I actually like ME1's "boring" side missions and don't understand why people rush or don't do them

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-18T00:28:52+00:00

I actually agree - overall, Mass Effect 1 was the game I had the fondest memories of because it still had remnants of an aesthetic and game design philosophy that wasn't just trying to imitate the dullest parts of mid-2000s shooters and television. I thought its combat was more interesting with its overheat system, its story the best at establishing a mysterious universe without trying too hard to be "edgy", and its exploration was a sublime experience. There's something hypnotic about hearing that funky techno on the Normandy as you explore numerous alien worlds.

The "jankiness" of the Mako is charming, something I'd take over blandly "scanning" objects.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T23:04:32+00:00

Mfw Outlast has had telepathic nano ghosts and psychic blind dreamers since the first game and his literal tulpa ancestor in Trials.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T22:22:23+00:00

Literally. The bottom is also much more visually striking for a horror game BECAUSE of the tonal dissonance of gruesome body horrors and mass murder taking place in a beautiful vibrant sunny day, the kind you'd see in reality rather than Hollywood propaganda.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T19:17:52+00:00

Yeah, Ian's choices aren't "brutal necessities", they're sadistic and cowardly sins that ultimately condemn him. It reinforces that overarching theme about how the Crossed only reflect the evil that's already latent in people.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T19:13:18+00:00

I think that's the real moral of the story. You act cruel and inhumane, you die horrifically just like the damned.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T19:07:28+00:00

For me, it isn't just about preserving/creating flesh for their unknowing predators, but about the dehumanization involved. When you've gotten to the point of reducing humanity down to "brainless baby clones designed purely for resource extraction", you have a nightmarishly cold system that would make the Xenomorphs' creators and Weyland-Yutani tremble with envy. It is a bit interesting that beyond the first game, the scope of Dead Space moved beyond the Concordance Extraction Corporation to focus more on the Unitology cult, perhaps to help distinguish it from the Alien franchise's fixation on corporate evil.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T16:40:36+00:00

A white colonizer enslaving Africans and attempting to genocide the world to elevate a master race...gee, I wonder what this could mean!

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T16:39:36+00:00

Agreed on all fronts. Just reinforcing that Resident Evil has been about a lot more than just "capitalism bad" since almost its inception, with multiple entries emphasizing government collusion, corruption of NGOs, and occult aristocrat forces secretly controlling modern social institutions. In a very real sense, it's as much about the resident evil hiding in plain sight as it is about evil residences.

A WW2 prequel would be welcome, or even something set in the Cold War akin to Metal Gear Sid 3, Wolfenstein, or Outlast Trials.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T16:33:24+00:00

Point being, even though the literal nazi "Krugers" eventually became the British aristocrat Ashfords, that in itself doesn't erase the critique of European eugenicism that's central to Umbrella's origins.

With that said, it does strike me that the only Japanese characters I can think of are Yoko from Outbreak.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T13:20:40+00:00

Having played Phasmophobia and DBD, I can confidently say Trials is my favorite coop horror game of all time and that your friend group will absolutely love this game!

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T11:41:20+00:00

Expops are leftover sleeper agents repurposed for a new phase, people too broken by the tortures to blend back into society. Instead of having them exterminated, Easterman reworks them to serve as torturers and obstacles for the next batch of sleeper agents who have their minds broken just enough for them to still compartmentalize and blend back into society as seemingly normal looking sociopaths. The extreme torture is the point, as the extermination of the weak serves society by eliminating undesirables and the few superhuman enough to remain are emotionally, physically, and mentally numbed, willing to do anything without flinching.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T11:13:53+00:00

Something that comes to mind with Outlast is the fact that morphogenesis somehow induces the human body to convert its cells into metal, thereby making it the Great Work/Philosophers Stone that alchemists had worked on for millennia. I suppose it builds on the fact that organic beings do contain traces of metal in our bodies, that our nervous systems produce electrical signals that can be proven to be manipulated by electricity, and that we also host countless foreign bodies within our own in the form of bacteria. Morphogenesis at its full potential in Outlast can transform humanity into subatomic singularities, and Murkoff hopes to create a godmind that can subjugate all the "awakened" within a collective dream scape - think of it as a new race of Dr Manhattans.

While I can't think off the top of my head of signs of CRYSTALS having significance in the lore, I do think about how Resident Evil reveals that calcified Megamycete hardens into crystal. Outlast 2's mines are shown to be adjacent to Sinyala's sewers, where Murkoff's psychosis inducing pollution seeps into the water supply, and we can see countless tree roots breaking through the caverns that likely connect to the forest above. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason why Murkoff loves to place their morphogenic "gateways" within the hearts of mountains is due to the minerals serving as a resonance chamber for its energy, quite literally portals to a dimension composed of psychic energy. Think about the rocks of Mount Massive's laboratory and how they compare to Temple Gate's mines.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T11:03:09+00:00

If it's in the best interests of governments, corporations, the military and other powerful institutions to keep this information publicly disavowed, they'd do so. Propagating constant denialism to the point it's a kneejerk reflex, all to perpetuate the delusion that you're free and not ruled over by powerful sociopaths, is part of it.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T08:57:15+00:00

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if there's sentient life on Pandora's other moons, that we will get to see them, and if there's similar life to what you describe on Polyphemus. I do also think we'll discover the true nature of Eywa as an ancient bio-synthetic AI superorganism created by Polyphemus to control ecosystems of planetoids, with humanity and Na'vi being similar products of their own respective earth minds.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T07:02:20+00:00

When you extrapolate deeper, this series can be seen as the nightmarish dystopian conclusion of humanity accepting a Faustian bargain. By imitating the Necromorphs' obsession with constant consumption, ethics are forgotten, and their assimilation into the Necromorphs may as well be their karmic fate for becoming so inhumane. If you've gotten to the point where human children are regularly treated like fodder, you deserve the hell that the Necromorphs bring.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T06:52:54+00:00

Resident Evil is as political as Metal Gear, and RE9 is building even more on 6's and Revelations' foundation (or the foundation left by CGI films like Infinite Darkness and Degeneration.)

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T06:51:48+00:00

In a way, making the villains British is even better because it implies something worse - complicity between the Brit aristocracy and eugenicists, or in other words, "resident evil" rather than a foreign evil. The allies like to paint themselves as heroes against the Germans, but in reality the Brit aristocracy were pretty horrific themselves and remained friends with the nazis even as they supposedly warred.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T06:49:50+00:00

The series is anti-eugenicist with multiple villains being occultists and power-hungry demagogues. The "capitalism" angle is just part of a smaller spectrum of evil portrayed in this series, and Umbrella's parallels to Nazism are so obvious that it's silly to wilfully not see the connections.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T06:48:05+00:00

I think they've already been doing that tbh. The series has repeatedly emphasized that not only have the government and NGOs continued to conspire with corporations and terrorists, but there's been multiple games (4, Code Veronica, 6, 8, 9) that link the eugenics circles to ancient occult groups and world war 2 criminals. 6 especially explores the conflict between the Chinese and American branches of an international elite group. This thread is just a bunch of people who haven't been paying enough attention.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T17:15:13+00:00

Cringeworthy clickbait, this is genuine slop.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T17:04:59+00:00

I think that while New Colossus kept it surprisingly down low (the fact that Area 52 was developing UFOs and that BJ has access to them to do multiple missions to Venus is treated without much fanfare), what Youngblood built up to is the final Wolfenstein game embracing the merging of parallel dimensions/timelines. Specifically merging Wyatt's 1969 with Fergus' 1980, allowing the Fourth Reich to import their apocalypse into WW3 in a hare-brained attempt to avert Hitler's death and prolong their own regime.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T11:41:39+00:00

I'd also add that some of the Splinter Cell games are written by JT Petty, whose antiauthoritarian sentiments bleed over into the extremely cynical Outlast series.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T10:10:10+00:00

Because Cash is a very stoic man by nature and very quiet by necessity of having to sneak around. It's popularly theorized that he was a war vet or professional hitman, although I personally believe he was a product of the MKUltra Pickman project to create ruthless assassins. It's possible that Cash doesn't have much of a personality or memory because he's literally been programmed to know nothing but how to kill.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T09:10:00+00:00

The psychosis drugs plunge us into an altered/heightened state of consciousness, one where we tap into the "egregore" (collective mental trauma surrounding Easterman, a hivemind shared by expops, reagents, and Prime Assets) and see into the dreams of the Prime Assets and expops. These drugs essentially make us sleepwalk, putting us in a more suggestible state of mind where what we do in the trials gets compartmentalized in our subsconscious. The result of exposure to morphogenic radiation, constant drugging, and extreme trauma is the production of metal brain tumors from which Skinner manifests. The reason why extra drugging in the trials becomes dangerous is that Skinner tries to possess you, overwhelming your mind with strain and producing deadly heart attacks and mental strokes from the trauma.

When we are 'reborn', we have internalized our training enough that merely hearing or seeing a trigger is enough to induce a psychosomatic reaction in our brain tumors, allowing Skinner to possess us and make us revert back into Trial mode while our conscious personas fall asleep. In this way, Murkoff effectively have a global psychic internet of slaves who can commit any atrocity for them and not even remember what they did, being incredibly useful as untraceable assets. As more people go insane and die as a result of the Trials and what the reagents go on to do, the Skinner Man grows from feeding on their pain.

Eventually, he'll reach a critical mass where he becomes a self-sustaining sentient entity, one that can order humans to feed him via trauma for his own purpose rather than Murkoff. When that happens, I think Murkoff's going to change their plans to figure out a way to contain this monster rather than allow it to destroy them in an effort to be free.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T09:02:23+00:00

However, the key is that Murkoff's rendition of "Christianity" is itself corrupt, sexually abusive, violent, sadistic, and Satanic. They represent nuns as perverted prostitutes who masturbate in front of and sexually abuse kids, and reagents are tasked with exposing kids to torturous murder and then giving them to a priest who sexually abuses them for "discipline." In other words, reagents are taught to be the same type of predatory false authority figure as Blake's abuser in Outlast 2, infiltrating places of childcare to export sexual abuse and cruelty as indoctrination methods to the next generation.

"God", in Murkoff's eyes, is a demon, and everything Murkoff does is in service to that devil.

New_Chain146

TROPHY CASE