Jackal is punctuated by monologues from a protagonist who appears perpetually in over his head – always biting off a bit more than he can chew and talking a bigger game than he can play. The game itself, like its protagonist, comes out of the gate with a lot of confidence and bravado but not quite the mettle to back it all up. The tragic distinction being that in-game our hero ends up making it out alive, where the game itself feels more like a fumbled attempt ending in bullet holes.

So Scott Cawthon figured out a while ago that management and horror go together like peanut butter and jam. He also, maybe unexpectedly at first, nailed the perfect youtuber game: a game that gets great reactions from youtubers; has the perfect lore breadcrumbs to spawn a decade of theory crafting; and it’s all wrapped up in a novel concept. Hellmart feels like the logical progression of that recipe. The basic management of checking cameras in earlier FNAFs here take the shape of a fully fledged supermarket simulator much like the recent trend of profession/job-simulators that have become popular over the last few years (not least among youtubers and streamers). The question is of course whether a grocery store simulation is a good foundation for engaging horror? For the most part, yes.

In his footnote to Howl, instead of offering a straightforward explanation of sources, references, or inspiration, Allen Ginsberg filled the page with an obscene and scattered stream of consciousness which pronounced the aesthetic value and inspiration which could be found in everything, including the maculate stuff. “The bum’s as holy as the seraphim!” wrote Ginsberg. If the minds behind Morsels wrote a footnote, I imagine it’d look rather similar. The game takes the gross and grimey and turns it into something attractive and exciting. It takes a tired setup and makes it feel special. Most importantly, it’s really quite fun to play.

Cards on the table, I loved the original Moonlighter. The combination of dungeon crawling and shopkeeping went together like rum and coke; a moreish combination where each half of the gameplay loop fed into the other (yes I do mix my rum and cokes half-half). By night you delved into procedurally generated dungeons where all the loot you collected was the stock you’d sell in your little shop by day. It put a nice twist on the familiar roguelike structure where in addition to progressing as far into the dungeons as you can you have the parallel objective of pilfering as much as possible; a good haul (and the lucrative day of sales that followed) often felt just as good as beating a dungeon.

So this site is primarily inspired by some recent Limmy streams where he advocated for personal blogs and webpages as an alternative to the main social media platforms which are generally quite crap and seems to be getting worse. Mind you Limmy abandoned his own blog after four posts but I believe in the idea enough to give it a go here. Stay tuned to see if I give up after four posts like my Scottish hero.