[Suzerain of Sheol]

So, I played through this a couple days ago and have been completely obsessed with it since. Anyone else?

Also, if you have not played/experienced it, get out. You don't belong here.

I should probably give a trigger warning, but since only people who have played/experienced the game are in here now, that should not be necessary.

If you have not played the game, perhaps go read the trigger warning, and then play it, and come talk to me about it. :P (It is very short. And free.)

Discuss.

Edit: Also, no lame Monika jokes.

FUCKING MONIKAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMM

[Gallagher]

Originally Posted by Suzerain of Sheol

been completely obsessed with it

me also

FUCKING MONIKAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Originally Posted by Gallagher

me also

Your obsession is an extension of mine. :|

[Gallagher]

my obsession is because i love you so much i want to die

[Suzerain of Sheol]

You love me so much that I, also, want to die, but this is a thread for serious philosophical, literary, and sociological analysis, NOT cheap memes. :|




mangaisliterature!

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Just Monika.

[Coda]

Have you dug into the code yet, or checked out the community for people who have?

There's MORE.

The stuff you can experience just by playing the game isn't all there is to it. You have to fight Monika on her own turf.

[mdom]

can I say how the game freaked me out doubly because my name is Monica???

anyway anytime the screen glitched I died a little

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Coda, I am super aware of all that and I have a ton of things to gush about I just didn’t want to start the thread with an essay. Will have to wait til I’m back from the doctor though.

[Coda]

I had a lot of the extra content spoiled for me thanks to Markiplier and GameXplain, but I would have figured most of it out on my own anyway -- after having played Undertale, I would have noticed the trickery with sayori.chr. And once I noticed that, I would have also noticed that the game is written in Python, at which point I would have dived into the source code to look for easter eggs.

Actually decoding the ARG content of the .chr files... I probably would have gotten a couple of them myself. yuri.chr I would have identified at a glance. monika.chr I would have written a script to decode the content. sayori.chr and natsuki.chr would have sent me to Reddit to get help. :P (If left to my own devices, I could PROBABLY have figured out sayori.chr, eventually. I would most likely not have figured out natsuki.chr.)

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Can you elaborate on what you meant about Undertale? I don't think I ever got into it enough beyond just playing the routes to have seen whatever it is you're referring to.

But anyway, the ARG stuff is really gripping, obviously, and adds a whole extra level of discomfort and intrigue to the game, but I'm mostly suspending judgment on whether it was a worthwhile addition until its determined whether Dan Salvado is lying about his next game having nothing to do with Project Libitina or not. It seems like the foundation was laid a little too thoroughly for it to just be creepy easter eggs, and if it doesn't go anywhere it'll be fairly disappointing retrospectively.

I have a million things I could say about the game itself, and I have no idea where to even start. I love pretty much every aspect of it, but the parts the specifically shine the most to me are:

1.) Manipulation of and prediction of the player's assumptions about the nature of the game and how it is played. Any time it preempts use of the menus is just amazing to me, in context.

2.) The metanarrative space the story creates where the experiential plot of the game exists in some nebulous feedback loop of the player's own interactions with the fiction, creating an experience unique to everyone who gets the chance to go through it.

3.) The insidious layers of the game's horror. From the trigger warning that doubles as an incitement to profound anxiety over the innocuous act 1 to the way Sayori's death is quickly fading in my mind as a representation of a brutally horrific tragedy that is all too real for a lot of unfortunate people... into something more like witnessing an eldritch event that destroys the sanity of the viewer. The horrific audio cues in that scene and the breakdown of the diegetic reality of the VN setting make me feel this weird flavor of existential dread that has me thinking the true trigger warning should have been for people who are vulnerable to de-realization and delusion. It's appalling, and I love it.

I also like to entertain the analytical lens of everything post-suicide being the visualized nervous breakdown of a teenage boy having his life utterly ruined beyond repair by one of the most awful things any human can experience. I don't think it totally works on that level, but it's definitely interesting to me.

4.) Can we just talk about the way this game has conditioned me to suffer paranoia at tempo shifts or sudden silence in digital audio? My phone popped up a low battery warning yesterday that interrupted my music and I felt my heart start hammering.

It might sound like I was really traumatized by this game but I absolutely love it. The fact that a piece of art/fiction can have this effect is amazing to me. The catharsis this game spawns is just brilliant.

And none of the above is even getting into analyzing the characters, where there is obviously mountains of material to delve into, but I've probably rambled enough for now. :P

Oh wait, just one more point. As I'm sure you're aware from our previous conversations, Coda ( or anyone who's read them), I introspect on subjects like free will, self-consciousness, AI, etc quite a bit, so Monika is just a treasure trove of analysis for me.

I really dislike when anyone dismisses this game as cheap shock value relying on gimmicky meta-scares. While those are obviously what it's best known for, there is just so, so, SO much more going on here. I don't personally know of any other form of fiction that has created this kind of relationship with its reader/player, but I'd love to hear about it if it exists, cause DDLC feels like a revelation to the art of storytelling (and story-receiving!) to me.

[Coda]

In Undertale, after you complete the Genocide route, you can sell your soul in order to reset the game and play again. But if you do this, the game saves a couple of innocuous-looking files to disk that are separate from your save files, which alters parts of the game. Creating new games or resetting your save file won't undo the damage. You have to delete those files (which can be quite challenging if you have cloud saves) if you want to put your game back to the way it was when you first installed it.

Knowing about this put me on alert at the end of DDLC Act 1. From there it's just my natural hacker curiosity.

I totally agree about what DDLC really is. It's really not a shock horror game for the most part. It's a psychological horror game dressed up as a shock horror game dressed up as a visual novel.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Ahh, right, that, I didn't know it messed with the files.

I do think it's really interesting, the difference between how Undertale incorporates its meta by crafting the game world around diegetic powers that resemble game functions whereas DDLC literalizes the game world such that it only consists of two bedrooms, two classrooms, a hallway, and a street, and populated by precisely 5 (6, if you count monster father) people who literally do not exist fictionally when they aren't on screen. (And there's an entire other discussion to be had about the protagonist's presence in the story...)

[Coda]

Huh, that IS an interesting contrast to observe.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

So, what's your take on Monika, Coda?

[Gallagher]

i fully believe in the tragedy of monika doing all of this to her friends under the impression that they are pretty little wank dolls, when actually they have as much of a mind as she does and simply lack the awareness of their circumstances

bless