Leon's Microblog – Posts tagged "Petscop"

(Speaking of which… I feel like this one line in the second-last video is the only point where the tone veered a little too much into Hussie-style audience ribbing, versus its typical straight-facedness.)

On a more culturally relevant level, the heavy use of mysteries involving unintuitive game mechanisms reminds me of the first 3 Homestuck acts, in terms of piecing together slightly abstract symbols and systems, figuring out who the major characters even are, and so forth.

Funny to say, but what Petscop reminds me of the most is Adam Cadre's Shrapnel (text game), in the sense of presenting a familiar fantasy exterior (Zork 1) inside of which is an interior about more grounded domestic abuse, split into non-linear scenes with unnerving hard cuts.

Despite first appearances, it actually does make it relatively easy by giving you lots of concrete numbers and labels to line up - names and familial connections of characters, specific dates, totals of collected game pieces to sort the found-footage with.

I hate to say it, but I really am getting enjoyment out of tediously scrubbing back and forth in all these video files for hours on end, and putting the pieces together. The big-picture story is not at all mindblowing, but it's still satisfying in itself to bring it into focus.

The way the latter third heavily revolves around game demo recordings is funny to me in that A) it demonstrates that any serial artwork eventually becomes about the tools and circumstances of its creation, and B) it really did find a way to change into a found footage series

Watching Petscop primarily makes me think "wow, gamer horror YouTubers are going to be chasing this high for years and years, huh"

I think it's a little interesting that by making the puzzles this approachable, such that the viewer can anticipate the solutions, it warms the viewer up to keep thinking about the actual puzzles of the series (the meaning of the portrayed events and veiled character backstories)

Some of this fictional game's puzzle designs are actually honestly pretty amazing