The irony of the ‘Spoopy season is that it is always over compensating with fear and dread, as the average person deals with something much scarier than whatever Halloween can throw at us.

I.E. the scariest thing that can be thrown at us is…us, point in fact

Gonna have to be a quick one today, as I left writing till the last minute. You’d think I would learn by now I should shift my schedule around to accommodate for this predictably regular happening, and move my slotted time for writing towards the beginning of the day. I however, like many, are dictated by the passions, and driven by vibes on the regular, so plotting such an adventure is quite out of reach for my daily operational standards. Not that I’m asserting this change is an impossible one, it is that I merely don’t give a shit about changing my slapdash ways. They say the pain of changing comes from the notion that it must be less painful than the pain of staying the same, so until it gets excruciating, I remain stubborn and damaged by my own lazy resistance of self-betterment…at least in this regard.

There isn’t much time left in ‘Spooptober, so whether or not I’m going to start another survival horror game remains to be seen. Not that one can only contend with the grim-dark and the horrifying one month a year, mind you, I’m just not sure how much of an appetite I’ll have for more, after my hypothetical replay of the Silent Hill 2 Remake (SH2R). The 2nd runthrough is not hypothetical in whether or not I will start it, but whether or not I will finish it, as the first two hours or so have proven largely less eventful than I remember the game being on a second go around. The heightened puzzle difficulty level has barely seemed to have made a minor difference, with only some slight incline in reading comprehension to have made clear any distinction between the two levels of challenge I’ve experienced, and as mentioned yesterday, The SH2R is more about the delivery of the themes than a radical display of the mechanics at play, and certainly not built with the same idea of “gameyness” in mind that a random Resident Evil entry might have the benefit of.

Kind of in relation to this point, a random thought I’ve had, and one I’ve kind of vaguely alluded to a number of times, is this amorphous notion I’ve picked up on, that the gaming community by and large doesn’t seem to jive with “walking simulators”, which are more or less video games that are usually indie based projects smaller in stature, that offer up a fun narrative adventure of sorts, but are super light on mechanics involved with the interactivity of the game itself (See: Slender: The Arrival as a random “Spoopy” example of this type of video game.) As in to say, games of this variety basically feature almost no mechanics to contend with at all, with most only giving the player the ability to walk and or navigate the avatar itself, hence “walking simulator”. What I find funny about this perceived negative push back against these kind of titles is the assumption gamers want “more game” in their title, disappointed that there isn’t a battle system, or deeper layers of systems to grapple with. Perhaps for some of the more “dogmatic” types out there, these games represent a mood too adjacent to what would be considered a more casual affair, and thusly write the games off as such.

I suppose the irony in my musing on this subject is that, in many games I play at higher levels, or within certain focused modes of interactivity, the attempt is to shave away most systems at all cost, so that one can essentially circumvent most of what the game offers in the name of speedrunning and the sake of efficiency. For example, when I play Silent Hill, like I just did with the SH2R, I basically didn’t fight almost any monsters I didn’t have to, and therefore largely negated most of the combat anyways, whilst bee-lining it from puzzle to puzzle, as if I am doing a pseudo speedrun at any given point, almost making the entire experience a puzzle game in and of itself, with only a sense of gore based window dressing and macabre thematics of a horror persuasion laying in the background Same goes for stealth games, me rarely being acquainted with any of the gunplay a stealth title has to offer for similar reasons. This is in the name of a gameplay style known as “ghost stealth” or “true ghost” stylized levels of “hush hush go fast” strategy, essentially having the player not utilize any (or bare minimum) resource, nor even interact with anything in the environment they don’t need to, blowing through the environment as if a ghost traveling through the realm, only a mere whisper on the wind left behind.

With both of those in mind, and even throwing other absurdist speedrun strategies into the mix, like Pokémon speedruns, where players literally mess with the coding of the game itself, and are able to warp essentially right to the end of the entire title if they know what they;re doing, and quite a lot of games can be made into walking simulators in essence, as apart of this ridiculous essence of simplifying the design by peeling it away to near nothingness in saving time. As someone who plays many games in these prescribed ways, and has committed to similar speedruns and approaches on the regular, I am left scratching my head at the push back from certain gamers to walking simulators as a genre, as to someone like me, I look at it and think “excellent, the fat is trimmed already”, in my attempt at conquering the title with the bare minimum in mind in plowing through to the end. Or put another way, all games are waking simulators in essence, if one is skilled enough/or trying hard enough, almost as if achieving higher levels of understanding leads one to the existential joy of self-negation through mastery.

I think there is something to be said about this process of mastery vicarious through abuse of systems to the point of self-negation, but that sounds like a much larger article, and I am essentially out of minutes to spare.

Maybe next time.

-Pashford