Thoughts on Raging Loop and Gnosia

Raging Loop is a time-loop game that has you play every side in an iterated game of Werewolf. The way it keeps you in line is by establishing that anything other than protecting yourself will get you killed. There’s a slow buildup over 20 hours of gameplay before you go full evil. Rushed into action to save someone? Screw you; you’re dead. Spoke up to prevent an innocent person’s execution? Screw you; you’re dead. Hesitated to directly murder someone? Screw you; you’re dead. It keeps validating the main character’s selfishness, while also trying to establish him as some kind of badass antihero who cleverly achieves his goals and gets all the girls to fall in love with him. And I’m like, even Light Yagami had an ideology. If you’re really that smart, I can think of a few more tactics you could try before giving in and going along.

Gnosia is also a time-loop game where you play every side in an iterated game of Werewolf. It doesn’t really matter that much whether you survive each game, so long as you gather more information about why the loop is happening. There are things you can only find out by surviving as a member of one faction, but there are also times when you can get more information by protecting someone you know full well is going to kill you. It reminds me of Omensight, where you sometimes doom yourself and the universe in order to maybe stop the universe from being doomed in some future loop.

There’s a character in Gnosia who has similar tactics and attitude to the main character of Raging Loop. In one timeline, he’s crew, and another crew member murders him anyway because he won’t stop sexually harassing her. I feel like there’s a point in somewhere.

(Still does the thing where you’re a sex machine, though. Both female and nonbinary characters are fine with you peeking at them in the shower!)

So much pain

Sometimes I think too hard about a problem, and my nearsighted eye starts to hurt, and it keeps hurting and hurting for days, and the pain keeps me from sleeping. Dim/no light doesn’t work. Bright light doesn’t work. Medium light doesn’t work. Lying flat doesn’t work. Resting in a chair doesn’t work. Light exercise doesn’t work. Heat doesn’t work. Cold doesn’t work. An eyepatch on my bad eye doesn’t work. An eyepatch on my good eye doesn’t work. Painkillers both legal and illegal don’t work. I want to vomit out the pain like thick black smoke, or wail until I pass out, or cut this damn eye out of my head.

My current theory is that it’s multi-stage. First I give myself eyestrain. The pain makes my nose run, and my sinuses get clogged and give me a sinus headache. The sinus meds seem to be working. I hate that it took me this long to figure out.

(Yes, I tried glasses. They get smudged, and I try to clean them, and they’re still smudged, and I try to clean them, and they’re still smudged, and looking through the smudges gives me a headache.)