go back to the forest and get chased by Ganados again. It’s like the game just gets interrupted occasionally with some other game that you have to play. And when I say that I really think these should have been two seperate games. The two have too much diversion to help eachother but enough content to go on solo. Why do they need each other? The school has its own plot and identity as a psychological horror game with one big badguy and some weird phenomena that sometimes makes you question your sanity. The most interesting thing is when the game pulls off a seamless transition between being in the Arizona wilderness and then suddenly you’re in the school or vice versa. It implies that you’re having a mental episode which is reinforced when you check your footage of things from the school and it’s distorted beyond recognition. It’s like the stuff you see there isn’t really happening… but it can still kill you. The problem is this cool mechanic is wasted on transitioning from one dangerous and scary place to another dangerous and scary place. It could be so much more unsettling with a contrast between one location where you are (at least relatively) safe or there are at least rules and constants of normalcy you can cling to and then another location that is chaotic and upsetting. A good example is when you hear the siren in Silent Hill and the world changes into Alternate Silent Hill. Silent Hill as it stands is a creepy abandoned town but that’s it. It also has monsters in it but somewhere in your mind you are familiar with the concept of an abandoned town because that’s something real. When the siren goes off, suddenly the world around you ceases to make sense as you’re thrown head first into a rusty metal hellscape. As bad a place as regular Silent Hill is, when you hear that siren you feel panic because things are going to get worse and similarly when you come back out again you feel relief. In Outlast 2 you’re just going from one Alternate Silent Hill to another. There’s no sense of dread when it happens. Instead of “Oh no, it’s happening” it’s “Great, this shit again.” 

It would be interesting to see this psychological world transition concept fleshed out into its own horror game. It needs to stay subtle, no defined crossover moment. Maybe something like Jacob’s ladder. I imagine a game taking place in a mundane setting of everyday life and then it takes a sinister turn and you start seeing freaky shit. Borrowing the Vietnam War backdrop of the movie, the player would have PTSD episodes triggered by something and then your environment would change to reflect your twisted perceptions. Maybe you go to trim bushes or something in your backyard and then you turn around and find you’re stranded alone deep in the jungle with monsters signifying a distorted version of the Vietcong you remember fighting. Maybe you’re working on your car and you go under it with a flashlight and suddenly you’re back in ‘Nam exploring a VC tunnel system full of traps. The line between reality and your nightmares becomes increasingly blurred and you eventually end up killing your wife thinking she’s a monster or something. I’d buy it… then again I buy anything that’s horror.

Not until the end of the game do you get a clear flashback of what happened between you and the girl you knew in school. In it you are your child self and it plays out as an unaltered truthful memory so it’s odd to see this blood smear through the stairs door window I recognize from an earlier foray into the school, (you can see it in the image of the many armed man). Oops. I think the level designers forgot to clean that up.

There doesn’t seem to be any line that these games won’t cross. Rape, crucifixion, baby murder, baby birth, full frontal nudity, castration and even what appeared to me like a guy masturbating over a corpse… It was a nice little romp.

Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation is a first person survival horror game based off of the Alien franchise. You play as the now adult daughter of the movie franchise's main character, Ripley. You investigate a derelict space station, Sevastopol looking for the black box data of the Nostromo mining vessel which her mother of course destroyed and fled in the first movie attempting to escape the alien scourge which has now infested the very same station you are trapped on. So in the timeline this should be between Alien and Aliens while Ripley is still in stasis in the escape shuttle.

In case you're wondering how I feel about the Alien franchise going into this game, I've read the original book, I own the original movie trilogy and the AVPs (if you care about that,) I have a Nostromo T-shirt and my dog's name is Ripley. I've never played an Alien video game… and still haven't seen Covenant.

Isolation is heavy on sneaking and hiding. You hack computers, cut through metal hatches, force open doors and generally go places you're not supposed to go to do things you're not supposed to do. The alien is definitely not the only threat you have to worry about on your way.

There’s a long build up of quiet and isolation up to your first encounter with enemies. Four armed humans appear in a big room searching for me which is a bit excessive when all I have is a wrench. When I heard them coming I fled the room. I soon discovered that there was no way I could reenter and do whatever undetected to pick them off, (assuming that’s even possible to do.) There are utility panels in a lot of places in the game where you can turn on or off local utilities like air filtration, lights, sprinklers, loudspeakers, etc. Honestly I’m mystified as to how most of this shit can help me if it does. I only ever used them to open doors and turn off security cameras which is pretty straight forward. In this room I can shut off air filtration which will make the air cloudy which I’m going to guess will make me harder to detect. The problem is that there are no boxes anywhere near where I am and it’s not possible to reach one undetected. I had no distraction items in my inventory so I just sat and thought and sat and thought. I couldn’t even pull the enemies from the room and get them to chase me. Eventually I just turned the game off. When I came back The four people had spawned outside of their room just right there around the corner from the save point. They came at me in a conga line and I just killed them one by one with the wrench as they emerged save for the last one. What was that all about? A glitch or did the game just realize I was up shit creek without a paddle and gave me a leg up?

After that I had an encounter with the xenomorph it was short and uneventful. It was like an introduction more than anything.

The next area was my first real serviceable stealth test. The area is populated with numerous ‘Working Joes’ as they are called in the game. These are low grade maintenance androids kind of like a simple prototype of Ash from the movie(s). They certainly couldn't pass for human though. They look like demon possessed store mannequins and are one of the freakiest video game enemies I’ve ever seen. Their uncanny valley appearance combined with glowing eyes and an emotionless reprimanding of you for making them waste company time while they search for you so they can beat you to death just for being in a restricted area is effectively terrifying. They're stronger and more resilient than humans but slower. I think the best part about this is that once you get attacked by one of these you don't trust any of them for the rest of the game which now that I think of it mirror's Ripley's fear of the synthetic in Aliens that looks like Ash, (the android that basically got everyone killed.) I did pretty well overall on this part.

 It wasn’t until the second encounter with the alien that I really hit the learning curve brick wall. The alien comes out of a vent after you get a password off of the computer. Your objective is to find a specific ID card in the medical facility you’re in and then get out. If the alien catches you, you die. It’s invulnerable to weapons, is really perceptive in sight and sound and also runs faster than you which means remaining undetected at all times is pretty much imperative to success. You’d think you could just sneak out of the room and go somewhere else and your chances of encountering it would be lower. NO. Similar to the rubber band AI in a racing game which magically keeps you from getting too far ahead of the computer players, you will never be reasonably distanced from the alien. Even though it doesn’t sense you it’s always going to be meandering around within 15 yards of your location at all times. (At least in this place.) Forget looking for the fucking ID. You barely have enough of a window to pop out of one locker and into another a few steps down the hall before your motion detector shows a dire proximity to the alien again. Obviously you have to enter a hiding space before it sees you or you’re fucked. Sometimes it will investigate your hiding spot. The first time this happened a ‘hold breath’ prompt came up which I missed and then died. The second time it happened I passed the prompt but then a second prompt came up for ‘lean back’ which I failed and then died. It gives you like half a second to react. What a fussy bitch. The time after that the alien just went straight to ripping open the locker and killing me with no prompts. It hadn’t seen me or even entered the room yet. Yes, by my assessment it seemed to spontaneously appear in the room after I hid for the sole purpose of killing me. What the fuck? Have fucking mercy. This is ridiculous. It’s like trying to hide from God. I keep wondering if there’s more than one of them or if it can teleport because it's just always where you are. You can leave it behind in one room and run straight into it in the next as it exits a ceiling vent in front of you. I tried messing around with a utility box I found in a pretty dark and obscure little nook. I got impaled from behind with my back against the wall. How did it find me? If I can’t successfully interact with THIS without dying then what the fuck can I interact with? How is the alien coming out of a solid wall behind me? I can’t walk around. I can’t stop to pick up or read things. Hiding works about half the time. How am I supposed to accomplish anything? Some of the automatic doors just plain take forever to let you in too. Is there even any excuse for this other than to be a pain in the ass and potentially deadly? This is simple technology in supposedly the distant future. It would be impossible to find an automatic door in present day that comes even close to opening this fucking slow. Yeah it's probably just loading the area beyond the door but it's still bullshit.

I got into a discussion with a GameStop employee who asked me how I felt about Isolation. I told him, “It's kind of a pain in the ass.” He told me he never finished it and it's on his backlog now. And he said that the alien learns from what you do and adapts. When I look at the trophy stats for the game it shows that only 28% of players complete the game, (get the final chapter trophy.) The game is a legit pain in the ass but I did get better.

I’ve never failed this abysmally hard at sneaking or at a video game in general since LAX in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow which was one of the very rare occasions I abandoned a game and it was at the very end. I spent one entire gaming session just dying in Alien: Isolation like 20 times. I accomplished nothing except learning how to run and hide and what places were pointless to visit in the obnoxiously large area. Now that I know you can lean back while hiding I do it automatically. When I turned the game back on the next night I died twice in quick succession but then found the ID and escaped. I thought that was the end of that encounter but no. It's still skulking around for the rest of the chapter. The chapter finale gets pretty ridiculous. You're supposed to get to the elevator and leave the area but you have to run a gauntlet where not only the alien is lurking but men with guns who are looking for you. You don't even have to deal with the men. Just hide somewhere, count to twenty and they’re probably all dead because the same improbably cruel criteria for staying alive also applies to your human foes. (Combat and running is to the alien what premarital sex is to a murderer in a slasher movie. You do it around them, you're dead.) Suddenly they added vent openings in the ceiling that are instant death by alien if you just walk under them. They don't even show up on your detector. So you have to navigate through this dark area watching everything from the monitor in your hand to the hall in front of you to the fucking ceiling, stopping to scrutinize every single overhead square shape you see in the strobing emergency lights.

Eventually you get a flamethrower, (I like that they touched on all the equipment from the first movie: shock sticks, flamethrower, motion tracker.) The flamethrower is your ace in the hole for when the alien finds you. When previously all you could really do is scream, “Not in the face!” now you can hose that bitch down with napalm to drive it off, (or more like a couple of very frugal fireball button taps.) This could constitute an indefinite fix for continuing your mission for a while or the alien could come right back seconds later for round two. It's a crap shoot.


 Making progress in this game is often grueling. You move slow and quietly punctuated by long periods of hiding and then maybe you get killed and do it again. A lot of times the alien just won't go the hell away so you can move on. It has this tendency to just camp out near your objective. You might see it close on the detector or come in the room so you hide in or behind something and wait for it to fuck off but it doesn't. It's pacing around the room like it knows you're there and is just trying to wait you out. Sometimes it'll just go stand in the doorway. The worst is when it leaves and then comes right back in like it's going “Ah-ha!” It can do this for forever. Once after accomplishing a significant amount of tasks I decided to backtrack to a save point. On my way I had three or four encounters with the alien where I had to hit it with fire and two times where I had to hide. When I finally made it to the save point the alien came out of a ceiling vent and I had to drive it off with fire. It retreated to the vent only to come out seconds later. This time I hid behind a big column and we played ring around the rosie for like two minutes while I used the motion tracker to see which way it was moving so I could stay out of sight. I JUST WANT TO SAVE AND GO TO BED! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?


The game has a crafting system. You can collect parts and blueprints which allow you to create about half a dozen different gizmos. You can actually make a medkit. The rest are distraction, disabling or lethal depending who you use them on. They can all be thrown or planted so that they're triggered by proximity. The only ones I ever really used are the EMP device which momentarily disables uninsulated androids and the Molotov which can be used to scare the alien in a pinch if you're out or want to conserve flamethrower fuel because it depletes quickly and the more you use it the more resistance the alien builds to it. Everything else I may have used successfully once. Those noisemakers don't seem to draw enemies far enough away from me to actually accomplish anything.

The loading screen gives you tips at the bottom which is nice because it takes like a fucking hour to load the game. One of the tips is to listen to dialogue of survivors before approaching to assess if they're a threat. This is bullshit. You will never definitively know from listening to them if they'll try to kill you once you make yourself known to them because they're never going to say something as contrived as, “GRRRR, I'm going to shoot the first person I see,” or “Gee, I hope more survivors show up. I love new friends.” when I come across ANYONE or ANYTHING I automatically assume they're a threat. I've spent inordinate amounts of time listening and sneaking around people who ended up being indifferent to my presence. I've barged into rooms I thought were safe and gotten shot at. That time I tentatively entered a big occupied lobby finally realizing it was safe only to come back minutes later and get shot at. What is up with that shit? It makes no sense. Are these bad people that ousted the good people while I was out? Are they the same people but got angry at me for some mysterious reason? Why would I assume to recheck a room I'd already established as safe especially when I'm running from the alien and have my nose buried in the motion tracker. I can only really figure out the working Joes since realizing that their eyes are only red when dangerous.

The sound design in Isolation is top notch. In fact I think it won an award for it but I can't remember where I saw that. Suffice it to say that every sound made me feel like I was about to die which is great for a horror game.

 I like how well the game sticks to the retro futurist technology of the 1979 movie. You have a lot of monochromatic green computer screens and I love the big data chip you insert every time you use a save terminal. You get to talk to the main computer via keyboard just like Mother. You get to suit up in the bulky ribbed space suits with mounted lights. You even get to play a flashback where you enter the original derelict, (after the Nostromo team,) and see the Space Jockey. You see the adult xenomorph(s) plenty. You see eggs hatch. You see facehuggers hatching, crawling and attached. You see bodies cocooned on the walls. But strangely you never see a chestburster scene which is probably the most iconic thing about Alien. Even if you've never seen Alien you probably know about this scene. It's just something that's enshrined in pop culture. Hell, within it's genre it's arguably the most horrific thing in a horror movie. You get choked and faceraped by a giant spider, unknowingly incubate its egg and then an alien explodes out of your chest. Why would the game not use this?

 
This game really drags on. You just go from one issue or one foiled scheme to the next. It finally ended at about the seventh or eighth time I thought it was ending. There is bad luck and then there is moving the goalposts. When you're seconds from evacuating after getting the run-around for the last four hours and then get snatched away and cocooned in a mysterious location with the mission being go back to where you just were THAT'S MOVING THE FUCKING GOALPOSTS.

This game will definitely piss you off. Just when you think you've seen everything and have it figured out it throws you a curveball. You might not enjoy the game's cruel nature of kicking you in the dick, in fact I'm sure that's why so few finished it, but in the end the experience is at least undeniably very Alien.

Ju-On The Grudge: Haunted House Simulator

Ju-on on the Wii is as you would expect, a game based on the J-horror movie Ju-on, or better known in the US, “The Grudge.” Not sure why both the original Japanese title and its English translation made it into the game title. I guess they wanted to make sure everyone knew what it was. Anyway, it’s a first person “haunted house simulator” divided up into five short episodes making it a pretty damn short game. In each episode, you take on the role of a different person, (all in the same family being tormented by Ju-on,) who has to solve simple puzzles in an environment where the lights don’t work even though the elevator does. Meanwhile, creepy phenomena happen around you.

Sometimes you’ll have a face to face encounter with the grudge. Typically when this happens, it takes the form of a quick time event with arrows prompting you to wave the wiimote different directions. If you fail a single prompt, you die and have to start over from the begining of the episode. There’s also ones where you hide and have to keep the wiimote cursor within a shrinking/moving ring. The most difficult QTE’s are always toward the end of the episode which is just great in a one shot no checkpoints game when the complicated deadly thing is at the end. Oh boy, I know that the more times I have to go through a gauntlet of the same exact scripted events that I’ve already seen, the more scary and entertaining it gets.

When I first started this game, I automatically connected the nunchuck, expecting to be using the joystick for moving but no. The only thing you use is the wiimote, waving it around to steer, (aim the flashlight,) and the directional pad to move. Goody, directional pad in a 3D game. My fave. It works okay. Not great. Still doesn’t have shit on a conventional controller with dual sticks and you’ll still occasionally find yourself spinning around and looking at the floor for no apparent reason. The character walks excruciatingly slow. I guess this is to control the pacing of the episodes but it’s so annoying. Sometimes a noise will happen or something presumably appears out of my field of vision with a sting and I’ll just keep plodding along like nothing happened because it’s too much of a pain in the ass to turn around and look. It’ll probably be gone by then anyway.

At the end of a chapter, or when you die, you get a rating of how you did. There are two meters, the fear meter and the sissy meter. The completely optional objective is to keep them as low as possible. I don’t think you get anything for doing good but the game berates you if you do bad. This is an interesting idea. Too bad the way it’s implemented makes it completely dumbfuck inaccurate. The sissy meter as far as I can discern just measures time spent in the episode. I guess the idea is that a sissy goes through a haunted house slowly. But in practice in the game it mostly means that if you explore or get stuck for a while, it translates to you’re a sissy. That’s not even taking into account how incredibly slow your character moves to begin with. I like exploring. I want to be able to see all of the scares and find all of the secret items. Was that not more or less the point of it all? If that means a jaded horrorphile like me is a sissy, then fine. The scare meter has to do with your reactions to quick time events. I don’t panic during these. I’m always as accurate to the best of my ability, unaffected by anything happening on screen unless it’s visually interfering with the prompts. I do it quickly and precisely but with exaggerated gestures. I do this because there is a lot of prompts on screen and/or I don’t have faith in the functionality of the wiimote. If I appear panicky, it’s because I don’t want to do the level over again, you know, just like in every single other QTE that exists regardless of horror elements. So the game gives you a low score for taking too long when they made your character walk super slow and it gives you a low score when you flail around with a controller that is designed to be used by flailing around. Fucking brilliant, guys! The scientific community needs to be alerted of this new method of fear analysis! We’re on the cusp of a fucking paradigm shift here!

Oh and nice mirrored/reused textures too you lazy bastards.

I did get a good score once. It works like this: knowing exactly where to go and what to do essentially gives you a low sissy score. Being apathetic toward failure and death during QTE’s gives you a low scare score. If that sounds like the perfect storm of fun, this is the game for you.

Ironically this is actually one of the least scary "scary games" I've ever played. It has the potential but I think the mechanics and the presentation kind of kill it. It's very linear almost to the point of being on-rails, (if you could go back and forth on the rails. But I guess if you were really trying to simulate a haunted house, it would be linear.) The events are all scripted and you know which ones can kill you and which ones can't. Any deadly encounters are all settled on reactionary time instead of your combat or escape abilities. There is no sense of increased vulnerability like there is with a life gauge or dwindling supplies... unless you count batteries but that's much to simplistic.

Finding batteries around in the levels is necessary to progress. Think of it as life support. If you run out, you die. Typically the hardest thing is finding that second battery in the short time you get before your first one runs out. After that it’s usually not an issue if you keep your eyes open.

Episode four is the hardest. It has you play as a security guard at a mannequin research facility where scientists are making strides in the field of creepy mannequin placement in dark buildings. The power got shut off by something weird on the security monitor. You’re supposed to go to the breaker room and switch it back on but you can’t get in without the three number door code which you have to find in three pieces scattered around the building. Why the hell do I not just know the code? If one person in the building is going to know the code for the door, it’s the damn security guard. I was also disappointed that I wasn’t able to put in the code manually. If you have two out of three numbers and you know the order, you can easily guess the third by trial and error… if you can do it manually. The final QTE is just nuts and I failed it several times. Even after I passed it, I still wasn’t sure how I did it because it was not an effort of the conscious mind. Something else took over.

Everyone dies at the end of their episode but you are required to pass the final QTE just so you can live another five seconds and accomplish nothing further. Why do I have to start over if I die? What is the ultimate difference if I die now versus five seconds from now? Or hell, why not just die at the beginning of the stage? Then you should get a game over screen and the next episode is unlocked. Nothing matters. It makes no difference except maybe in the final episode.

In order to unlock episode five, (the final episode,) you must collect all of the torn pieces to all of the secret paper documents scattered throughout the levels. What did I say before? I want to collect all of the pieces? Well not now that I have to do it to finish the game. Now it’s tedious and boring.

I got stuck on episode five during the cat event. (Think Neo dodging bullets from agents but instead of shooting bullets, they’re throwing cats.) I couldn’t figure out the final gesture so I kept failing it. For the longest time, I thought it was just up but it’s actually thrust as in thrust the controller at the screen. Oh, sorry. I was confused because the arrow wasn’t three-dimensionally pointing through the screen. My first question is why is the arrow placed near the top of the screen where up always goes instead of in the middle where it could carve out it’s own niche? My second question is why don’t you establish what the gestures are before hand so that people can recognize them on screen? Up to this point in the game, I had gotten by with just the four movements on a two dimensional plane, up, down, left and right and those didn’t need explanations but when you pull this shit out of thin air, it’s confusing. It makes no sense to introduce two new gestures at the very end of the game.

Anyone else think Grudge Girl looks cute, like in some of the parts where she just grabs your arm? No? Okay…

It’s hard not to compare Ju-on to Calling since they have many similarities. I can say without a doubt though that Ju-on succeeds in being better than Calling. That’s not saying much since Calling holds the distinction of being the worst game I’ve ever played released on a major console. Ju-on can beat Calling simply by virtue of being a shorter game.

Cool World

This is another one of those instances where something came out in my childhood which caught my interest but I didn’t have the means of experiencing it. Then years later as a powerful adult with an internet connection and a jonesing to reclaim my childhood via expired media, I am suddenly reminded of its existence only to track it down and finally close the book on it, knowing once and for all that it’s shit. Thank you, Netflix.

Cool World is one of those movies that purposefully comes out around the same time as another movie with a similar premise but one is clearly better like Babe and Gordy or Armageddon and Deep Impact. This is Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cool World. Actually, Cool World came out about four years later so I guess instead of being developed in tandem, it was just being a johnny-come-lately.

This is the story about a GI who comes home from World War II to his mom, the only person he has in the world. He wins a shiny new motorcycle in a poker game and takes his mom out for a spin. They get in a crash and she dies. And then right there on the scene he gets transported to Cool World, a more low brow and adult version of Toon Town. Why him? Why then and there? Because a cartoon professor did it. Why? Because reasons. Because reasons will likely be the only explanation to around 80% of your questions during the course of the movie.

Flash forward to the then present day 90’s where Jack sits in a prison cell, drawing characters from his hit comic book series, Cool World. Herein lies one of the main ignored issues. Cool World is established later as an alternate dimension that is independent of our reality and has existed since long before Jack was even born. In Cool World he’s actually recognized as “the guy that thinks he invented Cool World.” So if he’s never been there, never seen it, how did he create something with the same name, same look and same characters? How is it that when he draws Holli Would in his cell, it’s actually also Holli Would in Cool World and it comes alive and beckons him into the paper Take on Me video verbatim? Next he gets spirited away into Cool World. Then what? We don’t know. How did it happen? What did he do in there? How did he get back out later? This scene has no reason to exist. All it does is establish that humans can travel to Cool World… which was already established. This occurrence gets totally abandoned as we cut to something else and by the time we get back to Jack, he’s being released from prison.   

Going back to present day Frank, he’s somehow working for the Cool World Police Department after deciding to stay there for about the last fifty years up to this point in time. He hasn’t aged at all. (No one ages there.) One of his usual calls he gets is to go cock block Holli Would, (the poor man’s Jessica Rabbit.) She keeps trying to get real guys to come to Cool World so that she can have sex with them. If a human fucks a doodle… Pfff, fuck-a-doodle-do… If they diddle a doodle- damn it. If a human has sex with a doodle, (there’s no way to say this with a straight face,) the doodle becomes real. Why? Because reasons. Why is it bad? Because reasons. They needed some kind of conflict so they pulled one out of their ass.

Holli wants to be human because I guess it feels better. But she doesn’t really stop to think about the implications like not being immortal and eternally beautiful. Though I never saw a single humanoid man doodle in her world and there's only one other humanoid girl so really what the hell’s the point in that lonely existence? Man doodle. Man doodle. I hate the term doodle in this movie. “Toon” is probably copyrighted though. The fact that doodles can turn real also begs the question what about all the shtty looking freaks that populate Cool World? How would it work for them? Why are you making me imagine a person having sex with this? Who would do that? How? What would that even look like as real after they presumably transformed?

Most of the cartoon voices in the movie don’t really sound like good cartoon voices. The characters that populate the world have a real spectrum of art styles going on. There are some that look like they’re from any old WB short, or a Little Orphan Annie or Mutz strip. There are people that look like they’re from Popeye and then there are people that look more or less anatomically correct and human-like in the style of Don Bluth. The world around them seems to flip flop between Burtonesque and Gigeresque which is a huge contrast to many of the extras. Why are there so many different styles clashing here? I really want the whole thing to look like a cohesive universe but it doesn’t. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Toon Town was just one big collective place where all Cartoons ever made lived together so it made sense for everyone to look different. But this is a world not created by a bunch of different people (or anyone) so there should be some consistency in the same way the show Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends has a bunch of different weird creatures in it but they are all within the same art style.

Also, I like zoot suit wolves as much as the next guy but I think the maximum effectiveness of their presence in numbers is probably somewhere around three. Any more than that is diminishing returns.

All that being said, this looks awesome.

I also like the movie props that are semi cartoon and semi real in that they appear to be drawn but exist there on a two-dimensional plain like they’re on the side of a board

Another problem with Cool World, the world, is all of the contrived zaniness. The entire place is in complete anarchy. The movie will be having a scene and shit will be flying around in the background or doodles are clobbering each other the head with hammers and anvils in the foreground. This isn’t a place where characters live out their lives and you can write entertaining stories about it. This is just Wackyland. I realize it’s a cartoon world but they’re just going “Hey it’s a cartoon world! Look how cuhrayzee everything is! Woooooooo!

Why the hell is Frank the main character? I mean he had the potential to be but he just has little stake in the conflict. He’s trying to stop Holli but that doesn’t come off as all that interesting because they never explain why what she’s doing is bad. The only real motivation here is that toward the end Frank thinks she killed his partner. Jack, however does much better as the unwitting protagonist and antihero. His story is more interesting what with him being incarcerated, having a personal connection by being the comic book writer that thinks he invented Cool World, making the mistake of getting involved with a crazy cartoon lady and then rectifying his mistake at the end where he was blatantly made out to be the hero. But no, Frank has to be our story vehicle for some reason. It’s like having to watch Star Wars through the perspective of Chewbacca. Yeah, you could do it, you could even make it work but it still would have been much better the other way.

So Jack goes back to Cool World and has sex with Holli. She turns real and the two of them escape back into the ordinary world. (Jack lives in Vegas by the way.) When they appear in his house it’s accompanied with all manner of electric light shows. His two female next door neighbors come over to check on him and find that he’s apparently just hanging out in his house with his presumably new really weird girlfriend, Holli. I really feel like these two characters should have been introduced earlier in the movie. They’re obviously closish friends who care about Jack but because we’re just now learning about them, this seen and their reactions to what’s happening don’t have quite as much impact.

So, they go out on the town. Holli has little inhibitions or social grace. Back in Cool Worldshe liked singing and dancing so that’s what she does here. Before long, both he and she start exhibiting this weird phenomena where they begin to flicker in between doodle form and real form… which look nothing like them. Jack looks kind of like Wimpy from Popeye and Holli looks like… I don’t know, some stupid fucking clown. Needless to say they are a little dismayed by their collective identity crisis.

Holli runs off and just happens to come across the professor from earlier in the movie, now in the real world incognito. He tells her with some coercion that to fix the problem she has to merge the two worlds by unplugging a nexus point that happens to be at the top of a big neon billboard. Yeah, apparently there are just random nexus points or portals that lead from one world to the other scattered all over the place.

Frank comes back to the real world for the first time in fifty years to go after Holli. Now something else has to be addressed. The human world and everything in it is referred to in Cool World as “real.” So that implies that our world is used to justify Cool World by it’s own citizens as false, fake or secondary. In other words it has to be an imitation of something that already exists and is thus unnatural or manufactured. Otherwise any parallel dimension is just as “real” as any other. So this basically contradicts one of the few things they dared to actually explain. Which is it? Was Cool World created or not?

So anyway, Frank finds Holli and sees her odd blinking condition and then remarks “It’s happening.” What? What is happening? You didn’t explain what this shit was before and you aren’t doing it now. It might as well have never happened at all because you failed to give it meaning.

On the chase up to the sign, Holli knocks Frank off of the building and he hits the cement. Holli opens the nexus and a bunch of doodles from someone’s bad drug trip come spewing out all over the city like an alternate version of Fantasia’s Night on Bald Mountain segment. Jack transforms into a doodle super hero in the style of John K, and starts beating the shit out of everything, eventually fixing the nexus and restoring balance between the worlds. In the process he becomes trapped in some weird doodle limbo with Holli which is his dream and her nightmare.

Frank, who you write off as dead already, gets dragged by his unrequited love, (who wasn't worth mentioning up to this point,) back to Cool World where she actually watches him die. But that’s okay because they also forgot to mention that when you die in Cool World, you become a doodle and then I guess live forever. Because who gives a shit about things like exposition, foreshadowing and rules? If a conflict ever arises in your story, immediately resolve it with whatever you can make up on the spot. Or just forget it exists entirely. That’s always an option. This should have played out like the scene from American Horror Story where the girl gets hit by the car and her mom comes and frantically tries to drag her to the haunted house property before she dies so that she’ll be a ghost there. But in order to create a good scene like that, you have to ESTABLISH THE RULES BEFORE HAND. She acts like she knew this fact all along but conveniently forgot when it became important.

My final unanswered question is this: could he now cheat death by having sex with a human thereby turning back into a live human? I have to admit that as unclear and nonsensical as everything in this movie is, it sure does leave plenty of room for the viewer’s imagination.