So much of what I was going through on a personal level was connective tissue to Bill, Ben, Beverly, Eddie, Stan, Mike, and Richie. I was not a popular kid, but the natural friendships such as this that I formed during my early teens were the perfect mirror for what life was like for The Losers. It’s missing some pages and I had to buy a new copy for reading purposes, but I can’t describe just how special and important that book is to me. That friend never asked for that book back, and I still have it to this day. Nostalgia is what I started with, and I’ve gone a bit into why what LCB makes is the perfect wayback machine fuel for me, but for all those influence points I’d already mentioned, they’d mean nothing if they didn’t include the book that was most influential on me.Īt 13, a friend at school gave me their copy of Stephen King’s IT because our conversations during French class had led us to talk horror, and they were adamant this was a story I would be into. But it was the combination with another comforting favorite that sent it over the edge for me. So when LCB Game Studio revealed its latest was a vampire story I was naturally excited. It’s the reason I love vampire stories, especially the cruel pathetic tragedy of them. Much has been lost in my own moves from home to home over the years, let alone my parents, but that book is one of very few that has remained in my possession for literal decades. It’s horribly bleak and the impressive power of his curse slowly fades away to show the same horrible degradation of old age. The protagonist is a naive young man seduced by the alluring female vampire next door and the book details his life in the decades that follow. It was the first time I’d seen the romantic myth of vampirism described in a way that resonated with a failed romance (I wouldn’t discover that part for a few years though). The two-part ghost story told in The Waiting Room and A Manhattan Ghost Story, the subtle undead tale of The Island, and crucially, the depressingly detailed story of living with vampirism that was The Last Vampire. Four of the author’s novels were on the shelf. The author I would probably have never encountered if the previous tenants hadn’t got lazy enough to dump their old books on us was T.M. James Herbert’s The Rats tunneled into a kind of cruel gruesomeness I would grow to be obsessed with and when games like Dishonored and A Plague Tale arrived sporting their own hungry rats, I was extra smitten because of that book. Harry Adam Knight’s The Fungus would be a horrifying look at a world besieged by mutant mushrooms long before Naughty Dog told a story like it. The horror books were most important to me though. I can’t tell you what it was actually about, but the name Eric Von Lustbader was an appropriate moniker. They didn’t know of the smutty content in Eric Von Lustbader’s Sirens. ![]() ![]() My parents didn’t really check them out but left them amongst their own books after we moved in. When my parents moved house in the early 90s, we left a bookshelf full of stories the previous owners didn’t feel like packing up. Luckily I’m just a prick with an adoration for a handful of books that connect with what LCB has made.Įven before I really got to watch a lot of the horror films that would end up being firm favorites, the world of books was giving me the launchpad for a horror obsession. It could be made for me if I was to be an egocentric prick and believe that was the truth of it. The key takeaway is it is my kind of visual novel. It borrowed the feeling of Stephen King’s IT to tell a story of a 1950s childhood corrupted and it’s a melancholy story about a fucking vampire. After finishing its latest game Varney Lake this week I could look back on several instances of this haggard old man’s eyes lighting up and drooping mouth stretching into an almost rictus grin. ![]() The simplistic color scheme, the look and feel of a home computer adventure game from the 1980s, and a classic sense of horror and sci-fi storytelling from the midway point of the last century. Nostalgia dances and sparkles across the surface of LCB Game Studio’s Pixel Pulp visual novels. LCB Game Studios is Making My Kind of Visual Novels
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