Game Review--Dead By Daylight Mobile (Android)

"Some embrace the trials while they desperately search for a way out.  Others don't even realize they're imprisoned, and are made to relive an endless cycle of horror.  And still others lose their ability to feel or act and are flushed into the great emptiness that is The Void."

--The narrator, Dead by Daylight Mobile

Dead by Daylight's asymmetric multiplayer arrived on smartphone platforms with great controls given the limitations of the mobile version, portability that is more accessible than even the Switch version since a smartphone is more likely to be carried around, and mostly solid graphics for the "system."  Each match's four survivors have to power five generators scattered around each map to open two electronic gates--with an escape hatch that opens up under certain conditions as well.  The killer has to disable generator progress, hunt survivors, and put them on hooks so that an interdimensional being called Entity can eventually consume them.  The Entity of Dead by Daylight, as described in the opening cinematic, is an outright Lovecraftian being that can pull people out of various universes within a vaster multiverse and constantly pit the survivors against killers, with those who escape one trial only being placed in another.

Production Values

The game itself has been rather faithfully ported to the smartphone class of platforms, though the graphics predictably suffer by comparison to the Switch or TV-only consoles.  Dead by Daylight Mobile is another triumph of smartphone gaming.  It is examples like this that illustrate that console games can be brought to an unconventional platform and that handheld devices, even those not primarily crafted to play games like the Switch or PS Vita, are just a different kind of system.  The most significant issue is simply that the game crashes repeatedly and has so many severe glitches that sometimes it looks as if your character teleports across the map.  Other than this, smaller graphical or technical problems like pop-in effects for smoke or grass are the worst offenders.  Contrary to what could have easily been the case, not even the controls, which are streamlined with changes like automatic sprinting when the killer pursues a survivor, are deficient.

Gameplay

Just as the levels and aesthetic of Dead by Daylight on consoles has been directly ported to smartphones with only minor sacrifices, the controls are unusually efficient for a mobile game of this kind, with only the small size of certain icons and the rigidness of the locked pursuit mode as a killer being consistent issues.  Tapping specific icons on the touch screen drops pallets, passes skill checks while starting generators, slashes survivors, lays down bear traps, and other tasks.  Perks and add-ons modify how quickly or efficiently these actions can be completed, and they also can give special passive abilities that simplify the game for either the killer or the survivors.  For example, one of The Trapper's perks lets him reverse all generator progress by 6% once a survivor enters the dying state, and one of survivor Claudette Morel's perks lets her heal herself.

Killers run faster than survivors, yet survivors can stun them by dropping pallets and can vault away from them, and swinging a weapon, whether or not it hits a survivor, slows the killer and delays a second swing.  Survivors can take two hits without medical kits, self-healing perks, or a fellow survivor healing them; they can team up to start generators faster and to distract the killer by running in to take a blow for a teammate who is one hit away from collapsing and at the mercy of the killer, who can place them on one of many hooks to offer them to the Entity.  Still, other survivors can free them, and there is even a very small chance that they can leap off the hook on their own, but getting hooked three times automatically sacrifices them to the Entity and removes them from the match.

Finishing matches awards experience points both for a central leveling system and the individual character played, with both survivors and killers contributing to the central experience point meter that rewards players with one of the game's three special currencies.  As a mobile game, Dead by Daylight Mobile does have microtransactions, but optional microtransactions were already part of the game before it was released in its mobile format, and the daily and weekly challenges do provide additional ways to secure spendable in-game currencies.  For those who can patiently endure optional ads, extra items and a faster refresh of the mobile game's "bloodpoint" shop are both accelerated and free.  One can play Dead by Daylight Mobile without spending any actual money at all and still access quite a bit of the game even if it takes time.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

The dimension-spanning being called the Entity has pulled numerous killers and people to serve as the killers' victims from various universes in a vast multiverse that includes the worlds of Saw, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silent Hill, and others.  The Entity hopes that the killers will offer their prey as sacrifices for it to consume the bodies and souls of, only to resurrect the dead survivors (according to the wiki, at least, as the in-game lore is very vague most of the time) and place the ones who escape in yet another trial.  In this way, the Entity has a potentially permanent supply to feed on.

Intellectual Content

That Dead by Daylight takes its lore so seriously helps lend existential gravity to the events of the game, and despite there being almost no dialogue or narrative-driven character development, the premise is thoroughly philosophical.  Since it is a multiplayer game, it is not as much of a wasted opportunity to not focus on philosophically foundational, precise, or otherwise deep ideas in the context of a detailed story, whereas this would be an enormous blunder if Dead by Daylight had a single player campaign.  By its very nature, it is supposed to be about a potentially endless cycle of torment that a multiversal being which appears to be genuinely supernatural traps people in.  This premise works very well as a match-based multiplayer game even though the in-universe and conceptual ramifications of these aspects are mostly unexplored.

Conclusion

Dead by Daylight Mobile is one of the more technically impressive mobile games, and free mobile games at that, thanks to its console-transplanted gameplay and (generally) masterful conversion to the smartphone format.  The glitches and server issues carry over as well, but the strengths of the console versions are mostly present.  Anyone more who has played Dead by Daylight on another system and has either made great progress with leveling up characters (or buying them from the game's store) or is used to console controls might not have any need to play the mobile version except to restart or to indulge in curiosity, but the efforts made to take such a game and put it on smartphones seem so generally successful--at least by this point, if not at the time of the original mobile release--that this is an ideal game for someone wanting a more substantial experience on a smartphone.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  The killers spray blood with each strike of a survivor, and blood trails can be seen as victims flee or crawl from their tormentor.

Financial Burdens

Financial burdens are some of the most constant, near-universal trials faced by many groups of people even in modern Western culture, where the poor are supposed to live in luxury by comparison to the wealthy of more ancient times.  Many Americans are only one disease or car/house problem away from being unable to save money for a given month instead of spending all or more than what they make in that period, and the conditions of COVID-19--both the initial circumstances of the pandemic and the inept reactions and overreactions alike--have not helped almost anyone but already wealthy business owners prosper since early 2020.  It is true that capitalism itself is not the selfish applications of it that are rightly hated by so many, but deficiencies already present in American capitalism have been especially exposed in the past two years.

Alongside matters of health, financial matters are some of the most vital of the practical aspects of life, as well as some of the most likely to shape a person's mental health.  As they opposed lockdowns in response to COVID-19, conservatives cited both relative economic standstill and a higher risk of mental illness as supposed reasons why almost nothing at all should be done as a reaction to the pandemic.  The irony is that their own economic ideas bring misery and mental health crises as well--not that liberal politics is the solution, as that has its own deep philosophical flaws.  It is not even very difficult to see that the evidence of conservatives' words and actions actually point to them using mental health as a situational attempt to gain support, not them caring about mental illnesses overlapping with financial woes.

The way to identify the insincerity of conservatives in condemning the 2020 pandemic lockdowns because they hurt mental health (with isolation, inability to see friends, activity restrictions, and so on) is that they do not oppose the current American style of capitalism despite its enormous potential to devastate the mental health of millions.  Even though the American version of the workplace has usually been marked by low pay for long hours, apathy from managers towards severe non-work issues that call for days off, and routine mismanagement by those at the top of many companies, conservatives are often stupid enough to think that any change from the economic/workplace status quo is somehow communism and then oppose it harshly.  Before and during the pandemic they suddenly expressed concern for mental health in, they never collectively wanted to make life easier for workers as a whole.

Now, money cannot change metaphysical limitations, remove epistemological limitations, or address moral problems, but it can provide a penetrating level of security that diminishes the impact of many other trials.  After all, who would not need to worry less about getting mental or physical health problems dealt with by visiting doctors, repairing cars, homes, or other belongings, and acquiring necessities like food if they had a monetary safety net?  Many non-financial worries are magnified by financial burdens because some of the only ways to alleviate them cost money.  In this sense, financial security is a pathway to a far more general wellbeing.

Enough money to take care of basic needs and still have leftover savings for other problems is all it might take to prevent a high number of people from ever having broad anxiety or depression about practical life, as they would have the resources to access solutions to various trials that would otherwise be devastating.  It is demonstrably true that money cannot deliver anyone from every problem or give life objective significance.  To think otherwise is to believe in obvious error, yet the role of money in providing personal security and alleviating or even thwarting mental illnesses is usually overlooked by Christians except to ironically call for destructive conservative policies based on materialistic greed.

The False Expression Of Autonomy

Though they almost all cling to some sort of obvious error or set of errors, many people are at least minimally intelligent enough to realize that some sort of autonomy is necessary to have real knowledge, or else objecting to just believing things because others do would not be as popular a thing to condemn even among those who are not even close to understanding its full ramifications.  Liberals and conservatives, atheists and theists, and Christians and Muslims alike might generally at least talk as if they affirm this objective truth.  All the same, very few people are ever able to realize that rationalistic autonomy is not about believing in things because of subjective preference or random thoughts as opposed to groupthink.  It is about looking to the objective truths of reason while avoiding random, inconsistent, unverifiable, and preference-driven beliefs even if the only person involved in the reflection is oneself (and reason is not a mind-dependent, subjective thing at all, so an autonomous thinker is not relying solely on their own mind anyway).

There is nothing rational about autonomous thinking that is not in alignment with reason, where ideas are assumed, random or incompatible ideas are embraced, and no actual attempt is made to avoid fallacies.  Appeals to popularity and thought that is helplessly prompted or forgone in accordance with social whims are asinine, but even autonomous thinking is dead apart from sheer rationality.  Yes, some autonomy is an inherent part of rationality, but autonomy alone does not make someone rational or the ideas they believe true.  It is impossible to understand various logical truths and experiences without having directly contemplated them on one's own, whether or not they are things one could think of without sensory prompting and whether or not one actually did so.  There is just more to genuine autonomy and rationality than this.

Any person that does not look strictly to reason as the source of absolute certainty, the ultimate revealer and grounding of all truths (even if other epistemological and metaphysical factors are connected with some issues), no matter how little they are concerned with others and how philosophically autonomous they are, is thoroughly irrational, just in a different way from the person who thinks nothing can be known apart from social prompting or who thinks that consensus and conversation literally reveal truth epistemologically or make something true metaphysically.  A rational person looks to reason itself, avoiding the erroneous stupidity of looking to either their personal perceptions and preferences or the claims of others as the basis of truth and epistemology.

Whatever random ideas they might otherwise leap to without logical proof do not make someone intelligent, deep, or anything but as ignorantly reliant on logical axioms as the collectivist thinker they might rightly look down on.  This is not because seeking out the broadest consensus to agree with it or thinking that social interactions are a necessity for philosophical discovery and reflection.  If anything, even the random, irrational kind of autonomous thought is still less erroneous than this, if only because it is a perversion of the objective fact that the only person's mind one can inherently know is one's own and this is still ironically closer to autonomously reflecting on ideas without assumptions or constant social prompting.  However, both approaches and the fallacies behind them are still inherently contrary to reality.

The truth is still that no one has to choose between one of two or more philosophical errors.  It is always possible to forsake all assumptions and thus avoid any epistemological error, even believing in something true and logically verifiable without actually recognizing the logical proof for it, and any inherent error, such as contradictory, self-refuting ideas that could not possibly be true no matter what.  Two irrational, untrue philosophical concepts are still untrue regardless of whether one of them is more or less irrational than the other.  Identifying and rejecting multiple errors is within everyone's reach, with the only real problems being unwillingness and a voluntary lack of alignment with reason, the set of necessary truths on which all stands and comes to light.

Blaming Teachers For Other Educational Variables

Rarely, if ever, does formal education touch upon things that are of ultimate philosophical or practical significance.  The quadratic formula, the arbitrary names for taxonomy, and the general historic culture of random civilizations are not at all things that necessary to understand the core of reality (logical axioms and the nature of consciousness) or to live and survive in the modern or ancient world.  Memorizing and regurgitating information that amounts to sheer hearsay, such as all claims that historical events like wars or elections actually happened (as opposed to there being evidence suggesting but not proving that they happened), is not even true rationality, though at least small amounts of selective rationality are prerequisites to even understand relatively trivial things like these claims.

If a student struggles to learn and utilize any of these things and no one is fallaciously thought to be unintelligent, the tendency is for either the student or teacher to automatically be blamed, even though neither of them is necessarily mishandling anything and the fault might not be intrinsically tied to only one or the other if someone truly is at fault.  With as many variables as teaching has and the fact that so many of them could change, it is not self-evident, and therefore not necessarily true, that there even is a party that is doing something wrong if a child has difficulties learning.  Plenty of factors beyond the control of any person could come together to maximize educational challenges.

However, public school teachers are irrationally expected to assume that they are at fault for a student's failure when there is absolutely nothing about being the teacher that means one must be the source of the problem.  Perhaps the student has immense family troubles, physical or mental health issues, or other unfortunate circumstances that impede learning.  Perhaps they are just unmotivated or apathetic even if they do not have these specific difficulties.  There are many possible reasons why a student might not be effectively learning that are not related to the teacher at all.  In actuality, a person is plainly irrational if they cannot understand this no matter how integrated into formal education they are.  Successful learning in an educational setting depends on more than just one thing, no matter what anyone believes or says to the contrary.

After all, if these aforementioned troublesome conditions on the part of the student's life are met, it would not matter if the teacher is clear, concise, and relevant in their communication, if they are thoroughly familiar with the subject matter (as much as one can be given that school subjects are usually not truly knowable beyond possibilities and perceptions thanks to epistemological limitations), or if they are open and friendly with their students and the parents.  The teacher could succeed on every front and the student could still struggle, and even then it might or might not be due to a fault of there own.  Students who still fail to learn despite the teacher's best efforts could still not be wholly to blame.  This is vital but not particularly difficult to realize.

The preemptive desire to blame a particular person whenever a situation like this goes wrong is born out of irrational ideas about the reason for academic struggles, as someone will either be blamed randomly, with a different random person potentially getting blamed in each situation, or they will be blamed simply because they have a role like teacher or student.  There is nothing about having either role, or being the parent of a struggling student, that inherently has the largest or any part in sabotaging a particular student's progress.  It is possible for a teacher to be ineffective, lazy, or ignorant; it is possible for a student to be unmotivated or intentionally reluctant.  It is still not possible for all teachers or students to always have some blame or any at all.

The Marriage Day

Marriage is an especially prominent target of complementation ideologies, whether they are religious distortions or secular distortions of the truth.  There are idiotic wedding customs that directly or indirectly treat men as if they have a special status over women, like the idiotic practice of "giving the bride away," but there are also very overt components of traditional American weddings that treat men as if they are irrelevant to the marriage or lesser than women.  No matter which gender is given precedence over the other, the misconceptions of various kinds of complementarianism are always behind this, with nothing but demonstrable philosophical errors or assumptions behind them.

One somewhat popular misconception is that the marriage ceremony and day are for the bride, a formality meant to make her feel special and treat her specifically with some kind of public honor, but not necessarily the groom.  Some women, irrational enough to submit to stereotypes just to go along with them instead of being authentic, turn this into an avoidable but self-fulfilling "prophecy" of sorts for their own individual lives.  They act as if it is their obligation to plan their wedding around their own personal whims just because they are women or as if the ceremony itself is about showcasing their own aesthetic preferences or physical beauty, as if women are more beautiful than men or could possibly deserve to be treated as such.

Sometimes this cultural bias manifests as a total neglect of men's desire to be physically attractive on a wedding day, a denial that they have such desires at all, or an asinine insistence that they just act like women deserve to be treated as more beautiful.  Sometimes this manifests as sidelining the groom's role in planning a wedding.  However it might be expressed, it is folly and erroneous to pretend like marriage is about one partner instead of the other, and, regardless of whether it is a husband or wife that is elevated above the other, it will also set the marriage on perilous ground if the ceremony is intentionally structured to honor one partner more than the other.

A marriage, or one that is not coerced or marked by stupidity and superficiality, is a mutual relationship where a man and woman come together with all of their individuality.  Nothing about this means that a marital relationship or the event of marriage, the ceremony itself, is about the groom or bride more than it is about the other, and anything other than a mutual, equivalent celebration of both excludes this truth.  It is irrational to believe otherwise on any level.  Marriage does not involve one person (even so-called "sologamy" is not a relationship, as it does not involve one person relating to another), so it is philosophically idiotic by default to emphasize one partner more than the other at a wedding unless one of them, due to their personality, would prefer less of the figurative spotlight.

The marriage day is not about the man or the woman specifically, but the public uniting of them as a couple, a pair of individuals who desire each other's presence and intimacy enough to commit to each other.  This would be easy for almost anyone to immediately or almost immediately prove by logical deduction if it was not for years of societal biases for or against each gender, sinking their talons into even something as celebratory as the actual ceremony on a marriage day.  Of course, there might also be women who want to pretend like a wedding is about them out of personal arrogance and men too lazy or relationally uninvested to even put any effort into planning or enacting a wedding.  They are fools who believe or promote the idea that a marriage ceremony is about the bride in particular just so they can make their own shallow selves seem more legitimate.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

Micromanaging Workers Beyond The Workplace

The workplace is a social construct that--despite the fact that survival is actually not dependent on it in the strictest sense, as people could survive without the trappings of modern civilization, even if not always as consistently--is erroneously treated as the philosophical and personal focal point of everything in life by so many who are deluded enough to think that submitting to arbitrary social structures makes them deep, unique, or intelligent.  It can also be treated as the focal point of life by people so desperate to get by that they do not think beyond the comparatively unimportant pursuit of wealth.  There is little that is not expected to be sacrificed for the sake of even jobs with trivial pay by many in the workforce and many who manage it.  The inverse priorities shape entire lives.

Instead of actual philosophical truths, friendships, and self-actualization being prized first and foremost (and yes, Christian life intersects with all three, so Christianity is not being excluded here), these things are acknowledged or celebrated to the extent that they are useful for maintaining corporate interests or providing potential to help with finding or keeping jobs.  With Americans so deeply pressured to waste their lives away working jobs that likely do not even pay well enough to support a family without additional income, the national culture becomes one that generally treats work as if it is more foundational or necessary than anything deeper or even more foundational than working for money.  In turn, instead of work being rightly treated as something that hinges on other things, like mental health, a philosophically and relationally positive environment, and support from friends or family, work gets treated as if it is so important that life outside of the workplace still revolves around it.

From discouraging needed visits to doctors during normal working hours to letting relationships deteriorate for the sake of work opportunities to demanding that non-problematic actions outside of work get abstained from, there are numerous ways that some industries or managers micromanage--or at least try to micromanage--workers beyond the workplace.  This worsens with specific jobs, like that of teaching at schools.  Teachers in particular usually get pressured to avoid public activities that are not immoral as far as any philosophical evidence suggests and that do not even have to interfere with their role as an educator, like drinking alcohol in front of the public that might contain their students or the parents of their students.

It is outright stupid to see someone not abusing alcohol and assume that they are, but it is even more irrational to see someone drinking alcohol and think that they must be impairing their work ability by doing so unless they are engaging in some hedonistic rush to drink to the point of drunkenness or are drinking recklessly while working.  For teachers at Christian schools or pastors and their spouses, the church equivalent of this secular trend has the added idiocy of legalistic hypocrisy, of being mistaken for Biblical obligations although the Bible opposes adding to its instructions (Deuteronomy 4:2).  This could be extended to all sorts of Biblically innocent activities like profanity, wearing bikinis for women or forgoing a shirt for men, viewing controversial movies at a theater, or some other nonsinful thing.

It is irrational for an employer to ever enforce this kind of policy.  As long as a person is not in ideological delusions or moral error, there is literally nothing to object to about their lives, and if a person is not needlessly hindering their work performance because of things outside the workplace, what would drive an employer to support this other than irrationalistic entitlement?  With varying degrees of stupidity (including both assumptions and knowing denial of facts) or selfishness behind it, this belief reduces down to an arrogant desire on the part of certain people at the top of the workplace hierarchy to see others give other parts of their lives to make the business leaders feel more secure.  What workers need and their moral freedom to do anything that is not immoral are not less important than an employer's reputation among imbeciles.

Work is nothing more than a means to some sort of practical end on its own.  It is not any more special in and of itself, as much as it is enjoyed subjectively by some people or mistaken for something more, unless there is philosophical and moral significance beyond the mere completion of tasks for money that could hypothetically be exchanged for many other jobs.  Those who do not want to put effort into increasing their own resources might simply demand that others cooperate with random, petty, asinine expectations to enhance their own reputation or earnings.  Of course, this could only be perpetuated on a large scale if enough consumers, workers, or employers go along with this or even believe the fallacies of this idea.

The Motivation Of Moral Superiority

One of the few things that almost everyone on the political right or left or who holds to either moral relativism or realism seems to dislike is one person thinking they are morally superior to another.  Predictably, one of the only reasons someone would dislike this is if they have no basis for thinking they are morally superior to others and are dissatisfied with being morally inferior instead.  Insecurity and subjective dislike are the only ultimate reasons why anyone would object to the inherent connection between the concept of superiority and the idea of moral obligations, as those who keep their moral obligations would have more value than others.  Many people despise this true notion.

Not only is this philosophically erroneous, but in many cases it is also spurred on by personal insecurity about how a person might not measure up to their obligations.  This error could involve ideological stupidity and absolutely shallow motivations.  Any belief held out of personal security or insecurity instead of sheer rationalistic proof is idiotic already, but even a rationalistically verifiable and inherently true belief is invalid in a sense if the person holding to it does so just to satisfy a personal desire--not the idea, but the reason a person believes in it.  Beliefs that are the embrace of true and provable concepts are not invalidated like this if a person enjoys them or develops deep feelings around them, even when it comes to the desire for moral superiority.

A desire to savor the greater metaphysical value of being moralistically superior to those who do not share a rationalistic worldview and/or a high moral standing is only irrational if someone's only interest in morality lies in how they can feel better than others.  As long as the core, primary motivation is to simply do what one should-- as moral obligations, if they exist, are what one should do regardless of personal preference--then looking down on others who do not care about anything beyond their own preferences cannot possibly be an ideological or moral error.  Arrogance is only thinking of oneself as higher than one is, and if one is morally superior to someone else, it would not be immoral or otherwise irrational to savor this.

Some people might reject the very idea of moral obligations because they personally dislike the thought of someone else being morally superior to them, whether or not they have realized that moral superiority is metaphysical superiority.  That is, if moral obligations do exist, the people who understand them without making assumptions and sincerely carry them out have more value and deserve better everyday treatment than those who do not care about or understand them.  The wishes of the latter are objectively meaningless either way.

The people terrified by this concept cannot deserve to feel at peace as long as the irrational desire to simply have what one wants because one wants it is not set aside.  If there are no moral obligations, no one deserves anything, and if there are moral obligations, then some people are inferior to others while still possessing whatever human rights would exist.  In either case, or in other words, no matter what, those who are so insecure about the possibility of being inferior to others for moral reasons that they never do anything to contemplate or pursue a high moral standing are pathetic.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

Game Review--The Sinking City (Switch)

"It always begins with a great flood.  Then... the threat rises with the sea.  The sea is all that divides our world from the one below."

--Harriet Dough, The Sinking City

An isolated city that does not appear on maps and that has somewhat recently been the site of a massive "Flood," Oakmont serves as the central location for The Sinking City, a Lovecraftian cosmic horror title that succeeds at tackling the subgenre but fails to provide strong gameplay outside of its detective segments.  In light of this, it is far more of a detective investigation game than it is action horror or survival horror; the horror elements emerge more from the concepts of hypothetical meaninglessness, apocalyptic destruction, supernatural forces besides the expected eldritch being(s), and isolation of Oakmont.  Cthulhu is not even the grand antagonist.  In fact, it is the "Dreamer's Hidden Daughter," or Cthulhu's daughter, that the game focuses on instead of Cthulhu (who dreams in the underwater city of R'yleh as he awaits his release).  Even so, much of the game deals with the human and non-eldritch supernatural forces that clash in Oakmont, all as many of the humans struggle to adapt to the enormous amounts of water.  Multiple endings and multiple ways to react to events or people could incentivize replays, but the building cosmic horror and the extreme autonomy forced upon the player as a private investigator are by far the strongest aspects of the game, which could take 20-40 hours depending on how observant the player is and how many side quests he or she completes.

Production Values

Contrasting with the excellence of the atmosphere and worldbuilding, the graphics are completely lackluster at almost all times.  The dialogue animations are sometimes out of sync with the sounds of their voices, grass pops into the foreground as you walk forward, and the same creature might appear on both sides of a fence as if the fence was not there.  Sound, being a major aspect of a largely dialogue-driven game, therefore has the power to salvage the otherwise mediocre production values, and, thankfully, the voice acting and creature noises are handled more competently.  However, it is the writing that stands out even more.  Everything from the haunting effects of Oakmont's madness epidemic to the racial prejudices of the area, which are shifted to the Innsmouthers in an ahistorical move, are conveyed clearly.  The themes and the utter freedom to proceed--or look intensely for overlooked clues--as fast as one can discover who to talk to, where to go, or how to assemble clues into "deductions" (the game erroneously treats inferences as logically accurate deductions instead of unproven, perception-based guesses) are the strongest parts instead of anything having to do with the visual and audio production values.

Gameplay

The Sinking City is a very slow game.  I do not mean this in a negative way; I only mean to clarify that this is not an action game by any means.  Yes, there is occasionally a chance to use firearms, Molotov cocktails, and stick grenades, the latter two of which can be crafted using various items that players might come across.  Still, the majority of the game is spent interrogating people, gathering evidence, and very literally piecing together clues to reach conclusions about the events at Oakmont.  You even have to use addresses provided in dialogue or notes to find specific street intersections in particular neighborhoods, or sometimes use police or newspaper records to figure out where to go, to make progress.  Largely autonomous investigation takes a clear precedence over combat.

There are five districts in Oakmont that can be explored during cases, with a handful of diving sections thrown in for some of the mandatory cases related to the main story.  These sequences are narratively important, but the locations themselves cannot be revisited.  Since backtracking is very time consuming thanks to the need to often use slow boats to cross flooded streets, you might as well try to work on multiple cases in a given area once you reach it.  Many of the case descriptions simply provide an address, usually an intersection of two streets, that must be identified on the pause menu's map and then explored.  Actually looking around at a given spot gathers clues and can trigger a special mechanic.

Upon visiting and inspecting some of these locations, you might have to use a mechanic called retrocognition, a supernaturally enhanced ability to reconstruct past events in the protagonist's mind.  Anywhere from two to around four events must be put in the right order to have enough information to describe what happened to whoever assigned the case.  Not every investigation tool is as natural or well-implemented as retrocognition, unfortunately.  The written records at the police station or other places, which must be searched for specific details using a filter with three categories, can occasionally require a practically random set of search criteria to find the necessary clue, although this kind of gameplay feature is very authentic for a game about a private investigator and truly does reinforce the focus on letting the play figure out many things on their own (of course, no one knows anything apart from reason, even the inferences made in the game and why inferences are not true deductive knowledge).  One note prompting a records examination near the very end of the main story is so utterly vague and unhelpful that I had to look up the search filter combination just to beat the game.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A private investigator named Charles Reed comes to the drowning city of Oakmont, the streets holding water after a recent flood that the locals refer to as if it has a supernatural cause.  Charles has traced an outbreak of madness and visions or nightmares of a sleeping giant here, and the inhabitants find themselves confronting literal monsters in dreams and visions, as well as while awake.  Mr. Throgmorton, one of the town's most prominent members, wants to find his missing son Albert, who reportedly was found in a lifeboat speaking gibberish.  Albert was part of a geological operation to discover information about "the Flood" and the visions, which are possibly connected, the visions and accompanying madness being of great interest to Charles.

Intellectual Content

The standard Lovecraftian relationship between sensory limitations and manipulation, where hallucinations and sensory perceptions blur or sensory experiences shift suddenly, is made into a gameplay mechanic with the sanity feature, where looking at monsters or certain objects lowers the sanity meter and can trigger apparent hallucinations.  Because no one can prove that their sensory perceptions as a whole correspond to the actual external world, no one can actually prove that visual or audio stimuli are or are not hallucinated.  It is for this reason that one's sensory perceptions are not a valid indicator of "sanity."  One could perceive nonexistent objects in the external world and still be rational, such as by rightly believing that there is no necessary connection between a general sensory experiences and an outside world of matter--for sensory hallucinations are involuntary, but irrationality can be voluntary thrown aside.  Rationality--someone's ability to understand and use the laws of logic, even if applying them to things that do not concern the external world--is the only actual standard of sanity or madness.

The only inherent, genuine, universally attainable knowledge is that pertaining to logical axioms, deductive proofs, introspective states of consciousness, and other things that can be rationalistically derived from them (such as that absolute certainty is found in any deduction without assumptions or any introspection, not just in the basic recognition of one's own existence).  For the most part, the only knowledge that comes from sensory experiences is that one is currently having a sensory experience, not that the experience corresponds to anything beyond one's immaterial consciousness.  Because he is assuming that his sensory perceptions are accurate and that plenty of hearsay he encounters is true, Charles Reed is not truly making deductions, which grant absolute certainty, when he pieces together the clues he finds.  He even chooses between two different, exclusive conclusions at some points, and yet neither of the conclusions could be proven because they involve unprovable ideas about things like the intentions of other people.

Conclusion

Of all the cosmic horror games I have played and reviewed thus far, including Call of Cthulhu, the only one that matches or surpasses the thoroughly Lovecraftian worldbuilding of The Sinking City is Omen Exitio: Plague.  For all of its visual issues, The Sinking City not only shows a somewhat unique setting with a far higher emphasis on player autonomy than is normal, but it honors many key characteristics of Lovecraftian cosmic horror from start to finish.  Strange dreams of a superhuman entity, a sunken eldritch prison, cults and conspiracies, tentacled beasts, and the worsening hallucinations or confusing sensory experiences of the protagonist make this game almost perfectly Lovecraftian on a thematic level, just without many attempts to draw from the idiotic metaphysical/epistemological irrationalism that has become culturally associated with Lovecraftian cosmic horror.  The Sinking City's non-investigative gameplay is the weak link, but the rest is a triumph for this subgenre of gaming and general entertainment/art.

Content:
 1.  Violence:  Fighting only occurs very sporadically unless the player intentionally seeks out very specific combat zones.  Shooting or physically striking the creatures does involve blood, but their bodies vanish into a mysterious mist-like substance.
 2.  Profanity:  Words like "damn" or "bastard" are used on occasion.
 3.  Nudity:  In some houses, nude male statues can be seen, and the penises are visible.  Likewise, statues of naked or partly naked women are in some homes.

Natural Diversity

One of the least intelligent and most artistically ineffective ways to include diversity in entertainment is always, on the level of how they are presented, trying to reduce a character down to the trait/traits that just emphasize their diverse status alone.  The closely related error is having the characters draw attention to the person's trait, whether it is their skin color or something else, without having any valid philosophical or storytelling reason to do so beyond simply fitting into perceived cultural trends.  Not every film, show, video game, or book stoops to these pathetic failures, but natural diversity--the kind that both benefits stories in general and directly or indirectly gives vital philosophical acknowledgment of the fact that diversity is already present in humanity with or without entertainment--is what might best provoke thought among sexist or racist people and what objectively deepens worldbuilding better.

Some of the best recent examples that come to my mind of works that have this natural diversity include Zack Snyder's Justice League, which has a large ensemble cast of both men and women from multiple races, from the Amazons to the different members of the titular Justice League itself.  Then there is the 2021 sequel The Suicide Squad, also part of the DCEU, which centers on a set of characters with diverse talents and ethnicity but even features prominent side characters from either gender and with various skin colors.  Even the asymmetrical multiplayer game Dead by Daylight has male, female, white, black, and Asian (and so on) survivors or killers, all without any of them being out of place in the multiverse of the game, as the Entity takes miscellaneous figures from the universes of other franchises and the game's new universe to pit them against each other.

At no point in any of these films or video games does the diversity of the characters get specifically pointed out--of course, some other works of entertainment actually need to call attention to diversity or lack of it in order to make a thematic or artistic point.  The characters of the aforementioned titles, including the various killers of Dead by Daylight, are simply diverse and integrated well into their respective projects.  It was likely an intentional and valid choice to make them diverse, yet a person, and even a person who routinely thinks about philosophical matters as they relate to individual and cultural experiences, could watch or play them and never even be struck by the realization that the whole project is riddled with diverse characters that are not reduced to token characters or stereotypes.

Outside of art that needs to have a specifically male, female, white, black, young, old, or other kind of cast for the sake of historical accuracy, thematic potency, or storytelling purposes, this is exactly what the most natural and impactful diversity looks like: it is so organic that it might not even be until well after a very rational, thoughtful person has viewed the film or played the game that he or she realizes just how diverse the characters were, if it strikes them at all.  For this to happen, the philosophical errors and idiocy of stereotypes must be avoided, but the results are by far the most intellectually and personally insightful.  The humanity (or inhumanity of some creatures), individuality, and characterization of each person is on full display to the point that their gender or race might melt away from one's focus.

The goal, after all, of rational intentions behind diversity in entertainment is ultimately to emphasize the shared humanity of people who might not look like oneself or come from the same chance background, of people with different genitalia, skin color, nationality, or economic class.  The rationality of this intention lies in approaching art and broader life itself without the shallow, epistemologically invalid, objectively false errors of assuming that being a man or woman, white, brown, or black, rich or poor, old or young, or many other such things fates one to have a given personality, worldview, or lifestyle.  People are individual humans and any belief that gender, race, or class defines a person's true nature is inherently contradicted by reality.  When people understand and accept this, they can see parts of themselves in others even though the outward appearances might differ.

Acting As If One Does Not Believe One's Own Moral Philosophy

Just in case some fool makes assumptions about what I am and am not about to say, remember that I am not even anything more than a moral skeptic who recognizes the logical possibility of either objective moral obligations or moral nihilism, recognizes all ideological inconsistencies as refutations of an idea and all personal inconsistencies as stupidity and insincerity, and recognizes the evidence for Christianity as supporting but not proving its very particular set of values.  I am neither a nihilist not someone who pretends to know that there are indeed moral obligations, but I do openly admit the irrelevance of conscience to proving moral ideas or even understanding what logically follows from a given idea.  At most, conscience restrains people whether or not an act is truly evil or merely prompts thought about moral concepts.

Some who begin to recognize just how irrelevant and useless conscience is to almost all aspects of philosophy just make the pathetic assumption that there are no moral obligations (which does not logically follow whatsoever), or they believe the even more irrational tenets of moral relativism, the false idea that everyone's conflicting, subjective preferences are valid at once instead of equally invalid.  Still, even nihilists and relativists lash out all the time despite believing, or supposedly believing, that nothing is truly immoral.  Just as many moral realists will brazenly contradict their beliefs on the level of actions or other beliefs, most moral relativists and nihilists will brazenly contradict themselves on the level of belief or action by reacting to certain things as if they genuinely believe them to be evil.  Most people simply act as if they do not believe their own philosophy of morality, whatever it is, when it gets convenient not to.

For relativists and nihilists, it is as if they desperately want there to be no true moral obligations so that they cannot be condemned in the only sense that matters even as they are so eager for their lives to have moral significance that they are willing to leap into stupidity.  This is often why people contradict themselves in such obvious, emotionalistic ways: they want two incompatible concepts to be objectively true at the same time.  Instead of abandoning one or both, at least until they rationalistically assess whether either of them is even logically possible on its own, they cling to both and are confused or enraged when someone else points out their hypocrisy and broader irrationality.  They are not interested in truth except perhaps in small, inconsistent bursts no matter what they say with words.

The only two foundational moral philosophies that are even logically possible are deontological moral obligations rooted in the moral nature of the uncaused cause (if it has one) or total moral nihilism, as even the existence of reason, the uncaused cause, and the subjective desires of conscience do not make it logically necessary that obligations exist.  All other philosophical approaches to moral ideas contradict and thus refute themselves, like relativism or atheistic moral realism, and most sets of values are only logically possible as actual obligations at best, having neither logical proof that establishes them as true by necessity nor mere evidences that lend support to them.  Only a fool would believe that incoherent or assumed values actually reflect reality.

Moral philosophy is abstract, yes, but it is not so abstract that anyone is truly incapable of discovering all of these logical facts with only the laws of logic and their own willing minds.  The desperation of irrationalists of diverse ideological backgrounds, from atheists to fitheists to cultural relativists to people stupid enough to never realize that their subjective moral preferences have nothing to do with proving moral concepts, tends to reveal itself in spite of their petty facade of moralistic or intellectual superiority, resulting in outward displays of hypocrisy or ideological assumptions and contradictions.  Even those who are more consistent about their selective relativism and who actually believe they can prove nihilism still rarely act as if they believe what they say, and even non-rationalists who look down on such people still tend to think their subjective perceptions and preferences are more than just that: subjective perceptions.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

Originality In Entertainment Revisited

Originality can take more forms than novelty both when it comes to philosophical ideas at large and entertainment.  Autonomous conceptual reflection or autonomous creativity, like coming even to ideas introduced by others on one's own or using popular story elements without doing so because of popularity (or outside prompting), are expressions of the capacity to rely on reason and oneself instead of others.  Artistic autonomy is just sometimes denied a little more overtly thanks to all but a few people talking as if they have just assumed that a given work of entertainment must be inspired by or a reaction to some other work rather than merely being the product of a person's own thoughts.

Another reason why artistic autonomy--coming up with ideas without directly looking to specific examples of other works even if one might be drawing from emotions or thoughts previously stirred by exposure to entertainment--is trivialized or denied is that there are plenty of examples of works of art that by all appearances by made to imitate something else in a cheap way (as opposed to intentional parody or self-aware storytelling).  Intentions are impossible to know from actions because it is always possible for an artist to have motives that are not what they seem to be based on their work, but some art looks like a greed-driven attempt to profit off of success without any thought behind it beyond fitting into a current trend.

For example, if a story made solely to ride on the popularity of a similar work for the sake of money will usually make minimal changes to the story such as switching up names that otherwise make it almost an exact mirror for something else, but there is nothing clever or artistically sincere about this.  In contrast, even if someone thought of a story where every element had already been used somewhere else but was merely focusing on the quality of the execution and did not mistake it for something conceptually distinct from all other works of entertainment, then his or her story can still be one of excellence and originality in the sense that it is not meant to be inspired by any specific work that has already been released; it was truly their vision.  Thinking of a story oneself or without trying to model almost everything about it on some other work is still originality.

Even though the latter creator's ideas and work are not new or unthought of, they are sincere, can be understood for what they are, and were not derived from any sort of admiration for other entertainment, not to mention the idiotic idea that it is literally impossible to come up with ideas for art without exposure to or inspiration from other art.  It is true that artistic ideas, unlike philosophical ideas purely rooted in awareness of the logical axioms at the epistemological and metaphysical foundation of all things, almost always require some form of experience to be prompted (whereas purely logical truths must be at least indirectly grasped for even slight awareness of anything at all to be had and can be thought of without any sensory, social, or psychological prompting).

Regardless of the exact way a storytelling or gameplay idea is thought of, novelty in entertainment can be less of a strength than sheer quality of execution if handled correctly, not that novelty is impossible even after so much art of different mediums has been made and not that everything that is not new is just an intentional imitation of something established in the artistic world.  Originality in entertainment is too often just mistaken for something completely new (which is almost impossible beyond remixing well-used ideas) when there is more to it than that.  The intentions and methods of thinking behind an artistic idea also pertain to how original a song, film, television or streaming show, book, or video game is and can in fact far surpass sheer novelty in many cases.

Spouses Do Not Necessarily Deserve Greater Consideration Than Friends

One does not have to probe for long to find examples of married people who thoughtlessly cling to their spouses, or singles who cling to the idea of a spouse, at the expense of friendships.  The only reason to elevate marriage above friendships with either gender is inescapably emotionalistic, and thus invalid.  Any rational person can see that having deep friends of either gender does not displace having a thriving marriage.  However, most people do not have relationships built on rationalism and true depth, inside or outside of their marriages, yet they still think that their spouse deserves some special consideration over others even when their spouse is an intellectual insect, an emotionalistic hypocrite without any communicated thoughts of substance, a controlling imbecile, or any number of other such possible things.  It would be easy for my words here to be misunderstood by non-rationalists, but that does not make the ideas behind them any less true and demonstrable.

A generally irrational, hypocritical, selfish, or otherwise petty and shallow spouse could not possibly deserve as much affection or positive attention on the basis of merit as a rational, loyal, just, and caring friend.  This is not to say that people in struggling marriages with irrational partners should not try to reshape their marriages into mutual relationships based on deep intellectual and personal understanding, but any friends of theirs with superior philosophical, moral, and relational standing are more deserving of actual attention and concern in one sense.  Marriage is philosophically and functionally important, but it is not more important than friendships with either the same gender or the opposite gender.  The differences between the two relationship types are more related to the practical affairs of living with a partner and/or the explicitly sexual or romantic side of a marriage (though asexuals can easily forgo the latter and still have subjectively fulfilling and objectively deep marriages).  Friendship is more foundational because a strong marriage is a certain type of friendship, and no one needs marriage as opposed to friendship to satisfy their sociality.

The cultural obsession with marriage and dating has plainly driven many people to unhesitatingly, automatically prioritize their spouse over all others when this is never a rational thing to automatically do.  Even a philosophically competent, morally upright, affectionate spouse is no better of a person than a close and philosophically competent, morally upright, affectionate friend, and thus neither can deserve more love or respect as a person.  This goes beyond the objective truth that it is idiotic to intentionally confine one's social life to marriage (unless there are literally no worthy candidates for friendship): even when there is no substantial difference between the intellectual and personal nature of a friendship and marriage, the marriage is not more important by default.  Again, a spouse and friend of equivalent qualities would deserve equal consideration as the other participants in strong relationships.  A spouse does mot deserve to be thought of more highly or given an unnecessary level of communication to the detriment of friendships just because they are a spouse.

The general church and secular culture tend to, motivated by assumptions which are themselves driven by petty preferences, treat friendships as inherently expendable by comparison to marriages, but someone who will not care for both relationship categories is ultimately undeserving of having either type of relationship.  If someone is too irrational to understand the truth about how marriage has been given an incredibly exaggerated status in Western culture, they are not rational enough to handle marriage or even to be worthy of someone else having an interest in marrying them in the first place.  If they are married already but fall into this state of delusion and unworthiness, it is not as if it is Biblically permissible to divorce without abuse, neglect, or adulterous unfaithfulness of some kind, but until they change as a person for the better, they do not deserve the same kind of affection or respect that a rational, loyal friend does.

Enjoying And Analyzing Art

It is objectively true that liking or disliking art is subjective; whether or not art accomplishes its goals or has a high, mediocre, or low quality is objective.  Both of these are true simultaneously because it could not be any other way.  The idea that subjective enjoyment always corresponds to quality is a myth just as much as the idea that there is nothing objectively excellent or pathetic about various works of art.  This does not mean that it is bad for people to enjoy genuinely bad films or books, among other mediums, but it does mean that how one person or a larger group of people feel about a work of art does not reveal its quality or make it have or lack quality.

Whether I or anyone else enjoys or does not enjoy a particular type of art is entirely irrelevant to whether it succeeds at conveying non-vague ideas it was intended to, has any philosophical substance, has a coherent structure and execution, and so on.  If it is a book, is the writing style repetitive?  If it is a movie, are the acting and visual effects strong?  If it is a video game, are the mechanics deep or clever and does the story bring up philosophical concepts or have no conceptual depth?  These and other criteria for each medium determine if art is truly excellent, mediocre, or of poor quality.

It might offend some people that their appreciation or dislike for a given work of art, whatever the medium, has no actual relevance to either the nature of the art or to the critical evaluation of it, but this is the truth of the matter.  I or anyone else could like a book, video game, movie, sculpture, and so on, and this subjective enjoyment remains a separate matter from whether the work in question is actually excellent art.  Personal appreciation does not change forced acting into natural acting, visually random paintings into realistic paintings, or lackluster gameplay mechanics into nuanced mechanics.

Sometimes the quality of art does at least in part depend on the intentions of the creator(s): a movie meant to satirize bad acting could intentionally use bad acting, for instance.  An ironic comedy could use cheap comedy to make a point about just how stupid that style of attempted humor is when other films or games (or other mediums) unironically lean into it.  There is a major difference between a work that uses otherwise terrible quality in a clever or ironic way and a work that was actually intended to be of high quality.  With the latter, fans will just tend to believe its quality is neutral or high despite whatever deserved criticism it receives.

Of course, one could have one's preferences shift towards wanting art of quality as one reflects more on the nature of art itself and encounters examples of superb art.  No one needs to fallaciously think that their preferences are automatic signs that the real nature of a work of art is the opposite of whatever their feelings would imply.  Liking something is also not an indicator that it is poor art, just as disliking something does not mean it is good.  Personal enjoyment is not proof of quality and vice versa.  This is the fact that so many critics and casual consumers of art only seem to enjoy when rebuking someone else for erroneously criticizing a work that the former subjectively appreciates.

The Offense Of Blasphemy

Say "oh my god" or "god damnit" around evangelicals after identifying as a Christian, and they will usually look at you as if you have just committed a grave sin.  Some call it the offense of blasphemy, a very serious charge within the context of Christianity.  Blasphemy is categorized as a capital offense in Mosaic Law (I will address this more below), and it is both possible to demonstrate that these phrases are not what the Bible means by blasphemy and that there would be no Biblical evidence that this is sinful even if it was not clear on what blasphemy is.  Like with malice, lust, or adultery, evangelicals misunderstand blasphemy to be far more than a very specific sin, falsely equating irrelevant things with blasphemy just as they do with other sins like lust.

Verbal expressions like "god," "oh my god," and even "god fucking damnit" are not even necessarily referring to God, the actual uncaused cause, so this automatically undermines the idea that the phrases trivialize or attack God at the start.  They could easily be used as cultural wording for surprise, frustration, or anger without anyone thinking about or meaning to refer to any deity, much less the specific chief deity of the Bible called Yahweh.  It does not matter that they are used alongside profanity or as the equivalent of expletives because profanity itself is nonsinful on the Biblical framework of ethics.  If this is not blasphemy, how could one tell from the Bible itself what the Bible condemns when it prohibits blasphemy and even demand the execution of those guilty of it?

In Leviticus 24, the account of a man executed for blasphemy reveals precisely what this offense is: it is not using a generic term for deity like profanity, but actively, intentionally cursing God.  The story of two men fighting mentions how one of them "blasphemed the Name with a curse" (Leviticus 24:11), with a later verse quoting Yahweh as saying "'If anyone curses his God, he will be held responsible; anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord will be put to death'" (24:15-16).  Uttering "oh my god" or "god damnit" does not even begin to approach the actual malice or selfishness of cursing God, and yet this is what so many people, from typical evangelical imbeciles like Ray Comfort to plenty of casual Christians, say they think blasphemy is.  At the very least, they think such phrases qualify as blasphemy, even if there are worse forms of it.

It is very likely that such Christians have never thought very deeply about the ramifications of any idea in or about Mosaic Law, including its particular handling of blasphemy.  Do they actually think, contrary to what the Bible actually says, that Leviticus 24 says to kill people for exclaiming "oh my god" or some other such phrase?  If that is blasphemy, this this would be true, but it is so clearly erroneous upon direct examination that only a fool would ever think otherwise.  Moreover, if God's moral nature does not change (Malachi 3:6), then the execution law for blasphemy is universally obligatory on the Christian worldview no matter what Christians wish was the case.  These Christians would probably not be so hasty to just assume that "oh my god" amounts to blasphemy if they actually understood this!

Their folly here is comparable to trivializing rape or racism by mistaking (or knowingly misusing words) lesser or irrelevant offenses for rape or racism except for a major difference.  Lesser sexual assaults and even the most minor forms of racism are evil on the Biblical worldview, and yet saying "oh my god" or similar phrases is not.  Because it does logically follow from the idea that cursing God is an extreme sin that saying "god damnit" or "oh my god" is evil, this not even a case like extrapolating from the Bible's condemnation of alcoholism to conceptual overlap with drug abuse, neither of which is the same as condemning alcohol or drug use themselves.  In other words, uttering "oh my god" is not even sinful by extrapolation from what the Bible does condemn because assumptions and fallacies would still be used in the process.