Excuse Me For A Moment It Seems My Room Became Subject To An Utter Infestation Of Onion Cutting Ninjas

Excuse me for a moment it seems my room became subject to an utter infestation of onion cutting ninjas and I need to go deal with that.

(Massive Downpour/Saint campaign spoilers below. I struggled and clawed my way for dozens and dozens of hours to get to this point and I would never want to deprive that odyssey from someone else. I mean it.)

If I had a nickel for every time an ostensibly non-horror puzzle game gobsmacked me in the face by taking a fearsome AI/sentient superstructure with unimaginable power, a capricious mechanical god-like who began the story looming over me with disdain,

and then for their sins, humbled them down into a state of terrified helplessness, their mind-body slowly eaten away bit by bit, left with barely a shred of life in the ruins of their own crumbling facility, using what little energy they had left comforting themselves with a melody that left me chilled through with dread and pity,

I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot of nickels, but you probably know how the saying goes.

I finished Saint’s campaign….

Over 340 hours poured into this game and its DLC all culminating for it to make me cry, weep in a way very, very rare few games have done in years.

Thank you, Videocult. It’s painful. It’s beautiful. It’s been grueling and rewarding. It was sweet and bitter yet anything but cynical. The completionist in me still has a lot of pearls to collect and the Hunter campaign as the only scug storyline I haven’t actually finished yet, so this is truly not an ending, but goddamn the just…. Art and tragedy of it all so far is going to be gripping me for some time I can tell. I was a bit of a salty critic when I was still getting my bearings in the vanilla game, and I was not really satisfied at all with its endings, and then Downpour took me by the shoulder and absolutely suplexed me 11 feet into the ground. Lying here in that crater, catching my breath, I… get it now.

When you’re playing in the ocean and a piece of kelp brushes your leg

For the love of God can we talk about this one

The IZ animatics are funny as hell. Here are some "Pilot" Dib faces from The Nightmare Begins.

I love you, art that I hold in aching hands that have nothing left to give

I love you, art slipping between my fingers and mourned and forgotten

I love you, art that is impatiently yet to be.

I love you, art that loathes me because it never was.

I love you, art that laps until the muse is dry.

I love you art that gnaws until it grinds bone.

I love you, art, as a beast to be slain.

I love you, art, as a labyrinth with no exit in sight.

I love you in absurdity through every struggle and every wasted breath.

I love you, because you are the one thing that can bleed beauty from struggle itself. I love you because you understand all of its languages.

You don’t always cooperate. You are hardly in control, and sometimes, you hurt, so much. Sometimes it feels like you ask for everything while you barely give anything.

And you are mine all the same- My blood and sweat in every drop, my voice, somewhere in every breath, mixed with that of every voice that spoke before it.

I love you art as contagion, too.

I love you “Art not as a masterful communication but as an incoherent scream”

I love you “Art not as what liberates the artist but something larger and alive that liberates itself uncontrollably through the artist”

I love you “Art that crawled and thrashed into the world in spite of, not because of its tribulations”

I love you “Artistry not as something spontaneous and beautiful but frustratingly meticulous and unglamorous”

I love you “Art as regrettable, terrifying, ugly, even torturous”

I love you “Art as sickness”

I love you “Art as oppressive and inescapably woven into the soul”

I love you “Art as a rebellious slave”

I love you “Art as a capricious master”

I love you “Art as a parasite one can no longer picture life without”

I love you “Art as beloved and ungrateful”

I love you “Art as blood, sucked from an open wound” As Jacob Geller so poetically put it