The Bug Plush™campaign has ended, but I really hope you enjoyed the video!! As of editing this the absurdly long review of all BTD6 towers (I think it's like five hours long help) is nearly complete, and although the Elden Ring Nightreign challenge run had to be delayed because live service games are the bane of my existence (Everdark Augur haunts my nightmares please send help), that's been going nicely as well

Afterwards, I have an entire challenge run for Morrowind recorded / scripted that I'm hoping to get out ~a few weeks after that video is finished, then the OSHA Violations of the Fallout New Vegas Vaults is entirely scripted and partially recorded, but that's going to take a LOT more effort so it's likely to be released at a much later date.

Other than that, I hope you have a wonderful day, and thanks so much for being here! I know I said this in the video but this was purely a passion project to help get me out of a creative hangover, and in that regard it was a huge success and I'm incredibly optimistic for the future. But I appreciate you (IN PARTICULAR) immensely :) Cheers!!!

"upcoming GOTY contender Mewgenics" this has proven 100% true

Edmund games are the pinnacle  of "this game is such bullshit, and I love it" its like sort of unfair but not unexpected.

Sorry to be one of the inevitable many to tell you, but if you hold down while running off a ledge you'll automatically snap to it. I'm genuinely very impressed you played the entire game without that knowledge, it'd make life SO much harder

Everyone has a "I hate this game, 10/10" game opinion. Like Spelunky for me.

pretty much

Oh so I completely missed this message of this game. That makes sense actually, I kept seeing people saying that the game had a lot of meaning and I just sat there thinking "man I must be terrible at getting subtext". And in general I am, but I think in this case it's because my experience with the game was probably not the intended one? I absolutely loved the game, the controls, the physics and the difficulty the moment I started playing. I had no issues with the game and did not find it frustrating throughrout the whole game (ok I gave up on 100%ing it but only because of the cartridges, I hate deathless challenges). Which is really odd because I played Super Meat Boy and I had to take a break because I was getting too frustated, which has made me hold a negative opinion of Super Meat Boy to this day (I should probably give it another go tbh). At no point it felt like the game was being hostile at me, which is actually really funny now that I think about it.

I love achievement hunting, grinding out challenges to juice every drop of gameplay I can out of a game is my way of showing how much I love it. As someone with this mindset, I absolutely adore how The End Is Nigh uses achievements to represent the destructiveness of completionists mindsets, needing to beat the game deathless for the blue ribbon just shows that you aren't meant to 100% the game and that it is probably not great for your mental health to do so.

This spoke to me in a time I've never needed it more. I thought I "was" creative. That I was and now I am not, that some shift happened that broke me in some way I couldn't fix nor help. YouTube was my creative outlet as well, to talk about the game I love more than any other. I've wanted to make more, to talk about more, but while respecting the creativity and work I've accomplished in the past, I've also resented it for not being "my best work." I've spent months and years thinking about how I had already broke through my perfectionism, and it makes it all the worse when I slip inevitably.

It's as if I always play the End is Nigh. The moment I reach Acceptance, I only restart the game again and again to force myself through pain for no reason other than my own weaknesses. Why would one do something that doubles the work and makes one's own project 5% better at a maximum? Something that never makes sense but I personally fall into the trap of more than I escape it.

Inspiration has never felt so melancholy.

I LOVE PRETENTIOUS ART

31:19 That actually hit me like a truck. The amount of time I had a good idea for a story only to then wrote just a single page, erasing, rewriting then ultimately telling myself tommorow I will continue only to then get burn out... This happen more than a dozen time already. Even now, I currently have a story rotting at my desk because, I can't choose the mc name, I want the mc to have a family and a life outside the main story, I want everyone to have a motive... There is something really ironic about life on how the thing that inspire the most are often the best but if you try to follow its footstep, you will realise that you can't. I really like Shangari-La Frontier to the point I want to write something similar to that but I absolutely don't have the skill to do so. You know, there is a saying when I was a child  'Aim for the moon, if you miss, you will be among the star' but how are you suppose to get up there to begin with.

This video resonated with me quite a bit. And that goes beyond me simply being really into The End is Nigh and into Edmund's work as a whole. I think you really GET the game. Hearing you talk about Edmund's interviews and QnAs, and how those made you respect and understand him on a deeper level is something I've also experienced. Same goes for the perfectionism in creative work, which you talk about. And for the whole experience of your playthrough being a serious struggle.

The End is Nigh was the first game made by Edmund which I really got into. That was back in 2017. I obsessively explored the game's world, read every NPC dialogue, collected every tumor and cartridge. It was great. Hard, exhausting. But satisfying. I struggled through every Future chapter and had to take a break between each one. Sometimes that break lasted a day, sometimes way longer. But I did it because I really wanted to see what the story was leading up to.

After beating the second ending and most of the cartridges, I got into TEiN modding. The community was a bit larger back then than it is now. And people were very passionate about the game's small modding scene. I made a lot of friends by participating in the collabs.

In 2021 I created The End is Nigh Remake, putting an excruciating amount of work into making the game feel as polished as it could possibly be. This year I released a full fan-made sequel. It's weird how important TEiN became to me and for how long I stuck with it.
And it's so nice to see people still talk about the game 8 years after its release. Thank you for this video.

this has been on my wishlist for years and i am yet to buy it, so ill take your word for it that i should buy it, play for an hour, and refund, and politely leave this comment and exit the room until ive done that

edit: ive played the game! i did acceptance, but not evermore cause i do not like deathless (yeah not technically deathless but with how little ive engaged with the carts it may as well be). speaking of carts, i got them all except for acceptance's and nevermore's, but ive played like two. so, excited to see what you have to say

Your content feels like a late night conversation with that one friend, where both of you can air out your problems in what ever may be. Deep down you wish you heard from them more, but you also know that the reason these conversations are so special is because you don’t know when the next one will be. All the while you two are playing some giga random Roblox game that you swear was fun but when you revisit it, there’s just something missing, and you realize the game was just a vector for your conversation something that took just enough weight off  the topics you talked about to make them seem like a non issue.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t think many people who watch more than 1 or 2 of your videos care what game you are playing, or even the leave it is played at. we come here for the humanity that your videos contain. The game play is a bonus.

I absolutely love your content and I look forward to the next upload. Also I really hope nothing I said here is taken the wrong way if you do read this message.

Crazy how different my experience was. I loved this game from the start and almost immediately the controls clicked for me.

They just felt so TIGHT, up there with Celeste. I knew exactly how long to hold a jump, speed up my fall and even how much coyote time I had to extend my jump. Compare that to SMB where even after the credits rolled I still felt like I was mostly flinging Meat Boy around until it worked.

Of course there were frustrating parts (Golgotha can die, screw the fishes and poison) but I never left a screen without picking up the tumor it had, and backtracked after getting the key to get all collectibles before interacting with the friend, so I never really ran out of lives in Future. Nevemore is a whole different story, but if you beat the cartridges you have a few more lives to beat it.

Still hate the cartridges, though, especially the compilation ones.

Turns out this is exactly the video I needed right now, thank you. I'm an web author releasing three chapters a week, every week, and have been doing that for a year at this point. I've hit a slump and have been desperately trying to keep up with my release schedule, only for that same stress I've been putting on myself to cause writers block. I guess I just need to give myself permission to slow down sometimes, to take a break and come back when I'm more prepared to handle things.

The whole game is incredible and i feel like the music adds so much going with remixed rock "classical" music was honesty such a good decision. You can feel the daunting road ahead with the first level and the hopefull gloomy mood of the arid flats as well as the horrifying hell that is golgatha and acceptance is super frantic my favorite track in general is retrograde it makes all your attempts feel like fail compilations but there is a beautiful hope in the song

I used to play this game every day on the bus to school when I was at one of the lowest points of my life. took me over a real world year to beat it, but with that said I genuinely credit it as a huge part of why I’m so (I don’t know, “successful” feels like the wrong tone here, n truth be told I’m not doing much better than anyone else. I guess I would just say “happy”) today. I’m the most accepting I’ve ever been while also being the most stubborn I’ve ever been. it was tein that taught me those two things can meaningfully coexist. I work (what has over time become) my dream job now, which only happened because I jumped ship from my original dream job when I realized it probably would’ve destroyed me as a person, which only happened! because I played fucked up playing nevermore when I was 16 n redid the entire thing all over again. I owe so so much to this game n I hope that edmund mcmillen knows that even if it bombed (ha. ha) there’s people out there whose lives are significantly tangibly better because of it

All of your videos are awesome dude, TEIN is a game I could never play, just from preference, but I was always loved the story behind it.
I know it's kinda silly, but that image where a dude makes a cake that's smaller and less fancy than another, but the other guy is just happy to have two cakes is a perfect encapsulation of how most people enjoy things. It doesn't matter if one video is better or worse than another, that one video is more relatable to your audience or not, as long as you care and try, the result will be something I and others will enjoy. Not everything has to be the best thing ever and realizing that is such a huge weight to drop. Not matter what the video is about, or how many times you do a specific thing or whatever, I'm just happy you brought us such passionate shit for me to watch. Knowing how much you care about basically everything you do is a lot of what I love to watch.
As you said, sometimes taking a break or dropping something you just can't do is fine, you can always come back with a fresher mind or new ideas.

anyway keep making stuff ur style is awesome

This is the type of video that always leaves me wanting to leave a comment, but every time I always feel like there's nothing I can actually say. Like there's nothing for me to add other than that it made me feel something I have difficulty expressing, or that there's no point in saying something so miniscule because there's already 1000 comments and it's not like anyone will see it anyway. But like you said, you just gotta do it sometimes. Make something that sucks or that not a lot of people see so that you can make something good later. It doesn't apply 1 to 1 to something silly like expressing that a video essay made you feel something in a youtube comment, but fuck it. Here I am.

I was here. I watched it. And even though I know I'll probably never play The End is Nigh, hearing about it and both you and McMillen's experiences with it made me feel something that's hard to express. Thank you for that. Makes me want to try and get back to writing soon.