A Bit Further Into RE2: The Complex Escape Room

 Well, this is interesting:

After our initial prologue arriving in Raccoon City, at least in Leon's campaign, we find ourselves in the RCPD headquarters, an elaborate building that once was a museum (and I believe was built by the same architect as the mansion in the first game). This helps justify the sprawling and dramatic architecture.

It also gives the game an interesting structure: It's a big escape room.

Now, I'm still pretty early in the game, but I've noticed how much stuff I just have to pass my and note for later. For example, there's a locker room in which all you need is a code for each locker to open it up, but you need to replace some of the buttons in it to get access. Finding one button allowed me to open up the lockers with a 2 in their number, but I'll need another to open up any with a 3 in them.

My sense, then, is that the objective of the game is largely to just get out of the RCPD, though this might only be the game's first act - that being said, as a game from 1998, it's possible that it's a fair bit less epic in scope (we do, after all, have Claire's whole game to play here - which I'm given to understand is similar but different).

Interestingly, one of my frustrations with RE4 was all the points-of-no-return, where I figured I needed to progress further to solve some optional puzzle or finish some task for the Merchant, only to discover that I couldn't go back and do it (I never got the tile puzzle in the village, for instance, needing just one more tile).

Here, though, it seems that the entire thing is built around "you don't have the thing you need for that yet" and backtracking is a huge part of the game (the limited inventory is also a factor).

Interestingly, it reminds me of the old Sierra adventure games I played, like Space Quest. These, to be fair, were often fairly linear, but it was primarily about figuring out how to use various inventory items to solve puzzles. I got, for example, a roll of film to develop in the darkroom, but it seems I need some other chemicals to finish the job.

So far I don't think I've encountered anything other than your standard zombies, but boy are they tanky, and they often play dead only to rise up later, even if you hit them with nothing but headshots (and like, five bullets right in the dome). I did get a glimpse of what I believe is a Licker, which I know are infamous.

Anyway, I already have two of the medallions for the goddess statue in the main hall (a strangely pagan image for a Midwest city, though a couple tweaks and she could be simply Justice,) which to me implies that this is only our starting "big puzzle we need to solve."

Separate Ways Completed: And Now, A Journey to Raccoon City

 I beat the Ada chapter of Resident Evil 4, which serves as a kind of "sidequel" that shows the events of the main game from Ada's perspective. One of the interesting wrinkles to it is that the final boss is not really the last challenge - from Leon's perspective, we free Ada and then she turns up to toss us a rocket launcher to finish off Saddler once and for all. In this, we need to play through her rapid fight across the scaffolds of the big rig while Leon's fighting. With a sharp time limit (though I think I finished with a minute to spare) I was focused less on killing enemies than getting past them.

Anyway, Separate Ways is all well and good, but obviously a lot shorter of a campaign than Leon's main one.

Having beaten it, I decided to put RE4 to a rest and boot up the Resident Evil 2 remake. Right off the bat, there are some interesting differences: The Zombies are spongier than the early-game Ganados in 4. While I did get a combat knife after the first little excursion into the halls of the RCPD, I'm curious to see how much we can get away with using melee here - every time I get even close to a zombie that isn't incapacitated with a bullet, they grab me, and pre-knife, at least, that's guaranteed to take off a chunk of my health. We'll see if I get the chance to cut short such grabs with the knife like I do in RE4.

Still, the overall impression I'm getting is that avoiding foes is more often the right call than killing them.

As horrific as the Plaga parasites are, maybe I just got desensitized to them. The zombies are pretty standard horror movie zombies, but there's a somewhat more apocalyptic feeling here, you know, like a zombie movie, which is what they're going for.

I'm only like half an hour into the game - I was rescued by presumably doomed Lt. Branagh, who seems very pale and is clutching what I assume is a zombie bite wound. Now, Leon's gotten bitten plenty here, but presumably the lore of the game's zombie virus is that it's not, like, a guaranteed conversion if you don't then die. (I know part of the story of the upcoming RE9 is going to have an older Leon suffering from "Raccoon City Syndrome" as one of the few survivors. Man has had some nasty things attacking his body).

I actually initially meant to play Claire's campaign first, but they were listed with Leon first, and I'd just played a fair amount as Ada, so I was willing to go back to our favorite boy scout with boy-band hair. The two meet up early on, but are separated when their obvious route back out of the city is cut off by an exploding tanker truck.

I am bracing for a much simpler set of gameplay systems - RE4 was released when games were definitely heading in that "more is more" attitude toward game mechanics, but it looks like crafting, melee attacks, and any real sense of in-game economy are going to be out. In place, it seems that the RCPD is built more like a big puzzle-box (somewhat akin, I assume, to the Spencer Mansion). Even a big location from 4 like Castle Salazar is still a somewhat linear experience taking you through it, while I get the sense that a good chunk of this game is going to be figuring out the central medallion puzzle in the RCPD lobby.

That's kind of fun, honestly.

Still, I had one of those moments where I had jumped into a new game so shortly after finishing an old one that I realized I needed to take a break and digest what had come before.

An Explosive Ending to RE4, and Now... Probably More Resident Evil

 Ironically, the final boss of Resident Evil 4 is the one that I never died to.

Saddler, the evil cult leader intent on using the US President to spread mind-controlling parasites to the globe's populace (so... RFK Jr.?) undergoes a monstrous transformation and we fight him on what seems to be a big oil rig.

The fight, which I imagine is not too dissimilar to how it worked in the original (though without any quicktime events) has you blasting away at eyeballs on his new vaguely arachnid form to stun him so that you can get a critical knife attack in his... er... mouth-eye. Other than the top half of his old human face, there's very little human about his appearance anymore.

The final phase of the fight felt pretty simple - he becomes a mass of tentacles with a central eye/egg in which perhaps some remnant of his human form sits, and I just shot it a bunch of times with my sniper rifle until Ada tossed me a rocket launcher to finish the job.

There's a last-minute (well, 2-minute) escape sequence in which we run out of the island facility. There's one scary moment with a Ganado that comes after us, but most are writhing in pain with the death of the hive mind monarch in Saddler. We get on a jetski for the second half of this, and while we have some falling rocks to dodge, I don't think the intent here is to be at all challenging - it's a cathartic moment of explosions and speed.

After the Krauser fight - the real fight - in which I died maybe seven or more times (I actually had 14 deaths total in that chapter, which is I think over three times as many as I died in any other chapter, but there are some other hazards there) I was actually expecting to really struggle with Saddler, but maybe it was dumb luck or just a fight that played to my strengths, but I seemed to do exactly what I was supposed to.

The ending of the game fully transitions us out of whatever horror existed, the transformation from the folk horror insanity of the game's opening into this full 1980s-style action sequence completed.

The game is good, though I do think that it does suffer quite a bit after leaving the castle. Other than the sequence that introduces the Regeneradors, which has that real Umbrella "evil science" feel, the military vibes of the island don't really lend to a sense of creeping dread. I've already written about this, so I won't belabor the point.

I've started "Separate Ways," which was evidently a bonus campaign unlocked after beating the game originally, but is now a DLC. I got the whole Deluxe Edition for 12 bucks on the PS Store, so it was well worth the price.

Here, we see the events of the game from Ada's perspective, playing across familiar locations but in a different order and with different tools. Ada has a grappling-gun which lets her play a lot more with the verticality of spaces, at least when the game lets you.

The game mechanics are largely similar - we meet the Merchant and will want to trade him treasures for big chunks of money to immediately spend on upgrading weapons. Given that I never really used it in the main game, I've decided to focus Ada on her TMP submachine gun. Of course, I don't think you can really focus on just one weapon, because you'll run out of ammo quickly enough.

Ada is, of course, also a tonally different protagonist from Leon - she's a mercenary, and only stirred toward heroism against her better judgment. The fact that she's working for Albert Wesker, RE's perennial big bad (though I think he was definitively killed off in 5 - though I would not remotely put it past them to revive him in 9 or some later game) does not reflect very well on her, even if the post-credits scene from the main game does see her realizing just how deadly the thing she's getting for him could be, and has her abandon the job and take her dominant Plaga sample somewhere Wesker can't get to it.

Still, there is some fun to be had in following Ada's journey - we see that she's the one who rings the bell at the beginning of the game to stop the village fight, and we see what happens when she shoots Mendez to distract him from Leon in the village chief's house.

The pace, of course, is accelerated, and I've been struggling to gather the pesetas to spend on all the upgrades I want for her (stupidly, I dumped some resources to try to make room for the crossbow weapon only to send it to storage anyway because I forgot that was an option).

So far, the DLC has been in familiar locations, though I'm given to understand it's not exclusively so.

Anyway, even when I'm done with that, I shan't be done with ResE so soon - I found that the RE2 remake was available for just twelve bucks on the Playstation Store and figured I'd give that one a shot as well. Umbrella and Raccoon City are elements of the series I've been aware of for decades, so it'll be nice to see what it's like (I'm given to understand that, at least between the remakes, 2 was better-received than 3).

RE4's Final Act Leaves Something to Be Desired

 I know that Resident Evil games have a tendency to trade out their gothic or otherwise more classical horror in favor of modern sci-fi terror in their final acts. I wonder if this always accompanies a downgrade in the sense of atmosphere.

I'd known that getting to the island in RE4, which is basically a combination laboratory and military base, was known as a step down for the game, and I must sadly report that this is not wrong: we leave the moldering village and gothic castle in favor of a kind of generic island military base, more the kind of setting for a James Bond mission.

It's not that things aren't scary: this is where we encounter the Regeneradors, and even worse, later on, the ones that transform into Iron Maidens. These are monsters that have multiple parasites inside that can only be seen with a vision-limiting thermal scope and can only be hit with weapons that can penetrate flesh. These guys feel of a piece with the horrors dreamt up by the Umbrella Corporation, and while one is involved in among the most frustratingly difficult parts of the game, where you need to protect Ashley from Ganados coming in to take her away from behind a barred barrier while also fighting off one of these Regenerador/Iron Maiden combos. Initially, I was struggling because I was so low on supplies, so I wound up backtracking all the way to the Merchant, sold my magnum (which I was basically never using) and got a bit more ammo and armor, and even then, I wasn't able to put enough damage into the Iron Maiden's head-parasite and wound up killing it just by having Ashley release her hold on wheel that was holding up a bridge that it was standing on. This was only possible because the Ganados coming after her are evidently finite in number, so I was able to dodge the Regenerador long enough to take out the four or so Genados and then just ran back to her. I imagine I missed out on a gem or something for killing it conventionally.

But while these creatures are truly terrifying, much of the action on the island is just that - action. And the difficulty actually ramps up - I actually died more to the final Krauser fight far more than I have at any point in the game, and the giant race across the island has you fighting an absurd number of Ganados that then requires the game to give you tons of ammo, and it doesn't really feel like survival horror.

Weirdly, I actually think survival horror works best when it's honestly not that difficult - it works best when there's tension, and bursts of action-movie violence aren't really about tension as much as spectacle.

Comparing it with the, you know, other two survival horror games that I've played, I'm thinking about how Alan Wake II and Silent Hill 2 handle their final acts:

Backing up: I think ending a horror story is always difficult. Stephen King, a true master of the genre, doesn't always have the most satisfying conclusions. The creeping dread is really fun to establish early on, and drama typically works best with rising tension, stakes, and action. But what does that escalation look like?

In Silent Hill 2, the final "dungeon" is not all that dissimilar to the rest of the game, but the growing sense of dread is what is growing as James gets closer to his damning realization. But I think one of the ways in which you sense that it's different than before is that, unlike the Apartments or the Hospital, the Hotel starts off looking normal, even nice, but progress through it reveals more and more the state of disrepair and ruin that it's in. But unlike the stark transition into the otherworld, there's this terrible implication that the nice lie of it is the Otherworld, and when the truth is shown to us, the hotel's state of utter ruin becomes bare to see - not as the hellish, rust-filled night world, but as a bleak bright morning light on ashes and pain.

Alan Wake II does give us a giant spectacle with the Dark Ocean Summoning sequence, but as cathartic as it is (though I also found it kind of difficult, and thus not quite the hell-yeah moment that it was maybe meant to be) it's also undercut when we find out that it didn't work, or at least didn't work the way we thought it would. The final challenges are instead the surreal Eternal Deerfest, Saga's Dark Place Mind Place, and another chase with the Dark Presence now in the form of Alex Casey.

In both cases, the tone and overall feel of the genre is of a piece with the rest of the game.

With some exceptions (like the lab where we first encounter the Regeneradors) RE4's Island just kind of doesn't feel like the same game anymore.

I'm still eager to get to the end. I, sadly, think I screwed up the final Merchant request (meaning I failed to complete this one, as well as one I failed to find in the village) by going through a one-way door out of the room with the last blue cult emblem. I can't think of any major characters to deal with other than Sadler (though I feel like Ramon Salazar had a weird insectoid brute that worked for him that I don't think I ever fought).

Still, I'll say that I think the Village and Castle parts of the game were impeccable.

D&D As Survival Horror

 I don't know that I'll necessarily be able to run a true survival horror RPG. My friends, I think, are drawn more to the power fantasy, the high-stakes set-pieces, and the character drama.

Matt Colville has said in the past that D&D was originally a survival horror game, and MCDM's "Crows" aims to take the DNA of their heroic fantasy game Draw Steel and rework it in all the ways that will make for a tough, brutal survival horror dungeon crawler (Draw Steel famously doesn't allow heroes or monsters to miss, while Crows, at its early stage of development, will always allow for bad luck to screw you - casting a spell can potentially open a rift to hell or some such dimension and instantly kill your character, though extremely rarely).

As I've been playing Resident Evil 4's remake (which is, admittedly, a more action-forward entry in the genre, with foes often dropping ammo - a purist could make the argument that it's less survival horror than just an action game with gruesome elements) I've been thinking about that idea: D&D as survival horror.

It's not the first time I've given it some thought, but here are some ideas:

Recovery:

The adventuring day in D&D is a really important resource, and I think if there's one real failing of the 2024 DMG it's guidance on how much adventuring a party ought to get up to in a day. To be fair, I and many other DMs ignored the advice in the 2014 DMG. Complaints that 5E heroes are too powerful might not have been so strong if we were sending our players into the utter slogs that the DMG suggests on a daily basis.

Long Rests almost totally reset everything, even more in 5.5, where even hit dice expended fully recharge rather than only getting half your maximum. That means that a D&D character can more or less go hard every single day, but it also raises the following challenge: if you have a dark and scary dungeon, the optimal strategy for players is to just go in, fight something or do some other challenge, clear a room, and then leave the dungeon and rest outside.

A party might decide to rest inside the dungeon, relying on a cleared room and maybe using spells like Leomund's Tiny Hut (if the room's big enough) or Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion (if they're high-level) to prevent any interruption of their rest.

And even if they don't have that kind of fortification, DMs are forced to do some extra work to create monster patrols to assault the party while they're resting.

And even then, here's a question for you: if the long rest is interrupted with a 3-round monster fight (basically 18 seconds in-game) and the party prevails, they can continue their rest. Unless it was a truly grueling fight, do you, as the DM, feel like you've really made the dungeon feel scarier? Is it really all that much tougher? And are you going to send the same patrols of monsters against them again to show how truly nasty and scary this place is?

Let's look to Survival Horror. One of the big things in the genre (or at least in the three games in the genre I've played) is that there's no single moment that just resets your HP to full (actually, there might be, but they're relatively invisible). Recovery, of ammo and of HP, or any other resource, is something you need to work for, and every error you make - a missed shot or taking damage when you can avoid it (and the deal the games make with you is that you can avoid taking damage) means some little bit of your overall cache of resources is diminished when it might not otherwise have been.

So, what we need to do is make recovery a resource that is not so easily regained.

In D&D, an eight hour rest is what you need for a long rest. Officially, you also need to eat a pound of food per day (and drink some amount of water - a gallon, maybe?)

Let's totally rewrite that rule:

Instead, let's say that a "long rest" is a "full ration." We take time out of the equation (this might complicate things later, but we'll address it) and actually allow an adventure like this to take place over one long and terrible night. The key, though, is that "long rests" are now a consumable item, rather than an activity you can take.

Next, we ban spells like Goodberry or Create Food and Water - spells that conjure food would, of course, eliminate the scarcity that we need. Indeed, if we didn't ban these, the optimal thing would be to cast Goodberry, eat one of those goodberries immediately, and then have 9 left over with all your spell slots.

Short Rests... might be able to work as they normally do, but what I might do is institute a cap on how many short rests you can take. In Baldur's Gate 3 (not a survival horror game) you can only take two short rests before you need to take a long rest (long rests do take up resources, but in my experience I was never unable to take another ten long rests or more after any that I did take, the resources being so plentiful). Naturally, classes like Warlocks, Monks, and most Fighters get nearly everything back on a short rest. I think instituting either a one or two short rest per "full ration" might balance this right.

Difficulty:

One of the other hallmarks of Survival Horror is a certain pressure to execute things perfectly: with no regenerating health and often limited ammo for your weapons, you can't just go whole-hog on enemies with overkill and just shrug it off. You're always trying to take enemies down in the most efficient way.

But, again, the games give you the tools to do this.

Now, D&D has an element of luck, always: it's not a "skill" based game in the way that video games test your manual dexterity. The most wonderfully optimized character might get screwed by the dice.

I think the key is this:

Combat should be low-difficulty. But it should be arduous.

Now, this plays into our recoveries: If we think of the game as being divided into chapters or sub-dungeons (I do think this style of game lends itself to something of a mega-dungeon crawl) we might only let the party find sufficient rations for everyone to get a long rest (though there's certainly some potential challenge to giving them, say, only one ration at a time and forcing the party to strategize on who gets it) after completing a major chapter - to use Silent Hill 2 (remake) as an example, maybe they don't find any rations from the moment they enter Woodside Apartments until they get to the apartment where they hide in the closet right before going to Blue Creek Apartments, and then from there only getting full rations for the whole party after the first fight against Pyramid Head.

But, here's the thing:

Every individual fight they get into should be easy. Like, maybe lower-difficulty than the 5.5 DMG's "Low difficulty encounter balance" math. Like, maybe for a party of four 1st level characters, like a single Zombie.

See, there's a good chance that that single zombie isn't going to even hit anyone in the party before they kill it. A Zombie only has 15 HP (huh, they nerfed it from 2014. Never realized,) and a very low AC. But with Undead Fortitude and just the fact that a 1st level character is probably doing at the absolute most 15 damage with a hit (that's max damage on a Greatsword with +3 to Strength) there's a good chance that that Zombie might survive long enough to take a swipe or two at the party. Maybe one of those hits connects, and at that point, 1d8+1 (oh, maybe not a total nerf, this used to be 1d6) is pretty nasty for just about any 1st level character.

Now sure, there's a good chance they kill the thing before it hurts anyone. That's ideal - that's their goal. And they might favor long-range attacks to make it even less likely for them to get hit. All good.

But you throw like fifteen such encounters at them, maybe mixing it up occasionally - there's two zombies now, or the zombie's in a narrow, twisty corridor, so the only real way to get an angle on them to hit them is by getting up close - and that starts to really add up.

See, I think Survival Horror as a genre lives not in the frantic, desperate moments with boss monsters that can kill you in two hits (though that has its place). I think the genre really lives more in the moment where you're like "damn, I screwed up that fight, and now I'm totally out of ammo, my health is super low, and I'm just desperately trying to find some healing item before I encounter more monsters."

There was a specific moment in Silent Hill 2, in the Otherworld Hospital segment, where I spent a good 10-15 minutes in a state where I had zero ammo whatsoever and was probably one or two hits away from death, frantically trying to open every drawer and cupboard for that delicious health drink.

This is the feeling you want to cultivate in D&D as survival horror - the Cleric is out of spell slots, the Barbarian used their last rage, the Sorcerer has one spell slot they're saving for a Thunderwave but only if they can get three monsters in the area, otherwise it'll feel like a waste, and the Monk is sitting there with 3 HP left hoping desperately that they won't encounter any of those ghouls who have two attacks and might bypass Deflect Attack if they hit twice.

Attack Resources:

So, what about ammo?

The survival horror games I've played have all been in basically modern settings (give or take a decade or three) where the main kind of weapon people use is a gun. Diminishing ammo is a challenge for all involved, and when you look at the single shell in your shotgun and find yourself realizing that using that will only mean having to swap weapons when the monster doesn't go down in one blast, it adds tension.

In D&D, only archers (well, ranged weapon users) really ever worry about ammo. Spellcasters are pretty happy to use cantrips (though I've actually tended to use True Strike with a Light Crossbow on my Wizard since converting to 2024 rules - 1d8+1d6+5 is actually a bit better than 2d10 from a Fire Bolt) and so ranged combat is not really limited.

This is an area I'm a little hesitant to screw around with that much: I think getting rid of damage cantrips, or putting some kind of ammo-like limitation on them, would be getting a little too far into the guts of the game's balance. Cantrips are not as good as a martial character using a weapon, and that's by design (Eldritch Blast, when tricked out with things like Agonizing Blast, comes quite close - but technically it's not going to keep up when magic weapons get involved, not getting the damage bonuses of a +X weapon).

But that's actually kind of great: martial characters are supposed to be better at two things than casters: they're supposed to have better single-target damage (which they don't, really, if you start considering things like Conjure Minor Elementals) and they're supposed to be more sustainable, doing their full damage potential or near it without expending resources.

The thing is, I think that most campaigns (or at least most that I've been in) focus so much on big set-piece combat encounters that this sustainability never really has a chance to shine (and the fact that resting is relatively easy, as we discussed above, means that it's rare that players are really forced into situations that demand sustainability).

Again, in Silent Hill 2, one of the elements of the game I loved was the melee weapon (first a wooden plank and then a steel pipe). Giving the player a melee weapon that would never run out of ammo or require repairs - something that James always has available to him - gives the game's designers the license to take everything else from him: the game never has to worry too much about letting you run out of all of your bullets because you always have that back-up option (an option you're likely to actually prioritize because of the potential for conservation).

I think leaving those cantrips, leaving those martial characters with their powerful weapon attacks, gives you, as the DM, license to hold off on granting the players any recovery items. You can let the players run out of spell slots.

Timing:

Ok, here's our next thing:

In D&D, a lot of spells and other effects (like Rage) last either one minute, ten minutes, an hour, eight hours, or twenty-four hours.

I don't know that this works for us.

One minute is actually fine: the real meaning of a one-minute-duration spell is that it lasts until combat ends. Combat takes place in 6-second rounds, and so a one-minute spell will last 10 rounds in a game where combat rarely goes beyond four or five rounds (for really epic fights).

But the others are trickier: because I've never encountered a DM who actually tracks things minute-by-minute in a dungeon. Functionally, what's the difference between a 10 minute spell and a 1 hour spell? The game doesn't tell you how long it takes to search a room, or how long it takes for you to walk down a corridor.

When in combat, walking speed is typically 30 feet, which is roughly three miles an hour. Can you walk three miles worth of dungeon corridors in the time that a Charm Person spell lasts? Well, probably not, because the dungeon is full of obstacles, traps, and monsters.

I think, then, you need to start thinking about what these durations are meant to mean, much as 1 minute means "one combat encounter."

If we think about it this way, we can propose the following:

10 minutes maybe means "it'll last as long as we're in this room, doing stuff."

Now, this can be a problem, because what is a room? Are we talking about one solitary alcove with nothing but a faded fresco that is like a 10x10 foot square? That seems like it shouldn't take that whole duration. But at the same time, if it's some massive cavern with a giant insect hive in it with various monster-filled mine tunnels catacombing through the walls, that feels like it's maybe too much.

I'll be honest, I don't have a great solution here, but I think that a place to start with is:

1 minute translates to one combat encounter.

10 minutes translates to exploring one fairly large room.

1 hour means exploring a level of the dungeon.

8 hours means exploring an entire sub-dungeon (what in a normal campaign would probably be a whole dungeon).

24 hours means... probably not the whole campaign, but maybe an entire "act" of the campaign.

The key, I think, to communicate to the players, is that we're not saying that "this is the amount of time it takes to do these things." What we're doing is replacing the idea of a time-based duration with more of a "progress-based" duration. A Barbarian's Rage (in 5.5) should be able to help with some kind of jumping puzzle or some challenge that requires lifting heavy things or even making use of Primal Knowledge to do other tricky checks - but it's meant to be there to last that entire challenge, and once it's completed, the rage ends, the resource is expended.

Mage Armor is supposed to basically set a Wizard or Sorcerer up as if they're wearing +1 Studded Leather armor for the day - they invest that spell slot into having halfway decent AC. You give them a good chunk of the dungeon to enjoy it, then.

This, I think, also solves the issue with "long rests" being replaced with recovery items: if it were purely time-based, casting Detect Magic right before noshing on a recovery item would be a pretty strong move, but if a 10-minute effect is only for the room you're in, it might not be so overpowered.

Notably, some spells and effects might need to be revisited: Detect Thoughts can be used in a social encounter (and if we think of 1-minute spells as being "per encounter," that can extend to social ones) but it can also be used to detect hidden enemies, which is more of a "room searching" function, so this might require us to classify it a little differently.

Level:

I think running a game like this is definitely going to work better at low levels. For the most part, I find D&D starts to really hum in its sweet spot in tier 2, but this might be a mode of play that could make tier 1 really interesting: but only if you have full buy-in from your players and are really up-front about wanting to run a survival horror variant of the game.

The genre need not dictate difficulty: Survival Horror games are not inherently harder than other genres, and I think it's a key attitude you need to have when running something like this that the players doing well and even getting lucky is actually fine. The tension in horror is there when the characters are under threat of death: paradoxically, dying in a horror game is a release of that tension. The horror, the real juice of this thing, is if you can get them right up to the edge, like where I was with James Sunderland in that hospital, any minor thing like a mannequin hiding a little too well or a lying figure belching out bile faster than I could dodge could spell the end. And then, maybe even better, drinking that health drink and realizing that, well, I'm still out of bullets.

Out of the Castle, and Into, I Think, More Sci-Fi Territory in RE4

 The Castle, which seems to comprise kind of the second act of Resident Evil 4 (I believe of three,) is my favorite area of the game so far, but has my least favorite boss. Ramon Salazar is a little shit, but when Leon tries to get over with the fight quickly by shooting him multiple times (including in the forehead,) he returns as a giant monster with a massive set of mandibles.

Here are the things that make him an annoying fight:

There's only one very narrow weak point to hit (it only now occurs to me that he might still take damage when hit elsewhere, and I wonder if that would have made the fight easier) that is only open to target extremely briefly before he does a massive and hard-to-dodge attack. Second, he has an instant-kill attack he can do if he gets in melee. This is why I died to him like six or seven times, I think all of my deaths (except maybe one or two) came from this move.

It's a shame, because the Castle is such a very cool part of the game - gothic excess, lots of puzzles, and I've got to be honest, I didn't hate the part where we play as Ashley armed only with a blue lantern to freeze the parasites-in-armor (I know there's a name for them, like Armaradors or something).

Anyway, there's a fair amount of plot-induced losing Ashley, including right after our segment playing as her, and at this point, the escort-mission part of the game seems at least for now on hold. I'm given to understand that the remake worked hard to make her AI (remember when that wasn't such a loaded term? We're not talking LLMs here) less annoying - while she will get grabbed by enemies sometimes, it tends to only happen if you let yourself get swarmed, and she's pretty good at ducking out of the way of your line of fire.

The castle is pretty good, though there's a somewhat less exciting part at the end in which you are thrown underground into the mines below the castle, where Ramon's ancestors kept the source of the Plagas sealed - Ramon's the worst, and unleashed it for Sadler (Saddler?)

Anyway, while Ashley is missing and in the clutches of the cult, we team up with Luis, the former Umbrella scientist trying to make good. It's a brief arc, where Leon gets to have a kind of snarky banter, only for dear Luis to get knifed in the back by Leon's former CO, Krauser.

In the prologue, we're told that Leon was seemingly blackmailed/forced into joining US special forces, and one assumes that Krauser was the one that put him through his hellish training. We have a knife fight with him, which was honestly easy enough that I didn't feel that bad about reloading my save after not finishing one of the Merchant side-quests in the mines and doing the fight again.

Krauser leaves the battle unfinished, and we get a last little moment with Luis. The guy gives us a drug to suppress the progress of the parasite in Leon's body - setting the game's ticking clock back a little (though not yet for Ashley).

Anyway, we go to rescue Ashley from Salazar, but Krauser takes her on ahead while we fight the little (not so little anymore, I guess) monster.

Then, we hop in a speedboat with Ada Wong and head to some kind of island fortress. While I've barely scratched the surface of the island, it feels like a dramatic genre shift. The foes here are armed with more technologically advanced weapons, including one of those boar-mask-wearing brutes who has a freaking machine gun. Up until the point, ranged enemies have tended to have nothing but crossbows. There have been signs of technology throughout, but occasionally you can be lulled into thinking you're a 21st century soldier in a 17th century village. Now, though, a giant oil refinery looms in the distance.

And hey, this is, as I understand it, Resident Evil's classic formula: a facade of supernatural horror behind which lurks sci-fi terrors that are all too modern (even if they're pretty ludicrous, conceptually).

I'm given to understand the game is something of a three-act structure, and this marks the beginning of that third act. In retrospect, I probably would have been more thorough in the Village part if I had known I wasn't going to be able to come back. Currently I'm sitting on a super-valuable crown but don't have all the gems to fit into it. I'm also thinking of selling off some weapons I don't use very much to see if I can max out my upgrades on the ones I do - I hope the rate of money acquisition on the island ramps up (I did get what I assume to be the final Attache Case upgrade).

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.

My First Resident Evil

 Having watched Monty Zander's series on Resident Evil, and especially after downloading and enjoying Marina Ryan's concept album made in tandem with Zander's video essays, and to top it all off, seeing that the RE4 remake was on sale for just 20 bucks on the PS store, I decided to finally dive in.

The game was a noted departure for the series, bringing in the 3rd-person shooter mechanics (and I think popularizing them across gaming) and moving out of the Raccoon City vicinity to a remote region of Spain.

The remake looks fully modern - the dark forest into which you come across the village the game starts in feels real in a way that old games could never really pull off. But at least mechanically, I'm finding that muscle memory from games made in the 20-odd years since this came out have been betraying me - I keep trying to dodge incoming attacks (like in the Silent Hill 2 remake) only to realize that that's not a thing - if I want to not get hit by foes, I either need to keep my distance or potentially parry with my knife - which has limited durability and thus is something of a precious resource.

Anyway, I'm stuck on the first big, famous set-piece, where an entire village of infected cultist villagers comes after Leon and I believe the goal is just to survive long enough for them to abandon the fight.

The most efficient way to take out enemies, as I understand it, is to stun them with a headshot and then follow up with a contextual melee attack, which will usually take them out and even sometimes other foes nearby.

It feels honestly a little embarrassing to have needed to take a break so early into the game, but after dying four or five times to the villagers, I found my frustration overcoming my excitement. I wonder if this will be one of those things where once I come back, it'll all click into place.

But hey, my first ResE game!

Remembering Expansion Launch Events of the Past

 I've played through every single expansion launch event in World of Warcraft's history. I started playing in fall of 2006, and given BC's relatively late arrival compared with the overall expansion launch schedule (normally they come out in late summer or fall of even-numbered years, but BC didn't come until January of 2007, after Vanilla had been out for over two years) I wasn't actually max-level for it, but I was able to see and be killed by the demons assaulting major cities.

Expansion launches are big deals for WoW. They're the official closing of the book on the past two years' (or in War Within's case, only one-and-a-half, making it the shortest expansion in WoW's history) story and the big excitement-building thing for the game's next era. We get class changes (sometimes, as we're seeing in 12.0, giving us somewhat incomplete versions of the classes, especially the new Devourer spec) and in the latter years of WoW, this is when we get the various stat-squishes (or Shadowlands' level squish).

But these are ephemeral events - even if you group them all together, an expansion launch event tends to go on about six weeks, or a month and a half. If expansions come out roughly every two years, that means that these events all together make up only 1/16th of the game's overall schedule.

Furthermore, expansion events, because they're tailored to the individual expansion, are something that we truly won't experience for more than those six weeks. This creates a couple of funny incentives:

It should have some reward that is unique and can be a reminder of having experienced it, but the rewards also shouldn't be so unique that people will feel really bummed out if they missed it.

It should be memorable and fun, but it also shouldn't take too much development time, because it's only going to be going for a short time.

We've had some really exciting and memorable events, and a few that were perhaps not quite as well-regarded. I thought, as a WoW elder, I'd go down memory lane and see how well I can recall those we've gone through:

Burning Crusade:

    As alluded to before, WoW's first expansion saw Doom-Lord Kazzak, who would later become a world-boss in Hellfire Peninsula, leading demonic assaults on capital cities (I remember Ironforge was definitely one of the targets, though I can't recall if it was all six existing ones or just that and, like, Orgrimmar. Back in Vanilla, due to its convenient location and before they added Stormwind Harbor in Wrath, Ironforge was actually the real Alliance capital). Now, there was also an event at the Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands, but I was too low-level to get there at the time (by the time the expansion came out, I think my highest-level character was only 30 or so, and you needed to be 58 to go to Outland).

Wrath of the Lich King:

    Ah yes, I remember flying around Shattrath, seeing people angrily debating the recent electoral win of Barack Obama, while we had a couple quests. The Alliance, I believe, was primarily concerned with helping I think the Argent Dawn while the Horde was dealing with totally-well-intentioned Grand Apothecary Putress to try to create a cure to a zombie plague.

    The event combined what had been the patch-launch event (they did this back in Vanilla) for the Naxxramas patch (1.3 or 1.4, I wasn't playing yet) with its Scourge Invasions of various zones, but the big new thing was the Zombie Plauge, where, whether you were flagged for PvP or not, character of both factions could get infected and infect both other players and NPCs after turning into ghouls. I remember literally hiding out in the basement of the Darkshire Inn on my Warlock alt hiding out from the zombies - a bit of enforced RP that was honestly pretty cool. There were some who complained about how it disrupted gameplay, but wasn't that the point? Of course, the patch also saw the return of Varian Wrynn to Stormwind and the addition of Stormwind Harbor, which made travel to Darnassus and the Exodar much easier (you used to have to go to Menethil Harbor in the Wetlands).

    I believe there was some kind of event in major cities, which included Garrosh challenging Thrall for his role as Warchief, only to be interrupted by the Scourge.

Cataclysm:

    This was probably the biggest pre-launch event just because so much of the game changed, and it had to come in kind of two segments: first was one that fully needed the old Vanilla world, in which the Horde had an event to take back the Echo Isles for the Darkspear Trolls, while the Alliance had an event to take back Gnomeregan (I believe the Gnomes' faction in the Alliance is now just "Gnomeregan," but in Vanilla-through-Wrath, it was the Gnomeregan Exiles). We also had elemental invasions - certain areas across the world (I think excluding Outland, though there was a story quest to go meet Thrall there). Finally, there was also a quest that had you infiltrate a doomsday cult with sandwich-board signs on them that seemed to be new recruits into Twilight's Hammer.

    We also brought Magni the Titan tablets that would wind up turning him into his diamond (apparently Thraegar) form, which was interpreted as his dying until he reawakened before Legion. I think this all happened before the revamp went live, which we then had available for maybe a month before the expansion actually launched, so I remember spending a lot of time leveling up my Tauren Paladin.

Mists of Pandaria:

    I think this remains the smallest launch event. Scenarios were the exciting new feature for Mists of Pandaria, and the destruction of Theramore was a major event to kick off the expansion (and explain why Jaina went from biggest advocate of peaceful coexistence with the Horde to the Alliance's biggest hawk,) so we got early access to the Fall of Theramore scenario. And... that was it.

Warlords of Draenor:

    Things were primarily contained to the Blasted Lands, where we fought Iron Horde incursions into the zone, but we also go access to part, but not the entirety, of the revamped Upper Blackrock Spire dungeon. For those who did not play before then, UBRS used to actually be part of the same instance as Lower Blackrock Spire, as one of the old level-cap Vanilla megadungeons (LBRS is still basically a mega-dungeon).

Legion:

    Probably the best-remembered launch event, we got a few things here: first off, if you had the expansion, you could create a Demon Hunter and play through their starting experience early, hitting level 100 (the pre-launch level cap) by finishing it. But for everyone else, we got the Legion Invasions.

    These were actually a lot more free-form than what we'd get afterward. A zone, I think Hillsbrad Foothills, Dun Morogh, Westfall, Azshara, Northern Barrens, and I think Tanaris, would get invaded by the Burning Legion, and everyone in the zone could spread out and kill demons all across the zone, eventually summoning a big legion commander boss that would drop good loot.

    I don't really think it was much more than that, but something about the way it worked just... worked really well. For one thing, Legion saw massive class overhauls that brought in a lot of fun mechanics, so it was fun to test those out. But I also think that because the demons' activity across the zone was so omnipresent that you could kind of choose the style of demon-fighting you wanted. There were legion structures you could fight your way into, but also, I remember just being on a road in western Westfall and taking out a pair of felguards there - it felt like you could have both the giant epic battles and the scrappy hero-versus-the-monster fights at the same time.

Battle for Azeroth:

    This one was a little bifurcated. The War of Thorns was a multi-stage series of quests in Darkshore, which culminated in the burning of Teldrassil, and one of the genuinely most affecting uses of the UI for storytelling I've seen in the game (for the Alliance, at least) where you were tasked with saving 100 Darnassus citizens, but only given the time to get, at most, like 30 before the smoke overtook you.

    We also had some, if I recall correctly, some repeatable stuff in Silithus, fighting the other faction for control of Azerite. But the more memorable stuff was the one-and-done story quests.

Shadowlands:

    Much as the Wrath launch event took some elements of the Scourge Invasion event from vanilla, Shadowlands brought back the Zombie Plague, though I guess given how much easier it was to spread out with so many expansions having come around, it didn't feel as pervasive as the first time.

    Other than that, there was an event in Icecrown in which various Scourge rares would pop up. The biggest deal, as I recall, was that you could get a larger bag than would be available until I think Dragonflight or even War Within.

Dragonflight:

    Here, we had the elemental invasions, which were more wide-spread (I can't recall every zone they were in, but I know Badlands was the one I most often went to, also I think Northern Barrens again). I can't recall if we could create Dracthyr Evokers yet or if we had to wait for the expansion's proper launch - I'd guess the former. Naturally, we wouldn't get the Augmentation spec until later in the expansion (I'm guessing they intended it for launch but still needed to figure out how it would work).

War Within:

    Hey, fairly recent, right? This was the one with the memories of Azeroth, found in Dragonblight, Searing Gorge, and... was it Un'goro Crater? Or Tanaris again?

    I actually liked this style of event because there was real variety in the memories that popped up, with different objectives.

Midnight:

    Well, this one is currently going on. It's probably the smallest event since Mists of Pandaria, with a very short quest involving the Twilight Blade and then just the rare spawns that pop up in Twighlight Highlands. You can get a bunch of Champion level gear pretty easily, though in this new era of Delves, I mostly have Hero-level gear on the characters I really play (and that's a fair number: see name of blog).

What's interesting is that this is the first expansion in which the primary territory of the expansion will be at least partially revamped old, existing zones. While Cataclysm was a big revamp, the high-level content all took place in new zones. I think the closer parallel might be Warlords of Draenor, whose world was a glimpse into the past of Outland (though also technically an alternate universe... boy did that expansion have conceptual issues). With Quel'thalas and Zul'Aman, we're getting a fresh look at areas that were added to the game 19 years ago, and not really changed much since. (Before Cataclysm, I remember taking my Orc Warrior to Eversong and Ghostlands to level just because compared to Vanilla, the questing was better. But it truly does show its age quite a lot at this point).

Of course, showing us that revamp early wouldn't really make sense - these are not to be the leveling zones for low-level Blood Elf characters, but full endgame (for now) zones to take us to level 90.

Twilight Highlands does make a certain degree of sense given that it's the home territories of the game's most prominent big evil void-worshipping cult (though one would think after the defeat of Cho'gall that they might have vacated the area, or maybe the Wildhammer Dwarves would have kicked them out by now). Still, I'm surprised that they've limited the event to just this one zone. For Shadowlands it kind of made sense given that the rift into the Shadowlands was formed right over Icecrown Citadel, but the void invasion is coming in over Quel'thalas.

Again, there's some logic to not putting too much effort into a launch event. But this one is probably going to be less-remembered than others.

Siblings and Resonance: Control Resonance and Canon

 What is canon in a universe where a writer can re-write reality?

2019's Control was the first game from Remedy Entertainment to commit to the idea of a shared, connected universe, doing so by making direct references to the events of 2010's Alan Wake. While Remedy did have a game between those two, 2016's Quantum Break, that time-warped narrative officially belongs to Microsoft, much as Remedy's first giant hit, Max Payne, has been owned by Rockstar Games (even making a third game without Remedy's involvement). Alan Wake and Control are the two franchises that are fully owned by Remedy (I can't recall if they got the rights to Max Payne back prior to starting work on the remakes or if that's a licensing thing).

The point is, at this point, Control and Alan Wake have each had significant crossover with other another, with the FBC playing a key role in the main story of Alan Wake II.

This year, we are eagerly anticipating the release of Control Resonant, previously presented as Control 2.

The way in which Remedy makes its games and tells its stories invites you to scrutinize every detail you're presented with, and I think right of the bat that the fact that Control's sequel is not simply numbered - something previous Remedy games have done (Max Payne 2 does have the sub-title The Fall of Max Payne) - is cause for curiosity.

Resonance is, of course, pretty key to the world of Control. Both the villainous Hiss and the helpful Hadron and Polaris, are resonances, less physical beings than a kind of frequency or pattern.

While the idea of anything of any real substance merely being a resonance might seem absurd on the surface, things like String Theory suggest that this might actually be the underlying nature of matter itself: Einstein came up with his theory of special relativity that linked matter and energy (the famous E=mc^2) and String Theory suggests that the base particles of matter are actually coiled strings of energy that vibrate in a certain way.

One of the big critiques of String Theory is "so what?" - a question as to how this model actually changes our approach to what these particles do. But in the speculative fiction realms that these games take place within, one could imagine that vibrations and resonance might make reality itself a little more vulnerable to manipulation and transformation.

One of the strangest interpretations of quantum physics is the manner in which things can exist in a superposition until they're measured: a particle acts like it has all manner of "spin" simultaneously until it is measured. Some experiments have shown that a particle can interfere with itself because of this, the two versions of reality bumping up against one another until we intervene to determine the truth. And thus, there's an idea that when we do measure the spin of a particle, we're actually creating separate realities, one that is spin up, one where it's spin down.

Apologies to the physicists who could explain this a lot more accurately than I can.

Anyway, this got me thinking:

In Control, we learn that Dylan Faden was being trained to become the next director of the FBC. One of the numerous meanings of the game's title is that Jesse acted as the "Control" in an experiment - two siblings with similar parautilitarian potential, but one was subject to constant intervention and training while the other was left to her devices to mature into adulthood on her own (alternatively, Dylan being kept in captivity and away from the influence of the outside world may have been the control subject).

Of course, things don't work out with Dylan, and he plays the closest thing to an antagonist in the game, acting as the mouthpiece of the Hiss. Even before the Hiss arrive, though, Dylan's shot at directorship is over, because he's evidently killed one of the scientists working with him.

But what if he didn't?

Through the many drafts and edits that Alan Wake makes to the story that shapes his reality, we get numerous versions of events. Indeed, the scene in which Jesse spies on Alan meeting with Tom Zane in Control's AWE expansion plays out very differently when we see the same scene in Alan Wake II. But it's definitely the same scene, playing out in a different way.

Tonally, and genre-wise, Remedy has taken multiple approaches to the same idea: a multiverse. Quantum Break is not canon, again, because it's owned by Microsoft, but some of its ideas and even characters seem to have been slyly brought into the Remedy Connected Universe. Warlin Door is clearly Martin Hatch - he was even initially meant to be played by Lance Reddick, only for Reddick's death to prevent that. Door exists simultaneously in all realities, and while that can mean the truly distinct kinds of realities like the Dark Place, the Astral Plane, etc., it also might mean that he exists across alternate universes where peoples' fates are different.

In Control Resonant, we aren't playing as Jesse, but are instead playing as Dylan.

My expectation remains that we're probably going to be playing in the same canonical timeline/universe as the first game, and that Dylan, freed from the Hiss, will likely be motivated by finding his sister, perhaps without the assistance of the FBC (and even maybe its opposition). Jesse is the FBC's Director, but she has also clearly developed some friction with The Board.

However, let's also consider what seems to be happening in the game: New York, at least Manhattan, is getting twisted by weird energies and flooded with monsters previously contained by the Oldest House - things like the Hiss and the Mold (boy, the Firebreak team does not seem like it was very successful).

Unless the RCU is going to be one in which New York is either supremely fucked up or at least the Manhattan AWE becomes an enormous historical event, something has to bring the chaos there to an end. And I wonder if that means that we're going to be looking at an alternate universe.

Sequels invite twin imagery - Alan Wake II gave us two protagonists, two worlds, two "books," even the Koskela twins. Jesse and Dylan have always been foils for one another, and it's interesting that this game appears to be flipping the script, with Dylan trying to find his lost sister, rather than Jesse looking for her lost brother.

What does it mean for it to be Resonant?

Does it take place within a different universe?

In Alan Wake II's Lake House DLC, we play as Kieran Estevez, and near the end of the adventure, we have an opportunity to go to the Oceanview Motel & Casino via a lightswitch cord - something FBC agents are not only aware of but even encouraged to do when they find a cord. Estevez shows up not in the familiar lobby we see when Jesse visits it in Control, but in some other hallway that leads to a door marked with a symbol that we've historically associated with Control 2. This seems to lead into the Oldest House, and Estevez passes through a hallway that honestly looks more like the Executive Sector (with portraits of the director that show Jesse and someone else, maybe Trench, overlapping in concentric circles) but must be in Containment because there's a sign taking us into the Panopticon. There, Estevez encounters a no-longer-in-a-coma Dylan, his hair grown back, but still locked up and evidently distressed, trying to convey a message to his sister that he's "sorry" and that he "really tried."

The visions Estevez gets before she arrives back at the Lake House are clearly linked to the events of Control Resonant, with the Hiss and Mold breaking out into an Manhattan that has twisted in on itself in kaleidoscopic ways.

But there are some oddities:

In the Control Resonant trailer, we see what appears to be Jesse at Dylan's bedside, taking up the object we'll know as the Aberrant and jamming it into his chest - evidently the ritual required for him to bond with it, as she is bonded with the Service Weapon.

Now, to be fair, Dylan could just be sleeping in his cell when this happens. Given the editing, I think we're meant to believe that the containment failure, the outbreak of the Hiss and other dangerous things from the Oldest House, has already happened, and that this is an act of desperation on Jesse's part.

But if Dylan is still in a coma when this happens, a big question about the timeline opens up - Estevez's adventure takes place during Saga's - probably during the "Local Girl" chapter, as that's the one that starts right after Alan comes out of the lake and sets of the FBC monitoring station and ends with Estevez showing up to take over the investigation after he experiences in the Lake House.

There are some assumptions being made here, of course, like the idea that Estevez' visit to the Oldest House is happening at the same time - it wouldn't seem that impossible for her to have unwittingly gone to the near future. We know that time shenanigans are afoot in all of this - Saga and Alan having their distorted meetings at the Overlaps when Alan's half of the conversation is likely happening years earlier and not in the same order.

But it does feel very possible that we're looking at different realities, or at least, that the Dylans we're seeing need not all be the same one as the one we're playing.

Another note of interest: Alan has been having an influence on New York with his visitations of Alice. While we're likely meant to think of his visits to Parliament Tower initially as just Alan's projection of his home, we discover later that his visitations have been real enough to alert Alice, and affect her behavior. Even stuck in the Dark Place, he has had an influence on the real world.

Is it coincidence that Alan is from New York? Might we actually go to the real Parliament Tower as Dylan?

Anyway, we still haven't gotten any further news about Control Resonant, but the release date is some time this year. You can be sure I'll be dissecting everything we get.

Planes, Layers, and Depth

 I love Planescape as a D&D setting.

I come to fantasy for the weirdness, the otherworldliness, and Planescape invites you to play D&D in settings that take you far, far away from familiar, mundane reality, even more than the usual lands of wizards and dragons.

But it does create this odd issue:

As I've written about before, the influence of some outer plane in a campaign set within the Prime Material Plane (as most are) is one thing: a villain's entire plan might be to allow the searing fires of hell to be unleashed upon the world, and in such a campaign, the way that the Nine Hells would likely be portrayed is as some unimaginable nightmare of fire, spiky metal, and tormented souls.

In a Planescape campaign, the Nine Hells is likely to be... well, yes, filled with fire, spiky metal, and tormented souls, but also shops and inns and NPCs you might do quests for.

Planescape allows us into these outer planes, these truly separate planes of existence, but in doing so, forces us to portray them as at least slightly familiar to our regular reality.

I wrote recently about my desire to start a Planescape campaign on the Plain of Infinite Portals, the first layer of the Abyss, and specifically have it start off in the "Worst Bar in the Multiverse." The prompt for each player is to ask what mistakes they made in their past to wind up in such a place, and then have them adventure across the wasteland, in a kind of Weird West/Mad Max-like environment filled with demons.

But again, there's a version of the Abyss that ought to just be endless incomprehensible horrors, like a constant nightmare, where even glimpsing it might drive one insane.

And this got me thinking:

Planes have depth.

There's an idea in those 2nd Edition Planescape books (I think? Come to think of it, I don't have the corresponding PDFs) where the Elemental Planes can be visited by mortals, but only in the shallow depths of them - the elements mix enough in the shallows that, for example, there's air to breathe, or earth to stand on, even if you're in the Plane of Fire. But that the deeper you go into it, the more pure it becomes, and basically if you're not an actual elemental of the corresponding element, there's no real way to exist there in the deepest parts.

I think this can apply to every plane. Except, maybe, the Prime Material Plane.

Funnily enough, in my homebrew setting, the denizens of the connected part of the Shadowfell and Feywild (those parts that overlap my world) refer to the Prime Material Plane as the Flatlands. And while that was just a way of saying "it's kind of nondescript or boring," I actually think it makes a lot of sense if we think of the Prime Material Plane as not having any layers or depth - once you're in the plane, it just works according to some fantasy approximation of real-world physics (I tend to say it's real-world physics unless I call out a specific exception).

In Baldur's Gate 3, the second act takes place largely in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, which have been touched by the Shadowfell. But we do, on a major quest line, go to the actual Shadowfell, and it's portrayed as a swirling vortex of shadow, with no realistic way it could be inhabitable.

The funny thing is that the Shadow-Cursed Lands look more like the way that I'd portray the Shadowfell itself in a game I ran. But what might BG3's Shadowfell be equivalent to (not counting Hades, which does, to be fair, share a lot of vibes with the Shadowfell).

The answer, I think, is that that's "deep" in the Shadowfell, whereas the just dark, spooky version of the Flatlands (it's so much quicker to type than Prime Material Plane) would be the shallow part of the Shadowfell.

And you know what's beautiful about this? It accounts for the Domains of Dread.

While the shallow Shadowfell is the weird mirror world to the Flatlands, the Domains of Dread are deeper in the plane, perhaps not strictly corresponding to any real location in the Flatlands, but resembling them until you notice the foggy border beyond which there doesn't seem to be anything.

Unlike the "Border Shadowfell" (much like the Border Ethereal in contrast with the Deep Ethereal - see, I'm not making this up out of nowhere), the Domains of Dread are a little farther in, a little farther from familiar reality as we know it, and a little deeper into the swirling darkness and mists of nightmare logic. Perhaps deeper still than the Domains of Dread is the kind of swirling endless darkness in which gods like Shar or entities like the Dark Powers reside.

Now, the Outer Planes, at least, have what's called Layers. I think the only outer planes without them are The Outlands (the true neutral plane, which most resembles the Flatlands until you notice that each element of the landscape is perfectly balanced - a deep ocean for every mountain, a frigid tundra for each burning desert) and Limbo, the Chaotic Neutral plane, where any such structure would be anathema to what the plane stands for (arguably it either has just one layer or a constantly shifting number of them).

Planar layers are a little weird - on a certain level, it allows DMs to cordon off certain parts of the plane or focus on particular regions and vibes. Often, the deeper one goes into a plane (though in the case of Mount Celestia, unsurprisingly, the "deeper" layers are farther up the mountain) the more extreme the plane's whole vibe gets. For example, in the six layers of Carceri, the first layer, Orthrys (named for the mountain upon which the Titans of Greek myth lived, in contrast with Mount Olympus) the string of planetoids are close enough that there are structures built between them (including the palace of the aforementioned Titans - another name for Carceri is Tartarus, also from Greek myth). However, on the deepest layer, the planetoids of the plane are so far from one another that you can't easily see the next from the surface, the sense of profound isolation taken to an extreme.

But in a certain way, I think that layers and depth might not be quite the same idea: for instance, the Abyss is reputed to have infinite layers (far more than any other plane) though some argue this is just that no one has been able to count them all. Various demon lords have domains that take up one of these layers (though some, like Juiblex and Zuggtmoy share a layer, while Grazz't has three layers all to himself and his minions).

These layers are given numbers, indicating their relative order, but this order is somewhat arbitrary. While the Nine Hells of Baator and the Seven Heavens of Mount Celestia both prevent planar travel to anywhere except their first layer, forcing you to traverse all the layers between you and your destination on the plane, the Abyss requires no such travel - the Plain of Infinite Portals, the first layer of the Abyss, is filled with sink-holes that let you fall down into other layers directly (I really like making anything Abyss-related, like demonic temples, involve a deep, vertical shaft that one must descend).

Demogorgon's layer, the Gaping Maw, is not the lowest layer of the Abyss, even if he's (they're?) generally considered the mightiest of the demon lords.

So it's not a perfect, direct correspondence between the two concepts.

    Now, there's an alternate way of looking at this:

Player characters are, generally, mortal beings. While the creature types that you can play as have expanded considerably over time (Forge of the Artificer gives us our first official playable Aberration by redesignating the Kalashtar, and we also get Constructs and Fey in the Warforged and Changeling, respectively) I think we're generally meant to play these characters as being people first and weird monster second.

Thus, a way you could play the Outer Planes, or even just other planes in general, is that our perception of them is not necessarily what they are. We might see Avernus as a giant, blasted wasteland with an endless war raging across it because that's the closest comprehensible equivalent of what's going on that we can imagine. What does it mean for Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil to clash (in a realm that is the home territory of the former) in a philosophical sense? Well, that's hard to visualize, so instead we see it as clashing armies of regimented tyrannical brutes fighting slobbering hordes of pscyho-killers.

Even fiends themselves might not truly look the way we perceive them, because it turns out that the impulse to pursue one's reckless ambition at all costs doesn't really look like anything - except in this fantasy world, where we see it as a hulking demon with giant pincer arms.

    Still, I think you can get a lot of mileage about thinking of these planes as appearing more like reality on the nearby shores, but as one delves deeper into them, the experience becomes more impressionistic, more oneiric, more abstract.