MILWAUKEE, Wis. — A millennial fan of the hit RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is eagerly anticipating the upcoming date when she will dissolve into ash and rose petals and utterly cease to exist, sources confirm.
“It’s only a few more months, now,” said Danielle Preston, 32, as she smiled at her calendar. “All these years of toil and strain will burn away and be forgotten. I’m exhausted from seeing things how they are, rather than how I want them to be. I know where my life is going. There’s no secret, happy ending to unlock. It’s all so bleak. If there’s an afterlife, then I’ll see everyone after death. But honestly, I hope there’s not. I’d probably just annoy everybody.”
Preston’s mother, Sandra, said she was concerned by her daughter’s new obsession, but not surprised.
“She’s always been like this,” said the elder Preston as she flipped through a photo album. “When she was very young, she was sure the Power Rangers were going to ask her to join them. Then she spent her adolescence waiting on her letter from Hogwarts. I try not to think about the years she was certain that a vampire and werewolf were going to fight for her affection, but at least that was still on the optimistic side. I can’t imagine why she’s so eager to die, now.”
Aiden Renaud, an expert on the media that millennials have consumed throughout their lives, said that Preston’s experience is shockingly common.
“This is a generation that cannot separate itself from its favorite fiction,” said Renaud, who said the FunkoPop figures adorning his office were purely for research purposes. “They believe they are Jedi. They think Professor Oak is going to give them a Pokemon. They swear that Steven Universe is their friend. Combine that with the dearth of economic opportunity this generation is facing, and it’s no surprise that a property like Clair Obscur would create a pseudo-death cult. In fact, I’d say it was an inevitability.”
At press time, Preston was spending what she believed were her final days on earth collecting rare swimwear.
HYRULE — King Daphnes Nohansen Hyrule categorically denied that the government is in possession of a list of clients for notorious human trafficker, Tingle, source confirm.
“What’s going on with my ‘Ritos,’ and, in some cases, ‘Gorons?’” said King Daphnes in a message posted to the Pirates Charm network. “The files you’re asking for never existed! It’s just another Vaati-created hoax like Ganongate and climate change. If you’re so curious about Tingle, maybe you should ask about the Hero of Time, who paid A LOT of Rupees for maps when he was in Termina, which is a TOTAL CRIME!”
One of Tingle’s alleged victims spoke out against the king’s statement.
“I personally witnessed King Daphnes working alongside Tingle to extend his terrible, terrible operation,” said the individual, who requested he only be identified as David. “I was recruited by Ankle and forced to work against my will on Tingle Island for years. I saw everything. They didn’t care, because they didn’t think of me as someone who could possibly hurt them, but I saw them all: Tingle. Daphnes. The Rito Chieftain. Oh, yeah, he might be the biggest liar of them all. I don’t care if he’s half bird; he can definitely sweat.”
Retired Royal Secret Service Officer Impa said the official story didn’t make sense to her.
“We already know that King Daphnes is tied to Tingle,” said Impa. “His name appears several times in Tingle’s flight logs. You see, Tingle allowed many powerful individuals to travel using his private balloon, which was nicknamed ‘The Kokiri Express.’ Sometimes it was just for innocuous travel between Outset and Windfall, but other times it would stop at Tingle Island for days—or even weeks. There’s no public record of what happened there, but I know for a fact that the royal family was in possession of classified material related to the case. For King Daphnes to claim that no further records exist is a demonstrable lie. I wish we could ask Tingle for his side of the story directly, but he was found dead inside his cell in the Forbidden Fortress under mysterious circumstances. Supposedly, the guard who was responsible for shining a spotlight on his cell had been temporarily distracted by a walking barrel.”
At press time, King Daphnes had offered Tingle’s brother and collaborator Ankle immunity in exchange for favorable testimony.
Mike Klubnika’s s.p.l.i.t. starts with a content warning about self-harm and suicide. After playing through it, that content warning should be in a larger text in brighter colors.
You might remember Mike Klubnika’s name from last year, when he scored a viral hit with Buckshot Roulette, which was a sort of black comedy about shotgun gambling. By comparison, s.p.l.i.t. is a short, inexpensive narrative-driven horror/adventure game built around old-school hacking. It’s a memorable, potentially upsetting experience.
You’re a hacker named Axel who’s seated in front of your computer, speaking with two allies via a text-based chat app. One of them has just arranged for a “field kit” to be delivered to you, and under protest, you’ve agreed to crack it. Everything else about the game – its setting, the year in which it takes place, what’s at stake, what the titular acronym stands for – unfolds over the course of the next 90 minutes.
Most of s.p.l.i.t. is played via Axel’s monitor. Your computers are all running on plain text, on a system that isn’t quite MS-DOS. The challenge is to hunt for passwords, edit configuration files, and sort through directories from the command line, with an occasional speed-typing challenge to represent Axel’s reactions under pressure. There are no mouse controls at all. It’d be pleasantly nostalgic for an earlier era of computing, if the rest of the game wasn’t about slowly intensifying paranoia.
The first hurdle to s.p.l.i.t. is wrapping your head around the computer’s OS, which made me feel slightly foolish for the first 15 minutes. I was supposed to be some sort of underground hacker, or so I thought, but I was using the “help” command the way telegrams use “STOP.” I eventually had to keep handwritten notes to encompass both the commands I needed and the passwords I was searching for.
The second hurdle might be that s.p.l.i.t. never slows down to explain itself. All the details of its short story are delivered in passing, from incidental details in files and conversations between people who already know the stakes. You’re coming in for the last chapter in a long story arc.
It was over almost before I knew it. s.p.l.i.t.’s endings sneak up on you, which is also when it rolls up its sleeves and earns that content warning. It’s not a particularly gory game, but without spoilers, you don’t want to fire this up if you’re already in a bad mental place. The ending is a lot.
s.p.l.i.t.’s last 5 minutes send it off on a bleak note. Other horror games tend to have some built-in breaks in the tension, but the only option you get with s.p.l.i.t. is your ability to turn it off. It reminds me of similarly relentless movies like When Evil Lurks or Martyrs, and if that’s your preferred style or horror, s.p.l.i.t. is a must-see.
It’s probably about as long as it should be, but I did end up with more questions than answers by the end. I also could’ve handled seeing more of its hacking-based investigation puzzles, as by the time I figured out how to navigate Axel’s OS, the game was almost over.
I won’t forget s.p.l.i.t. any time soon, but it doesn’t feel wholly complete. It’s built like a late chapter in a larger story, as if you’d started a trilogy with the last entry in it, and I wouldn’t mind seeing the rest at some point. Taken on its own merits, I’d need to know more about someone before I recommended this to them, but anyone who’s in the mood for some unflinching horror might want to check s.p.l.i.t. out. It’s 60 to 80 minutes of simulated ‘80s hacking that builds up to a truly vicious finale.
[s.p.l.i.t., developed and published by Mike Klubnika, is now available for PC (Windows/Linux) via Steam for $2.99. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive via a PR representative for Klubnika.]
HOLLYWOOD — Marvel fans are up in arms after learning the baby between Mr. Fantastic and The Invisible Woman was conceived via intercourse, an act that was strictly forbidden in the MCU up until now, our sources confirm.
“I don’t know what that sick freak Kevin Feige is up to,” says one Marvel fan after watching the most recent MCU film TheFantastic Four: First Steps. “But the idea of two physically fit and attractive actors having sexual relations as characters from my beloved comic books is vile and wrong.”
Without spoiling the MCU’s most recent entry, the public relations team for the film has been hard at work doing damage control across social media.
“The MCU Multiverse is vast and expansive,” said head of Marvel PR Janice Copper to an angry mob outside of the company’s Burbank location. “FF:FS takes place in a universe where sex isn’t just a normal occurrence, but the ideal way to reproduce, something Earth 616 is not accustomed to.”
This mass hysteria has even made its way to the lead actors of the film, who were bombarded with questions this past weekend at the premiere’s red carpet event.
“Aren’t these the same fans who wanted Ant-Man to go up Thanos’ butt?” said Pedro Pascal to a reporter for IGN. “Marvel fans need to expand their horizons and watch more sexual cinema. Something like Y tu mamá también might scar them for life, maybe start with When Harry Met Sally.”
Even Kevin Feige himself has had to face the criticism and defend the creative choices of his writers.
“It was a decision that we grappled with for weeks. If a baby is in the picture, sex is implied, and that’s a big Marvel no no,” he said during a roundtable last week promoting the film. “The only other time we implied sex is when Deadpool gets pegged, and everyone seemed to love that! But this? Not so much.”
At press time, MCU fans have forgotten whatever they were mad about after seeing Silver Surfer and having a whole new thing to bitch about.
Professional wrestler and famed storyteller Hulk Hogan passed away today at 71, finally losing a lifelong battle with the truth.
Hogan was infamous for his colorful and often impossible storytelling. Throughout his legendary wrestling career, he claimed responsibility for inventing leg drops, the color yellow, and the United States of America, for which he was awarded the Snopes Lie-time Achievement Award. Hogan also once stated he was the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s Hamlet, despite being born centuries after its first production; this was never disproven, primarily because no one bothered checking.
During his later years, Hogan’s tales became even more eccentric. In one widely circulated story, he declared himself the inventor of pizza, a statement met with polite silence from the entire nation of Italy. He also insisted that he body-slammed Andre the Giant with such force that the shockwave ended the Cold War.
In recent years, Hogan claimed to have declined an offer to become Trump’s Secretary of Defense because it interfered with his beer promotional schedule, although he confidently asserted that had a “foolproof plan” to single-handedly end the Russian-Ukrainian war. Earlier this year, Hogan insisted he was James Gunn’s first choice to star in “Superman”, but graciously allowed David Corenswet to take the role.
Among Hogan’s harshest critics was outspoken wrestling historian Jim Cornette, who said upon hearing the news,
“I’d say rest in peace, but he’d probably tell everyone he invented resting, peace, and funerals. Hell, he’d probably claim he booked his own afterlife to go over God in a two-out-of-three falls match.”
Hogan’s survivors include numerous celebrities he frequently identified as close personal friends, all of whom politely declined to comment, presumably because they had never actually met him.
Instead of a traditional funeral, sources say Hogan had plans for a farewell pay-per-view titled “Heavenmania: The Final Brother,” complete with pyrotechnics, a fog machine, and an open challenge to the concept of mortality itself. Tickets are not on sale, but Hogan insisted it would be “the most watched event in celestial history, brother.”
Superman is coming off another big weekend at the box office. James Gunn’s DC revival is making waves this summer, especially with audience members returning to capture every little detail on display in the epic superhero movie. One detail that audiences are still scratching their head over is what the ‘S’ on Superman’s chest stands for. The film doesn’t outright say, but we did some digging to try and find the answer.
Upon seeing the movie again, my early analysis brought me to the conclusion that the S stands for ‘Sex Machine’. It make’s sense if you think about it. His parents sent him from Krypton to have sex with a bunch of Earth women. It’s just a shame that Clark didn’t land in a house that contained a copy of Neil Strauss’ The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. He would for sure have a brood of Kryptonian hybrids in no time, but no he instead landed in the sexless home of Jonathan and Martha Kent and developed feelings.
Back to the drawing board for my third watch I noticed that Superman was saving every one. I dug through all the S words I knew. Save? No. Squirrel? No. Sissy…yes, that must be it, I thought at the moment. The S stands for ‘Sissy’. Who actually believes that they can save everyone? And why are you so nice to everyone? You are Superman. You can freeze everyone to death by blowing on them. You can melt through our skulls with your laser beams. Stop being so damn nice, you sissy. I was sure I had finally found what the S stood for, then Superman threw Ultraman into a dark abyss and it was back to the drawing board.
Does it stand for ‘Supergirl’? That’d be some smart early marketing for the next movie. Oh wait, that’s right, she’s in this.
What about ‘soft-reboot’? No. That’s just dumb.
My multiple Superman viewings and my deep dive into a dictionary left me broke and no closer to finding out what the S stood for. Gunn was also being annoyingly tightlipped about the symbol. I was stumped. I’ve turned out articles like this for every superhero movie since the original X-men run. I pulled easter egg after easter egg and milked theme after theme from these movies, for the sake of SEO, yet here I am, all bent out of shape about what this S stands for. I am no man of steel. Wait. Steel. Man of Steel. Oh my god.
Gunn, you magnificent genius. The S on Superman’s chest stands for ‘Snyder’, as in Zack Snyder. This is amazing. How could I have not seen this before. Gunn was paying his respect to those who came before him. If not for Snyder providing the blueprint with his heroic run of Superman movies, we may never have seen James Gunn work his magic in the DCEU. Thank you Mr. Gunn for respecting the history and thank you Mr. Snyder for making all this possible.
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Controversy erupted in the Souls community this week after longtime FromSoft gamer Andy O’Reilly was caught on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert playing Sekiro on his Steam Deck with cheat mods.
“This is a betrayal of the highest order,” wrote frequent forum contributor Marcus Strong. “Andy was a stalwart of this community. Not only was he always responding to others requests for help with sage advice like ‘git good’ and ‘skill issue’, but he was also one of our fiercest gatekeepers. No scrub could get past him. Any newcomer who even thought about easing into this genre with assists and accessibility settings were quickly swatted away by Andy. He cheated not just the game, but himself.”
The viral moment saw O’Reilly quickly duck out of view when he realized the camera was on leading Coldplay frontman Chris Martin to quip “he’s either using cheat mods, or he’s very shy”. It wasn’t long before the FromSoft community online figured out O’Reilly’s identity.
“As FromSoft die-hards we spend half our time online harassing people who don’t play the way we deem acceptable so it wasn’t hard to figure out that it was Andy,” wrote r/Soulsborne mod Ronald Cole. “Once we knew it was him we made sure to just pile on the harassment. He’s become a meme in the community but he deserves it. I mean he brought it upon himself, what kind of idiot cheats in such a public place? If you’re gonna cheat at a Souls game you gotta do it in secret, not at a Coldplay concert.”
The incident has become such a hot topic within the Souls community that even popular content creators like “Maidenless” Mike Schwartz have weighed in.
“Look, it’s not our business. What other players do in their private lives is between them and God but cheaters deserve to be outed and humiliated. There is no greater kind of scum than a cheater. It goes against everything these games and this community stands for. If the thought of cheating even pops into your mind the only right thing to do is be honest with yourself and just go play something else. This is a FromSoft game so it needs to be given respect, it’s not some easily disposable commodity like a woman.”
At press time, O’Reilly has tendered his resignation from the Souls community and stated his intentions to become a League of Legends gamer in hopes of joining a more accepting community.
LOS ANGELES — Self-proclaimed Snyder superfan Jason Morris has taken matters into his own hands to #RestoreTheSnyderverse and is holding James Gunn at knifepoint on a Hollywood street, LAPD sources confirm.
“Zack Snyder is a visionary filmmaker and he has legions of fans that demand for his full vision of a DC cinematic universe to come into fruition,” said Morris. “Warner Brothers sabotaged the box office because they wanted to Marvelize the universe with this stupid James Gunn Superman reboot. I am here to rectify this betrayal and ask James politely to give Henry Cavill the role of Superman back and to finish what Zack started. Here’s how we can still restore the Snyderverse: we put more pressure on the jugular.”
James Gunn said that he believes that some superhero superfans are being a little unreasonable.
“Zack and I are friends,” said Gunn, blood dripping down from the knife being pressed into his neck. “He did a good job bringing his vision to the screen. He has moved on, though, and it’s my job to help lay the groundwork and shepherd in a new universe with a lot of talented creative voices that I hope people will love. For the love of god officer, please take the shot. He’s going to kill me.”
Zack Snyder admires the passion of his fans but thinks people are taking it a little too far.
“Hostage situation? Sounds pretty badass!” said Snyder. “James is my friend and I hope that he lives long enough to keep making his movies. I’m excited to check them out. James promised me he would watch my Rebel Moon movies when he had some time. I don’t think violence is the answer, unless it involves Superman or Batman committing acts of mass violence on-screen. I don’t condone my fans taking extremist action. They should keep that energy just on social media.”
At press time, Snyder fans were quick to remind anyone who would listen that Man of Steel made more domestically than Gunn’s Superman if you adjust for inflation and that if we besmirch the Snyderverse that they know where we live.
WASHINGTON — Following a rigorous and exhaustive inquest, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has officially concluded that there is no war in Ba Sing Se, officials at the FBI confirmed Thursday.
“As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has conducted an exhaustive review of investigative holdings related to the alleged war in the four nations,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “It was a long and arduous process, but we are very thankful to have had the cooperation of a local intelligence agency known as the Dai Li. After reviewing all of the facts and evidence available to us at this time, we are happy to report that the truth has been uncovered and there is, in fact, no war in Ba Sing Se.”
Earth Nation citizens, however, were quick to share their doubts regarding the FBI’s official verdict. We spoke with Kenji, a local zookeeper and activist in Ba Sing Se.
“Personally, I don’t buy any of it,” said Kenji, 51. “The FBI really expects us to believe that this hundred-year war just doesn’t exist? After everything we’ve seen and heard? There are Earth Kingdom citizens currently in prison for crimes they committed in relation to the ongoing war. How can they justify keeping these people locked up if the–”
Unfortunately, Kenji was unable to finish his statement, as he abruptly remembered he was late to an appointment in Lake Laogai, out in the country.
Earth King Kuei was eager to speak with Hard Drive to publicly thank the FBI for their thorough work, and to address the citizens of the Earth Kingdom directly.
“I want to express my immense gratitude to the FBI as well as the Dai Li for finally uncovering the truth and putting an end to all this pointless fear-mongering and misinformation. And to any citizens who still may be having doubts or fears regarding all of this, I would like to cordially invite you to a stress-free retreat at our luxury spa facility in Lake Laogai, where all your fears will be put to rest.”
At press time, Long Feng would like to speak with you, the reader, immediately.
It’s centered on its protagonist, Mick Carter, a homeless man who burned down his whole life rather than process his own grief. You’re often working to escape from death traps or monsters, but those aren’t as harrowing as one awkward conversation between Mick and his ex-wife.
The Drifter is easiest to describe as a direct descendant of old LucasArts point-and-click adventures like Monkey Island, as filtered through what its Steam page describes as “a dash of ‘70s Aussie grindhouse.”
It’s a horror game, but the source and subgenre of that horror changes several times over the course of the story. By rights, The Drifter should collapse under its own weight, but it’s smart, fast, and focused. I’m actually surprised it’s as coherent as it is, given some of the turns its story takes.
If that sounds interesting to you, you should probably pick this up without reading any further. The Drifter is a sort of New Weird murder mystery at heart, and like any mystery, it’s hard to discuss without spoilers. (It’s hard to take screenshots that don’t accidentally spoil at least one plot twist.) You’re better off going in as cold as you can.
The Drifter is set in Australia at some point in the late ‘90s to early ‘00s. Mick has been a hobo for the last 5 years, in a largely fruitless attempt to outrun a personal tragedy. On the news that his mother has died, Mick returns to his hometown to attend her funeral, but is murdered almost as soon as he arrives.
For no obvious reason, Mick doesn’t stay dead. He crawls out of what was meant to be his grave with no idea what’s just happened to him or if it happened at all. Now he’s penniless, homeless, questioning his own sanity, stuck in the last place on Earth he wants to be, and trapped at the center of a series of seemingly unconnected mysteries.
If you’ve ever played a point-and-click adventure game, you already know how to play The Drifter. In each area, your goal is to search the environment for items and information, which you use to get Mick out of his latest problem. If you’re stuck, it’s usually because you missed some small detail or didn’t talk to everyone that you could’ve.
The big difference is that The Drifter runs off a streamlined version of the point-and-click formula. None of its maps are particularly big or elaborate, dialogue can be taken at your own pace, it’s careful to indicate when something in your environment is no longer relevant, and when (not if) you get Mick killed, he immediately comes back to life at a point just before the decision that led to his death. It’s ditched much of the strange post-Myst cruft that got attached to adventure games in the ‘00s, like having to spend half the game slowly walking across empty landscapes, and is all the better for it.
Most crucially, The Drifter ranks very low on the Grand Scale of Puzzle Impenetrability. While it’s got a couple of weird challenges scattered across its running time, common sense and pattern recognition will get you through most of the game. It’s thoughtfully built and has no desire to waste your time.
The story manages to match that overall pace. It’d be easy for a game built around several interlocking mysteries to end up feeling overstuffed, but you’ve solved several of Mick’s initial problems by the halfway point. The rest of the game is devoted to finding out how and why everything intersects. I did have a few leftover questions by the end, but on the whole, The Drifter nails its landing.
The Drifter reminds me of Peppered, in that both games make a genre staple into a cornerstone of their setting. There’s a broad streak of the old Sierra sadism in The Drifter – some of the most lovingly detailed animations in the game are devoted to Mick’s death scenes, including one that may actually be a first for the medium – but that’s one of its core mechanics. Sometimes the only way to get through a situation is to get Mick killed and see what you learn in the process.
My only real point against The Drifter is that it’s thematically uneven, to the point where I was surprised to find the game only had one writer. Chapter 5 goes real Eli Roth for a minute, and Chapters 6 and 7 feature a temporary genre shift that almost derails the entire narrative. I can’t accuse The Drifter of ever being boring, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it shook people loose at certain specific points.
As a point-and-click revival, the word I want to use for The Drifter is “confident.” It manages to dodge many of the usual shortfalls of the point-and-click formula while also telling a complicated story about the stages of grief. It shouldn’t work, but does. It can be rough at certain points, especially if you’re recently bereaved, but if you’re in a place where you can handle the subject material, The Drifter is a memorable, worthwhile run.
[The Drifter, developed and published byPowerhoof, is now available for PC via Steam, and the first chapter is available for free via Itch.io. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a PR representative for Powerhoof.]
