Watch out for this episode – it’s all about Snakes! We talk about our menstrual cycles, factual inaccuracies in action movies, and start our own religion. We pitch our script for the next Wolverine movie, determine the worst part of being a man, and convince ourselves that snake owners are legitimate sociopaths.
Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast and follow us on Twitter @SeeingReddit or e-mail us at SeeingReddit@gmail.com! Tell your friends if you enjoy the show – we’re always happy to offend new listeners! Our theme song is “Reddit” by Podington Bear, you can find it at freemusicarchive.org. Thanks for coming and keep your pockets on Shrek!
Classic Adventure Game Feel with Fresh New Mechanics Makes for a Great Game Experience
In recent days Rime has been getting a lot of headlines with its bizarre DRM information, but Spanish developer Tequila Works has another game out recently that deserves to be talked about for anyone with a nostalgia for the classic adventure games of Lucasarts and Sierra – The Sexy Brutale. In a lot of ways The Sexy Brutale manages to recapture that classic adventure game style without sacrificing on having fresh-feeling mechanics and aesthetics, making it less of an homage to the old school and more of a recapturing of how those games felt the first time you played them.
The premise of the game is what originally reeled me in – it takes place over the course of 12 hours in the titular high-class casino, during which time all the guests at the hotel are murdered. Your character, a much-liked priest with a mysterious past, is awoken from reliving his death endlessly by a bloody apparition tasking him with discovering the cause of all the deaths and ultimately preventing them, which he can do with the aid of a magical pocket watch that allows him to relive the final 12 hours of the casino over and over again.
This premise leads to a very cool game experience, where the player can voyeuristically observe gruesome (and very creative deaths) keeping an eye out for ways in which they can intervene next time. It’s the ultimate expression of a game’s writer having their cake and eating it too – all the scenes in which the hero fails to save his charge aren’t just in there as a fail state, they are sure to be seen by every player. No doubt this helped to inspire some of the best dialogue and character development I have ever seen in a video game.
In a lot of recent games that I’ve been playing I’ve noticed that the once-novel “detective mode” (named after the pioneering Batman: Arkham games) has become de rigueur for any game that involves the player picking up on clues – perhaps as a response to player dissatisfaction with pixel hunting. However, The Sexy Brutale provides a refreshing change of pace, where all character interactions are viewed through keyholes with no special magic that allows you to separate clues from flavor, heightening the player’s interaction with the setting in a way that a lot of mystery games fail to do. The fact that objects that can be interacted with are always highlighted with a circle around them certainly helps as well.
It’s not often that I feel compelled to get 100% of the achievements in a game – my typical gaming experience is focused on ingesting the story and any medals I achieve are incidental – but The Sexy Brutale presents such an intriguing mystery that the achievements are more than just scoring more points – they offer further insight into what is going on.
The game isn’t without its faults, including the frustratingly slow plodding of the player character through the halls that you have explored enough to know that they hold no new secrets. Necessary to the functionality of the time mechanic in the game is that it takes a predictable amount of time for you to get from one room to another, so a run or fast travel option isn’t available, but after your 40th trip from the Heaven and Hell Staircase to the Spider Room you really start to miss it. Still, it gives you the chance to admire the beautifully designed environments and sprites that lend to the overall turn-of-the-century aesthetic.
When the full truth of the story finally reveals itself, the twist is not terribly surprising, but it does present the player with a lot to think about concerning the nature of death and love, which I think is a triumph. It’s not often that a game can truly incite a player to ask themselves philosophical questions with a final-moments reveal.
For those like me with a love of old standards like Loom and Monkey Island, I cannot recommend The Sexy Brutale highly enough – the game isn’t a huge time commitment (I finished it in about 7 hours) and is certain to put a smile on your face. Even if you haven’t yet dipped your toe into mystery adventure games, The Sexy Brutale is a great example to start with.
1/4 cup chocolate syrup (or if you forgot to get this like I did, 1/4 cup corn syrup with a little cocoa powder mixed into it!)
8 tablespoons butter (1 stick), melted
For the ice cream layer:
1 pint container of vanilla (or any white) ice cream
1 pint container of strawberry (or any pink) ice cream
The stuff you need
Make the cookie layer
Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a standard 17”x12” cookie sheet with sides (sometimes called a jellyroll pan or a half-sheet pan) with nonstick cooking spray and line the bottom with parchment.
Sifting
Sift flour, cocoa, salt, and baking soda into a medium bowl. Beat eggs, sugar and chocolate syrup in a large bowl until light brown. Add melted butter and whisk until fully incorporated.
Mixing
Add dry ingredients to the egg mixture. With a rubber spatula, slowly incorporate the dry ingredients into the wet; stir just until no dry streaks remain. Pour batter into prepared baking sheet; using a spatula spread batter to an even thickness.
Batter
Bake until cookie springs back when touched, 10 to 12 minutes. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then run a butter knife around the edges to loosen the cookie. Put a large cutting board over the pan and flip it, removing the pan (or flip the cookie carefully out onto a clean countertop). Cool completely, about half an hour.
Cookie sheet
Cut out your cats, 8 as just cat shapes and another 8 with eyes cut out as well. Put them on a plate in the freezer to make them easier to handle.
Cat cutouts
Cut your ice cream pints into slices (cut right through the cardboard) with a bread knife and place the slices on a tray in the freezer to firm up again, about half an hour. Cut the slices in half and match the halves up with one white and one pink for each circle; freeze another half hour.
Ice cream cutouts
Cut cat shapes out of the ice cream so the ice cream cut-out is half white and half pink, and stack them: plain cookie, ice cream, cookie with eye holes. Freeze again on a plate for at least an hour before serving, or wrap them individually in foil to store them for a week.
He’s a frozen treat with an all new taste!
Cuz he came to this planet from outer space!
A refugee of an interstellar war!
But now he’s at your local grocery store!
Cutter sizes
Notes
This recipe itself isn’t too hard, but some of the details are tricky. You can make it in advance so try to do it when you have time to put the ice cream back in the freezer as much as possible. It’s very easy to get frustrated when even a few extra seconds out on the counter on a hot day ruins your ice cream slices. You can see in my picture that my vanilla ice cream stayed very soft, like Play-Doh, even when fully frozen, and my strawberry ice cream made nice firm slices that stayed sharp and easy to work with for almost 15 minutes! They were even the same brand (Haagen-Dazs) so it must be down to the ingredient ratios of the different flavors. Maybe give the pints a squeeze at the grocery store and see which flavors/brands are hard. Lower butterfat ice creams will be easier to work with because fat limits freezing, premium ice creams with higher butterfat will taste better (in my opinion) so use your judgement.
If you want to make things easier, just buy all the same flavor of ice cream and don’t worry about halving and moving the slices for the half-white-half-pink color scheme, this is a minor detail compared to the look of the whole thing. No reason you can’t just use whatever ice cream flavor is your favorite either, but remember a lot of chunks will make them hard to slice.
I spread my cookie batter “mostly” flat expecting it to level a bit while cooking; it barely did at all and was definitely thicker in some spots. Next time I’ll be sure to take the time and smooth it as flat as I can.
Now- that cookie cat cutter! In the picture above the notes section were the 3 I considered: a “cat head cookie cutter” I bought on Amazon for about $4 that’s way too big, a pink Japanese sandwich cutter in the shape of a pig that’s not *quite* the right shape, and a round 3” biscuit cutter I modified myself. This is definitely the one I recommend, simple round cutters are easy to find, and you just need jewelry pliers (like needlenose pliers with rounded tips- or just needlenose would work too) to shape the cutter. Gently bend the ear points out with your fingers, then use the pliers to shape clear angles where the ears join the head. Squish the circle a bit to make the head wider than it is tall. Mine is NOT very symmetrical but you can’t tell from the finished cookies! I used a round fondant cutter for the eye holes (it has a little spring-loaded pin to push out the cut material) but you could easily use a drinking straw or flat pen cap to make the eyes.
If I was making these to take them to a party, I would forget about ice cream altogether- I’d use whoopie pie frosting as filling. They’d look just as cute but keep at room temperature for days. Make and cut the cookie as usual, but make this filling:
6 tablespoons butter (3/4 stick), softened
2/3 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
pinch of salt
1 and 1/4 cups marshmallow fluff
Beat the butter and sugar until fluffy, add vanilla and salt, beat in the marshmallow fluff until smooth, about 2 minutes. Chill in the fridge if it seems too soft, then pipe directly onto the cookie bases leaving a little room for spread all the way around, then add the cookie tops and press lightly into place.
I don’t know why we talked for twenty goddamn minutes about Porygon, but there’s nothing I can do about it now. This is Someone’s PC: A Pokémon Podcast.
Another duo of NoSleep stories starts this week, with Does It Hurt When You Sleep?. CreepyPodsta: The Creepypasta Podcast welcomes two brand-new guests to the show: Lisette Voytko and Kira White.
Support the show on Patreon! $1 a month gets you two bonus episodes and one short story!
In this very nice episode, we completely fail to make innuendos while talking about Fasting. We talk about artificial butter flavor, hidden animal dicks, and buying Jeff video games. We dive deep into Mad Max, Bizarro Clark Kent, and Breatharian mystics and come to the conclusion that we hate all internet communities, which is a shame given the premise of our show.
Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast and follow us on Twitter @SeeingReddit or e-mail us at SeeingReddit@gmail.com! Tell your friends if you enjoy the show – we’re always happy to offend new listeners! Our theme song is “Reddit” by Podington Bear, you can find it at freemusicarchive.org. Thanks for coming and keep your pockets on Shrek!
