It’s 9am on a Monday, and the employees at 303 East Wacker are walking around in a sleep deprived fugue. Their morning routines are bizarrely turned on their heads; their co-workers are strange and confused.
The mysterious fugue that has settled over 303 East Wacker is just the beginning. Four employees are going to be plunged into a fight for their very lives.
PLAYERS
- Nate – Faye Irwin. A 20-something programmer for Groupon who is working to support her daughter
- Zach – Baldarich Homer Macklean. A friendly man who likes his sales job against all odds and might fight bears on the weekend.
- Charlie – Jo J. Hotaling. Human Resources woman who presides as the law in this office.
- Kevin – Spencer Gray. Secondary account assistant who realizes this company is going down and aims to take as much with it as he can.
Features samples from
- “Shhhhhh” by Alias Conrad Coldwood – OFF Original Soundtrack
- Gregorian Chant #5 – Internet Archive (http://archive.org/details/GregorianChantMass)
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Things I learned today: There is no Pip capitalism.
On the other hand, in Little Fears you have to spend belief to gain belief. So the ability to believe in things is a capitalist ideal apparently, which I guess makes communists also existentialists.
I have expected Zach’s character to fire the gun when he said “oh come on, these aren’t real.” I was waiting for the horribly consequences of doing that the first time I listened to this. It never came. 🙁
But this is still a great listen.
Yes, well there was the running around and shooting of gun-copters that followed.
On the subject of the “company sells something potentially shameful under a discrete name, doesn’t deliver, gives refund cheques under a highly inappropriate name so they are rarely cashed” scheme, I’ve heard that that actually HAPPENED, back in the day when machines didn’t cash cheques.
Also, the idea of running the Receiver mythos, vague and sparse as it is, as a horror RPG is genius. It’s a surprisingly good fit.
You are some random person who for unexplained reasons has a handgun. This makes you SCARED rather than empowered as (at least as a new player) you quite realisticly have NO IDEA what to DO with it. Then you start looking around… Everything is just slightly WRONG, and apparently extra-dimensional benefactors are arming you for resistance against OTHER extra-dimensional forces who appear to have disappeared everyone and everything you know and replaced it with inscrutable _things_ trying remorselessly to kill you.
All your benefactors ask is that you listen to all their weird magic cassettes… The ones that tell you about how to fight your enemies… or the default keybindings for all the fiddly operations on a 1911 under a thin guise of referencing illustrations in a manual that doesn’t exist, or describe some kind of subliminal treatment/antidote tape… or MATCH the description given in the previous… (which you might receive before you hear the tape describing it)
Your biggest enemy is your own clumsiness and everything works to reinforce the idea that if you can’t concentrate while under fire, you WILL die.
As such a simple game, the environment feels all weird and sterile, but it actually works in favour of the atmosphere a lot as there is NOTHING in the world but the buildings, machines trying to kill you, and the items you desperately need to fight back and figure out what happened / is happening to you.
I find it interesting because people seem to think that survival horror is about horrible organic noises/imagery and long expanses without a weapon. Receiver manages to create a resource-management-themed… not horror, but terror and apprehension I guess… atmosphere with an everpresent and powerful yet still woefully inadequate-feeling weapon used against stupid machines, because the wielder is totally outmatched. People DIE when shot. Robots may or may not be wounded. You can take your enemies out in one hit… but so can they and yours are not reliable, while one hit on you always spells death.
I hope Wolfire makes a sequel someday. It’ll be awesome if they make something that is to Receiver like Overgrowth is to Lugaru. Speaking of which, I really need to buy Overgrowth. I picked up Receiver on sale on Steam with some loose Steam Wallet change.
Thanks for listening and giving your analysis of the game! Always good to hear from dedicated listeners. I was sorta drawn to the game at the time because it was new and had a vague story that I felt like I could work with. It also had a lot of situations which would allow me to do a thorough stress-test of Nemesis.
Listening to this for the first time. Heard many CoC APs from RPPR and Wives of March on here but this AP is actually scarier than the in your face threats. ‘You realise there is no one out there to save you so you have to do it yourself…’
When the music plays it makes you jump. So does the odd voice. ‘Here is a gun and this is how to use it’.
Well done Drunk and Ugly. Feels like a Japanese horror film. Yeah, though listening late at night wasn’t the best idea…
Thanks for listening! Hope we didn’t keep you up too late.