We’ve set up the signal using the lighthouse, and help is on the way. All Acharky and I need to do is survive a little while longer. Just a little… longer…

I’ll be honest. The more I think about this ending, the more something feels missing.

I don’t expect to get all the answers from the ending of a Dark Pictures game, but I don’t feel like I understand anything regarding what happened in the Murder Castle. There’s no sense of resolution regarding the killer and his motivations, methodology, or even identity. We both even know if Du’met is his real name. And the post-credits scenes actively work to undermine our understanding by having someone pick up where we left off despite the fact that we killed the person here on this island.

And that might be okay, but the actual also feels like their character arcs got dropped at some point. Admittedly, it’s hard to tell how much of that comes down to the choices we made along the way, but so many plot threads regarding our central cast get completely dropped. What about the friend that Kate supposedly let down? What about Jamie’s texts or the conversation that Charlie allegedly had with the killer? Did our survivors learn anything or grow from this experience?

It’s not that any one thread got dropped. It’s that almost every hook or thread remains unsolved. Our adventure just kind of ends without tying anything up. It’s disappointing, especially from this studio.

Still, I enjoyed the adventure as a whole despite all that. Next time, we’re going to beat fools up as Sora Kingdom Hearts in The Bouncer.

While it’s been over a month since I last streamed Marvel Snap, the truth is that I’ve been playing it obsessively ever since it launched. And in the time since, I’ve built up something of a decent collection.

Now, it’s time to start showing off some of those decks I’ve been fooling around with, starting with this Deathwave Deadpool deck.

One of the cool aspects of deckbuilding in Marvel SNAP is that since decks are only twelve cards, no more and no less, every card included in a deck has a specific purpose in mind with its inclusion. There’s not a lot of room in a deck for filler tech pieces. And since we draw nine of twelve of these cards over the course of a given game, we have a 75% chance to see a specific card in a match. Compared to other card games, those are unbelievably high odds.

This deck in particular has two related game plans. Its first plan is to get Deadpool out and kill him as early and often as possible. Every time he dies, he returns to our hand with his power doubled. If we happen to put a card like Hulk Buster onto him and give him that extra boost of power, then that boost is *also* doubled when he dies. Much of the deck is filled with ways to kill him and other cards that profit from being killed.

The other combo this deck runs is known as DeathWave, based on its two core pieces: Death and Wave. Death is a 9-cost card, which is normally unplayable since Marvel Snap only goes to Turn Six. However, it has an ability that gives it a discount for each card destroyed in a match. Wave is a 3-drop card that sets the cost of every card in both players’ hands to 4, which would normally allow players to play only one card in a turn.

However, Death’s discount applies even when her cost is set to 4 by Wave, meaning she can be a 2-drop card if at least two other cards have been destroyed. If we’ve gotten enough kills, that means we can play her and another card on the final turn, when our opponent is restricted to only one play.

Both of these plans synergize well with Taskmaster. If we kill Deadpool enough and dramatically increase his power, then we can play either Death and Taskmaster for a total of 24 power across two bodies on the final turn, or Deadpool and Taskmaster if their sum would be greater. (Or all three if we get extremely lucky like I did in this hand.)

This means we have the potential to make huge swings on the final turn that our opponents will not be able to prepare for. And that’s just part of what our deck can do. Next time, we can talk about some of the other potential play lines.

Two of our merry band have perished in the death traps of the Murder House. Only three remain, and they’re in danger because the killer is still out there.

Acharky and I need to move. And we need to do it fast.

Not a whole lot for me to say about this episode. It’s mostly tension, fighting, and escape scenes. We’re less thinking and more reacting, though I do wonder if this scene would have changed if we actually trapped the killer correctly instead of killing Jamie.

I’m not killing that goddamn dog though. Not even if it gets someone killed.

The perils of the Murder Castle have already claimed the life of our poor(?), innocent(?) producer Charlie, and we narrowly avoided losing another of our companions to them.

Will the remaining four survive?

Nope. RIP Jamie. We were all rooting for you, but it wasn’t in the cards.

I gave a lot of crap to Acharky for killing Charlie in the last batch of episodes, and I will keep doing so because it’s funny. But if we’re being serious for a moment, both of these kills stemmed from a lack of understanding of what the game was asking us to do in these moments.

Charlie is dead because Chris did what he was trained to do through all of the various iterations of these Dark Pictures games. He had no indication that he was supposed to hold down the switch to keep the mannequin from hitting the lighter.

And as for me, I only saw a prompt to press Square, with no context. Now, to some extent, this is on me. If I was paying attention instead of listening to Chris talk about H. H. Holmes, I would have heard the cast talk about trapping the killer with the walls. However, even in that context, it’s difficult to parse when I’m supposed to open and close the wall. I imagine I’m far from the only person who made that mistake.

Unexpected consequences for actions are normal for these games, but in both of these cases, there was a little more than the devs could have done to provide context for what was happening in the scene. Hopefully, as they start working on the next game, they keep that in mind.

Our mission to thwart another Hydra operation was successful, and our heroes have returned home. But surely they have as much to do off the battlefield as they do on it.

So let’s take a look at that aspect of the game.

You can tell this game was developed by a team with knowledge of Marvel Comics because there are deep cuts here that one doesn’t make if they’re only familiar with the MCU. Characters like Magick, Nico from the Runaways, and Robbie Reyes’s Ghost Rider aren’t on the list of usual suspects with Marvel-licensed games.

It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but for me, this is exactly what I want. I love hanging out with the EMO KIDS, or playing video games with my best buddy Spider-man.

Couldn’t ask for anything more from Midnight Suns, to be honest.

Alas, Acharky in his haste, has killed one of our five journalists. Only four of our charges remain, thanks to his callousness.

May they avoid suffering the same fate.

One of my favorite parts of any of these games is when the lightbulb clicks and we figure out how the victims are intended to die, and thus how we can prevent their untimely demise. Charlie, the chain smoker who spent much of the opening trying to find his cigarettes, died in a blazing inferno started by his own lighter. And Erin, the asthmatic, was supposed to die of suffocation inside a vacuum-sealed chamber. Both of them are poetically appropriate deaths for said characters given their underlying conditions.

Fortunately, we were able to save Erin and discover this in the process of doing so. It makes me wonder what trials await for Kate, Jamie, and Mark when we next pick up, and hopefully conclude, The Devil in Me.

Hold a moment. Firaxis made a Marvel game, similar in spirit to their X-Com games? And it lets you hang out and play video games with Spider-man? And it’s good?

Yes. It’s called Marvel’s Midnight Suns. And it’s here.

I admit that this game wasn’t even on my radar until I started hearing from critics who started playing it. Word of mouth was enough to convince me it was worth my time, and I’ve been more than happy with my time.

Giving me a deck to edit and refine will almost always produce the feel-good chemicals in my brain, but there’s also a depth to the combat that kept me hooked from start to finish. Each of the heroes has their own niche and toolkit that captures their character, and all of them feel unique from each other. A lot of the fun came from figuring out which heroes synergized well with each other in order to create powerful setups and combos.

And if that was the only layer to Midnight Suns, that might be enough, but there’s also something here for the Persona/Fire Emblem: Three Houses crowd. But we’ll get into that later.

After a couple of technical issues, we’re back in the game and hoping to protect the team of reporters trapped in a recreation of H. H. Holmes’s Murder Castle. We’ve yet to lose any of them, and with luck, we’ll keep it that way.

Correction: I have yet to lose a single charge yet, in any one of these Dark Pictures games. Poor Chris, always making the exact wrong decision and costing his people dearly.

As the cards at the end of the last episode and the start of this one made clear, we experienced a technical issue with the game in the middle of our recording. A scene on Chris’s end failed to load properly, which meant I was unable to progress on my end either. Reloading the game and rebooting our consoles did nothing to solve the issue, so we had to go into the Chapter Select and restart the section we were doing in order to get back on track.

It’s easy to decry the development team for an issue like that, but games aren’t easy to make, especially when you’ve made four of them in as many years. To be honest, it’s impressive that there haven’t been more issues over our time playing these games. (Although I hear that the patches made to the previous Dark Pictures games have introduced new bugs.)

While I understand how this could happen, and that it’s not a severe enough defect to prevent the game from being shipped, glitches are a tricky thing for players. Once we find one, particularly one big enough to cause us to lose significant progress, it becomes tricky to place trust in the game. Chris was hesitant to trigger the scene again, even though he knew he would need to in order for us to keep going because he was afraid the game would glitch out.

Once we’re questioning what’s a bug versus an intended feature, it’s not something that we can stop questioning until the end of the game. For a genre like this, where suspension of disbelief and immersion are king, that can be the death knell. It’s understandable, but it’s painful all the same.

The groundwork has been laid. We’ve met our cast and the internal conflicts of the group have been laid bare. With that, our plucky journalist team can now be confronted with the deadly trials and tribulations that will test their mettle.

Can Acharky and I keep these wayward charges alive? Let’s find out in The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me.

It’s always cute when a character in a horror movie tries badly to deny the truth staring at them plainly in the face. I can’t help but laugh at the phrase “It’s just blood” in response to seeing a trail of it leading down a dark hallway.

Chris and I have both said that if we can’t save everyone, Charlie is an acceptable casualty. Hopefully, those words aren’t prophecy waiting to happen.

*stares at the next episode’s thumbnail*

Hopefully.

We have a case to solve… kinda. Well, not really. We have a gun we need to retrieve if we want to have any hope of getting paid.

So I suppose we had better get busy.

You can tell this is a game written and created by an independent developer in 2022 because it tackles the theme of class divide that has become an even more stark reality in our daily existence since the Covid-19 pandemic became a part of our daily existence.

I expect it to become a larger part of the overall plot once it comes into focus, and I’ll be interested to see where the story goes from here. For now though, it’s left a great first impression.