Never in my life have I felt so used by a game. Feels dirty. The video game equivalent of emotional abuse.
5 stars, would recommend.
Never in my life have I felt so used by a game. Feels dirty. The video game equivalent of emotional abuse.
5 stars, would recommend.
If you want more psychological horror emotional abuse, try Echo, which gets frequently compared to DDLC. It’s set up like a gay furry visual novel to start with, but it’s more like Night in the Woods where the paths are who you hang out with instead of who you explicitly want to “date”. As the story progresses it gets extremely dark. I could only do one of the paths before I had to look up the others because I’m too much of a chicken.
Fair warning that it’s a slow burn to get to the rough stuff, but the story is solid and it’s humorous on the way so it’s not boring.
Edit: I hadn’t played Echo in a few years so I went to the wiki to refresh myself on the story and it is a lot more tightly-written and lore-heavy than I realized. Each “path” has a different story with a subset of the lore, so you need to play all of them to begin to understand the full picture. There’s also a sequel, a prequel, and a prequel-prequel(?), which all presumably contribute to the lore. I see there’s a giant Let’s Play of most of it, which I think I now feel compelled to watch at some point. It would probably be less spooky to experience it with other people in control.
Edit 2: I strongly recommend you don’t play Carl’s first, solely on the basis of it not being a strong introduction to the game. Carl’s route takes a long time to get into the swing of things, and the story payoff doesn’t entirely make up for it (though I still really loved this path by the end). This was apparently the first path they wrote, and cynically I think that shows a bit. Leo’s path was much more of a page-turner for me throughout and I think it gives a much stronger sample of the unique Echo flavor. Leo’s is the one I played years ago and there’s maybe a dozen moments from this path which will never leave my brain.
I’ve seen people online say to do
Carl->Leo->TJ->Jenna->Flynn, and with regards to Carl and Leo I’d say objectively that’s probably the correct order in terms of lore unfolding, but there’s only a couple of small references from Carl’s route that you can notice in Leo’s route, so if you’re on the fence about whether you’re even interested in the game at all I’d do Leo’s first so you can get a proper introduction to the game’s themes.Oh shoot my partner and I started that and got a good way through and completely forgot about it! The writing is very good. I’ll re-ass that to my list!
Auto-correct or Freudian slip?
Either way, I’ve assed “re-ass” to my vocabulary list.
Oop, autocorrect! Hahaha
I just finished Echo and Arches last night and holy shit.
Echo is a bit odd with the pacing, the choices and a general vibe of “this was made up as they wrote it.” It wasn’t particularly scary, either. Meanwhile, Arches, knocks it out of the park. The main story is pretty scary, and then the “alternate reality” part makes for a good buddy cop type show premise with a horror twist to it; I wonder if the author plans to do more with that whole thing. I saw them post about how they really like writing Devon and Cameron, so I hope to see more of them in the future.
Now I’m about to start up The Smoke Room. Echo Project is awesome. Might as well also check out Adastra while mentioning them. Not horror, but emotionally harmful still. Lol
Ugh, I feel like there’s no way I could do Arches if it’s way scarier than Echo. Maybe if I only do it during the day. I’m fairly sure when I did Echo I played it into the night and regretted that. I do feel like dipping back into it all for the story though. I think I’ll try the let’s play series at some point to start with.
Well… Did you think the monsters were scary or Brian and Duke? Because Arches has less supernatural horror and more of the realistic kind, and with the whole romance between the main characters along with the themes of PTSD and trauma, the action sequences are so much more visceral and realistic.
Moreso the supernatural stuff for me. The other stuff was dark but I wasn’t checking for Brian under my bed.
spoiler
Although after reading some of the wiki today I’m a bit more reassured that a lot of the supernatural stuff in Echo seems to be neutral/benevolent, or at least misunderstood.