Day 88 - Lethal Baboon
WTF, Mobile Trash, Horror ·
Sam’s Take:
I was already in a bad mood when starting this review. First of all, since I had been dealing with cleaning the house post covid nightmare, and since Skeeter wasn’t around to remind me, I totally forgot about this review until late at night. Second, this game didn’t come with any way to play it on PC, so I had to download an Android Emulator to test it.
Then the emulator didn’t work, so I changed the settings on my phone to allow it to play on there. Turns out the fault wasn’t with the emulator, it was with the game. Just crashes on startup.
Maybe Skeeter got it to work, maybe he didn’t, we’ll find out tomorrow once he has internet again.
I’m sorry there’s no review, but since this was pre-chosen to prepare for Skeeter’s time without internet, there’s no way around it. As compensation, here’s a Cyberpunk 2077 screenshot with four of the same NPC clones:
Cyberpunk is a weird fuckin game isn’t it? Like there’s so much stupid teenage edgelord stuff. They also do that thing in the dialogue where after you say the nice option the character is like “I APPRECIATE HOW KIND YOU ARE BEING BECAUSE I AM A VIDEO GAME LOOK HOW I RESPOND TO YOUR CHOICES, YOUR CHOICES HAVE CONSEQUENCES”.
But then for every stupid bit of dialogue, or middle-school comedy moment, there’s a moment of pure magic that no other game has pulled off. There is no game that does two characters sitting in a cool room talking better than CP2077. The freedom to look around while in conversation and soak in the atmosphere really brings those neon-noir vibes to new heights in a way only an interactive medium can pull off.
I’ve recently had one specific line of dialogue in my head. There’s a mission where you go to where Johnny Silverhand was buried, and unmarked grave in a junkyard. For a moment you ruminate on the nature of mortality and legacy. At this point you both have died once, his engram in your head is the only thing sustaining you, and your body is the only thing giving his mind a place to stay. He asks you something along the lines of, “what do you think of me”. My V responds with something like, “I think of you as the man who saved my life”.
Johnny then responds with the line, “you have no idea how badly I want that to be true”.
Johnny and V’s relationship is naturally complex. Both are stopping the other from living a full uninterrupted life, yet both also give the other a chance to live again. In the end we know only one of us will be able to continue our life. It’s a zero sum game, either he takes over the body, or we find a way to safely remove him from our head.
Johnny could have responded “thanks”, he could have responded with “and you’re the woman who saved mine”, but he doesn’t. Instead he says a line so strange that it’s impossible not to annalyse. It’s the regret of a man who lived life based on ideals he couldn’t follow through with, who’s vision of “going out with a bang” led to an unmarked grave and a dying fanbase. At that moment Johnny isn’t just realizing that dying in that terrorist attack didn’t leave the legacy he wanted, he doesn’t even want that legacy anymore.
At that moment Johnny considers himself dead, and you alive. He had his chance and he fucked it up, but he can give you another. It’s easy to say “I love you” to someone, but it’s rare to get the chance to say it in a way where the recipient knows you mean it.
“you have no idea how badly I want that to be true”
Sorry I couldn’t play Lethal Baboon.
Recommend: Nope
Replay Percentage Chance: Actually 0%
Time Played: No
Skeeter’s Take:
All we need is a bit of Unity, which is good, because all we have is Unity.
I can’t get past the “Made with Unity“ launch screen.
After reading Sam’s review, it seems like I could have saved him some time by pre-screening any of these games. But in hindsight maybe it’s a good thing that Lethal Baboon happened - or rather didn’t happen. If it ran like a game should, we wouldn’t have Sam’s Cyberpunk review, and we would have had to actually play Lethal Baboon.
Recommend: Pee
Replay Percentage Chance: Pee
Time Played: Head
Random Review