Discord used to be a tool that I used to communicate with friends, and over the years it's increasingly become something like a car up on blocks in my front yard - something to tinker with, absent any prospect or expectation of continuous functionality. I have to constantly remind it that I don't want to use the speaker in my monitor. And mics? "Forget about it." I would say that this is an unforgivable sin but I know at least one other person who might actually prefer this state of affairs. Also, this really happened. So.
The Killing Stone was originally supposed to be out out by now, I believe. I don't mean that The Killing Stone is canonically Gay, but obviously if the game were gay - if such a thing were possible - it would retain my utmost respect.
What I mean is that it came out in Early Access for a couple reasons they establish in the little hostage letter they make you write when you release things in this way. In one of the early news updates on Steam, there is a line that just delights me.
"The feedback we've gotten from our playtesters suggests that players are especially invested in this narrative layer."
I was like, yes?! I am?! Can you see me right now? Must I refresh the seals?
The game is brilliant. Yeah, it has cards. Instead of a deck being made of individual cards, it's made of little three or four cards packs which they call Pacts. I genuinely think they are making a pun. But it's similar to the deckbuilding in the venerable Card Hunter, where you put equipment on a Diablo style dolly and each piece of equipment means a specific number and type of cards. Each of these decks represents a character in the game, and some of the pacts within it have Bad Cards like you would see in other games of this type - curses, whatever that game calls them. Aside from kicking the shit out of demons and so forth, removing that hellish Inheritance is sort of the point over several rounds of play. Thinning the deck, as a story conceit. The heart swells.
But beyond that, yes! Everything in the game rows in the same direction - it works precisely because of the twisted game, the scary atmosphere bumping it, and the Baroque language spiking it directly into your forehead. I think this is a work of genius, to me it's just evident, but I love that they're like, "oh, some peeple like word?!" Like many forms of media, the work exists in the space between the participants. Until someone plays the thing it's not done, and in some ways doesn't exist.
(CW)TB out.
