u/Feeling-Influence691

Looking for good book recommendations - Anything where the story has the animal’s POV and how they see the world compared to humans.

Nothing grimdark or depressing, something where maybe the humans fail to stop a serious threat and an animal ends up saving the day.

Anything with lions or powerful animals like gorillas and elephants would be good. Bonus if there are bonds and emotional and wholesome moments.

Make sure you have Lambert’s bunny toy on hand, then throw it in the middle of a collapsible wooden bridge.

This next step is very crucial- HIDE BEHIND A STONE PILLAR SO THAT THE STALKER DOESN’T SEE YOU PRIME YOUR GRENADE AND CANCEL ITS DOLL PICKUP ANIMATION WHEN IT STOPS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BRIDGE!

This tip comes fresh to you after hours of repeated reloads and trial and error. At first I thought it was blind luck in my previous successful attempts, but now I realise that when you arm the grenade in plain sight as the stalker picks up the doll, the stalker will snap out of its doll inspection animation and charge forward before you can even throw it.

The frustration with the slowness of the game and its checkpointing not resetting you at the entrance to the bridge arena is palpable I assure you.

Hope this helps for anyone struggling. There is a crate with a grenade in the first platform on the far right that you have to remove some planks from to find your grenade. Make a beeline for that first before moving into the centre of the arena to trigger Lambert’s spawn animation.

The pitch is that you play as a Homo Sapiens character who gets trapped in a landfall pit connected to an natural cave labyrinth and have to find your way out.

The vibe would be similar to the Amnesia games like Bunker and Rebirth as well as Alien Isolation. You have limited weaponry options and your best defence is to run or hide or throw out lures as distractions.

Through sheer misfortune, you end up separated from your tribe and end up falling into a landfall pit which is connected to an ancient cave network. You need to find your way out before you starve to death or permanently run out of light sources.

You can create fire to cook your meat and keep yourself warm at checkpoints but only if you have foraged and grabbed enough materials. Torch sconces can also be made as a permanent light source to save you burning through torches. Underwater streams will also be used as a health replenishment source.

You can craft a limited amount of items to help you in your journey like pouches and tools to increase your versatility and how to navigate certain areas.

Sound simple enough right? The only downside to keeping yourself alive in the bowels of prehistoric Africa is that you are not the only being trapped underground.

A host of megafauna has also fallen into the traps and you have to contend with a variety of predators that are also trying to search for a way out or are just too starved and hungry from their time in the caves to behave like healthy animals.

Boar and antelopes as well as animal carcasses can be hunted and harvested for health and supplies. Provided you can do so safely without attracting the attention of the other predators trapped in the cave system with you.

Pleistocene Africa was host to predators like lions, leopards, prehistoric hyenas like pachycrocuta brevirostris and sabretooth cats like megantereon, homotherium and dinofelis. And an unknown and varying amount of them are trapped inside the cave labyrinth with you.

Your only defence is the ability to make fire as a feeble deterrent and a small body to hide in crevices to evade a horrific menagerie of hyper carnivores as you struggle to find your way to the surface. A spear and a flint knife would be a last and only resort and even then survival would not be guaranteed.

On top of that, you’ll find certain clues and archaeological Easter eggs. You’ll even encounter other Sapiens characters trapped in the cave with you, though not all of them should be considered friendly. The drive to survive and pre-existing clan rivalries in the surface world can prove to be just as dangerous if not more so than the predators and environmental hazards that exist in the subterranean hellhole you have found yourself in.

Your objective is to survive, not give in to madness or fear, survive and fend off predators, aid or defend yourself against other Sapiens, and make it out of the cave before you run out of fire and food.

What do you guys think? I had to do a bit of digging and work out which predators existed when as I am not an expert. The original pitch was going to be homo habilis but then I mixed up my time periods with Miocene Africa, which had hyenadonts, bear-dogs and actual bears to contend with, and was also a time when our ancestors were more ape like.

Habilis was much later and could make fire and had roughly the same predators to contend with as Sapiens, but might not have been as nuanced with their intelligence as Sapiens, so I decided Sapiens - basically the modern human - would be a more relatable protagonist.

(Potential trigger warnings- discussion of alcoholic and negligent parenting as well as statutory r*pe through a student teacher relationship)

The result is pure carnage as the boyfriend now defends her against any and all implied threats to both the relationship and her virtue.

Some context- the young woman has lived a sheltered life and has consumed fantasy romance stories from a young age, both as a defence mechanism and a source of comfort against an unideal life. This can be from a troubled household when the parents divorced with the father being a woman chasing alcoholic and the woman being a passive negligent entity in the household. This results in her being both self sufficient but also deeply insecure and immature in places.

Her school life could be a showcase of a typical nerdy life in school, being bullied and ostracised by her peers, a bit like book Carrie because of her toxic somewhat holier than thou attitude to others as she sees herself as a princess waiting for her Prince Charming to swoop in and rescue her instead of seeing a therapist or making a better effort to make friends or work on her own faults.

The additional darker twist is that she ends up in a short relationship with a young teacher which doesn’t last long with the teacher being publicly disgraced and fired, but long enough to impress on her the romanticised ideal of what a man should be- smart, charming, seemingly all knowing and unflappable. She is told repeatedly that what happened to her is deeply wrong and messed up and a huge abuse of authority and power but deep down she secretly still yearns for him.

Fast forward to when she is in uni and in her twenties. She ends up with a smart, kind, caring but somewhat insecure boyfriend who is a gentlemen to her but not the best with confrontations. She projects her ideals of the perfect man onto him which the boyfriend initially enjoys but lately begins to feel the strain of not always being able to live up to her ideals.

The final straw is when she gets catcalled on a night out with her friends and her boyfriend and the boyfriend attempts to stand up for her, but is verbally threatened and intimidated by the punks who do the catcalling. He makes the painful but ultimately sensible decision to back down and call the bouncer to have them kicked out. This infuriates our protagonist as she wanted him to physically beat up the men despite their obvious size and strength advantage.

They get into an argument about the boyfriend’s masculinity and the boyfriend brings up the previous issues that have been simmering under the surface. This prompts the woman to find a one wish willow across her path and uses it.

The immediate personality change comes into effect and the woman has the time of her life with her new and improved boyfriend. She doesn’t bat an eye when he verbally rebukes the nasty old lady who insults her hair and style, or when he does grandiose and publicly disruptive gestures of affection and gallantry.

It’s only when he acquires a European sword from a museum and graphically murders the bar punks and her friends catch wind that things start to unravel. And then the boyfriend’s knight persona begins to clash with his suppressed original personality and you can pretty much see where this goes from here.

Friends start catching strays, the teacher ends up involved and also dies and pretty much anyone else who appears to distract or threaten the sanctity of the knight and the protagonist’s relationship.

“I’ll be whoever you wish for me to be, my lady.” (Smiles unhinged) I’m your Prince Charming.”

P.S. the man ends up becoming the vagabond and pillager ideal of the knight when the woman wants to be taken care of financially and be showered with riches like a queen.

He turns to a life of brutally violent crime robbing and stealing anything in increasingly unsubtle ways to the point that he blows up an actual building with innocents inside as both a message and stop the cops from trailing him.

TL:DR I gender flipped Obsession as a sequel idea to show both the toxic double standards in both romance and society, highlighting how woman can be both victims and perpetrators of the abuse of power in sexual relationships and also how men can be victims of the ideal of toxic masculinity in the hyper fantasised lens of women wanting the perfect man in their relationship.

The alcoholic father and the forbidden teacher relationship abuse element is also to show how women or rather anyone when you think about it can receive messed up ideas of what love in relationships is meant to be like at a young age.

I also think that another touch to the original movie would be to show that Bear neglected both his grandma and his cat, and is also a p*rn addict, which explains his toxic ideal of how the perfect ideal girlfriend should behave. Then I flipped around and asked what would it be like if a woman used a one wish willow on her intended paramour and changed some crucial elements so it would not be a basic reskin of the original plot.

Points I liked

- the film not holding back as to what would happen if a neighbourhood got swapped out into the Jurassic period. The carnage and brutal dinosaur on human violence and the sight of human and animal bodies including cats was surprising to see considering it is a PG-13 or a 12a. This film got away with a lot and didn’t pull any punches.

- some decent dinosaur animation and behaviour. I wish the film or the promos actually named the species for us Dino autists out there so we can name and identify the dinosaurs and reptiles.

- bravo to the film for actually showing what would happen if a human with a sledgehammer tried to throw hands with a motivated theropod dinosaur. - and yes, I did make a meme about the allosaurus easily being able to catch up to humans running full speed, but it was injured in the leg and conveniently was blocked by trees and distracted by Ewan and Anne Hathaway before it could actually catch the kids.

- good convincing acting. I mean all the cast had to do was act terrified when running for their lives so they got that part down pat.

Points I did not like.

- the CG could have looked better. Some prosthetics would not have hurt for the close ups shots. I miss the Stan Winston days where people actually cared for prosthetics and animatronics in monster films instead of relying all on cgi.

- the film does try to be sentimental and wholesome but that is undercut by the brutality and grimmer aspects, like the boy nearly getting killed by the neighbourhood bully who was venting misplaced hatred because he and his little brother had lost their mother. A lighter toned film would have maybe had the kid being cornered by the bully and his goons only for the brother to show up and de-escalate the tension by reminding them there are bigger things at stake. The boy would have then apologised to the broken armed kid and his brother. He and his friends and the older kids could have formed a loser esque gang with bikes to serve as a kind of scouting group, and that would have given a kind of ET element to the film with a group of kids armed with nothing but bikes and luck in a neighbourhood filled with dinosaurs.

- the plot quickly shatters any illusion of this being a fun sort of adventure and instead shifts into the grimmer more darker tropes survival horror, which might work if this was for older audiences like Quiet Place which got a 15 rating but feels too dark for a pg-13/12a film. Hearing screams and random gunshots as dinosaurs attack the family’s neighbours is a pretty dark world building element there.

- that shock death with the dad. I liked this but I also thought something would come along to distract the allosaurus Anax just as Ewan got his leg fucked up. But nope, just got graphically and very audibly eaten right in front of the whole family. Anyone else who isn’t the main character is not spared or given plot armour. If this was more family oriented, I would have the old lady who is killed at the start perhaps live and be helped by Anne Hathaway, so as to not traumatise younger viewers with grandparents.

- I will parrot what other critics have said in that there was a lack of community in the film and the family should have sought and joined up with their neighbours. Humans survived anything nature or the world threw at them by banding together, and they should have taken a note out of post apocalyptic films and joined together to make a community hub and entered a large building to fortify against the dinosaurs.

Sure, the family get more screen time and focus but they also feel very isolated and left to deal with the dinosaur threat on their own. I guess this is what the spielbergian family oriented element other reviewers have noticed with the parents battling their own desire to separate and be reminded why they are a family for the kids and the kids going out to rescue each other or their dog or the private school girl.

-one goof I noticed- the asshole neighbour who gets eaten alive by the pterosaurs is practically erased from the rooftop he was standing on. No corpse, no bloodstains on the roof which we did see splatter when he gets slashed by the pterosaur- just gone. Filmmakers forgot that and I doubt the pterosaurs could eat bone or lick up all the blood.

- I’d be remiss as a dino enthusiast if I did not call out the presence of the decently animated spinosaurus when the majority of the dinosaurs appear to be from the late Jurassic America - Spinosaurus was early to mid Cretaceous in Africa. The film could have maybe explained that maybe the Sagan wormhole thingymajig also popped up in other time periods which explains the presence of the Cretaceous theropod.

- the pterosaurs pretty much have a classic pterodactyl shape with the big heads and the long arrow tails. I’m no full expert but I do know most of the smaller to medium sized pterosaurs had those tails and the larger ones did not. Again, if the film or the promo content actually told us what the animals were, - Tropeognathus maybe but with a tail(?)

- the ending could have been better explained as to how Anne ended up saving all her neighbours and warning them to get out of Oak Street before the time swap event happens. Like a Groundhog Day Scenario where the family repeat the events again and again until they get everyone out.

A lot more negative points than good but I say and maintain that this is the film that Dominion should have been, not Trevorrow’s lie with locusts. It could have done with a rewrite to be more family friendly and leans a bit too hard on the more adult and darker elements for it to be enjoyable for family audiences. If it was marketed at and aimed for adult and teens then all the better, but as it wasn’t, its tone is inconsistent between bleak scenario and family adventure.

Overall 7.5/10 for being an original dinosaur adventure that didn’t pull its punches. I feel the mixed tone and baggage might make this rating lower, but I hope at least this encourages other big studios to take risks and give us more dinosaur horror stories - provided they are enjoyable to watch and are not too grim or bleak like certain stories like Rift or Primitive War.

And with those last words, the car designer ended up live-streaming his own death, much to the horror of his family, his trophy wife, and the delight of meme posters desperate for new material.

I don’t mind if the MC is weak or if he can hold his own. Just going through Gladiatrix and the slave by Pierce Scott now- have heard of the Everlasting and the bookkeeper of Brisfen, and of course his orc charioteer bride and his secret illuminations.

Species does not matter- am open to any genre so long as it is well written. sword and sorcery or high fantasy. Just something where I could enjoy as a cosy read and get immersed in the world.

I like the John Carter and Red Sonja comics available on kindle unlimited if that helps as well. Bonus if the worlds involve dragons and or dinosaurs.

I’m very tempted to get the game as it is for £19.99 in the UK as I really enjoyed switching off and just cleaning things when I had game pass. I’ve seen it dip in price before but didn’t have the budget to grab it at the time. - I own an Xbox One.

Does anyone know when any seasonal sale events across Steam or Xbox like a publisher sale? It’s done by Square Enix I see based on the description.