Category: Shawn’s House

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Lone Survivor

Lone Survivor is a 2012 game from Jasper Byrne.

I would love to take the easy way out and describe it as a 2D Silent Hill but as much as I’d mean it to be a compliment, it would be doing a great disservice to what a great game Lone Survivor is.

You play as a man in a surgical mask known as “You”. The game starts you off some unknown time after an outbreak has mutated people into horrifying monsters. You awaken alone in your apartment after having a dream about a man with a box on his head and a girl in a blue dress. Your receive a radio transmission telling you that something is going on in room 203 and this starts your adventure off.

The point of the game is to scavenge supplies for food and making sure to rest so that your mental state doesn’t decrease. Everything in game has an effect on your character. If you only eat junk food or don’t sleep enough your hallucinations become worse and your character grows more irritable. Will you take the drugs you find to stay awake and plow through the game or will you sleep and eat well, trying to be as responsible and safe as you possibly can in this horrible new world? You meet a few characters and even a cat along the way and how you interact with them also leaves a lasting impression on your fragile mental state.

The soundtrack to this game is wonderful. It is also going to draw comparisons to the Silent Hill series but it does a powerful job of being its own beast. The music adds wonderfully to the atmosphere without ever detracting from it. You will love the songs but the atmosphere of the game is built so well that you will never ignore what’s going on to focus solely on the music.

I have always been a sucker for stories that focus on characters with a decaying mental state and how they either overcome the situation or allow it to break them so this game was an absolute treat for me.

Overall, I can’t recommend this game enough. You can get it right now for 15$ on Steam or Good Old Games and that is absolutely money well spent.

 

Trailer

The song in this trailer is Sleep Forever from the OST

Director’s Cut Trailer

The song in the Director’s cut trailer is Roost by Big Black Delta

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Archives Shawn's House The Republic of Shawntario

The Zombie Story Checklist

Despite the relative young age of the website, I have received more Zombie stories than anything else. I have unfortunately not accepted any of them because of how generic they were.

I appreciated how hard the authors worked on their stories, and there were some very interesting parts in them, but Zombies in general are just done for me.

I have decided to create a Zombie Story Checklist. If you are able to check something off in every section, then you should probably go back and re-write some stuff.

Choose an occupation for your main character.

1. Police Officer

2. Soldier

3. Courier

They were comatose due to being involved in the following.

1. Car Accident

2. Bicycle Accident

3. Shooting Accident

They wake up in

1. Civilian Hospital

2.Military Hospital

3.Mental Hospital.

They wake up and go

1.Home (It’s always home)

They are searching for their

1. Wife

2. Son

3. Wife and Son

(It is never a daughter)

They meet up with a group that consists of

1. One white woman, One Asian or African American male, Two white males.

2. One white woman, two white males.

3. Two white women, One Asian or African American male, One white male.

The Abrasive white male dies in the following way.

1. Noble Sacrifice

2. Killed in an argument with one of the Caucasian females.

3.Noble Sacrifice

The main character falls in love with

1. The white chick…always the God-Damned white girl.

The story ends

1. With everybody dying.

2. With everybody except the lovers dying.

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-Shawn Lachance

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Archives Shawn's House The Republic of Shawntario

Effective Villains- The Moral Event Horizon

Greetings all,

Today I am going to deal with my absolute favorite trope- “The Moral Event Horizon”.

A Moral Event Horizon is an act committed by a character that plummets our opinion of them so far away from “good” that it would be impossible for them to recover. This act does not need to be committed by a villain (who is already passed the “good line”) and can be incredibly effective in completely turning a previously well centred, good character over the deep end.

There are unfortunately easy ways for us to use this technique; rape has always been a sure-fire way to completely kill off reader or viewer sympathy with a character, but unless you have the necessary writing and character crafting skills, it comes off as not only cheap and forced, but also in incredibly bad taste.

An effective way of establishing a good moral event horizon is to use it on a character who toes the line between “good” and “bad”.  The ambiguous nature of the character will allow for a greater transition to “irredeemably evil” than if it is used on a character that is previously established as evil. It is also generally ineffective to have a character who is noble and good suddenly fall into the Moral Event Horizon. These turns rarely seem genuine and most readers and watchers will have a hard time believing that this character will stay evil.

If you want a character that your readers or viewers can unanimously root against, the moral event horizon is an incredibly effective way to ensure that nobody is rooting for their redemption.

Just remember, when it comes to villains, make the act that pushes them over the edge meaningful. Don’t waste it on things that lessen the story that you are trying tell.

That’s all for now

-Shawn