Rynling R&D

I broke my stupid foot and spent the past week in bed. Playing Bloodborne again would have fixed me; but, since the game is a PlayStation exclusive that’s not available on Steam Deck, I settled for the next best thing and watched a few movies that promised a similar vibe.

It Follows (2014) is a horror movie about an eldritch creature that stalks teenagers in a suburb of Detroit. The conceit is that the creature can look like different people, and its target can only notice it at the edges of their attention.

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Dark City (1998) was released a year before The Matrix, and it’s very close to the same story.

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The Head Hunter (2018) is an hour-long art film that I discovered by reading a Reddit thread about “movies like Dark Souls.”

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The Ninth Gate (1999) is a supernatural mystery in which Johnny Depp pieces together a demonic ritual for a wealthy client by tracking down and comparing the last surviving editions of a forbidden book.

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Vermis is an illustrated strategy guide for a dark fantasy game that doesn’t exist. Plastiboo, the author and artist, has taken the concept of “fake strategy guide” and executed it with absolute sincerity and fidelity. Both the writing and the crusty “screenshots” have a pitch-perfect clarity of tone and style that invites immersion.

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Of all the books published by Hollow Press, Vermis remains my favorite. I’d recommend it especially to people who don’t want to play Dark Souls (or King’s Field) but are still curious about the atmosphere and flavor of this genre of games. It’s really something special.

Heavenly Purgatories: The Postmodern Labyrinth
https://doshmanziari.substack.com/p/heavenly-purgatories-the-postmodern

Stripped of all narrative elaborations, it’s clear that the Backrooms can be placed, at least initially, in the context of “uncomfortable” imagery of interior spaces. Responses to such imagery often involve claims that one feels dislocated yet aware of a vaguely familiar aspect. A tension between accommodating and hostile design threatens to explode or compress, hanging in the air like a hum. Some grotesque event may be on the verge of happening.

I'm in love with this author's writing. I also love their architectural art and their retro game music, which they share on Tumblr (here).

I appreciate this particular essay on liminal spaces not just because it's highly quotable, but also because it's well-illustrated and contains links to excellent examples of the "liminal" (or "dreamcore") genre on YouTube. It's a fantastic resource.

I’m not sure how to describe the game Indika save to say that it’s like Dark Souls, if Dark Souls were a no-combat walking sim set in 1910s Russia. It’s an incredible game, but I’m going to need to take some time to process it.

I was actually thinking two things when Indika randomly crossed my radar on Steam. The first is that I’m starting to get nostalgic for the PS3/PS4 era of graphics (ca.2010-2014) where games were very pretty but not yet completely photorealistic. “The original 2011 release of Dark Souls” is a strange liminal territory to aim for in terms of graphics, but Indika occupies this space quite well.

The second thing I was thinking is that it would be cool to see a spiritual successor to Bloodborne set in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. The religion is incredible, the vibes are immaculate, and it would be a pleasure to be horribly murdered while exploring that style of “Russian Revival” architecture. Indika is more Dark Souls (ie, empty ruins) than Bloodborne, but it scratches the same itch.

By the way, a friend was recently saying that Spain would also make a good setting for Bloodborne, and you know what. That would be amazing too. Fuck yes.

Night River
https://shadowknell.bandcamp.com/track/night-river

SHADOW KNELL is a mystical, mournful, and doom-laced synth fantasy that echoes from dungeons deep and forests eternal. SHADOW KNELL’s warped and woozy orchestral arrangements serve as the murky soundtrack to untenable evocations, obscure dreams of grim grandeur, faded memories of the sublime.

I like all those things! Apparently a rising genre on Bandcamp is "dungeon synth," which is meant to recall the soundtracks of PlayStation-era FromSoft games. I really enjoy the Lunacid OST (which I can't link to because I had to extract it from YouTube like a peasant), and a lot of the work in this genre has the same feel. I'm too shitty of a casual gamer to be able to play actual dungeon crawlers, but it's nice to write and draw and edit while listening to weird ambient sewer level music.

Btw it did not escape my notice that the musicians who put together this particular album live in Philadelphia. Of course they do. This is absolutely the bgm that greets me when I step outside to go running in the morning.

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I think, honestly, that this is the Dark Souls manga I always wanted. I hope it gets an English translation.

Dark Souls is a cozy game, hear me out:

(1) You can play it on a cute Nintendo Switch Lite.

(2) You play as a little guy you can dress up.

(3) Your little guy has all sorts of quirky friends.

(4) Your job is to walk around and light campfires.

(5) The environment is filled with beautiful plants and moss.

(6) The play cycle is very short, so it's good for casual engagement.

(7) It's helpful to play in darkness, so it's good for bedtime.

WRITHE
https://emcarroll.itch.io/writhe

16pg fan comic exploring the characters of Adella and Arianna from the 2015 video game Bloodborne. Partial nudity, gore, violence.

Today I learned that one of my favorite horror comic artists, Emily Carroll, has a fancomic about Bloodborne that's free to download from Itchio. Content warning for the usual Bloodborne themes (body horror, violence, blood, etc), but the art and writing are gorgeous.

Understanding the sublime architecture of Bloodborne
https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/understanding-sublime-architecture-bloodborne/

The impulse here might be to see Bloodborne along the lines of a moralistic warning against hubris, lest we suffer the consequences, à la the Tower of Babel narrative taken on its least interesting terms. More than a didactic project or a tooth-baring of the Souls games’ mechanics, though, Bloodborne is a honed iteration of Miyazaki’s fascination with systems of mystery and a modern revival of a myth: that of architecture as a parallel to the natural world, through which sublimity can be found.

...I think I understood maybe about half of this essay. I intend to spend the weekend reading it closely, looking up references, and understanding the rest. Unfortunately, I will probably never play Bloodborne, but damn if it doesn't look cool as hell. Anyway, this is another interesting essay about architecture:

Illumination and Occlusion | Dark Souls Remastered
http://www.heterotopiaszine.com/2018/08/23/illumination-occlusion-dark-souls-remastered/

This finitude is acutely felt during a particularly intense moment in the game’s centerpiece city of Anor Londo: after cutting down the local gargoyle population, the player is forced to hastily ascend a narrow buttress while dodging arrows fired from either side. This moment is hailed as a sadistic masterstroke not just for the visceral tension of dashing across treacherous heights, but because of the contrast between the tiny range of movement made available to your character and the vastness of Anor Londo. The gargoyles drop you in the middle of an enormous, deserted metropolis, where upon you are forced you to run across tiny rafters, manned ledges, and a rather onerous elevator system just to get to the throne room. The enduring power of Anor Londo comes from the limitedness of one’s access to an overwhelming space.

I beat the Capra Demon (my beloved) on the third try.

It's possible that I gitted gud, but I doubt it. What I think is far more likely is that the Nintendo Switch version of Dark Souls Remastered isn't great, and that having responsive controls makes the game significantly... not "easier," but less impossible.

The textures on every single surface of the architecture continue to amaze me. I am constantly possessed by an almost painful urge to touch the television. Dark Souls is just so fucking beautiful. Once I level up my character (his name is Pothos) enough so that I'm not in constant danger, I'd like to sit him down and do some environment studies in the same way that people used to draw screenshots of Breath of the Wild. If this is how I learn to draw architecture, so be it.

Anyway, another thing that's cool about playing Dark Souls in Ultra HD on a giant screen is that I can now see how everything connects to everything else. Although this isn't technically true, the idea behind Dark Souls is that the entire map of the game is always loaded, and that the distant background is just another part of the game you can visit and interact with. The Nintendo Switch version was too muddy for me to really see the distant background, but now I can look up or down and be like, "Oh that's where that is!"

Speaking of which, I've decided that the concept of "lens focus" is for losers, and that visual depth can be achieved through relative scale, relative movement, and atmospheric haze. I think lens focus might actually be one of the reasons I find live-action movies so uncomfortable to watch these days. Maybe this is me being spoiled by anime and video games, but I think every single pixel of an image should be as crystal clear as the focal point. Further, the focal point should be defined through mise en scène, not the technological limitations of how light moves through glass. I love analog media, but I also think it's nice that we have other options and can do things differently now.