A Look at Silent Hill: Townfall

 Having recently been introduced to the Silent Hill series, the more psychological/Lynchian horror series compared Resident Evil's action-horror theatrics, via the SH2 remake, I've been curious about the series and other entries within it.

While Silent Hill f released only a... few months ago, I think, they already have the next game in the series announced an apparently coming out this year. Townfall, like f, takes place in a different town, this time a place called St. Amelia, which is a remote fishing town on the east coast of Scotland (there was a little documentary about the studio, Screen Burn, which is based in Glasgow, going out on road trips to real towns to base St. Amelia on, including a shot in-game that perfectly replicates one harbor-side street in a real town).

In the trailer, we're given some obscure hints at the plot: Simon Ordell is told by a woman that he can't stay in "that room" forever, and he resolves to return to St. Amelia to "set things right." He seems to wake up in the water, climbing onto a pier in the town. One thing that's particularly notable about Simon (while the game is from a first-person perspective, we'll evidently see him in cutscenes) is that he has an IV tube in his left hand, a needle sticking into the veins, and a hospital bracelet.

If I may do so, I know this series is all about its big plot twists, and my immediate thought was that Simon might be in a coma - that the exhortation for him to not "stay in this room forever" might have referred to a hospital room. Is he kind of astrally projecting to St. Amelia, then? Just putting this here in case I'm proven right.

The game makes a few changes to the formula: the action is in first person, as mentioned before. There's also a curious change to the classic Silent Hill radio. In this case, you actually have a portable television (for those kids who don't remember life before smart phones, there was a time when you could have a really crappy little TV that you could walk around with that had a tiny screen). One of the game mechanics is that you can tune the CRTV, as they're calling it, and at certain frequencies, you'll be able to detect monsters.

Among the monsters you encounter, we've seen a weird axe-headed creature wandering around. I couldn't tell if it was simply because of the perspective, but this might have been an enemy we see Simon fighting off with a thick bit of wood, though the creature looked mostly like a Lying Figure from SH2 to me (I think it might just be that if the axe-head were straight on it would be hard to see in the brief shots of it). Another monster of some sorts seems to pull its chest open, to reveal a snaking medical tube and needle, the kind used to draw blood (or, you know, to put an IV in).

From the dialogue, Simon sounded American to me, but that might have just been from a small sample size. The other character we hear is definitely British (though English, I think, rather than Scottish).

Anyway, it seems pretty cool.

Moving on to the Castle: RE4 Shifts from Folk Horror to Gothic Horror

 Given its beloved status, it's always funny to me when I chronicle my journey through a game (in this case a game's remake) that has been out for a quarter of a century or so. I was around the target audience when it came out (at least in terms of demographics) but I was scared of the gore and horror of it.

Anyway, finally experiencing Resident Evil 4 in its fancy, modern incarnation, it's been pretty interesting:

Beating the evil priest (whose name I do not recall) sent me on from the game's rural village setting in which it starts to a grand medieval castle, where I'm taunted by a creepy little in-bred (one assumes, though he's also probably got the weird Plaga parasite) aristocrat.

Actually, let's talk about that boss fight:

(Just looked his name up) Mendez has of course been an implacable force in the game - not long before we have this fight, we have a segment where we need to flee him with Ashley, starting with him only like ten feet away, and then a bunch of Genados (I don't know that I've actually seen this term used in-game yet) getting in our way. I died (or got Ashley killed or captured) far more here than I did in the actual boss fight.

The fight itself has two distinct phases, taking place in a burning building. The first allows you to climb up to a loft where his attacks can be usually pretty easily either parried with your knife or dodged with a quick evade. From this angle, you can hit the creepy parasite eye growing out of his back and then leap down for a nice critical hit if you stun him. The second phase, he sets that loft on fire and starts jumping back into the burning rafters to throw flaming debris at you and also, occasionally, barrels of explosive oil, which you can shoot to do a bunch of damage to him.

The lack of a dodge button really messes up my muscle memory - you just need to run to make sure that the debris doesn't hit you. Anyway, he'll occasionally jump back into melee range, and I found that running forward so that his attacks would go past you was the safest bet. It took two attempts to take him down, and I collected his false eye to sell to the Merchant.

Anyway, the castle has been gothic excess to the extreme, which is super fun. Resident Evil has always been more in the sci-fi horror territory, with its evil pharmaceutical megacorp Umbrella as the big bad of the first three games, but my understanding is that all of that 80s action movie stuff is wedded to these classic horror aesthetics, like the big haunted house that is the first game's setting.

Folk Horror is obviously the real touchstone of the game's first act, with these bizarre villagers burning a police officer alive and attacking Leon without warning. The various sieges (I can think of three - the opening village square, later when we meet up with Luis, and then when we're attacked by a pair of chainsaw-wielding ladies along with a bunch of other Genados) reinforce this subgenre, which always kind of plays on people with strange beliefs turning into predators stalking you as prey.

Going into the castle, in addition to throwing you into what is effectively a siege where you're the one attacking (there's a second El Gigante you have to kill with a cannon that is wearing a mask like that one Uruk-Hai who blows up the wall at Helm's Deep in The Two Towers,) but it's also here where Ashely briefly gets separated from Leon after the parasite drives her to attack him.

Gothic Horror, I think, is very much focused on the fear of becoming the monster, and Leon and Ashley's parasitic infections are, of course, terrifying because it could presage their own transformation into these horrible tentacle-headed monstrosities (oh, also, I've encountered a more powerful version of the exploding-head Genados that can do a one-hit kill, which is fun).

Anyway, there are plenty of tense set-pieces. One involves sending Ashely up to raise a bridge where you have to kill like, twenty cultists trying to capture her (a few also attack you, but that's mainly so they can drop ammo). I found myself quite good at taking them out with headshots with my handgun, but I was truly nearly out of ammo by the end of it.

In contrast with the Silent Hill 2 remake I played last year, RE4 for sure puts you in positions where you could potentially be helpless, running out of ammo and potentially breaking all your knives. I think the game is generous enough, and the enemies aren't too spongey, so that you are unlikely to hit that point. I've found that a tactic I like to use is to hit Genados in the leg and then do a melee attack to preserve ammo, but this rarely takes them out anymore. The Bolt Thrower is a decent default weapon, though the Riot Gun, my newer shotgun, is something I'd like to use all the time, it's just that there's not enough ammo.

I think I must have hit some important central location at the castle, because the Merchant shop has another elevator to his shooting gallery. Getting B grades isn't too bad, but I haven't really tried for A grades - I'm hoping this mini-game isn't too necessary.

I also unlocked more weapon upgrade ranks. I wonder if there even is enough money to get them all, but I know that the game will refund most of the cash you pour into upgrades if you sell a weapon, which I take to be an invitation to try them out. I sold my old handgun, for example, which had everything up at the previous max of 3 ranks of upgrades.

I've gotten a little more liberal with green herbs - typically I try to get a green/red/yellow combination and then pop it when I'm in dire straits to not only fully heal myself by also increase my max HP. But healing items are not super plentiful - it is a survival horror game, after all - and so I'm focusing as best I can on not taking damage.

Once Again, I Think the Abandoning of the Block Model Does the Latest Magic Set a Disservice

 Lorwyn is back for the first time since it debuted in 2007.

I actually missed it the first time. I've played Magic the Gathering in kind of three distinct periods: one from Fallen Empires through Tempest Block when I was an elementary school kid (and I guess my first year of middle school,) again briefly in college for Kamigawa, Ravnica, and Time Spiral (before a certain MMO took over my online gaming interest) and now my current era in MTG Arena once it came out for MacOS and iOS in 2020, which actually makes this current period the one in which I've played the most continuously (though I think there have been some gaps there).

Anyway, while Ice Age and Alliances had the beginnings of a block structure (much later they'd release Cold Snap to finally finish the trilogy off) Tempest, I think, was the first true Magic block, with three sets released over the course of a year that told a singular story (that of the crew of the Weatherlight journeying across the plane of Rath).

Subsequent years would hold to a similar structure, with Urza's block, then Nemesis block, then probably the most famous of them, the Invasion block (MTG's first giant climax storyline, which killed off nearly all of its important recurring characters - something WotC seems utterly allergic to nowadays - I don't think killing off characters is always necessary to establish the stakes and import of a plot, but boy did the March of the Machines really pull its punches after feinting toward killing off a number of planeswalker characters - frankly, it feels kind of weightless, even if I'm glad to have a post-post-Mending ability to see non-planeswalkers go to other planes).

Invasion block was followed by Odyssey and Onslaught block, establishing a new cast of characters and sticking with the bold mechanical themes established in Invasion (where Invasion was the multicolor block, Odyssey was the graveyard block and Onslaught was the first major tribal block,) the next block, Mirrodin, which coincided with the new card frames that technically debuted in 8th edition (and MTG's 10th anniversary) gave us a new plane that was connected to its central theme: artifacts.

The next several blocks had this recurring concept: a new plane, and on that plane, a new mechanical theme, with Kamigawa's legend-focused mechanics and Ravnica's two-color guilds.

Most blocks were three sets - you had the initial establishment of the mechanics, and then an evolution of those mechanics perhaps with a few more added in, and then a third set that often remixed the mechanics that had been brought in.

Lorwyn came in following Time Spiral and took the tribal theme from Onslaught block (Fallen Empires did it first!) and actually came in as a four-set block, which itself was two smaller two-set blocks. Lorwyn, we discovered, was only half the plane, while Shadowmoor was its dark reflection. The same tribes existed in both halves of the plane, and so there was cohesion between the sets, but there was a dramatic shift in tone - such as the tight-knit Kithkin, who were basically like Hobbits in Lorwyn, becoming xenophobic hive minds in Shadowmoor.

Cut to 19 years later, and we get a return to this plane, with an excellent Jim Henson-company-produced puppet music video. But for the past several years, Magic has not done blocks. Instead, each set is essentially independent. Even in cases where there have been sets taking place on the same plane one after another, like Innistrad's Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow, there weren't really any mechanical throughlines that held between the two.

I've talked in the past about how I think this leads to a homogenization of the standard format over the years. In the next three years, you can be pretty confident that there's not going to be continued support for a Kithkin-themed deck to grow and develop. Indeed, within this same standard format season (which was expanded to three years a couple years back) we had Bloomburrow, a world of anthropomorphic animals that also had a tribal theme, but it's not like there are a lot of "Mouse matters" cards that have come out since then, so if you've got a Mouse tribal deck, it probably hasn't changed a lot since 2024.

But I also think that a world like Lorwyn/Shadowmoor kind of demands to be represented in multiple sets. As someone who didn't play the block back in the day, when I look through my cards, I don't really register which side of the divide they're on. Yes, there's a cool cycle of legends who will swap which half of their world they're on each turn if you spend a little mana, but it all kind of gets lost in the shuffle.

And, again, because we've got so many other sets (including a number from other IPs - I was excited for the Final Fantasy set but in retrospect feel like that was a devil's bargain) it further dilutes how much immersion I feel in any given plane, from both a mechanical and flavor standpoint.

I will say, we've gotten some amazing original settings, and we wouldn't have seen so many of them had it not been for this shift. But there's a part of me that also would love if we had spent, say, a year in Eldraine, a year in Ikoria, a year in Duskmourn, and maybe we were still looking forward to the space opera of Edge of Eternity.

I realize I'm shouting into the wind here: MTG apparently has been raking in tons of cash with the influx of Universes Beyond into the standard format - I think the game made something like a billion dollars in the past year or something.

But the older I get, the more I wish that companies weren't motivated purely to maximize profits. I think the world we live in would be a lot better if the endeavors (business or otherwise) that people took on were to make the thing that was truest to their creative goals. I've always been blown away by the Magic creative team's ability to come up with all these exciting fantasy worlds and characters to populate them, and I just wish that they got the time they needed to breathe.

New Control Resonant Trailer Has Topsy-Turvy Urban Gravity-Shifting

 

Well, it's coming out this year, but we don't know when this year.

Our first trailer dedicated to just gameplay, we're given a glimpse of what Dylan's journey across a warped and weird Manhattan will look like.

A few takeaways:

I get the sense that Resonant might be a little more action-focused - Dylan seems to have to fight off a number of monsters en route to his mission objective, and while that certainly happened with Jesse, the first Control game was, I felt, more about exploration interrupted by bursts of action.

We see what appears to be Hiss (or maybe Hiss/Dark Presence hybrids, as the monsters seem to be more inhuman like Emil Hartman was) as well as some Mold Infected along his route.

Dylan is seen shifting weapon-types rapidly throughout combat. While I'm sure this is a developer with intimate knowledge of the systems trying to show it all off, I'm curious to see how fluidly we can play.

It's said to be an "early" mission in the game, and Dylan already has a lot of abilities, including what seems to be the ability to hover (a pretty late-game thing for Jesse).

The Shift ability that they showcase allows Dylan to hop to surfaces that aren't parallel to his own ground and change gravity - we see him hop onto a wall, making that "down" for him, and when he fights a foe, it seems he has the ability to shift them off of that plane of gravity to send them falling sideways.

Enemy design looks like it's getting a lot more diverse, which is awesome (though I suppose we'll see as the game goes on).

"Resonants" appear to be the game's major bosses. In the announcement trailer we saw some posters for what looks to be some kind of dance show called "Parting," and that seems to then be the focal point for this actually rather human-looking boss.

We see signs for a Casino, a Hotel, and a Theater in similar neon lights. Casinos aren't a think in New York, but it does make me think of the Oceanview Motel and Casino, the Place of Power from the first game, and of course its Oceanview Hotel seen in the Dark Place (which... maybe is the same place? Honestly, if not for the familiar name, the Hotel in Alan Wake II might have seemed no more notable than Caldera Street Station or Poet's Cinema).

We seem to have a friendly woman on the radio named Zoe. Is she an FBC agent? I don't remember any Zoes in previous games.

The game's UI seems to retain a lot of its look from the first game - I'm eager to see all the environmental storytelling and document-hunting that I enjoyed so much in the first game.

Symmetries seem to be a major motif - the road leading to the dancer Resonant is mirrored, with smears of blood creating symmetrical patterns that look almost like an intentional design.

Anyway, I'm really excited to have more morsels of this game, one that I've been really looking forward to since playing the first game three years ago (and I'm a newbie, others have been waiting seven years! Not quite the same wait as we had for Alan Wake II, but still!)

D&D's Warlock and the "Dark Mage" Archetype

 Arguably, this could also be considered a Diablo post, given that the inspiration for this was the announcement of the new Warlock class for not just Diablo IV, but also Diablo Immortal and even Diablo II (which has a relatively recent remaster - they're not just rolling this out for a 26-year-old game out of the blue).

Anyway, when not viewed through the lens of any particular RPG system, the terms Wizard, Sorcerer, Mage, and sometimes Witch and Warlock are more or less interchangeable, though I would say that the latter two carry a certain tonal connotation.

When I was growing up, Witch and Warlock were more or less the feminine and masculine, respectively, terms for the same thing: a kind of dark spellcaster (this isn't particularly historical: while I believe most of the victims of, say, the Salem Witch Trials were women, there were some men also accused and executed, so "witch" is not strictly a female term). But I think that in this era, at least outside of the hyper-religious communities, there's been a real reclamation of the term "witch" to connote a kind of feminine mystical power that pre-dates patriarchal cultural impositions. The fact that witches are typically women, of course, has always carried with it this kind of implication that it's a power that doesn't fit neatly into the patriarchy, and so embracing "witchiness" as a rebuke to a culture that denies power to women makes a bit of sense.

Warlocks, on the other hand, being either ungendered or even masculine in connotation, can kind of safely live in that "truly dark" connotation.

The irony, then, for D&D players, is that Warlocks are not, actually, strictly "Dark" in the same sense.

D&D defines its spellcasters more by the manner in which the magic is attained and practiced than its aesthetic and association with any particular supernatural alignment. While the Warlock does, probably, have more dark-coded features (things like "Agonizing Blast" or the Pact of the Tome giving you a "Tome of Shadows") you can actually quite easily play an angst-free Warlock, such as one with an Archfey patron that might be, say, a benevolent fairy court, or even an angel.

Warlocks, rather, leave the door open for a darker, more cynical or scary source of power, in part because the assumption is a transactional relationship with one's patron. You can play a John Constantine-type character with a Fiendish patron while still being a good guy - you've worked out a deal in which you get that power, but it's possible that this deal had you outsmarting them, rather than submitting in some way to them. In other words, you might not have a soul bound for the Nine Hells through some infernal contract.

While I think that the direct relationship with your patron is a really exciting and interesting one for RP reasons, I also think that the relationship need not be totally direct: I think a Warlock who has uncovered a connection, or even stolen relics or secrets from their patron in some way can work well too: the key is that the Warlock has taken power from elsewhere - unlike a Sorcerer, it's not a superpower inherent to them (though I think you can blur the line a bit - if a Sorcerer didn't inherit their powers from their ancestry but got it by being exposed to some sort of energy, they could have a somewhat similar backstory to a Warlock).

The one challenge here, and one that I think can be tough to figure out as a new player, is that Warlocks are not an intelligence-based class.

In a lot of other fantasy RPGs, the warlock archetype is often depicted as the one who discovers secret, forbidden rites and rituals, magic that is banned by more respectable mages, and that it is the secrets that a Warlock knows that are really the thing that sets them apart from other casters, both in terms of capability and also social acceptability.

The truth, though, is that that archetype, the "Dark Mage" archetype, is honestly better handled by, well, the Wizard in D&D. Wizards are, of course, the "classic mage" class, and probably better than any other class fit that standard "magic user" archetype, with spellbooks and scrolls and such.

And so, our Dark Mage, the one that hold all these arcane secrets that are forbidden, for instance, by any reputable magical institutions (or are maybe only granted to those initiated into its innermost circles, in the case of a perhaps corrupted institution) is more, in D&D, of just a Wizard who picks nasty spells to learn. Certain subclasses lean into this: the Necromancer Wizard, of course, is a pretty classic "Dark Wizard," (though I'd argue the Necromancer is a slightly different archetype than the Warlock - you'll note that they are different classes in the Diablo series).

I do think Eldritch Invocations are meant to represent some of those "dark secrets" that the Warlock has access to, and indeed the entire strange nature of their spellcasting, unique compared to all other classes, is meant to make it feel truly different and transgressive, in a weird way. But the nature of the class, being a Charisma caster, means that it feels like it's less aligned with that "I know dark and hidden secrets" as a source of power.

Warlocks do have a handful of unique spells, some of which can be pretty good (obviously Eldritch Blast is designed to be the best damage cantrip in the game, though its benefits of course don't necessarily kick in until you invest in souping it up a bit).

In the early "One D&D" playtest, they toyed with the idea of changing which stat Warlocks used for spellcasting depending on their Pact Boon - Tome would actually not even get Charisma as an option, having to choose between Wisdom and Intelligence (my very first D&D character I came up with, with a Tome written into his backstory, would likely go Wisdom).

I honestly don't know that 5E really has the mechanics to fully embody, on a class-design level, this "Dark Mage" archetype. But the good news is that you can pretty easily accomplish it simply through RP, backstory, and flavoring your spells.

Frankly, a Conjuration Wizard (wonder when we'll see the revised subclass actually printed for 2024 D&D) could be a very good demonologist-type, perhaps picking up Summon Construct to start off with some kind of frightening-looking effigy and then getting Summon Fiend in tier 3, flavoring a spell like Fireball as hellfire and just having all their spells involve dark runes and blood on an aesthetic level.

RE4's First... "Boss" Beaten, and Exploring the Lake

 I had been worried after dying several times in the opening village segment of RE4 that I was going to struggle the whole game. To be fair, when a game has really captivated me, I've been willing to put up with a brutal wall, like Central Yharnam in Bloodborne, for example (though that might be the extreme - the oddity being that now, with so much experience in that game, I now find that opening pretty easy, even if I stop to fight everything).

What I'm finding kind of interesting is the way in which RE4 plays in both one-way paths and revisits. I came back to that starting village square, only for the bell tower (which is a bit of a trap even if you go in there the first time) and was able to use a key to get into one of the desks, but I think I still need Ashley to get into the damaged building.

I'm finding myself with more weapons than I can reasonably use - I bought the SMG but haven't actually used it. I'm currently focusing a lot on the Bolt Launcher and the starting pistol, which has such ample ammo that it always feels like a reliable option.

Comparing this to the other seminal survival horror remake I played recently, RE4 has way more "systems" than Silent Hill 2 did. This, combined with the more action-movie tone of it, has really made me feel less, well, horror than I did playing SH2, even when peoples' heads are exploding with some kind of big tentacle parasite thing.

I'm given to understand that in the original Resident Evil, the zombies you took down early in the game can rise up as "Crimson Heads," and so there's actually some incentive to, when you can, leave the zombies alive and just evade them. I don't think it's the same mechanic at play here, but it does seem that taking down a foe sometimes causes them to start wriggling, and then you can do a quick execute with your knife (which costs precious durability, of course) to prevent them from rising again.

This version, though, has them just a little more erratic and, you know, having to fight an enemy you've already killed. The new foes have their heads fully explode in gore and a bunch of horrifying lashing tentacles come out.

I don't love seeing Leon torn apart in brutal ways when I die. Gore is my least favorite aspect of the horror genre, and the one that honestly holds me back more than anything else when it comes to embracing it. Comparing this to Silent Hill 2 and Alan Wake II, those games were focused far more on the psychological horror elements (though I'd argue the story more than the enemies themselves in AWII did that. AWII does actually have some nasty gore when you blast away at Taken, but it's all kind of a surface thing - bits of exposed muscle and bone on their bodies but still all held in the same shape).

There are sidequests and minigames, and I'm not sure how much I'm going to have to invest in these to make it through the game. I took an elevator at the Merchant's lakeside shop and found a shooting gallery game. I was able to get B grades in each, which gave me enough tokens to get a charm for my attache case.

It's actually only now, on chapter 4, I think, that I've managed to hit a point where I'm running out of inventory space, though I also just bought another upgrade. I'm tempted to put another of my weapons in storage (I also just got a new pistol, but it's not upgraded at all, and so I'm tempted to stick to the starting handgun, which I've poured a fair amount into). I like having the rifle for long-range kills, and I like the Bolt Launcher/Thrower (whatever it's called) for its efficiency (though having only three shots per reload is not great - might upgrade that). The Shotgun I actually don't use as much as I expected to, but it's nice when I need to pour a lot of damage onto a dangerous target. I also think that blowing a foe's head off might prevent them from rising again.

The new issue, not related to the game, is that my PS5 controller has developed a very slight drift on one of its joysticks, which I only noticed when I opened the map and it started zooming out on its own. Sigh.

Saved by the Bell, and Onto Chapter Two in Resident Evil 4

 Well, coming back to it after my first several unsuccessful attempts seemed to do the trick. RE4 begins, famously, with an entire village coming after you, and you have to just basically run and evade as best you can, maybe taking out a villager here and there to make an opening, until the church bells ring and everyone suddenly becomes chill and leaves you alone.

Given my experiences with the Silent Hill 2 remake, I assumed I was on a somewhat linear path and would never return here, but after struggling to figure out how to get into a locked desk and up a wall into a high window in an otherwise-locked-off building, I realized that this was going to be a bit different: online, I saw the game described as something of a Metroidvania.

Tonally, it's funny: the game is certainly scary in a kind of physical threat sense, and I know that the body horror gets cranked up to 11 as the truth of what's going on here is revealed, but truly, coming off of SH2, this is far, far more like an action movie.

Following my first foray further into the chaos, I discovered a tied up man named Luis, the first friendly NPC since the doomed Spanish police officers who brought me here. Before we can even get him untied, Leon is thrown into a wall by a big guy in a priestly get-up and then injected with some horrific parasite.

Waking up, there's a quick section to help you hone your knife skills (I seemed to do it all right, getting a good parry off and taking the other two enemies in this area with stealth kills). Then, we finally meet the Merchant, and have something to spend all the money we've been collecting.

This felt like a reasonable stopping point, but I felt the drive to go and do a second of the Merchant's quests, taking out three rats in the previous small area. These evidently grant Spinels, which are traded to the Merchant for unique items.

It seems that scrounging valuables will be useful, as the guy can sell us ammo and even upgrade our weapons - I evoked Troy Barnes here and got a new rifle and upgraded the durability of my knives (which I was going through like crazy - I'm hoping/assuming this applies to all my knives and not just a single one, which would seem kind of pointless as an expense).

The key is that after that big village fight, the other combat encounters I've had have been far more reasonable, rarely more than like five foes to face. I'm sure that this ramps up over the course of the game.

The story is playing pretty coy: Leon has a woman in the chair back at "HQ" wherever that is, and even after he's captured they don't take his communication equipment. I know from pop culture osmosis that Leon's there to rescue the president's daughter, and that a good chunk of the game is a big escort mission, but so far his actual goals are left for us to wait for more exposition.

Anyway, getting past that first hump, I can start to feel the appeal of the game's core gameplay loop.