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I can’t be the only one who keeps typing zonai as nomai right..  👀 (I think theyd get along)

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i love this little game <33

while drawing this i ended up subconsciously taking way more inspiration from this work than i expected, so you should go look at it bc it rocks

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(Almost) feels like home

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*climbs into your askbox like an old friend* I just wanted to come and say I vibe so hard with your feelings about Outer Wilds! Unfortunately for stupid reasons of physical impediment I'm unable to play games with a controller and it is, as it turns out, pretty impossible to play on mouse and keyboard, so i had to experience it through other people's playthroughs which was a huge shame. but nevertheless, I absolutely agree with "rewrote my brain"!!

Interestingly enough, I had the exact opposite experience with the control schemes -- I played the game using keyboard & mouse pretty comfortably, and absolutely would have suffered with controller. In the early game the controls do take some getting used to (particularly the delayed jump and zero-gravity maneuvering) and I was using a pretty awful button mapping setup earlier on, but with the exception of [THAT SECTION] that controller can arguably-slightly-cheese I preferred the ease of looking around and aiming my scout that kb&m provided. Though I'll admit I'm biased in that regard, as I've gone to pretty comical lengths to avoid having to use a controller for anything (looking at you, Sonic Adventure 2) and thus never really learned how to hold/use them.

That aside, even though you didn't get to play the game on your own, I'm glad you were able to enjoy other folks' playthroughs -- there are some seriously awesome ones out there. Since it's impossible to replay Outer Wilds for obvious reasons I always try to push people towards experiencing it on their own first, but in a situation where you can't I'm glad you still got to see it through one way or another.

As for the actual point of the ask hahaha, yeah, gosh, this game just fundamentally dug into me in a way others haven't. I legitimately went through the five stages of grief over the game's ending.

The game is also just great at putting you in the shoes of the Hatchling. With the exception of like, continuing a save after getting the kazoo meme ending which technically "doesn't happen," you explore the world and learn everything entirely in-character, which made it all hit much harder for me. It didn't feel like I was observing a story, it felt like I was the one making it and uncovering the mystery and having all of this happen to me. That and the fact that I had some personal things going on in my life around when I played Outer Wilds that aligned with the game's themes, leading to it kinda taking me out on a very personal level.

Outer Wilds also just seemed perfectly engineered to suck me in, haha. It's got computer simulations! Black holes! Quantum mechanics! I was the kinda kid who lived for space documentaries so getting to fly around and explore everything was amazing. Going through environmental puzzles, reading adorable exchanges with the nomai, getting to see the most incredible sights (the door falling away at the [SPOILER] and having to make a leap of faith to get across the gap was amazing), and putting it all together in a wild red-string conspiracy board...I completed the entire game over the course of like, 2-3 days as I recall? Just entirely immersed for that time.

It's inspired me so much in my stories and how I think about mysteries. It's the best time-loop game out there, and the presentation of the sandbox mystery is just unparalleled in any other game. Hence why everyone who's played it is left looking up Youtube playthroughs and chasing that high again -- personally I think going into the original Subnautica game blind touches some of the same feelings, but you're never really gonna get the Outer Wilds Experience again.

The mechanics are great, the mystery is presented wonderfully; I fell in love with the environments and the characters and the dialogue. The themes were tied into the story very naturally and hit me right in my core. Obviously I can't really replay it, but I do sometimes boot it up just to reread some sections or go hang out on Giant's Deep for the ambiance; it's comforting and nostalgic in a weird sort of way.

Sorry that this response isn't anywhere near coherent. I'm very, very tired right now, and I love Outer Wilds a lot and won't pass up a chance to ramble about how great it is. It's a very special game to my heart and dug into me in a way other games often can't do. It's not for everyone, but if it is for you it's REALLY for you. Clearly I like it and clearly you like it. So thanks for climbing into my askbox and setting me off, haha.

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My dearest followers and mutuals and friends and lovers. I am going to extend one deadly serious question to you on this beautiful afternoon.

What is your #1 video game recommendation

#OUTER WILDS #To be clear: NOT The Outer Worlds #Outer Wilds is a different game #It's a mystery-puzzle-exploration game where you're a little space archaeologist #Who was caught in a time loop and is left searching ancient ruins around the solar system for answers #Lots of reading and flying around planets in your spacesuit #It's also a game you can literally only ever play once #I.e. if you look up a let's play on youtube you will never be able to properly experience the game #Because the only progression is your own knowledge and knowing the mystery means there's no progression #There are other games I've put more time into like Terraria and Stardew and Hollow Knight and am obsessed with #But Outer Wilds rewrote my brain #It's just so fundamentally special #And once you're done you get to join the rest of us living vicariously through first-time players

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LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

#FIN FIN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #jadetank really came through with this one

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(Not my characters, original comic: @purity-town )

#!!!!! #Hahahaha Andrew is not having a great time #Thank you for drawing him!! #He looks real cool in your style!

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Little progress video of the last chapter cover. I don't usually keep progress snapshots, so it's kinda cool to watch it come together.

#Please excuse the awful video crop/editing #I don't have an easy way to make slideshows of portrait images #So I had to improvise

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#YESSSSSSSSS

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Chris' personal quest in Drakkenheim is to find a way to stop the spread of the contamination and eventually cleanse the city of the Haze. To facilitate this, we've spent the entire campaign thus far taking notes and building a red string board of everything we've learned. It's been getting out of hand.

(Screenshot below the cut, mostly spoiler-free because the picture is pretty crunchy due to how far I had to zoom out to take it.)

#We have like 120 pages of session notes at this point #We survived the Cathedral so next session we're off to the Inscrutable Tower! #Dungeons of Drakkenheim #Drakkenheim

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More Chris because I like to draw him

#Eughghfh I'm really tired so you can see the sketch quality declining here #Lil snip of Chris in a dress because he's so pretty

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shout out to everyone who participated in the january-february mass depressive episode

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Hi hi pixelrhys again do you have any fun AUs for your Terraria guys because I'm looking at you with big eyes. Do you ever consider making some if you don't have any?

This ended up rather long as I went into a big infodump, so I’m gonna toss it all under the cut!

Kinda yes, kinda no! It depends on how loosely you define AU -- Chris and Andrew (and sometimes others) occasionally get thrown into other things I’m doing, but I don’t have many actually-thought-out AUs of Purity Town proper. PT does have a sort of "levels of canon" thing going on such that the more self-indulgent ideas I have aren't really canon but are just for fun for myself, but none of them are fleshed out enough that they've gone beyond a one-off doodle here or there. (That category mostly consists of random ship stuff, fun character interactions like various characters being a part of the Lunatic Cult, indulgent fun with Chris' powers/power level and star theme, fun with Andrew's personal powers, and so on.) Things that don't go beyond a one-sentence idea, essentially. That also includes a lot of wildly differing post-game ideas that haven't yet been ironed out, though admittedly I haven't even posted most of the ideas I've had for hardmode, so that doesn't count for much.

Chris, Andrew, Alalia (the Dryad), and the Lunatic Cultist (kind of -- name irrelevant, roughly the same character) all appear as NPCs in a D&D setting I’ve been working on and off for a couple years now. The simple background of the setting as it relates to them specifically is that an age ago a civilization of arcane casters (“Ascendants”) inhabited a giant crystal cluster that grew after a star fell to earth, but all disappeared in an instant with the coming of a new god that replaced the sky. Chris, Andrew, and the LC were members of this civilization. Andrew was a Watcher, a unique role among the Ascendants for those with expertise in divination magic that allowed them to monitor the goings-on of their kingdom, a job that required a uniquely strong sense of self and strong discipline to avoid being swept away in the tide of information. Due to this quality, he was approached by the LC as a participant in a project to elevate a mortal soul into artificial godhood, but this initial attempt somewhat-failed as Andrew clawed his eyes out (and then refused any magical restoration) to reduce the amount of sensory overload his newfound godhood imparted on him. The LC also approached Chris to join them in a follow-up experiment, but he declined because he thought their research was bullshit (it was based on the true theory that reality, magic, mortal souls, and the souls of gods are all made up of the same fundamental material called Waver, but he didn’t think they had the technology to manipulate it in such a way). Chris instead worked on his own research, basically an in-universe equivalent of astrophysics-but-for-magic, studying how their world’s binary-planet (a gas dwarf named Sigil) and moon (a much smaller moon named Luna) influenced local spellcasting. When the LC’s next experiment killed every remaining Ascendant by ripping their souls from their bodies and forming them into a single light in the sky, Andrew survived due to the aforementioned partial-godhood and Chris survived due to working in a magic-insulated lab, and both were rendered unable to die as their souls were permanently bound to their bodies. Between then and the present day/start of the campaign after the crystal has been re-settled over centuries by non-Ascendants (forming the city/state of Lighthaven/Newveil), Chris starts a wizard school under the title of Wishmaster Delha, makes a magical crown to place a new king on the throne, fakes his death, and nowadays just hangs out selling potions to foolish adventurers. Andrew, on the other hand, started a mostly made-up religion around the new sky before dipping out of the spotlight and in the present day lives with Chris, helping him with his potions where able. Alalia is also present in the setting as the elvish-archdruid (i.e. not immortal but very very long-lived) leader of a druid community who oversees most of the area’s crops and natural trade goods of the area, and hates Chris/Andrew partially for being immortals, partially for being Ascendants, and partially because Chris keeps selling questionable not-druid-approved potions on the black market solely to piss her off.

Chris is also my player character for a Drakkenheim campaign (and Andrew is kinda there too)! The TL;DR of Drakkenheim is that 15 years prior to the start of the campaign, an eldritch meteor fell from the sky and hit the city of Drakkenheim, destroying much of the city and leaving the rest blanketed in a contaminating Haze, transforming the dead into monsters and making magic within the bounds of the city go haywire. In this setting, Chris is a human fighter (eldritch knight) who is mageborn (i.e. has the gene that makes people capable of channeling wizard/sorcerer magic -- relevant because mageborns have additional social-legal restrictions placed upon them due to the continent once being ruled by evil sorcerer kings and the fear of that happening again). Because of his weak magical ability and having grown up in the countryside and then having to move due to the spreading corruption as a refugee following the meteor, he missed out on being tested by the Amethyst Academy for magic and so didn’t learn about his powers until adulthood. He then had a very short stint at the Amethyst Academy before being kicked out for lack of ability, and over the next few years moved back in with his parents, met Andrew, learned another language, taught himself sword fighting, and decided to head to Drakkenheim to work as an adventurer for money and on the side try to research a way to control and eventually contain/destroy the spreading contamination that had destroyed his childhood home, while also trying to grow his own magical abilities. Kind of awkwardly, the Amethyst Academy mage NPCs tend to ignore his existence and belittle him, sole exception being his ex-teacher/ex-Academy-mage Ryan Greymere who’s also working to cleanse the city. Chris in this setting is also mildly religious (in a "it doesn't matter if it's inherently true to the world or if it gained power through people believing in it because in the end it exists and I grew up with it" kind of way), following a religion that instead of believing in a god like many of the old nature religions believes in a light of goodness inside of people. This puts him in an even more uncomfortable spot as the first paladins of this religion were renowned for freeing the continent from the ancient sorcerer kings, and thus said religion is the cause of a lot of the anti-mageborn movements floating around and the source of some nasty comments. Compared to some of the other party members (including but not limited to possibly the last surviving legitimate heir to the throne of Drakkenheim), Chris is very much meant to be Just Some Guy, but is super loyal and very ride or die as far as his relationship with the rest of the party goes (and unlike his first adventuring party, they didn't abandon him, so even better). Which is all good, because he’s not making much money from this, but instead got wrapped up in a plot to put his party member on the throne with hopes of using its power to restore the city. Andrew is kind of also present in this setting in that he’s an elven cleric of the same religion Chris follows, and is my backup character if Chris is killed. He’s Chris’ partner, and stayed with Chris’ family after Chris went off to start an adventuring career in Drakkenheim, giving him an excuse to join the party if Chris dies.

I haven’t posted much about the D&D setting I’ve been working on, but I’ll occasionally post Drakkenheim doodles when I have the energy to draw. Sometimes they include other party members, and sometimes it just sneaks into more generic Chris-as-a-character posts, as without specifically drawing his armor/scarring/party members it’s hard to distinguish his Drakkenheim design from his Terraria one. With the armor and scarring it comes off closer to his hardmode design, but as mentioned, I haven’t posted much hardmode content so that’s pretty irrelevant haha. And then as for all of the assorted self-indulgent one-off ideas, I just often don't feel up to drawing them, so they get to live in my brain rent-free instead, haha.

#Sorry this took a while to respond to #It's been a busy couple of days #I hope this is an interesting read nonetheless!

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More Chris doodles, including another hairstyle that does nothing to help keep his hair contained & some wings.

#I have so much appreciation for Terraria letting you customize which items are for vanity and which have effects #Chris usually keeps the wings dissipated because they're very bright and large #(Hardmode wings -- the prehardmode fledgling wings are smaller and floofier and less glowy) #Avoiding drawing actual hardmode armor/outfits because that's a lot of effort

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Bugsnak based on that super sad little Starbucks croissant

#PATHETIC BEAST #Obsessed with this creature

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Some sleepy Fritz. He's so exhausted.

#“The missile is very tired. He is eepy” #“The missile has had a very long day of splashing bandits and wants to take just a small sleeb” #Etc. etc. etc #Hair down!!!!!!

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i love these creature

#Posts that make me want to learn to crochet