Never in my life have I felt so used by a game. Feels dirty. The video game equivalent of emotional abuse.
5 stars, would recommend.
Never in my life have I felt so used by a game. Feels dirty. The video game equivalent of emotional abuse.
5 stars, would recommend.
If you want more psychological horror emotional abuse, try Echo, which gets frequently compared to DDLC. It’s set up like a gay furry visual novel to start with, but it’s more like Night in the Woods where the paths are who you hang out with instead of who you explicitly want to “date”. As the story progresses it gets extremely dark. I could only do one of the paths before I had to look up the others because I’m too much of a chicken.
Fair warning that it’s a slow burn to get to the rough stuff, but the story is solid and it’s humorous on the way so it’s not boring.
Edit: I hadn’t played Echo in a few years so I went to the wiki to refresh myself on the story and it is a lot more tightly-written and lore-heavy than I realized. Each “path” has a different story with a subset of the lore, so you need to play all of them to begin to understand the full picture. Even by playing all paths I think you’d have to be observant to connect some of the mysteries though. There’s also a sequel, a prequel, and a prequel-prequel(?), which all presumably contribute to the lore. I see there’s a giant Let’s Play of most of it, which I think I now feel compelled to watch at some point. It would probably be less spooky to experience it with other people in control.
I just finished Echo and Arches last night and holy shit.
Echo is a bit odd with the pacing, the choices and a general vibe of “this was made up as they wrote it.” It wasn’t particularly scary, either. Meanwhile, Arches, knocks it out of the park. The main story is pretty scary, and then the “alternate reality” part makes for a good buddy cop type show premise with a horror twist to it; I wonder if the author plans to do more with that whole thing. I saw them post about how they really like writing Devon and Cameron, so I hope to see more of them in the future.
Now I’m about to start up The Smoke Room. Echo Project is awesome. Might as well also check out Adastra while mentioning them. Not horror, but emotionally harmful still. Lol
Ugh, I feel like there’s no way I could do Arches if it’s way scarier than Echo. Maybe if I only do it during the day. I’m fairly sure when I did Echo I played it into the night and regretted that. I do feel like dipping back into it all for the story though. I think I’ll try the let’s play series at some point to start with.
Well… Did you think the monsters were scary or Brian and Duke? Because Arches has less supernatural horror and more of the realistic kind, and with the whole romance between the main characters along with the themes of PTSD and trauma, the action sequences are so much more visceral and realistic.
Moreso the supernatural stuff for me. The other stuff was dark but I wasn’t checking for Brian under my bed.
Oh shoot my partner and I started that and got a good way through and completely forgot about it! The writing is very good. I’ll re-ass that to my list!
Auto-correct or Freudian slip?
Either way, I’ve assed “re-ass” to my vocabulary list.
Oop, autocorrect! Hahaha