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DrowZ reviews: World of Horror and Phasmophobia

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. For the second entry in The Cement Mixer's unnamed month of horror, I decided to bounce around a couple of horror games: World of Horror and Phasmophobia. I actually have also been playing Darkwood, but I wound up writing that piece for another website, which I'll link to in a future post. World of Horror is an early access indie adventure game reminiscent of old DOS RPGs and Junji Ito's work where you are tasked with keeping an ancient god from waking up and destroying the world by solving mysteries in a small Japanese town. Developed by Pantasz and published by Ysbryd Games, World of Horror is a stylishly chilling little roguelike RPG that filled me with intrigue. Mechanically, World of Horror is multiple a game of rolling dice and meter management. You have a handful of stats, like something you'd find in a tabletop RPG. You often won't see anything that's not your two health stats, reason and stamina, being applied. But repetition and context clues aid yo

DrowZ: I wrote about Darkwood

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  Hey everyone, sorry on the delays for the October posts. I've been going pretty hard at freelance work lately so I've had less energy to put to this overall. On the bright side, I managed pitched one of my ideas for a post here into something for another website, Play.Jumpcutonline.co.uk.   You can read the post here!    Darkwood I've got two reviews for you coming up, one on World of Horror and the other on Phasmaphobia - I just need to play more of it.   I'm also probably going to launch a Patreon or something instead of the Ko-fi to raise funds because I need money, to put it plainly. I appreciate all forms of support though, and thanks for reading! It'll launch in the next post.

Suspiria: A Horror Classic

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Happy Halloween the second everyone. Or something. I'm not very festive in general and it's honestly a character flaw of mine. Anyways, I don't usually celebrate Halloween and I'm not a horror fan, but I have been wanting to expand my horizons. So I'm gonna look at four things of the spooky and/or scary variety this month, starting with the 1977 classic, Suspiria.   Suspiria is a 1977 horror movie about a mysterious German ballet-school and a string of supernatural murders, at least that's what the tin says. It doesn't really ever drift from that - closer inspection does reveal more about the "Why" and the "How" of Suspiria, but for me in 2020, it's a single concept executed well, created by director Luca Guadagnino and crew, but also also the year 1977. You should go watch it, because I'll be talking about it and what it meant to me here. Here's a link.  Okay, so once again let me preface this by saying that I'm not anyon

Here we are again

There are countless people who speak more elegantly than me, especially on topics like this. If you've ever spoken to me, you'd quickly find out that I'm a curt and speedy emotional speaker who opts to get his words across in as few words as possible. So in being brief, I just want to say that without justice, there is no peace. The police who murdered Breonna Taylor have not been punished, and honestly I am not surprised, I'm not sad, I'm just angry. It's how the system works. It's weird how easily I got desensitized to people openly talking about how much they wish me and people who look like me just not exist. I read it, hear it, feel it, and continue with my day. My parents, for whatever reason, never outright warned me that people would challenge my right to exist. They were always quiet about it, they warned me about the police, but I don't know why. If I hate to hypothesize, it's because they wanted to believe that the world would be better wh

DrowZ: Comics, we're making one.

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I've spoken about comic books a lot on this blog, and sometimes I worry that I worry that it sounds like I hate the genre, when in actuality, it's more that I'm disappointed with them. The idea of the modern comic is like, a hundred years old? Something around that - and in that time, they've been used to fight hate in so many forms. Everyone knows that Jewish immigrants created Superman, everyone knows the X-men are an allegory for racism. If you didn't, well, you know now. It's just that they suffer from the same issues that every other medium has: capitalism.  "Woah DrowZ, put down the torch," I hear my friend, Straw McMahon, say. So I'll be brief - comics are a business, and to stay afloat, they have to make money, which isn't very conducive to making the first step, especially with how little money they make nowadays. Instead, what more frequently happens is that they'll try a new, progressive thing, give it to a 50-year-old whit