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If you think about it, Severance's "innies" the people trapped in an endless cycle of office work should genuinely hate their "outies" their other halves who exist everywhere else. While outies are free to live a seemingly carefree existence, unburdened by the labor, boredom and indignities of office life, innies have no escape. Every time they enter the elevator at the end of their shifts, which triggers the switch to their outie persona, innies just blink and return to the sterile hallways of nefarious biotechnology firm Lumon Industries. There are no weekends or holidays, there isn't even time to sleep. Spoilers ahead for Severance season 2. No spoilers for the finale, "Cold Harbor." Severance's first season arrived as we were all reeling from the initial onslaught of the COVID pandemic and many of us were dealing with our own work-life balance issues. It introduced the show's core concept that Lumon pioneered the ability to completely separate work and life experiences and it made the terms "innie" and "outie" a new cultural shorthand. But the debut season also leaned heavily on the outie perspective, sometimes to a fault. In its second season, Severance became even stronger by focusing more on the innie perspective. Do they deserve whole lives, or just the labor their outies don't want to deal with? Are they allowed to fall in love? Are they even real people? Apple These are all concepts the show previously touched on, but the innie experience became all the more tragic as season two went on. We watched as Adam Scott's Mark S. wrestled with the dueling desires to rescue Lumon's wellness counselor, Ms. Casey, who was revealed to be his outie's supposedly dead wife, and also nurture a budding romance with fellow innie Hellie R. (Britt Lower). John Turturro's Irving B. spent the entire season nursing a broken heart, after the innie he fell in love with disappeared. And Zach Cherry's Dylan G. ended up falling in love with his outie's wife (Merritt Wever), who saw the best aspects of her floundering husband through his innie. Innies owe their lives to their outies, but lead a tortured existence that basically just makes everything easier for outies. Season two made it clear that the process of severance, which involves a brain injection that splits the innie and outie personas, essentially creates an adult child who only exists to work. Innies have no understanding of science, history or the greater world beyond what Lumon tells them. And naturally, the company's messaging to innies is purely focused on efficiency, output and the cult-like adoration of its founder, Kier Eagan. (It's as if Apple based its entire internal culture on worshipping Steve Jobs as a god, complete with archaic rituals and holy texts.) Apple While we spent less time with outies in this season, the show still had a sharper take on their side of the severed experience. There's a funny nod to the "return to office" phenomenon, where Tramell Tillman's Milchick practically had to beg the outies to come back to Lumon, following their innie revolt at the end of season one. In our world, RTO is mostly a phenomenon where executives are eager to witness their employees toiling away, rather than allowing them to potentially slack off while working at home. We also get a sense of what outies lose by giving up their work life to their innies. When Dylan G.'s outie, Dylan George, is turned down for a basic job outside of Lumon, he learns he can't count his innie's work time, since he didn't actually experience it. (In some ways it feels reminiscent of what we could lose by outsourcing work to AI tools.) Severance isn't just a trap for the innies stuck in Lumon's offices, their outies will also have a tough time landing a job anywhere else. The only choice is to stay loyal to Lumon, and its dear founder Kier, until you retire. Or die. According to Dan Erickson, the creator and showrunner of Severance, this season was partially inspired by the recent Hollywood writer's strike. "We were all talking to our guilds and having conversations about workers rights and what we owe our employers and what we should reasonably expect back in return... And how much of ourselves and our lives and our energy we should be willing to give up for the sake of a job," he said in an interview on episode 252 of the Engadget Podcast. Apple While much of the second season was written before the strike, "consciously or unconsciously, I think that the tone of that, of those conversations made their way into the story," Erickson said. "And certainly I think that they'll be on people's minds as they're watching the show. Because at the end of the day... it is a show about the rights of workers and what they deserve as human beings." As I watched this season of Severance, and processed the events of its explosive finale, I couldnt help but be reminded of Kazuo Ishiguros heartbreaking novel Never Let Me Go. Its set in a strict boarding school where students are raised to serve one specific purpose, and their own lives are devalued in the process. But they still love, learn and dream. They have hopes and desires. Every innie should be so lucky.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/severance-season-two-review-innie-rights-and-humanity-made-for-a-stronger-show-100003400.html?src=rss
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Bloober Team is taking its horror game cred into a new direction with the launch of publisher Broken Mirror Games. This "co-development label" is collaborating with Rock Square Thunder, an indie outfit founded by ex-Bloober devs, for a new open-world survival horror game called I Hate This Place. It's scheduled for release in the final quarter of 2025 on PC, PlayStation, Xbox Series S/X and Nintendo Switch. The source material for this adaptation is a comic book series of the same title from Skybound Entertainment by writer Kyle Starks and artist Artyom Topilin. Fittingly, the game has kept a hand-drawn style for its tale of protagonist Elena, who has accidentally unleashed a nightmarish force and now has to fight for her life by using her wits and finding shelter before the sun sets. While its exact focus in the genre has shifted, Bloober Team has created several well-received horror games such as Layers of Fear, last year's Silent Hill 2 remake and the upcoming Cronos: The New Dawn.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/bloober-team-launches-horror-publishing-label-with-debut-game-i-hate-this-place-220032691.html?src=rss
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Theres something really exciting about FBC: Firebreak, Remedys take on cooperative, online first-person shooters. Ive been trying to pinpoint a specific wow factor since attending the games developer-led demonstration last week, but Ive concluded its a combination of multiple cool features blended perfectly together. FBC: Firebreak is set in the sterile headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control and it features Remedys trademark dark surrealism, but its also infused with a healthy dose of silliness and mechanical depth. The result feels like a modern Left 4 Dead in the best possible way, just with Hiss instead of zombies and three players instead of four. Left 3 Dead, anyone? FBC: Firebreak takes place six years after the end of Control. The Oldest House, which used to be the seat of power for the FBC, has been sealed with the Hiss inside, and its now time to eradicate the invasion and lift the lockdown. The agency is sending in the Firebreak team, a unit composed of government volunteers with no extra combat training and little hope of making it out alive. As a member of Firebreak, youre handed some special equipment, patted on the back, and locked inside the headquarters with the Hiss and every unfortunate employee its infested. Good luck. The game is broken down by Jobs, which are essentially custom-built missions in specific regions of The Oldest House. All Jobs have three zones, but otherwise each one has a unique objective, crisis, and environment. After selecting a Job, you get to customize your run by setting the Threat Level and Clearance Level Threat Level determines combat difficulty and the number of rewards up for grabs, while Clearance Level sets the number of zones you have to clear and the type of rewards. I will say we do have more than three clearance levels, and you get into some pretty interesting stuff later, such as corrupted items that appear during the job, game director Mike Kayatta said. Remedy Entertainment Before the match begins, each player gets to select one of three Crisis Kits, loadouts designed with specific playstyles in mind. Crisis Kits come with a tool and an item each. The Jump Kit is based around electricity and it has the Electro-Kinectic Charge Impactor, a portable jackhammer kind of device with a conductive metal plate on the end, capable of slamming into enemies or propelling yourself into the air. It also has the BOOMbox, which plays music to attract enemies before exploding. The Fix Kit gives you a big wrench thats able to repair machinery and stagger Hiss, and it also includes a turret that you have to smack with the wrench to assemble. The Splash Kit is for all the water signs out there it features the Crank-Operated Fluidic Injector, an industrial water cannon that can extinguish fires and soak enemies so theyre primed for extra damage, plus a Humidifier, which sprays healing water in a wide area. A good way to look at all of this is that you're going to kind of combine the threat level and the clearance level and the type of job you want to play to sort of create your own load, your own experience, exactly the session that you're looking for with whatever group you're playing with that night, Kayatta said. Members of the Firebreak squad have their own Research Perks, or upgrade slots. You purchase Perks with currency earned during Jobs, and stacking upgrades of the same type strengthens their effect. Equipping three Perks of the same type lends that ability to nearby teammates as well. Remedy Entertainment For example, one perk might give you the feature that each missed bullet has a chance to return to your clip, or the ability to extinguish yourself by jumping up and down, which is how that of course works, community manager Julius Fondem said. If you equip just one perk, you get its effect. Simple, straightforward. If you equip two of the same type, you get a stronger version of that perk. And if you equip three of the same perk type, you can actually share its effect with your nearby crewmates. As you increase your kit proficiency, you'll increase the slots you have to play with, giving you the opportunity to play with a lot of different builds and strategies. Killing Hiss is all fine and dandy, but collecting currency is a major goal of each run in FBC: Firebreak, too. Currency is used to purchase new gear and cosmetics as well as Perks. Ultimately, Firebreak is about efficiency, Fondem said. You can't fail objectives, but the longer you spend doing them, the more and more Hiss will show up to stop you, increasing the chance that your crew dies on the job. That means the longer you spend exploring for currency, the more risk you're inviting and the harder it will eventually become to make it back to headquarters in one piece. Speaking of currency Remedy promises it wont charge for critical content post-launch. We want to keep all of our players united, which means that all playable post-launch content, such as Jobs, will be free for everyone who has the game, Fondem said. We'll support the game by offering paid cosmetic content as well. The Job that Remedy showed off in the media briefing (and featured in todays Future Games Show Spring Showcase) was Paper Chase, a mission filled with flying yellow sticky notes, sticky-note monsters, and one hulking sticky-note titan as the final boss. Its set in a classic FBC office space, concrete walls and blood-orange carpet, and players have to eradicate the rogue, multiplying sticky notes as well as the rushing Hiss. Little squares of paper swirl through the air and cling to the players face, covering the screen at times, amid explosions, flickering lights and showers of bullets. At one point, a player places a piggy bank in their melee weapon and smashes it on the Hiss, screaming, Stand back, piggys coming out! It activates an AOE wind effect on nearby enemies. There are environmental factors to mess with and a range of weapons to deploy shotguns, machine guns, rifles, pistols, water cannons, turrets, grenades, electrified impact devices, boomboxes and overall, Paper Chase seems like a damn good time. Remedy Entertainment Its taken plenty of iteration to get to this point. And as it turns out, FBC: Firebreak isnt limited to three players just to differentiate itself from a slightly similar 6-year-old game with a four in its title. The reason why we did three-player squads, really, it was like an organic quirk of the development, Kayatta said. We actually started testing with four players. I think it just didn't feel quite as good. It was a little harder to understand where people were. That's something that's, like, not required but definitely helpful in this game. And it just felt like, with all of the chaos and all of the fun systems going off, three just felt right over time. So that's it. And yeah, you can play solo or duo. FBC: Firebreak is due out this summer, and its heading to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, plus itll be available day-one on Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. Itll support cross-play. Remedy is aiming for a lower-minimum PC spec requirement and optimizing the game for Steam Deck. Still, FBC: Firebreak will ship with full ray-tracing support, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation and NVIDIA Reflex capabilities.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/fbc-firebreak-first-look-left-4-dead-but-with-remedys-silly-surreal-touch-214657219.html?src=rss
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