Hey guys! No sponsor for this video obviously because of the subject matter. Imagine the "And you know what DOESN'T make me horribly depressed? Today's sponsor, Audiobook Website" But fr, if anyone has any advice on improving my audio quality, please reply to this comment with some sage guidance. Is my room just too echoey? I use a blue snowball microphone. Any advice would be dearly appreciated. Hope you all enjoy the video and thank you for watching!
No kidding, I’ve seen sponsors for apps that are supposed to help with depression and mental health. The videos were great but the sponsors felt wrong.
You're doing ok on the audio. If you're worried about quality there's maybe very minor background noise, barely audible if at all, you could try the "remove noise" function on whatever your audio editor is. I used audacity back in the day because it was free, and it was the only thing that made my karaoke level microphone of tolerable quality. Just select a blank stretch of audio and click to clean it up, even takes care of fan noises. Great tool 👍🏼
@@ryanb4940 I actually have the pleasure of knowing Jon irl (spoiler: his name isn't really Jon) and I can say as one with inside information: he was too scared to finish Layers of Fear lmao so he definitely didn't get to that bit yet He has done the others though, I'll give him that
I specifically hate suicide endings where the justification is that the person in question was a burden. That's literally what I've thought every time I've contemplated/attempted suicide. People who are mentally ill really do NOT need to be told they are a burden any more than they already are.
@@rinsuu9848 You as well, homie. I'm doing better these days. I have trouble holding a job which is a downer. But, other than that, things are alright.
That's not just a bloober problem though, even the original SH2 made by Team Silent handled the concept of suicide and Angela's story very, very poorly and tactless
Mine wasn't feeling like a burden, that came later. For me it was that intense, helpless feeling of being alone. Completely, utterly alone. I'm better, in case someone asks. ❤
You have to do what she tells you even if you don’t really know why and it ends up roping others into her sphere of influence? By gosh, the Blair Witch is an influencer!
That made me laugh. Thank you. Now all I can think of is a horrific Blair Witch monster doing the duckface shots from a high angle with the rotting floor boards behind her. Peak comedy.
This was so insane to me cause like... From what we "see" of the witch she isn't human... Like did she have to wait for someone with a camera to show up? She couldn't have bought it herself lol
I feel they will try hard to be too edgy and straight up show the "scene" with angela and her dad but it will be extremally distasteful and very cringey.
The idea of doing a “silent hill” thing for Blair Witch is so bizarre to me. The original Blair witch was about entropy, decay and the horror of the truly unknowable and undefinable. You watch as their documentary framework, all their narratives and beliefs, break down into pure chaos. It’s beautiful and haunting and even to this day, unique. Making it “about trauma” is just a bizarre and unmotivated reduction of its frame.
Agreed, even the "actual" second movie that's shot more as a literal movie instead of found-footage (it was still found-footage but they were like... home-security cameras so they shot it much more normally than the first. I enjoyed it. Sue me.) did a much better job of sticking to the themes of modified perceptions and compulsions due to it. I wonder if this started as it's own IP, then decided it'd sell better with the Blair Witch sticker on it?
I was so incredibly confused watching someone play this game because the setting was very interesting so I was pumped… then the flashbacks about being mean to wife started and I went “oh no”, I never finished watching because from those scenes I immediately knew where this game was going and I’m just so tired of this being the only story horror games want to have now?? Like we all know silent hill 2 is a masterpiece but why is it that it’s impact has just devolved to “kill wife >:(“ instead of opening a door to other impactful situations that would actually require thought to be turned into a game
@@CausticMedeimI’m still PISSED the studio took the original idea of Blair witch two and out it through a nonsense blender because the idea behind it is fantastic
Mentally ill people are a danger to themselves more than to anyone else, and the implication that it’s best for them to die so the world doesn’t have to deal with them is a deep insult to their humanity. They deserve help dealing with their struggles, not to be abandoned and exterminated.
To be fair, that’s not really the implication the game was trying to give. The Witch trapped Ellis in a space/time loop to transform him into the Carver like she did with Rustin Parr and Lane in the films.
I feel like (as someone who went through years of therapy to deal with it as a child) OCD would actually make for a great horror game. You’re just living your life, but there are “puzzles” (ritual compulsions) that you 1. MUST do correctly 2. MUST start again if anything disrupts you (noise? Pet moved? House settling? Motorcycle went by? Text notification sound?) 3. Get more complex over time. And when you fail them, the music and lighting keep gradually increasing a feeling of unease that escalates to pure teeth-grindingly terror-all of which snap away back to normal life as soon as you succeed. Maybe some background reminders about how your OCD is disrupting you life, like messages from your boss about you being late again (door check ritual), being unable to touch or eat things for no apparent reason, friends describing themselves as “so OCD because they have a tidy desk. Meanwhile you have a night ritual that gets harder to complete because you’re exhausted. Your PC could keep glancing at an alarm clock, knowing you need to sleep, but unable to do so until you finish. The overwhelming terror of unknown disaster was always the hardest thing for me to explain, but I feel like a game could REALLY nail it with simple but thoughtful design. Like 5 Nights At Freddy’s but it’s inside your own damn head.
This is a great idea! I was thinking about a similar thing but for ADHD, which lends itself more to a sort of parodic take on the CRPG than a straight-up horror - you get quests, and every time you get a new sidequest it can just delete a bunch of more important quests out of your quest journal until an NPC reminds you about them, and sometimes when you go to continue with the main questline you literally can't get the quest to continue, like the game takes your agency away for a bit and says "nah, come back and do this some other time" until you go away and do something else for a bit, and sometimes you just get stuck in a loop of repeatable sidequests because you're hyperfocused. Also the PC's idle animation has them jiggling their leg all the time or pacing around.
Based idea. Unrelated, but this reminded me of the game Solipsis, off the Dread X collection. You play as an astronaut on the Moon, and you find information that seems more and more unbelievable the further you go; the gameplay involves you having to fit the information into your brain, jigsaw puzzle style.
Right! Like i feel like having a mental illness or disability in ur game has aloooot of potential for not only just spooks but to show ppl how we struggle with things in an interesting way. The problem is always that folks who make these things don’t care abt an interesting way to portray it (with help from ppl who have the conditions and also research) and instead just. Go off of some weird stereotypes of what they THINK it is? Like what u have written here absolutely would work. And i am sure others with other conditions could come up with cool shit. I hope some ppl do it! I don’t have ocd but I’m autistic and i can think of a lot of weird shit that’s scary as an autistic person for a horror game lol (stuff that isn’t just meltdowns 😒).
Yep a great idea, it could even include the mental side with whispered/ thought rituals that make you more stressed if you don't do them. The player remembering to do them as someone (unaware of your issue) says or does something that triggers it and trying to do it while listening. the stress of a dialogue choice while doing a OCD ritual. The worry of wondering if this converstaion will be normal or plagued by a ritual.
That's a very cool idea, my mother has OCD and extreme _extreme_ germophobia so personally I think it'd be very cool for this hypothetical game to show how it affects people around the individual as well. Even if just briefly touched upon.
The fact that the """good ending""" is literally validating the all too common Hellbrain Thought of "the world would be better off without me" is just Honestly I don't think I'd be too far off by calling it dangerous
Yeah, that's horrible actually. Why is the blame and onus to ""think about others"" on the traumatized people rather than the things/people that traumatized them
@@steelbear2063 dude what the fuck. Just because some bad people exist doesn't mean we should reinforce their suicidal ideation. Language like this hurts a lot of people.
Yes! As someone who struggles with suicidal ideation, the thought of "everything would be better if I just killed myself" crosses my mind way too often. And this kind of shitty media saying "yes, you're absolutely right. You are too broken to be fixed. You're a ticking time bomb, ready to start aimlessly killing everyone around you. You should kill yourself, that's the right thing to do" is outright dangerous. Someone who struggles with these thoughts could quite easily be pushed over the line with this if caught at the worst time. These kinds of writers don't seem to remember that there are actual people in the world who struggle with depression and PTSD and that their works might have horrific effects on those people.
@@TessuDraws The thing is though, as someone who also has to deal with these thoughts going into a horror game with the expectation that the character you're playing always survives is kind of... naive. Some stories just don't have happy endings, incompetent writers just ruin it.
One of my favourite games ever is The Cat Lady, it starts with suicide. You don't control the character and never see it at all, there's only Susan narrating how everything is spinning and such. Then she becomes immortal, which is exactly the opposite of what she wanted. Rem Michalski used to work as a nurse, so everything from the hospital staff's apathy and bureaucracy, passing through the doctor's abuse of power, to the police's disregard when Susan calls telling she was kidnapped is so realistic. It really understands mentally ill people and how the world treats us like shit.
The Cat Lady Trilogy is amazing, i always tend to return to that game and see how it unfolds.From the derranged mind of Joe Davis in Downfall, to Susan struggle to deal with depression and loneness, and finishing with Lorelai and her fight with her insecurities and the Queen of Maggots. Such a great trilogy to be reminded Yuki.
(disclaimer on this one - I'm not an expert on military psychological screening or military background checks. _But I know they exist_, unlike Bloober Team's writers apparently.)
Currently their screening is totally chill with the general anxiety and mood disorders as long as you're relatively controlled without medication, and if I remember right they're proposing medication waivers now for mood disorders and stuff like adhd because of how high rates of mental illness are in younger demographics and how much their recruitment has tanked already, but considering you could absolutely get rejected for having a surgery, over a decade prior, that fully resolved a health condition as recently as 2017 for sure, he definitely shouldn't have made it through with such a substantial psychiatric record at that point.
"Mental Health has become its own setting by this point. It's like Middle Earth, except... *shit* and *boring* " The bluntness yet sharpness of this critique got me in tears. XD
"mary deserved it she was faking and james found a better girl, but than you became skelly and WROTE THIS CAUSE JAMES DED ALL ALONG :O" game sites: wowses so deep much deeper than og 2 :O
@@asuspiciousavocado3317 Do you mean the version of mary inside james' head- the head of the severely mentally ill man who is pushing all of his own responsibility off of himself and onto his **dead wife?** That bossfight?
I’ve always found it hilarious to imagine a maniacal paper hoarder prancing about ahead of the protagonist shedding notes and diary pages like a stressed out chicken shedding feathers. It’s just so ludicrous.
You have to do what she tells you! You have to leave all these notes and photos meticulously strewn about in the hopes someone comes and reads them because it’ll be, like, super cool and scary and their faces will be all “bwaaaaah?”.
I think every game should just start with an intro sequence of a cargo plane with deeply personal correspondence exploding over the game area. Even if it's a pirate game. Or Tetris.
Hello. I used to be suicidal and I can say this. One of the things that people tend to get wrong is that people have to be sad before they take their life. In fact most people who do suicides is happy in their final hours because they have it all planned out how it is gonna happen. Whenever I felt that joy I would force myself out of it because I knew that meant I was teetering on the edge.
I see you using the term "used to be" so want to send you gentle congratulations on your fight (as a sufferer of depression and anxiety, I know it's a constant thing and not a "yay, I've beat the final boss" situation, but still, every win is still a win so I applaud you👏), and just want to support your statement. I have, luckily, not reached the point of suicidal thoughts but have had three loved ones end themselves and each of them seemed to be in better moods and on the mend just before doing it. From what I understand, it's that feeling of finally being in control, finally having a plan and a course, that makes them appear to be "getting better" and is why it's almost always a huge shock to everyone when they're gone. I'd give everything I've ever had to make mental illness non-stigmatized and as understood and treatable as general physical illnesses. I don't understand why people overlook the fact that our brains are an organ just like our hearts or lungs and require just as much care.
A game that I find did a surprisingly considerate suicide ending is Cyberpunk 2077. It's an ending that simply ends the game but somehow doesn't feel like a cop out from the writers. After your character shoots themselves off screen you witness the reactions of each friend you made on your journey, and how they all process their grief individually. But in the end, they're all so completely shattered, wishing that you had reached out, going to show that suicide isn't necessarily the answer to suffering.
Has anyone ever made a game where you have to STOP your character from killing themselves by keeping them busy, avoiding unhealthy behaviors, and working to move their life back into a positive direction?
I was just thinking I would play the hell out of a game like that, especially if it was constructed in such a way that it *showed* the player how to construct such healthy patterns in their lives.
Dude, you're onto something with the concept of the "mental health setting." I don't know if you've had the displeasure of watching the recent Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, but I think it's a prime example of this type of thing where the writer almost fetishizes mental duress and ignores the personhood of their subject, relegating them only to their trauma and refusing to see them as a whole human being.
@@stefanmayer9047 Omg, is it ever so very bad... 😖 I'm a huge MM fan and have yet to find a good depiction of her actual struggles and successes, but this....THIS....it was so insulting and skin-crawlingly off the mark, I was spiritually offended. Reading interviews with the director explains a lot about the choices made for Blonde, absolutely disgusting individual. 😡
As someone who's struggled with suicidal thoughts for 15+ years, I understand the concept of a mentally ill person perceiving suicide as a noble act -- there are times where I start to think I'm a waste or a burden and that everybody would be better off without me and that offing myself would only make everyone else's life better. Obviously, I know this isn't true, but mental illness can try like hell to convince you it is. The problem starts when these stories with "noble suicide" endings try to frame it as a *good thing.*
Yeah, as a mentally ill person with a psychology degree, I really hate this kind of game and how they deal with these issues. I have C-PTSD, anxiety and depression, and I have a history of self-harm and suicidal ideation, as well as having suffered a traumatic brain injury as a child. I also live with several chronic pain conditions. So I have had a lot of experience with media that tries to reflect my life back to me, but instead all I see is a cheap, ugly version of me that isn't me. Often, I do have intrusive thoughts and dangerous urges and if I acted on these, I would harm either myself or someone else. But the answer to that is not that I have to eliminate myself to make sure it never happens. It's a ridiculous notion. I'm not a robot programmed to act upon every thought I have; I have free will. The idea that I could ever be so broken that I could only ever harm people is genuinely offensive and very harmful. I take anti-depressants; I am in therapy; I write poems and stories to express my trauma; I read books about trauma to better understand myself; I have a support group around me that I can turn to. These things will never fix me because my foundation is broken, but that does not mean I cannot heal and build a better me. I do not have to succumb to my trauma and I do not have to succumb to my mental illness. It is honestly very harmful to suggest that the only option is suicide because a lot of my intrusive thoughts tell me exactly that. When a game turns around and tells me "the only way to protect everyone else is to kill yourself", it is finally showing me a true reflection and that reflection is what my intrusive thoughts say when I'm suicidal. I do not need or want to have them affirmed because they are wrong. It is dangerous to imply it as the solution because maybe, that's all someone needs to finally step over the line and end their life. It is also dangerous because it isn't true and all it does is further demonise those of us who are mentally ill. I am a danger to other people in the way that anyone can be a danger to other people. There is not one person who is inherently incapable of harming others. We can all hurt each other if we so choose or we can do it accidentally. The notion that it's only the mentally ill people who do it is wrong and it's dangerous. Mental illness can be a factor in causing others to harm each other, but so can pretty much anything. If Bloober want to tell me that I'm wrong about that, they should go consult experts in the area or read their work because what they portray in this game is not accurate. If anyone is interested in said work, I'd recommend Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman or Love With Accountability by Aishah Shahidah Simmons as good first reads.
Hey, another survivor! I'm proud of you. I never made it far enough to get a psych degree myself. Thank you for your comment. I hope others will be inspired by your story; I know I am, as it's similar to mine. Best of luck in all things!
Lovely comment. I can relate to your situation. It's great to see someone express themselves like this. I wish our media was more sensitive and thoughtful with their writing. Tired of feeling like a living trope and not a whole and complete, complex individual. Capable, hurt, but healing. Thanks for your comment.
I think the only game I've played that had suicide and poor mental health as an element that didn't come off as tasteless shock value was Disco Elysium. And I didn't even really dig into that element until my second playthrough. It's portrayed very much as an intrusive thought, one that can be suppressed or pursued but is always kind of looming. There's a moment where you find some mementos from the past you've forgotten, and while they're happy on the surface, a thought about the aquarium is immediately followed up by "You should go and kill yourself there." *That* made me jump, the way it's said in the same tone of voice as the rest of the second person narration, with a casualness that betrays how often the protagonist has thought about this. There's a subplot about the protagonist losing his gun and needing to find it, and you eventually find out that he pawned it off in the midst of a drunken bender, and your various thoughts wonder why you might have done this before Volition - the skill that represents your desire to change and recover - bluntly telling you that "You pawned it so you wouldn't shoot yourself in the head." Overall, those moments did actually make me think about my own intrusive thoughts, how even our worst and cruelest impulses towards ourselves can become so everpresent in our minds that they start to feel normal. And how even then, we can and should keep going for our own sakes. I found it to be a very compassionate and relatable game with regards to my own mental health. Much like Hellblade, its attitude towards mental illness is that it's everpresent and inescapable if you have it but that it's also not the be-all end-all of your life and it doesn't doom you to a life without happiness. Sometimes it's just there, chattering around in the background. But Disco Elysium is definitely in the minority there. Overall, I also usually immediately check out when a game tries to play the """spooky mental illness""" or """unreliable narrator""" card (which really does seem to be just an excuse to throw any need for coherency or point out of the window)
@@alexroy5854 i agree that the mental health depiction was definitely off/unrealistic!! and to me, it made sense because everything we see is from alice's pov so she herself may not even realize what she is thinking or feeling
Bloober’s one message is literally just “if you have serious mental health issues, it’s WAY more convenient for everyone if you just die.” They don’t think their story messaging through at all, and keep landing on that message. Honestly I wish bad horror writers would go back to magic as the be all end all excuse. “Mental health” is not a good substitute for magic in a story. Yet they use it like magic. It cheapens a story if none of the things in it really actually happen. It’s all just a dream. They were in a psych ward the whole time. They actually have vivid delusions. It’s all lazy. Great video as always. I love hearing your takes on these games. The “the player character kills themself is the new it was all a dream twist” is a spot on take. I’d love to hear your takes on some of the Fatal Frame games in the future. Esp 3 and the upcoming re-release of 4 to the west after being region locked. I feel they have a much more sensitive, intelligent, and empathetic portrayal of the mental health struggles the characters have. 1+2 are great spooky haunted house games, too. But less ~*~ psychological horror~*~ than 3+4. 5 is a soggy dumpster fire.
Well, there are stories where magic is feeding on "mental health". It's all just a mash of different dreams making a very real body count. And no death doesn't clear it up. The problem could persist for centuries. It could be starved back down sure, but it won't leave.
Yeah, while there’s a lot that can be done with exploring psychology in horror, I’m imagining something more like Silent Hill. Mental health issues can easily be a factor, but one that fuels twisted and very real manifestations of the psyche. This kinda crap is not only lazy, but utterly offensive to anyone suffering with their mental health. Not to mention potentially dangerous for anyone actually suicidal to play.
@EasterBurn Seriously, it drives me nuts whenever i see people say that Bloober Team want "people with mental illness to kill themselves, because the world would be better off without them" or "how a victim of sexual abuse was demonized while her abuser was made sympathetic". The Medium for example, A game that is literally about dual worlds and seeing through different perspectives ends up showing us nuanced and three-dimensional presentations/perspectives from characters, whether they are good or bad (morality-wise) , wow, SHOCKER!!! Even Silent Hill 2 did that and made us sympathize with James (a man that killed his ill wife) and Eddie, but people seem to have double standards. But now, speaking of The Medium game, Lily (the victim of sexual assault) was always presented as a sympathetic, broken and tragic character that was manipulated by an evil spirit/demonic entity (The Maw) spawned from her own trama and rage. The Maw is a literal entity with a mind of its own, so it's not like Silent Hill 2, where Pyramid Head and the Bubblehead are all contructs and vessels of James's psyche (and Silent Hill's) in order to metaphorically judge/punish him for his sins and made him accept the horrible truth of Mary's death. The threat presented by The Maw is also different from the ones in Silent Hill, since he is a literal, living and breathing demon that needs a host in order to survive, who just happens to be Lily, so his fate and well-being is connected to the girl that happens to suffer from mental health issues with suicide being a potential and tragic way to defeat the demon. Richard (Lily's abuser) was also presented with a sympathetic past, but even then the game and its characters never excused his actions, in fact, they call him out on it and his own biased mental state (since the main characters, who happen to be Mediums, can enter/invade the minds of other people, so no wonder those minds are biased to themselves, they are trying to justify their own actions, while the Mediums are mere passangers of the their minds) and refer to him as a "monster". So, seeing people here say that The Medium is a game that support suicide for victims of sexual assault and/or people that suffer from mental health issues is a little sad and somewhat ridiculous. There is nothing wrong, with disliking the story and criticizing it, but it seems as if the majority of the criticism made towards The Medium's story that i have seen, all revolve around people wanting a different interpretation/outcome towards the themes of mental health.
@@RitualBlood that is a lot of words to say “it’s actually clever that the girl having trauma is directly responsible for everything bad that happens to everyone around her and the only solution is to die”
As soon as you said “Rule of Rose”, it twigged that a Bloober remake of that game would have the potential to be the magnum opus of the disasterously bad taste factory that is Bloober.
Rule of Rose is my favorite game of all time and I agree, they'd absolutely butcher it. They'd give Hoffman a tragic backstory to explain away why he was a child molester, or imply Clara and Diana were "asking for it"
@@Kintsugi23There's something extra icky about the idea of them doing it to those characters considering they're literal, actual minors. Kids who never knew any better. This game's protagonist is at least a grown adult.
Between how bloober handle trauma survivors and those with PTSD I truly fear what's to come for silent hill 2. We can only hope they have no control over the story. I am so happy your videos are here to provide an insightful deep dive into team bloobers storytelling
That was my exact thoughts while watching this video! Bloober keep making these games seemingly trying to "make a point" about trauma and mental illness and go about it in the absolute WORST, most insensitive ways imaginable and think they're being "smart" and "thought-provoking" by doing so. It's ab-so-lutely fucking disgusting and I'd rather spend price-gouging amounts of money on an ebay copy of SH2 than buy the remake. (Although I'm just going to end up emulating it in the long run, because neither price-gougers nor Blooper deserve my money.)
Really hoping Konami and the OG members of Team Silent who came back to work on the remake keep Bloober Team in line. If they change the narrative to even remotely suggest that Mary, Maria, Laura, and especially Angela deserved what happened to them while making every single possible excuse for James, Eddy, and Angela's father I am going to kill someone.
@@Neon-Rain Control of story or not they control the presentation. That trailer was... something else. James moping like a sad puppy looking at the camera through a noose is typical Bloober "subtlety". The OG SH2 had an oneiric quality to it (I think that would be the Lynch influence). Everyone seemed numb to what's happening in front of them even if it's the most bizarre stuff.
There's reports they're on a tight leash from Konami... but how much of that leash is one with some leeway to stick their disgusting opinions of mentally unwell people into the game, we'll only know until the game comes out.
Small side note on Senua’s Sacrifice: her “weird powers” are actually another manifestation of her psychosis. A common delusion/symptom of psychosis is the belief that the individual can see signs and symbols that no one else can (e.g. a hidden message in the TV scheduling; a paint splash predicting the future). Additionally, this often coincides with the belief that third parties are sending them messages through abstract reasoning (e.g. the man in the news broadcast is talking directly to them, rather than reading a script) which is a key factor that drives Senua to see her mother’s face in rock formations which call back to memories. It’s actually a rather thoughtful inclusion that portrays the range of symptoms those with psychosis go through and integrating it as a part of her experience of the world. It’s not perfect as there is something to be said about gamifying these largely impactful symptoms but still much more considered than whatever Bloober tried to do with Blair Witch
I never saw Angela walking into the fire as a Suicide, more of a metaphor of her State of mind. She has already decided that her world had fallen apart and that there were No one coming to help her. Angels depicts the mentality that everything youre paranoid about is true. Its also interesting to know that Angela is supposed to be a kid. She is 15 and were hurt early in her childhood, that created a warped sense of her surroundings and her communication and trust in people. Her dialog in her departure scene is one of my favorite scenes Silent Hill. It includes serious topics of SA, something that Bloober is trying and failing in. But SH dont look down at their SA victims, its more of a study of Angela’s mentality which I actually find way more intersting than James’s.
@@bugdomrulez in a documnetary the character designer said that she was supposed to be around 15-16 But they modelled her after a 40 year Old actor, the voice actor
@@crypticcryptid4702 I mean that could be true. I can see it that way, like her journey still goes on. I just think Angela has a bigger role than some people think, she is on the front cover. I can also see some sort of Madonna-whore complex. In the way James perceive her. An unconscious bias for her being “broken goods”. That’s why I think it’s important that people know that Angela is a child. James are very willing to adopt Laura, another child he perceives as more pure, unconsciously. When I listen to her dialog in the staircase scene. I can only imagine a child that has grown up way to fast not trusting a parental figure, “or maybe you think you can save me, take care of me. Will you love me? Hmph…that’s what I thought. I also find it very interesting that Angela is talking down to you, like she is talking down to a child, herself. Like “you thought someone would come, but they didn’t”
I always thought team silent not making a spin off with her as the protagonist was a missed opportunity. One can argue that her story is pretty easy to fill in the blanks for or that we know all we need to know already, but Idonno. I'd be interested to play it.
I’m not yet in a financial situation to become a patron, so for now you’ll just have to settle for my stubborn insistence on leaving you genuine compliments under every video. I find it very satisfying every time you drop an incredibly based political opinion in the middle of your already solid commentary and I hope you never stop doing it
Not remotely a horror game, but the nightmare segments in Max Payne are probably the best way to go about portraying PTSD in a video game. The whole game is spent with Max obsessing over and trying to avenge the deaths of his wife and daughter so he can move on. In his worst moments, he has vivid nightmares of trying to save them, only to realize he was the killer, representing how he feels that he could have prevented their deaths if he was there for them. These segments are genuinely horrific, especially the floating, invisible maze where he has to follow blood trails and the sound of his daughter crying. His PTSD is never represented as something detrimental to him, only the driving force behind his revenge. His enemies and allies don't constantly remind him that he should kill himself to stop others from dying (even though others do die as a result of his actions), they simply tell him to stop trying to find the truth, which is a pretty standard threat for a detective story. The nightmares don't interfere with his reality or cause him to mistake things that are obvious to the player, far from it, they only happen when he's under extreme stress or the influence of super meth (makes sense in the story). It sucks that so many games see PTSD as a driving force behind their horror rather than a character element which can enhance the horror that's already there. Is this an excuse to talk about Max Payne? Yes. Play Max Payne.
And if you want more horror adjacent games from the same devs, play Alan Wake and Control. Also, Alan Wake 2 coming next year and it will be full blown survival horror game
The last time a game claimed to be watching my every slight wank and winge to judge me vigorously without feeling pointless to me was Silent Hill: Shattered memories. "Stare at alcohol during a therapy session, retroactively become an alcoholic. Look at pin ups, ascend to Hawaiian shirt dad."
God that was so bad, especially since in Silent Hill games you usually try to explore as much as you can, Shattered memories actively punished you for doing it 😬😬
Idk I really loved this game, it makes sence narratively, like your daughter just went missing, and you are taking your time looking at sexy ladies? And if Sheril thinks that is a natural behaviour for Harry, it means he probably wasn't the best parent. Same with alcohol - to me it just implied that she herself has troubles with addiction, after all, it peaked her interest during her therapy session and in this case her substance abuse because of normalizing her father's behaviour. Not the best for gameplay - yes, sure, but interesting storytelling choice. Or maybe I'm just reading into things.
The only game I’ve played in recent memory that actually really spoke to in regards to my own past suicidal ideation was Disco Elysium. The dark humour and self deprecating jokes that aren’t really jokes anymore. It was refreshingly blunt without feeling cruel or tacky. It just felt so honest and human and not “oooooh what a spicy and dark twist!!”
I really think this game would've worked better if they went with the "all in the head" ending. Having the monsters not be real instead it's just Ellis trying to find this child. Setting it in the Blair Witch Forest but with no Blair Witch. Having Ellis be afraid of the (non existent) witch as he is actively breaking down. Maybe the boy just got lost? That definitely would've been more preferable to this absolute condemnation of trauma. Ellis is actively presented as being a black hole to everybody because of his PTSD, a drag to be around and his mental health actively makes him a monster who's only redemption is through death. A better ending would be Ellis finding the child despite everybody's contradictions and his urge to live and grow help him win. Bullet could've been an excellent example to Ellis that he deserves to live and how he can find purpose in helping others. Bullet only lives if Ellis cares, even outside of the game.
I agree when I got my ending which was the bad one I was like okay let me see the good one. I was like how is this good. I was hoping me being good to my dog and wife maybe that help with survival or Ellis may get a redemption ark but nope you either die a hero or become a villain. Which made me sad I at least wanted the good ending be slightly happy.
I think what Bloober doesn’t understand is that not everyone with mental health issues are black holes. I’ve been battling depression for the better of my teen years. Yeah, I can lash out sometimes. Yeah, I’ve considered what everyone else’s lives would be like if I wasn’t alive anymore. But I still try to be a good person, because guess what? Your mental health doesn’t define who you are. Bloober’s depiction of it is, honestly, gross. We’re not animals who need to be put down because we have no use. It completely dehumanises those who are battling with their inner demons. And it’s disgusting. I defo agree that your version of the story would’ve been more powerful. And don’t have Carver be some serial killer. Have him be a manifestation of Ellis’ inner demons. The voice in the back of his head, trying to fill him with poisonous thoughts. Judging everything he does, trying to drag him down at every opportunity. Also, put more of an emphasis on Ellis’ relationship with Bullet. Show how despite the trauma he’s faced, he still cares deeply for those he loves. Even if he’s struggling, he still has compassion. He still wants to be a good person.
Honestly with the reviews excited for "horror game, but with dog!" I gotta wonder if they've ever heard of Rule of Rose or Haunting Ground. Like at least in those games your choices have more meaning on top of dog mechanics.
i feel like part of the reason SH2's in water is so good is because it's not a """solution""", it's an epilogue. and that it's one of many endings. wonderful review as always. even more afraid of bloober's sh2 remake
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is probably my favourite “mental health” game aside from SH2. They seemed to handle it sensitively (and appropriately for the time period and place). I could genuinely feel her pain and I think that’s in part because of the actress who did a great job and the genuinely scary and harrowing sequences in the game that reflected real life experiences (the BTS shows that). It’s also just a well made fun game.
If you wanna be gripped by a game that deals with the aftermath of suicide while being deep and thoughtful you have to check out LISA: the painful. It also has perverts so now you know you have to play it.
The virgin Bloober suicide ending and the chad ZA/UM suicide _beginning_ -this comment's probably gonna age really poorly considering what happened to ZA/UM.-
Bullet here somewhat reminds me of Hewie from Haunting Ground. In Haunting Ground you play as a completely disarmed girl kidnapped in a spooky mansion and you have to find your way out. Very early you find Hewie, a white dog that will be necessary to solve a lot of puzzles and is absolutely vital for your survival being your only "weapon" to buy time against your stalkers. You can command him, tell him to "come", "stay", "go here", "search", "attack" and the like and I remember thinking it was a cute little thing for like 20 minutes after which his AI would drive me up the wall. When you changed rooms he'd constantly just stop following you and start howling for you to come back, he'd stop dead in his tracks for no reason, or he'd be unresponsive, EVEN after petting him, feeding him, treating him because he's listening - it was infuriating
Fun fact; Guy Cihi (James Sunderland’s voice actor and design base) thinks, or thought, of the “In-Water” ending as the most appropriate for the character.
If I recall, and it's been like half a decade so I could be mistaken, he said he understood James' hopelessness. Though I think he did also say that the ending where James basically adopts Laura (Who Guy's daughter auditioned for which was the only reason he was at the auditions) also made sense.
@@MertKayKay You might want to re-think that statement. Guy Cihi fell down the conspiracy rabbit hole (according to him there is zero scientific evidence that AIDS, H1N1 or COVID are real and the COVID outbreak on a cruise ship was caused by 5G) and turned out to be a Trump supporter and anti-vaxxer. He also thinks autism is a disease. He really went off the deep end.
"your sample size is small, your standard deviation is big, your conclusion conclusion means nothing and you should feel bad" I think is a really good example of the research actually gone into the mental health aspect of most of these stories. Honestly Senua's the only one mentioning 'actually talked to people with the illness' and like 95% of people will some sort of mental health issue will tell you that Psychiatric Experts are really good at reading what it says in a book and really shit at translating that to a real life experience. Like when a woman's disinterest in makeup or femininity is labelled "symptom" and not "tomboy" On top of it all, while I am a fan of the in water ending as James Sunderland's cannon end, the idea of 'Maybe we should just euthanize the mentally ill for the good of society' Studio taking control I feel like I'm gonna have to deal with "violently smothering her was a good thing actually" combined with more scenes of Mary to make her seem less human 'cause of her illness... (Can someone bring up that Miyazaki clip of him shutting down a bunch of game developers for making monsters by referencing disabled movements? I feel like it's fitting...)
Sure does make me worry about the recently announced SH2 Remake from Bloober team. I have a creeping dread that we'll get a new story segment where it reveals Angela's Dad's tragic backstory that reveals why he was so abusive towards his daughter just so it can make him empathetic while making Angela herself more unlikable. Just some classic Bloober team treatment of mental health and abuse. That being said, maybe Bloober team will do better now that they actually have a competent script to write around and a blueprint to follow? I try and be optimistic, and Bloober does do atmosphere really well so... maybe they'll avoid all the pitfalls and manage something incredible. Here's hoping.
You summed up the problem with Blooper Team really well at the beginning; "It happened because the writers wanted it to". I can't believe these will be the people behind the Silent Hill 2 remake, why can't we SH fans catch a break?
Thank you for acknowledging that Observer was actually good. Bloober Team’s been getting a lot of well-deserved backlash, especially after the announcement that they’re making the SH2 remake, and while it’s cathartic, it was making me sad that one of my favorite games was getting caught in the crossfires just for being under the same studio name. Edit: AND THANK YOU FOR SAYING CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE ROAD IS SHIT easily the worst book I was required to read in high school, and all my classmates at the time considered it their favorite.
I also appreciate The Road hate. I hated slogging through that book, hated having to discuss the “themes” and “meaning” behind it. I always hear it lauded as a classic and some of the best writing ever, but I was just bored and lost the entire time. Possibly a result of my aphantasia making it super difficult for me to enjoy that style of writing 🤷🏽
guess i'm lucky enough to have not read it then lol, i only know of the "baby eating cult" or something along those lines...and with that i think i'd pass also an odd book to be reading in high school, although saying that we had to read "of mice and men" which notouriously is chalked full of racist slurs that the teachers read out loud unapologetically 😕
I agree with all you said, except The Road comments. I loved that book, but I love depressing novels (Make Room Make Room by Harry Harrison is grimmer.)
@@cutthr0atjake I wouldn't say it being depressing was the issue for me. The writing style was absolutely atrocious. I am sure my husband got annoyed by my constant reading aloud of lines and paragraphs out of frustration. Lack of punctuation, constant sentence fragments, and incomplete metaphors just made it torture to get through. I get that the writer did it on purpose, but that didn't really change that it was awful to read through. If it wasn't required for my English coursework in college, I never would have finished it. I have no problem getting through books in one sitting, but I struggled to get through each and every page of The Road. It is one of the exceptions to "the book was better" argument when it comes to movies.
Another note on the suicide ending thing these games have going on, particularly Madison: A lot of them put the final suicide down to something demonic and use that as the justification for it coming out of nowhere (Madison) or it somehow being the only rational (The Medium). Which is A) a really dumb fantastical simplification of a REAL WORLD issue and B) actively harmful to the people who suffer from these conditions. Depression, anxiety, PTSD absolutely suck, but they're not mystical problems from a fantasy story, they're incredibly grounded, real issues faced by real people every day. Framing them as anything else not only literally demonises people with mental health issues, but could also make it that much harder for people who don't suffer from them to rationalise them when they come across others who do.
Something to be said when Krieg's Fantastic Fustercluck has far more heart and empathy for people suffering from mental trauma than a studio dedicated to make experiences about it.
You ask if people are really happy rating a game on whether you can pet a dog. Allow me as an alternative to offer you my sister's three-point game rating scale: 1. Can you pet the dog? 2. Does the game have a fishing mini game? 3. Does the song "The Boys are Back in Town" play at any point in the game?
I liked how Soma handled the concept of suicide in the Theta segment. Mark Sarang's continuity idea made me feel all sorts of conflicted. At first I was like "this is fucking stupid, you don't get to continue on as the same person just because you kill off your old self" but when Simon switched bodies, I had to reevaluate my stance. I realize that witnessing suicide (or the aftermath of it) is not the same as considering it, so I don't know if this even counts. I do appreciate you talking about Bloober Team's games and how horrible they are at handling almost every single sensitive topic one can think of. I agree that Observation was their best game. Wonder what made it so different from the others. And I'm pretty scared for the Silent Hill 2 remake by them. I know they'll do it justice in the artistic sense, their art team is fantastic. I just hope they can't mess up a game that's already been written long ago...
I think mental illness metaphors are something that can be done well, even in a non-horror setting. Celeste comes to mind when talking about depression and anxiety. It's a game that beats you down, but also shows that you have to confront your mental illness and accept it as part of you to move on with your life. I think that's what a lot of game writers don't get. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, schizophrenia, ADHD, autism, etc. aren't something that goes away, they may get easier to deal with with medication and/or therapy, but they're always there. And no one has a meter of how much mental illness they have until they're deemed 'too dangerous' and need to off themself. Someone killing themself because they felt they were 'too dangerous' to live isn't a noble sacrifice, it's a tragedy. I worry about Bloober being at the helm of Silent Hill 2 because there's a LOT of nuances when it comes to mental health and they've shown they're not good at that. Maybe they'll prove to us they learned from the Medium's criticisms and make a good SH2 remake, but I'm not going to hold my breath. It really feels like Bloober is stuck in the 2012 days when making a horror game about mental illness was seen as revolutionary and you didn't have to do as much research. But now EVERY horror game has some allusion to mental illness and now it's about how well they can portray it. Senua's Sacrifice really raised the bar on mental illness being portrayed in video games, and that's wonderful. We need more games like Senua that portray characters with mental illnesses as more than just 'evil unreliable narrator'. Unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean they're an evil character, but the majority of unreliable characters do turn out to be evil or fall into evil tropes. I'm glad Senua broke from that.
@@JohnDiGrizUkraine I was talking more about clinical depression and anxiety rather than situational. Both are similar in how they affect people, but come from very different things and one can lead into another very easily. Situational is, in the best of circumstances, temporary and may not even need medication to help deal with it. It stems from what's going on around a person, whether it be a death in the family, bullying, parents divorcing, etc. Clinical, however, means that there is something fundamentally wrong with how someone's brain chemistry works. The most common being that the brain cannot naturally produce healthy levels of serotonin. I was speaking of the later, and how people with clinical depression and anxiety have to be on medication for life just to function normally in society.
@@knightofiris I have a hard time discerning which I might fall under. I wonder if I'd be fine if I was in a better place in life, or if I'm even depressed or anxious to begin with.
As far as games that tackle mental health and suicide go, "The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories" is one that resonated with me. Suicidal ideation is clunky and melodramatic and really really hard to write. I think it's nearly impossible to write without it feeling a little cringy and overblown, because that's how I look back on my worst stuff, sometimes. I want to knock some sense into myself and yell but I also want to give my younger self a big hug. It's so hard to pierce through that thick layer of "nothing will ever be good." I actually wonder if someone on Bloober team really does have a history of struggling with suicide, because the feeling that "I am bad, actually, and everything hurts, and killing myself is the ethical choice" is a wildly seductive one, and hard to shake. It's just as hard to write as a depiction of a character being lit on fire. It's very easy to hold your controller and say "whoop, where's the nearest puddle, let's get this fixed," but if you're actually on fire, your mind might not be able think beyond "ow ow ow, I don't like this." I certainly am not giving Bloober a pass on what they've written, though. My brain comes up with enough calm, rational-sounding excuses to off myself, I don't need my survival horror games trying to back it up. And as far as games that do it well: The MISSING is pretty clunky (it's a Swery game, so you know what that means), and it walks right into a couple classic cliches, but it's a really honest portrayal. I really, really love the gore-soaked premise, and though shock value is fine and dandy, JJ's continued dismemberment is horrifying, funny, and just A Thing You Gotta Deal With at all the right times, just like what ti eventually represents. The final boss fight left me feeling maybe more empowered than any other boss battle in any video game, because the mechanics felt like a dim echo of how my mind actually has to work when thinking through low times and intense situations. It's a pretty short game, and whether you end up loving it or hating it, you'll certainly come out of it with a lot of thoughts.
Thank you so much for addressing this. I struggled with being suicidal for years and I also worked on a suicide hotline for around two years. The concept of "I'm too broken to live" came up a lot in my work and it's horrible that lazy writers have been leaning on it. The idea is so incorrect that these games have to construct elaborate scinarios to justify it. In real life, having suicidal ideation is common and not something that makes you broken. Personally, I don't find literal mental illness or suicide scary, it's best when the horror is an abstract metaphor for these issues and can stand on its own on a textual level as a spooky story. Then you and your friends can talk about you thought the ghost was a metaphor for. Love the vids, keep up the good work!
Bloober has a very hard problem with emotional connection and forced actions. You never relate to the protagonist, such as having him abandon the dog as a necessary option. Instead of creating a bond they instead relied on a cheap tactic of dogs generally being loved to force an emotional response instead of earning it. Same goes for the ending, you never really connect to the protagonist in any relatable way. Senua continuously highlights her plight and how much her husband meant to her alongside the difficulty of her journey. So when something profound happens you understand the weight behind it, her mental status a constant reminder of how these brief moments of happinesses are worthy of praise. Creating that understanding of how mental issues can make alter entire world views compared to someone without them is difficult, as you stated, but Bloober usually takes the easy way out. "Leave the dog"
Very true! "Leave a dog to die or keep them alive" is an easy choice for any player, and, like you said, it pins emotions to something that the game itself hasn't earned. Especially when you face no penalty for keeping the dog alive, it just comes down to the most fundamental aspects of a person's humanity.
I've played the game but couldn't tell you ANYTHING about it other than there's a dog in it. With bloober doing the SH2 remake, I'm scared of what they'll do to the story.
A game that is special to me specially was Doki Doki Literature Club. It wasn’t the best game I’ve ever played or beat written but the way it described depression was the reason I sought out help. I always thought that I didn’t have a problem and that if I did I can just tough it out. After years of conditioning to never cry and machismo, I had feelings that I didn’t know how to express. Then I saw Sayori talking about her depression and even the moment when she says that she should be happy but it just won’t go away, finally put into words that I was feeling. Eventually after my college grades were dropping, I finally decided to talk to a therapist and was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. So because of DDLC, I reached out and while I’m still depressed at least I’m getting help.
Bloober are the ONLY reason I’m really scared for the silent hill 2 remake. You can make a game look as pretty as possible and have immersive but simple gameplay but if the story falls flat then what does the game have to hold onto besides aesthetics. Hopefully they can improve or get better writers lmao but yeah Silent hill 2 has tons of mental health awareness or struggles(Angela)
Omg I stopped playing Senua's Sacrifice because I was so paranoid I would die and I didn't want to start over! Well then, I know what I'm doing this week.
Ooo yes!! Gotta get back in there :D Brilliant game. The Rot scared me too, I remember I died about 10 times and I was terrified that each death would be my last
I find all these extreme horror portrayals of depression, PTSD, schizophrenia, bipolar, BPD etc. really just misrepresent what it's like to live with mental illness. I can't speak to the others, but for me and many folks who have depression specifically and have struggled with suicide ideation it's more mundane than how it's shown. It's your mind and body being so quiet it becomes unsettling. It's feeling so disconnected from those around you that it's like watching your own life through a blurry television. It's the presence of so much gaping absence it becomes painful. My suicide ideation has only ever been scary to me in the moments where I've gotten to the step of having a plan. Sitting in the dark in my bedroom considering what will happen when someone finds me. That's the scary part. It's considering that life goes on without you, whether you choose to stay or not. It's not jump scares and extreme trauma. For a lot of us it's just a chemical imbalance in our brains and/or everyday cognitive distortions. Night in the Woods captures this very well I think. The awkward nostalgia of being part of something but also not. Of feeling like you are missing a piece of the puzzle that everyone else has. I don't know, this is mostly a ramble, but these big horror set pieces miss the mark for me and are really just distasteful.
Look forward to a video game where the protagonist sees a mentally healthy therapist that they gel with really well and actually start to recover and patch up relationships and- oh who am I kidding! Pro-recovery? In our horror video game?
As someone who has dealt with mental health issues for the majority of my life, the too damaged to heal/live trope is just depressing. I’ve already dealt with intrusive thoughts on an almost daily basis, that I’m never going to be able get better or improve, that I’ll always be a burden to those around me, so I may as well just end it for all our sakes. Encountering this suicide trope in so many different things, just exasperates it. Luckily I’ve reached a place where I know that these thoughts are not the truth and despite feeling shitty, I have been getting better. But I can’t imagine the effect it could have on someone in a worse place than me
As a person who's struggled with suicidal ideations since high schools, it's not scary to me. It's more like... having a gremlin sitting on your back that weighs you down and annoys you and constantly makes life way way harder by screaming in your ear and tries to twist everything so doing the bad thing seems like the path of least resistance and the only way to get rid of the gremlin and know a little bit of peace.
I hope Konami keeps Bloober on a short leash during the developement of the Silent Hill 2 remake, I also hope Konami has enough awareness that people would burn them alive if Bloober messes with the story and themes of Silent Hill 2 LMAOOOO
I just want to say I rewatch this video pretty often, along with a handful of your other reviews. I love your dry humor, clever delivery and narration, and your opinions and theorizing. The work you put into your videos really shows, especially when it means slogging through a second playthrough where getting into the room early changed absolutely nothing.
You mention the laziness of suicide endings. And I Totally agree. It's something I've often complained about in Lovecraftian stories. But there is a game that I really don't want to spoil, so kind of can't even name given that the nature of this discussion is "Surprise suicide endings". So I'll try to be vague, but people may well know which game I mean. In this game, the story has A: Had a voice on a radio pushing you forwards and B: given a lot of details about the location you're in, and it's downfall. As you go on, the main character is revealed to be from that location, and has a great sense of loss over leaving it before said downfall. The sense of community is gone, for example. You also learn of several other problems the main character has. And by the end, you come to realize the voice over the radio isn't someone else, it's his own suicidal urges, pushing him onwards towards the end. The entire game is revealed to have been about his suicide. And you can clock on to that idea either right at the end when you're trapped in a room with nothing you can interact with other than a noose, or some time before then, if you've been thinking about it. Rather than just "And then because my story is so super scary the main character necked himself." Which honestly feels like telling the audience what to feel at best, and flat out masturbatory at worst. It's also nice that the game has an alternate ending, found by ignoring some of the advice of the radio voice (For example: You're told to avoid a particularly dangerous alternate area, and exploring it is required for this ending), where the main character can regain the will to go on. It's not just bleak for bleak's sake. There is a potential for light. Two other positives: The reason for suicide isn't "To make the world better" (Because that'd be really fucking insensitive to people with suicidal ideation) and isn't the fucking GOOD ending. Edit: Expect a reveal in the replies, since people will no doubt want to guess or discuss it!
so i'm one of those people who loves the concepts and stories behind horror games but between the gore and jumpscares, I *cannot* play them myself. I found your channel this last week and have just been binging your content. I literally breathed a huge sigh of relief when in one of them you blatantly said "I won't be showing the jumpscares". Thank you for allowing me to live vicariously through your videos, your sense of humor has had me in tears a few times. Also if you haven't played it, can I suggest Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice? It's a psychological horror game that I tried playing, incredibly enjoyed it - doesn't really have jumpscares or insane amounts of gore (to the extent i played, at least) - but due to my own MH issues I don't think i'm going to be able to finish it and i would *love* to hear your thoughts
Hey Riley! Absolutely no worries on the jumpscares, I can't STAND them and I will never put them into my videos :'D I actually scream with them, I get so tense Hehe if you enjoyed Hellblade you're going to absolutely love this video after the first hour ;) Thank you for the recommendation!!
@@MertKayKay LMAO that's what i get for commenting before finishing the video 🤣 I'm glad you enjoyed it so much too!! *slides you a pic of my cat in hopes you'll make a Hellblade video one day* The first horror game I ever tried playing was one of the resident evils (10+ years ago, I don't remember which one, i think Umbrella??? It was on the Wii), and my girlfriend came back from class and found me paralyzed on the bed, staring at the screen because I knew there was a jumpscare coming and I was trying to figure out all the ways to kill the zombie before it could jump out at me 😂i'd made it maybe 5 minutes into the actual game 😂
@@MertKayKay It's honestly a great point & click mystery game, but the ending and lack of impact from player choice have been... contentious, to say the least.
Thank God someones reviewing some bloober team games cuz I high-key don't feel like playing them to see how bad silent hill 2 remake is going to be (Rip that absolute magnum opus of gaming)
Town Fell seems like it'll have a better chance because of the two teams behind it. No Code's Observation and Stories Untold are great and Anapurna's published good games as well! SH2 however....I'm not so sure how well that will be. Unless they only do a graphic touch up and don't mess with the story.
"Senua's combat isn't great..." Oh? I thought Senua's combat while very simple was thrilling and satisfying. The very first foes are intimidating, your perspective is limited and the bosses require you to pay attention instead of just mashing. I adored the Valravn fight in particular for that. Hit feedback sounds were satisfying and in every combat, be it due to excellent voicework or animations, the direction and atmosphere... I felt Senua struggling and braving unnatural foes to get to her goal. And further on when there were some much longer and heavier combat encounters, I felt so good I can't even tell you. So yeah... I guess mechanically the combat isn't much, but the game uses all its tools and strengths to make the battles feel more dire and suspenseful than the system would allow on its own.
I feel some authors just want to use the suicide ending in horror , because they think horror should end badly. Yes you can have an ending with character who didn't survive the horrors, but it has to make sense with your theme, not just ''Welp, better kill yourself''. I have no hope for Silent hill 2 remake from them (even if they don't touch the script, since Bloober never made a game with combat.) Why not have Bluepoint make that remake.
I have to say that you commented on what ruined so many TV shows and movies that had such good promise. The person who to all outward appearances is perfectly normal, showing no signs of mental illness, but when the detective (or other people trapped on an island with them, whatever the case may be) properly identifys them as the killer, and they suddenly becomes a drooling, cackling, maniac. Like if The Joker was perfectly normal in every way for weeks on end, until someone says, "Hey, aren't you The Joker?" And he then says, "WHY YES, HOW GOOD OF YOU TO NOTICE! HHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!" and starts spraying people with his seltzer bottles filled with acid and throwing exploding pies.
I feel like this ending idea feels like a bully mindset, the kind of taunt an elementary school kid will throw at you because they think you're a loser.
Honestly, as someone who deals with schizophrenia, and then playing Senua's Sacrifice blind? Fuuuuuu---. I didn't realize what I was getting into. It's... frustratingly accurate, just regularly having an invasive nag doubting or accusing you really gets in the way of communication and trust. But it really is just... a background noise to my life, I'm glad Senua is a mythological story, and not "oh yeah, she was delusional the entire time, ooOoooOooo!" Thankfully I've been more open about my condition in recent years with some people I've grown to trust over the years and they've been... understanding. But yeah, games that go "bad guy is schizo!" or something just feels... cheap at best. Like, I'd take "bad guy is evil because he's just an asshole" over "evil because mental heeeeaaaalllllth" any day. I also have Anti-social Personality Disorder, so I bristle at the trope (both in media and real life) where someone acts horribly and people accuse them of being a sociopath? Like... no. They're just an asshole. Sociopathy isn't like THAT at all. Perfectly normal people can just be assholes or feel justified in their more malicious or morally reprehensibly actions due to their own perception without being narcissists, sociopaths, or psychopaths. But I've deleted, decided to not comment, then decided to try again, too many times to continue this without risking starting over again, so I'mma just post this. Been binge-watching your stuff since the Song of Horror review and been enjoying it immensely, you're very intelligent and eloquent, so don't let the internet jack-asses get you down. (Although judging by the regular "if you want to watch gameplay instead of my essay, go do that, you child" I'm feeling you know how to deal with them already.)
I'm super late but as someone who has dealt with suicidal ideation before, I thought it might be worth giving my thoughts on your question toward the end. Mental health struggles scare the shit out of me but I think that using depression as an effective and respectful Horror Device would be so hard that it may not even be possible. One element that I do think could be utilized is the fear of institutionalization. The threat of being thrown into an asylum for factors totally outside of your control has fantastic horror potential. I and so many of my friends are scared of being deemed "too difficult" and being shut up forever, tapping into that fear (in a respectful way) seems like a safer route to me. idk if this is helpful at all or if I'm just bearing my soul for no reason but oh well. I hope anyone reading this has a nice day
I think the best part about the game is that the dev team is called "bloober". Just talking about suicide and dead kids and in-between a "bloober" gets thrown in, like a child with a loose grasp on English trying to insult their parent for stealing a chip from them. From what I've seen of the game (and your video), it almost feels like the design meetings literally went "Okay, so the wiki page says the movie is set in a forest, so we'll do that. Oh and why not throw a dog in there too, everyone loved that dog in Fallout 4 right? Now, lets just use mental health as an excuse for any magic stuff, aaaaand he'll kill himself at the end cause at the end of Blair Witch they die too". Like that was just the entire discussion around how to make the game. The only two games I can really think of where mental health was done decently are Stories Untold and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, and only one of those is a horror game. Stories Untold (spoilers) uses the protagonist's mental health and refusal to accept responsibility for his actions to tie 4 seperate miniature fictional stories together, with the premise that the protagonist regularly recreates his own memories of his accident and the years following by putting them in fictional horror stories reminiscent of the Twilight Zone. Usually when you review these horror games I try and 'rewrite' the story in a way where it'd be more intriguing/enjoyable, but this game doesn't really have much of a base at all. Like if I *had* to do a story involving both Blair Witch and mental illness, off the top of my head I'd do one about a guy who goes into the woods investigating the disappearances and wanting to prove the idea of the witch to be false. After a bunch of possibly-magical horror events pop up, you see them start spiralling due to a refusal to believe in the supernatural, and you later find out that it's because their parents were obsessed with the supernatural and believed their mental illnesses to be as a result of possession and rather than seek help for their child, they were treated as a creature, abused and mistreated, until they eventually snapped and murdered their parents. There, a refusal to believe in the supernatural is necessary for the protagonist to remove any belief of wrongdoing, as for them it hinges on the idea that the demonic and supernatural aren't real, so the player gets to actually decide what's real and what isn't through playing on their own rather than just being streamlined this rubbish story.
I think the Water ending of SH2 works becuase it isnt James taking himself out to 'fix' anything. It's literally a man allowing the cursed town to devour him as it has many others. He clutches at his misery, lowering himself past the teeth and down the throat, deciding that he'll lie down there with the wife he murderered. It isnt repentance, it's a horrible surrender to dark forces too vast for a broken man to overcome or escape. And it's built up to, after he has seen other curse victims climb into the jaws of their nightmares and settle down in defeat.
honestly, i think the only time suicide in a game has "scared" me is in Doki Doki Literature Club, where the character committing suicide is the protagonist's best friend. it tapped into one of my personal biggest fears: that someone i love could take their own life. i'd never see them or hear them again. and i know, selfish as it may sound, that it would just lead me to blame myself, as though i could have done _anything_ to stop them. i mean uh haha game bad funni doggy
For something like MADiSON`s possession thing, I think it would be really cool if the game didn't completely take control away from the player at first. I'd introduce short episodes through the game where the character ignores the player's commands, maybe stopping completely or maybe walking by itself in a random direction. Players are already used to the game taking control during cutscenes, so using the gameplay segments to instill that sense of not always being in control would be more effective. Still, there should be some restraint and not have it happen too often, plus have some foreshadowing via worldbuilding or something. Even then, I definitely wouldn't use the possession to push a suicide ending. If I really wanted the character to die like that, the best thing to do would be to frame it as "murder" (the murderer being the demon) rather than as "suicide". And even then it would be very tricky to ensure the player doesn't read it as "suicide", so I'm not sure I'd be willing to go there.
Blair Witch isn't really about mental health. (Remember that Blair Witch has multiple films, and they confirm that the Witch is real, that the characters are trapped in a time loop and can't escape.) Any ambiguity that the OG Blair Witch might have had is long gone. It's about a supernatural entity that has power over time and space. I think that the PTSD in Blair Witch is set dressing. It's there to mislead the player into thinking that perhaps you're crazy, perhaps there is no Blair Witch. But there is a Blair Witch, and the power she has in the films is to lock characters into time loops until they die or do what she wants. That's why there's no escape.
For another psychological horror that did mental health correctly is In Sound Mind. They worked with professionals *from the start* and kept working with them all the way through development. Even from the pre-release demo to the full release, they kept working with them and story changes where made from the demo to the full game via input by professionals. And the end result was very good imo
A comment I wanna make, since I'm early on: Has anyone noticed these games always follow things like "Identity disorders" or "Mental health = ur crazy and see things" and suicide? But never like.. The genuine depression and desperate that comes with mental health problems? THe isolation of it? The dire want of help that you need, but struggle or can't seek yourself? What about the crippling anxiety that some people get that makes it impossible to socialise with other people or even leave the house? Speaking from experience here on some of these aforementioned things. Like, it's not an easy task and it's hard to be 'tasteful', but when writing a story of mental health there's such a deep and rich well you can draw from. And no one ever does? It frustrates me that people with mental health problems (Such as myself) are more.. resources to be used, rather than actually tastefully wrote about. Also, I don't have anything like DID but I really wish games would stop doing "THis person has two identities! One of them is a crazy killer!" Because it does nothing but stigmatise those people. (I wanted to throw in an addendum: The things I struggle with aren't something people write about. Yknow, depression, isolation, anxiety, stuff like that. But it bothers me that people *like* me, or people with different disorders or problems, just get stereotyped by these games and media who treat it two dimensionally. "Oooh, this person is a psychopath and killed their family and themselves! Oooh, this person has PTSD and dies to make sure they can't hurt anyone else with their trauma! Fucking hell.)"
I felt what you said about mental illness becoming a fantasy setting/mechanic for games all the way down to my bones. As someone with pretty severe mental health issues, including a psychotic disorder, I don't feel at all seen or represented by this kind of garbage - i wish they'd actually use some imagination and come up with a fantastical source for everything. Using real labels without any sort of flailing grasp toward realism is nothing but exploitation. Thanks so much for your frankness.
The last part about game devs 'talking to psychologists' really hit hard. As someone with a bunch of bullshit happening in their brain, I find it really hard to play alot of games because of their treatment of people like me. The only game I can think of that did anything good about mental health was Psychonauts 2, which is far from a horror game, which is a shame! I love horror, it's just hard to find horror about mental health STRUGGLES instead of horror about 'the mentally ill'. Very good video!
A few months back I watched this one review of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, where the reviewer talked about their mental health and how wonderful it was to see a game that treated them with respect, sadly that review was either deleted or privated.
In any horror movie, series, or game, if the central protagonist is a veteran it’s a red flag for me. Especially if the veteran has PTSD or a “haunting past.” There is a set percentage of gamers who can directly relate with these types of protagonists, so you are immediately distancing a majority of your audience. Secondly, I feel like it’s an easy way to try and give your story depth and credibility, even if your story is tired and lazy. I’m not saying veterans shouldn’t be represented in stories. I’m just saying, relying on veteran trauma is disrespectful, lazy and generic. I can’t relate to Ellis or his stupid choices at all which directly impacts the immersion of the game.
You know the thing that most disappoints me about Blooper is that their art team is amazing. They just have very generic writing and directing. Get these artists on a team with a focused director and/or writer and we have psychological horror game gold.
One of your videos popped up in my recommended and I've now been going through them like wild. You make incredible content and have introduced me to new games I want to check out as well as ones I know to stay far away from lol. Thanks for making such awesome content!
Salem this is the nicest comment I've received in a long time, thank you so much for letting me know :D I know it sounds sappy of me to say but it really motivates me to hear. Thank you!!
@@MertKayKay You're so welcome! Also you mentioning Silent Hill 2 in another video pushed me to find and ISO that worked for my emulator and start streaming it finally so thank you for that as well I had issues getting it to work in the past and it had laid dormant forever lol
A favorite game of mine is End Roll, a simple and relatively short RPG maker game. It’s very dour overall. It’s a story about a 14 year old boy who has killed a lot of people and suffers from some serious trauma and PTSD, and ends with him killing himself. Yet I love it and its portrayal of his struggle with guilt and regret. I probably wouldn’t think this kind of game could work until I played it. It doesn’t necessarily say anything about mental health, but I found it to be engaging and beautiful. I think you can make a good story and a good game out of these kinds of concepts. But there’s a big difference between stories that are trying to cashgrab a certain audience by being dark and having mental illness in it (oooo!!!!) and games made by people grappling with their own problems and trying to express some of them in their work.
By far my favorite youtuber, thank you so much for the videos you put out. I get the notification that you've uploaded something new, and I immediately know I'm about to have a good time. Your analysis is always spot on, I never feel like I'm being talked down to or that anything is dumbed down, and you sound like someone I would be friends with IRL. Keep being awesome!
One horror game I really like that grapples with suicide is Disparity of the Dead, one of the small games from the DreadX Collection 3. In it you play a detective in an afterlife, and lots of people from this afterlife talk about having committed suicide. The game ultimately reads to me as someone with suicidal thoughts reconciling their desire to die with emerging atheistic beliefs that nothing awaits them past death; it's empathetic and personal, trying to work through something and not just gawking at those with mental health issues like a circus sideshow. As an aside, I also recommend in general the DreadX Collections; I'm not going to say that every single game in them is a winner (they are not), but they're all pretty short and there's some really interesting ideas and hidden gems in there!
yay an hour video! i love hearing you talk about games you have some great insight edit as i go along: i think the whole vision going fuzzy and flickering is so funny like when my vision blurs its not because im suicidal (which i am) its probably bc i forgot to wipe my glasses. also i think that type of visual would work in cases like anxiety attacks because it really does feel like that when im having one. like that and maybe clouding the volume is a good way to portray it. but ofc you need other accompanied symptoms like throwing up or stumbling or breathing heavily
@@MertKayKay maybe, I'm curious as to how they'll handle the Silent Hill 2 remake. Maybe having a more dictated story will allow them to exercise the areas they do well at, environments and atmosphere
"This isn't Halo: Reach, it's Burkittsville. Get therapy." Easily my favorite line from this video, the delivery is top notch. Great analysis as always! I saw interest for this game fall off hard on TH-cam, and I always kinda wondered why. Now I know.😐
Games aren't the only medium with a habit of using mental illness as a way to cover up bad writing. Any badly written character with vague motivations can be jerked around to do anything the plot might need because (shrug), you know, they're CRAZY, and crazy people are just weird and do things that make no sense. Off the top of my head I think of Sator in that movie Tenet, who wants to obliterate everything that has ever existed or ever will exist. Why? He's nuts, and something something about his marriage to Elizabeth Debecki. I don't know what all of time and space have to do with his marriage, but it seems to me that anyone who was depressed enough to want to off himself could find a less complicated way of doing it that didn't involve time inverted pincers movements and international conspiracies. That's a lot of trouble to go to.
Hey guys! No sponsor for this video obviously because of the subject matter. Imagine the "And you know what DOESN'T make me horribly depressed? Today's sponsor, Audiobook Website"
But fr, if anyone has any advice on improving my audio quality, please reply to this comment with some sage guidance. Is my room just too echoey? I use a blue snowball microphone. Any advice would be dearly appreciated.
Hope you all enjoy the video and thank you for watching!
No kidding, I’ve seen sponsors for apps that are supposed to help with depression and mental health. The videos were great but the sponsors felt wrong.
Soundproofing, soundproofing and more soundproofing
consider even wearing a soundproofing suit!
@@villings fashionable and practical, I dig it.
You're doing ok on the audio. If you're worried about quality there's maybe very minor background noise, barely audible if at all, you could try the "remove noise" function on whatever your audio editor is.
I used audacity back in the day because it was free, and it was the only thing that made my karaoke level microphone of tolerable quality. Just select a blank stretch of audio and click to clean it up, even takes care of fan noises. Great tool 👍🏼
@@thomasjess5029 gotta make their money somehow.
wife bad, mental health bad; roll credits - Bloober Team
Pass me a stella
victims of abuse bad - bloober team
@@weirdautumn "victims of abuse? you know what to do with that knife *wink wink"
-Bloober Team
How is wife bad in Layer’s of Fear? She was an abuse victim and showed her as a victim. It never painted the husband as truly loving or good.
@@ryanb4940 I actually have the pleasure of knowing Jon irl (spoiler: his name isn't really Jon) and I can say as one with inside information: he was too scared to finish Layers of Fear lmao so he definitely didn't get to that bit yet
He has done the others though, I'll give him that
I specifically hate suicide endings where the justification is that the person in question was a burden. That's literally what I've thought every time I've contemplated/attempted suicide. People who are mentally ill really do NOT need to be told they are a burden any more than they already are.
Me too. The main driving force was that I felt as though my exstence was a burden.
Its absurd that people take bloober team seriously.
@@Assortment54321 I hope you're doing okay now and that you know your existence isn't a burden.
@@rinsuu9848 You as well, homie.
I'm doing better these days. I have trouble holding a job which is a downer. But, other than that, things are alright.
That's not just a bloober problem though, even the original SH2 made by Team Silent handled the concept of suicide and Angela's story very, very poorly and tactless
Mine wasn't feeling like a burden, that came later. For me it was that intense, helpless feeling of being alone. Completely, utterly alone.
I'm better, in case someone asks. ❤
the witch taking photos of her victims before killing them: ✨ for the gram ✨
You have to do what she tells you even if you don’t really know why and it ends up roping others into her sphere of influence? By gosh, the Blair Witch is an influencer!
That made me laugh. Thank you. Now all I can think of is a horrific Blair Witch monster doing the duckface shots from a high angle with the rotting floor boards behind her. Peak comedy.
BWAHAHAHAHAA!! Made me snort, thanks for the belly laugh! 🤣😂
This was so insane to me cause like... From what we "see" of the witch she isn't human... Like did she have to wait for someone with a camera to show up? She couldn't have bought it herself lol
@@AmeliaMastervally it's carver who does it. play the game for once before hating ffs
My favorite thing to tell people about this game is "I liked the part where the Blair Witch sends attack helicopters against you."
I cant wait for SH2 remake where the door monster is explained to be James' fear of doors because his wife slammed them on him or something
Door monster?
@Chandler Burse oh the abstract daddy, I always thought it was a bed frame with 2 people on top of each other
@Chandler Burse Where did you read that?
I feel they will try hard to be too edgy and straight up show the "scene" with angela and her dad but it will be extremally distasteful and very cringey.
@Chandler Burse I’m sorry, are we just going to breeze by the fact that they just referred to him as the “abstract daddy”?
The idea of doing a “silent hill” thing for Blair Witch is so bizarre to me. The original Blair witch was about entropy, decay and the horror of the truly unknowable and undefinable. You watch as their documentary framework, all their narratives and beliefs, break down into pure chaos. It’s beautiful and haunting and even to this day, unique. Making it “about trauma” is just a bizarre and unmotivated reduction of its frame.
Who wants to bet we will see a "pyramid head" in the first few minutes of the game...
Agreed, even the "actual" second movie that's shot more as a literal movie instead of found-footage (it was still found-footage but they were like... home-security cameras so they shot it much more normally than the first. I enjoyed it. Sue me.) did a much better job of sticking to the themes of modified perceptions and compulsions due to it. I wonder if this started as it's own IP, then decided it'd sell better with the Blair Witch sticker on it?
I was so incredibly confused watching someone play this game because the setting was very interesting so I was pumped… then the flashbacks about being mean to wife started and I went “oh no”, I never finished watching because from those scenes I immediately knew where this game was going and I’m just so tired of this being the only story horror games want to have now?? Like we all know silent hill 2 is a masterpiece but why is it that it’s impact has just devolved to “kill wife >:(“ instead of opening a door to other impactful situations that would actually require thought to be turned into a game
@@CausticMedeimI’m still PISSED the studio took the original idea of Blair witch two and out it through a nonsense blender because the idea behind it is fantastic
@crizmeow8394 not criticizing you but might wanna put that plot twist behind a spoiler warning 🥰
Mentally ill people are a danger to themselves more than to anyone else, and the implication that it’s best for them to die so the world doesn’t have to deal with them is a deep insult to their humanity. They deserve help dealing with their struggles, not to be abandoned and exterminated.
Even when they've hurt others because of their mental illness
@@icravedeath.1200ew emo
@@verymuchadisappointment168 um what the fuck?
To be fair, that’s not really the implication the game was trying to give. The Witch trapped Ellis in a space/time loop to transform him into the Carver like she did with Rustin Parr and Lane in the films.
I feel like (as someone who went through years of therapy to deal with it as a child) OCD would actually make for a great horror game. You’re just living your life, but there are “puzzles” (ritual compulsions) that you 1. MUST do correctly 2. MUST start again if anything disrupts you (noise? Pet moved? House settling? Motorcycle went by? Text notification sound?) 3. Get more complex over time. And when you fail them, the music and lighting keep gradually increasing a feeling of unease that escalates to pure teeth-grindingly terror-all of which snap away back to normal life as soon as you succeed. Maybe some background reminders about how your OCD is disrupting you life, like messages from your boss about you being late again (door check ritual), being unable to touch or eat things for no apparent reason, friends describing themselves as “so OCD because they have a tidy desk. Meanwhile you have a night ritual that gets harder to complete because you’re exhausted. Your PC could keep glancing at an alarm clock, knowing you need to sleep, but unable to do so until you finish.
The overwhelming terror of unknown disaster was always the hardest thing for me to explain, but I feel like a game could REALLY nail it with simple but thoughtful design. Like 5 Nights At Freddy’s but it’s inside your own damn head.
This is a great idea!
I was thinking about a similar thing but for ADHD, which lends itself more to a sort of parodic take on the CRPG than a straight-up horror - you get quests, and every time you get a new sidequest it can just delete a bunch of more important quests out of your quest journal until an NPC reminds you about them, and sometimes when you go to continue with the main questline you literally can't get the quest to continue, like the game takes your agency away for a bit and says "nah, come back and do this some other time" until you go away and do something else for a bit, and sometimes you just get stuck in a loop of repeatable sidequests because you're hyperfocused. Also the PC's idle animation has them jiggling their leg all the time or pacing around.
Based idea.
Unrelated, but this reminded me of the game Solipsis, off the Dread X collection. You play as an astronaut on the Moon, and you find information that seems more and more unbelievable the further you go; the gameplay involves you having to fit the information into your brain, jigsaw puzzle style.
Right! Like i feel like having a mental illness or disability in ur game has aloooot of potential for not only just spooks but to show ppl how we struggle with things in an interesting way. The problem is always that folks who make these things don’t care abt an interesting way to portray it (with help from ppl who have the conditions and also research) and instead just. Go off of some weird stereotypes of what they THINK it is? Like what u have written here absolutely would work. And i am sure others with other conditions could come up with cool shit. I hope some ppl do it! I don’t have ocd but I’m autistic and i can think of a lot of weird shit that’s scary as an autistic person for a horror game lol (stuff that isn’t just meltdowns 😒).
Yep a great idea, it could even include the mental side with whispered/ thought rituals that make you more stressed if you don't do them. The player remembering to do them as someone (unaware of your issue) says or does something that triggers it and trying to do it while listening. the stress of a dialogue choice while doing a OCD ritual. The worry of wondering if this converstaion will be normal or plagued by a ritual.
That's a very cool idea, my mother has OCD and extreme _extreme_ germophobia so personally I think it'd be very cool for this hypothetical game to show how it affects people around the individual as well. Even if just briefly touched upon.
The fact that the """good ending""" is literally validating the all too common Hellbrain Thought of "the world would be better off without me" is just
Honestly I don't think I'd be too far off by calling it dangerous
Yeah, that's horrible actually. Why is the blame and onus to ""think about others"" on the traumatized people rather than the things/people that traumatized them
Can agree, it's even worse when wtitten by incompetent writters.
@@steelbear2063 dude what the fuck. Just because some bad people exist doesn't mean we should reinforce their suicidal ideation. Language like this hurts a lot of people.
Yes! As someone who struggles with suicidal ideation, the thought of "everything would be better if I just killed myself" crosses my mind way too often. And this kind of shitty media saying "yes, you're absolutely right. You are too broken to be fixed. You're a ticking time bomb, ready to start aimlessly killing everyone around you. You should kill yourself, that's the right thing to do" is outright dangerous. Someone who struggles with these thoughts could quite easily be pushed over the line with this if caught at the worst time. These kinds of writers don't seem to remember that there are actual people in the world who struggle with depression and PTSD and that their works might have horrific effects on those people.
@@TessuDraws The thing is though, as someone who also has to deal with these thoughts going into a horror game with the expectation that the character you're playing always survives is kind of... naive. Some stories just don't have happy endings, incompetent writers just ruin it.
One of my favourite games ever is The Cat Lady, it starts with suicide. You don't control the character and never see it at all, there's only Susan narrating how everything is spinning and such. Then she becomes immortal, which is exactly the opposite of what she wanted.
Rem Michalski used to work as a nurse, so everything from the hospital staff's apathy and bureaucracy, passing through the doctor's abuse of power, to the police's disregard when Susan calls telling she was kidnapped is so realistic. It really understands mentally ill people and how the world treats us like shit.
I'm really hoping it gets a console release, it looks very unique.
@@dmaa88 It's from 2012 and the newer games were only released on PC too, it seems porting the engine would be very hard. That's a shame :(
The Cat Lady Trilogy is amazing, i always tend to return to that game and see how it unfolds.From the derranged mind of Joe Davis in Downfall, to Susan struggle to deal with depression and loneness, and finishing with Lorelai and her fight with her insecurities and the Queen of Maggots. Such a great trilogy to be reminded Yuki.
@@MaxinEve I also need to go back to them often, they are so dear to me ☺️
The Cat Lady is my absolutely favorite when it comes to the theme of depression. Love love love it.
Love how Jake the Dog is just peeking out from the back of the chair like some kind of sleep paralysis demon, very immersive
He observes and he takes note
I'm like 90% sure any military with even halfway competent psychological screening would reject Ellis.
(disclaimer on this one - I'm not an expert on military psychological screening or military background checks. _But I know they exist_, unlike Bloober Team's writers apparently.)
this is the united states we're talking about tho
Most of his issues seem to be much worse post service
Currently their screening is totally chill with the general anxiety and mood disorders as long as you're relatively controlled without medication, and if I remember right they're proposing medication waivers now for mood disorders and stuff like adhd because of how high rates of mental illness are in younger demographics and how much their recruitment has tanked already, but considering you could absolutely get rejected for having a surgery, over a decade prior, that fully resolved a health condition as recently as 2017 for sure, he definitely shouldn't have made it through with such a substantial psychiatric record at that point.
His mental health deteriorated after the fact : / The military can't predict the future lol
"Mental Health has become its own setting by this point. It's like Middle Earth, except... *shit* and *boring* "
The bluntness yet sharpness of this critique got me in tears. XD
I can't wait for Bloober Team's version to have a new ending that posits "Maybe Mary was the real villain, ackshually"
"mary deserved it she was faking and james found a better girl, but than you became skelly and WROTE THIS CAUSE JAMES DED ALL ALONG :O"
game sites: wowses so deep much deeper than og 2 :O
@@ddjsoyenby oh my god is that a reference to the ‘welcome to fanfiction’ video by jelloapocalypse (might be spelling that wrong)
I can't wait for the reveal that Thomas Orosco was actually abused as a child, so we should give him a pass for repeatedly raping his daughter.
She does turn into a boss fight in one of the endings, though.
@@asuspiciousavocado3317 Do you mean the version of mary inside james' head- the head of the severely mentally ill man who is pushing all of his own responsibility off of himself and onto his **dead wife?** That bossfight?
I’ve always found it hilarious to imagine a maniacal paper hoarder prancing about ahead of the protagonist shedding notes and diary pages like a stressed out chicken shedding feathers. It’s just so ludicrous.
My notes! My copious notes! :'(
You have to do what she tells you! You have to leave all these notes and photos meticulously strewn about in the hopes someone comes and reads them because it’ll be, like, super cool and scary and their faces will be all “bwaaaaah?”.
I think I saw this in a stephen kind movie. One of the bad ones lol.
I think every game should just start with an intro sequence of a cargo plane with deeply personal correspondence exploding over the game area. Even if it's a pirate game. Or Tetris.
Putting this in my next dnd campaign
Hello.
I used to be suicidal and I can say this.
One of the things that people tend to get wrong is that people have to be sad before they take their life. In fact most people who do suicides is happy in their final hours because they have it all planned out how it is gonna happen.
Whenever I felt that joy I would force myself out of it because I knew that meant I was teetering on the edge.
Same here. I was that person on the outside like portraying a happy persona but dealing with grief, I just thought about it often.
I see you using the term "used to be" so want to send you gentle congratulations on your fight (as a sufferer of depression and anxiety, I know it's a constant thing and not a "yay, I've beat the final boss" situation, but still, every win is still a win so I applaud you👏), and just want to support your statement. I have, luckily, not reached the point of suicidal thoughts but have had three loved ones end themselves and each of them seemed to be in better moods and on the mend just before doing it. From what I understand, it's that feeling of finally being in control, finally having a plan and a course, that makes them appear to be "getting better" and is why it's almost always a huge shock to everyone when they're gone. I'd give everything I've ever had to make mental illness non-stigmatized and as understood and treatable as general physical illnesses.
I don't understand why people overlook the fact that our brains are an organ just like our hearts or lungs and require just as much care.
I think someone with PTSD pissed in the breakfast cereal of every Bloober Team member.
A game that I find did a surprisingly considerate suicide ending is Cyberpunk 2077. It's an ending that simply ends the game but somehow doesn't feel like a cop out from the writers.
After your character shoots themselves off screen you witness the reactions of each friend you made on your journey, and how they all process their grief individually. But in the end, they're all so completely shattered, wishing that you had reached out, going to show that suicide isn't necessarily the answer to suffering.
Holy shit o: Is that the main ending or?
@@Densoro Oh no nono, more of a secret ending. But it's still super bloody sensitively done. Very well written ending!
Man that ending fucked me up so much. It really made me rethink some things
Yes definitely. That was the most surprising moment of the game for me. Thought it was absolutely devastating.
It don't matter tho, every ending even the good ending you die somehow.
Has anyone ever made a game where you have to STOP your character from killing themselves by keeping them busy, avoiding unhealthy behaviors, and working to move their life back into a positive direction?
I was just thinking I would play the hell out of a game like that, especially if it was constructed in such a way that it *showed* the player how to construct such healthy patterns in their lives.
I remember there being a simple text game called Depression Quest (or something like that) where you choose how you cope with your illness
Disco Elysium i guess.
That is the plot of Disco Elysium, kind of
Agree with the others that said Disco elysium haha
Dude, you're onto something with the concept of the "mental health setting." I don't know if you've had the displeasure of watching the recent Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, but I think it's a prime example of this type of thing where the writer almost fetishizes mental duress and ignores the personhood of their subject, relegating them only to their trauma and refusing to see them as a whole human being.
I've heard horrible things about that biopic!
@@MertKayKay it's very bad!
Its really bad. It became a comedy for me just because of how baffingly bad it is.
@@stefanmayer9047 Omg, is it ever so very bad... 😖 I'm a huge MM fan and have yet to find a good depiction of her actual struggles and successes, but this....THIS....it was so insulting and skin-crawlingly off the mark, I was spiritually offended. Reading interviews with the director explains a lot about the choices made for Blonde, absolutely disgusting individual. 😡
As someone who's struggled with suicidal thoughts for 15+ years, I understand the concept of a mentally ill person perceiving suicide as a noble act -- there are times where I start to think I'm a waste or a burden and that everybody would be better off without me and that offing myself would only make everyone else's life better. Obviously, I know this isn't true, but mental illness can try like hell to convince you it is.
The problem starts when these stories with "noble suicide" endings try to frame it as a *good thing.*
That sounds like a difficult line to walk in terms of depiction.
A line that bloober tripped over and knocked out all it's teeth all over the floor.
Yeah, as a mentally ill person with a psychology degree, I really hate this kind of game and how they deal with these issues. I have C-PTSD, anxiety and depression, and I have a history of self-harm and suicidal ideation, as well as having suffered a traumatic brain injury as a child. I also live with several chronic pain conditions. So I have had a lot of experience with media that tries to reflect my life back to me, but instead all I see is a cheap, ugly version of me that isn't me.
Often, I do have intrusive thoughts and dangerous urges and if I acted on these, I would harm either myself or someone else. But the answer to that is not that I have to eliminate myself to make sure it never happens. It's a ridiculous notion. I'm not a robot programmed to act upon every thought I have; I have free will. The idea that I could ever be so broken that I could only ever harm people is genuinely offensive and very harmful.
I take anti-depressants; I am in therapy; I write poems and stories to express my trauma; I read books about trauma to better understand myself; I have a support group around me that I can turn to. These things will never fix me because my foundation is broken, but that does not mean I cannot heal and build a better me. I do not have to succumb to my trauma and I do not have to succumb to my mental illness. It is honestly very harmful to suggest that the only option is suicide because a lot of my intrusive thoughts tell me exactly that.
When a game turns around and tells me "the only way to protect everyone else is to kill yourself", it is finally showing me a true reflection and that reflection is what my intrusive thoughts say when I'm suicidal. I do not need or want to have them affirmed because they are wrong. It is dangerous to imply it as the solution because maybe, that's all someone needs to finally step over the line and end their life. It is also dangerous because it isn't true and all it does is further demonise those of us who are mentally ill.
I am a danger to other people in the way that anyone can be a danger to other people. There is not one person who is inherently incapable of harming others. We can all hurt each other if we so choose or we can do it accidentally. The notion that it's only the mentally ill people who do it is wrong and it's dangerous. Mental illness can be a factor in causing others to harm each other, but so can pretty much anything.
If Bloober want to tell me that I'm wrong about that, they should go consult experts in the area or read their work because what they portray in this game is not accurate. If anyone is interested in said work, I'd recommend Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman or Love With Accountability by Aishah Shahidah Simmons as good first reads.
Hey, another survivor! I'm proud of you. I never made it far enough to get a psych degree myself. Thank you for your comment. I hope others will be inspired by your story; I know I am, as it's similar to mine.
Best of luck in all things!
This may sound like a joke question but i really want to know the anwser, what do you think of Rambo First Blood?
Lovely comment. I can relate to your situation. It's great to see someone express themselves like this. I wish our media was more sensitive and thoughtful with their writing.
Tired of feeling like a living trope and not a whole and complete, complex individual. Capable, hurt, but healing. Thanks for your comment.
I think the only game I've played that had suicide and poor mental health as an element that didn't come off as tasteless shock value was Disco Elysium. And I didn't even really dig into that element until my second playthrough. It's portrayed very much as an intrusive thought, one that can be suppressed or pursued but is always kind of looming. There's a moment where you find some mementos from the past you've forgotten, and while they're happy on the surface, a thought about the aquarium is immediately followed up by "You should go and kill yourself there." *That* made me jump, the way it's said in the same tone of voice as the rest of the second person narration, with a casualness that betrays how often the protagonist has thought about this.
There's a subplot about the protagonist losing his gun and needing to find it, and you eventually find out that he pawned it off in the midst of a drunken bender, and your various thoughts wonder why you might have done this before Volition - the skill that represents your desire to change and recover - bluntly telling you that "You pawned it so you wouldn't shoot yourself in the head." Overall, those moments did actually make me think about my own intrusive thoughts, how even our worst and cruelest impulses towards ourselves can become so everpresent in our minds that they start to feel normal. And how even then, we can and should keep going for our own sakes.
I found it to be a very compassionate and relatable game with regards to my own mental health. Much like Hellblade, its attitude towards mental illness is that it's everpresent and inescapable if you have it but that it's also not the be-all end-all of your life and it doesn't doom you to a life without happiness. Sometimes it's just there, chattering around in the background. But Disco Elysium is definitely in the minority there. Overall, I also usually immediately check out when a game tries to play the """spooky mental illness""" or """unreliable narrator""" card (which really does seem to be just an excuse to throw any need for coherency or point out of the window)
Spooky mental health is super over used. It was fresh when American McGee was making the Alice games, but now it's so over used it's just stale.
Yeah, I was scrolling through the comments to see if anyone else said this!
@@alexroy5854 i loved McGee’s Alice so much because i really loved how her character interacted with the wonderland around her
@bxnnymo Good stuff those games! Obviously it didn't have a very realistic depiction of mental health issues, though I feel it was from a good place
@@alexroy5854 i agree that the mental health depiction was definitely off/unrealistic!! and to me, it made sense because everything we see is from alice's pov so she herself may not even realize what she is thinking or feeling
Bloober’s one message is literally just “if you have serious mental health issues, it’s WAY more convenient for everyone if you just die.” They don’t think their story messaging through at all, and keep landing on that message.
Honestly I wish bad horror writers would go back to magic as the be all end all excuse. “Mental health” is not a good substitute for magic in a story. Yet they use it like magic. It cheapens a story if none of the things in it really actually happen. It’s all just a dream. They were in a psych ward the whole time. They actually have vivid delusions. It’s all lazy.
Great video as always. I love hearing your takes on these games. The “the player character kills themself is the new it was all a dream twist” is a spot on take. I’d love to hear your takes on some of the Fatal Frame games in the future. Esp 3 and the upcoming re-release of 4 to the west after being region locked. I feel they have a much more sensitive, intelligent, and empathetic portrayal of the mental health struggles the characters have. 1+2 are great spooky haunted house games, too. But less ~*~ psychological horror~*~ than 3+4. 5 is a soggy dumpster fire.
Well, there are stories where magic is feeding on "mental health". It's all just a mash of different dreams making a very real body count.
And no death doesn't clear it up. The problem could persist for centuries. It could be starved back down sure, but it won't leave.
Yeah, while there’s a lot that can be done with exploring psychology in horror, I’m imagining something more like Silent Hill. Mental health issues can easily be a factor, but one that fuels twisted and very real manifestations of the psyche. This kinda crap is not only lazy, but utterly offensive to anyone suffering with their mental health. Not to mention potentially dangerous for anyone actually suicidal to play.
cry of fear
@EasterBurn Seriously, it drives me nuts whenever i see people say that Bloober Team want "people with mental illness to kill themselves, because the world would be better off without them" or "how a victim of sexual abuse was demonized while her abuser was made sympathetic".
The Medium for example, A game that is literally about dual worlds and seeing through different perspectives ends up showing us nuanced and three-dimensional presentations/perspectives from characters, whether they are good or bad (morality-wise) , wow, SHOCKER!!!
Even Silent Hill 2 did that and made us sympathize with James (a man that killed his ill wife) and Eddie, but people seem to have double standards.
But now, speaking of The Medium game, Lily (the victim of sexual assault) was always presented as a sympathetic, broken and tragic character that was manipulated by an evil spirit/demonic entity (The Maw) spawned from her own trama and rage.
The Maw is a literal entity with a mind of its own, so it's not like Silent Hill 2, where Pyramid Head and the Bubblehead are all contructs and vessels of James's psyche (and Silent Hill's) in order to metaphorically judge/punish him for his sins and made him accept the horrible truth of Mary's death.
The threat presented by The Maw is also different from the ones in Silent Hill, since he is a literal, living and breathing demon that needs a host in order to survive, who just happens to be Lily, so his fate and well-being is connected to the girl that happens to suffer from mental health issues with suicide being a potential and tragic way to defeat the demon.
Richard (Lily's abuser) was also presented with a sympathetic past, but even then the game and its characters never excused his actions, in fact, they call him out on it and his own biased mental state (since the main characters, who happen to be Mediums, can enter/invade the minds of other people, so no wonder those minds are biased to themselves, they are trying to justify their own actions, while the Mediums are mere passangers of the their minds) and refer to him as a "monster".
So, seeing people here say that The Medium is a game that support suicide for victims of sexual assault and/or people that suffer from mental health issues is a little sad and somewhat ridiculous.
There is nothing wrong, with disliking the story and criticizing it, but it seems as if the majority of the criticism made towards The Medium's story that i have seen, all revolve around people wanting a different interpretation/outcome towards the themes of mental health.
@@RitualBlood that is a lot of words to say “it’s actually clever that the girl having trauma is directly responsible for everything bad that happens to everyone around her and the only solution is to die”
As soon as you said “Rule of Rose”, it twigged that a Bloober remake of that game would have the potential to be the magnum opus of the disasterously bad taste factory that is Bloober.
Rule of Rose is my favorite game of all time and I agree, they'd absolutely butcher it. They'd give Hoffman a tragic backstory to explain away why he was a child molester, or imply Clara and Diana were "asking for it"
@@Kintsugi23There's something extra icky about the idea of them doing it to those characters considering they're literal, actual minors. Kids who never knew any better. This game's protagonist is at least a grown adult.
Between how bloober handle trauma survivors and those with PTSD I truly fear what's to come for silent hill 2. We can only hope they have no control over the story. I am so happy your videos are here to provide an insightful deep dive into team bloobers storytelling
it's what i'm hoping and if they do welp i can't wait for a sh1tty version of in water to be all the endings.
That was my exact thoughts while watching this video! Bloober keep making these games seemingly trying to "make a point" about trauma and mental illness and go about it in the absolute WORST, most insensitive ways imaginable and think they're being "smart" and "thought-provoking" by doing so. It's ab-so-lutely fucking disgusting and I'd rather spend price-gouging amounts of money on an ebay copy of SH2 than buy the remake. (Although I'm just going to end up emulating it in the long run, because neither price-gougers nor Blooper deserve my money.)
Really hoping Konami and the OG members of Team Silent who came back to work on the remake keep Bloober Team in line. If they change the narrative to even remotely suggest that Mary, Maria, Laura, and especially Angela deserved what happened to them while making every single possible excuse for James, Eddy, and Angela's father I am going to kill someone.
@@Neon-Rain Control of story or not they control the presentation. That trailer was... something else. James moping like a sad puppy looking at the camera through a noose is typical Bloober "subtlety".
The OG SH2 had an oneiric quality to it (I think that would be the Lynch influence). Everyone seemed numb to what's happening in front of them even if it's the most bizarre stuff.
There's reports they're on a tight leash from Konami... but how much of that leash is one with some leeway to stick their disgusting opinions of mentally unwell people into the game, we'll only know until the game comes out.
Small side note on Senua’s Sacrifice: her “weird powers” are actually another manifestation of her psychosis. A common delusion/symptom of psychosis is the belief that the individual can see signs and symbols that no one else can (e.g. a hidden message in the TV scheduling; a paint splash predicting the future). Additionally, this often coincides with the belief that third parties are sending them messages through abstract reasoning (e.g. the man in the news broadcast is talking directly to them, rather than reading a script) which is a key factor that drives Senua to see her mother’s face in rock formations which call back to memories. It’s actually a rather thoughtful inclusion that portrays the range of symptoms those with psychosis go through and integrating it as a part of her experience of the world.
It’s not perfect as there is something to be said about gamifying these largely impactful symptoms but still much more considered than whatever Bloober tried to do with Blair Witch
Ah that's so interesting, thank you! :D I see how that feeds into her delusions and such, thanks for the insight
I never saw Angela walking into the fire as a Suicide, more of a metaphor of her State of mind. She has already decided that her world had fallen apart and that there were No one coming to help her. Angels depicts the mentality that everything youre paranoid about is true. Its also interesting to know that Angela is supposed to be a kid. She is 15 and were hurt early in her childhood, that created a warped sense of her surroundings and her communication and trust in people. Her dialog in her departure scene is one of my favorite scenes Silent Hill. It includes serious topics of SA, something that Bloober is trying and failing in. But SH dont look down at their SA victims, its more of a study of Angela’s mentality which I actually find way more intersting than James’s.
i thought Angela was 19?
An interesting take on her final scene that I read, was that it was less her giving up on life and more going to fight her own final boss.
@@bugdomrulez in a documnetary the character designer said that she was supposed to be around 15-16 But they modelled her after a 40 year Old actor, the voice actor
@@crypticcryptid4702 I mean that could be true. I can see it that way, like her journey still goes on. I just think Angela has a bigger role than some people think, she is on the front cover. I can also see some sort of Madonna-whore complex. In the way James perceive her. An unconscious bias for her being “broken goods”. That’s why I think it’s important that people know that Angela is a child. James are very willing to adopt Laura, another child he perceives as more pure, unconsciously. When I listen to her dialog in the staircase scene. I can only imagine a child that has grown up way to fast not trusting a parental figure, “or maybe you think you can save me, take care of me. Will you love me? Hmph…that’s what I thought.
I also find it very interesting that Angela is talking down to you, like she is talking down to a child, herself. Like “you thought someone would come, but they didn’t”
I always thought team silent not making a spin off with her as the protagonist was a missed opportunity. One can argue that her story is pretty easy to fill in the blanks for or that we know all we need to know already, but Idonno. I'd be interested to play it.
I’m not yet in a financial situation to become a patron, so for now you’ll just have to settle for my stubborn insistence on leaving you genuine compliments under every video.
I find it very satisfying every time you drop an incredibly based political opinion in the middle of your already solid commentary and I hope you never stop doing it
Cryptid I appreciate your comments very much and the fact that you find my politics "based" made me laugh like an idiot in my chair, thank you so much
Over the last three days or so, I'm pretty sure she has become my favorite content creator, so I getcha.
Not remotely a horror game, but the nightmare segments in Max Payne are probably the best way to go about portraying PTSD in a video game. The whole game is spent with Max obsessing over and trying to avenge the deaths of his wife and daughter so he can move on. In his worst moments, he has vivid nightmares of trying to save them, only to realize he was the killer, representing how he feels that he could have prevented their deaths if he was there for them. These segments are genuinely horrific, especially the floating, invisible maze where he has to follow blood trails and the sound of his daughter crying. His PTSD is never represented as something detrimental to him, only the driving force behind his revenge. His enemies and allies don't constantly remind him that he should kill himself to stop others from dying (even though others do die as a result of his actions), they simply tell him to stop trying to find the truth, which is a pretty standard threat for a detective story. The nightmares don't interfere with his reality or cause him to mistake things that are obvious to the player, far from it, they only happen when he's under extreme stress or the influence of super meth (makes sense in the story). It sucks that so many games see PTSD as a driving force behind their horror rather than a character element which can enhance the horror that's already there. Is this an excuse to talk about Max Payne? Yes. Play Max Payne.
And if you want more horror adjacent games from the same devs, play Alan Wake and Control. Also, Alan Wake 2 coming next year and it will be full blown survival horror game
I was in a computer game. Funny as Hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.
The last time a game claimed to be watching my every slight wank and winge to judge me vigorously without feeling pointless to me was Silent Hill: Shattered memories.
"Stare at alcohol during a therapy session, retroactively become an alcoholic. Look at pin ups, ascend to Hawaiian shirt dad."
God that was so bad, especially since in Silent Hill games you usually try to explore as much as you can, Shattered memories actively punished you for doing it 😬😬
Idk I really loved this game, it makes sence narratively, like your daughter just went missing, and you are taking your time looking at sexy ladies? And if Sheril thinks that is a natural behaviour for Harry, it means he probably wasn't the best parent. Same with alcohol - to me it just implied that she herself has troubles with addiction, after all, it peaked her interest during her therapy session and in this case her substance abuse because of normalizing her father's behaviour.
Not the best for gameplay - yes, sure, but interesting storytelling choice. Or maybe I'm just reading into things.
The only game I’ve played in recent memory that actually really spoke to in regards to my own past suicidal ideation was Disco Elysium. The dark humour and self deprecating jokes that aren’t really jokes anymore. It was refreshingly blunt without feeling cruel or tacky. It just felt so honest and human and not “oooooh what a spicy and dark twist!!”
I really think this game would've worked better if they went with the "all in the head" ending. Having the monsters not be real instead it's just Ellis trying to find this child. Setting it in the Blair Witch Forest but with no Blair Witch. Having Ellis be afraid of the (non existent) witch as he is actively breaking down. Maybe the boy just got lost? That definitely would've been more preferable to this absolute condemnation of trauma. Ellis is actively presented as being a black hole to everybody because of his PTSD, a drag to be around and his mental health actively makes him a monster who's only redemption is through death.
A better ending would be Ellis finding the child despite everybody's contradictions and his urge to live and grow help him win. Bullet could've been an excellent example to Ellis that he deserves to live and how he can find purpose in helping others. Bullet only lives if Ellis cares, even outside of the game.
Oh gosh, this would’ve been a great story to tell!
I agree when I got my ending which was the bad one I was like okay let me see the good one. I was like how is this good. I was hoping me being good to my dog and wife maybe that help with survival or Ellis may get a redemption ark but nope you either die a hero or become a villain. Which made me sad I at least wanted the good ending be slightly happy.
I think what Bloober doesn’t understand is that not everyone with mental health issues are black holes. I’ve been battling depression for the better of my teen years. Yeah, I can lash out sometimes. Yeah, I’ve considered what everyone else’s lives would be like if I wasn’t alive anymore. But I still try to be a good person, because guess what? Your mental health doesn’t define who you are. Bloober’s depiction of it is, honestly, gross. We’re not animals who need to be put down because we have no use. It completely dehumanises those who are battling with their inner demons. And it’s disgusting.
I defo agree that your version of the story would’ve been more powerful. And don’t have Carver be some serial killer. Have him be a manifestation of Ellis’ inner demons. The voice in the back of his head, trying to fill him with poisonous thoughts. Judging everything he does, trying to drag him down at every opportunity. Also, put more of an emphasis on Ellis’ relationship with Bullet. Show how despite the trauma he’s faced, he still cares deeply for those he loves. Even if he’s struggling, he still has compassion. He still wants to be a good person.
All in "le head", then Pyrocnyical would've liked it.
@@Cheetahgirl_Studios Isn’t that pretty much what the game does already?
Honestly with the reviews excited for "horror game, but with dog!" I gotta wonder if they've ever heard of Rule of Rose or Haunting Ground. Like at least in those games your choices have more meaning on top of dog mechanics.
Those games are also better than bloober team games
i feel like part of the reason SH2's in water is so good is because it's not a """solution""", it's an epilogue. and that it's one of many endings.
wonderful review as always. even more afraid of bloober's sh2 remake
Very true! Extremely true actually. Yes. I love this
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is probably my favourite “mental health” game aside from SH2. They seemed to handle it sensitively (and appropriately for the time period and place). I could genuinely feel her pain and I think that’s in part because of the actress who did a great job and the genuinely scary and harrowing sequences in the game that reflected real life experiences (the BTS shows that). It’s also just a well made fun game.
If you wanna be gripped by a game that deals with the aftermath of suicide while being deep and thoughtful you have to check out LISA: the painful.
It also has perverts so now you know you have to play it.
Hell yeah! LISA is an amazing game in general.
just don't play the joyful, because it does a lot of the same shit bloober team games do
Mert I must know how many times you flubbed saying “Bloobers Blair Witch” before getting the winning take
Oh my god I called it The Bloob Witch SO MANY TIMES
@@MertKayKay The Bloob Witch sounds like she lets people donate their chesticles to others xD
The virgin Bloober suicide ending and the chad ZA/UM suicide _beginning_ -this comment's probably gonna age really poorly considering what happened to ZA/UM.-
This comment made me burst out laughing, the chad beginning is an excellent term
What's wrong with being a Virgin?
they have matta dogs
@@MertKayKay no
Bullet here somewhat reminds me of Hewie from Haunting Ground. In Haunting Ground you play as a completely disarmed girl kidnapped in a spooky mansion and you have to find your way out. Very early you find Hewie, a white dog that will be necessary to solve a lot of puzzles and is absolutely vital for your survival being your only "weapon" to buy time against your stalkers. You can command him, tell him to "come", "stay", "go here", "search", "attack" and the like and I remember thinking it was a cute little thing for like 20 minutes after which his AI would drive me up the wall. When you changed rooms he'd constantly just stop following you and start howling for you to come back, he'd stop dead in his tracks for no reason, or he'd be unresponsive, EVEN after petting him, feeding him, treating him because he's listening - it was infuriating
Fun fact; Guy Cihi (James Sunderland’s voice actor and design base) thinks, or thought, of the “In-Water” ending as the most appropriate for the character.
Aww that's devastating! Guy is a fantastic dude though, he knows our boy James
If I recall, and it's been like half a decade so I could be mistaken, he said he understood James' hopelessness. Though I think he did also say that the ending where James basically adopts Laura (Who Guy's daughter auditioned for which was the only reason he was at the auditions) also made sense.
@@MertKayKay You might want to re-think that statement. Guy Cihi fell down the conspiracy rabbit hole (according to him there is zero scientific evidence that AIDS, H1N1 or COVID are real and the COVID outbreak on a cruise ship was caused by 5G) and turned out to be a Trump supporter and anti-vaxxer. He also thinks autism is a disease. He really went off the deep end.
@@polyghost NOOOOOOOOOOOOO
@@polyghost what?
"your sample size is small, your standard deviation is big, your conclusion conclusion means nothing and you should feel bad" I think is a really good example of the research actually gone into the mental health aspect of most of these stories. Honestly Senua's the only one mentioning 'actually talked to people with the illness' and like 95% of people will some sort of mental health issue will tell you that Psychiatric Experts are really good at reading what it says in a book and really shit at translating that to a real life experience. Like when a woman's disinterest in makeup or femininity is labelled "symptom" and not "tomboy"
On top of it all, while I am a fan of the in water ending as James Sunderland's cannon end, the idea of 'Maybe we should just euthanize the mentally ill for the good of society' Studio taking control I feel like I'm gonna have to deal with "violently smothering her was a good thing actually" combined with more scenes of Mary to make her seem less human 'cause of her illness... (Can someone bring up that Miyazaki clip of him shutting down a bunch of game developers for making monsters by referencing disabled movements? I feel like it's fitting...)
Sure does make me worry about the recently announced SH2 Remake from Bloober team. I have a creeping dread that we'll get a new story segment where it reveals Angela's Dad's tragic backstory that reveals why he was so abusive towards his daughter just so it can make him empathetic while making Angela herself more unlikable. Just some classic Bloober team treatment of mental health and abuse.
That being said, maybe Bloober team will do better now that they actually have a competent script to write around and a blueprint to follow? I try and be optimistic, and Bloober does do atmosphere really well so... maybe they'll avoid all the pitfalls and manage something incredible. Here's hoping.
You summed up the problem with Blooper Team really well at the beginning; "It happened because the writers wanted it to". I can't believe these will be the people behind the Silent Hill 2 remake, why can't we SH fans catch a break?
With Bloober’s track record, I’m very concerned for the Silent Hill 2 remake…
True. Be very afraid.
Thank you for acknowledging that Observer was actually good. Bloober Team’s been getting a lot of well-deserved backlash, especially after the announcement that they’re making the SH2 remake, and while it’s cathartic, it was making me sad that one of my favorite games was getting caught in the crossfires just for being under the same studio name.
Edit: AND THANK YOU FOR SAYING CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE ROAD IS SHIT easily the worst book I was required to read in high school, and all my classmates at the time considered it their favorite.
I also appreciate The Road hate. I hated slogging through that book, hated having to discuss the “themes” and “meaning” behind it. I always hear it lauded as a classic and some of the best writing ever, but I was just bored and lost the entire time. Possibly a result of my aphantasia making it super difficult for me to enjoy that style of writing 🤷🏽
guess i'm lucky enough to have not read it then lol, i only know of the "baby eating cult" or something along those lines...and with that i think i'd pass
also an odd book to be reading in high school, although saying that we had to read "of mice and men" which notouriously is chalked full of racist slurs that the teachers read out loud unapologetically 😕
I agree with all you said, except The Road comments. I loved that book, but I love depressing novels (Make Room Make Room by Harry Harrison is grimmer.)
@@cutthr0atjake I wouldn't say it being depressing was the issue for me. The writing style was absolutely atrocious. I am sure my husband got annoyed by my constant reading aloud of lines and paragraphs out of frustration. Lack of punctuation, constant sentence fragments, and incomplete metaphors just made it torture to get through.
I get that the writer did it on purpose, but that didn't really change that it was awful to read through. If it wasn't required for my English coursework in college, I never would have finished it. I have no problem getting through books in one sitting, but I struggled to get through each and every page of The Road. It is one of the exceptions to "the book was better" argument when it comes to movies.
Yes, the movie was brilliant!
Another note on the suicide ending thing these games have going on, particularly Madison: A lot of them put the final suicide down to something demonic and use that as the justification for it coming out of nowhere (Madison) or it somehow being the only rational (The Medium). Which is A) a really dumb fantastical simplification of a REAL WORLD issue and B) actively harmful to the people who suffer from these conditions. Depression, anxiety, PTSD absolutely suck, but they're not mystical problems from a fantasy story, they're incredibly grounded, real issues faced by real people every day. Framing them as anything else not only literally demonises people with mental health issues, but could also make it that much harder for people who don't suffer from them to rationalise them when they come across others who do.
Yeah, it would almost be funny if people didn't actually think that way. (Either it's a "darkness you have to conquer!!!" or literally demons)
Something to be said when Krieg's Fantastic Fustercluck has far more heart and empathy for people suffering from mental trauma than a studio dedicated to make experiences about it.
Oh my gosh I am pretty sure I cried during that DLC
You ask if people are really happy rating a game on whether you can pet a dog. Allow me as an alternative to offer you my sister's three-point game rating scale:
1. Can you pet the dog?
2. Does the game have a fishing mini game?
3. Does the song "The Boys are Back in Town" play at any point in the game?
That's a scale to live by
I liked how Soma handled the concept of suicide in the Theta segment. Mark Sarang's continuity idea made me feel all sorts of conflicted. At first I was like "this is fucking stupid, you don't get to continue on as the same person just because you kill off your old self" but when Simon switched bodies, I had to reevaluate my stance.
I realize that witnessing suicide (or the aftermath of it) is not the same as considering it, so I don't know if this even counts.
I do appreciate you talking about Bloober Team's games and how horrible they are at handling almost every single sensitive topic one can think of. I agree that Observation was their best game. Wonder what made it so different from the others.
And I'm pretty scared for the Silent Hill 2 remake by them. I know they'll do it justice in the artistic sense, their art team is fantastic. I just hope they can't mess up a game that's already been written long ago...
I think mental illness metaphors are something that can be done well, even in a non-horror setting. Celeste comes to mind when talking about depression and anxiety. It's a game that beats you down, but also shows that you have to confront your mental illness and accept it as part of you to move on with your life.
I think that's what a lot of game writers don't get. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, schizophrenia, ADHD, autism, etc. aren't something that goes away, they may get easier to deal with with medication and/or therapy, but they're always there. And no one has a meter of how much mental illness they have until they're deemed 'too dangerous' and need to off themself.
Someone killing themself because they felt they were 'too dangerous' to live isn't a noble sacrifice, it's a tragedy.
I worry about Bloober being at the helm of Silent Hill 2 because there's a LOT of nuances when it comes to mental health and they've shown they're not good at that. Maybe they'll prove to us they learned from the Medium's criticisms and make a good SH2 remake, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
It really feels like Bloober is stuck in the 2012 days when making a horror game about mental illness was seen as revolutionary and you didn't have to do as much research. But now EVERY horror game has some allusion to mental illness and now it's about how well they can portray it.
Senua's Sacrifice really raised the bar on mental illness being portrayed in video games, and that's wonderful. We need more games like Senua that portray characters with mental illnesses as more than just 'evil unreliable narrator'. Unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean they're an evil character, but the majority of unreliable characters do turn out to be evil or fall into evil tropes. I'm glad Senua broke from that.
Psychonaut 2 is also a good representation of mental health issue and isn't an horror game.
I agree with your points, but depression and anxiety definitely can go away, even if not in every case, and it takes a lot of time and effort
@@JohnDiGrizUkraine I was talking more about clinical depression and anxiety rather than situational.
Both are similar in how they affect people, but come from very different things and one can lead into another very easily.
Situational is, in the best of circumstances, temporary and may not even need medication to help deal with it. It stems from what's going on around a person, whether it be a death in the family, bullying, parents divorcing, etc.
Clinical, however, means that there is something fundamentally wrong with how someone's brain chemistry works. The most common being that the brain cannot naturally produce healthy levels of serotonin.
I was speaking of the later, and how people with clinical depression and anxiety have to be on medication for life just to function normally in society.
@@knightofiris I have a hard time discerning which I might fall under. I wonder if I'd be fine if I was in a better place in life, or if I'm even depressed or anxious to begin with.
As far as games that tackle mental health and suicide go, "The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories" is one that resonated with me. Suicidal ideation is clunky and melodramatic and really really hard to write. I think it's nearly impossible to write without it feeling a little cringy and overblown, because that's how I look back on my worst stuff, sometimes. I want to knock some sense into myself and yell but I also want to give my younger self a big hug. It's so hard to pierce through that thick layer of "nothing will ever be good." I actually wonder if someone on Bloober team really does have a history of struggling with suicide, because the feeling that "I am bad, actually, and everything hurts, and killing myself is the ethical choice" is a wildly seductive one, and hard to shake. It's just as hard to write as a depiction of a character being lit on fire. It's very easy to hold your controller and say "whoop, where's the nearest puddle, let's get this fixed," but if you're actually on fire, your mind might not be able think beyond "ow ow ow, I don't like this."
I certainly am not giving Bloober a pass on what they've written, though. My brain comes up with enough calm, rational-sounding excuses to off myself, I don't need my survival horror games trying to back it up.
And as far as games that do it well: The MISSING is pretty clunky (it's a Swery game, so you know what that means), and it walks right into a couple classic cliches, but it's a really honest portrayal. I really, really love the gore-soaked premise, and though shock value is fine and dandy, JJ's continued dismemberment is horrifying, funny, and just A Thing You Gotta Deal With at all the right times, just like what ti eventually represents. The final boss fight left me feeling maybe more empowered than any other boss battle in any video game, because the mechanics felt like a dim echo of how my mind actually has to work when thinking through low times and intense situations. It's a pretty short game, and whether you end up loving it or hating it, you'll certainly come out of it with a lot of thoughts.
There are ways to handle dark themes. To me Blooper handles them like you would handle something sticky.
Thank you so much for addressing this. I struggled with being suicidal for years and I also worked on a suicide hotline for around two years. The concept of "I'm too broken to live" came up a lot in my work and it's horrible that lazy writers have been leaning on it. The idea is so incorrect that these games have to construct elaborate scinarios to justify it. In real life, having suicidal ideation is common and not something that makes you broken. Personally, I don't find literal mental illness or suicide scary, it's best when the horror is an abstract metaphor for these issues and can stand on its own on a textual level as a spooky story. Then you and your friends can talk about you thought the ghost was a metaphor for. Love the vids, keep up the good work!
No worries Rachel! Thanks so much for watching my videos, it's a shame to hear so many of the messages in these games sound so familiar :'(
Bloober has a very hard problem with emotional connection and forced actions. You never relate to the protagonist, such as having him abandon the dog as a necessary option. Instead of creating a bond they instead relied on a cheap tactic of dogs generally being loved to force an emotional response instead of earning it. Same goes for the ending, you never really connect to the protagonist in any relatable way. Senua continuously highlights her plight and how much her husband meant to her alongside the difficulty of her journey. So when something profound happens you understand the weight behind it, her mental status a constant reminder of how these brief moments of happinesses are worthy of praise. Creating that understanding of how mental issues can make alter entire world views compared to someone without them is difficult, as you stated, but Bloober usually takes the easy way out. "Leave the dog"
Very true! "Leave a dog to die or keep them alive" is an easy choice for any player, and, like you said, it pins emotions to something that the game itself hasn't earned. Especially when you face no penalty for keeping the dog alive, it just comes down to the most fundamental aspects of a person's humanity.
I've played the game but couldn't tell you ANYTHING about it other than there's a dog in it.
With bloober doing the SH2 remake, I'm scared of what they'll do to the story.
A game that is special to me specially was Doki Doki Literature Club. It wasn’t the best game I’ve ever played or beat written but the way it described depression was the reason I sought out help. I always thought that I didn’t have a problem and that if I did I can just tough it out. After years of conditioning to never cry and machismo, I had feelings that I didn’t know how to express. Then I saw Sayori talking about her depression and even the moment when she says that she should be happy but it just won’t go away, finally put into words that I was feeling. Eventually after my college grades were dropping, I finally decided to talk to a therapist and was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. So because of DDLC, I reached out and while I’m still depressed at least I’m getting help.
Bloober are the ONLY reason I’m really scared for the silent hill 2 remake. You can make a game look as pretty as possible and have immersive but simple gameplay but if the story falls flat then what does the game have to hold onto besides aesthetics. Hopefully they can improve or get better writers lmao but yeah Silent hill 2 has tons of mental health awareness or struggles(Angela)
Omg I stopped playing Senua's Sacrifice because I was so paranoid I would die and I didn't want to start over! Well then, I know what I'm doing this week.
Ooo yes!! Gotta get back in there :D Brilliant game. The Rot scared me too, I remember I died about 10 times and I was terrified that each death would be my last
I just started playing it! First game to get me engaged in a while.
I find all these extreme horror portrayals of depression, PTSD, schizophrenia, bipolar, BPD etc. really just misrepresent what it's like to live with mental illness.
I can't speak to the others, but for me and many folks who have depression specifically and have struggled with suicide ideation it's more mundane than how it's shown. It's your mind and body being so quiet it becomes unsettling. It's feeling so disconnected from those around you that it's like watching your own life through a blurry television. It's the presence of so much gaping absence it becomes painful.
My suicide ideation has only ever been scary to me in the moments where I've gotten to the step of having a plan. Sitting in the dark in my bedroom considering what will happen when someone finds me. That's the scary part. It's considering that life goes on without you, whether you choose to stay or not.
It's not jump scares and extreme trauma. For a lot of us it's just a chemical imbalance in our brains and/or everyday cognitive distortions.
Night in the Woods captures this very well I think. The awkward nostalgia of being part of something but also not. Of feeling like you are missing a piece of the puzzle that everyone else has.
I don't know, this is mostly a ramble, but these big horror set pieces miss the mark for me and are really just distasteful.
Look forward to a video game where the protagonist sees a mentally healthy therapist that they gel with really well and actually start to recover and patch up relationships and- oh who am I kidding! Pro-recovery? In our horror video game?
As someone who has dealt with mental health issues for the majority of my life, the too damaged to heal/live trope is just depressing. I’ve already dealt with intrusive thoughts on an almost daily basis, that I’m never going to be able get better or improve, that I’ll always be a burden to those around me, so I may as well just end it for all our sakes. Encountering this suicide trope in so many different things, just exasperates it. Luckily I’ve reached a place where I know that these thoughts are not the truth and despite feeling shitty, I have been getting better. But I can’t imagine the effect it could have on someone in a worse place than me
She doesn't miss
Edit: Dead Space 2 is a good portrayal of PTSD, grief, guilt, and manipulation/abuse without making that the sole focus.
As a person who's struggled with suicidal ideations since high schools, it's not scary to me. It's more like... having a gremlin sitting on your back that weighs you down and annoys you and constantly makes life way way harder by screaming in your ear and tries to twist everything so doing the bad thing seems like the path of least resistance and the only way to get rid of the gremlin and know a little bit of peace.
I hope Konami keeps Bloober on a short leash during the developement of the Silent Hill 2 remake, I also hope Konami has enough awareness that people would burn them alive if Bloober messes with the story and themes of Silent Hill 2 LMAOOOO
"You guys better add some friggin' pachinko in that."
I just want to say I rewatch this video pretty often, along with a handful of your other reviews. I love your dry humor, clever delivery and narration, and your opinions and theorizing. The work you put into your videos really shows, especially when it means slogging through a second playthrough where getting into the room early changed absolutely nothing.
Artemis I'm super flattered to hear it! It's honestly an honour to hear it. Thank you and I'm glad you enjoy my stuff
You mention the laziness of suicide endings. And I Totally agree. It's something I've often complained about in Lovecraftian stories.
But there is a game that I really don't want to spoil, so kind of can't even name given that the nature of this discussion is "Surprise suicide endings". So I'll try to be vague, but people may well know which game I mean.
In this game, the story has A: Had a voice on a radio pushing you forwards and B: given a lot of details about the location you're in, and it's downfall.
As you go on, the main character is revealed to be from that location, and has a great sense of loss over leaving it before said downfall. The sense of community is gone, for example.
You also learn of several other problems the main character has.
And by the end, you come to realize the voice over the radio isn't someone else, it's his own suicidal urges, pushing him onwards towards the end.
The entire game is revealed to have been about his suicide. And you can clock on to that idea either right at the end when you're trapped in a room with nothing you can interact with other than a noose, or some time before then, if you've been thinking about it.
Rather than just "And then because my story is so super scary the main character necked himself." Which honestly feels like telling the audience what to feel at best, and flat out masturbatory at worst.
It's also nice that the game has an alternate ending, found by ignoring some of the advice of the radio voice (For example: You're told to avoid a particularly dangerous alternate area, and exploring it is required for this ending), where the main character can regain the will to go on.
It's not just bleak for bleak's sake. There is a potential for light.
Two other positives: The reason for suicide isn't "To make the world better" (Because that'd be really fucking insensitive to people with suicidal ideation) and isn't the fucking GOOD ending.
Edit: Expect a reveal in the replies, since people will no doubt want to guess or discuss it!
Total chaos?
@@ianrogers41 Indeed. An odd name for such an experience.
@@calemr honestly considering the state of Tyler's mind it fits
The fact that I immediately recognized the game, another classic "it was all in le head" game
so i'm one of those people who loves the concepts and stories behind horror games but between the gore and jumpscares, I *cannot* play them myself. I found your channel this last week and have just been binging your content. I literally breathed a huge sigh of relief when in one of them you blatantly said "I won't be showing the jumpscares". Thank you for allowing me to live vicariously through your videos, your sense of humor has had me in tears a few times.
Also if you haven't played it, can I suggest Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice? It's a psychological horror game that I tried playing, incredibly enjoyed it - doesn't really have jumpscares or insane amounts of gore (to the extent i played, at least) - but due to my own MH issues I don't think i'm going to be able to finish it and i would *love* to hear your thoughts
Hey Riley! Absolutely no worries on the jumpscares, I can't STAND them and I will never put them into my videos :'D I actually scream with them, I get so tense
Hehe if you enjoyed Hellblade you're going to absolutely love this video after the first hour ;) Thank you for the recommendation!!
@@MertKayKay LMAO that's what i get for commenting before finishing the video 🤣 I'm glad you enjoyed it so much too!! *slides you a pic of my cat in hopes you'll make a Hellblade video one day*
The first horror game I ever tried playing was one of the resident evils (10+ years ago, I don't remember which one, i think Umbrella??? It was on the Wii), and my girlfriend came back from class and found me paralyzed on the bed, staring at the screen because I knew there was a jumpscare coming and I was trying to figure out all the ways to kill the zombie before it could jump out at me 😂i'd made it maybe 5 minutes into the actual game 😂
@@breadleyj Aww you get paralysed with fear too! I'm the same :D I will stare at a pause screen for hours lol
This makes me want to see your take on the ending for "The Excavation of Hob's Barrow." 👻
I have never heard of this! I'm deeply intrigued
@@MertKayKay It's honestly a great point & click mystery game, but the ending and lack of impact from player choice have been... contentious, to say the least.
Thank God someones reviewing some bloober team games cuz I high-key don't feel like playing them to see how bad silent hill 2 remake is going to be (Rip that absolute magnum opus of gaming)
Any time Jilly Bear! I'm looking at Observer soon too
Town Fell seems like it'll have a better chance because of the two teams behind it. No Code's Observation and Stories Untold are great and Anapurna's published good games as well!
SH2 however....I'm not so sure how well that will be. Unless they only do a graphic touch up and don't mess with the story.
@@MertKayKay ahh!! Can't wait!! Love your reviews!!
"Senua's combat isn't great..."
Oh? I thought Senua's combat while very simple was thrilling and satisfying. The very first foes are intimidating, your perspective is limited and the bosses require you to pay attention instead of just mashing. I adored the Valravn fight in particular for that. Hit feedback sounds were satisfying and in every combat, be it due to excellent voicework or animations, the direction and atmosphere... I felt Senua struggling and braving unnatural foes to get to her goal. And further on when there were some much longer and heavier combat encounters, I felt so good I can't even tell you.
So yeah... I guess mechanically the combat isn't much, but the game uses all its tools and strengths to make the battles feel more dire and suspenseful than the system would allow on its own.
I feel some authors just want to use the suicide ending in horror , because they think horror should end badly. Yes you can have an ending with character who didn't survive the horrors, but it has to make sense with your theme, not just ''Welp, better kill yourself''.
I have no hope for Silent hill 2 remake from them (even if they don't touch the script, since Bloober never made a game with combat.) Why not have Bluepoint make that remake.
I have to say that you commented on what ruined so many TV shows and movies that had such good promise. The person who to all outward appearances is perfectly normal, showing no signs of mental illness, but when the detective (or other people trapped on an island with them, whatever the case may be) properly identifys them as the killer, and they suddenly becomes a drooling, cackling, maniac.
Like if The Joker was perfectly normal in every way for weeks on end, until someone says, "Hey, aren't you The Joker?" And he then says, "WHY YES, HOW GOOD OF YOU TO NOTICE! HHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!" and starts spraying people with his seltzer bottles filled with acid and throwing exploding pies.
I feel like this ending idea feels like a bully mindset, the kind of taunt an elementary school kid will throw at you because they think you're a loser.
Honestly, as someone who deals with schizophrenia, and then playing Senua's Sacrifice blind? Fuuuuuu---. I didn't realize what I was getting into. It's... frustratingly accurate, just regularly having an invasive nag doubting or accusing you really gets in the way of communication and trust. But it really is just... a background noise to my life, I'm glad Senua is a mythological story, and not "oh yeah, she was delusional the entire time, ooOoooOooo!" Thankfully I've been more open about my condition in recent years with some people I've grown to trust over the years and they've been... understanding. But yeah, games that go "bad guy is schizo!" or something just feels... cheap at best. Like, I'd take "bad guy is evil because he's just an asshole" over "evil because mental heeeeaaaalllllth" any day.
I also have Anti-social Personality Disorder, so I bristle at the trope (both in media and real life) where someone acts horribly and people accuse them of being a sociopath? Like... no. They're just an asshole. Sociopathy isn't like THAT at all. Perfectly normal people can just be assholes or feel justified in their more malicious or morally reprehensibly actions due to their own perception without being narcissists, sociopaths, or psychopaths.
But I've deleted, decided to not comment, then decided to try again, too many times to continue this without risking starting over again, so I'mma just post this.
Been binge-watching your stuff since the Song of Horror review and been enjoying it immensely, you're very intelligent and eloquent, so don't let the internet jack-asses get you down. (Although judging by the regular "if you want to watch gameplay instead of my essay, go do that, you child" I'm feeling you know how to deal with them already.)
I'm super late but as someone who has dealt with suicidal ideation before, I thought it might be worth giving my thoughts on your question toward the end.
Mental health struggles scare the shit out of me but I think that using depression as an effective and respectful Horror Device would be so hard that it may not even be possible. One element that I do think could be utilized is the fear of institutionalization. The threat of being thrown into an asylum for factors totally outside of your control has fantastic horror potential. I and so many of my friends are scared of being deemed "too difficult" and being shut up forever, tapping into that fear (in a respectful way) seems like a safer route to me.
idk if this is helpful at all or if I'm just bearing my soul for no reason but oh well. I hope anyone reading this has a nice day
I think the best part about the game is that the dev team is called "bloober". Just talking about suicide and dead kids and in-between a "bloober" gets thrown in, like a child with a loose grasp on English trying to insult their parent for stealing a chip from them. From what I've seen of the game (and your video), it almost feels like the design meetings literally went "Okay, so the wiki page says the movie is set in a forest, so we'll do that. Oh and why not throw a dog in there too, everyone loved that dog in Fallout 4 right? Now, lets just use mental health as an excuse for any magic stuff, aaaaand he'll kill himself at the end cause at the end of Blair Witch they die too". Like that was just the entire discussion around how to make the game.
The only two games I can really think of where mental health was done decently are Stories Untold and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, and only one of those is a horror game. Stories Untold (spoilers) uses the protagonist's mental health and refusal to accept responsibility for his actions to tie 4 seperate miniature fictional stories together, with the premise that the protagonist regularly recreates his own memories of his accident and the years following by putting them in fictional horror stories reminiscent of the Twilight Zone.
Usually when you review these horror games I try and 'rewrite' the story in a way where it'd be more intriguing/enjoyable, but this game doesn't really have much of a base at all. Like if I *had* to do a story involving both Blair Witch and mental illness, off the top of my head I'd do one about a guy who goes into the woods investigating the disappearances and wanting to prove the idea of the witch to be false. After a bunch of possibly-magical horror events pop up, you see them start spiralling due to a refusal to believe in the supernatural, and you later find out that it's because their parents were obsessed with the supernatural and believed their mental illnesses to be as a result of possession and rather than seek help for their child, they were treated as a creature, abused and mistreated, until they eventually snapped and murdered their parents. There, a refusal to believe in the supernatural is necessary for the protagonist to remove any belief of wrongdoing, as for them it hinges on the idea that the demonic and supernatural aren't real, so the player gets to actually decide what's real and what isn't through playing on their own rather than just being streamlined this rubbish story.
I think the Water ending of SH2 works becuase it isnt James taking himself out to 'fix' anything.
It's literally a man allowing the cursed town to devour him as it has many others.
He clutches at his misery, lowering himself past the teeth and down the throat, deciding that he'll lie down there with the wife he murderered.
It isnt repentance, it's a horrible surrender to dark forces too vast for a broken man to overcome or escape.
And it's built up to, after he has seen other curse victims climb into the jaws of their nightmares and settle down in defeat.
honestly, i think the only time suicide in a game has "scared" me is in Doki Doki Literature Club, where the character committing suicide is the protagonist's best friend. it tapped into one of my personal biggest fears: that someone i love could take their own life. i'd never see them or hear them again. and i know, selfish as it may sound, that it would just lead me to blame myself, as though i could have done _anything_ to stop them.
i mean uh haha game bad funni doggy
For something like MADiSON`s possession thing, I think it would be really cool if the game didn't completely take control away from the player at first. I'd introduce short episodes through the game where the character ignores the player's commands, maybe stopping completely or maybe walking by itself in a random direction. Players are already used to the game taking control during cutscenes, so using the gameplay segments to instill that sense of not always being in control would be more effective. Still, there should be some restraint and not have it happen too often, plus have some foreshadowing via worldbuilding or something. Even then, I definitely wouldn't use the possession to push a suicide ending. If I really wanted the character to die like that, the best thing to do would be to frame it as "murder" (the murderer being the demon) rather than as "suicide". And even then it would be very tricky to ensure the player doesn't read it as "suicide", so I'm not sure I'd be willing to go there.
Blair Witch isn't really about mental health. (Remember that Blair Witch has multiple films, and they confirm that the Witch is real, that the characters are trapped in a time loop and can't escape.) Any ambiguity that the OG Blair Witch might have had is long gone. It's about a supernatural entity that has power over time and space. I think that the PTSD in Blair Witch is set dressing. It's there to mislead the player into thinking that perhaps you're crazy, perhaps there is no Blair Witch. But there is a Blair Witch, and the power she has in the films is to lock characters into time loops until they die or do what she wants. That's why there's no escape.
For another psychological horror that did mental health correctly is In Sound Mind. They worked with professionals *from the start* and kept working with them all the way through development. Even from the pre-release demo to the full release, they kept working with them and story changes where made from the demo to the full game via input by professionals. And the end result was very good imo
“Not the kind of bullet your mum uses”.
Thank you for that sudden and unwanted graphic image! 😂👍
A comment I wanna make, since I'm early on: Has anyone noticed these games always follow things like "Identity disorders" or "Mental health = ur crazy and see things" and suicide? But never like..
The genuine depression and desperate that comes with mental health problems? THe isolation of it? The dire want of help that you need, but struggle or can't seek yourself? What about the crippling anxiety that some people get that makes it impossible to socialise with other people or even leave the house? Speaking from experience here on some of these aforementioned things. Like, it's not an easy task and it's hard to be 'tasteful', but when writing a story of mental health there's such a deep and rich well you can draw from. And no one ever does? It frustrates me that people with mental health problems (Such as myself) are more.. resources to be used, rather than actually tastefully wrote about.
Also, I don't have anything like DID but I really wish games would stop doing "THis person has two identities! One of them is a crazy killer!" Because it does nothing but stigmatise those people.
(I wanted to throw in an addendum: The things I struggle with aren't something people write about. Yknow, depression, isolation, anxiety, stuff like that. But it bothers me that people *like* me, or people with different disorders or problems, just get stereotyped by these games and media who treat it two dimensionally. "Oooh, this person is a psychopath and killed their family and themselves! Oooh, this person has PTSD and dies to make sure they can't hurt anyone else with their trauma! Fucking hell.)"
This is why I'm so afraid of the Silent Hill 2 remake with Bloober at the helm. They really better not touch anything story-wise.
I felt what you said about mental illness becoming a fantasy setting/mechanic for games all the way down to my bones. As someone with pretty severe mental health issues, including a psychotic disorder, I don't feel at all seen or represented by this kind of garbage - i wish they'd actually use some imagination and come up with a fantastical source for everything. Using real labels without any sort of flailing grasp toward realism is nothing but exploitation. Thanks so much for your frankness.
The last part about game devs 'talking to psychologists' really hit hard. As someone with a bunch of bullshit happening in their brain, I find it really hard to play alot of games because of their treatment of people like me.
The only game I can think of that did anything good about mental health was Psychonauts 2, which is far from a horror game, which is a shame! I love horror, it's just hard to find horror about mental health STRUGGLES instead of horror about 'the mentally ill'. Very good video!
I just finished Psychonauts 2 and I share your enthusiasm! It is a brilliant game.
A few months back I watched this one review of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, where the reviewer talked about their mental health and how wonderful it was to see a game that treated them with respect, sadly that review was either deleted or privated.
In any horror movie, series, or game, if the central protagonist is a veteran it’s a red flag for me. Especially if the veteran has PTSD or a “haunting past.”
There is a set percentage of gamers who can directly relate with these types of protagonists, so you are immediately distancing a majority of your audience.
Secondly, I feel like it’s an easy way to try and give your story depth and credibility, even if your story is tired and lazy.
I’m not saying veterans shouldn’t be represented in stories. I’m just saying, relying on veteran trauma is disrespectful, lazy and generic.
I can’t relate to Ellis or his stupid choices at all which directly impacts the immersion of the game.
"Like some sort of a bleak soft magic system" - Oh god, hadn't thought of it that way but it fits way too well.
You know the thing that most disappoints me about Blooper is that their art team is amazing. They just have very generic writing and directing. Get these artists on a team with a focused director and/or writer and we have psychological horror game gold.
Yes, their designs are INCREDIBLE!
One of your videos popped up in my recommended and I've now been going through them like wild. You make incredible content and have introduced me to new games I want to check out as well as ones I know to stay far away from lol. Thanks for making such awesome content!
Salem this is the nicest comment I've received in a long time, thank you so much for letting me know :D I know it sounds sappy of me to say but it really motivates me to hear. Thank you!!
@@MertKayKay You're so welcome! Also you mentioning Silent Hill 2 in another video pushed me to find and ISO that worked for my emulator and start streaming it finally so thank you for that as well I had issues getting it to work in the past and it had laid dormant forever lol
A favorite game of mine is End Roll, a simple and relatively short RPG maker game. It’s very dour overall. It’s a story about a 14 year old boy who has killed a lot of people and suffers from some serious trauma and PTSD, and ends with him killing himself. Yet I love it and its portrayal of his struggle with guilt and regret. I probably wouldn’t think this kind of game could work until I played it. It doesn’t necessarily say anything about mental health, but I found it to be engaging and beautiful.
I think you can make a good story and a good game out of these kinds of concepts. But there’s a big difference between stories that are trying to cashgrab a certain audience by being dark and having mental illness in it (oooo!!!!) and games made by people grappling with their own problems and trying to express some of them in their work.
By far my favorite youtuber, thank you so much for the videos you put out. I get the notification that you've uploaded something new, and I immediately know I'm about to have a good time. Your analysis is always spot on, I never feel like I'm being talked down to or that anything is dumbed down, and you sound like someone I would be friends with IRL. Keep being awesome!
Ecstasy that's fantastic news and I am so grateful ; - ; I hope to keep impressing you with my videos!
One horror game I really like that grapples with suicide is Disparity of the Dead, one of the small games from the DreadX Collection 3. In it you play a detective in an afterlife, and lots of people from this afterlife talk about having committed suicide. The game ultimately reads to me as someone with suicidal thoughts reconciling their desire to die with emerging atheistic beliefs that nothing awaits them past death; it's empathetic and personal, trying to work through something and not just gawking at those with mental health issues like a circus sideshow.
As an aside, I also recommend in general the DreadX Collections; I'm not going to say that every single game in them is a winner (they are not), but they're all pretty short and there's some really interesting ideas and hidden gems in there!
yay an hour video! i love hearing you talk about games you have some great insight
edit as i go along: i think the whole vision going fuzzy and flickering is so funny like when my vision blurs its not because im suicidal (which i am) its probably bc i forgot to wipe my glasses. also i think that type of visual would work in cases like anxiety attacks because it really does feel like that when im having one. like that and maybe clouding the volume is a good way to portray it. but ofc you need other accompanied symptoms like throwing up or stumbling or breathing heavily
The more I hear about Bloober, the more glad I am that Observer is their only game I've played.
Oh absolutely! Observer is fantastic :D No idea what happened there. Maybe all their best writers got poached after the fact
@@MertKayKay maybe, I'm curious as to how they'll handle the Silent Hill 2 remake. Maybe having a more dictated story will allow them to exercise the areas they do well at, environments and atmosphere
"This isn't Halo: Reach, it's Burkittsville. Get therapy."
Easily my favorite line from this video, the delivery is top notch. Great analysis as always! I saw interest for this game fall off hard on TH-cam, and I always kinda wondered why. Now I know.😐
Haha, thank you Joey! Yes, this game is VERY dull, and, well- you know the rest
Games aren't the only medium with a habit of using mental illness as a way to cover up bad writing. Any badly written character with vague motivations can be jerked around to do anything the plot might need because (shrug), you know, they're CRAZY, and crazy people are just weird and do things that make no sense.
Off the top of my head I think of Sator in that movie Tenet, who wants to obliterate everything that has ever existed or ever will exist. Why? He's nuts, and something something about his marriage to Elizabeth Debecki.
I don't know what all of time and space have to do with his marriage, but it seems to me that anyone who was depressed enough to want to off himself could find a less complicated way of doing it that didn't involve time inverted pincers movements and international conspiracies. That's a lot of trouble to go to.
Been a while since I saw it but wasn’t his whole desire to end the world before he died, as an act of extreme narcissism?