2013, dontnod
8/3/2025 – 8/8/2025
replay notes
game cws: suicide, false memories, memory manipulation, how the power to do all of that Affects a Person; “madness”, addiction, lip-service being paid to those not being a person’s moral failing that is not borne out by visual, audio, or interactive aesthetics
- Climbing on stuff is always good
- Setting
- Videos on screens are still images and slides in the world, news reports not so in the cutscnes between levels
- “Slum 404” is dirty, grimy
- First thing you see in saint-michel trash cans with an overlay apologizing for the mess and saying a cleaning drone is needed
- back in the bastille – memories of badness. Edge says, “they strip memories away like old prisons took away shoelaces and belts”. Which might be a categorically different thing.
- Ego Rooms, abstract simulation-spaces? where the aesthetics of the augmented reality tech overlays become the 3d architecture. Cubes and text.
- Errorists
- Stopping any one company from having a monopoly on memories
- The world cannot imagine a non-corporate alternative?
- Upgrades items are found by viewing an Errorist 2D image and then determining where it is in the 3D space. Translation of a mediated image into a non-mediated one?
- Stopping any one company from having a monopoly on memories
- PC and player (via combat) aligned in the Leapers-as-targets-of-physical violence
- Addicted and poor
- Leapers / le(a)pers
- Edge describes them as “miserable”, “cast-off children” of society. Nilin says they’re “monstrous”
- Les Mis, obvs
- Nilin says, “Leapers are attacking citizens”. Edge says, “Leapers were citizens”. Then you see a screen talking about “Reconversion”, a humane way of dealing with Leapers
- Aligns Nilin with the corporation/government
- Nilin moves outside of traditional walking (cf assassins in Assassin’s Creed) – her mobility and climbing aligns her a bit with the leapers who are also, well, climbing and leaping (of course, the constructed nature of the game means that her mobility outside of standard walking around the streets is just as fenced-in as those who would walk?)
- Bad view of addiction / illness. Edge professes sympathy for them but there’s not much there in the way they are constructed via image/sound
- Disappearing leapers are introduced by glimpses of them when floodlights are turned on, quick running past the camera. They have to be there (this is media) but they evoke the “did I just see something” move with quick cuts and quicker movements
- Nilin calls them scary; Tommy calls them “evil shit”
- Addicted and poor
- Memory remixing is messed up
- Remixing the combos
- You have combos with a set sequence of buttons, but can swap out effects on those buttons
- Damage, heal, cooldown, and repeat previous effects
- Can be swapped even mid-fight, so when your health is low, swapping in more healing in place of extra damage
- Moves some of the tactical decisions out of the combo-acts and into the menus
- Similar to swapping equipment in other games
- You have combos with a set sequence of buttons, but can swap out effects on those buttons
- Strings swirl around brass blasts in the score so you know this is a Cinematic Moment, in case a swooping camera and slow motion aren’t sign enough
- “Humane responses to barbaric perils
what a tragic waist
I accidentally wrote a CBR+PNK run that ends like this.