your turn now
Feb. 10th, 2020 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mikogalateaI finished Chapter 2 of Your Turn to Die last night! This game's so good, even though it's also so painful. ;.;
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One thing about YTTD that really stands out to me is how the protagonist herself becomes massively traumatised as the Death Game progresses and inevitably kills people off, including her best friend. Sure, DR protags lose people they care about and there's a great deal of heartbreak when that happens, both on their part and the player's, but it doesn't fuck them up bad enough that they suffer full-blown hallucinations like poor Sara does!
I think this game does a good job at making you feel for Sara, and I like that it does so by putting the player in the same awful position as her at particular points. You feel her despair when she's desperately clicking on the switch in the false hope that it could save Joe. You feel how horrible it is to (manually!) push the fake Reko on to the spikes in order to save Gin. You feel the want to put poor Nao out of her misery, even when Sara can't bring herself to actually press the switch (I yelled when I saw that fucking thing again) because Nao's still screaming that she doesn't want to die and someone suffered a slow and painful death in front of her again and oh God Nao's death was horrendous and I had to watch that bloody scene twice ;.;
The reveals in 2-1 both made Kai into one of my favourites and left me feeling quite sorry for him. Most of Chapter 1 encourages the player to see him as so creepy and threatening, even though it turns out he was a good guy all along. =/ He was surprisingly moe in that one flashback with Sara's dad, too. (C'mon, holding a frying pan in front of his face to hide his tears was cute.) At least he got to be awesome posthumously through things like the hacking program on his laptop... and if there was one bit of silver lining to the awful cloud that was Joe's death, it's that at least the hopeless "minigame" gave Kai time to slit his wrists and bleed out enough to die before he could be executed, thus making it so he could have his last little moment of defiance.
Alice was the one who died at the end of 2-1 for me. D: What made it worse is that I got him the tokens to let him buy Reko's treasure, and the outcome of that made me feel so bad because I honestly thought I was helping him! I wonder if that particular event would've turned out better if it had been the real Reko there at the time instead of the fake... as it is, they only got to have the briefest sort-of reconcilation mere seconds before Alice died, and it's all so tragic.
I didn't want to vote for anyone at the end of 2-2. ;.; Nao's in the worst position as the Sacrifice, Kanna's a literal child, and as much as Sou's been a little shit, the fact remains that he had his status as someone with no chance of winning the Game drilled into his head in his First Trial and that can't have been good for him psychologically.
I ended up going with the "Kanna dies" outcome first, and needless to say I felt like a monster. Didn't help that Sou flipped out and went full-blown spiteful antagonist as a result here, either.
I picked the Nao ending next, not least because her own death was so fucking horrible I didn't want to see it twice in a row. This outcome actually made me ship Nao/Sara on some awful level. >>; I wouldn't mind angsty bittersweet fic about them living/coping with the sheer trauma of the Death Game afterwards. (On the subject of ships, though, I actually think this game is best at platonic bonds. Sara&Joe, Nao&Mishima and Reko&Alice are all great, just to name the most obvious examples, and they're not any lesser for not being romantic connections.)
The outcome with Sou dying felt the most hopeful by far. Sou defies the execution and does something good with his last moments (it's interesting what radically different actions he takes depending on if it's him or Kanna who's voted to die), Sara gets to finally put her Joe-related demons to rest altogether, everyone's pumped to defeat the Game with no more deaths... makes me excited for the next update, so I can see how this is going to pan out!
Strictly speaking, I've still got the version of 2-2 where Alice survives to see. Unfortunately, that'll want me to see Nao getting slowly crushed two more times when I get to the end of it and make saves for both final branches, and I'd rather not put myself through that again too soon...
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There's supposed to be a PV for Chapter 3 coming very soon, and the next Witch's Heart game (another freebie pixel horror I love) is also coming just as soon, so I can't wait for those!
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One thing about YTTD that really stands out to me is how the protagonist herself becomes massively traumatised as the Death Game progresses and inevitably kills people off, including her best friend. Sure, DR protags lose people they care about and there's a great deal of heartbreak when that happens, both on their part and the player's, but it doesn't fuck them up bad enough that they suffer full-blown hallucinations like poor Sara does!
I think this game does a good job at making you feel for Sara, and I like that it does so by putting the player in the same awful position as her at particular points. You feel her despair when she's desperately clicking on the switch in the false hope that it could save Joe. You feel how horrible it is to (manually!) push the fake Reko on to the spikes in order to save Gin. You feel the want to put poor Nao out of her misery, even when Sara can't bring herself to actually press the switch (I yelled when I saw that fucking thing again) because Nao's still screaming that she doesn't want to die and someone suffered a slow and painful death in front of her again and oh God Nao's death was horrendous and I had to watch that bloody scene twice ;.;
The reveals in 2-1 both made Kai into one of my favourites and left me feeling quite sorry for him. Most of Chapter 1 encourages the player to see him as so creepy and threatening, even though it turns out he was a good guy all along. =/ He was surprisingly moe in that one flashback with Sara's dad, too. (C'mon, holding a frying pan in front of his face to hide his tears was cute.) At least he got to be awesome posthumously through things like the hacking program on his laptop... and if there was one bit of silver lining to the awful cloud that was Joe's death, it's that at least the hopeless "minigame" gave Kai time to slit his wrists and bleed out enough to die before he could be executed, thus making it so he could have his last little moment of defiance.
Alice was the one who died at the end of 2-1 for me. D: What made it worse is that I got him the tokens to let him buy Reko's treasure, and the outcome of that made me feel so bad because I honestly thought I was helping him! I wonder if that particular event would've turned out better if it had been the real Reko there at the time instead of the fake... as it is, they only got to have the briefest sort-of reconcilation mere seconds before Alice died, and it's all so tragic.
I didn't want to vote for anyone at the end of 2-2. ;.; Nao's in the worst position as the Sacrifice, Kanna's a literal child, and as much as Sou's been a little shit, the fact remains that he had his status as someone with no chance of winning the Game drilled into his head in his First Trial and that can't have been good for him psychologically.
I ended up going with the "Kanna dies" outcome first, and needless to say I felt like a monster. Didn't help that Sou flipped out and went full-blown spiteful antagonist as a result here, either.
I picked the Nao ending next, not least because her own death was so fucking horrible I didn't want to see it twice in a row. This outcome actually made me ship Nao/Sara on some awful level. >>; I wouldn't mind angsty bittersweet fic about them living/coping with the sheer trauma of the Death Game afterwards. (On the subject of ships, though, I actually think this game is best at platonic bonds. Sara&Joe, Nao&Mishima and Reko&Alice are all great, just to name the most obvious examples, and they're not any lesser for not being romantic connections.)
The outcome with Sou dying felt the most hopeful by far. Sou defies the execution and does something good with his last moments (it's interesting what radically different actions he takes depending on if it's him or Kanna who's voted to die), Sara gets to finally put her Joe-related demons to rest altogether, everyone's pumped to defeat the Game with no more deaths... makes me excited for the next update, so I can see how this is going to pan out!
Strictly speaking, I've still got the version of 2-2 where Alice survives to see. Unfortunately, that'll want me to see Nao getting slowly crushed two more times when I get to the end of it and make saves for both final branches, and I'd rather not put myself through that again too soon...
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There's supposed to be a PV for Chapter 3 coming very soon, and the next Witch's Heart game (another freebie pixel horror I love) is also coming just as soon, so I can't wait for those!
