The Queue: Another week, another Thursday

Thursday keeps coming around, and even though time ostensibly runs in one direction it’s also cyclical. Somehow it’s always Thursday, and we’re always here in the Queue.

This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I do my very best to answer your gaming questions. Let’s get to it.

As a Delve enjoyer I wish you could farm myth crests in a Labyrinth, but you can only get a maximum of 20 per week from Delves (5 myth crests per Delve, to a max of 20), and a complete Labyrinth run counts as three Delves.

You could use Delves or the Labyrinth to farm hero crests to convert to myth crests (if you’ve unlocked the ability to upconvert to myth crests by having item level 321 in every slot). There’s no cap on hero crest drops, and though the conversion rate is bad, at 30 hero crests for 10 myth crests, but it’s better than nothing. (Do remember that some of the crests you get from Delves are from the nemesis chest, and the more clusters of snakes you kill, the more crests you’ll get — though this only applies to hero crests. You can still only get a maximum of 20 myth crests from Delves per week.) But Tier 5 Ritual Sites are probably a faster way to earn hero crests if you’re getting to myth crests by converting.

However, there is some farming you can do in a Labyrinth if you have an easy time of killing Kindo’jan, who reportedly drops 10 myth crests and 10 hero crests, beyond the regular Delve rewards, with no cap. (I’ve struggled to kill him so this isn’t for me.) Once you’ve opened the door to Kindo’jan’s chamber once you can go straight there without unlocking every chamber in the delve. (Sort of straight there; you must clear a path to the final room and there is not actually a straight path.)

To the point I’m getting frustrated. Some days that’s at different places than others; some days you just have more patience than others.

Sometimes there’s fun to working out puzzles over time. Sometime you feel like you’ve tried everything and it isn’t working. Sometimes you just need to go over your options and keep trying.

But are you having fun working out the puzzle, or are you getting frustrated? If you’re just frustrated, you’re not having fun. And when you hit that point, look it up. Keep having fun.

This is such a matter of personal opinion. Are you bothered by jump scares? What about razor-sharp tension? Menacing atmosphere? Psychological horror? There’s a lot of ground to cover if you want to be scared in a video game.

There’s a mission in Mass Effect 3 that I still find very creepy even though I know the exact path of the level and all of the details. You’re exploring an Asari base, and the power is out, so most of the base is dark. And in the distance, screams, the sharp, long shriek of the game’s banshees. They walk towards you slowly, but stutter-step with a short range teleport that closes distance. But the way you know they’re around is that distant shriek.

I’ve been playing The Seance of Blake Manor, which is highly atmospheric, and there’s an air of quiet menace and spiritual appearances that aren’t really jump scares, but jump scare me. Plus there are angel statues all over the manor that occasionally turn in your direction and then do nothing in a way I find highly ominous. But it’s primarily a mystery game, and this is just the atmosphere that sets up the supernatural events you’re in the middle of.

I also found Arkane’s Prey to be extremely creepy, certainly enough that I’d nudge it towards the horror category, but it’s really just a sci-fi FPS. In which you’re on an abandoned space station with aliens, and (initially) all you have is a wrench. No big deal.

I found Subnautica so frightening that I couldn’t even play it. I was terrified of whatever was coming at you in the water, and most of the log entries sent chills up my spine. I watched an actual play instead and it was an excellent narrative, holding the tension of being trapped in this unknown place very well… even while you built a cute little sea base.

There are several recently released horror (or horror-adjacent) games I’m looking forward to playing, including Penguin Colony (a game about being a penguin surrounded by cosmic horrors), The Mailroom (you are a mail clerk, but in hell), and Dead Letter Dept (oddly, another mail-themed game in which you transcribe lost letters with nowhere to go). Or Donut Panic, coming soon, in which you run a cute little donut shop. Trainwatch is further out, but it looks excellently creepy and very weird. I’m here for the weird, and horror games are honestly doing some of the most interesting stuff in gaming right now.

I assume that by the time I actually went through all of this, my soul would already be gone because the devil was just tired of hearing about it. I’m probably not a good person to ask.

That’s all for today, my friends. Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you down in the comments section… unless I get distracted by my Steam wishlist, anyway.