Thess vs the World

You know what really sucks? Being a fan of eldritch horror and being singularly ill-equipped to interact with most of the audiovisual media surrounding it - that's what sucks.

As anyone who reads this stuff I write knows, I get migraines. Though at least they're not as bad as they used to be - they used to be nearly constant, and spike for weeks, whereas now they happen a lot less often and even one of my primary triggers stopped being one (by which I mean, I can eat chocolate again, huzzah). However, my main triggers are still bright lights and what I can only call visual disturbances. Which is ironic when the thing that triggers the migraine is also a symptom of the migraine. When you're me and you use hyperfocus as a painkiller, that kind of thing means that you don't know whether the wonky vision is just the game until you switch the game off and the pain kicks in.

Now, it's bad enough when they play weird-ass camera tricks in a game like Tomb Raider. They want the camera to be really shaky and mobile because they think it'll aid immersion. Which ... no, not really. I mean, maybe it does for some people; I can't speak for everyone. The thing is, when that happens to us in real life - we fall off something, we roll down a hill, whatever - we will generally close our eyes because we're not seeing anything worth looking at anyway. As for running? We try to mitigate the shaky-vision by focusing on our actual objective, or at least some point in the near-ish distance, specifically because watching the world shake and blur is not good for us. But most games are like, "FULL IMMERSION! SEE EVERY BIT OF SHAKY-CAM WE CAN THROW AT YOU!!!" and end up with games that people like me can't play. Pretty big reason why first person games of any kind are off the table for me. I can take the ones that don't try the Full Immersion Shaky-Cam thing; people may say it looks too smooth but it doesn't make my head feel like it's about to explode.

But then there's eldritch horror games. I mean, I get it. In something like The Sinking City, they need to give an indication that This Is Eldritch Shit, and specifically This Is Depleting Your Sanity Meter. (Although if we're playing a private investigator in the 1920s, I struggle to believe that standing near a body with its face bashed in is that detrimental to your sanity, because if it is? YOU CHOSE THE WRONG LINE OF WORK, BUDDY.) And in something like Control (which is more "eldritch action-adventure" than "eldritch horror", honestly, but never mind), shit gets so many levels of wonky with reality shifts that there needs to be something underlining it. And seriously, the devs must work so hard for this - they need to determine what sort of visual disturbance they want, specifically design, and then make the engine create it, and it probably takes a lot of imagination and effort. I just wish it didn't have to be there, because I'm tired of being unable to play almost every single game that requires a warning for people with epilepsy. I don't have epilepsy - I have significant issues with migraines, a love of eldritch horror, and moderate depression that the former means that I cannot indulge the latter as I'd like. Also, people with epilepsy deserve to be able to play these games too, so switching it off or even muting it a bit feels like a good idea.

But I guess I hate the "FULL IMMERSION - ALL MUST BE SHAKY!!" type games more than I do the eldritch horror ones. The latter are just trying to stylistically render what I can only call a parapsychological concept, and that's hard, and requires some tricks and weirdness. The former just believe in a type of realism that ... more real than real, if you get me. Like, they render what our eyes would see if we weren't subconsciously mitigating the experience, instead of rendering what our brains would register, and it's fucking ridiculous.