Saturday Morning Gaming: Returning to the House of Hell
I wasn’t allowed to read stuff like Stephen King when I was a kid. He wrote about stuff like demon-possessed cars and zombies and vampires and corn and supernatural stuff and Mom didn’t want me to fill my head with that garbage. So I had to be sneaky. If you checked out two books from the library and mom asked “what did you check out?”, you’d have to name both books. But if you checked out TEN books from the library, you could start listing off five titles and she’d smile and nod after you said the fifth one and jump to the stuff she liked reading. (It was always best to check out a Dr. Doolittle book or something like that so Mom would talk about how she read Dr. Doolittle when she was a kid and not ask about the eleventh and twelfth book hiding at the bottom of the bag.)
Well, one of the books that I never, eeeeever, would have been allowed to check out was Steve Jackson’s House of Hell. I mean, it’s got Hell RIGHT THERE IN THE NAME.
And, yeah. It’s something that might be okay for a 15-year-old to read but it was FREAKIN AWESOME for a 12-year-old.
Well, I haven’t read the book since Reagan was president and saw that it was on sale on Steam and… heck. Let’s go back to Steve Jackson’s House of Hell.
The basic idea in the book is that you are driving down a dark road during a bad storm and your car ends up in a ditch. Luckily, you see a house in the distance and you go there hoping to use the phone and maybe stay out of the rain until morning.
Unfortunately… THIS IS THE HOUSE OF HELL and you, instead, get to enjoy trying to survive the night in a haunted house full of ghosts and bad guys and silly little traps. Here, check this out:
Yeah! Let’s drink it!
Game over.
Now the game does let you drop bookmarks wherever you want and you can always go back (just like real life!):
But start over, find a new way to die. I touched some keys, for example, and they were red hot. I failed my luck roll and I yelped and the guards found me and dispatched me. Start over.
Now that I’m in my early 50s, it doesn’t have that whole “forbidden fruit” thing going on that sweetened it so back in the 80’s… but it’s nice to go back and play it again.
So… what are you playing?
I succumbed to the temptations of the Steam Summer Sale (after you waved temptation right in my face) and picked up Celeste, a decade-old game that was highly-rated and on sale for two bucks and in the “metroidvania” category, my favorite. So far it’s enjoyable enough, but someone put it on the wrong shelf — it’s a platformer but not a Metroidvania in any way I can tell.
Also returned to Return to Monkey Island yesterday after a several-month break and am now close to the end (I think).Report
I need to get back to Return to Monkey Island. I got to the point where the world opens up, visited a few islands, then got sidetracked. Hopefully I can figure out what I am doing whenever I return.
I have been playing a lot of Elden Ring. I am glad I gave it another shot. I have beaten the Grafted guy and the Library Witch with the weird singing kids. Now I’m at the place with the weird ten-fingered hands. I have done a lot more exploring this time. It is the most rewarding open world in that regard. In a lot of open world games, you just find a bunch of collectibles. If you get enough, you might get a reward. In Elden Ring, the exploration itself is usually pretty satisfying, but you also get more tangible rewards, more often than not. I guess I prefer finding actual items to finding collectible 34/500 or whatever.
I also got Riven Remastered, which is playable in VR. I finally sat down with it yesterday. One of the issues I had when I played it before was navigation. On the original version, I had trouble figuring out how things connected, since it was just moving from a static screen to another static screen. Since the new version has seamless movement, things are much more cohesive for me. Even if I don’t actually finish the game, just experiencing the world in VR is worth the price for me.Report
The weird hands are my least favorite monsters in the game.
Even some of the bosses that I fought several dozen times are able to get me to grudgingly say that maybe they’re okay… but those hands manage to balance being uncanny with being annoying.
(And the Library Witch with the weird singing kids? That is my favorite boss in the game.)Report
Re RtMI, sounds like you hit the pause button about the same place I did. It was a little investment of time to catch back up (and it had been a long enough time that i didn’t get a couple of later references to the first part of the game), but as is often the case with these things, what at first seemed like a huge map with too many possibilities ended up being quite manageable.
Just finished the game (I didn’t totally solve a couple of the last bits, just experimented enough and lucked out). It was a fun trip down memory lane.Report
Incidentally, if you just want to read the endings of stuff like this, there’s an archive of them here:
https://www.tumblr.com/youchosewrongReport