Soulslike boss where when you get them below 20% hit points it triggers a taunt where they refer to themselves in the third person, and the name they say is completely different from the label on the on-screen health bar. The game immediately pauses, buffers, then displays a popup informing you that someone else’s health bar has been shown in error and apologising for the inconvenience. The depleted health bar is then replaced with the correct (full) health bar, and the fight resumes.
ALT
Reaching that guy without dealing damage to the boss and angering him is part of an unmarked questline.
I’ll freely grant that fantasy-setting-where-everybody-is-a-girl milieux raise a lot of worldbuilding questions, but Where Do Babies Come From isn’t one of them. “How do they have kids if they’re all giiiiirls” my guy, some girls can get other girls pregnant in real life. A thousand things in need of explanation and you’re hung up on the one that requires none.
Old, busted: asking where babies come from in a magical all-women society.
New, shiny: asking what kind of novel hierarchical bullshit a magical all-women society can invent instead of hierarchical bullshit about gender
I’ll freely grant that fantasy-setting-where-everybody-is-a-girl milieux raise a lot of worldbuilding questions, but Where Do Babies Come From isn’t one of them. “How do they have kids if they’re all giiiiirls” my guy, some girls can get other girls pregnant in real life. A thousand things in need of explanation and you’re hung up on the one that requires none.
Apparently at least some versions of Aristasia glossed over this by saying that blondes lay eggs.
I’ll freely grant that fantasy-setting-where-everybody-is-a-girl milieux raise a lot of worldbuilding questions, but Where Do Babies Come From isn’t one of them. “How do they have kids if they’re all giiiiirls” my guy, some girls can get other girls pregnant in real life. A thousand things in need of explanation and you’re hung up on the one that requires none.
There is no meme so domain-specific that I won’t laugh at it. Give me train fandom memes about fucked up signal flags. Give me Beowulf scholarship memes about how to correctly translate “hwæt”. The fact that I have no frame of reference is no obstacle to a sensible chuckle.
I raise you my challenger:
Funnily enough, you’ve managed to hit my actual area of expertise, so this one doesn’t provoke a sensible chuckle so much as it does flashbacks to that one time in college I went 96 hours without sleep because I started a CS term project on this meme’s exact subject matter the week before it was due
Open-world 2D platformer which initially appears to exclusively employ lock-and-key gating, but the various key items actually are granting you new movement tech and not telling you about it. The new inputs are unintuitive but not particularly hard to execute, so you’re just constantly having “wait, could I always do that?” moments.
I’ve been seeing a lot of confusion in the notes about exactly how this proposed gimmick is meant to operate, so let’s break it down. Broadly speaking, there are three principle mechanisms of access gating in non-linear platformers:
Ability gating: Permanently altering the player character’s capabilities in a way which allows them to overcome previously impassable obstacles; for example, a high-jump upgrade that lets you reach new platforms.
Lock-and-key gating: Permanently altering the environment in a way which removes previously impassable obstacles; for example, a keycard which causes certain locked doors to open when you approach them.
Knowledge gating: Revealing ways of acting or interacting which the player character already possesses, but which were deliberately obscured from the player, typically due to requiring unintuitive sequences of inputs and/or only being possible in very specific situations which are unlikely to arise by chance.
Most of the “this is just [insert game]” responses are simply name-checking other titles which employ knowledge gating, which isn’t what’s being proposed here.
Rather, we’re talking about breaking a very specific implicit rule which almost all non-linear platformers observe: knowledge-gated movement tech is either available right from the start of the game, or else tied to ability-gating in such a way that it’s obvious in retrospect which upgrade is granting the tech in question.
Critically, knowledge-gated movement tech is almost never tied to lock-and-key upgrades. This is a rule you probably haven’t worked out explicitly if you’re not a game design nerd, but you’d be hard-pressed to find counterexamples in mainstream titles, and for pretty obvious reasons: it’s hard to secretly give the player new abilities without changing how they interact with the environment.
(This is why, for example, something like Tunic doesn’t qualify. The hidden manual pages inform the player of knowledge-gated movement tech, but don’t actually grant it – you can still do all that stuff without finding the pages that tell you about it.)
The central joke at the player’s expense, then, is that we’re proposing a non-linear platformer which pretends to exclusively employ lock-and-key gating, when in fact the pickups which appear simply to passively unlock paths are also modifying how the player character is able to interact with the environment in non-obvious and undisclosed ways.
But if it’s pretending to employ Lock-and-Key gating, then what are the extra movement abilities for? Isn’t Lock-and-Key separate from Ability gating, by this taxonomy? It sounds like what you’re proposing is a game where you pick up a keycard which opens all the red doors for you and also secretly lets you airdash by spinning the control stick in a circle 3 times, but you don’t actually need to use the airdash to get anywhere? Just for fun?
The ideal deployment is probably a “game has a good ending and a bad ending, and the good ending is only accessible by using the movement tech.”
In form with the tone of the suggestion, it’s probable that there is nothing in the text of the bad ending that suggests there was a better outcome.
Depending on how blatant we want the player-hostile design to be, you could also just deliberately softlock players who haven’t twigged to the secret movement tech two-thirds of the way through the game.
Thinking to myself “they can’t possibly have written this entire 20 000 word fic exclusively in 4chan greentext format”, like a fool.
Give us the fic
> be me > 22 year old baby trans in the Most Serene Republic of Greater Caliphornia, year of our lord 2069 > no talents or skills aside from a mastery of the Hissatsu Ougi > (my parents were transphobic ninjas)
I’m desperately curious about your daily internet navigation routine that takes you these places.
I mostly just look up what’s being referenced when people blorbotag my shitposts.
>and I have to keep walking east because there’s a trail of dead bodies behind me >which is why I’m now in fuxking DENVER >and I’m legit out of estrogen >drowning my sorrows in some shithole bar >”what’s got you down stranger?” >look up >buff cowgirl milf is talking to me
I low-key love this? They’re certainly making use of the format; the chaotic and comedic flow of events would feel lower quality and wordier in standard prose
I don’t know how anyone has found this as the only ao3 tag it has is “original work.” There’s not even a rating or relationship type. The fic summary for anyone intrested is:
“in 2069 AD, the region once known as the United States of America is a world of complex lore and political intrigue that our heroine doesn’t really care about because she’s too busy trying to find estrogen in the post-apocalyptic Midwest.”
Give that roughly two thirds of the comments and kudos appear to post-date the creation of this thread, at least in this particular case the answer to “where do people find this stuff?” is apparently “right here”.
Not A Bit Good
(They/Them) Multifandom Mess. Used to post mostly Sherlock (TJLC). Also: Ace Attorney, The Witcher, Hannibal, Star Trek, (occasionnal Captive Prince, Black Butler, Supernatural and others). Aces and Aros belong to the LGBT+ community. TERFs/Gender Criticals and other bigots will be blocked on sight.
ALT
(They/Them) Multifandom Mess. Used to post mostly Sherlock (TJLC). Also: Ace Attorney, The Witcher, Hannibal, Star Trek, (occasionnal Captive Prince, Black Butler, Supernatural and others). Aces and Aros belong to the LGBT+ community. TERFs/Gender Criticals and other bigots will be blocked on sight.