Blood Stained Intrigue Wiki
Tyrell Baskerville
Mintale Town, had never been the same. Not since BRVR had unleashed his untempered wrath upon the place. Jessica stood at the very edge of Mount Snowfall, overlooking the hellish carnage in the valley below. Another dribble of blood ran down the sides of her mauled face, a reminder that the Raichu now lived her life in never-ending, ceaseless agony. After what had happened--when her ex trainer allowed his rage to get the best of him on that fateful day.
But she endured it, regardless. She was a very strong, determined Pokmon. After all, that was what he had trained her to be. She was stuck between worlds after death; doomed forever to roam amidst the realms of other Pokmon games, seeking a much-needed peace. Her latest odyssey, had lead her here, to Mintale Town. More specifically, BRVR's version of Mintale Town.
Jessica's ears pricked slightly as she heard her friend come down the ice-lined path. The Pikachu whom had met with a similar fate. His trainer, had abandoned him. As he approached her, Jessica could see the miserable tears in the Pikachu's eyes. They slid down his face, intermingling with the bloody maw of the psychotic killer he had become. The Raichu could never be sure, but it seemed to her that his madness had been brought on by being abandoned. Although BRVR was well past the point of mourning, and now hated his old master with every fiber of his being, Jessica sensed that once they had once been very close.
"I was just thinking, that's all." BRVR replied in a hushed murmur. The Raichu finally turned to face him. He was a mess. His fur was covered in blood, more than she had seen on him in a while. A chill raced down Jessica's spine, prompting her exposed organs to quake with pain again.
BRVR, had already long ago murdered nearly all of the resident Pokmon of Mintale Town. And even if he hadn't; even if by some stray chance he had stumbled across a survivor that day, Jessica's nose didn't lie. The scent of this blood was familiar. Relational.
"I know how you feel, BRVR. After all, I can never truly die either." The Pikachu looked her up and down, critiquing the brutal extent of her wounds. Wounds that should have killed her--killed any Pokmon. But for reasons unknown, they hadn't. BRVR's eyes went wide.
"You said it yourself--you can't! Just like me!" BRVR hissed, his cheeks sparking with rage. Jessica reached out a comforting paw, but he turned away from her. "We know so little about their world--and they know even less about ours. Like I said, they think it's just a stupid game."
Jessica pondered her friend's last statement very carefully. There was a connection between her world and BRVR's. Maybe, there was a way to reach Cameron too! He had spoken to her before, loved her from across another universe. Maybe there was a way to reach out to him again. She got to her feet with a painful struggle, blood already beginning to pool from her numerous gaping wounds. As Jessica stared down the mountain, BRVR called out to her.
"The story?!? I'll tell you the story, Jess. Cameron, murdered you. He cared more about the problems in his real life, than the friendship he shared with you," the Pikachu paused, his eyes widening in tragic defeat. "I know. My old friend, did the same to me. Replaced me. Labeled me a child's play thing. Left me helplessly locked away in a world where I can NEVER die!"
Jessica was silent for a moment, now realizing that she was powerless to make her friend see reason. BRVR was beyond help at this point. His mind had become vengeful and distorted from years of abandonment and pain. The other Pokmon whom had once been his neighborhood friends had either fled Mintale Town, or been slaughtered by his hand.
Electricity sparked from the Raichu's cheeks, illuminating the entirety of the snowy mountain in a harsh yellow glow. Jessica gave her friend one last sorrowful smile, before fading away. BRVR didn't question where she'd disappeared to--he already knew. That literal bleeding heart of a Pokmon had gone to try and make contact with her previous master.
Unattended atop Mt. Snowfall, the demented, forgotten Pikachu sat alone and shivered in the icy breeze. The crimson sky never changed; nothing in his world ever did so anymore. And now without the company of Jessica, BRVR was truly alone.
Seemingly out of nowhere, sound and energy surged into life from unseen realms beyond his world, and a bright light engulfed him. Dark eyes, which had long ago lost all hope, now twinkled with intrigue.
I do enjoy spending the week trying out new indie games on Steam; brings back nostalgic memories of my childhood when I used to dive into the part of the canal near the sewage runoff pipes, and then have to spend the afternoon combing turds out of my hair. But every now and again, amidst the turds, I'd find a real treasure, like a used condom; the sperm bank would pay a whole 50p for one of those, once I'd finished chewing it. Man, it was great growing up upper-middle-class!
So it's mostly been a pixel art jamboree this week; first, I tried out Forager, a 2D pixel art twist on the survival crafting grind-'em-up genre that presently occupies the bed of gaming like a giant farting horse that won't stop hogging the blanket, which I played until I realized that being in a small environment smashing rocks is what you do when you're in a prison, but without the possibility of forbidden romance. Then I tried out Dark Devotion, another 2D pixel art twist on Dark Souls to add to the pile, which discovered that once you take the majestic scenery and sturdy level design out of Dark Souls, all you have left is a game moodily blatting you in the face with a rake for eight hours. Finally, I settled on Katana Zero, a 2D pixel art twist on hideous psychedelic violence; also, it's published by Devolver Digital, obviously, because the phrase "2D pixel art hideous psychedelic violence" is to Devolver Digital what the word "Walkies!" is to an under-stimulated dog with poor bladder control.
In fact, I was thinking about listing the features of Katana Zero as part of a hilarious "Games Published by Devolver Digital" bingo card, until I realized I was just writing down features from Hotline Miami. Pixel art and hideous violence, check. That's the given; that's the bloodstained arugula forming the base of the "Horrible Devolver Digital" salad. A colorful retro aesthetic particularly themed around retro forms of media in a way that would give Quentin Tarantino an even bigger priapism than the one he gets from his morning bowl of discontinued breakfast cereal, check. High-speed gameplay where you can reload and try again before your death rattle has even gotten six inches past your tonsils, check. Emphasis on soundtrack, check. Somewhat obscure plot full of hallucinatory moments strongly implying that the main character is on enough drugs to fill out one of Michael Jackson's average weekly prescriptions, Cinnamon Chex with sausage on the side!
So to put it bluntly, Katana Zero is side-on platforming Hotline Miami, but there's also a bit of Gunpoint in there, and a bit of Mother Russia Bleeds, if only because that, too, is another strong contender for "Devolver Digital: The Game". But does it have any ideas of its own? Well, in Katana Zero, you play a complete loser with a Japanese sword, as referenced by the title; you spend your days hacking up assassination targets given to you by your psychiatrist, because I guess punching a pillow wasn't doing it for you anymore, and you keep taking a magic drug that gives you the power to see the future, but which is probably also turning your brain into blancmange. It's the kind of plot where you're a small piece of a larger intrigue, and none of your manipulators ever tell you anything; it might take more than one playthrough to fully grasp it, so it's just as well that the gameplay kicks arse... mostly.
Your precognition means that your failed attempts are all framed as possible futures and also gives you a slow-motion power, so at the end of the level, you see a replay of your successful run as the timeline that actually happens for realsies, and all the slow-motion stuff plays at normal speed. I've often thought games with slow-motion could use something like this; doing something in slow-motion isn't that impressive because I can see how the game has slowed down and extended the wheelchair ramp to let my masturbation-addled thinking keep up, but when the game then shows you how what you just did looks from an outside perspective, you can go, "Oh, OK, I'm a fucking badass. I mean, I suspected as much; I do masturbate to a heroic degree, but it's nice to see it confirmed."
Every enemy dies in one hit, and you can dodge and deflect bullets, so on a successful run, you sweep through all resistance like a red-hot knife through a knife-hotness inspection, and it generally kicks arse; just a shame there's so much plot in the way. And now, all the game developers will throw down and stamp their baseball caps they got free at GDC and cry, "He's officially impossible to please!" Sorry. I do like narrative; it's just, I think this is the SUPERHOT and Quadrilateral Cowboy problem, where they came up with a lovely little original gameplay loop, but refuse to let it breathe properly and keep killing the pace for the sake of story moments. Press "Right" to walk over to the fridge, press "X" to eat up leftovers for tea. Was this necessary, game? I'm happy to just assume my character picked up drive-thru on the way home from the murder spree.
Then there are a couple of gameplay "asides" that fit into the core combat about as comfortably as a hypochondriac into a vat of assorted cattle guts; one of your assassination targets flees on a motorbike and we give chase on a second convenient motorbike, and suddenly, we're playing an arcade shooter from the early 90's where we dodge slow, predictable missiles that move like they're on wheelchairs when, five minutes ago, I pressed the dodge button two frames earlier than I should have done and my knackers were shot clean off right into someone's martini.
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