Flow State

0:00 - Content Warnings
0:45 - Is escape possible?
3:34 - Why Citizen Sleeper hit me this hard
6:55 - Who does YOUR body belong to?
9:26 - Citizen Sleeper's characters
16:12 - The body is not the self
20:42 - Content Warning: Body feelings
22:34 - Who do YOU belong to?
27:00 - Lem & Mina: An uncertain future
40:27 - Content Warning: Death and grief
42:01 - Where do you BELONG?
44:02 - Getting to know Emphis

Citizen Sleeper asks you to decide if escape is possible.

It took several minutes of impasse and tears and not touching my controller, for fear of making a decision before I was ready, for me to know what I thought about that question. Citizen Sleeper gives you several potential answers and in the ones that resonated with me was the kind of deep personal freedom you only find, sure enough, through community. 

Citizen Sleeper is about disability and body dysmorphia and the inevitability of corruption, and it is about the things the grow among and around those things. The antidotes and the byproducts.  

Citizen Sleeper is about collections of people: families, gangs, unions, neighborhoods, corporations, and communes. It is about the individuals that make them up and how their individual needs strengthen or threaten the collective. But for our purposes today, it is about place. Yes the whole of its corporate, colonized space, but also...the aging space station its story takes place on: Erlin's Eye.

The Eye is not exactly a welcoming home, but for a sleeper it is, in many ways, better than what they've come from. In the world of Citizen Sleeper, AI has been outlawed. So as a way of getting around that, the company Essen-Arp pays regular people to emulate their consciousness. It's a way to skirt the rules, but it also relies on there being people desperate enough to participate. These people are asleep in some kind of corporate facility, and their emulated consciousness is downloaded into a constructed body called a Frame. This new person is called a Sleeper, though many in this world would take issue with my calling them a "person." These Sleepers are forced to do some sort of labor for some period of time and when that time is up, the Frame is deactivated, the person whose consciousness they were made from wakes up, and that person gets paid for the work their Sleeper did.

As you might imagine, the Sleeper, an emulated human personality living inside a constructed body and being forced to work their entire life only to benefit another person, might have feelings about this arrangement. So Essen-Arp makes sure that if the Sleeper ever escapes, their Frame, their body, will begin to destabilize. It will break down at an accelerated rate. Death will always come for the Sleeper, either through violence or planned obsolescence.

And this is where the game places you at the start. You are an escaped Sleeper, nearly frozen in a cargo container, just trying to survive long enough to make it to Erlin's Eye. You're not sure where you'll go after that, but you know... well you hope there will be options when you get there.

MY LINKS

Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live

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Andrew Shouldice, creator and lead developer of Tunic, was actually heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda, a game known for having many secrets that, depending on your perspective, are either genius or obtuse. But Tunic is heavily inspired also by games like Fez, Dark Souls, and Elden Ring. These are all games I have never played.

Tunic got me to love a Soulslike.

0:00 - The conundrum
1:24 - What people actually mean when they compare Tunic to Elden Ring
2:05 - How Tunic gripped me
4:09 - How Tunic makes difficulty fun
6:49 - Tunic is GORGEOUS

MY LINKS

Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live

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13 Sentinels pumps out huge reveals, twists and turns that are actually meaningful to its characters rather than being empty fan service, and just super fun story beats every few minutes. And it wears its many sci-fi inspirations on its sleeve. 

13 Sentinels is ostensibly a game about teenagers with secret powers that let them call down giant mechs to protect their city from kaiju attacks. But there's also an alien invasion plot line, a time travel element, and even an 80s high school drama. This game is referential, but its characters love the source material so fervently that reference quickly becomes reverence. It is unapologetic about its love for genre fiction and aims to be the epitome of those kinds of stories in a way only a video game can be.

0:00 - You should play 13 Sentinels
2:05 - This game is the best sci-fi tv show ever
4:48 - A few gripes about 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
6:59 - Who 13 Sentinels is for

MY LINKS

Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live

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The Forgotten City has a VERY corny ending, and I LOVE it. I love it so much that I played The Forgotten City for a second time just to tell you why.

This isn't a review, and it's not a video about The Forgotten City Skyrim mod. Instead, it's me trying to figure out why the ending to the 2021 worked for me and sharing that with you.

I love making these kinds of videos, so please settle in and let me know in the comments if you liked it.

 @JacobGeller's video about The Forgotten City - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjGBP0E4zEs

0:00 - The White Hallway...
1:04 - What is The Forgotten City?
4:31 - This city's single mysterious law
6:40 - Yes. Another loop game
7:46 - How the game EARNS its ending
11:19 - The trope lands
15:01 - This could have been cringe city
16:47 - The horror that necessitates the cheese

I haven't played Animal Crossing in a while. I bet you haven't either. The game does a lot to shame you when you log back in after a long time, and I have my own guilt attached to my abandoned island. I also have a lot of parallel guilt and shame attached to my body and how I treated food when I was originally playing Animal Crossing New Horizons. That connection is what this video is about.

Obvious CONTENT WARNING for body image talk, food talk, and honestly just talk about pandemic grief. I have a lot to unpack, and I hope it's helpful for some people.

0:00 - A content warning
0:29 - Grasping for control
2:32 - Bingeing on control
4:02 - This pattern in my real life
5:09 - My body image in light of all of this
6:09 - Shame in the game
7:34 - Guilt in the game
8:12 - What I'm doing about it

MY LINKS

Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live

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Hironobu Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy creator, has released a new game EXCLUSIVE to Apple Arcade called Fantasian. It's a throwback to the Square Enix FF7 era, but its setting is entirely made of PHYSICAL DIORAMAS. This is how I feel about the game including the issues with iCloud saves that I encountered trying to play an Apple Arcade game on Mac, iPhone, AND iPad (but not Apple TV).

0:00 - PHYSICAL SETS
0:30 - The Good
4:18 - The Bad

MY LINKS

Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live

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In this video, I talk to two trans people about the news that the video game Hogwarts Legacy could have trans options in its character creator. This Hogwarts Legacy news paired with J. K. Rowling's notorious transphobia had my brain flying around, but I didn't want to share my own opinions on Hogwarts Legacy, JK Rowling, and the news surrounding them. I wanted to ask trans folks what they thought. 

AC's website - https://acfacci.com
Hope's links - https://linktr.ee/ohthereshope

0:00 - Why we're here
0:30 - The controversy
3:19 - A conversation with AC & Hope
3:33 - Tell me about your HP fandom...
6:21 - What is your fandom like in 2021?
10:39 - On death of the author
14:03 - What do you think about the character creator?
21:57 - Troy Leavitt
23:48 - Will you play Hogwarts Legacy?
26:29 - My decision

MY LINKS

Find my Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, and Discord at https://matthorton.live

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An Internet acquaintance recently showed off his custom Gameboy Advance collection, and I immediately fell down the rabbit hole of retro modding and custom gameboy builds. When my husband asked what I wanted for my birthday, parts for my own build was the only answer. I bought a Gameboy Advance in 2021 and built it exactly the way that I wanted it. This is that custom GBA build.

Kyle Starr's IG: https://www.instagram.com/_kylestarr

0:00 - A man of many hobbies
0:22 - Modded Game Boy Advances?!
1:17 - The mods I did
3:32 - Work left to do
4:52 - What did it cost? Everything...
9:03 - My next project(s)

MY LINKS

Find my Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, and Discord at https://matthorton.live

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Games That Got Me Through 2020

These are my top 5 games of 2020. These are the games that, looking back at 2020, stick with me the most, built the most important memories, and were the most fun. And with everything that went wrong in 2020, these are the games that kept me going.

0:00 - Looking back on 2020
0:40 - #5 - 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
3:02 - #4 - Spider-Man: Miles Morales
4:59 - #3 - Animal Crossing: New Horizons
6:17 - BONUS - Good Sudoku
6:53 - #2 - Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition 
8:27 - #1 - Hades

MY LINKS

Find my Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, and Discord at https://matthorton.live

This is a love letter to Kentucky Route Zero.

Kentucky Route Zero is a game you can't win. It tells you it's a tragedy.

0:00 - The most important moment of the game
0:14 - Spoiler warning
0:27 - What is Kentucky Route Zero
1:23 - Kentucky Route Zero on capitalism
4:14 - 1st Technique - Magical Realism
12:06 - 2nd Technique - Choice
22:46 - 3rd Technique - Community
28:25 - The game's final act

Kentucky Route Zero is one of the best games I played this year, and this video is why.

Actually, it is a game, but it's really a point and click game, adventure game, visual novel combo. There's a LOT of reading, but it's also one of my favorite Nintendo Switch games of 2020. Magical realism, anti-capitalism, and some serious David Lynch vibes make this one of the best games of 2020 for me. 

A game ostensibly based in rural Kentucky, you play Conway, on a search for 5 Dogwood Drive. This sends you on a route down the Zero, a mysterious highway in the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky. The game tells you it's a tragedy and that your strategies are useless. It's not the kind of game you win. You can't min-max your way to a good ending. 

This is my Kentucky Route Zero review. I played the Nintendo Switch version, so all the of the Kentucky Route Zero gameplay you're seeing is from the TV Edition.

Included in this video is my cover of a hymn that is included on the Kentucky Route Zero soundtrack. If you'd like to download that yourself, watch all the way to the end for instructions. 

MY LINKS
https://MattHorton.live

Thanks to the Kentucky Route Zero unofficial Discord for the assistance.

Love Letter icon by Vectors Market and Noun Project.