MUSHROOM KINGDOM — Waluigi, noted foil of Mario and Luigi, has been arrested after being caught masturbating in public at Cheep Cheep Beach.
“I was doing my morning patrols at Cheep Cheep Beach as usual,” says Police Officer Toad, “when I heard this nasally ‘WAA’. It was disturbingly erotic. I went to investigate and that’s when I found Mr. Waluigi with his overalls off, in sexual congress with himself. He most likely chose that location and time of day, because Cheep Cheeps were extremely active, leaping out of the water and enticing people. That’s usually the reason we catch people here.”
After he called it in, Waluigi was detained by a Lakitu with a fishing pole. Many residents observed the lanky man in the air, waving his arms frantically and screaming “WAA!”
When later reached for comment, Waluigi was indignant.
“First of all, waa. Second, I’ve been under a lot of stress with an upcoming Mario Kart Tournament. It’s a new world with new stakes and… and I needed a release. Third, I don’t have a thing for Cheep Cheeps or their big, beautiful lips.” He then added a disheartened “waa.”
Wendy O. Koopa, Waluigi’s lawyer, is outraged at the MKPD for sex-shaming her client. She went on to suggest that her client’s public amorous display is a symptom of something deeper than just a go-kart race.
“I don’t think I’m talking out of school when I say that Mushroom Kingdom is one of the most sexually repressed nations ever. I mean, nobody fucks around here. And soon, all that sexual build-up has got to go somewhere and it poses a danger for people. Why do you think all those Bob-Ombs just randomly explode?”
A court hearing date has not been disclosed.
At press time, a Chain Chomp was apprehended after it was caught in the middle of choking itself with its own chain in an attempt to reach orgasm.
MONTREAL — Fans of the simulator genre have a new game to look forward to and it’s set to be the most realistic one yet. Game Dev Simulator is set to be the most true-to-life simulator game ever made as it consists solely of browsing Indeed.
“We wanted to give gamers the most accurate recreation possible of what it’s like to be a game developer,” said Lead Designer Travis Strickland moments before he was laid off. “We know that gamers are interested in the specifics of how the games they love are made and what it’s like to work in this industry. Using our collective decades of experience, we were able to really fine tune and perfect this simulator to offer an experience that’s as close to the real thing as possible. Players will be able to spend hours browsing Indeed, filling out applications and never hearing back.” Strickland was escorted out of the building by security before he could continue.
Strickland’s replacement Jason Page broke down what content players can expect from the game.
“Players will be able to enjoy two modes at launch. A campaign mode in which you go through your career as a game dev all the way up until the moment you burn out and take a data entry job instead. Once they’re done that they can enjoy our free play mode which will allow them to play for as long as they want. Simulating the game dev experience of endlessly scrolling Indeed for as long as they want. Post launch we plan to introduce a multiplayer mode where players compete to see who can be the first one to get a job offer. This will also introduce a battle pass with exciting rewards such as pre-written resumes and family members that can get you a nepo hire.” Page was promptly fired and escorted out of the building after he finished.
There has been some controversy over the game’s lack of what some consider the most important part of game development. Getting laid off.
“I’m not going to say it’s never going to happen but for now at least we really wanted to hone in on what the majority of game dev is.” Stated Page’s replacement, Luke O’Reilly. “The fact of the matter is that being laid off, while it is an integral part of game dev, it just doesn’t lend itself well to long term gameplay. Game dev is 90 percent Indeed searching and 10 percent getting laid off and we chose to focus on the 90 percent for this game. Maybe once we all get laid off, the next team can find a way to implement it.”
At press time, Game Dev Simulator has been canceled after the studio was acquired by Microsoft and promptly shut down.
For decades, we’ve seen countless video games objectify the female form with tacky, over-the-top jiggle physics on comically large breasts. Ever since the dawn of 3D graphics, titles like Soulcalibur, Dead or Alive, and Zenless Zone Zero have pandered to young male audiences with childish caricatures of what teenage boys find sexy.
The male-dominated realm of game development has long perpetuated these harmful, unrealistic beauty standards, but studio Hilltop Games has said enough is enough: in their upcoming title Killhammer 3, the breast physics were programmed by a woman.
This unprecedented move was described by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “a huge victory for feminism.”
We spoke with the visionary behind Killhammer 3’s breast physics: Diana Baker, who herself possesses only a modest bust size. “Yeah, no, I just love being assigned stupid crap like this,” said Baker in a deadpan monotone. “That’s absolutely why I got into game development, so I could help fifteen-year-olds—and grown men with the brains of fifteen-year-olds—jerk off to my work. After all, are you really even gaming if you’re not staring at tits the size of basketballs flop around like a pillowcase in a wind tunnel? I just love my job.”
“Whatever,” she concluded. “At least I’m not working at Blizzard.”
Baker’s male supervisor, Evan D’Andrea, had nothing but praise for his loyal underling.
“Diana’s great. She’s a real broodma—I mean, workhorse. I don’t have to micromanage her at all since she takes feedback really well. For the breast physics, I mostly just told her to crank it way the hell up. If a woman in the game so much as takes a single step, those puppies ought to be slapping the ceiling. Aw yeah, video games are awesome.” D’Andrea then took some time to show off the small figurine collection at his workstation, including characters such as pre-reboot Lara Croft and the Sorceress from Dragon’s Crown.
“Women’s rights are constantly under attack these days,” said Hilltop Games’ male CEO Nicholas Wagner. “That’s why we pay our female employees 90 cents for every dollar we pay a man, well above the national average of 83 cents. It’s also why we have the women at Hilltop tackle sensitive issues like this, so that we can use them as a shield in case of criticism.” Wagner went on to tout the success of throwing female employees under the bus, citing credulous gamers constantly on the search for a woman to blame for absolutely any perceived wrongdoing.
At press time, online right-wing activist Mark “Grummz” Kern posted on X that he was “conflicted” by this development.
SPRINGWOOD, Ohio — Attempted murderer Freddy Dunning-Kruger has overestimated his ability to adequately slay children while they sleep, sources on Elm Street report.
“I kill kids in their dreams. It’s kind of my thing,” Dunning-Kruger reported from the subconscious plane of a psychosexual nightmare. “I’m pretty good at it, too — top 25% of nighttime dream murderers, I’d say. You’d think that if you killed them in their sleep, they would die in real life. It barely works. Half the time they wake up in a puddle of bed piss and I have to kill them from scratch again! And don’t get me started on when they lure me back into reality and murder me instead. Murdering a murderer who you hate because he’s a murderer? It’s so hypocritical.”
Dunning-Kruger’s survivors have noted patterns of inefficiency and shoddy work in his murder plots, despite his high-level self-assessment.
“Freddy talked a lot without really doing anything,” Dunning-Kruger survivor Patricia Granger admitted, apparently confused by Dunning-Kruger’s lack of ability. “He wanted to torture me with my deepest fears. I’m really only scared of public speaking, though, so he just sat in the audience while I gave a PowerPoint about the history of Ohio. He wiggled his knife glove at me a little bit, but I don’t think he was even trying to scare me: he was trying to check his watch. By the time he got up to kill me, my alarm had gone off and I was safe.”
Investigators familiar with Dunning-Kruger’s crimes claim his incompetence is common for paranormal serial killers.
“Yeah, Freddy, I’ve heard of him. Trying to murder kids in their dreams. Real bad at it. Seen a few cases like it before,” recalled crime scene investigator Elijah Landsman as he smoked in an office he was no longer allowed to smoke in. “They set unrealistic expectations — high quarterly goals for their murder quotas. Always think they’re gonna kill a whole group of horny teenagers or some shit, but at least one gets away — usually a girl, usually white. They try to look all macho with a knife glove or a hockey mask, but the form breaks the function; they can’t see jack shit through those masks. Can’t say I’m surprised that this guy is failing. He needs to nail the basics before he can add the pizzazz.”
At press time, Dunning-Kruger was seen entering a nightmare about a forgotten final exam.
NEW YORK — Living rooms and family rooms across the country have been nearly destroyed by rambunctious tweens following the release of “A Minecraft Movie” on the HBO Max streaming service, concerned parents report.
“Dear God, we just bought that sofa,” said Amy Lark, 43. “Now it’s covered in Gogurt and Feastable crumbs. He didn’t even have any friends over! He just asked if he could use his screen time to watch a movie, and I had all the parental restrictions set up, so I thought it was fine. Since he was six, watching a movie alone has always meant 90 minutes of free time for me. And now there’s Cherry Freeze Prime on the ceiling. And don’t get me started on the carpet—he smashed all of our lamps onto it then dumped a bunch of houseplants on top of that. I’m trying to clean it up, but it’s all wet for some reason. Oh. Oh fuck. It’s piss. He pissed on the carpet.”
Lark’s son described the experience of watching the movie from the comfort of his own home.
“Hahaha, yeah, I fucking pissed when Steve said, ‘Chicken Jockey!’” said Ayden Lark, 13. “It fucking ruled. My boy Derrick did it after he saw about it on TikTok, and now all the boys are Pissin’ for Chicken. I can’t believe I can watch this movie every day now. I can even just watch the Chicken Jocky clip over and over! We don’t need to get our moms to drive us to the theater and then yell at the employees for getting mad at us anymore. This is, without a doubt, the best time to be alive.”
Movie theater employees expressed a reserved sympathy for the parents who were now forced to deal with this behavior.
“It’s horrific, and no one should have to go through it,” said Zach Beatty, 23, an AMC employee. “I remember what it was like here, but I can’t even imagine what it’s like at home. Sure, we had to deal with popcorn and soda, but now these monsters have access to Lunchly. You start throwing that stuff around a living room, it’s practically a biohazard. You’ll never get rid of the mold. On the other hand, if these people had spent literally any time actually parenting their kids, it’s reasonable to assume that none of us would have had to deal with any of this. It’s hard not to see it as a form of karma.”
At press time, reports of living room destruction had grown even more dire after a rumor spread that it was possible to construct an End portal out of drywall, cushion stuffing, and copper wire.
WASHINGTON — With the second coming of Death Stranding just days away, the world is bracing itself for the latest video game from Hideo Kojima.
“These Kojima predictions are real touch and go,” said Douglas Kirk, a spokesperson for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as he slipped on a hazmat suit and smashed his cellphone into pieces. “Whatever the lunatic predicts could come to fruition in days, weeks, maybe even years. We have to prepare for anything. Don’t get caught sleeping behind the wheel. Pack a bugout bag, but also barricade your doors. Horde everything. Trust no one.”
Now desperate, people around the country are pleading with Kojima to have a change of heart and cancel the upcoming sequel. #PleaseKojima has gone viral on Twitter.
“You don’t have to do this to us,” wrote @LaLeLuLiLoGamer, a regular Kojima reply guy on Twitter. “Could you just do a spinoff of Boktai instead?”
“On the beach? Oh great, now I can’t go to the beach for the next 20 years on the off chance this game predicts something terrible,” wrote @C0keNJackBeachBum.
“We’re still fighting off all the misinformation stuff from MGS2. Cool it Hideo,” wrote Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .
While Hideo Kojima just smirked at inquiring members of the press and said nothing as he left a showing of Elio, one Kojima Productions employee spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“Kojima-san is excited for you to play Death Stranding 2,” said the employee, who looked over their shoulder to make sure Kojima wasn’t looking before saying the next part. “You all need to run for your lives. The things he’s put in this game will unleash a darkness this world has never seen before. We of course all had our part in bringing his vision to life, BUT FOR GOD’S SAKE RUN YOU FOOLS. RUN AND HIDE.”
At press time a dark shadow loomed over the entire planet.
LOS ANGELES — In a surprise move, Warner Brothers Discovery has laid off everyone working on its upcoming unannounced video game adaptation. David Zaslav, WBD CEO and self-proclaimed media mogul, confirmed the layoffs during WBD’s latest earnings call, earlier this week.
“Layoffs are tough, I’ve been told,” Zaslav said in a Zoom video from the comfort of his super yacht, anchored somewhere off the coast of an island poors are not allowed to know about. “Yet, this round of layoffs adds a bit of authenticity to our upcoming video game adaptation. The studio who made the game was recently hit with layoffs, and now we are looking at a similar situation as we work to bring the game to the big screen. I hope fans see how dedicated we are to honoring the source material.”
After forcing two yacht crew members to fight to the death for the entertainment of the shareholders, Zaslav went on to share some additional details about the upcoming adaptation.
“I want you all to know, we are cutting corners wherever we can,” Zaslav said before pointing out a portrait of Jack Welch behind him and reminding everyone that they used to be “Jackin’ Buddies”. “We are leveraging AI to rewrite scenes on the fly, polish all CGI, and to take scoldings from executives who have no idea how to create anything but sadness.”
The video game adaptation, which has been in development for ten years, has reportedly cost the studio over $120 million. WBD CFO, Gunnar Wiedenfels, shared some of his concerns about the ballooning budget of the adaptation.
“I think I speak for everyone on the board when I say I am worried about where we are spending the company’s money,” Gunnar said, before reminding everyone of his genius rebranding of Max to HBO Max. “Why are we spending $100 million on a movie none of us care about? Let’s take a cue from our brothers and sisters at Microsoft. Let’s cut our losses and cut some fat bonus checks, you boners.”
At press time Zaslav bought another yacht from the deck of his old yacht.
CELADON UNIVERSITY — A determined Golbat earned her Ph.D in Child Psychology after overcoming the tragic adversity of being abandoned by her trainer at a Day-Care nearly twenty-six years ago.
“I’ve come a long way since Route Five,” she screeched in her address to her graduating class, lowering the defense stat of everyone in attendance. “At first I didn’t want to believe it. We were going to take down the Elite Four together, I told myself. I watched for days as my trainer rode their bicycled back and forth just outside the window, but never returned for me. I just kept leveling until they were gone forever. Well, today, we’ve all leveled, and we did it for ourselves!”
Golbat made a positive impression on her peers, but even more so on her instructors.
“Golbat’s story really struck a chord with me,” said Professor Yellowwood. “It’s one thing to leave your Pokémon in Day-Care with other members of its egg group so you can farm shinies in a nonstop orgy of unspeakable depravity, but to just leave your Pokémon there for so many years? How Golbat came to be the dignified and empathetic child psychologist is nothing short of a miracle.”
Golbat noted that she uses her trauma as a tool for empathy rather than an obstacle.
“When I aged out of the Day-Care and was forced to live in Rock Tunnel for shelter, I said to myself, ‘I will never let another soul feel this alone ever,’” said Golbat. “That’s been the driving force behind my doctoral thesis: Left Behind, the Impact of Day-Care Neglect on Effort Value Training. It’s already set to change the way Pokémon trainers think about using Day-Care facilities.”
At presstime, Golbat has graduated Summa Cum Laude and is looking at a promising career as a barista at Starbucks.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Maurice Johnson, 42, the newly appointed stepfather of a blended family in Arkansas, is enthusiastic about what he sees as a long-term role in the remake of the family structure. However, his stepchildren believe Johnson’s “remake” resembles more of a “remaster.”
“At first, we were excited about Maurice and his vision to bring this family into the current decade. But pretty soon we realized that what Maurice promised was really just a saturated version of what we already had. And I promise you, that wasn’t a good thing at all,” said Harry, 10, the youngest member of the family. “He didn’t actually change any of the clunky mechanics we grew up with under our previous dad. Maurice just sits on the couch all day, drinking beer and watching World War II documentaries. All that big talk about ‘the greatest family you’ve ever seen’ unfortunately didn’t hold up. Just as I suspected.”
Beth Johnson, a 40-year-old lawyer from Little Rock and Maurice’s new spouse, is equally bewildered.
“This is a nightmare. None of this is what Maurice promised four years ago,” she said. “I had high hopes that this relationship would be different this time around. All those lies about how this was going to be the best version ever, with countless enhancements to our broken family dynamics—I mean, how hard is it to fix Friday nights together? An ape could do it. Whatever. I’m downloading Tinder tonight.”
Maurice stated that he was confident that his contributions to the family were, in his words, “historical in some retrospect.”
“There is nothing better than watching D-Day re-enactments seven days in a row while drinking cold beer. I want to teach this family something and that’s loyalty and brotherhood. Those guys fought for the free world, and that is exactly what this family is going to do. At least I am. Did you know Hitler was a vegetarian? Neither did I,” Maurice declared, pausing to raise the volume on the television.
At press time, Maurice insisted that his stepchildren sign up for youth soccer, despite it being an entirely different multiplayer mode than they had played previously.
When I was a kid, I had a few computer games that I’d found incomplete at garage sales. Some of them were impossible to understand without their manual, if they worked at all, but I’d still fire them up occasionally just to see what I could accomplish.
Repose is one of a handful of games I’ve played recently that reminds me of that experience, as it’s both literally and figuratively about fumbling around in the dark.
Like Dragon Ruins, Repose plays out as if it were an attempt to boil a first-person dungeon crawler down to a single core element. In DR, that element was the experience grind; in Repose, it’s finding your way through a maze of twisty rooms, all alike. It’s a simple formula that’s primarily built around trial and error, and carried by its style and visual design.
At the start of the game, you’re a new employee for a nameless company, who’s come aboard to replace someone named Aaron who abruptly disappeared. Your job is to explore the lower levels of the company’s facility and retrieve any oxygen tanks you can find.
Those tanks are exclusively found on the skeletal corpses of men in astronaut suits, which is the first warning sign. The second is that the facility is patrolled by increasingly bizarre, hostile mutants; the third is that Aaron periodically approaches you in your dreams to warn you about what’s to come; the fourth is that the facility changes dramatically with each new level, from an isolated basement to an abandoned city to what might be post-apocalyptic cyberspace. It’s possible that this is a bad gig.
In each level of Repose, you start at a bed with a fixed amount of energy, which depletes by 1 every time you take a step. Your goal is to use that finite number of available actions to explore the maze until you find something that will let you progress, such as a door switch, a keycard, or someone who knows more than you do.
The first hurdle you have to get over with Repose is that it’s self-consciously designed like a PC game from the ‘80s. It looks like it was built to run on a VAX terminal, although the animation’s too fluid for that; it has no mouse controls at all; the save system uses 8-digit passwords; and melee combat requires you to walk into enemies while holding down the Enter key. It’s a lot to get used to unless you just came out of a 45-year coma.
Past that, it’s a game about pushing yourself to go a little bit further after each consecutive, guaranteed failure. You get access to an in-game map throughout much of the facility, but it’s deliberately not as helpful as it could be. Once you have your bearings in any given level, it’s a question of exploring as far as you can before your energy runs out or something with a TV instead of a face turns you inside out. When you die, you’re immediately sent back to the closest bed to try again, while all enemies immediately respawn.
There are a few more quirks to it than that, but Repose is almost as simple as it initially appears to be. The finite pool of energy is both the only real source of tension in Repose and the most obnoxious thing about it. If you removed the energy limit, Repose would lose virtually all of its challenge, but with it, much ofthe game is about failing upwards.
As a result, Repose ends up feeling more like a strange platformer than anything else. Once you’ve figured out where you need to go, each stretch of the maze narrows to the successful execution of a sequence of timed inputs: forward, forward, forward, ready axe, kill monster before it shoots you, forward, left, forward, etc.
It’s an odd overall experience. If Repose wasn’t also a surreal horror story, I might not have stuck with it for as long as I did. It’s got some great visuals and interesting twists scattered across its short run time, along with a creepy lo-fi soundtrack.
The dystopian edge of the gig economy has given rise to a slow-building sub-genre in horror, with games like this and Threshold at the forefront. Repose is like “The Prisoner” for wage slaves, and even after I’d lost some patience with its gameplay, I kept going to see what would happen next.
This is absolutely one of those games that remind me why I don’t use a scoring system. Repose’s actual mechanics are simple and guaranteed to frustrate you, but its visual design and overall vibes might make it worth the trip for die-hard horror nerds. It’s in what I think of as the Velvet Underground tier of media; not everyone will enjoy Repose, but anyone who does will go on to make art that’s a lot like it.
[Repose, developed by Attila Bertold Bozó and published by Akupara Games, is now available for PC via Steam for $7.99. This column was written using a Steam code purchased by Hard Drive.]
