Friday 31 August, 2018

Picking back up from where I left off I found out that I was not in fact done with creepy long arm dude. Instead I had to run through the vents while he was reaching for me through the cracks. Interestingly enough it was after this that you are put into your final confrontation with the long-armed monster where I was actually interested in the game play mechanics that were chosen here. The challenge for them being how to do you fight against something when you have made the game where your only controls are to move and grab things. So, I was quite impressed when they set up this encounter where your first idea would be to climb and run away, but then you can see that the bars of the cage bend and it may give you the idea, for me it took a while, to pull the cage bars and as logic would have it you basically disarm the long-armed monster.

However, you’re not free as the next scene give you a glimpse of the next monster you have to face off against, which by the looks of him and the fact there are meat hooks going in his direction I can only assume is a cook. Of which I instantly predicted that I was going to see some humans either being stored away like raw meet in a freezer or I was going to literally see these people getting used as cooking ingredients. What I saw next though felt a bit like foreshadowing that you are getting more and more monstrous with how you get food for yourself, as this time when we get hungry we latterly kill a rat which was foreshadowed in the times that we got hungry the last time. As I got closer to the area that reminded me of a food cafeteria I was just waiting to see what your first encounter with the cook would be like. Following the blood on the floor to the kitchen I saw the big boy himself who isn’t as blind and easy to dodge as the blind one. He caught me very quickly and instantly went about cooking me up. After sneaking past the cook and climbing into the rafters I found out that now there were two cooks that I had to evade for the next part of this game. Which from an artistic standpoint it’s interesting how they chose to almost make them look like twins and make the connection even greater by making them look like two halves of the same monster. I continued to progress until I reached the point where you are tasked with creating a sausage link long enough to swing into the next area with. Which posed the question, was I going to have to put a body into the sausage grinder to get to the next level? Luckily, I didn’t have to do that, but as I got into the next area I got to do the same old song and dance with the monster’s brother. This one was actually grinding one of the human like things in a grinder, but at this point I was getting a little desensitized to the whole feel of the human meat processing plant vibe. My last run against the cooks was hoping onto the meat hooks to safety which was really fun actually cause of the horror elements of having no other options but to run away as fast as I possibly could. Once I was out and away I got the achievement for the kitchen level and I was out of there.

For the Kitchen level I felt like a lot of the gameplay was the same for each cook. Honestly speaking, looking at what the game had been thus far just from mechanics alone it was a large amount of repetition without many new mechanics being added in per level. With the long arm guy it introduced the idea of distracting the monster with an item that made a noise, but not much of anything new for the cooks. The only thing that I could think was possibly added was having to go around the zone to find multiple items to solve the puzzle like with the sausage grinder, but with it only being used that one time I was questioning if it was just that one puzzle or an attempt at another mechanic.

Great job Lee! You bring up a lot of super interesting points, especially concerning the ethics of including such dark material in a game. One thing I found curious was the parallelism you draw between yourself and the rats you eat. In your second log you point out that you feel like a mouse being chased around by monsters, and in your third you mention that "you are getting more and more monstrous with how you get food for yourself." Can you be one monster's rat and another rat's monster at the same time?