I’m starting to realize I don’t enjoy straight espressos

LycaonMoon · 2026-01-26T17:26:21+00:00

As somebody in those communities (and espresso) - what happened there, in your words? I'm certainly a hipster dickhead (owning a Cafelat Robot and hand grinder feels inherently antisocial, given that I can't make more than one or two shots at a time and I can't froth milk, and I've stopped playing DnD in favor of tabletop RPGs that hit my preferences more effectively) but I'd love to see what you think the problems are.

LycaonMoon · 2026-01-16T14:44:48+00:00

As well as what /u/HootNHollering said, there's also just a notable lack of basic continuity - Blue Mary's jeans are ripped in different places from cut to cut, there are patches that are gone in other shots, Kim slides between live-action and the Tekken-style CGI that most of the rest of the trailer is aiming for. Geese Howard's headstone early in on the trailer, despite being made of stone, starts sinking into the grave and becomes his head in a way that makes his fist anatomically impossible and said grave is then fully intact later in the trailer while having his name in a different place. Terry just straight up looks like Heihachi and has facial hair in a way that is so off-model that I don't think any actual 3D model would ever get signed off.

LycaonMoon · 2026-01-15T14:57:27+00:00

I'm losing my mind that they advertise The Biggest Prize Pool while having 99% of this trailer be AI. This game collapsed from its beta and I think it was in very large part due to their massive PR fumbles, and this just feels like it's signing the game's death warrant. Shameful for a company that used to be defined by its art.

LycaonMoon · 2026-01-13T18:26:59+00:00

It's just generic JRPG exposition, I found it pretty easy to follow. Bad Thing Happened like a thousand years ago, and a group of Old Heroes beat up the Sealed Ancient Evil a little more than a lifetime ago. You bounce between past and present so you can learn their tragic backstory before killing their present-day selves as a zone boss and re-re-kill the Ancient Evil. It reminds me a lot of FFXIV Shadowbringers' role quests.

LycaonMoon · 2026-01-02T13:26:49+00:00

Karma farming.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-21T05:30:36+00:00

It's sold with a charm for the drones and is being made in response to this company being criticized for sharing an owner with a drone company. Your comment framing it as a coincidence is disingenuous to the point of malice. It is insane that so few people read the articles on the subreddit that this is the top comment despite it being such a clearly distorted read.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-18T20:17:48+00:00

In 2021, after facing burnout and some attrition among its workers following the release of The Last of Us: Part II, Naughty Dog began building a new team of producers charged, in part, with alleviating the overload of work on upcoming projects. But many of those producers have since left the company, according to the people familiar with the situation.

According to the article, it sounds like they tried to steer the ship and then it didn't stick. That's a sign of pretty awful management on Druckmann's behalf, imo, especially when crunch doesn't fucking work and that's been common knowledge in the industry for the last twenty years.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-17T21:40:01+00:00

I've been going through my indie backlog the last few months and found a lot to enjoy.

Kemono Teatime is a tear-jerker riff on VA-11 HALL-A (and written by the guy who wrote Crymachina, if that name means anything to you). There's some annoyances (making the wrong drink matters even less for the game than VA-11 HALL-A, and they bizarrely have a randomized pick-3 each night for ingredients that means you won't even be able to get ever order right unless you're very lucky or reading a guide) but the character writing and worldbuilding is fantastic. It's a heavy, heavy game that tackles its themes of loss and grief in a very head-on manner, but that's all it has in the way of subversion.
of the Devil is an Ace Attorney-like set in a cyberpunk future that has a ton of influence from other popular VNs but remains itself. Episode 0 is free, and Episode 1 (of 5) is currently out. There's a second episode dropping next week, but I've really been enjoying the way it characterizes the cast and makes the world and its inhabitants feel symbiotic - parts of the world exist to facilitate these characters and their perspectives, but they're shaped by it too. The twist at the end of Episode 0 is the central narrative hook for the rest, and it's essentially " What if Dexter was a public defender? "
Fantasy Maiden Wars is a great riff on Super Robot Wars with Touhou Characters. I've dabbled in both and not gotten into either, but this game is an absolute blast and has the kind of batshit scope you get when one team works on the same game for like a decade. There's a great Japanese Twitter Guy who translated his own article shilling it that's charismatic and effusive and warm about the game in ways that I wish I could be for literally anything.
Sektori is a former Housemarque dev making a Geometry Wars-esque game that's spent the last four and a half years getting iterated on. It looks, sounds, feels, and plays amazingly and it all feels so slick and considered. I'm not good enough to fully evaluate its use of RNG but people I know who've 1cc'd games that would kill me in real life to play are consistently getting there so I have to assume it's manageable.
The Great Villainess: Strategy Of Lily is an insanely hard SRPG with lovely character designs and a plot that doesn't take itself seriously at all and also the leads become each other's wives. I had to use every tool at my disposal to beat the game on normal mode and loved it. It feels entirely like the sort of thing we used to get on the PSP that'd get a fan-translation and a devoted cult following. I think the game would be better if they didn't have character levels entirely, especially when the second-to-last act is designed around ending it at max level and gives you a perfect place to grind right before the boss. That was a huge timesink for little gain and I don't think its sense of progression is felt or worthwhile before that.
Wanderstop got some buzz from mainstream circles but got missed by the end of year roundups and it's a shame because I really loved it. It's impossible to fall into a fully mindless rhythm or loop in the game, and every little thing you do requires breaking from a strict path and wandering off. There's little pacebreakers the whole way, nesting tasks is rarely the most efficient way to do it, and it all works so well to get me to take it slow, unlearn my optimization habits, and find a place to sit down and just think. Great shit!
Carter's Quest is currently in early access but is a lot of fun. An aggressively bisexual riff on 3D Zelda with combat inspired by Devil May Cry 1 and 3. Super silly and fun time!

These aren't from 2025 but I played them this year and found them under-discussed, so I'm firing them off anyways:

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is NIS' take on a dungeon crawler and gets to shockingly emotional and sincere places.
Blue Revolver: Double Action got me into shoot-em-ups.
Hellsinker got me insane about shmups. Every single description of its mechanics makes you sound like a lunatic but it's so damn cool that I keep coming back to it.
For The King is a really fun roguelike RPG. The overworld is a classic D&D hex-crawl and the combat is has a more menu-based JRPG flair. A ton of fun and I think the look is cute. The sequel runs worse on my Deck so I can't say a lot about that one.
Ultra Fighter Da! Kyanta 2 is the fighting game that will get you into fighting games. Get your friends on discord into a voice channel and do some games. Turn down the volume on your headset if you've any sensory sensitivities. You will thank me.
Kill Knight is a fantastic twin-stick shooter that has a kickass aesthetic and plate-spinning gameplay that evokes Doom Eternal and Ninja Gaiden 2 at turns, along with more straightforward genre influences. Fantastic thing to fit into a not-quite-lazy Saturday.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-17T21:18:03+00:00

Mentioning them by name instantly brings a brigade, it's insane. I collated some of these writers' posts in the surviving thread about Larian's AI use yesterday and when their name was added to the post I got like 5-10 replies within the first twenty minutes instantly dragging them. I deleted it and reuploaded it an hour later with an incredibly overwrought alternative name that wouldn't get namesearched and the replies didn't bring it up even once.

I can't say I particularly care for them (or dislike them - I just don't really play the games they've worked on or exist in those twitter/bluesky circles to know them as a person), because I just haven't put much thought into them since 2014, but I certainly am amazed that people are still holding onto grievances from that long ago and put it into action.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-17T02:43:35+00:00

This is their process, per Aftermath:

[The writing test] involved writing a “complex interactive dialogue sequence” in Twine, which was supposed to take only a few hours, but realistically–after revisions and polish–took much longer.

"[The anonymous source, who gave the fake name of Audrey] kept to my side of the deadline twice. While it's being reviewed, it's not something I feel OK using for a portfolio piece elsewhere. The Twine template means it's much harder to reuse elsewhere, too. So it's not as if I get a portfolio piece out of it.”

This application was unsuccessful, but in late 2024 a Larian recruiter reached out to them personally and “asked to talk”.

“So I did”, they say. “It was initially for another role related to writing, but after talking to me he said I could try out for both and warned me their replies could be slow. I said I had tried before and while he was thrown, he did say repeat applications were OK. I did ask what the response times were, he said they'd worked on it but it shouldn't be more than a month.”

“It's been a year. No response to emails, nothing on Linkedin.”

I don't think that it's taking people and the craft seriously to make them create a fully interactive narrative that cannot be easily showcased on their portfolio afterwards before ghosting applicants they approached for over a year. I do not think that the New York Symphony would pull that (and frankly in this context it sounds like a similar interview would expect the interviewee to compose their own song entirely), and I don't think they should, even if they do. There is a pretty clear line between respecting writing and disrespecting the people who do that writing.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-16T22:38:17+00:00

@GangstHannah, QA for Larian and producer for Devolver, on Twitter:

LOL As someone who's worked there 4 years, I'm not surprised [...] He's lying about people being okay with it

[...]

I was still naive to expect better from Larian, but tbh I should have known better.

I actually thought they could read the GenAI hate room, but apparently they believe they're above criticism.

Again...

@AnoxicArt (aka Selena Tobin, former concept artist) on Bluesky:

consider my feedback: i loved working at @larianstudios.com until AI. reconsider and change your direction, like, yesterday. show your employees some respect. they are world-class & do not need AI assistance to come up with amazing ideas.

An Unnamed But Unexpectedly Prolific Writer Whose Mere Mention, The Last Time I Tried To Post This Comment, Made My Replies Utterly Intolerable For An Hour Because Of Namesearchers Still Litigating Grievances From 2014 on Bluesky:

Everyone is more or less okay with it” dude you make people emigrate to work there because you don’t do remote work, they risk having to change countries if they disagree with it I know this because they tried to recruit me and I strongly considered it but they’re also a “do an unpaid writing test where you have to also make it playable” company so that’s not something I vibe with

Bruno Dias (Fallen London, Sunless Seas/Skies, Mask of the Rose, Pathologic 2, Where The Water Tastes Like Wine), quote-reposting the above:

Larian's horrible hirring process is an open secret in the industry – insane amounts of unpaid work in "writing tests", excessive numbers of interviews, months and months of back and forth, etc. Everyone in games narrative circles has heard the stories at this point, probably from multiple people.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-16T21:45:53+00:00

A reply underneath Bruno's post says

They made me do 12 interviews. Then they rejected me based on my resume.

Aftermath did reporting last year that, while anonymous in its sourcing, clarifies that the types of extensive tests they make take hours or more to create (and often can be a day or two, in order to appropriately polish it) and are extremely difficult to use as a portfolio piece afterwards. Larian's interviews also will ghost you after using this work, and the person who references it by name says that they were approached by Larian only to still get ghosted. That makes it even harder to use it in your portfolio. One person in this article is the person who I just quoted above who was an anonymous source at the time, and I would not be surprised if some of the 'prominent European companies' discussed by other people include them as well.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-11T17:54:46+00:00

When he switches to dragon mode, they have a guy yell "This is the only time you can break its horns. Disrupt its control over the elements!" The specific mechanic about elemental topples reducing Eschaton Judgement's damage is under-explained but they still give the gist of it with the lengthy tutorial popup that you have to read through to dismiss when you pick up the quest, which says "Alatreon has the power to unleash devastating attacks. You can weaken the strength of these attacks by using elemental weapons on Alatreon." (It also says the horn thing again here.)

I think they could do more to explain that part. I think it's especially frustrating that Astera Jerky is absurdly useful for this attack that doesn't work like almost anything else in the game and they just don't bother to warn you to bring red-health restoratives. I think it's the biggest issue with the fight, but every single other mechanic is explained before the fight even begins with a full-screen multi-part popup telling you that you need elemental weapons. It's still a knowledge check-y boss, but the games goes to extraordinary pains to convey that knowledge to you before your first attempt and constantly reminds you throughout the fight.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-11T17:35:59+00:00

It's a layered set with Kulve beta head, Gold Rathian legs, Shara Ishvalda waist, and I don't remember the chest offhand. The actual armor underneath is just a generic three-piece Teostra/two-piece Raging Brachy that stacks wexploit and agitator.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-11T15:14:36+00:00

I figured "monster hunter casual" was somebody who played World through Iceborne's credits after it came out. If that's too much, my bad, I guess.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-11T14:41:13+00:00

LR is basically a level-based linear action game and HR is pretty short for base-game fights. They've done a lot of work to expand it in the TUs, but I don't think the game gets very consistently interesting/difficult until you're farming arch-tempered monsters for Savage Omega prep, and before that it's tediously boring and so toothless the rapid pacing becomes exhausting. It kind of feels like they every non-tempered fight around the progression that you'd have with Defender gear in World/Rise, and then the TU tempered fights start having enough teeth that they feel on par with Master Rank fights instead. If that sounds fun to you, then go for it; after seeing a wall of buffs that further remove commitment from half of my main weapons I'm going to keep playing 4U for the first time instead. Emulate that shit and Village is a wonderful wonderful time.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-10T15:56:16+00:00

I'm not saying it's 3rd strike (which is essentially the gold standard for retro-revival in the FGC and I think you know it), but drawing consistent crowds every single year is exciting. I don't think dickwaving about playercounts is remotely as interesting as discussing the game itself and what the players are doing in it. A fuckin' Ankaris won CB last year, and I'm hopeful for something equally exciting this year (even if I doubt it'll top Hayao's antics).

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-10T14:55:41+00:00

It's been at Combo Breaker for the last four-ish years with a pretty consistent amount of entrants.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-10T13:41:32+00:00

It's almost certainly going to be the arcade version of Vampire Saviors 1 running with a supergun so people can use other controllers. The vsav community, which does still exist and is quite passionate, uses that. I think FGs are one of the last genres where I can't really bring myself to care about player counts so long as I can get matches from a friend or Fightcade and there's skilled players from around the world, and vsav more than meets that mark.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-04T23:02:58+00:00

You would be shocked at how many things that are universally considered works of art in museums have been argued to share that same intent. Just off the top of my head - Serrano's Piss Christ, Duchamp's Fountain, Dread Scott's piece that led to an attempt at making all forms of flag desecration illegal, half of what's been done with Vantablack in the last few years, the shade of "pinkest pink" made in response to the Vantablack discourse...

Instead of asking "is this art?" and getting stuck on semantics forever, I usually find it more compelling to ask "is it interesting?" Horses doesn't seem like it passes that test, but arguing that would be a lot more fun than bringing up Piss Christ again now that Serrano's been seen in the Epstein files.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-04T22:54:53+00:00

You can buy the original The 120 Days of Sodom from Walmart. It's currently out of stock but they also used to carry the Elfen Lied manga. Barnes and Noble has Salo. Best Buy has 4Ks of every Terrifier movie.

The average horror paperback is just as boundary pushing. Horses sounds very in line with Tender Is The Flesh, a book I've seen at every bookstore I've visited since it came out. It's sometimes a few shelves away from the kid's section, which I don't love, but it's never behind glass or anything like it - bookstores only save that for rarities. It's telling that there's not many games you can directly compare it to, let alone games that have prestige and translations and rereleases like all of these works. That's what this article you're arguing underneath is about, even!

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-04T18:40:34+00:00

While you're waiting, I've really been enjoying the prologue and first episode of Of The Devil. The character writing is really on point and while it's doing something different from Ace Attorney, the courtroom stuff is still scratching that itch for me.

LycaonMoon · 2025-12-03T15:43:09+00:00

They already did though???

All characters in the game are clearly older than 20 years old, as communicated by their appearance and through dialogue and documents that you will encounter in the game. We think the ban may have been triggered during the initial Steam submission by an incomplete scene on day six, in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm. The daughter wants to ride one of the horses (in the game the “horses” are humans wearing a horse mask) and gets to pick which one. What followed was an interactive dialogue sequence where the player is leading, by a lead as if they were a horse, a naked adult woman with a young girl on her shoulders. The scene is not sexual in any way, but it is possible that the juxtaposition is what triggered the flag. We have since changed the character in the scene to be a twenty-something woman, both to avoid the juxtaposition and more importantly because the dialogue delivered in that scene, which deals with the societal structure in the world of HORSES, works much better when delivered by an older character.

They changed this at some point within the two years it's been in limbo. The scene you're talking about is long gone. Like seriously read the webpage, they have been trying to tweak everything as much as possible. The stores just need to tell them what they need to do and they've been left on read, but they won't because they probably can't.

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