Emergency Poll: Of COURSE today SOMA Started an ARG

POLL RESULTS: These were a little too close to where I think it wouldn't be a good idea to kick the video down the line, especially with how close to done it is. So it's being relegated to some extremely light connections to its existence, and should be out early next week just in case something nuts happens on Friday plus it'll give me time to be sure captions and all those other tweaks are in place. The YouTube backend has changed a lot to where I had to figure out how to disable some AI foreign language autodubbing thing along with a bunch of other annoying backend changes. In any case, the video should be out in time with the Patreon cycle and we should be back on track this coming week!

It would figure that Frictional has had several other games hit ten year anniversaries with only some merch or other out of game fanfare, and THIS time the game starts up with an email with a cereal box cipher leading to https://www.hotelsamsara.com/. For reference the game has always updated near daily because it does something odd with save files and the cloud on both GOG and Steam, but today had some cryptic patch notes about Simon's spam filter followed by an in-game email.

So most likely this is teasing a new game, but there's a chance that some of the Switch port features could lead to a remaster, or at least some sort of patch for the game. If it's a visual update that'd be annoying, but I don't think it'd change much of what I think about the game unless it was a really horrendous looking one. However this does tie into some things I've found in SOMA itself, meaning either spending a bit longer looking for things in this that connect to SOMA along with anything else that gets revealed in the next few days, or just saying -fuck it- and throwing the video farther down the timeline in favor of some shorter Halloween projects I could turn focus on. I'm not entirely in favor of that, but with how long this video has taken it feels like it'd be a waste to then ignore something topical happening to get it out some days earlier. Either way this means a pay cycle will likely go through right before the video is going up since it's either "take a few extra work days to evaluate what all might be passing into this" (there's a chance I've already caught all there is) or say "fuck it" and kick the can down the road. I think I can only laugh at this point since it's just been finding the stability to get the "wrapping up" pass done and this happens. I could also just ignore this entirely and try to get it out earlier, so I will leave it to an admittedly rapid vote, which I'm setting for 2 days but I'll be monitoring in case there's a clear preference earlier.

Thank you as always - VOTE BEGINS