So in addition to blogging my technology and programming projects and adventures I'd also like this site to be a place for me to talk about some of my thoughts in other hobbies such as video games and whatnot. I'll try to tag these posts so that they are easily filtered between different categories like coding or random thoughts so that any viewers here can sift out the content they wish and find it easily.
So recently I've been hooked on a great game called Video Horror Society or VHS for shorthand. The game's website can give more details than I will here and is a great next stop from this blog entry. It's a free to play 4 v 1 asymmetrical 80s themed horror game and I'd like to give me thoughts on it here and tell you why I enjoy it.
Initial thoughts
So my initial thoughts were that I loved the atmosphere and the theme of the game. The 80s idea and clothing of the teens, the game play that, in my opinion, beats dead by daylight in every way simply because it's more riveting than the "king" of the genre Dead By Daylight. I'd first heard of this game after a Twitch streamer I routinely watch Sequisha had been playing it on his stream. I fell in love with the vibe the game has from there. I think that there is a big learning curve, especially for playing the solo monster in the game. However I, as a teen, have had the best times in VHS when the monster player is skilled and either kicks our butts or we win by a hair. As a new game, the community is still trying to grow so as a result queue times when find a match can be bad at times.
The Good
No Pay 2 Win
Obviously, the hatred of all gamers. Thankfully, VHS has only cosmetics in their store so of which are pretty awesome! Overall, it's a neat model and no pay 2 win has to be up here
Friendly Community
So far every game I've ever played hasn't been toxic. Unlike the game that this constantly gets compared to (I'll even rant about it further on) Dead by Daylight, this game isn't yet tainted by toxic asshats and that makes it wonderful to just chill out and play. One of the issues I personally had with DBD was that it's just too much of a shitfest and toxic people in there. Of my games in VHS, the people who had microphones and used them were pleasant to talk to and even were able to team up with and try our best to win. Overall a good experience on this front.
Linux Compatibility
I'd come to not like DBD over the years and once I made my jump to Garuda Linux and found out that the DBD devs used easy anti-cheat and frankly are too lazy to make it work with Valve's proton it made the game quickly irrelevant to me. Proton is a compatibility layer for Linux that allows native windows games to run on Linux with a negligible (most times) performance loss. Video Horror Society runs perfectly well under Proton 7 and Proton GE 7.27 (at the time of writing). As far as this game's performance with Proton I find the only hitch with it is that when the monster first transforms on your first game, it can freeze the game for 2 seconds (it could also be my hardware a GTX 1070 Ti) as well.
Performance and Optimization
There seems to be some good optimizations on this front. Coming from a Linux user using Proton I can routinely get a stable 120 fps (capped in game options) and uncapped about 150 fps or so on my GTX 1070 ti. I'm sure windows might have some kind of performance increase (whether its a noticeable one I'll leave to the bench markers). As I recall correctly, it's minimum system requirements on Steam's store page seemed reasonable.
The Bad
Queue Times
It's a smaller community, as it's a generally new game (releasing tail end of July 2022) so the community is still growing and given the asymmetrical nature of the game, matchmaking times as a teen are dependent on how many monster players are online and queued. If you like to play monster, then you won't be waiting longer at all right now. My hope is that as word gets out about VHS and the player numbers grow this will become less of an issue.
Learning Curve
This can be for both sides, teens and monsters. But I'd highly say this about the monster side. Having played DBD in the past I've noticed when clear DBD killer mains or newbies are monsters as they attempt to chase you down and are easy to kill. In VHS I've noticed the best monster and the ones who've stomped me as teens are the monsters that utilize corners and cover in the map well. They are the dangerous monsters. Overall, I've heard some other opinions that monster isn't as rewarding to play as the teen side, they might be right. So far I've only played teen (as I've been trying to see from a teen's side what makes a monster good and not) before I get rekt as well haha! If in doubt, I'd recommend watching some monster VHS players on Twitch!
Closing Thoughts
Obviously, this is just one guy's opinion. In a vast of other opinions on Steam and the like. But if you're looking for a new game, one that you can chill out and vibe on in some downtime and one with some grind (for skins and perks in the form of challenges) I'd recommend Video Horror Society. It's a fun game that I've been playing on for a while now and I think ought to earn some more attention in the world.