Sonic.EXE Review

Sonic.EXE

Rating: X - Comedy

Themes/Genres:    Creepypasta; Video Games

Main Characters:   Sonic, Author

Overview:

The author receives a strange CD in the mail one day, believing it to be sent by a friend, but inside finds a cursed Sonic the Hedgehog 3 game and a request for its destruction.  Instead of doing as the letter asked, the author decides to play the game out of curiosity and soon find themselves faced with bloodshed, gore, and demonic entities.  Before long the game bleeds itself into real life and turns the author’s life upside-down.

Review:

Dear god this creepypasta is a mess.

Seeing as this is the first creepypasta I’ve reviewed and there are still those who have never heard of them, allow me to explain.  A creepypasta is a term used for internet-based scary stories, basically the upgraded version of telling spooky stories around a campfire.  It’s a wonderful addition to the horror genre, creating wonderfully horrific tales that are sure to leave a mark on your psyche… but also having plenty of duds amongst the batches.  As there tends to be with anything.

Sonic.EXE is the latter.

Despite an immense popularity amongst creepypasta fans, gaining not only tons of fan art but even a fan-made game recreating the game of the story… the actual written story is downright awful.  And about as terrifying as, “The Room.”  You spend more time cringing at the awful grammar and try-hard “gore” than you do actually fearing for the writer’s life or wondering about the potential reality behind the story.  A well-written creepypasta often leaves you wary and silently fearing that it may actually be a true story, that there truly are silent monsters always just out of eyesight or you’re actually stuck in an endless loop of recovery limbo.  Sonic.EXE does nothing of the sort.

Right from the get-go it throws your suspension of disbelief to into the furthest corners it can possibly manage with a delivery that shouldn’t have even made in the first place.  The friend wants the CD destroyed… but instead of just doing it himself, he sends it to a close friend, telling him to and giving no real explanation as to why he can’t.  The best you can gather is that ‘he’ is after him and has run out of time… how long does it take to break a CD in half?  How much longer does it take to package, stamp, and send something off?  This entire story gets thrown off with that one single detail.

You could, of course, argue that the entire situation is immediately full of shit and that this friend is just trying to be a clever asshole and prank his friend by giving him some bullshit “oh no don’t play this, I’m ded” spiel and then sending his friend a hacked game for the sole purpose of scaring the shit out of him… and really, that’d make the entire story more believable.  But I feel like that’s not what the writer was going for.  Unfortunately.

Instead, we now get led into the clusterfuck of a tale about the author and his terrible experiences with a game he was told not to play in the first place.  So moving on, we now get into the game itself, and hoo-boy, let me tell you… I haven’t seen this much try-harding since the last three Saw movies.  Split-second image recalling, the ever-present 666, HYPER REALISTIC BLOOD, playing music backwards, far too many “gory” details on tiny pixelated animals that you couldn’t possibly have actually seen, Kefka laughs, and the mixture of about 10,000 different games for no reason whatsoever.  This story is not only ridiculously long in the first place, it makes it feel even longer considering all the ridiculous shenanigans you have to try not to laugh through.

The author consistently forgets what he wrote just a couple sentences back by constantly repeating himself apparently, for example when the music slows down… only to start slowing down a couple sentences later.  Or completely changes between “this is definitely not a glitch” to “I can’t tell if this is a glitch or a hack” later on down the line.  He can’t make up his mind about anything.  But then turns around and seems to be able to perfectly time exactly how long certain sequences take.  While freaking the fuck out.  I don’t know about you, but when I’m freaked out I have no concept of time whatsoever, all I can think is “dear god there’s hair everywhere, where the fuck is the DOOR?!”  But maybe that’s just me -- maybe the author sits there counting exactly how many seconds are in-between screens for whatever reason.  I’m just going to go ahead and call BS, anyway.

Of course, we need to get some game-breaking-into-reality nonsense in, as well, by having the author suddenly feel like a specific character is in trouble.  You know, just after watching shit go down the entire rest of the time, but chose that specific moment to decide the characters were in trouble.  Or claiming that the “characters, themselves, were actually in trouble”.  You know, that real life Sonic and Tails that’s floating around out there, their actual souls are in trouble, and the author can just feel that… playing this hacked game.  Finally we get some nightmares to tie it all up into reality, naturally.  Because nightmares obviously mean that it’s definitely a demon-possessed hacked video game and definitely not that you’re just a little bitch.  I am definitely trembling now.  This is some Freddy Krueger-level scares now, we’ve got nightmares.

By this point most people would quit playing the game, not only because it’s so “horrifying” but because the author legitimately believes the souls of these video game characters are doomed to eternal damnation because of this game.  Most people would be like “you know what, maybe I should actually break this CD like that letter said to do in the first place”.  But not this guy!  No, in true Genocide-Route fashion, he’s just got to know what else there is and continues playing, sending another character to their HYPER REALISTIC death.  But it’s okay, because he cries about it.  This game supposedly drags the characters and the player into actual Hell just for playing it… but I guess he’s a completionist, gotta get that final ending.

And what is this final ending, the conclusion to all this mental torment, the last piece of the puzzle?

A plushie.

That’s right, folks.  Play a Hell game, get a free Sonic plushie.

BE AFRAID!!

Look author, Sega already has a terrifying plushie and it’s not a blood-dripping, red-eyed Sonic.  In fact, it’s a Tails.  A Tails Doll, if you will.

This entire story is a mess to get through and don’t think I’m going to excuse bad writing just because it was an early creepypasta, as some people seem to do.  People have been writing and creating horror for as long as the human race has been telling stories, and they didn’t need hyper-realistic blood or details no one would actually be able to see to do it well.  No pass.  It’s too long, the grammar is awful, the setup is laughable, and the plot is questionable at best.  It’s got the subtlety of an action film

.

I’ve always said, just because it has blood… doesn’t automatically make it a horror.  Just because there are deaths, doesn’t mean its horror.  There is no better example for that than here.  You can’t just throw every cliché in the book in and expect it to be scary, you have to create an atmosphere, you have to make it believable, you have to be subtle, and you have to let readers’ imaginations run mad.  Sonic.EXE does none of this.  It’s not scary.  It’s cringe-worthy and laughable.

Resident Evil 7 Demo: A Quick Look

Resident Evil 7: Demo
Rating: Holy shit that's cool

Resident Evil, it's been a long time since you've been considered a true horror.  Much like the Dead Space series, you jumped the horror ship straight into the waters of action-based gameplay and, admittedly, probably lost quite a few fans in the process.  The horror fans, at least.  While I admit I'm still fairly new to a lot of games and hadn't played anything worth mentioning until relatively recently, I've made up for a lot of lost time pretty quickly.  But if there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that fans of the original horror-centric games are getting a breath of fresh air with a lot of upcoming releases.

Among those are Capcom's Resident Evil 7 and Kojima's Death Stranding.  And while we're still wracked with pain and anger (mostly anger) over the loss of Silent Hills, (fuck you, Konami) it looks like Capcom's giving us this badass looking Resident Evil game. It probably won't beat out my hype for Death Stranding because RE doesn't have Norman Reedus or Sink Baby, but that's a focus for another review.  For now, let's see what's going on in the RE world.

The demo starts out in the best possible way, throwing you right into it with no explanations and no time to understand before throwing you into the actual gameplay section, where it only gives you one mission and then leaves you to wander.  How better to set an atmosphere for spine-tingling than with next to no instruction and a sudden need to escape your immediate surroundings?  With slow movements and questionable noises, of course!  And we have plenty of that to go around!  The way the game starts out with a preset low controller sensitivity instantly throws you into a slow, cautious, 'there is obviously something right around this corner' air, which puts most people off right off the bat.  While it could just be seen as a weirdly inconvenient presetting, it honestly adds more to the atmosphere than you'd normally expect, especially since most people change it up as soon as they realize they can.

On top of the slow movements, the demo is filled with both subtle and sudden noises all around the player, an extremely vital factor in any game.  Without the right sounds, or lack thereof in some cases, it's almost impossible to correctly set a tone.  These noises keep you on your tones and checking your back at all times, keeping you consistently tensed without there even being anything there.  You're not going to find much throughout that house for most of the game, except for key moments, but you're always going to waiting for it, and that's the important part.

Not much of the bigger story can be really been seen through this quick, terrifying demo, but it certainly does a great job of setting it up to keep you guessing and wanting to know more.  Best of all, you can keep looking for more hints and tips towards the story of the unfortunate victims and the family that used to inhabit the house by replaying the demo and searching new areas, trying new things, and unveiling pieces you may not have seen before.  While on your first playthrough of it you may just want to hurry and get on out of there as quickly and painlessly as possible and miss several details, but you may also be inclined to play through a second, third, even fourth time, each time with new information you've gathered from the last to try new situations.  Pull the lever right from the get-go, open the drawer first-hand so you can get what's in there later on, figure out where that mannequin finger goes... each time finding something new and unravelling more mysteries about your situation.

It's not a huge demo, but it gives a lot to discover, explore, test, and theorize about... all while being scared out of your wits the entire time.  It's certainly the first time in a long time I've been on-edge just watching someone play, let alone playing it myself, so I'm excited for the full release.  I just hope they're able to deliver on this hefty promise of tantalizing horror.  I'd hate to see a repeat of the disappointment from Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (a decent game that just couldn't live up to Amnesia: The Dark Descent)..... or worse, Silent Hills. (fuck you again, Konami)

We're excited, Capcom, don't betray us.

This demo is amazing and I can't recommend it enough, I just hope the full game lives up to its blazing potential.  I'm skeptical, it's hard to go from action to horror, but it looks like they've got a good handle back on it.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Review

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

By Ambrose Bierce

Rating: Chills

Themes/Genres:    Psychological, Short Story, Horror; Death, Nature of Time, Illusions

Main Characters:   Peyton Farquhar

Overview:

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a tale of a Southern man in the time of the Civil War, pining for a soldier's life he can't have, and sacrificing his life to assist his side of the war.  Taking the subtle advice from a passing Confederate soldier, he goes to burn a bridge the Union is trying to rebuild only to be caught and hung in the early morning hours on Owl Creek Bridge.

During the process, the rope broken and he's plunged into the river below, giving him the opportunity to escape and return to the family that filled his final thoughts.  Through much trial he finally makes it home to his wife, who is waiting with open arms, before reality returns and his life ends on the end of a rope on Owl Creek Bridge.

Main Review:

A short story written in 1890, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has had several adaptations, inspired many works of art such as songs, albums, plays, and many more stories, and is another work of fiction that helped shaped the written world.  It’s been directly and indirectly noted in everything from heavy metal songs like “The Hanging Soldier” to an episode of the Simpsons where the class is putting on a play of the story, itself. Over 100 years after its publication, this classic story is still reaching audiences.

And it certainly deserves to be.

While in today’s era of horror the ending of “he was actually dead, after all” isn’t the most shocking revelation in the world and has been done countless times, it’s oftentimes done incorrectly.  Either it’s made far too obvious with no subtlety whatsoever, or it comes completely out of left-field with no indication that it’s even an option.  Owl Creek Bridge doesn’t have that problem.

There are recurring themes and hints throughout the story that, if paid attention to, indicate the twist ending the entire time and keeps the story connected to itself, without becoming too belligerently obvious.  One of the examples of this is the repeated appearance of the color grey.  The grey suit on the Confederate soldier, the grey eyes in both him and one of the sentinels, and the grey sky under which he escapes, they all convey the idea of a clouded sense of reality, misleading illusions and obsessions.

Another is the driftwood that appears under the bridge, distracting Peyton from his thoughts of his wife and children as he comments on how incredibly slow it seems to be moving despite the seemingly rushing water of the river.  It’s a parallel to the slowing and fluidity of time, often described by those on the verge of death.  It becomes an extension of himself, floating down the river to freedom.

A final note is the disproportionately acute senses Peyton acquires after his escape from the rope and yet the strangely detached view of his own body.  It shows the increased gap between him and reality, as his physical body remains in place at the end of the rope, his raw senses have to make up for the detachment by going into an inaccurate overload.  It allows him to slip into his full fantasy of escape.

All of these are consistent enough that they can be pointed out and connected, especially after a second or third read through, but are also written well enough that on a first read-through it still accomplishes the point of a twist, the brief shock.  While this isn’t necessarily the most ‘horror’ of stories, it’s certainly a well-written piece of work and deserves the read.  Just maybe not so much if you’re looking for a nightmare-fueled night.  While the idea that anything you could be experiencing right now could potentially only be a pre-death illusion is a scary enough thought, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is far less nightmare and far more time slows down and the world melts away in the most poetic, fashion.

It’s an English teacher’s wet dream with its brilliant placed and thought-out metaphors, but maybe not the scariest story on the block.

A Nightmare On Elm Street Review

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Rating: Instant fav

Themes/Genres: Horror, Human vs Supernatural, Gore/Slasher

Main Characters: Nancy Thompson, Freddy Krueger

Ah the 80’s, a great period for music, fashion, and especially… slasher movies.  Some of the best classics came from the 80’s, including my lifetime favorite, A Nightmare on Elm Street.  A movie that came out before I was even born but, just like Guns n’ Roses and leg warmers, still had a huge impact on my life.  So why don’t we take a look at what made it the instant-classic it is?

Right from its initial release, A Nightmare on Elm Street was a box office hit.  Not only was it credited with completely revitalizing the horror genre, with huge impacts on the slasher genre specifically, it was an instant success, spawning several sequels, a TV series, a crossover with the other horror giant at the time Friday the 13^th, and a remake in 2010.  Even with some very 80’s campiness that certainly didn’t hold up over time, the movie still holds a 7.5/10 on IMDb and remains a favorite among many.

It’s certainly mine.  Until The Ring came out, Freddy was my personal, unchallenged horror movie favorite and will always hold the title of childhood favorite.

In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy Thompson and a group of friends are hanging out one evening after they have a particularly frightening, and similar, dream one night.  What starts out as a normal night of 80's teen shenanigans, turns into a blood-soaked nightmare by the early hours of the morning when one of the girls is slaughtered mercilessly by an invisible man in front of her horrified boyfriend.  By morning, the police are after the boyfriend but it's clear to Nancy that there's more to the story, especially when she falls asleep in class and, following the bloody body of her dead friend, she meets the killer herself.

Nancy then has to try to solve the mysteries of the burned dream killer and find a way to defeat him before she and her remaining friends meet the same fate.  The line between reality and dreams becomes blurred but Nancy is determined to find the answers… because one, two, Freddy’s coming for you and if she doesn’t wake up screaming, she won’t wake up at all.

The music and sound effects in this movie are enough to send chills down people’s spines every time they hear for years to come, even coming with its own kid’s jump rope song for an extra little addition that you won’t realize the significance of until later on in the movie.  The theme song, itself, is beautifully crafted and the opening scene of the movie is a grand setup for the overall atmosphere of the movie.  It sets a movie that knows how to create suspense, something horror movie directors are still struggling to do even nowadays.

(Though the goat still confuses me.  Why goat?)

Then you meet the unfortunate victims of this setting.  Just an unsuspecting group of teenagers, one being the heroine of our story, Nancy Thompson.  She’s a relatively level-headed girl who just wants to help a friend feel better, but turns into a survivalist badass by the end of the movie, set on destroying the thing hunting her friends, even if she has to face down her own parents to do it.  Three, four, better lock your door.  When it becomes clear that her parents know a lot more than they’re letting on about the killer, she demands answers and looks for them however she can.  Even when she’s the only one of her friends left and everyone’s pegged her as crazy, she still keeps an eye on what has to be done and does it.

On the other hand of the situation there’s Fred Krueger, a serial killer turned supernatural dream killer.  A fucked up individual to start with only made stronger in death where sleep is his playground.  Those long, sharp claws will forever haunt the nightmares of the residents of Springwood, Ohio as well as the audience in front of the screen.  Five, six, grab your crucifix.

The film does its absolute best to blur the lines between reality and the dreams Freddy resides in to keep you guessing which is which.  It creates seamless transitions from reality to dream by keeping environments the same and the cuts natural, it isn’t until that dark figure in the distance shows up, stretching his clawed arms out that you realize it’s a dream.  Once the realization is made, though, the movie replaces your suspense with horrifying images of Freddy slicing his own body, no shortage of disgusting bugs none of us want to be near, and bloodied, talking corpses in clear body bags.  It’s a true nightmare that’s kept plenty up at night,  good thing that’s where you’ll want to be if you want to avoid Freddy in the first place.  Seven, eight, better stay up late.

In the end, Nancy finally confronts Freddy on her own turf after pulling him into the real world, facing the true reality of the situation and seems to come off on the winning side of it.  With Freddy’s defeat, she gets her friends and her mother back and life returns to normal… except for that weird fog.  The movie leads you to believe Nancy won, that Freddy’s been defeated, simply by the power of belief, an honestly lame ending if you ask me… but it psyches you out one last time in the best possible way.  You can’t kill Freddy.  He only lets you play longer.

A Nightmare on Elm Street lives up to its title and is a truly nightmare-inducing creation, I can’t recommend it enough to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet… somehow… it’s always going to be worth the few extra nights of lost sleep.

Nine, Ten… Never sleep again.

Scumbag Loser Review

Scumbag Loser

Initial Rating: Chills

Themes/Genres:    Mystery, Horror, Shounen, Supernatural, Psychological; Humans vs Humans; Societal Commentary; Mystery with Monsters

Main Characters:   Masahiko Murai, Haruka Mizusawa

Overview:

Masahiko is a 16 year old school student who sits back and judges the world, religiously snapping photos of every person he deems a 'scumbag loser' of society, without realizing his own problems.  One day during school, while self-assuring himself that, no matter how low he gets, he can never get lower than a fellow classmate by the name of Yamada, that same classmate suddenly reveals his new girlfriend and becomes the talk of the class.  This sends Masahiko into a hallucination-induced panic attack about suddenly becoming their class's 'scumbag loser'.  When faced with this idea, he pulls out his own picture of a girl he has several photos of and reveals her to be his own girlfriend, who happened to be an old classmate of theirs that had moved 5 years back.  He assumes he's safe, now that his girlfriend has officially been named better than Yamada's, and relaxes...

Until the very next day, when she shows up to class and, after being prompted by another student, backs Masahiko's story up.  Clearly to the shock of Masahiko.  After school he confronts her about it, getting answer after answer about the situation… until he finally reveals that Haruka Mizusawa didn't move 5 years ago, she was killed, but nobody knew about it except him.  Even once she suggests that she may not be human, desperate to still not be the class's scumbag loser, Masahiko then agrees to do anything she wants as long as she continues going out with him.  What he didn’t expect, was that what she wanted was a weekly sacrifice of someone else considered to be a scumbag loser, someone who would have 'no reason to live', according to him.

Main Review:

Scumbag Loser, boy was this an interesting one.  Another piece I found on a ‘Top 10 Horror’ list, except this one was ‘Top 25’, this wasn’t actually my first choice for the first manga review I wanted to do.  However, unable to find the other two at first, with a name like ‘Scumbag Loser’, how could I resist looking into it?  This was both exactly what I expected to find and not what I expected at all from it.

Other than the one list I found it on, I had never heard of this manga before and, even after looking further into it, it seems decently under the radar still.  It does have a 6.8 on Anime List, under the Japanese name of “Saiteihen no Otoko”, but it hasn’t quite even hit 1500 reviews yet.  Beyond that, there isn’t much talk about it.  It’s not really hard to see why.

Right from the get-go you can tell this is isn’t your basic manga, honestly it’s hard to tell that it’s even a horror, I almost skipped right over it from there.  But you know the old adage, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ and that’s a pretty relevant lesson for this one.  Going from the cover and looking further in, the visuals are already odd and off-putting, but that sort of response is just the thing the story, itself, goes for, and thus compliments it well.  It does its damnedest to make you as uncomfortable as possible and to show you the true ugliness of every character, a horror in a new light, and succeeds pretty damn well.  There were several times I had to just stop reading and ask why I was even still bothering with this.  The main character was absolutely disgusting and not the sort of thing I was really into, but I pressed on, mostly for a lack of Fourteen.  It doesn’t take you long to realize this manga has no problem showing the goriest of details where they’re needed, even if it isn’t normally the kind a horror fan is looking for.  The art style works really well to portray the overall feel of the story, show it how it’s meant to be.

But at points you actually have to wonder what the overall feel of the story was supposed to be in the first place.  While the story likes to jump around and sometimes lose focus on the main point of the story in favor of go-nowhere fluff, there’s also a bigger air of mystery around it all.  The past of these characters are left in relative shadow besides the big reveal and you’re left wondering, rather than focusing on the weekly sacrifices, what exactly happened 5 years ago and if that’ll ever be answered.  You get hint-by-hint throughout the story, what may have happened, and thus makes it feel far more like a mystery with monsters than a true horror.  That, however, doesn’t change the fact that the characters and expressions in this manga send consistent chills down your spine whenever you look at them for too long.

Or just makes you want to burn your panties so no one can ever touch them besides you again.

Either way.

Masahiko is, especially for a main character, hard to tolerate through a good half the story.  He made it hard to finish this story because he’s just so unbelievably unlikable the entire time.  Between his panty-sniffing, obsession with Haruka, overreactions, and constant lack of self-awareness, he’s hard to stomach, and that never really makes for a great main character.  Even once the story tries to gain sympathy for him and tries to explain his motives, that over-arching feeling of disgust is just incredibly hard to get away from.  He just never really becomes much of a likable person, even in the final chapters.  By the end he manages to finally gain some insight that turned this manga from ‘dear god why am I reading this’ to ‘okay, I’m glad I at least finished this’, but you can never really even pity the main character, let alone relate to him in any way.  But I also think that was the entire point, they’re all scumbag characters in one way or another.

The only character I could ever really feel pity for was Haruka, however, even though she was a scumbag-eating monster and a really bratty kid.  Ultimately, her punishment was far worse than she ever deserved and, even in the ending, I feel like she deserved better than that.  Somehow, the inhuman creature ended up being the least detestable one.

The final couple chapters of the manga are some of the most confusing pages, though, aside from the not-ending when Haruka attacked Masahiko.  It draws in two new characters who realistically have no effect on the storyline whatsoever:  They didn’t really even need to be there in the first place and exist almost entirely as fluffing, but they do at least circle back to the actual story eventually.  It still felt a bit anticlimactic, but it was the turning point for me on the manga, even though it left a lot still unanswered.  But the look on Masahiko’s face when he finally realizes that he is, in fact, also one of those ‘scumbag losers’ makes it all worth the while.  It forces that self-awareness he’s been utterly lacking since the beginning into his face and it’s honestly just such a generally fulfilling moment that it makes reading it at least worth it.  On top of that, it gives Masahiko a second chance to save his childhood friend and gives Haruka a chance to say what she’s needed to since then.  It’s not the best ending in any stretch of the word and it cuts off fairly short, but overall the series’ shortness is what makes it tolerable enough to get through in the first place, so I can look past that.

Scumbag Loser is, in general, a confusing and disgust-driven story, but not ultimately a bad series.  It takes a lot of chances and, while it doesn't always work out for it, I can respect a story that pushes boundaries.  It was a story about judging others and evaluating yourself told in a very unique way, and while making the main character intolerable usually doesn't work out well, this is one of the few contexts it works in.  It's still incredibly difficult to get through, but it's short enough that you can probably shove through it until the end.  It's not exactly a story I'll ever be going back to and it certainly wasn't something I couldn't put down, but I think it's at least worth a glance just for something different.  Especially if you're tired of unrealistically perfect main characters.  I’d definitely peg this one a bit more as mystery than horror, but the elements are there and this one causes your stomach to churn in a whole new way, making for an interestingly different kind of horror.