LogFAQs > #969393933

I don't know why this is. Is it some kind of undiagnosed ADD? I don't know. Maybe? I know people with ADD, and I share some things in common, but not others. Or maybe I just have some kind of mysterious procrastination disease, fuck if I know! Like there's some kind of problem in my brain that stops me from doing productive work for no particular reason. Or, maybe it's just part of how my creative process works. I'm as introverted as introverted gets, and I spend most of the day inside of my own brain; inventing, creating, refining ideas. Before I can really start making something, I feel like I have to go through a long editing process inside my own head, getting everything in order exactly how I want it before I can even begin; how would I know where or how to begin until I have everything in order? I know that most artists would probably consider this a toxic thought process, as the editing process should really come after the first draft of a work, but foolish kid I was, I always considered the idea of a first draft sort of beneath me. Whatever I was going to write, it was going to be perfect on the first try, because I felt I was capable of making a mistake-free work in one attempt, and that flawed process has continued for me until now. It has its benefits; often, when I finally begin work on something, whatever I create really IS good the first try, because I've spent so long in my own head contemplating it, sharpening my ideas to a fine point before making them manifest. I'm capable of creating good works, and I'm capable of doing a lot of that legwork inside my own brain. But of course, it doesn't matter if the first few strokes of the pen, or the brush, or the... uhhh, fuck, what's the musical equivalent? A violin bow? Sure, the first few strokes of the violin bow - none of it matters if these never come to fruition in the first place.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/2/AAA-H0AAD4FY.jpg

In some probably futile sense, I hope that writing a list like this can serve as some sort of therapy to help me with my procrastination, to help me try to work through and diagnose my problems, to see if I can't try to fix myself merely through trying to write. As you can see, it's had... mixed results. I always start out pretty good, getting out the first few writeups in short order, while my energy is at its peak and the stakes are at their lowest. But something always comes up - a vacation, an illness, a random period of depression and insomnia that I can't make sense of, whatever - and the excuses start to pile up. To make matters worse, the list gets harder as I go along, because my energy starts to lag, and the list gets harder to write as I go along. If you followed my Mega Man music ranking, you saw it, and you're seeing it here, too. The first few entries on a list are easy. If the list is comprehensive, and includes bad things at the bottom, then I can easily waltz through a few lines of shitpost about each one and move on - I don't care about the subject matter, so I care less about the quality of my writing. If it's a list like this, where the bottom of the list is merely good, it's still mostly the same deal; a 3-4 paragraphs summarizing the main points of why I enjoyed the game are enough, and I can move on. But as I climb the list, the merely good becomes great, the great becomes excellent, the excellent becomes profound. And the more meaningful something is, the more pressure I put on myself to think of something better and more interesting to say about it. I can't write something merely good about an excellent work; I must write something great. And I can't just stop at great when writing about a profound work; I have to write something beautiful, something that touches on the divine. Yeah, that's an eye-rollingly lofty standard to hold myself up to for whatever dumb bullshit I'm writing here, I know, but listen; there is no lofty standard that a perfectionist brain won't hold itself up to. And maybe that's why I relate to Chicory so much.

Unfortunately, this demon still resides in my brain, alive and well, and he's calmly ignoring my eviction notice. But at least, now that I've confronted him in my writing, I know that I can't go back to procrastinating on this writeup; clicking on that open Slice & Dice tab would be a hilarious admission of defeat after probing my own thought process so openly. I can still send the other demon, the ranking demon, packing. So let's talk about Chicory, and let's try to unpack why Chicory means so much to me, and then we can close this particular ranking chapter.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a quaint, vaguely Zelda-ish game about a dog with a paintbrush. The gimmick is that the whole world is like a coloring book, everything drawn in white with black outlines; you can use your paintbrush to color in anything and everything on the screen as you please. You go on a quest to master the paintbrush while solving everyone's color-related problems, gaining new abilities that let you progress through the world, talking to NPCs, all that stuff. It's more puzzle-oriented than combat; outside of a few boss battles there's nothing to fight, so it's just a chill time coloring in some stuff. And there's an emotional gutpunch of a story that made me cry a lot and completely re-evaluate my life. You know the drill. Who among us hasn't played one of these by now?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/3/AAA-H0AAD4FZ.jpg

It's hard for me to even figure out where to start talking about this game, because there's simultaneously a lot of things I could say about it, but also, only one really important feeling I need to convey. To say that this game resonated deeply with me is an understatement. When I first played this game, I played for about four hours nonstop with no intention of taking a break, which is rare for me with an adventure game like this, when the realization hit me like a train; I had already fallen in love with this game. Not just that, but I recognized an old-but-familiar feeling, the feeling that I was having a formative experience right then and there. I'm 34 years old; having new formative experiences become rarer and rarer with each passing year of my life. Yeah, I know this sounds like a lot to say about a video game, but being excessively masturbatory about how this game made me feel is really the only way I can get across how profoundly it got me.

Fuck, I clicked on the Slice & Dice tab. Hang on a sec. Okay I lost. Let's keep going.