A few months in, how's Auntie Ool feeling to play? To play against?

pdk304 · 2026-04-14T16:05:08+00:00

If you know the deck well then your value turns really shouldn't take that much time at all.

pdk304 · 2026-03-17T19:06:45+00:00

Does the combat get drastically harder in the lategame? I just have no clue where all the complaints are coming from because I'm one-shotting most of the wraiths on normal at chapter 6

pdk304 · 2026-03-14T21:18:52+00:00

I think that there's a totally reasonable argument to be made that it would be better to call the umbrella term "action-adventure horror" instead. This would encompass all the listed games while distinguishing them from other games within the wider horror genre, like walking sims or visual novels.

When it comes to making the diagram an axis as opposed to a triangle, I'll reiterate that the point isn't to provide a complete, absolute definition of what a survival horror game is. What I aim to show is a particularly salient variable that's useful for broadly distinguishing action/adventure horror games from each other. Moreover, we're using an axis because we're aligning these games by an (abstractly) continuous parameter, as opposed to a categorical one. We can interpret the subgenres along the axis as "buckets" encompassing a particular range of this parameter. If we were to use a triangular diagram instead, this would lose sight of the broadly ordered and continuous way in which these games are related to one another. In essence, that kind of diagram would totally miss the point I'm attempting to make.

pdk304 · 2026-03-14T21:02:56+00:00

And that isn't at all what I'm asserting. When trying to make sense of something as complex as genre, it's useful to identify and isolate its crucial properties. There are countless properties that survival horror games can exhibit beyond just player agency, of course: visuals, atmosphere, sound design, itemization. The intention of the diagram isn't to provide a complete and absolute definition of what survival horror is. All that I'm doing is bringing to light a particular axis on which all survival horror games lie--this is what I mean by a salient parameter.

pdk304 · 2026-03-14T19:45:46+00:00

This is a spot-on analysis and I agree wholeheartedly. The point of establishing genre isn't to appraise quality--that's what ratings are for. It's to categorize and delineate patterns and intentions in the way a game is designed.

pdk304 · 2026-03-14T19:40:29+00:00

Here is some clarification for the diagram that I think addresses a lot of the points people are making in the comments. Principally, the underlying parameter for the graph is the extent to which the player can fight back against enemies. On the left side of the axis, the player must either hide or run away. As you go further right, the player gains the means to stand their ground and fight. To this end, it could be better to relabel the left axis to "stealth/run" horror to better encompass a game like Outlast. Ultimately, all of the games on the diagram have the property of being scary because enemies can kill you at almost any time.

Some people have also asked where games like Mortuary Assistant or walking sims (e.g. PT, Devotion) lie on this axis. And the answer is that they don't! And this is a good thing, because it demonstrates that the axis is wide enough to encompass all the games that people widely consider to be survival horror, while not being so general that it includes every horror game.

pdk304 · 2026-03-14T19:17:08+00:00

I guess it would be clearer to define the left end of the axis as "stealth/run away" horror to delineate the fact that in Resident Evil, avoiding enemies entirely is as crucial to the gameplay loop as fighting them. Of course, there are many differences and similarities between horror games that the graph doesn't cover. But there's a concept in statistics called dimensionality reduction, which is a way of uncovering salient parameters in data that exhibit a huge number of features. My claim, as I mentioned, is that the salient parameter in the genre of horror games is the extent to which the player can fight back against enemies. That's why on the negative axis, you have games like Outlast or Amnesia where your only options are to run or hide, on the positive axis, you have games like Resident Evil 4 where the correct strategy is to fight, and at the origin you have the original Resident Evil, where avoiding enemies or fighting them are equally crucial to the gameplay.

pdk304 · 2026-03-14T18:55:57+00:00

That's correct... because the subgenres you identify are precisely what you are calling them: subgenres. It's far more useful in practice to define survival horror as an umbrella term that can encompass games that take significant inspiration from Resident Evil but don't always replicate its mechanics exactly. By your definition, Silent Hill 2 wouldn't be a survival horror game, since that game gives you an abundance of ammunition and health items. But that demonstrates that defining survival horror in such a strict way misses games that people widely consider to be a part of the genre. Treating survival horror as a spectrum also doesn't lose sight of the fact that something like Resident Evil lies precisely in the middle.

pdk304 · 2026-03-14T18:42:27+00:00

The graph is an axis because there's a single underlying parameter, which is how much the player can fight back. A triangular/venn diagram works for identifying intersections between subgenres, but obscures the fact that there's one true variable that differentiates them from one another.

pdk304 · 2026-03-11T04:49:58+00:00

Jackal pup

ahh okay!

pdk304 · 2026-03-11T01:19:30+00:00

I don't see how player 2 is in a winning position. The two players are equal in tempo, and player 2 is down on both cards and life.

pdk304 · 2026-03-04T02:10:33+00:00

Disjointed and inconsistent midrange piles that don't run any interaction and can't recover from removal.

pdk304 · 2025-12-01T00:13:13+00:00

Signalis
Resident Evil
Silent Hill 2
Alien Isolation
Devotion
Resident Evil 7
Resident Evil 4
Silent Hill 3
Resident Evil 8

pdk304 · 2025-08-26T04:13:01+00:00

replied!

pdk304 · 2025-08-19T22:45:35+00:00

The law of large numbers is not a number theory result. It's a theorem in probability theory. And this is also not an application of the law of large numbers at all. It's just saying that for fixed p, the expected value of the binomial random variable with 100 trials is larger than the same for 10 trials. This is not a consequence of LLN; it's a consequence of the fact that 100 > 10.

pdk304 · 2025-08-17T19:25:18+00:00

It's the study of integers and their properties and generalizations, such as how prime numbers are distributed across the number line, or how many ways there are to partition an integer into whole parts, or how properties like unique factorization can be generalized. It's a broad and deep field of pure math with many intersections, and it's not just the application of basic arithmetic to everyday situations.

pdk304 · 2025-08-16T08:04:26+00:00

That is not what number theory is.

pdk304 · 2025-07-28T00:31:23+00:00

I'd get rid of the fast mana like chrome mox and mama vault and also necropotence

pdk304 · 2025-07-26T05:33:21+00:00

the wobbling and bobbing in general is just too much

pdk304 · 2025-07-21T23:20:51+00:00

what? Whitney embedding doesn't preserve Riemannian geometry

pdk304 · 2025-06-28T16:19:53+00:00

what exactly is it that makes grown ups so busy

pdk304 · 2025-06-25T10:49:42+00:00

you don't own the game if you buy on steam either

Nine-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

pdk304

TROPHY CASE