I started playing Spelunky
– the ‘enhanced edition’, not the lo-fi original – in March 2014, during
the last Oxford vacation I ever spent at my childhood home in Birmingham. I
don’t know why I bought it. It was cheap in a sale on GOG, but even so, it’s a
famously hard platformer and I am famously bad at platformers. I never honed
those nerves and thews on Mario. I miss jumps; I get stressed. I think I lasted
half a level in Meat Boy. I ought to
have bounced off Spelunky after my
first handful of deaths.
Instead, I got hooked. I’d play it a few times (which
doesn’t take very long; early in one’s Spelunky
career surviving for five minutes is a significant achievement) and then
decide it was too hard and not for me. The next day I’d fire it up again,
wondering if I’d somehow magically got better at it overnight. This lasted for
the rest of the vacation, until I went back to work and lost all my free time
again.
The platformer where I threw all our bombs to get out of all our problems and pT used all our ropes to get us out of poverty, culminating, every time, in a dead gold god squashing us to death
Here I am again, interminably blogging about the intersection between horror, games and narrative! In my defense, there’s fewer people who speak more eloquently about this stuff than prunescholar, and because the ability of a game to provide horror with static art that changes very, very slowly or suddenly – well, that slipstream point of something being off is, in my mind, the heart of all horror. I do think that this underpins the scariest part of Stephen King’s novella The Langoliers, in which I argue that the scariest stuff is in the first ten pages and I am 100% right. Do give this a read.
Hey! This is the first continuation of my series on micro-narrative in otome games. I’ll be tagging all the entries under the acronym for “Wizardess Heart universal narrative key” so that they’re easy to find. This post gets more into set-ups and typical tropes/character development that goes into otome, and also with the interesting abbreviation of worldbuilding that characterises the mobile branch of these games. It would be useful to read my introduction first, if you haven’t done so already.
For those of you who have known me for a while, you may know that I’m really interested in game narrative, micro-narrative and industries created on shilling these things to the public. I like short fiction magazines; I like interactive fiction and narrative games; I like ARGs and Echo Bazaar, which don’t seem at first blush like bedfellows but are, I do think, part of a similar umbrella enough to be grouped together. I’m going to be doing a multiple-part series highlighting a game made for the market of the Teenage Girl – a market I am passionately interested in on heaps of levels – casually exploring otome, the common narratives of otome games, story incentivizations and the pay-for-chapter model.
