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[Mobile Gaming] How the Nyan Cat led to the death knell for a popular mobile game- the downfall of RWBY Amity Arena.
Note: Many of the links are to the Amity Arena Library, a website devoted to the game which includes tracking the history of it through patchnotes and a running history of what cards entered and left the meta. Their website was a valuable resource for this post.
Mobile gaming has taken off like a wildfire since the advent of the smartphone boosted the average processing power a phone could carry. Initially it took the form of crossing over older, more easily runnable games onto the mobile market to... mixed success, but in recent years we've seen both the West and East use mobile gaming to replace the old fashioned movie tie in game. It's easily accessable, has a much wider reach than consoles or PC, you can take it on the go and standards are inherently lower for mobile games than they are a full 60 dollar game. Since the 2010s, mobile gaming has shifted to what's called the "Freemium" module. The game itself is free to download and start playing, but is insideously designed with obnoxious paywalls or artificial limiters put in place to limit how much you can play each day. If the game is part of a pre-existing franchise, additional money can be made through a premium currency or a chance to obtain high-powered units by rolling a slot machine random chance mechanic. And thus, gacha gaming was born. This sub has had several threads in the past on high profile gacha games, such as the monolithic Fate Grand/Order, Pokemon Go or Genshin Impact. One of the more popular things to roll for in gachas as a consequence is wallpapers for your homescreen, especially for high-grade units as they're usually animated to move a little bit on the homescreen. Today we're looking a low to mid-tier gacha game that rose and fell with the advent of one catgirl. Let's talk RWBY. RWBY is an online web anime made by Rooster Teeth focusing on four prospective monster hunters who get embroiled in a world-spanning shadow war. It's of debatable quality in matters of animation, combat, voice acting, story, worldbuilding, romance, and it's kind of a little racist if I'm being honest, but one of the major positives of RWBY is that the series tends to have good character design. Series creator Monty Oum set in the guidelines for the show while making it that most if not every design should be made to be cosplay friendly, hence why most of the outfits have things most costume designers haven't heard of like... pockets. And Rooster Teeth, above all else, likes making money. So they know people like RWBY's character designs, enough so that in 2017 plans were made to release a gacha game themed around RWBY called Amity Arena, which would be developed by Korean company NHN Entertainment. Amity Arena is a PvP tower defense game. Each player controls two turrets and a tower and has three minutes to use units themed from the show to destroy the other player's structures. Whoever took out more wins, destroying a tower is an instant victory. When the game launched, it had three tiers for units- Common (generally held for mooks or low-tier characters in the show), Rare (roughly protagonist-level or elite mooks go here) and Epic (High tier characters usually with an active ability that did lots of damage or stopped enemies in their tracks). The game launched in October 2018 to generally positive reviews from both mobile game players and RWBY fans alike. Fans were happy to get a lot of new official art for the characters in the game and the base gameplay loop was fun. Criticism at the time was largely themed around the lack of content besides PVP matches and some issues with the meta but overall, the launch went well. Each month, the developers would add new units, including popular characters like Neopolitian, Cinder Fall, Zwei the dog, and more. But everything changed with February 20th 2019, which introduced Neon Katt, the titular catgirl (RWBY characters are themed around fairytales, except for Neon, who is themed around Nyan Cat, and her partner Flynt Coal, who is themed off a potentially racist joke made by Rooster Teeth). Neon is a character from RWBY Volume 3 who's part of a team that RWBY face during a tournament arc. Her partner, Flynt Coal, was part of the game at launch, and Neon would join him a few months later. Neon in the show is a cocky fighter who taunts the heroes and zips around on rollarskates, which in-game is represented by Neon skating towards the nearest enemy structure to her and hitting it, while all units within a radius of Neon are taunted and provoked into attacking her above all other targets unless they-selves are coded to hit structures. On its own, not a bad idea for a unit, but Neon came with four big caveats:
Neon was the fourth corner of the square that became known as the Artillery Arena meta, which saw Neon, Cinder (who had an AOE ability she could use which was wide enough to hit a turret and tower and single-handedly killed the entire launch meta of using fragile swarm units), Zwei (an on-summon high damage AOE on any part of the map) and Penny (another AOE ability that instead did chip damage and locked a location down) turn the game's meta into a chip game. Every player ran at least one of the above cards, if only to counter the others. Neon was the universal counter in being anti-swarm and the hardest to stop, especially at launch where her taunt range was so large, it could grab units from the other lane.
Neon launched with a unit weight of "Heavy", which meant that if she was behind a unit she could push it on her way to the turret. This launched a sub-meta where Neon was placed behind a larger unit such as the Ursa (which like Neon was a unit that focused on structures but was made slow to cover its tankiness), to push them towards the turret faster. This was called Disco Bear. They eventually patched this so Neon phased through units by making her a lightweight.
Neon couldn't die. She was invincible until she hit a structure, which combined with her taunt meant that Neon was very annoying to fight and could lock down an entire lane of the battlefield by being placed well and taunting enemies to let you prepare a counter.
Neon was a very cheap unit to summon. Amity Arena uses a mechanic called "Aura" where all units cost a certain amount and it recharges over the match- for instance, protagonist Ruby Rose has a Rare card that costs four Aura to summon, while Weiss Schnee has two rares that cost three and five. Neo only cost two Aura, which made her one of the cheapest units of the game and thus disproportionately powerful for her cost and easy to cycle through your deck so you could spam her.
From the word go, Neon is an unpopular unit; she's clearly overbalanced and elements such as the Disco Bear glitch have players thinking she'll have to get knocked down in a nerf- she'll either be made slower, more expensive, or able to die pre-hitting a structure, right? Neon doesn't show up in the next patch. Instead, before she's fixed, an entire new class of units called Legendaries are introduced, and this is where the game goes full gacha. Legendaries were meant to represent the highest tier characters in the game, the ones who were either the most popular characters or the highest-tier fighters in the show. Or in some cases, the popular ships such as combo cards for White Rose (Ruby/Weiss), Bumblebee (Blake/Yang) and Flower Power (Ren/Nora). Legendaries, representing their value, were impossibly rare and had an infinitely small chance of actually appearing (The most reliable method was to buy the premium chests and hope you'd roll a Legendary, which often cost tons of money), and if you did get one, there was no way to guess which Legendary you'd actually get. Some such as White Rose and Adam were high tier units, others like Hazel or Checkmate were... kinda broken at launch. The playerbase isn't happy at this, especially as free to play players are left out in the cold and reliant on the game giving them high tier units effectively out of pity. Neon would get a small nerf in the April patch which lessened her taunt range and killed the Disco Bear meta, but her invincibility would be left untouched, even as players submitted feedback regarding how to make it more efficient. The official Amity Arena discord has a weekly feedback section on Tuesdays where players could submit up to four suggestions on how to nerf/buff units and general requests for quality of life such as "Can this character get a new skin from this part of the show," or "Can we have an option to lower music volume that's not just muting all music?" (they never did add that second request) Neon would then remain in this state until the November patch, despite constant weekly requests for a Neon rework, and all it would do is make Neon functionally mortal, in that she had a flat shield bar of 20 that would be lowered by one for each attack before the next hit would kill her. Neon could now die... but your chances of actually doing enough damage to stop her were slim, and regardless, you were now at a serious Aura defecit. It took seven months for this one unit to get a substantial nerf, all while the game added new units every week and the number of units being affected by patches each month began to gradually sink. To round up some of the major issues people had with Amity that developed throughout 2019 alongside Neon's general existance making life hell:
Common units were meant to be chump fodder, but could level up the most amount of times with a level cap at 13. This meant longer-term units that had a long time to level such as the Xiong Family card, the AK-130s the Beowolf Pack, or the White Fang gunners, could become shockingly strong if players grinded the money up to reach max level.
A pre-existing divide between free players and players willing to burn money IRL to get access to premium currencies led to a huge disparity in play. Free players have long complained about how hard it is to scrounge money together to level up units at higher costs as even the basic currency of Lien is hard to get large quantities of (you get a certain amount every match win but otherwise you need to burn the Schnee Premium Dust currency for the highest payouts, but SPD is also needed for shop resets, buying crates or unlocking cosmetics). The developers used to do frequent double weekends where all gains were doubled for a weekend, but these became less and less frequent as time went on. Legendaries only added to the divide, as their rarity was bad enough for players willing to spend money (one player, known as one of the largest whales in the community, in trying to get Sienna Khan, reported burning nearly nine hundred dollars on her, while taking nearly six hundred to get the Ice Flower card).
One actual counter was born to fight Neon in the Argus Shield, a stationary unit that existed solely to stall units and take damage. At 2 Aura, it was the first structure to counter Neon, which allevated one of the primary problems with Neon in that no way to counter her was cost-efficient for an enemy player. They buffed the Wall to 3 Aura eventually which killed that hope, and all this happened before Neon's November nerf.
The Summer of 2019 saw a large number of defensive units released; alongside the Argus Shield, several different units were released themed around turrets for the technological kingdom of Atlas, such as the Beam Turret. The Atlesian Burrow Gun was the straw that broke the camel's back and made for a miserable meta as the Burrow Gun would only appear (and be available to take damage) when a unit entered its range. These three units together were all very overpowered on launch and led to a large exodus of players sick of defensive and chip-based metas, especially as what few offensive units that were good enough to counter these metas (such as Professor Port and Adam Taurus) were often nerfed into the ground within a month of release.
Also around this time it became apparent that the developers were unable to meet the quotas that Rooster Teeth was forcing on them. The social media team admitted that a certain number of units needed to be in the game in time for Winter 2019 when Volume 7 was set to start, and as the year went on more and more game-breaking bugs were being found in units, or they were at best horrifically undertuned or overpowered. The Apathy was perhaps the largest case of this, as an unfound bug pre-release meant that the Apathy (who have a passive ability that let them self-duplicate) had no cap on their power, meaning that they could immediately overwhelm defenses and in the case of some phones, be such a resource hog the phone would crash. Many Legendary units were especially guilty of being under-tuned due to low Legendary availability meaning they were simply weren't powerful enough to compare with high-levelled units. Checkmate's ability simply didn't work at launch, and Neon made several more such as Hazel Rainart a joke. May Marigold's invisibility bubble would have been an interesting game changer... were it not for a bug that made it that units placed in the bubble still played their sound lines, meaning players knew what to expect. Things were so bad that when Flower Power launched and wasn't broken or needed an emergency patch, the playerbase were shocked.
Unfortunately, the Novemember patch did little to stop the problems with Neon, and a new problem would rear its head for Christmas: Jinn. This unit embodied many of the problems players had: She was a Legendary so it would be hard for free players to get her, and only added to the sheer number of Legendaries that were out there. She was another structure card, and she was horrifically broken. Stopping time for seven seconds in an area around any friendly units, Jinn broke the game overnight, with players horrified at how little playtesting she'd clearly had. Most chip units now couldn't damage structures as Jinn simply could stop time and freeze the turret for the duration of the attack. And to make matters worse? She cost two Aura, meaning it was very easy to cycle a deck and start Jinn spamming. And yet at two aura she was still one of the only cost-efficient Neon counters... until they patched her to be worth three Aura instead. Talking of the feline menace, January saw Neon get a HP nerf that set her shield at 14. Finally, Neon could be realistically be taken out, still at an Aura defecit but at least it can be countered and now they just have to raise her Aura- why are you buffing her game? Less than a month later, Neon got, of all things, a buff. Her HP shield was set at 20, and her attacks now did double damage. This is around the point where a lot of players begin to suspect the developers aren't listening to feedback and more long-term players dip out or drop the game. Neon got touched one more time in April, which slowed her down (which itself was a problem as Neon's lessened speed on spawn simply made her better at generating aggro), she dealt 10% less damage and made it somewhat easier to hit her enough to kill her, but a new problem was on the horizon. Because Neon was now no longer the game's White Whale for patches. Meet the White Fang Gunner Barracks. Added in September 2019, the Barracks fell under many player's radar simply because they were horrifically undertuned. Their gimmick was that every few seconds, a White Fang Gunner would spawn, with three spawning on death. In April, as Neon got her last appearance in the patches, the Barracks got a huge buff and became the centerpiece of the meta; they now spawned two Gunners, which made them immensely valuable for just five Aura. You could overwhelm many anti-swarm units before they had a chance, and shred your way through turrets. The Barracks would then go six months before this overtuning was rectified, barring one nerf in August that lowered their health to try and stem the tide of units. To sum up every other thing that went wrong during the year meta-wise:
The playercount was getting so low that players were able to make lists of the AI bots the developers had in place so lower-level players had a challenge (Amity breaks up players by a trophy system where you gain trophies with every win, and by this point most of the active players were in the 2500 to 3500 range. This also meant new players steamrolled through the lower levels only to hit a brick wall in the 3000 range, with the only reliable solution being to willingly lose matches until you were in your optimal range and grind victories until you reached a certain level.
The patches became more and more threadbare, going from 8+ units getting changed each month in early 2019 to three units at most getting changed in 2020 patches outside of the anniversary patch going back to the golden days of eight. The only area where they didn't get more threadbare was in the cosmetics and emotes that the developers were cranking out, all of which were only available through hours of grinding or premium currencies. This was despite the fact that the units were being released slower, going from once a week to once a fortnite.
The majority of units added in 2020 were Epic or Legendary tier, which were the hardest to get for free players unless they got lucky and they were added to the store (and if they had the lien as a Legendary in the store costs a flat 40,000 Lien). One Common and four Epics were released compared to twelve Epics and seven Legendaries. The release of Moonslice Adam especially was annoying for this regard, as Adam already had a Legendary released (at least for Team RWBY, each of them headlined a Legendary when it came to the team attack cards), and this was clearly done to pander to Adam's fans again as his first unit saw a spike in interest in the game. The math was done and showed how artifically scarce Legendaries were made.
The undeovertuning was still in play. Colossus is seen as one of the worst cards in the entire game because of its gimmick. I have literally never seen anyone play it. Flynt became overtuned and now he's a staple thanks to his trumpet's AOE attack being able to hurt turrets and shred most units. Launcher Nora was an especially overtuned unit thanks to her high-damage constant AOE barrage and long range meaning she could annhilate most anything if given enough cover. Even after patches she's still dangerous. September saw the White Fang Dropship Formation added, which was widely seen as a terrible unit and done as an emergency addition because the planned unit for September in the Grimm Seer had to be cut last minute for technical reasons.
The game has barely had significant content added since launch, with the primary gameplay still just being PVP. Barring Battle of Beacon (a mode where you can play as Ruby and Weiss and fend off Grimm which most players just use to grind chests, and no, they still haven't added Blake or Yang) and Plaza (a lobby where you can dress up as a character and run around Beacon), the game has added no new features and quality of life content players have requested since launch (rerolling in the shop, Superior Crates having guaranteed Legendary spawn rates) have been released at a snail's pace (you still can't reroll Legendaries if you're looking for a specific unit). Academies where players can unite to trade units and chat still lacks features that have been requested for years such as the ability to delete messages. And Plaza immediately went to hell because players were doing erotic role play in the chats and after people came forward with proof that minors were being sexually harassed in the Plaza or being coerced into side-channels, the dev response was to... just turn off the chat entirely instead of banning the accounts or implementing moderation. This also removed the chatlog which deleted a lot of the evidence of said harassment.
As OctobeNovember comes in, the players are getting more and more furious. The weekly feedback includes a near constant demand for an acknowledgement from the developers given how often it feels like the feedback is being ignored. The social media team get caught several times hyping up how the coming patch would address player concerns, only for said patch to lack those units. The meta has been locked down to the Xiong Family, Flynt, Launcher Nora, Spider-Mines and the hell-cat herself in Neon. Everyone runs at least one of these, people run meta decks not because they want to, but because it's the only way to have a chance of victory. And then in December, things implode. The patch for the month was set to launch on December 10th with the monthly event missions. But when the clock rolls around, the event missions (which usually take about two weeks to do if you're doing as many as you can a day)... has a six day timer. And the update doesn't come out. The art team doesn't release new unit art. The shop has no special timed bundles. There's no patch notes. And then the Twitter team who've been hard carrying the game through... actually talking to the players and acknowledging the grievances they have... admitted that they don't know what's going on either. The best guess is that the devs have come down with Covid, but no statements to confirm or deny this leave it as guesswork. The timer eventually got reset and people could do the event, but then on Christmas itself, another issue. Ruby has appeared in the plaza on Halloween (her canonical birthday) and Christmas, and if you go talk to her you get free stuff. But on Christmas people, people discovered that Ruby was talking as if you'd already talked to her. Because they hadn't updated Ruby yet for 2020. She still thought it was 2019 so if you'd talked to her then for goodies, she had none now. They patched it eventually but a lot of people didn't see this fix before the timer ran out to get the free stuff. Some have resorted to memes to cope with the fact that the game just seems to have died out of the blue. Others have been trying to desperately rally the players and find a way to save it. Some resorted to friendly mockery of the whales who'd spent thousands on a game that seems to be dying (seriously though gacha games need to curb this shit but they won't because whales are godsends for their bank balances). If the game doesn't get an update in January then two months without new content will mark the end, and the already significant playercount drops will only increase. And it's hard to say if any one thing could have turned Amity Arena's fate around beyond just "Have a better balancing team who can respond better to feedback." Neon began the time of death, but by the time December rolled around the meta was in a horrifically toxic place where if you wanted to make any progession, you had to get down and dirty with the pigs. The team just constantly failed to balance problem units outside of their emergency hotfixes of Jinn, and more often then not they went after units and buffed or nerfed them at random going off playcounts to determine what needed fixing instead of the actual written feedback they were getting. It's clear from the references to the show and some of the attempts to reach out to the community that at least one person in the team genuinely wanted to make the good appealing to RWBY fans, but somewhere during the game's lifespan, they lost their way. Less focus needed to be put on how to milk the players, and instead focusing on making a game sustainable and enjoyable enough to warrant the cosmetics and emotes. The game's failure ultimately isn't on the playerbase. It's on the people who were actually making the game who chose to slack off because they thought it acceptable to do so. Thanks for reading. EDIT: HOT OFF THE PRESSES, I JUMPED THE GUN Had I waited one more day, my story would have had a far more sudden ending, as the game just announced its shutdown for January. RIP.
[Chronicles of Elyria] People paid $10k to be kings and queens in a failed crowdfunded game; lead dev still pretending he’s ‘working on the game’ after closing the studio and laying off all staff.
Remember, Remember, the 5th of NoRender...
I am surprised there aren’t any posts about Chronicles of Elyria on HobbyDrama yet! The community was so rife with drama from start to finish that I don’t even know where to begin. Throwaway because I will probably be doxxed if I post on my main.
What is Chronicles of Elyria?
Chronicles of Elyria was pitched as a Kickstarter in May 2016 as a dynamic MMORPG with procedurally-generated quests, a fully destructible environment, closed economy, finite resources, and survival elements. The goal was $900k, but they made about $1.3 million in the initial campaign, and through their subsequent crowdfunding efforts made close to $8 million total over the next few years.
What went wrong?
In terms of lofty ideas, Chronicles of Elyria was right up there with Star Citizen, but with a fraction of the funds. We’d be here all day if I went into detail about all of the game’s proposed features, because it’s like they were trying to be Crusader Kings meets medieval life simulator meets Harvest Moon meets survival game meets action RPG all at once. Browse through their Developer Journals; even without a background in game development, it’s clear that the scope of what they were trying to pull off would have been ambitious for a major studio, let alone a small crowdfunded team. The game’s initial release date was a laughably unrealistic Q4 2017, so it was no surprise that this would get pushed back again and again over the course of development. However, on March 24, 2020, lead developer Caspian made an announcement that rocked the community: State of Elyria: Into the Abyss (autoplay warning). In his typical long-winded fashion, Caspian spent the bulk of the post outlining the milestones the team reached over the past year, but only in the last few paragraphs did he mention that due to financial stressors from COVID-19, they ran out of money and had to lay off the entire team, shuttering development of Chronicles of Elyria. Because of several factors I’ll cover in the next few sections, the community did not take this well. In less than two weeks, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office reported they had received over 150 official complaints against Soulbound Studios, the most they had ever received for a company in that amount of time. Community whales formed a 'CoE Lawsuit' discord and discussed plans for a class-action lawsuit, demanding accountability and refunds. Some of them even pledged over $20k on the game, and they weren’t going to let Caspian cut and run. Amidst threats of legal action, on April 9 Caspian dropped another blog post, A Letter from Soulbound Studios to Our Community claiming that the March 24 post came from a “very emotional place.” He said that the community misinterpreted his intent, and that he was actually trying to communicate that he was still working on the game while looking for ways to secure additional funding. As you can expect, this was just as poorly-received as his last announcement.
Wait, why did people spend so much money on this game? And how did the drama get so spicy?
By its own design the game stirredupdrama even before release. With social stratification based on medieval feudalism literally built into the system, there was no way around it; the developers cheekily called it the “Dance of Dynasties.” There were multiple tiers of "pledges" and if I’m remembering correctly, the prices after the kickstarter were $500 for a Mayor title, $1000 for Count, and $3000 for Duke. The most coveted were of course the King/Queen titles, which had people shelling out a whopping $10000 for the chance to be royalty in an unreleased game. Even with the limited supply (6 kingdom slots per server iirc), these kingdom packages sold out all but one server. A few monarchs even purchased TWO kingdom slots to guarantee their supremacy on their chosen server. It’s very difficult to overstate the cult-like mentality of the community during the “peak” years of 2016-2018. There was an official CoE discord server where the developers frequently engaged with players, but most of the drama happened in what were called the Discords of Elyria. These were community-run discords for individual kingdoms, duchies, counties, towns, and baronies. Each had their own cliques of ‘advisors’ and elite roleplaying cabals. No, ‘elite roleplaying cabals’ is not an exaggeration; these people were spending thousands of dollars for a title to justify RPing as nobility to lord over the peasant rabble. This attracted a lot of entitled narcissists; the game’s structure practically encouraged it! I’ll give you an anecdotal example: I was really active within a kingdom discord and was eventually appointed as an advisor (the equivalent of what a guild officer would be in a normal MMO). This title was almost useless until release, so it was mainly just a glorified clique with a secret discord channel where we would theorycraft and talk shit about people we didn’t like in the kingdom. But I was the only one on the advisory council that did not possess a noble title, and a Countess kicked up a big fuss about this. Just like the real-life aristocracy, she was scandalized! Wording it in an RP-appropriate way with paragraphs of purple prose, she claimed that the $60 I pledged to the funding of the game wasn’t enough to prove I was fully committed. She and her cronies were so bothered that they tried to get me off the council. They went around DMing a bunch of people, accusing me of being a spy because I used to RP with some guy that left for a rival kingdom, and dredged up screenshots of year-old discord posts as proof my conduct was “unbecoming” of a representative of the kingdom. There’s a saga behind that story and many others; I can absolutely go into more detail in another post if enough people are interested in the byzantine “Dance of Dynasties” and the inter- and inner-kingdom drama that went down during the development of this beautiful disaster of a game… and developer involvement in said drama. If you want to waste several hours of your life, there is plentyofRPcringe archived on the read-only forums. For now, that’s just a small slice to help illustrate how detached from reality and cult-like this community was. Going back to the downfall...
Early Red Flags
As I alluded to, there were already red flags when the game was first pitched on Kickstarter. Despite hitting the initial $900k and going well into their stretch goals, the devs were still encouraging players to crowdfund long after the Kickstarter ended. There were several additional promotional events (somewhat outdated post that doesn't include everything) selling both cosmetic items and mechanically useful items, despite the developers going through hoops to justify over and over again why the game was not pay to win (it was). Eventually, the constant promotions and gamey tactics prompted community members to question why we were seeing more promotional events than development updates. The devs then admitted that the original Kickstarter campaign was meant to raise enough to be able to create a demo to attract investors and secure a stream of income that didn’t rely on crowdfunding. Unfortunately, no investors took a gamble on a risky debut from an inexperienced team, and despite Caspian making a few weird statements on Discord and implying they had “other sources” of funding that they did not have to divulge to the community, he too later admitted that they were relying solely on crowdfunding to make this game work. Well, this news was a departure from their previous claim that all they needed was 900k to develop the game for a Q4 2017 release, and that all funds would be used towards the development of Chronicles of Elyria. No one knew this was all just for a demo to attract investors, and people were justifiably upset.
The Community Begins to Turn
There was (and still is, last I checked!) a particularly loyal and obsessive subset of the community. At the slightest hint of criticism they’d quickly jump in to defend the game and devs. The community moderators were no better, and a lot of posts were censored or deleted from the forums. The developers had built up a sort of cult of personality with their over-involvement with the community. Despite a hilarious lack of transparency about the actual development of the game, they were… uncomfortably close to the playerbase. Caspian complained about specific players on the official discord and publicly accused two kingdoms of cheating during a cheap browser event meant to (surprise) raise more money. A player made a post on the forums saying the community outreach manager should be replaced (he was known for being snarky and condescending). Said community outreach manager actually private messaged people that upvoted the post, basically saying “if you think I should be replaced, please don’t contact me if you ever need anything in the future.” Yes, that came from the guy handling outreach. The "Map Selection" event was rife with its own kingdom vs kingdom drama, but the devs weren't able to redeem themselves here. After months and months of delays for a map event, Caspian failed to deliver the high-resolution maps as promised on November 5, 2018, claiming they were taking too long to render. "Remember, remember, the 5th of NoRender" became a meme and rallying cry across the community in reference to the constant delays and deception, to the point where people were banned just for saying it in the official discord. Then there was the issue of Prelyria. Prelyria was the low-poly pre-alpha client of the game they were developing. Meant to be like a graybox, it became a lot more involved than that and seemed to eclipse the development of the “real” game. People felt they had been bamboozled when they looked back: Pre-alpha video May 2016 Pre-alpha video September 2019 Some players with industry experience were pointing out that the amount of time the devs were spending on building the Prelyria assets and developing the low-poly client first (it was a lot more involved than a simple graybox) was actually going to be more cumbersome and definitely not save all the time the devs hoped it would. At this point, Caspian still looked like a well-intentioned idea guy with his head in the sky, and most people didn’t think he was intentionally scamming anyone. Personally, I believe Caspian definitely started out in earnest, but he spoiled his own vision with mismanagement and obfuscation. Funding was always a touchy subject. Despite first claiming they only needed $900k to finish the game, then saying no wait actually we need like $3 mil, Chronicles of Elyria raised almost $8 million in total and after 4 years in development had nothing close to a minimum viable product. We later learned that $500k of that initial $900k came from Caspian himself. This of course was not disclosed until after the Kickstarter. On March 20, 2020 (four days before the infamous Into the Abyss announcement), the devs released an exciting update claiming that Pre-Alpha Testing Has Officially Begun! Players that had pledged (iirc) $1000 or more now had access to test Alpha I! But excitement quickly faded as players realized this wasn’t really an alpha, but a 10-15 minute demo showing off movement and parkour mechanics and ONLY that. I didn’t have alpha access so I don’t know how bad the demo really was, and those who played it are still under NDA, but I heard it was terrible, and looked like something that could be slapped together in a couple weeks using Unity store assets. Let’s look again at the timeline Caspian pulled out at the end of 2017 when he admitted the Q4 2017 release date wasn’t going to happen:
V3 of the Website (Q3 2017)
ElyriaMUD (Q4 2017)
Alpha 1 (T1 2018)
Server Selection (T1 2018)
Settlement / Domain Selection (T2 2018)
KoE (T2 2018)
Design Experiences (T3 2018)
Alpha 2 (T3 2018)
Beta 1 (S1 2019)
Prologue & CoE Adventure Toolkit (S1 2019)
Exposition (S1 2019)
Beta 2 (S1/S2 2019)
Stress Test (Any paid account)(S2 2019)
Launch (S2 2019)
By March 2020, the only milestones they hit were V3 of the Website, Server Selection in November 2018, and Settlement/Domain Selection (after a series of delays that included a period of radio silence lasting over 100 days, it began somewhere around Summer 2019 and never officially concluded).
The Downfall
Now for the big question I’m sure all of you have: why was it such a big deal when he announced they ran out of funding? Indeed, projects are cancelled or become vaporware all of the time. While it's obvious Caspian and team were drowning in too many ideas and not enough tangible progress, why was this scummy enough to warrant hundreds of complaints to the AG and a class-action lawsuit? About a week before the March 24 announcement, Caspian launched the “Settlers of Elyria” event. It’s hard to explain out of context, but basically all the unclaimed duchies, counties, and baronies were going on sale, and players could purchase them at reduced prices. Yes, up to a day before he announced he laid off the entire team, he was allowing people to spend thousands of dollars on fake titles. Worse was the fact that this event was designed for new members of the community that didn’t have a chance to buy titles before or weren’t able to because of the prohibitive cost. Illegal? Maybe not. Fucked up? Absolutely. This, combined with Caspian taking a PPP loan right afterwards painted a damning portrait of a man squeezing every last penny out of this failed endeavor before he ran. Caspian kept the official discord open for a couple days after announcing the shuttering of the studio, but on March 29, he “fired” all of the community mods and deleted the discord, claiming that people were saying “horrible, unimaginable things” about him. There were rumors that he was cheating on his wife with a (much younger) community member. Apparently, a dev was corroborating these statements and providing receipts. Whether these awful rumors were true or not, Caspian’s reaction in the mod forum was nuclear.
The Future of CoE
After nearly six months of radio silence, a few days ago on December 17, 2020, Caspian gave interviews to MassivelyOP and MMORPG.com and released an “update” video that is a nothingburger rehash of old 'gameplay' footage and platitudes. He keeps saying that CoE is in development, but he has nothing to show. He keeps saying some of the staff have volunteered to work on it, yet based on their LinkedIn profiles it looks like most of the original team have found jobs elsewhere. He refuses to release the results of the studio’s audit. The new FAQ on the website is an obvious attempt to avoid lawsuits and in the two interviews he hilariously continues to extol his own transparency while being as transparent as a brick wall. People are still able to find justifications for Caspian's actions and to this day are in the community-run discords and subreddit trying to keep the hype train going. Maybe it's a combination of Stockholm Syndrome and Sunk Cost fallacy, but a lot of people still maintain absolute trust in his vision. I personally did not invest a significant amount of money (but I did waste my time, RIP), but it's still as saddening as it is maddening. Yes, those "Dance of Dynasty" posts on the forum might be cringey now, but people put SO MUCH creative energy and passion into coming up with lore for their kingdoms and duchies and towns and such, and despite being a skeptic for most of my time with the community, it was an incredibly unique experience to be part of this group. I just wish they would move on; put that energy into something productive and not waste it on a failed game. Caspian used them and he will continue to use them if people keep giving him a platform. EDIT: added more links EDIT2: Obligatory "wow I didn't expect this to blow up!" but I really didn't! Thanks for the gold x2!
Gotta Collect 'Em All: Hype Decks and Popular Playing Card Series When you're into cardistry, you'll know a thing or two about playing cards. They are, after all, the tools of the trade. And you'll quickly discover that there's a lot of different custom decks out there, many of which are great for card flourishing. A vast amount of cards that have already been produced, and there's steady flow of new cards that are being released on an ongoing basis. Arguably the most popular playing cards beloved by cardists and collectors alike are what some refer to as "hype decks". These are decks that have effectively become a brand of their own by virtue of their sheer popularity. In the last few years alone there are several "brands" that have generated a huge wave of momentum. Almost every new release is quickly sold out, and previous releases don't take long to fetch high prices in the secondary market, as buyers scramble to "collect 'em all". In this article we'll introduce you to some of the more popular series of this sort, which are beloved by both cardists and by playing card collectors. FONTAINES The Fontaine brand is one of the biggest and most recognizable brands in the world of playing cards today, especially in cardistry circles. When you first see a Fontaine deck of cards you might wonder why. After all, what is there to get excited about card backs which have a lower-case "f" put together in a simple and minimalist design, and card faces that are mostly standard? The reason for the success of this brand is the man behind it, Zach Mueller. Zach began making a name for himself with his creative cardistry videos, some of which went viral on youtube. Inspired by the iconic Jerry's Nugget casino deck which appears later on this list, around 2013 Zach whipped up a simple design of his own, printed the deck, and began using it in his cardistry videos. It wasn't even originally conceived as deck that would be published more widely, nor was including it in his cardistry videos originally intended as a marketing gimmick. But the popularity of his videos did have the result of producing a demand for decks like the one Zach was using. When he tried his hand at crowdfunding one, it became an instant success. Zach built on this success with further releases of the same design but in different colours, and later expanded his Fontaine brand to include clothing and other merchandise. Today the Fontaine company has a significant number of releases every year, and they are typically so much in demand that each sells out in minutes. While many of the initial decks didn't evidence much variety aside from recolouring the back design, in recent times we have witnessed some more innovation, such as collaborations with other artists, and a UV black-light edition. https://preview.redd.it/bk51kexhhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7ad5a040ac2cd67d9644f02041f3937ba2e28642 ORBITS The Orbit decks come from magician Chris "Orbit" Brown, with involvement from designer Daniel Schneider. The Orbit series is extremely popular with card flourishers, and it's not surprising why. The circle design on the card backs makes it ideal for cardistry. The first version of the deck was blue, had a print run of only 2500, and only managed to hit its Kickstarter target on the final day when it was put up for crowdfunding in 2015. In contrast, today collectors can't get enough of them! The fourth edition alone had a print run of ten times that amount, and the first few versions of the deck will now cost a pretty penny on the secondary market - if you can find them. Common to most of the decks in the series is of course the signature circle look of the card backs. But there's also the regular presence of light-hearted jokers, mini-astronauts, and even tiny orbitting rockets on the card backs, all of which capture something of the galactic and space theme, and add elements of warm humor. There have been minor tweaks to the design to ensure that each deck is not just a simple recolouring of the previous version. The V7 deck is noteworthy for its retro pink and blue colours, and for including a tribute to the failed mission of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, and has the added bonus of being a very cleverly marked deck. The face cards of the Orbit decks mostly feature a style borrowed from the classic Arrco decks, which gives them a slightly different feel from your typical Bicycle deck, while ensuring that they still have a very familiar, recognizable, and practical look. Some of the decks feature even members of the Orbit crew as the court card characters. It is certainly a successful formula, and these are versatile playing cards that are both novel and familiar enough to make them suit a variety of purposes, from card flourishing to card magic. As with most other entries on this list, the success of the series has generated an increased demand for the first decks in the series, which are not easy to get hold of. https://preview.redd.it/0lakhcmihcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=424b4fba74ee4be5d763fb2439b270df0d319019 JERRY'S NUGGET The history of the Jerry's Nugget decks is a fascinating one, and it even includes a great detective story. The short version is that these striking red and blue decks were first printed in the early 1970s for Jerry's Nugget Casino in Las Vegas. They ended up in storage instead of being used at the casino, and eventually made their way to the gift shop, where they were sold for a dollar or two each. At this point they were discovered by some big name cardists, who began popularizing them via their videos, and spoke highly of their handling qualities, which were the result of printing methods that couldn't be replicated with modern methods. The demand for them grew, but by this time they were sold out. With a limited supply and increased demand, they slowly became a holy grail for collectors, prices typically reaching $500 per deck on the market. Around 2019 Lee Asher became involved with a project to reprint the cards, to make them readily available again, and put them in the hands of a new generations of cardists and collectors. A deal was brokered between Expert Playing Card Company and Jerry's Nugget Casino, and with the help of an incredibly successful Kickstarter project that fetched nearly half a million dollars, a new edition of Jerry's Nugget decks hit the market. The new decks are almost like the original, but consist of a Modern Feel version printed by USPCC and a Vintage Feel version printed by EPCC. The scene was ripe for capitalizing on the popularity of these classic decks, and so the deck was subsequently reprinted in colours like Teal, Coral, Black, Steel Grey, Yellow, Orange, Green, and purple. There are also some limited editions like Pink, and there are even special limited editions with gilding. Many card flourishers love the minimalist look of this series, the famous name and iconic look, and the variety of different colours make them ideal for collectors. https://preview.redd.it/kuxzzlgjhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8356844549aedec90eda4b447063afc00faf88f5 CHERRY CASINO The Jerry's Nugget decks aren't the only decks that capitalize on the public interest in old-time casinos. This is also the concept that lies at the heart of the Cherry Casino decks, which is a series of playing cards produced under the Pure Imagination label. Pure Imagination Projects was founded in 2013 by Derek McKee, and the first Cherry Casino deck was produced around 2015 in a bright aqua colour. The idea was to draw on the image of an old time casino, hence the classic cherry artwork familiar from slot machines, an iconic symbol of gambling. Several versions then followed in successive years, as the Cherry Casino decks slowly grew in popularity One of the drawcards of this series is the bold metallic ink used on the cardbacks for most of these decks, which instantly sets them apart from your average deck. One of my personal favourite colours in this series is the Tahoe Blue, which is inspired by one of the clearest and deepest lakes in the United States, Lake Tahoe. The use of metallic ink on card backs creates a gorgeous and inviting pearlescent blue that is hard to get enough of. The Cherry Casino decks are also very versatile and practical, and the relatively standard card faces makes them ideal for card magic or for playing card games. Yet the striking card backs also makes them very appealing for cardists and collectors. This creates the ideal combination of something striking and something simple, which is the greatest strength of the Cherry Casino series. The vibrant and eye-catching colours, set them apart from the competition, and give them the magnetic quality that collectors look for, while they remain functional and suitable for a variety of uses. The first decks in the series are especially prized by collectors, since they are long out of print, and entered the market long before anybody realized how successful this series would become over time. https://preview.redd.it/uvqcml7khcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2ef474b844f7af286d7d3c3bf3fb5a9f67bead9e VIRTUOSO Virtuoso, commonly called The Virts, is a group of Singaporean cardists, originally founded by Huron Low and Kevin Ho. Other team members joined them over time, and they began releasing cardistry videos on their youtube channel. Around 2012 one of their cardistry videos went viral and was eventually featured on the Discovery Channel, which only increased the growing interest in their work, especially their creative card flourishing videos. It was also around this time that The Virts came up with the idea of designing a deck of card that was specifically geared towards cardistry. They used a design that was strongly geometric in flavour, and where even the court cards and number cards were optimized for card flourishing, to enhance the visual aesthetic of cards in motion. Today it's quite common for a deck to be optimized for cardistry, and there's a ready market waiting to buy decks like this. But at the time this was a groundbreaking idea, and even somewhat of a financially risky one. But card flourishers welcomed the very first Virtuoso deck with open arms, and the deck proved to be more successful than ever imagined. Since the release of their first deck, The Virts have continued to release follow-up decks on a somewhat regular basis. Typically each new release is accompanied by a flashy video that showcases the amazing cardistry of The Virts themselves, which is cleverly accentuated by their cardistry-friendly cards. Their signature geometric design is common to all of the decks released so far, and the eye-catching colours and consistently handling qualioty ensure that card flourishers love it. Recent times have seen the rate of their releases slow down, but news in 2020 about their latest deck - which is scheduled to come out in 2021 - generated a new wave of excitement. Loyalty to the Virtuoso brand and decks is evidenced by the fact that many people were ready to pre-order the new deck sight unseen. https://preview.redd.it/48zmr2okhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cd5fcc61431a3e2764fd95bb5dba12a79658817d ORGANIC PLAYING CARDS One of the more fun entries in this list are the food-inspired decks created by Organic Playing Cards (OPC). This brand is originally the brainchild of Cameron Toner and Nathan Lex, who started OPC while they were in college, combining Cameron's love for card magic and Nathan's love for cardistry. The company has since evolved, and others have come on board as they grew. Their original goal was simply to produce a fun deck of banana-themed cards, now known as Peelers V1. Since then they've gone on to produce a cornucopia of fruit-inspired novelty decks. The concept of what you can expect from an OPC deck is a simple one. Typically it's a deck that features two pieces of fruit on the card backs, some humorous changes to the court cards that incorporate that fruit, an adjusted colour scheme, and a fun take on the tuck box. For example, the Squeezers V1, V2, and V3 decks are orange, lemon, and grape-fruit themed retrospectively, and the tuck boxes are designed to look like juice boxes, complete with an ingredient list. The Snackers decks are themed on strawberries and blackberries, and come in a resealable package typical of a bag of candies, and even include an artificially added scent that smells like the fruit. The latest additions to this popular series have included an avocado themed deck (Avocardos), and in somewhat of a departure from the usual fruit theme and look, a corn-themed harvest deck (Shuckers). So they are exploring new directions, but they haven't run out of fruit just yet, and I look forward to see what they come up with next. https://preview.redd.it/56o6yqelhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b9aec71b43d043c10980cee343e3bf3e8ffed30 WHAT TO BUY AND HOW MUCH TO PAY? Buying and pricing In the end, you should buy what you like, not what other people tell you to like. But how much do these decks typically cost? Latest releases typically sell at retail price, and don't cost a fortune. Although in some cases, especially with in-demand brands like Fontaines, you have to be right at your computer when a new deck is released, and be among the first set of buyers who are fortunate enough process a purchase in the few minutes before they are sold out. Otherwise you'll have to rely on resellers, some of which can have inflated prices. Older decks for virtually all of these series, however, tend to command much higher prices. This is simply a matter of supply and demand: as the number of collectors grows, more and more people want them, while the supply is limited, because the original decks are long out of print and out of stock at retailers. You'll have to rely on the secondary market to try to source these, and expect to dig deeper in your wallet if you want to get first and second edition decks of many of the above series. Investing and re-selling When collectors see some of these decks selling for over $100 on the secondary market, it can be tempting to think that it's a good idea to buy a stash of decks in the hope that you'll hit a jackpot with a brick of decsk that will be worth a bundle down the line. The reality is that this is hard to predict. When most of these decks were first released, nobody knew that they would become big hits over time. It's only as a series or brand generates momentum and establishes a loyal following, that the prices of the original editions start to rise. For example, I have a Peelers V1 deck, and these are now worth up to US$150 today. At the time I picked it up, it was just a novelty deck from an unknown brand, and I used it as an everyday deck for card games and card magic. Who was to know the success that OPC would later become? Meanwhile I've just been using it casually for card games! Much the same is true for the very first Fontaines deck, which costs a fortune now, but at the time was really just an ordinary deck. The playing card market is fickle and future hits are almost impossible to predict. If you want to earn money, rather than gambling on playing cards, you're better off spending your time working for money at your regular day job. Other popular series Are there other series besides the ones covered above? For sure. Daniel Schneider's series of Black Roses deck also has its passionate collectors, as do the Golden Nugget decks, the Gemini Casino decks, and the NOC decks. The Planets series by Vanda was also popular for some time, but with the release of all the planets this is obviously now complete. There are also people who collect anything produced by a particular brand, such as Anyone Playing Cards. Perhaps even that new release you're thinking of purchasing will become the start of a successful new series or brand - you can never really tell! https://preview.redd.it/ppwyhb5mhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=75a4ee69f8af72d0c022c24d50e3581b80066959 HAS THE INDUSTRY JUMPED THE SHARK? More and more, faster and faster In the first few years of the boom in the playing card market that was created by the arrival of crowdfunding around 2009, new releases were typically produced either as a mass market deck, or as a numbered limited edition. That seems to have changed in the last few years, and the number of permutations for a particular deck seems to be more than ever before. First of all we get recoloured versions of the same deck, multiple times over. Then in addition we get a numbered deck, and a gilded deck... and multiple combinations of all of these. It starts to become impossibles for collectors to get a complete collection. In addition, in some cases, a very limited edition of a popular series is produced at a high price tag, like the $75 Cherry Casino House Decks, putting it out of the reach of most collectors, except those with very deep pockets. In other cases, companies are releasing decks in different colours so fast (here's looking at you, Jerry's Nuggets), that collectors can hardly keep up. The inevitable question arises whether some of these developments are unhealthy. How much is too much? All this understandably makes some collectors begin to feel a little jaded, and wonder if some of these series have jumped the shark. Are some creators starting to take the mickey out of collectors, knowing that they will want to "collect 'em all", even if they have to spend ridiculous amounts to do so? Is this capitalism gone mad, and are producers becoming too motivated by trying to make big bucks? If this trend continues, it can start to feel like price-gouging and greed, and creators run the risk of sucking the joy out of collecting, and losing their customers. All this means that producers have to be careful in the decisions they make about what they release, and not simply be motivated by making money. Collect 'em all? But there's a lesson in this too. It doesn't make sense to mindlessly collect every single thing. But if you do think carefully about what you want to collect, it can be a lot of fun to collect series like the ones covered here. By all means collect 'em! But maybe just not all of them. At least, not all the time. https://preview.redd.it/c50y53umhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3f00f71fa02141ee251913695a2cc7fba823a260 Author's note: I first published this article at PlayingCardDeckshere.
Introduction We're all familiar with the Hotline Miami's, Hollow Knight's, and Celeste's of the world. These are some of the indie games that hit the big time. Of course, for every one of these games, there's 100 other indie games that have been glossed over, relegated to a spot in a digital store few people will ever find themselves in. I wanted to bring attention to some of these lesser known indie games. I'm going to order them according to Metacritic Critic Ratings. Some of the games towards the bottom have a pretty low rating that I personally disagree with, but it's only fair that you hear from more than just me. While the reviews are low for some games, this is partly due to how few reviews there are for some games. #19 on the list has a 49% for the Xbox One version of the game due to it only having two reviews, while the PlayStation 4 version has a 90% rating due to it only having one review, despite both versions being functionally the same. This high level of variance usually occurs when a game only has a few reviews. Price will include a link to the U.S. store page of the game. Price is in U.S. dollars. 1. Inertial Drift
Includes a Separate 2 Player Local Competitive/Versus Multiplayer Mode
Description: Inertial Drift's distinguishing characteristic is its employment of the right analog stick for drifting. This takes a little getting used to, but it feels great once you get the hang of it, creating some exhilarating moments when perfecting corner turns. The game has 10 unique tracks + 10 reversed tracks, 16 vehicles, and four separate story arcs. Each story arc is only a couple of hours long and features a different protagonist with a different vehicle. Since you’ll be racing on the same track a few times, there are a few gameplay variations that differ from just reaching the finish line at the end, such as racking up a certain number of points that are acquired through longer drift times and other means. There's quite a bit of dialogue between races, and in the races themselves characters will frequently dish out positive commentary on your performance in the form of text in the top left hand corner of the screen. The game's aesthetics are a fusion of anime and synthwave. I've heard many fans liken the game to the manga Initial D, though I'm unfamiliar with that series myself.
Completion Time: ~3 Hours (for 1/4 Story Arcs)
Extra Content: There are a number of different modes including a Story Mode, Challenge Mode, Grand Prix Mode, Arcade Mode, two player Split-Screen, and Online, as well as a Tutorial. Completion of challenges in Challenge Mode allows you to unlock new vehicles for the other non-Story Modes. Grand Prix Mode allows you to race using different characters/vehicles through a connected set of challenges, while Arcade Mode is for one-off races. I wouldn't recommend this game for online play as the user-base is pretty small (hence it being overlooked) and you're unlikely to find a match. Getting all the achievements is fairly difficult.
Description: This is an action platformer that emulates arcade games from the latter half of the 1980s, but it is probably most reminiscent of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts. The creator, Locomalito, states that the soundtrack uses the true arcade sound of the YM2203 chip. The game is hard, but the checkpoints are never more than a minute or two apart, and the lives' system/continue system has no penalties outside of locking you out of achievements. This is a very boss dense game - in the ~4 hour run-time it takes to complete the game, you fight 19 bosses. The handful of weapons and items you pick up helps lend variety to the combat, and no two boss fights feel the same.
Completion Time: ~4 Hours
Extra Content: The game has two endings. Most players will get the bad ending the first time around and be locked out of the final stage (which is the longest stage in the game). You do have to play through the game again to get the good ending, but you'll likely do it in half the time. If you want to see all the major content on your first go around, I recommend looking up how to get the good ending before you play the game. If you do achieve the good ending on your first playthrough, the completion time is probably closer to six hours. As far as achievements are concerned, 100% completion is very difficult to obtain. If you like an extreme challenge, this one's for you.
Description: Valfaris acts as a continuation of Slain - the developer's previous work - but it’s not necessary to play Slain first to understand the story of Valfaris. While Slain was mostly just a slightly above average action platformer, Valfaris is one of the best run & gun games I've ever played. You play as Prince Therion who returns to his home planet of Valfaris on a quest to kill his father. It's themed around a fictional planet and has a gross alien vibe coupled with heavy metal music. The music doesn't override the other audio in the game, and it does a nice job of upping the ante when you're fighting a boss – of which there are many. You're equipped with a primary gun, a more powerful mana-based gun, a sword, and a shield that can block with mana or parry.
Description Continued: There are a number of weapons to acquire throughout the game, and the guns in particular do a great job of feeling different. You’re able to upgrade your weapons with Blood Metals. Some Blood Metals are found in plain sight, others are rewarded for defeating a tough enemy, and some are given for going off the beaten path. These upgrades typically just up the firepower but will sometimes introduce a secondary move to your weapon. There are checkpoints every two minutes or so, and most bosses will have a checkpoint just before them (only the weaker bosses come after a gauntlet of enemies). The game is a little hard at points, but overall it strikes a nice balance of feeling accomplished for overcoming the challenges without getting overly frustrating.
Completion Time: ~8 Hours
Extra Content: There are a few secrets to find throughout the game that are off the beaten path, though I was able to find 2/3 of them on my first playthrough. I found all but one weapon as well. The replayability comes from New Game+, which allows you to take all your upgraded weapons into a harder version of the game. Since the weapons all function a bit differently, this can be lots of fun. There are also some achievements that test your skills further, like finishing the game in two hours or beating the game with 10 or less deaths.
Description: This is a 3D platformer that reportedly takes inspiration from both MediEvil and Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. There’s about equal amounts of platforming and combat in this game. While the combat is relatively simple, you’re given a variety of weapons that all feel unique. The levels have a good amount of variety within them – you’ll jump between ships on a ferry ride, ride an undead horse through the sky, play a few mini games as a headless Jack, and fight a boss at the end of each of the six levels. Both the combat and platforming are relatively easy – platforms are typically large and Jack has an edge grab that helps tremendously, and smashing the many destructible objects around the levels increases your health. This game takes the linear adventure approach, with a number of collectibles sprinkled throughout the levels: crow skulls, presents, and gramophones. Some areas are more open and allow you to choose the order in which you do certain tasks. The game has a decent amount of dialogue in it, which does an effective job of giving some character to Jack, his two animal companions, and the rest of the cast. The visuals and soundtrack are particularly great, especially if you’re into Halloween themed media.
Completion Time: ~4 Hours
Extra Content: There’s collectibles to back for – I got about 2/3 of the collectibles on my first playthrough – skins to unlock – which are purchased with the collectibles you find in the levels – and you get to start a second playthrough with all the weapons already unlocked at the beginning
Description: Pato Box follows an anthropomorphic duck boxer on an adventure through a stylistic noir comic book world. “Pato” is a Spanish word that translates to “Duck” in English (the game was developed by a Mexican studio). The boss fights are heavily inspired by Punch-Out’s gameplay, but there are levels outside of these fights to help differentiate it. Most of the levels can be selected in any order you choose and typically serve as a leadup to the boss fight. Bosses are usually introduced by a cutscene followed by some dialogue taunting Pato Box. The levels play entirely differently from the fights, but the themes of the level match those of the bosses. The levels will employ various elements of evasion, stealth, exploration, and a few time-based mini-games. The casino level, for example, will have you walk around the casino looking for chips and punching the slot machines to earn enough to pay entrance to the fight, while the food factory has you evading stompers, sawblades, and butcher knives as you work your way through the level.
Description Continued: There are variety of things to find throughout the levels: tokens for decorations in Pato Box’s room, backstory on the boss of the level and the world, and tips on how to win the upcoming fight. The fights themselves lock Pato Box in the middle of the screen, allowing you to block, juke left or right, and perform a low or high jab to the left or right. Bosses are dynamic and have a number of different phases to fight through. The game foregoes a HUD in favor of a visual representation of your health via scars on your body, which I thought was a nice touch. While the levels and bosses play pretty differently from each other, they’re weaved together by a dark and intriguing story that follows Pato Box’s quest for retribution against an evil corporation.
Completion Time: ~7 Hours
Extra Content: There’s an Arcade Mode that lets you replay boss fights and some collectibles to find in the main campaign. The achievements are very difficult, and many ask you to beat a boss without taking a single hit.
Description: Ultra Hat Dimension follows Bea through a series of rooms in a palace on a quest to undo the magical spell that has made the mythical Spluff creatures want to attack one another. There is a little bit of backstory via one sentence thoughts from Bea in between levels, but nothing major here. The gameplay revolves equipping four different types of hats and using them to evade or push Spluffs around to retrieve the key and reach the door. Each Spluff dons one of four different hats which effects their behavior towards other Spluffs and you. You will be punched one tile back by every Spluff unless you’re wearing the same hat as the Spluff. Spluffs interact with one another differently depending on what hat they’re wearing in a rock, paper, scissors kind of way – they may punch a Spluff back one space, get into a scuffle that allows you to get close to them without wearing a hat, or they may temporarily disable them in a way that allows you to access the space the Spluff consumes within eight moves. There are undo and reset buttons included that allow you to quickly rewind mistakes. There are some clever puzzles accompanied by catchy tunes and a charming pixel art aesthetic. The difficulty is about average.
Completion Time: ~3 Hours
Extra Content: Since this is published by Ratalaika Games, getting all the achievements can be obtained after only clearing 2/3 of the levels. There are a few custom maps on the PC version of the game but no additional content on consoles.
Description: Usually with Metroidvanias, I expect a long, difficult game that's difficult to navigate. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight is a counter to those ideas while still maintaining the exploratory nature of the sub-genre. The plot is pretty simple and doesn't feature a ton of story, but there are a few NPCs you talk to throughout your quest. The combat is also fairly simple, but the boss fights you engage in are all great. Without much weapon customization, it's stripped to the basics of dodging enemy attacks while trying to get a hit in. It makes for a game that's easy to get into and instantly start enjoying. All of the areas are visually appealing, some more than others, and each of them lasts shorter than you'd expect. The game is only around 3-5 hours, but it feels like you've played so much more in that time. Some games only really start to take off by the time this game finishes.
Completion Time: ~4 Hours
Extra Content: Getting 100% map completion should only take an hour or two of cleanup. I did miss an optional boss on my first playthrough. There are also items to discover, and the achievements give fun challenges to extend the life of the game. One cool thing I liked was that beating a boss without getting hit at all gives you a useful item. It also features New Game+, allowing you to carry over most of your items, making the game more difficult, and changing up enemy placement.
Description: The Count Lucanor’s story is very fairy tale-esque – more like a classic fairy tale as it can be pretty dark and grotesque at times. On his 10th birthday, Hans chooses to leave his mother in a quest for wealth. After some walking and conversation with NPCs you find along the way, you stumble upon a large mansion and find that the count of this mansion is looking to pass his wealth onto an heir who can prove himself worthy – “worthy” in this case being the one who can figure out the count’s name. From here, you are tasked with adventuring through the mansion and solving environmental puzzles in a nonlinear way to acquire the letters that spell the count’s name. There is a survival horror element to the game, as you are unable to attack the enemies in the mansion and instead must crawl under tables and find other ways around them. You can place candles around the mansion to light it up to help you better evade enemies, but your usage is limited (though you can find more).
Completion Time: ~4 Hours
Extra Content: There are five different endings and some puzzles/rooms you don’t even have to do. This could double your playtime – maybe even more if you don’t use a guide. You have to get all five endings and do some other miscellaneous stuff to get all achievements, but it has a relatively high completion rate.
Description: If you liked Detroit: Become Human or Until Dawn, Late Shift will be right up your alley. This game is a bit different from both those titles in that it's an FMV, with the gameplay solely consisting of the choices you make. You receive prompts at key moments in the story on what you want your character to do next, and this effects the outcome of the game. It plays more like Black Mirror's Bandersnatch, though this game came before it. The story follows an everyman who gets tangled up in London's criminal underground just as a result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Completion Time: ~1.5 Hour Completion Time*
Extra Content: There are 180 choice points and 7 different endings. I only got 4 out of 21 of the achievements on my first playthrough. There are a number of different routes to take with the game.
10. Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure
Includes a Separate 4 Player Local Competitive/Versus Multiplayer Mode
Description: Unbox takes heavy inspiration from Banjo Kazooie and other collectathons of the fifth generation but has levels far larger than any Nintendo 64 platformer. Fortunately your customizable character can cover huge amounts of ground very quickly via the unbox mechanic, which is basically a super jump you can use up to six times before you need replenishment via item pickups or checkpoints. Both the jump and unbox mechanic are tied to the shoulder buttons, which takes some getting used to but is ultimately one I’m in favor of, as it allows for camera control without removing your thumb from the jump or unbox buttons. The high speeds you can travel make for some great exploration, but the game is still able to disable your ability to unbox by giving you a “fragile” item, allowing for more carefully considered platforming sections.
Description Continued: Each of the three major worlds have four major collectibles: 200 gold tape, 10 caged zippies, 18 stamps, and 1 super stamp rewarded upon defeating the boss of the world. There is also a hub world that has just 200 gold tape to collect. The 18 stamps are the jiggies or stars of the game, and they’re primarily what you’re after to advance the game. 9 of them are hidden across the world, while the other 9 are given by NPCs upon the completion of a task: Digi will ask you to take an item from point A to point B with some platforming in between, Dash will ask you to complete three races around different areas of the map, Superbox will ask you to destroy 20 enemies in X amount of time, etc. The other collectibles simply unlock more cosmetic options for your character.
Completion Time: ~7 Hours
Extra Content: The game only requires you collect 2/3 of the stamps to beat the game. If you want to collect all the stamps, zippies, and gold tape, this could more than double your playtime, as the worlds are massive and finding all the gold tape is a daunting task, though they do make a distinct noise when you are near them once you’ve collected half of them in a level. Your friendly companion Bounce will also give you visual clues on where to find whatever collectible you might be stuck on. I was able to find all the collectibles in the first world but three gold tape with next to no issues, though Bounce helped me with the remaining three. I really have to commend the developers for their inclusion of both audio cues and visual guides built within the game to guide you to collectibles – it makes collecting every last thing a lot less tedious. The high speeds of your character allow you great traversal of the world, which also helps with collecting everything. The achievements require you to collect everything. In addition to the single player campaign, there are quite a few local multiplayer modes for up to four players – these include Boxing, Collect, Thief, Oddbox, and Delivery. The developers go into more detail on each mode here.
Description: This is the sequel to the original 2D PC exclusive from 2017, with another 3D sequel currently in production. If you care at all for the story, it’s recommended you play or at least read about what happened in the first game. Spark 2 actually follows Fark, another jester. Spark 2 emulates many of the high speed moments found in 3D Sonic games, but brings a few ideas of its own. In particular, action is a bigger focus in this game, though platforming is still the priority. Enemies are easy enough to run past with a few exceptions for mini bosses at the end of some levels and the nine main bosses. In addition, enemies can also add to your score.
Description Continued: In addition to Fark’s expanded move-set in combat, he also has the ability to double jump, dash, and wall jump. The jumps give you a lot of air time, lending more leniency to the platforming, and the dash is great for building momentum. There’s quite a bit to explore in each level too – jumping off ramps in the middle of loopdeloops will sometimes result in you finding the game’s main collectible, floppy disks. Fark can also acquire four additional costumes found within the levels that offer some variation in abilities. The game offers five difficulties at the start, with it recommending the second easiest option, Normal, as the default way to play your first time through. Bosses on this difficulty are fairly easy provided you’re competent with timing when to use your shield, though I did lose once or two against a few of them.
Description: Remothered: Tormented Fathers feels very old school in its design philosophy - no weapons outside a few self defense items and distraction items. You go back and forth in the mansion and have to learn the layout and where things are to proceed. You have to manually select the key item from your inventory to use on triggers (but a key icon is still shown to guide you a little). The sounds in this game do a great job of evoking tension, and I appreciate that the stalkers don’t seem to teleport, so if you can get away from them, you’ve earned your freedom for awhile. This is the first game in a loosely connected trilogy. The second one - Remothered: Broken Porcelain just released last month, but I've heard it's pretty buggy at the moment and not recommended in its current state.
Completion Time: ~6 Hours
Extra Content: There are some collectibles you can go back for, but not a whole beyond that. You’ll probably get most of the achievements – if not all, except the collectibles one - on your first playthrough.
Description: The premise of the game is a fusion of side scrollers and oldschool fixed screens that teleport you to the opposite side of the screen when you pass through one side - think Pac-Man, arcade Mario Bros., or Balloon Fight. You will find obstacles in your path that are impenetrable in a typical side scroller, but can be overcome by holding a button to turn the screen into a fixed screen that allows you to pass through one side and out through the other end. This is a totally unique take on a puzzle platformer I haven't seen before, and all five worlds bring something new to the table. For example, World 2 will flip you upside down when you pass through a screen, allowing new types of challenges as a result. There's more emphasis on the puzzle elements than the platforming.
Completion Time: ~2 Hours
Extra Content: There is a New Game+, but from what I could tell from the beginning it wasn't a whole lot different. Still, there's an achievement for completing New Game+ and some other fun achievements.
Description: SINNER is a Soulslike boss rush - there are no levels and only small area before each boss to practice your moves. There are eight bosses, the first seven allowing you to fight in any order, each representing the seven deadly sins. You are equipped with everything the game has to offer from the beginning (except for the New Game+ weapon they give you), and instead of becoming more powerful, you gradually lose things with each boss you defeat, hence the “sacrifice” in the title. It’s like a reverse RPG. Each boss has a different sacrifice associated to it – one may deplete your throwing items’ usage, while another will deplete your health and stamina. Picking the best order to fight them in adds a little strategic thinking to the game, as you may be more dependent on your large health and stamina bar more than your throwing items’ usage, for example. The game is fairly difficult, so your victories over each boss feel very gratifying when they do come.
Completion Time: ~5 Hours
Extra Content: There is New Game+ that offers you an additional weapon. The achievements task you with a few things you have to pull off in battles, and getting all the achievements is pretty easy to obtain.
Description: Reportedly inspired by obscure Japanese games from the late 1980s and 1990s, Tamashii blends puzzle platforming together with an oppressive atmosphere. The introduction starts with the character being willed into existence by a godlike character that tasks him with destroying the macabre forces that have taken control of and corrupted his chambers. Your character is able to spawn three inanimate clones of himself which is the primary source for most of the platforming and some of the boss fights – you’ll use them to trigger switches and open up new paths. There’s about an even mix of puzzle solving and platforming, and there’s a whole eight bosses in this short adventure (though one is a secret) that are probably the most visually interesting moments in the game. The creatures and backgrounds are effective in selling the dark presentation of the game. The difficulty is about average – maybe slightly easier than most indie puzzle platformers. There is a sequel currently in the works.
Completion Time: ~2.5 Hours
Extra Content: There are a few obscure secrets to discover. You can also play through the chambers again with a score meter, and there are certain achievements associated with getting a good score. Getting all the achievements isn’t too difficult, but you’ll probably need a guide for some of the secrets.
Description: Verlet Swing’s aesthetic is as intriguing as its gameplay: you are tasked with grappling and swinging yourself across these vaporwave styled levels without hitting anything. The levels are all very short, but you’re likely to play many levels dozens of times before even finishing it… just to get a 1/4 rank. The ranking system is actually very cool, in that it encourages you to find alternative paths or sometimes just building up more momentum to get to the end faster. Most levels do seem to have a set path, but at the same time, with the proper grappling of the mechanics, you can forge your own, which is a game in itself.
Completion Time: ~7 Hours
Extra Content: There’s an in game challenge menu that mostly recycles a lot of the base game content – though there’s a particularly funny one that switches the perspective to third person to play as a knockoff Spiderman. You can also go back and try to get the best possible time for each level. Getting all achievement is extremely difficult.
Description: Warlock’s Tower’s puzzles are built around the movement of the player. There are numbers on the ground for the player to pick up – either 3 or 5 – and this gives the player a set number of steps before they die. Your goal in every level is to make it to an exit, and you’ll have to acquire the numbers in an order that gets you there. It is a bit easy in the beginning but eventually works up to be a challenge in the later levels as more elements are introduced: enemies, teleporters, conveyors, and even controlling two characters at once that share movement usage. The game has a very believable GameBoy aesthetic and sound effects to accompany it, and it works for this slower paced tile-based game.
Completion Time: ~6 Hours
Extra Content: This is published by Ratalaika Games, but surprisingly enough, you actually have to beat the game and find a few NPCs hidden in certain levels to get all achievements. There are optional levels in each world that don’t have any achievements attached to them, and this should add a few hours to the game.
Description: The Bunker is an FMV point & click adventure, meaning it features real actors and environments just like a live action movie. Many of the actors involved have been in high profile movies/TV shows as well, including The Hobbit, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and Penny Dreadful. The game takes place in a fallout shelter and follows the last survivor as he tries to find a way outside following the death of his mother, after living 30+ years in the bunker. The gameplay has you solving puzzles and finding ways to proceed to the next area. The story is the focal point of the game though, and it frequently switches between the past and the present to tell its story. There’s a good juxtaposition between the lively past and the lonely present that makes you question how the protagonist ended up as the last survivor. There’s only one narrative choice to make in the game, and it comes at the very end. The game also works in handheld mode with touchscreen functionality if you'd prefer to play it that way.
Completion Time: ~2. Hour Completion Time*
Extra Content: You can replay the game and try to find all the collectibles. Most of them give more background on the story. You can trigger the ending you did not choose the first time around by simply reloading the last checkpoint, so there is no need to play through the whole game again to unlock it. Getting all the achievements is fairly easy.
Description: Hayfever is a precision platformer that revolves around a mailman propelling himself using a number of different allergens that act as power-ups. A lot of the platforming is aerial and typically has you catching allergens mid-air to perform maneuvers in quick succession. It's not an easy game by any means, but it has oddly relaxing music to accompany the rather intense platforming. There are also letters to collect in each level to steepen the challenge and some secrets to discover too. It takes an hour or so to get used to the aerial platforming, and this is one of the few 2D platformers played better with the analog stick rather than the D-Pad. But letters that seemed unattainable to me at the beginning of the game became much simpler by the end, as I had mastered the controls and physics of the game. I’ve played a ton of 2D platformers, and this is one of my favorites.
Completion Time: ~8 Hours
Extra Content: It'll take another 8 hours or so to collect all the letters and probably about 6 hours or so to beat the Hard World, which features an additional 28 remixed levels. There are also secrets to uncover, but they don't net any in game progress and only work towards your achievement completion. Finding these secrets will probably vary more in time because they are hidden, but expect them to take a few hours to find. Just to clarify, letters are an expanded test of your platforming skills and are all in clear view of the screen, while secrets are a test of your observational skills and take a little more digging to finish. Attaining all achievements is a fair and rewarding challenge that took me about 25-30 hours to get.
Description: Cybarian has an interesting yet simple combat system that distinguishes itself from most action platformers. Instead of mashing the attack button, you have to press it once, wait two seconds for the animation to complete, press it again, wait two seconds for the animation to complete, and then press it again to complete a full combo. It sounds like something that's easy to get down quickly, but I found myself still occasionally going too quickly in the intensity of a boss fight. The game punishes you by not fulfilling the attack if you button mash. After each boss fight, you unlock a new move that will be required to fell some foes in the next stage. Conversely, you can play Hard Mode which unlocks all moves right from the get-go, but you'll have to beat all four stages without dying. "Hardcore Mode" would've been a more apt description of this difficulty setting, I feel.
Completion Time: ~1.5 Hours
Extra Content: Just like with Ultra Hat Dimension and Warlock’s Tower, this is a Ratalaika Games published game, so getting all the achievements can be achieved in under an hour. It would've been nice if they pushed you to beat Hard Mode, but you'll just have to settle for internal gratification instead.
Conclusion My top 5 on the list in order would be the following: (1.) Hayfever, (2.) Valfaris, (3.) Cursed Castilla: (Maldita Castilla EX), (4.) Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, and (5.) Pumpkin Jack. Have you played any of these games? What are some other overlooked single player indie games? See my post below for some upcoming indie games to look out for.
The Blacknickel Guide to Famous Landmarks: The Thing on the Greenwich Steps (Part One)
Travel Tip: Don’t Take Coins From the Greenwich Steps Location: A Long, Red Brick Stair Near Coit Tower, San Francisco Fond of urban hikes? Coit Tower is one of the most popular day-hike destinations for travelers in San Francisco. Don’t worry; even if you fail to reach the tower before closing time, there’s a spectacular urban-ocean view from the parking lot. Collectors will want to stop by Coit Tower’s glowing penny-press machine to get a coin stamped with the iconic tower silhouette. There’s nothing wrong with doing this. In fact, I encourage it if you are traveling with children. Visitors also leave pennies scattered on the wide stone slab window ledges on top of Coit Tower, itself. As with most coin-based rituals, it’s better to leave a penny than to take one . . . but these specific coins are not the ones that do harm. A three-minute stroll from the tower, you may notice a secluded stair. This red brick stairway, called the Greenwich Steps, is actually a landmark “street” offering travelers a shortcut down a lush hillside garden. Even in summertime, the cool green shade on the steps may prompt you to pull up your jacket collar. I say shortcut, but at 387 steps, the stair won’t feel that short. It descends the hill in crooked segments, and the brick gives way to concrete halfway down. At the bottom, you will be unceremoniously deposited between a residential garage and a frank Slippery When Wet sign. But from there it’s an easy twelve minutes on foot to the Embarcadero, the historic Ferry Building with its clock tower, shopping, restaurants, and a science museum that sells adults-only tickets on certain Thursday nights-- for those of you not traveling with children. I only meant to walk the Greenwich Steps twice during my stay. Once up. Once down. You should be fine so long as you simply keep moving. If you encounter a local tending the flowers, it’s okay to nod in passing. Just don’t stop to pick up any coins. I don’t care if you see coins on the steps, by the steps, in the foliage, or piled on top of an old-fashioned brick pillar at the halfway point. It might look like pennies, dimes, or a bright silver dollar. Do not pick up any of it. If your child finds a Greenwich Coin, stay calm. Consequences are rarely severe for children. The problem lies in what you’ll have to do to keep it that way. There’s one way to deflect the consequences of taking a Greenwich Coin. Trade. Use a trinket, a piece of candy, make a promise-- whatever gets the coin out of their hands. Then discreetly toss it into the underbrush. Your child won’t carry the onus of the Coin after trading it away. The downside is that you will. You touched it; you took possession of it for a short time. You aren’t the prey it wants, but by the laws that govern it, you’re still fair game. If a stranger approaches you or your child directly after you’ve thrown away a Greenwich Coin, don’t get ruffled. Stick to your travel plans and do not deviate. Don’t listen, don’t give them anything, do not confront. Pretend they aren’t even there. Trust me, if there’s ever been a tourist trap, con, or scam artist that you’d want to avoid, it’s this one. They’re after more than your wallet. Collectors, look. You’re going to be in the most trouble here. I’m sorry. I know it’ll really test your self-restraint when that Steel Wheat Cent or whatever turns up underfoot. Just keep in mind that the steeper the value of the coin, the deeper the shit you’re in if you grab it. Best thing you can do is kick it off the stairs to protect the next traveler who ventures along. A stranger will come for you if you’ve taken a Greenwich Coin. Usually it happens on the steps, but you can’t rule out the garden, the parking lot, or the tower grounds. Careful, because locals often go jogging up the Greenwich Steps, and sometimes the stranger will pose as just another jogger. It’s unnerving how fast it closes the distance. If being pursued, seek shelter in the popular mermaid-themed cafe near the bottom of the Steps. Yeah, I mean it. Order a drink you’ve ordered many times before-- that’s important, it helps. Trust me when I say this is better than the alternative. In the old days you’d need a church. A lot of travelers would fail to reach one in time. Now we have other options. Any place that is iconic, ritualized, and identical wherever you go can function as a sanctuary in a pinch. If you still have the Greenwich Coin on you, I’m sorry, but you have to drop it in the tip jar now. If you don’t, you’re going to need more help than a barista can provide. (If you are a barista working near the Greenwich Steps, don’t be alarmed. You’ve probably taken home a Greenwich Coin at least once, but it’s lost the power to hurt you. Ritual acts of selflessness are powerful like that). Here’s the thing about sanctuary: it’s temporary. The thing hunting you will have difficulty crossing the threshold, though, so once you’re in, you’ve got a brief grace period to work with. I have to admit, I’ve been that traveler feverishly searching the internet for advice while a cold drink sweats in my hand and a monstrosity paces outside. The last time this happened, it casually slid a finger along the window to distract me. It looked human. They often do. It was even pretending to talk on the phone. Or . . . thinking back, that phone call might’ve been real. Muffled, but I could still make out the words: “Quite close. Yes, it’s that one.” Said while arrhythmically tapping the glass in front of my head. Shit. I think I know who it called that day. Back on track: the thing coming after your Greenwich Coin might look like anyone. Could be that man in a business suit, or that woman in sweats. Whatever you’re most attracted to. And no, it’s not necessarily carnal attraction . . . although it could easily exploit that. No. It’s whatever best draws you astray. You involved in a niche hobby? Got a favorite show, a band, or a game you can’t resist talking about? It’ll paint itself in your stripes, sing out to you in a voice familiar. For me, it appeared as an older woman: denim jacket, bangles, sitting across the historic brick steps with one bare foot. She held her ankle as if it hurt. Her race and other details are not important. You shouldn’t expect any of that to be the same when it comes for you. I can’t say she reminded me of someone specific (I have suspicions). That tug of concern, though: I felt it, crisp as torn paper. The wind tugged silver hair about her shoulders as she called out. “Please, help me up?” Of course I knelt by her and asked what happened. Look, I’d read up on travel hazards before leaving home. No book, blog, or article ever warned me about a thing that doesn’t have its own face. Most travel guides deal in bog-standard reality. Which bus to catch, local eats, how much tickets cost. I had faith in my wits and good fortune. After all, I’d just picked up a rare nickel at the bottom of the Greenwich Steps. I’m not going to tell you the specific nickel, but it was good. The buy a house with cash kind. I’ve always wanted my own land. A place to call mine. You know what happens to your brain when you get hit with that kind of euphoria, jet-lagged in a strange city? Yeah. I was daydreaming up those steps. I offered the stranger my hand. She pointed up through the green canopy. I thought it meant she lived in one of the square-topped residential buildings on the other side. She leaned on me as she hobbled. I kept a few fingers free to cover the sling-bag containing my passport, phone, and all my money. Yeah, I thought myself quite clever for making sure no one could pick my pocket, even as the stranger literally led me up the garden path. “Here,” she said. The stair is steep, and most of it’s framed by safety rails. But there are gaps. She passed through one, still gripping my hand, and limped right into the humps of yellow sorrel and baby’s tears. I tried not to let her pull me off the stair. I made all the usual protests. I don’t think there’s a path here. Ma’am? I’m not comfortable doing this. Please, stop. Let go of my hand. Hey! She didn’t even look back. Her grip tightened, and she dragged me over the edge before I could scrabble for a handhold. I lurched. You know those dreams where something has grabbed you, and your attempts to struggle make no difference? You just flail, and the teeth sink deeper. Her nails bit into my hand. She stepped out of her remaining shoe and kicked it aside. Her limp was gone. We plunged under the myriad arms of an Angel’s Trumpet. That’s a tree you’ll see more than one of, here. The tined ivory blossoms whisked over my head and shoulders, dusting me in its sticky-sugar scent. I’ve hated that smell ever since. I fumbled my phone out of my travel bag with my free hand. But I unlocked it sloppy-- right into camera mode. The second try got me a transit map. Third: home screen. No signal. Don’t give up if you can’t get a signal. Emergency services might work anyway (might). But don’t squander your chance. I kept making false starts, hunched against the stranger’s pull. Everyone thinks they can dial for help as easy as 3-2-1. But you’d be surprised how wrong-handed you get in a crisis. You thumb open your work contacts, because that’s how you’re used to starting calls. Or you get as far as the keypad and mash the numbers in wrong. Ever had shaky hands? Just save emergency service lines into your phone. Even the easy ones. When I finally got a call out, it rang twice. The first trill was scratchy. The second slid off-pitch, as though falling into the distance. Then the call disconnected. The ground dipped. It shouldn’t have; we’d been going uphill in a steady, inexorable climb. A sylvan hollow spread before us. Ancient cedars and spruce repeated into the gloom, all festooned in lichen. Far off lay the mossy corpse of a tree-- where tourists and concrete should have been. Golden strings caught sun in its branches. Spider silk. There’s a primeval rainforest hidden between the shadows of the Greenwich Steps. Not a jungle. The cold kind, with evergreens and fog. The stranger flung me into it. My phone bounced out of my grip. I caught my footing, wheeling to face her. But she-- she inhaled her nose. Sucked it into her skull like it was made of tissue paper. Her eyes wrinkled and her head curled up. No blood. Bones collapsed, nothing but spider-skin. Arms and legs shriveled off. For a moment the clothing held together. Then it settled into a pile of sticky leaves and silk. Not even the denim was real. “You took my coin,” gasped the husk at my feet. “Now I shall exact the balance. My prize.” I stomped on it. I wear combat boots, and I kick hard. That thing should have died under my heel. Invisible fingers twined around my throat-- from behind me. “No arguments.” It’s voice still emanated from the webby mess on the ground, even as its unseen counterpart-- its other half? Its true form?-- nuzzled the back of my head with an appendage that humans lack. Does it hurt when something eats your name? I remember my legs shook. I know I begged it to stop, more than once. After the first sip, when you finally quicken to what’s happening, the physical discomfort just seems incidental. Let’s be clear: I don’t have amnesia. It wasn’t that surgical. That thing guzzled down every intonation, every sigh, every tag, award, shout, and signature. There was once a small corner of the world that knew me. A family. I had classmates, peers, a disappointing boss. Maybe I had a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. I think I did. If you could somehow track them down, not a single one of them would know my name. Everywhere my name should be, there is nothing. Every instance of that identity is gone. The thing on the Greenwich Steps took it all. “Do you think you’ve paid enough to bear my currency?” it asked. I gibbered. “Yes. Yes, I’ve paid.” “So sure of your worth. Should you be? Your entire life so far is pennies to me.” Then it took my face. Afterward, I sprawled among the ferns. The leaves dripped. I could still see. That was the first thing I became conscious of. Watching dew slide through the moss. Then came rustling and croons overhead. It sounded like parrots. I slowly canted my head back. Trees came into focus. There they were, crowding a branch. Red masks, leafy bodies, flicking their heads left and right to study me. A wild flock of cherry-headed conures right in San Francisco. They are actually one of the features that draw tourists to the Greenwich Steps. I didn’t know that at the time, though. I wept in bewilderment at the parrots. Then I reached up to touch my face. It was gone. Just like reaching into a bag of static. I sat up with a jolt. Just a meter to my right: a long, red brick stair cut through the teeming vines. No sign of other people. Nor of my captor. I staggered down the Greenwich Steps. Maybe three hundred of them, one or two at a time, with all the grace of a dazed animal. I gripped the safety rail so hard it squeezed the blood out of my fingers. There was a coin on the second-to-last step. I stepped on it, then went back and kicked it away. I’m not ashamed to admit that I sobbed after that. Right next to the yellow sign that says Slippery When Wet. Yes, I still shed real tears. They appear like raindrops on my hands and shirt. It was a long walk back to my hotel to assess the damage. I passed dozens of people on the way. No one reacted as if anything were out of place. A man even nodded to me. I hesitated, wondering if he recognized me, if he could somehow help-- but it turned out he just wanted me to hurry on through the hotel doors so that he could go next. Up in my room, I discovered that my reflection now gives me vertigo and screaming fits-- unless I focus below the neck. Then it’s ok. My passport and driver’s license are not ok. Maybe it’s because both my name and face are supposed to be there. I can barely pick them up. I can’t look at them. Other people can, but I don’t think they actually perceive a specific name, face, or number. What they see, I’m not sure. Any time I present my signature (a line) or one of my ID, people just accept it. Routine, casual. But only if they don’t really try to look. They get upset if they really look. Early on, I insisted that a man check my passport. “Do you think the picture looks like me?” is what I actually asked. He nodded without looking at it. “Nice picture.” “What color are my eyes?” I asked. The man opened his mouth. Stopped. He blinked at the passport, then up at me, before he blanched and backed away. Fast. As if I’d flashed a weapon at him. “What’s wrong?” I was angry, I admit. Not at him. He was just some unlucky hotel staffer. I feel really bad about it, now, but I stalked after him, passport open in my hand like a bible. “Just tell me what my photo looks like. Is my signature legible?” “I don’t, I can’t--” he stammered, still backpedaling. “Just go away. Please, oh fuck. Fuck.” “Is my name easy to pronounce, John?” His sleek black nametag said John. John backed right into one of his coworkers, who winced. She addressed me stiffly. You know how people talk when they’re forced to handle a belligerent customer. “Is there something we can do for you . . . ” She got no further. Her customer service smile drained away and her gaze settled somewhere in the safety of the middle distance. Not alarmed, or anything. Not like John, who was still scrambling to put distance between us. I swept past the other staffer, still after John’s unsatisfactory answers. People were turning to stare at him by then. (Him. Not me). John ran himself into a large potted tree in the lobby. Probably left a bruise on his leg. “Don’t ask me that,” he begged. “I can’t look again. I can’t.” “Are you ok?” called one of the hotel guests, anxious. At that point, shame caught up with me. I folded my passport and broke eye contact. “I’m sorry.” The words came out rough, at first, but softened as my hope gave way. The pain in my chest dwindled into a brittle dry thing, like webby leaves. “Sorry for-- for asking you a confusing question. You were very helpful. John. It’s not your fault. You understand that? I’ll put in a good word for you.” Someone ran over to John. At first he didn’t answer any of their questions. Then he said that he lost his balance. “I don’t even know why. My heart’s racing. I’m so cold . . . ” I walked away. No one stopped me. I did glance back, once. Two people stood over John, who sat on the floor with his head cradled over his knees. He was shaking. Crying. One of the people near him was on the phone. I caught the word ambulance. I’ve since put colored tape on my passport and all my cards so I can identify them by just the edges. People rarely ask me for identification, though. It can happen if someone’s distracted when I approach. Oh. You’re probably curious what became of the coin. My lucky nickel. It’s gone. Or, pervasive. I have no idea where I used to bank, but now, it’s whatever bank I happen to walk into. My presence unsettles the tellers. They get antsy as soon as they have to ask for my account number. I can say any string of numbers that come to mind, and they punch it in. Once I just said, “I don’t know my account number.” The teller nodded and typed in . . . that, I guess. Their computers usually start to whirr with effort at that point. Sometimes the video advertisements in the background get screen-rips or flicker off. Another time, the casing on an overhead light cracked. The tellers ask if I want to make a withdrawal today, and when the drawer finally springs open, they can’t get rid of the coins fast enough. Yep. Banks never leave me empty-handed. All the coins in the drawer, all for me. Doesn’t matter what amount I request, what bills I specify. I walk out with pockets full of metal. I have asked after my account balance. But only twice. I swear, I was just curious. The first time, the teller covered his mouth, said, “Excuse me, I-- I don’t believe I can . . . Certainly, I’ll write it down for you.” His pen-hand trembled. I wondered if my account had somehow been filled to an impressive sum, since it took him so long to write. But the paper he slid across the counter had no numbers on it at all. It was an unintelligible scribble. I said thank you and the teller swayed on his feet. A bead of spittle formed at the side of his mouth. I asked him if he was ok, to which he started hyperventilating. I felt awful for that, and started to leave, but another teller took over. Stupidly, I slid the paper back across to her. The note with the jagged scribbles. I asked her if what was written on the paper matched the amount of money in my account. She stared at the note, frowning. Then at the computer. “Yngh . . .” When she spoke again, her voice came out hoarse, as if invisible fingers had crowded around her windpipe. She looked absolutely terrified. No eye-contact, of course. “Thank you . . . so much . . . for banking with us,” she told the air right next to me. The tip of her nose turned translucent grey. Bloodless. I did not like that at all. I bolted. Anyway, I prefer to use ATMs. It’s much easier to watch a machine clatter, churn, groan, or smoke (the smoke only happened once). I can insert my card, but if I’m not feeling up to handling my wallet, then I can usually get away with a tap-tap-tap on the machine chassis. ATMs always spit out coins for me. Most of them aren’t equipped to handle coinage, of course. So there’s a lot of digging, wrenching, and groping involved on my part. I’ve had enough practice now that I can tickle out a few bills as well. I don’t think I’m technically supposed to do that, but when I poke around and a chewed-up benjamin crams itself between my fingers, I get the sense the ATM is equally pissed off about the rules. I understand, given what it must endure to deliver what I’m owed. I try not to bother the same machine more than once. Yeah, I regret the one that started smoking. There was a line of customers behind me, too. I accidentally hit the green button when it prompted me for a receipt. The screen flashed. for(; ;){ ẅ̶̛̠̖́̀ẻ̶̟̊̍r̶̗̔e̸͉̤̊͊g̵̫̰̜͌ì̵̠̚l̴̨͘d̶̢̲̭̐̅͘ } Carbon paper erupted from the horizontal slot by the card reader. It was covered in more of the same, but with the text blown out in soot. The machine began to squeal as more and more receipt paper ribboned out of it. Smoke puffed from the inbuilt security camera pointed at my face, and the lens shattered. Then alarms went off inside the bank, mechanical wails overlapping. Anyway, the fire department put the automated teller out of its misery before too much of the building was damaged. I watched it go down from a safer distance: a sticky red bench at the muni stop. When a bus pulled up and hissed open, my hands were still shaking. I reached into my pockets and annoyed the driver by dropping coin after coin while I tried to count out the cost of my ticket. Envious of my endless money? If you haven’t figured it out already, the boon of the coin doesn’t make you rich. I survived the early days thanks to what was already in my travel-bag. Of course, I then multiplied my very good fortune by going back to the Greenwich Steps. It was hunting. Yes, for whatever reason, it stood out to me at once. I caught it pretending to photograph bees with a blocky vintage camera. Just a man in a fleece sweater, digesting my name in his belly. A gaggle of European tourists crowded down the steps between us, drawing that hungry gaze around to follow, until he looked past them and noticed me. He sauntered down the steps, pausing just before the landing where I had (effectively) cornered myself. At this point, my brain cells jump-started. This honey-eyed, fatherly figure made the perfect counterpart to the woman in denim. He wasn’t ambushing any European tourists in that face. (What they saw when they passed him, I don’t know). This face, this specific face, was just for me. “Your expression right now,” he chuckled. He raised the camera and snapped my portrait. Click. Flash. The camera whirred, and a glossy square of film slid out of the bottom. He removed the film and shook it gently in the dappled light. He looked me steadily in the eye as he did it, too. “The answer is no.” “What?” my voice broke on the way out. “No, you can’t have back what you traded away, you greedy thing. That is what you’re here to demand, isn’t it? Unless you come to me with a separate deal.” He smiled. Took the final, languid step down to my platform. He wore both shoes today. “Though,” he continued, “I question whether you fully apprehend the deal you’ve already struck. You do understand that what I took, I ate? There’s no stuffing life back in the bird after you’ve chopped its head off and fried its legs for dinner.” “Who are you?” I asked. He loomed before me, smelling of Angel’s Trumpets. The white square in his hand had begun to transform into a photograph, thin shapes spreading over the surface and tarnishing with color. “Oh, if you beheld my face you’d fall in seven pieces, little pie. Pronouncing my name would burn all other words out of your skull. My sword pierces the Invisible Hand and tilts the scales. E pluribus unum is what I am. I am an American miracle.” Close enough. I blew his knee out with my heel. Bone snapped like stick. Pigeons startled off the nearest rooftop. From him, just a wet gasp as he collapsed, eyes rolling up. Then I kicked him down the stairs. His body tumbled around and down. Skull crunched on brick: spatter-sap. A leg bent the wrong way around a metal post. The sweater unspooled. Cobweb, hairy twigs (legs?), and spore clung to the stair in his wake. Ex uno, detritus, I thought to myself. Now you are mulch and smear of insect. The vintage camera lay busted at my feet. Must have been the real thing. Looted off another victim, no doubt. Which meant that he’d taken a real picture of me. Even in my fury, I couldn’t entirely wall off the questions pooling in a corner of my heart. The thing had to be stronger than this, surely. I still had five crescent-shaped marks in my hand, from when I had dangled in the grasp of the denim woman. I followed it down. I was unable to look directly at it-- at the spindly, many-jointed thing hatching like a mayfly out of the sweater-man’s skin. Have to wonder if it meant what it said, earlier: about splitting into pieces if you ever saw it for real. By the time I reached the vacant husk, it no longer resembled a human at all. It was a cocoon of rushes and grass, shredded down the back as easy as newspaper in the rain. (If you’re curious, the photograph of me was conspicuously absent. Guess it got nabbed). “So, how does this usually go?” I asked it. “Do your treats just hobble off and die nameless? No customer complaints at the corporate office?” “Sometimes they come back, as you did.” The words drifted from the discarded body, rather than the thing itself (wherever it was). Two dandelion clocks stood where sweater-man used to have eyes. His broken-bark jaw hung open in a permanent grimace against the brick. “My worshippers.” “They worship you?” “Call me Prosperity. Call me Profit. I’m your only hope of either, now. Don’t worry, I drive a reasonable deal for the desperate.” “I’m not-- I don’t want anything from you.” “For now, yes. You wrung more out of me than most. That face-- mm, well worth silver. It may be some time before you come back to feed me.” I stepped on what used to be sweater-man’s neck. It hissed-- but not in pain, as I first thought. It was laughing. “You should know that no matter how far you wander, I’ll always recognize you. By taste, if nothing else.” Something that was not fingers flicked the nape of my neck. Yeah, here’s a travel tip for you: when a freshly-molted greedfly kisses the back of your neck, run. I sure as fuck ran. For three nights after that, I dreamt I was lost in a crowd. No one knew me. No one could help. No, I wasn’t just lost. I had to find someone, to warn them-- but flies kept trying to crawl into my mouth. Travelers, turn your attention to the Embarcadero. Late afternoon, cusp of evening. A throng of brightly-dressed tourists. Yes, just like my dreams. My pockets swelled with coin. Money is so damned heavy. You forget about that when it’s just a number chained to your name. You forget how important a name is. I let the crowd eddy me into the Ferry Building. The inside: a golden medley of ways to spend too much money. I was exhausted. My nose-- my . . . sense of smell drew me into an artisanal bakery, and then to the famed local coffee with the alliterative name. This stuff is not brewed under the sign of the mermaid. I ordered a small. Eating and drinking works just fine if I don’t overthink it. Even so, I spill things down my shirt as often as I get a bite in. I lost half a croissant right outside of a charming bookstore. But the espresso shot through me like a bullet train to full daylight. Despite the darkening sky, I woke all the way up. Shook off my woes, all that. Espresso nuts, I think you’d like this stuff. Cup in hand, I wandered the broad arcade with, shall we say, new eyes. I peered at tote bags stamped by Golden Gates, wire-stand postcards, kitchen keepsakes, exfoliants with rare ingredients, all the usual. Then I glimpsed a yellow shirt and a beat-up traveler’s backpack bobbing ahead of me toward the dock. That one. Espresso and cream stung my hand as I hastened after the shirt of yellow. Why? Call it a compulsion, a deep lizard-brain directive. Yeah. I just didn’t want this one to end in flies. I caught up just outside the ferry terminal. We weren’t alone: a line was already forming for the next crossing. The man in the yellow shirt stood by the ticket machines. He swigged from a water bottle and wiped his mouth. Something bad was about to happen. I knew it like a wild animal senses earthquake, impending. I followed his gaze to a wooden sign, hand-painted and hung right next to the ticket machines. It offered Private Boat Tour, Sunset! Just minutes from now. The curves of each s were bigger on top than on bottom. An arrow pointed away into the gathering dusk. Yellow Shirt teetered for a moment, then spun to follow it. When I glanced back at the wooden sign, it was gone. Nothing left but a faint imprint of grease on the wall. The certainty hit me as hard as the coffee, but equal and opposite. I didn’t know what laid the trap, or what he’d suffer after he was lured in. Just that my fellow traveler was about to fall down a hole there was no climbing out of. Strings of his life yanked out, snapped. Maybe worse. He was alone, like I had been. I ran, pockets jingling and slapping (damn it) to catch up. “Hey. Sir, sir?” He strode ten more steps before he could no longer pretend I was talking to anyone else. The look he cast over his shoulder was annoyed. But at least he stopped. “I don’t have money for you. Well, maybe a little.” He jammed a hand into crusty jeans and fished out a blackened nickel. He plopped it right into the dregs of my coffee. God, fucking da-- whatever. “Thanks, man.” I made an effort to sound thankful. Then I blurted, “That tour’s a rip-off. Go back and catch the ferry. It’s the only safe water-crossing tonight.” “Um. What?” he squinted at me. I backed away, averting my eyes. With any luck, he would see something normal-adjacent where my face was supposed to be. “Don’t miss the ferry,” I warned him. “Don’t stray. Go straight back where you belong. And then call someone and tell them where you are.” After a silence that lasted too long, the man adjusted his backpack. He didn’t look happy. To be specific, he looked as if he’d just glimpsed a nightmare enfleshed. One of his knees started trembling. “Right on.” His voice came out an octave shriller. He seemed weirdly reluctant to turn his back on me, but after stumbling back a few steps he wheeled around. I watched him go all the way back to join the ferry queue. He walked much faster than before. Ran, actually. (The water bottle fell out of his backpack as he sprinted away, keening between each gasp of air). I meandered the pier for a while, after. At one point, a seal broke the surface of the sea. Its dark head bobbed on the waves. Watching me? Harbor seals nose around here from time to time. Especially outside waterfront seafood restaurants. But this . . . this was not that. The back of my neck prickled. Its head was too narrow, its jaws the wrong shape. It had no eyes, but it kept pace with me as I walked. I got it, then. Yellow Shirt. I had cut loose its prey. I stopped, my heart struggling like a moth under a claw. It slipped back under. The water chopped violently in its wake. I shuddered. Yeah, I don’t plan on napping on the beach anytime soon. No boat rides, either. But when you do, that blind gaze promised. Oh, right. You should probably hear this now: every famous landmark has a snare set just for you. It makes a kind of sense, doesn’t it? Everyone wants to trap tourists. But there are traps not laid by human hands, and the cost of falling into them can’t be paid out of your wallet. What I lost, I can’t replace. What I gained in return-- I’m still figuring out. The least I can do is warn people. I have to, actually. We’ll get to that. For now, I’m avoiding the sea. --the Blacknickel Guide Part two: forthcoming
Age: 21 Height: 170cm Weight: 60kg Shoe/Penis Size: US 10, EU 43/44 Build Type: Athletic, Lean Location: Australia Shipping: Shipped with GD-EMS and arrived in 13 days which is close to record time for my parcels so far! Total shipping cost was about $190 USD.
Contents:
Jackets/Coats: 4 Hoodies/Crewnecks: 5 Tees/Longsleeves: 5 Pants: 4 Socks/Underwear: 7 Shoes: 2 Accessories/Other: 7 Coronaviruses: 0 *** If you saw the previous reviews, you'll know how it works: I've given every item 3 scores out of 10; one for how they look (1:1 status etc.), one for how they actually feel to weause/own, and one for my overall satisfaction with the product. All products will also have weight included! Love you guys that much. Each item has a WeGoBuy direct link, taobao W2C, and QC pics. Plus some quick thoughts after receiving and using them for a while. The size & colours listed are as selected on taobao, not necessarily TTS. Measure yourselves people, it ain't hard. Note: for transparency, the WeGoBuy link to items contains a referral code. You can use it to pretty much go straight to the agent phase and support my reviews, but if you don't want to use a referral code just use the taobao W2C link as normal. You know the drill. Let's get into it.
🥼 Jackets/Coats 🥼
TNF Retro 1996 Nuptse // ¥388.00 // $61.49 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: M // Colour: colour matching Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 8/10 Weight: 850g Thoughts: Had to get an HD QC pic of the logo as it looked a bit funky in the potato quality QC pics, but fortunately both on camera and in hand the stitching looks great. Inside logo tag is clean too. Fits very nicely, and feels comfy and warm to wear. There are lots of TNF jackets round here in winter, but it's cool to have a different colourway that stands out. It could maybe have been a bit thicker but it doesn't bother me too much since it only gets "cold" down here in winter, not cold cold (looking at you guys, Canada and Northern Europe). The seller's also got a ¥399 batch which is supposedly thicker so if you need it to be toasty, maybe check that one out (wego / tao). Since we're heading into summer here down under, this is gonna get a bit of the closet treatment for a while, but looking forward to breaking it out when the temp starts dropping again. CAV EMPT Corduroy Jacket AW18 // ¥234.00 // $33.39 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: M // Colour: Navy Looks : 7/10 // Feel: 6/10 // Overall: 6.5/10 Weight: 1126g Thoughts: The colours on this one are a little strange; retail is meant to be a navy blue. It looks super black and dark in the QC, but in hand it's a bit closer to blue, even verging on green in some lighting? Not too much to worry about because Cav Empt isn't that well known round here anyway. Apart from that, the badge is great, text is good, and jacket itself is alright. The sleeves are a bit wide I feel, but the jacket length and shoulders fit nicely. Not the most comfy jacket I've ever warm, but does the job and feels adequately warm to wear. Not sure if I'd cop again for quite that price but if you like the piece a lot it might suit you. Fear of God Clouds Denim Jacket // ¥201.24 // $30.73 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: M& // Colour: Blue and green pink blooming Looks : 1/10 // Feel: x/10 // Overall: 1/10 Thoughts: Fuck this was garbo. Warning: QC pics may be vomit inducing. I gp'd so many different sellers on both tao and weidian looking for this piece, and this was the only one that even ended up shipping. Garbage looking batch: I don't know what clouds these guys were looking at but the colours aren't even remotely close to the original pattern. Incorrect buttons and inner tags too. Returned & refunded as fast as I could really. If anyone's got a good hookup for this piece, lemme know. Blank ArchiveMAMC Gradient Coatlegit// ¥428.00 // $65.55 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: S // Colour: spot Looks : 8/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 8/10 Weight: 1344g Thoughts: Fuck Taobao Resellers. Was originally looking at this coat on Blank Archive as it looks like a cool, semi-formal long coat for winter, but saw a comment saying that the company drop-ships from taobao. Reverse image search and what do you know: there it is. Selling for $65 on TB, $145 on BA. They didn't even bother to shoot new photos and just stole them too. Fuck you guys. Anyway, this is a cool piece, the outside is awesome looking and the inside is lined with a warm, kinda faux-fur material. It's not overly long for this kind of a coat, comes up at above knee height. Again, it's getting hot down under so it's gonna sit in the closet for a couple of seasons but can't wait to break this one out on some chilly winter evenings (or even show off in the office maybe?).
🧥 Hoodies/Crewnecks 🧥
CAV EMPT Night Vector Crewneck // ¥128.00 // $18.58 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: M // Colour: Black Looks : 8/10 // Feel: 6/10 // Overall: 7/10 Weight: 1126g Thoughts: Love the graphics on this, especially the minimalist line drawing on the back. It's actually really thick and heavy feeling, and fits a bit oversized which is nice. It's more of a sleeves up to the hands not sleeves up to the wrist type fit. The inside lining is a bit more on the rough side than the soft side, but doesn't make it uncomfortable to wear at all. The front graphic is maybe a little bit too faded and dark, but not noticeably so, and the rubber badge is decent quality. It's also got the reversible inside graphic too which is awesome. There were quite a lot of loose threads when it first arrived, but nothing an appointment with Dr Scissors couldn't fix, and it hasn't fallen apart yet either. A really dope piece for CE fans. Acne Studios Flogho Sweatshirt // ¥269.00 // $40.82 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: S (adult) // Colour: Black Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 9/10 // Overall: 9/10 Weight: 554g Thoughts: If you don't own a sweater with writing on the collar in late 2020, wyd? Topacney continually manages to knocks things out of the park when it comes to acne studios. This is a pretty simple crewneck, but it looks fire and feels really comfy. Soft, slightly elastic material, neck hole isn't too loose, inner lining is soft and warm. This one just feels great to wear. I really don't have too much more to say, it fits great but check yourself against the size charts or send him a message as his pieces tend to run quite large. He was pretty helpful on wechat regarding sizing. Vintage Nike Mini Swoosh Hoodie // ¥145.00 // $22.01 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: L // Colour: Earth Colour Looks : 7/10 // Feel: 5/10 // Overall: 6/10 Weight: 752g Thoughts: Ambition's second batch. I really wanted the tan coloured one, but it was sold out in M. I ended up going for L and hoping it was oversized, but damn this thing fits LARGE. Lengthy and the sleeves have a lot of slack which means unless I hit a mid-20s growth spurt, it's unlikely this is gonna fit me very well at any point. Disappointing because the hoodie itself looks quite nice (although doesn't have drawstrings for the hood) and feels decent. The inner lining isn't the softest and it doesn't feel quite as thick as some of my other hoodies but still passes the vibe check at $20. Will probably get worn round the house or just as a comfort piece but a little disappointed it won't make it out much. Might cop another in a smaller size if it's restocked. Definitely go either TTS or 1 down with this one. Palace x Ralph Lauren Skate Polo Bear Sweater // ¥135.00 // $21.10 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: M // Colour: Navy Blue Looks : 5/10 // Feel: 9/10 // Overall: 7.5/10 Weight: 861g Thoughts: This one's interesting, because while it's not really the most 1:1 rep you'll ever see, holy shit is it comfortable. I don't know exactly how they made it, but it's so soft it feels like touching a cloud. It's amazing if you just want a nice sweater with a cool picture on it, but there are some flaws which need to be pointed out. The knit on the sweater isn't quite as good as retail, it's much thinner and more fine, not coming off so much as a knitted sweater. The colours on the bear aren't quite right either, which is especially noticeable on the face - the contrast is just a bit too high. The P on the jacket isn't quite as crisp either. Lastly, the skateboard kinda dips in the middle (looks like my man's riding a ripstick lmao) but this isn't so much of a probably when wearing since the fabric bends anyway. At least this one DOES have an RL embroidered on it. The inner tags are slightly different too. This may not be good for my UK repfam due to all the flaws, but if you're like me you may just want a reasonably accurate sweater for a significantly cheaper price. I haven't heard of any better batches coming so this might be your best bet. It's a little rough around the edges but nothing in life is perfect so I can learn to love it. Kapital Skeleton Knit Sweater // ¥258.00 // $40.89 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: 1 // Colour: army green Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 9/10 // Overall: 9.5/10 Weight: 680g Thoughts: Now THIS is how a knit should be. It's wide knit, but very sturdy. The holes are actually a part of the knit, meaning they're sewn in around the outside and don't have loose threads. Looks great, and feels super soft and warm to wear. There's only 2 sizes: size 1 fits me great as a M style fit. This the type of sweater ya granny would give you and you cherish for years. Personally, I think I would have preferred the skeleton graphic to be on the front of the sweater but hey that's a complaint for the designers at Kapital, not the repmaker. So as far as this one goes, great quality and good looks. Didn't quite sneak it in for spooktober but alas.
👕 Tees/Long Sleeves 👕
Acne Studios Upside Down Logo Tee // ¥124.20 // $20.94 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C dead // QC) Size: S // Colour: black Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 9/10 Weight: 359g Thoughts: Pretty hard to get wrong, it's a black tee with some white text. Cool lookin white text tho. Fits kinda boxy, but the blank is quite thick and heavy, nice quality. Really digging the minimalism vibes, and the upside down text. 🙂🙃 type beat lmao Guess x Places + Faces 3M Striped Tee // ¥149.00 // $22.55 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: S // Colour: black Looks : 7/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 8/10 Weight: 281g Thoughts: This closet is brought to you by Union Kingdom. Anyone who's been in this sub for longer than 13 seconds knows about UK and the quality of his guess tees. This one is no excpetion, fits just like any of his other tees, feels comfy enough to wear, and the 3M is reflective under the light. I kinda wish I'd copped some of the other colourways than black to work with some other fits, but it's hard to go wrong with a black and white tee in a fit either. If you're a fan of 3M shit and just straight up going and utterly fucking up people's flash photos, this is a tee for you. Comme Des Garcons Play Red Heart Tee // ¥119.00 // $18.06 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: Male L // Colour: Black with Red Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 8/10 Weight: 201g Thoughts: Heart looks really decent, good shape and stitching. Rest of the shirt looks black (as expected for a black tshirt). Held it up next to my retail CDG longsleeve, and could barely tell the difference between logos. Material is quite soft and nice too. Seller has a few different colour combos so pick what you like best. But if you buy this it means you like boys, haha get it guys??? Because of the brand name?? It means you like boys?? You know it m— Palace Pigeon Hole T-Shirt // ¥64.00 // $8.96 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: L // Colour: White Looks : 3/10 // Feel: 4/10 // Overall: 4/10 Weight: 192g Thoughts: Bought this so long ago I forgot it was even in my haul. Pretty much the definition of "meh" in a tee. The graphic shape is accurate enough, but it looks like it's been heat-pressed on and seems plastic-y where I'm pretty sure the original is screen printed. It's also missing the palace symbol where the tag is. The blank is damn thin as well. Material is soft, so I'll probably just wear this around the house some. But hey, you get what you pay for I guess. Should I just be happy a shirt even arrived for $9? Maybe. Palace P-3D Longsleeve Ultimo 17 // ¥71.00 // $10.02 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C dead // QC) Size: M // Colour: Black Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 9/10 Weight: 419g Thoughts: Quick side note does anyone else get kinda amazed when they think about the fact they can receive decent quality, thick, accurate clothes for like 10 bucks? For not even one hour's work at minimum wage, this shirt is a definite COP. Looks very accurate as far as I can see, has the correct symbol where the tag should be, and the blank feels heavy & thick. Even came with the palace paper tag on the inside. In my opinion this is one of the coolest trifergs, so definitely super happy with this cop. W2C is dead unfortunately, but reverse image search and you should get some more options.
👖 Pants 👖
Amiri Distressed Leather Insert Jeans // ¥249.00 // $37.67 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: 30 // Colour: Black Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 9/10 Weight: 633g Thoughts: Can we agree we need WAY more quality pants in this sub? These are fantastic. Fits TTS, skinny fit but slightly elastic, really comfy overall to wear. Construction feels good. Love the leather patches, it's great for both the aesthetic of distressed jeans, and the fact nobody gotta see my hairy-ass knees. My ONLY gripe is that the pockets are just a little too shallow. Fits a phone (barely) and that's about it. These'd be in the rotation way more often with just slightly deeper pockets. Nike Techwear Pants // ¥94.00 // $14.98 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: M // Colour: black Looks : 5/10 // Feel: 5/10 // Overall: 5/10 Weight: 510g Thoughts: These are most likely a fantasy piece, I thought they might be a cool and different style to most of my other stuff, but unfortunately in person they're not as great. They don't feel super uncomfortable for techwear pants, but the swoosh on the right pocket is large as all hell and the text on the left side patch is utter nonsense. They're pretty wide around the calves, but short and tight at the ankles making the fit a bit awkward. As pants, they work but that's about the best it gets really. Burberry Style Plaid Pants // ¥100.00 // $15.63 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: M // Colour: deep khaki Looks : 4/10 // Feel: 3/10 // Overall: 3/10 Weight: 195g Thoughts: Can't help but feel kinda scammed with these. I wasn't looking for EXACTLY burberry pants, just something in that style, but these aren't wearable. They're SUPER lightweight and thin, and feel almost more like summer pyjama pants than real pants (which is probably what they'll end up being). They're also pretty dark, closer to brown in hand. I don't think I could even wear these out, and considering the price of some of the other stuff in this review? Save your $15. Take it elsewhere. Generic Loose Heel Pants // ¥60.00 // $9.07 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: L // Colour: Black thin section smooth Looks : 7/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 7/10 Weight: 483g Thoughts: Was just looking for some general pants in this style with the loose heel cut. These are pretty decent; they're kinda silky, almost like formalwear pants. The heel is maybe not quite as boxy as I'd like, but they feel really comfy and are still tight around the waste. Pretty much the exact perfect length for me too so no real complaints here. Just some decent pants too vary up my fits.
🧦 Socks/Underwear 🧦
Tommy Hilfiger Underwear // ¥19.00 // $2.89 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: L // Colour: sapphire Looks : 8/10 // Feel: 7/10 // Overall: 7/10 Weight: 124g (2 pairs) Thoughts: Pretty decent for the price. Colour is nice, text is good. But who're you pretending is gonna see these anyway? They're maybe a little on the small side, the thigh sections occasionally ride up a little. But keeps shit in place and makes you seem more like you're packin tho by comparison so toss up the pros and cons I guess? Nike Lab Tiedye Socks // ¥19.00 // $2.97 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: OS // Colour: 1x blue purple, 1x pink blue and white, 1x green, white and blue Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 7/10 // Overall: 8.5/10 Weight: 90g ea Thoughts: These are a STEAL for the price. Love the look of these, the pink and blue ones gotta be my favourite colorway, so summery. They feel pretty nice to wear too, not the most elastic sock ever but definitely comfy. Great way to splash and extra little bit of color into a fit. Definitely a good cop for 3 bucks. More socks = doing the washing less often. Trust me the math checks out. Palace P Socks AW17 // ¥10.00 // $1.52 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: n/a // Colour: 1x White, 1x Black Red Bar Looks : 8/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 8/10 Weight: 60g ea Thoughts: I think it was Confucius who once said "one's haul can never have too many socks". It's a dollar fiddy for some Palace socks. Are you even gonna read if I write anything else? They're made of a nice stretchy material and don't feel stiff or scratchy to wear like some other socks I've had.
👟 Shoes 👟
Common Projects Suede Chelsea Boot // ¥398.00 // $62.19 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: 44 (male models) // Colour: Sand Chelsea Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 10/10 // Overall: 9/10Weight: 1673g Thoughts: Shoutouts saiyou0018 who took FIVE qc pics for free. It'd be nice to get a few more shoes in the sub that aren't Jordans or other sneakers. But these are GOOD. Like, real good good. Fits like a glove (a foot glove?) and are actually really comfy to wear?! I was expecting it to be blister town: population me with these, but they slip on as easily as 8 year olds on Xbox live slip into my mother apparently. The insoles feel really cushiony too. Would definitely recommend some kind of waterproofing or other protection though as the rubber soles and suede outside can get dirty pretty easily. A little more on the expensive side for shoes in this sub, but for those who want something a little classier these are worth every penny. Yeezy Boost 350 Static Black Reflective // ¥149.00 // $23.96 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: 44 // Colour: Black Starry Looks : 8/10 // Feel: 6/10 // Overall: 7/10 Weight: 1229g Thoughts: Right after I say we need more non-sneaker shoes...fashionreps and cheap weidian shoes, name a better combo. For a $24 weidian sneaker, I was honestly not expecting this level of quality. They're properly reflective under light, the shape is good and the laces aren't too stiff. They're maybe a tad on the tighter size, so I'd recommend sizing up .5 or 1 size for the most comfy fit. Whenever my fam comes over they ask me how many sneakers I could possibly need and I'm willing to take suggestions on how to answer that question.
💎 Accessories/Other 💎
Palace P 6 Panel Corduroy Cap // ¥32.00 // $4.86 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: adjustable // Colour: red Looks : 7/10 // Feel: 7/10 // Overall: 7/10 Weight: 103g Thoughts: More corduroy for my retro stylers. Feels a bit thinner and flimsier than some of my other caps, but looks good and stays on my head. I was a little worried about the stitching of "PALACE" at the back, but looks fine in person. Has palace tags on the inside too, so for $4.86 (holy shit I just remembered this was $4.86) this one delivers. Fear of God 6th Collection Suede Hat // ¥78.00 // $11.84 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: 165/80a // Colour: Gray Looks : 8/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 7/10 Weight: 130g Thoughts: The novelty of this one wore off a bit when I started struggling to work this into as many fits as I'd like, which is disappointing since the quality is really good. But hey, you might be better than me on that front. The suede feels and looks nice, the rubber FOG tag is perfect as far as I can see, and has the correct inner tag too. Fits nicely on my big ass head, and has velcro adjustment. Maybe figure out how you wanna wear this one, but for $12 it's a solid cop. Stussy Stock Low Pro Cap // ¥28.00 // $4.24 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: adjustable // Colour: Light Khaki Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 9/10 // Overall: 9/10 Weight: 94g Thoughts: How many caps is too many caps? This haul plus my last couple of hauls has the stack of caps in my wardrobe lookin like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I apparently thought this cap was so good I bought 2 by mistake. Fortunately my agent had me and returned 1. But yeah, it's good. Fits on my head and keeps the sun out of my eyes. Nice stitching on the front. Love the cream colour. Food $200 Data $150 Rent $800 Caps $3,600 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this my family is dying Louis Vuitton Upside Down Logo Pendant Necklace // ¥89.00 // $14.18 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: n/a // Colour: Golden Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 8/10 Weight: 101g Thoughts: Always gotta squeeze a bit of jewellery and other accessories into the haul. Trust me you'll be lacking if you don't. This one's good, decent length and not tight around the neck. There's 3 different connecting sections where you can join it up, so you can adjust the length based on how close to your neck you want it. It's even got engraving on the little linking sections too. The fabric bag it comes in is kinda poor quality, but if you're the kind of person who cares about that, you might wanna be spending a little more than 14 bucks on this type of thing. Can't believe it came with the upside down flaw tho smh!!! /s Goyard Saint Marc Card Case // ¥76.00 // $11.54 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: n/a // Colour: Dark brown Looks : 9/10 // Feel: 7/10 // Overall: 7/10 Weight: 175g Thoughts: There comes a time in every young repfam's life where they evolve from a Goyard cardholder to a full Goyard wallet. Outside looks nice, embossed text on the inside is pretty good too. It's quite large (better have big pockets): there's 5 card slots and then some pockets for cash, receipts, drugs, condoms, whatever else you want I guess. Kinda wish it held a few more cards but for $10? Not gonna complain too much I don't think. Various colorways available, but you can't knock the classic brown IMO. Palace P Bottle Opener // ¥149.00 // $22.61 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: n/a // Colour: Rose Red Looks : 8/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 8/10 Weight: 21g Thoughts: This could be retail considering the price? Who cares, I thought it was cool and needed a bottle opener. Before I got this I spilt beer all over my floor at home trying to open a bottle using another bottle. Which while it technically worked, isn't really optimal. This thing looks fine, and opens bottles. There's a blue version too if that's more you. That's about it really. Maison Kitsune Fox Head Tote Bag // ¥65.00 // $9.84 USD (WeGoBuy // W2C // QC) Size: n/a // Colour: spot Looks : 8/10 // Feel: 8/10 // Overall: 8/10 Weight: 227g Thoughts: This is a bag. It holds things in it. It also has a picture and some text on the front. In all seriousness, there's really not a lot I can say, $10 is maybe overpaying for it a little bit, but looks nice and is great for carrying stuff around at Uni or work. Feels sturdy enough, and is made of a canvas-like material. ***
FINAL THOUGHTS
Pretty happy with most things in this haul, I generally lucked out this time around with things fitting correctly and being decent quality (with the few obvious exceptions). My wardrobe's starting to feel pretty full now, so I'm not sure what will come in my next haul but I'm sure there'll be some things I can't resist copping. Someone better remind me to add in some extra coathangers. Let me know if you guys want any in-hand pictures or fit pics. Happy to answer any DMs if you need extra info. I was also thinking of putting together some styleboards using lots of my reps so far so drop a comment if that sounds interesting. If you've made it to the end, thanks for reading, big ups to y'all. Remember to stay safe and stay dripping 🔥
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