The 30th Day of Horror: Liminal Horror Investigators

 

Liminal Horror Investigators (Goblin Archives)

You know what I haven't reviewed yet? An actual paper-and-pencil RPG! Lots of movies, several books and graphic novels, a few video games....but no RPG. Well, let's fix that with Liminal Horror. Published in the indie scene by Goblin Archives, the current edition is called Liminal Horror Investigators, which is a slightly buffed up version of the original Liminal Horror book. Being indie zine RPGs, these are slim tomes, but don't worry....a recent crowdfunding campaign which I backed is for a thick and heavy hardcover Deluxe Edition, so as with all good and simple RPGs, that will inevitably change. It's like the carcinization effect on beaches, except in the RPG book world, all slim and to-the-point RPGs inevitable morph over time into immense, weighty hardcover tomes.

Liminal Horror uses the game engine introduce in "Into the Odd," which is a very simple mechanical system involving only three stats: Strength, Dexterity and Control. You have a hit score, "HP" for Hit Protection, which is effectively your "combat competence timer to death" meter.....the game system's combat mechanic is unique in that during combat, an attack simply rolls damage and applies it to the target's armor and then HP score. Hit Protection is really measure of how tough and competent you are in a fight, and when it hits zero your luck has run out and damage is now critical, going against your stats. This leads to the Wounds table, where bad things happen, or the Fallout table which is what happens when you take mental damage against your Control score. In Liminal Horror Fallout can be customized to the module, and it can mean anything from mental effects such as paranoia to bizarre supernatural curses and manifestations. The sample tables provided provide some great concept spaces for a game.

Most of the game's character generation process boils down to rolling for a profession, appearance personality traits, gear, and some bonds and features to link the party together. The remainder of this 44 page book is a couple pages of rules (it's a very simple game) and cool stuff for a "facilitator" to use -- the game's name for the GM. This includes rules on artifacts, a small bestiary, different styles of adventure design (voidcrawls, mysteries, funnel rules and flashbacks all get some attention). There's no magic system as such; magic may manifest as a side effect of fallout, resonant artifacts, or whatever the GM (facilitator) might throw in the investigator's way.

Overall Liminal Horror is a very nice, slim pick-up-and-play zine RPG and well worth a look if you like portable games that can get a group up and running in no time. It has a number of modules available from different supporting publishers, of which The Bureau and The Mall are two of the most noteworthy, though I am especially fond of The Parthogenesis of Hungry Hollow. The style of horror in the game and its modules is reflective more of modern horror themes common online and in video games. Imagine Silent Hill, The Backrooms, Creepy Pastas, Slenderman, Sirenhead and such and you will get an idea of what is thematically in sync with what Liminal Horror supports....but even in the bae book there are some curiously Innsmouthian influences hidden in there so mythos horror is also in the mix. Note also that there is a module featuring these frog men in the first Liminal Horror book that is missing from the Investigators edition, so still a reason to hold on to that tome if you find an original. Mechanically this newer version just adds more rules options and ideas, but leaves that module out. I am interested to see how they fill up a couple hundred pages with the Deluxe Edition.

For useful resources on Liminal Horror click here!

 

The 29th Day of Horror: Suitable Flesh (2023)

 

Suitable Flesh (2023)

Some movies fall under the category of cosmic horror, and they may or may not draw direct inspiration from Lovecraft and the many, many successors in this genre. Other films are distinctly Lovecraftian, either referencing elements of Lovecraft's mythology (Arkham, Cthulhu, etc.) or adapting his actual stories. There's also a third category of films as I see it: movies based on Lovecraft's reinterpretation through the lens of Stuart Gordon's style of Lovecraft movies. I think Suitable Flesh fits this last category. This last category isn't just characterized by a style emulating Stuart Gordon's direction or screen writing, but also the notion that there's a strong psycho-sexual undercurrent in the mythos of Lovecraft, something that may have been there on an unconscious level for Lovecraft himself, not out of sorts for his time, when psychiatry in the nascent age of Freud and Jung. Also, Gordon's penchant for copious levels of gore. Director Joe Lynch is channeling all of this in spades in Suitable Flesh, which is loosely based on The Thing on the Doorstep (super super loosely), and to prove my point further is even dedicated to Stuart Gordon.

Dr. Elizabeth Derby meets the wrong kind of patient, but perhaps it was inevitable given she maintains a practice in Arkham, Massachusetts. Asa Waite is a young man who claims to be periodically possessed by his father, Ephram. At first she thinks she just wants to help him, but really she's abnormally, sexually intrigued by Asa and what she thinks is just a schizophrenic episode. Asa, however, contends that his father is literally possessing him. After meeting Ephram, Elizabeth has lots of clues in front of her she does not recognize with her clinical nonbeliever mind (including what one can only assume is the Necronomicon on his desk). A short time later an emergency happens, Asa begging for her to help, and she stumbles on a scene in which Ephram appears to be having a heart attack and Asa wants to finish him off. Things go sharply awry as Asa is possessed, then they have sex, then she discovers that in having sex he possesses her, and then in short order Ephram with Asa's mind awakens and possessed Asa cuts his head off. Then the house catches fire. 

Like, that's all in the first act!

Anyway, it continues from here and escalates....quite rapidly.....as Ephram, now in Asa's body, reveals he very much wants to take possession of Elizabeth now. He can do so over the phone, with the right spell, fairly easily, while leaving his own body as Asa chained up on a basement somewhere so she can't escape once she's swapped bodies with him. This leads to an interesting undercurrent of sexual violation as the mind of Ephram has his way with Elizabeth's body while she is dispossessed. Oh yeah, and there's an altar to what I would assume is Azathoth or something in the basement. Weee!

This movie was a trip. Watch it with people who don't mind lots of sex (though, to contrast, it is slightly tamer sex than in, for example, the recent movie Honey Don't), and the sex does play heavily into the story. There is also Elizabeth's friend who works at Arkham Asylum, Dr. Upton, who is the straight-laced friend who wants to help but can't quite put the clues together (and also in the original story the actual narrator).

This movie was frickin' wild, a total trip. The one takeaway you should get out of this movie is that weird shit goes down all the time in Arkham, Mass. and the profession of psychiatrist is probably fraught with existential danger in that lovely town. Well worth a watch, even if you aren't in to Lovecraftian stuff! A solid A!

Spoiler! Best moment: the scene where Elizabeth tries to kill Asa by backing into him with the car,  and the lovely use of the car rear-cam during the scene. Second best moment: that poor security guard!

The 28th Day of Horror: The Breach (2022)

The Breach (2022)

John Hawkins is the Sherriff of the lakeside town of Lone Crow investigating a body in a boat that washed ashore in his district. The body is a mess, and Hawkins quickly brings in coroner Jacob Redgrave, while  his reliable officer Parks starts researching to find evidence of missing persons. The coroner quickly identifies the body is effectively shredded and missing all of its bones. Parks finds out the clothing and ID of a missing man, a physicist named Cole Parsons who apparently came to the area and hired a guide to take himself and his crates of equipment upriver to a remote house only accessible by boat. The person who took him is Meg, an ex girlfriend of both the sheriff and the coroner.

Hawkins decides a trip upriver to investigate the house Parsons was staying at may shed light on his grisly death. He brings Redgrave along, and Meg knows where to go so they take her and her boat. On the way out they hear strange, ominous noises that seem to come from everywhere all at once. Not long after they arrive at the house, but something is off. Meg realizes the house looks different aged far beyond one year since she last was there. Inside, the decrepit mansion has more weirdness. A mysterious surging generator, a strange room filled with arcane trappings, and then Linda, Parson's estranged wife shows up....she's been looking for Parsons ever since an event where their daughter disappeared.

The story rapidly escalates with one new twist after another. As with so many other well done movies I hesitate to say any more; this is best watched for effect. I will say this much, though: I bought the movie on a lark because it was listed as in the cosmic horror genre, and that is 100% on target. Indeed, while it does not attempt to replicate any specific Lovecraft or mythos tale, it does have a nontrivial amount of From Beyond in it's DNA.....there's a definite sense that Edward Tillinghast's machinations were a bit of inspiration for the story here, though the actual nature and execution in The Breach is most definitely its own unique take. 

A couple observations that are maybe teeny tiny spoilers: First, particle physics and occult black magic are probably best not mixed together. Second, I notice the Rotten Tomatoes score is fairly high, but the popcorn meter (which I think is the audience score) is really low. Do not be dissuaded; I suspect the low rating is because this movie does not end on a positive note; quite the opposite, it ends like all cosmic horror tales should, utterly devoid of any sort of happy ending for our poor protagonists.

Anyway, the soundtrack as always helps make the movie, and this one is no exception. The gory FX are almost all practical, and the third act of this movie is utterly bonkers, as it should be. Solid B for me! I liked it enough that while I do have it on Vudu, I may see if I can hunt around for a proper Blu-ray for the collection.

The 27th Day of Horror: Ash (2025)

 

Ash (2025)

I got to watch this movie on its limited theatrical release, making me very glad I decided to go see a random movie on a lark on the one weekend it was out in theaters. Ash was released by Shudder, which if you don't know about them, Shudder is a fantastic horror-focused curated streaming service. In fact, these days I only subscribe to four streaming services, and Shudder is one of them. The other three are Curiosity Stream, Magellan TV and Hulu, thought the last one is technically free as part of my phone deal. Shudder however is the best, especially if your tastes run in a "weird and horror" vein for films. 

The setup for Ash is immediately intriguing as a woman named Miya awakens with a concussion and memory loss on a research station on an alien world. She finds the rest of the crew dead, brutally murdered, and outside an alien landscape. She quickly figures out that the atmosphere, while somewhat breathable is actually mildly toxic and she flees back into the ship after witnessing a bizarre "mirroring" image of herself in the hazy distance. Soon, as she begins to have flashbacks of her memory of the living crew on the ship, a second crewman who was on the orbiting ship named Brion arrives in response, apparently, to a distress call.

As the mystery of what happens unfolds, Riya begins to remember the events, and image sof herself killing her fellow crewmates. Evidence is uncovered of an alien artifact, a tunnel network that the crew was exploring, and an unexpected death while doing so. Brion meanwhile remains focused on the next window of opportunity for the lander to break orbit and return to the ship. As daylight falls, a hull breach diverts their attention from the mystery for a moment, though the actual breach appears to have been sabotage, suggesting a third person is still alive....and there is a missing body, or so it seems...

Ash does an amazing job of building paranoid tension and as escalating mystery with only two actors, accomplishing a vibe not unlike The Thing in terms of the "Who's really causing these problems?" kind of sense. By the third act it goes completely off the rails....and I will absolutely not spoil it, but take note that all of those amazing creature effects at the end are practical effects, a real spectacle when the "truth" is finally revealed. 

Much of this film has an eerie, dreamlike quality. There are a lot of impressive establishing shots for the planet's environs, and some eerie dream sequences. Some of the graphics feel like they might be using some AI elements, but the mix with practical effects works very well. The soundtrack is also incredible, deeply unnerving and mood setting.

If you are a fan of horror in general, scifi horror in particular, or want some inspiration for your next Mothership campaign, this movie is well worth a watch! It is another one of my guilty pleasure faves, but is also a genuinely good film. About the worst thing I can say about it is: why don't they have, like, better surgical machines, or even anesthetic in the distant future? You'll know what I mean when you see it! Anyway...solid A, totally worth a watch. 

The 26th Day of Horror: Psycho Girls (1985)

 

Psycho Girls (1985)

It was a while before I decided to pick this movie up from the Vinegar Syndrome collection, but I think I'm glad I did. It's a weird, punk, low budget psychotic movie that is exemplary of its period in time; this kind of movie could only exist in the unique conflux of attitudes and ideas in the seventies and eighties, with twisted and weird takes on sanity and psychotherapy. Watching the extras on the making of this movie was possibly more interesting than the movie itself, but the movie did manage to deliver on its incredibly nutty low-budget "horror comedy" vibe. Also, its a canuxploitation film, another are gem from Canada. 

Directed by Jerry Ciccoritti, who has a great interview on the making of this film worth watching, did it in his early punk days on zero budget with some film they had available, in abandoned properties they had access to. It's a great story. The movie itself is a mix of wannabe actors and friends of the director, none of them especially "good" but all of them doing a fine job of hamming it up for the camera.

The plot is about two sisters, one of whom (Sarah) kills her parents one day with rat poison and ends up committed for the next twenty years...or so it seems. The other sister Victoria lives her life and seeks to make sure her sister never leaves the asylum. One day, her sister kills an orderly and escapes. First her psychiatrist (the amusingly named Doctor Hippocampus) ends up murdered and skinned, then she seeks out Victoria, and the two of them have a confrontation from which Sarah walks away the lone survivor, Sarah then travels to the house of a writer and his wife where Victoria had been a housekeeper and offers her services as cook while her sister is "away." They accept, and that night at the dinner party things go very, very south.

Sarah, it turns out, escaped the asylum with a gang of fellow inmates, who conspire with her to drug the guests of the evening party after feeding them her sister, literally. They then tie up and proceed to inventively murder the guests one by one in the depths of the now shut down asylum (the timing on her escape vs. shut down of the asylum is a bit wiggly here). It is up to our writer, who has been a quasi-film-noir narrator the entire time, to figure out how to escape before he and his wife are the final victims of the evening.

The "villains" of this movie are caricatures more than anything, suitable as Batman villains more than they would be a representation of real madness. The movie does a surprisingly good job of introducing our main characters (the husband and wife) and their later guests during a lengthy dinner conversation, enough so that their deaths have a bit more impact later on. There's a lot of "80's level" talk about psychiatry and therapy in this movie, and the villains are  to some level supposed to be reflective of this underlying theme. It is quintessentially 80's in this regard, maybe even a throwback to the 70's, with what can only be described as a contentious and very, very dated take on the entire topic of mental health and psychiatry, through the lens of some aspiring early guerilla punk filmmakers.

There is one amusing plot hole, not obvious but I do love it: midway in, the psychos order some pizza for delivery deep in the asylum while torturing their "guests." The pizza guy eventually shows up and almost walks in on the entire affair before dropping the pizza off and fleeing. The entire scene is amusing, if only because its so out of left field, and shines a light on the later sequence in the film when our two protagonists finally escape and then get lost in the endless halls of the impossible to navigate asylum....apparently only the pizza guy knew exactly where the entrance and exit was!

One might also wonder about the name Psycho Girls, because strictly speaking only Sarah is here to do the evil deeds (her gang of psychos are all men). According to the director its the two sisters....but alas, we really didn't get to see Victoria shine. I was sort of hoping for a surprise twist at the end (and there is one, a bit) in which Victoria is revealed not to have been dinner but rather it was the psychiatrist, and she returns to end her sister....but nope, the twist went in a slightly different direction.

Some of this movie, including the extended dinner talk scene and certain other moments (the pizza guy, the confrontation between the sisters, even the entire "dinner party turned massacre night" them) reminded me oddly of Quentin Tarantino's films. I wonder if Tarantino saw this, given how much he was influenced by cinema from this period and earlier.  

So, this is a movie worth watching if you like this period of cinema and enjoy experimental low-budget weirdness from early aspiring directors. It's also worth a watch if you just like creepy and off-putting horror films. For me, it definitely was worth seeing though I do rank it at a solid C.

The 25th Day of Horror: The Resurrected (1991)

 

The Resurrected (1991)

Apparently Stuart Gordon's success at adapting H.P. Lovecraft stories to film led to Dan O'Bannon taking a shot at it. Yes...the man behind Return of the Living Dead and a whole lot of Alien did, in fact, take a shot at Lovecraft with The Resurrected, loosely adapted from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. I had picked this up recently from Vinegar Syndrome, and was all excited to enjoy what I thought was an unknown film to me. Right around the point where the stalwart team of investigators find themselves in the depths of Charles Ward's secret laboratory (which he inherited from Arthur Curwen), the really cool reanimated monster shows up and I was instantly, "Wait, I have seen this movie before. Twice."

So with this sudden realization, the question must be posed: is this actually a good movie if I had completely forgotten about it, twice? Well, assuming the issue is not the high quality 4K UHD copy I watched confusing me into not being a  grainy SD release as I think it was the last two times I saw it, the real answer is: it's actually pretty good, but its also rather slow for the first 75% of the movie, in a manner which, while shockingly appropriate in is methodical pace for your average Call of Cthulhu game, and definitely in alignment with some of the source material, is nonetheless just not exciting enough to be very memorable. This holds true right up until you get to the point where the investigators (for they are the embodiment of your average CoC team) decide to go to the source of the evil, with explosives, though they cannot resist exploring to see what it is they need to blow up first. This leads to some truly inspired rubber monster special effects that are well worth seeing. 

The plot is straight-forward: John March is a private investigator in Providence who is approached by Claire Ward, the worried wife of Charles Dexter Ward, who has been acting very strange lately. He's holed up on the old family property with a strange Asian guy, doing something  that has her very worried. March takes the case, and proceeds to handle it in a remarkably staid and proper manner, with his allies doing research for him while he checks out what's going on. For much of the film this feels like a mellow police procedural, in which occasionally weird murders happen. When there are moments of weird gore its a reminder that there is, in fact, a horror story going on and not just a case of a strange husband shacking up with other strange men in a colonial house. 

March eventually deduces that Ward's got some serious problems, with a lot of corpse theft and possibly a connection to murders in the area that look like wild animal attacks but may, in fact, be cannibalism. As the story deepens, more of Ward's true story and his obsession with his ancestors and their alchemical desire for immortality are revealed, until it all culminates in an explosive finale that reminded me of half the Call of Cthulhu games I've participated in over the decades. 

The Resurrected was doomed not to compete with Stuart Gordon's films due to its almost painstaking effort to follow the pace of a slow, methodical investigative procedural, but when it does go off the rails it does so quite well. It really could have used a few more scenes early on that helped set the stage for the odd murders, for example, but I suppose there was only so much mileage to be had with the grotesque resurrected dead at the end, and introducing them earlier would have used up their impact too soon. 

Overall, for fans of Lovecraft's appearances on film, this is worth a watch. If you like supernatural horror procedurals, you will find something to like. The soundtrack to this movie is great, though typical of the nineties with its orchestration, and a general fan of horror will enjoy the events at the end of the movie for sure. I would rank this a deserving C+ and I look forward to forgetting I saw it all over again in a few years. 

The 24th Day of Horror: Alien from the Abyss (1989)

 

Alien From The Abyss (1989)

Easily set in the category of  "entertainingly bad" and also a movie from when I was still a teenager, I am simultaneously shocked I had never seen it before, and also not shocked at all because my love of really bad vintage films is a more recent thing for me; I generally didn't like wasting my time on garbage like this when I was in my late teens and twenties (ah, the irony). I mean....the first time I saw Tetsuo The Iron Man in my twenties on VHS I thought it was garbage; now I have that director's entire filmography on my shelf. The more things change.....!

Alien From The Abyss is another low budget "filmed somewhere in the Philippines where SAG-AFTRA can't find them" type of films, directed by Italian hack/auteur Antonio Margheriti (I mean that in the best possible way), Alien from the Abyss is a lovely case of how to make a big budget concept come to life on a shoestring budget, and it actually does an entertaining (if not good) job of it. The story revolves around a reporter and her cameraman, who sneak on to a remote island with an active volcano to find evidence of corporate malfeasance. Specifically, the corporation is disposing of nuclear and toxic waste by dumping it into a volcano. 

A tangent! The volcano is a lovely set piece. They have a miniature, filmed from one very specific angle, and any time they want to show the volcano they have someone pick up a pair of binoculars to look at it....always from that same angle, no matter where they are on the island. 

So our lead character and her cameraman quickly get into trouble as private goons try to catch them, and meanwhile we have a mad scientist and the corporate bad guy up to no good, then there's a secondary protagonist introduced in the form of a skeevy snake harvester on the island, and somewhere around the halfway point in the movie something happens, and the eponymous Alien from the Abyss awakens in a lake, melting and clawing everything in its path. We also have lots of miniature shots establishing various facilities to be destroyed later, in some glorious miniature set pieces that any fan of Godzilla movies will admire.

The creature is, for most of its run primarily just a long black claw that snakes around causing all sorts of problems. The mad scientist (hammed up by the actor, making for one of the more memorable characters in this movie) has a way of injuring it, but he's ultimately just a delivery mechanism for the protagonists to nab the weapon when he gets mildly bumped and dies. The last sequence in the film grants us full view of the immense alien, which stands twenty or so feet tall and is held up by a crane, a sort of floppy kaiju sized mannequin. Even despite this, the special effect is surprisingly good for the kind of movie this is; it's well worth a watch for this effect alone.

Alien from the Abyss is a bit of a mess, as most movies of this caliber are, but its got plenty of memorable moments and set pieces, and the actors really do give it their all. I watched the Severin Films UHD release of the restored version and have to say it was worth my time. As with all such films, it rests in the category of a solid B! If you are ranking it against actually good movies I'd probably call it a D+, though. But if you want to watch something you might have stumbled across on Saturday late night TV at midnight? B for sure.

The 23rd Day of Horror: Malignant (2021)

 

Malignant (2021)

Released in the general era of the Pandemic, Malignant is one of several films that got pushed out there either for a limited theatrical release or were moved to streaming, and like so many of those movies I don't think too many got widely circulated. Malignant in particular feels like an interesting throwback: it's an old school horror film in the sense that its a balls-to-the-wall 80's style supernatural slasher film that also manages to grab some of the modern horror film energy. I had read somewhere that the director James Wan really wanted to make a gonzo throwback horror film....and I have to say, he totally did it. 

Malignant opens up on a suitably spooky sanitarium somewhere on the pacific coast, one of those immense and impossibly malevolent looking facilities practically ready to fall into the ocean. Something bad is going on here, and a patient who appears to have bizarre supernatural powers is subdued, though we never get a good look at them. Cut to years later, and we meet Madison, a woman who lives in her own form of impossibly large house is having problems with her lousy boyfriend who injured her in a fight. Not long after, she begins to experience horrific visions in which she witnesses a killer's actions while finding herself paralyzed. She seeks answers, even as the real murders begin to pile up. Can she aid the police before the killer finds her?

I'll stop here. I loved this movie. It's another one of those guilty pleasure movies I mentioned. I think I'd rank it a solid B+ but deep down inside I think this one is so close to an A that I award the B only grudgingly. If you like gonzo throwback horror with weird supernatural twists, check it out!

Okay then....

SPOILER ALERT

Yeah so Madison is not seeing through the eyes of the killer. Well, not exactly. She IS the killer! Or more accurately, her insanely evil, suppressed vestigial twin which primarily exists as a secondary face that was hidden by very effective cosmetic surgery on the back of her head. Her twin is awakened after her head injury, snapped back into awareness, and it slowly begins to take possession of Madison, subsuming her control in the fugue states she experiences. Because the twin is on her "back" it moves backwards....I believe they got a noted contortionist to do a lot of these scenes, because they are quite wild. There's an entire sequence in the police precinct that is ridiculously over the top, and if you are prone to watching spoilerific content online you have probably seen clips of it. Believe me....just watch the whole film, it is 100% a complete psycho trip and I loved every minute of it. 

The 22nd Day of Horror: Little Nightmares Enhanced Edition (Switch 2)

 

Little Nightmares Enhanced Edition (Switch 2)

Besides finding suitably horror-themed games (and movies, and books, and graphic novels, etc.) to play for my 31 Day of Horror challenge, I've actually been trying to explore new types of games and themes to sort of branch out and find things I might find more interesting, or which are less demanding of my time, or --heck-- just more suited to my aging tastes and interests. Apparently one can play too many shooters, or too many third person games, such that the familiarity of those genres can become predictable and tedious (I'm looking at you, Atomfall!) but there are entire types of games I've avoided in the past, and one of those is the 2D style side scroller. These games come in a variety of flavors, but all have as a commonality a fixed perspective and a play pattern that has you moving, usually from left to right on the screen, experiencing something and maybe solving puzzles, surviving and unlocking story bits. Variants abound such as the roguelites (Dead Cells, Ultros) and the metroidvanias (Shadow Labyrinth, Metroid Dread) but the one subgenre of this style I have been enjoying the most is a style I am not sure has a proper name: games like Limbo, Inside and Little Nightmares all seem to fall into this special category of what I might imagine could be defined as "survival side scrollers."

Little Nightmares is in its third game and I decided now was the time to catch up on it. The Enhanced Complete Edition released on the Switch 2 at the same time as the third game, so I picked it up to start here. Interestingly they haven't released the enhanced edition of Little Nightmares II on Switch 2 yet, and the regular Switch edition looks very muddy and unpleasant on Switch 2 (it is not taking advantage of the souped up new hardware), so I am currently playing through that one on a Steam copy. But this review is about the first game.

Your character is apparently named 6 although I am not sure this information is communicated anywhere in the game that I found (I discovered my son has played all of these and is, similar to many other franchises out there I know nothing of, he by contrast is bursting with lore and esoteric details on these games). 6 appears to be a little girl in a raincoat, and the somewhat exaggerated graphical style of the game which is a 3D/2D (2.5D) format exudes a weird "hyper-real" feel to the environments and characters. They look cartoony and exaggerated (in a grotesque way) but the whole time I played it felt like I was just maneuvering my tiny person through endless dioramas of exquisite detail. It makes this game stand out amongst the rest, and I can see why a lot of people love this series as a result.

Anyway, 6 wakes up in the bowels of what you learn is a huge, monolithic and almost abyssal ocean liner. She seeks escape, but escape requires going through level upon level, looking for a way out while encountering the monstrous residents of the vessel. A custodian who seems to keep children in order to be slaughtered for food, who is blind but grasps with freakishly long arms and short legs. A pair of cooks who harvest food for the passengers, who you later meet and discover are all effectively grotesque ogres, gluttonous and mad creatures who will scramble to eat you if you are spotted. The final boss is possibly the one who runs it all, a vain woman dressed like a geisha who is the only thin creature on the ship but also possesses powers of shadow and a terrible hatred of her own image in mirrors. 

Amidst all this are other captured children, many beyond saving, and tiny mushroom-capped creatures called nomes who seem hesitant about you (though in a DLC playthrough of another child trapped on the ship they prove quite helpful and even friendly). 6 must make her way through each region of the ship, doing what she can, even as she finds she is gripped by her own intense hunger. Honestly, her debilitating periodic hunger attacks had me wondering if she was basically a child version of the ogres, eventually destined to transform into one of them....until I got to the story's end (which I won't spoil) and I was like....ah. Wow. Okay then.....

If you are wondering if this game is for you, I have the following observations on my playthrough of the main game and the expansion story (about a boy who tries to escape as well, via a different route): first and most important, I managed to get through the entire main campaign without consulting an FAQ or playthrough. I can't say the same for the expansion, which I think was targeting the more hardcore players, and an FAQ was helpful toward the end. Would I have figured out the rather myriad puzzles at the end on my own? Eventually I might have, but I'd probably have spent an extra hour puzzling it out and backtracking a lot....I did that even with the guide.

The second thing to know is that the 2.5D perspective means that unlike many other side-scrollers/metroidvanias this game lets you move around within each articulate and detailed area. You sometimes have to make jumps based on where you think you are going to land, only to discover you miscalculated, or the game's queues don't quite align with what you think is the correct trajectory. This doesn't pose a problem like 90% of the time, but that 10% can be frustrating. There's a sequence where 6 is being chased by a veritable wall of ogreish flesh and you escape with a daring leap over a chasm to a hook, and I think I had to try that one twenty times before I got it right. So...patience will be necessary in certain spots.

Luckily the game is built around a save point system that is well aware you are possibly at a rough spot, so it is generous in providing plenty of close proximity save locations, where 6 will reawaken as if from a bad dream. Usually if something got you the first time, you can (usually) navigate correctly around the problem on round two. Except, of course, for those handful of spots. You'll know 'em when you get to them.

All told, I really enjoyed my playthrough, and plowed through the DLC expansion immediately after. I also enjoyed the ending, it was not at all what I expected in either case. I then immediately jumped in to Little Nightmares II as a result. Definite A! The Switch 2 edition is a solid thumbs up, but I am sure the Steam version of the Enhanced Edition is also well worth it. 

The 21st Day of Horror: Spectregraph TPB

 

Spectregraph TPB (Mark Tynion IV and Christian Ward)

If you aren't into the graphic novel scene, or are mostly only familiar with it from the DC/Marvel side of the picture, you may not know just how many incredibly good graphic novels out there are in the horror genre (also, the crime genre). Image and Dark Horse are the largest non-big-two names most are familiar with, but other publishers exist and are knocking it out of the park. In this case, DSTLRY is releasing several remarkable graphic novels in a larger format, of which Spectregraph is my favorite so far.

The story focuses on an immense, mysterious mansion once the domain of a wealthy American industrialist named Ambrose. Ambrose was obsessed with the occult and belonged to a secret society of like-minded individuals, but in the sixties he grew disenchanted with the lack of evidence of supernatural phenomenon and ghosts in particular. He took a new approach: he wanted to find out how to make ghosts. The house became a lifelong project with his partner, a man who would outlive him. When Ambrose died, the house went for sale on the market. 

Enter Jamie, a harried mess of a woman who is stressed about losing her job as a real estate agent, and also so frazzled she leaves her infant son at home alone. Jamie rushes to meet with the mysterious party interested in viewing the house for possible sale, and meets Vesper, a morbid and depressed goth girl who represents the mysterious client. Together they enter the house for a tour of the mysterious Ambrose's decades-long project.

Vesper and Jamie arrive in the centerpiece of the eerie mansion eventually: a chamber which is code locked and key locked, and reveals an immense ocular object that renders them both unconscious, though not before Vesper reveals something stranger is going on by knocking out Jamie. When all is done, they find that the building is locked down, the key is missing, and horrific ghosts that appear to be disembodied masses of body parts roam the halls, full of harmful malice. The two are forced to work together to get to the heart of the mystery....a mystery in which Vesper reveals that the Spectegraph was supposed to kill her and turn her into a ghost, except it didn't work! 

I hesitate to write any more on Spectregraph as it is a worthy read and if you find the lead in above tantalizing, I suggest finding a copy and reading it, instead. Tynion has been pretty consistently knocking it out of the park with his horror trades (WorldTr33, Something is Killing the Children and The Nice House by the Lake are all outstanding works of his), and Christian Ward's art style works exceedingly well for Spectregraph's mashup of haunted puzzle mansion and disembodied floating gore bag ghosts.