Everything Sucks And I Love It Here

You made it! Welcome to the first ESAILIH (Eh-Sail-E) a new newsletter by me, Saturn. The big question at the top - what the freak is ESAILIH? Easy answer, it's a place for me to think about the media I'm consuming and how it ties into the larger world around us. I'm sure I will worm other thoughts in here too but the focus is games and media. I came up with the name mid 2024 and have just been sitting around on it, trying to figure out it's identity, while my own life kept moving forward. Well, turns out life keeps moving in that direction all the time so the name - the idea, wasn't doing anything but stagnating. Now we're almost into mid 2025 and.... uh-oh. So, here we are, ESAILIH hits the ones and zeroes of digital print and I get to think real hard about all the stuff I love. Not that I'm not thinking about it all the time, it's just with "gestures to everything going on in the world" it can feel a little silly wanting to cover media of all things.

Which brings me to paragraph two. You like humor folks, because this writing is gonna be goofy as fuck. Sorry, that's not the point of paragraph two. The point is I've covered media before and that first time still feels like I accidently fell into the pool, not so much dove in back in 2016. I wasn't in the games media space long, only a few years, but being in it was one of the first moments of 'holy shit this is something I'm supposed to be doing.' Now flash forward years later and I know my relationship to both games and other media I love has changed drastically. And I would hope so. My world views have changed. My outlook on life has changed. I have changed. All quite dramatically. Which is where the sticky feelings of should I even be covering this stuff anymore come up. And then I look around at what has happened to games media, the thing I love, the people I respect, the people I admire that got me to start writing in the first place even if they don't know it. It's a wasteland of bodies. And here I've been playing dead waiting for it to be over so I can just move on, but I can't. A lot of us can't. Every single person I see putting the time and energy into this, is doing it because they fucking love this stuff. Media coverage is important, it doesn't need to be world changing. How we talk about and engage with art is important. Engaging with media might help us move through our day, or can put our minds at ease, or just think about things from a slightly different outlook. And that's the relationship I'm hoping to reexplore with ESAILIH.

Before I go any further with ESAILIH, I want to speak to the crowd that might not know much about the games industry or the games media space. While it is easy to look around any field and see the ruin that the current administration and politics of the world at large are having on peoples lives. The games space is particularly brutal. The games media space is all but dead. Hence this newsletter. In the last few weeks two big things happened in games media. Polygon one of the most respected sites in games coverage was sold to Valnet and immediately laid off the entire staff including the person who started Polygon. Then in the same hour GiantBomb, (a site you have to thank for leading the way in video coverage and internet trends) seemingly imploded only to be bought by the very people that were getting fucked, the next week. It has been a wildly emotional ride that myself and many others are still spinning from. These two events come after years of watching quality writers, editors, entire websites of people who just love covering games get thrown to the trash time and time again. Games media, the one I came to back in the mid twenty-teens is dead and was already dying when I entered the space.

Out of it though a new landscape has emerged, as it always does. In place of major sites housing talent, many have gone independent and while they might not have the funding of a larger corporate site, at least their is a home for folks looking to discuss media and how it relates to the world around them. ESAILIH is going to be one more light on the block welcoming anyone to come in and see what's being talked about. As for what I'll cover here. It really will be whatever the heck I feel like. There are truly no rules anymore, if there were ever. *Note to you the reader; give it like two paragraphs and I'll be talking The Outlast Trials.* I've so rigidly thought I need to stick to how things ought to be done to get the places I want. That I never realized that the way I've gotten to those places before is to do exactly what's happening here. Write however you want. Pursue what impassions you. Just do what makes you happy. Something I've heard time and again in my life and finally seem to actually be listening too. I'm pursing many other things besides getting back to games and media coverage. What I hope for and know is that all of these things can co-exist because they all exist within me. I will save certain aspects for other post because I don't want to veer too off topic like I know my ADHD wants me too, but just know and always remember we are multifaceted creatures who are never just one or two things.

Fine, I'll talk about The Outlast Trials now. We haven't actually talked a single game but lets wrap it all around. The Outlast series is known for its first person horror where you the protagonist don't have a weapon like you might in other horror games, but must instead rely on the environment to progress through the deluge of horrors the games throw at you. While the first two games were self contained single player stories. The Outlast Trials is a co-op multiplayer game having followed the style of many online games introducing seasons, giving the players a progressive story with new content through the year. The Outlast Trials is currently in Season 3 titled Relapse. You are a Reagent one of many who have voluntarily signed up to be part of The Murkoff Corporations Trials. This is where Outlast gets fun and I really will try and stay on track. Murkoff has been the main antagonist of the Outlast series since the first game. The Outlast Trials takes place in 1959 before the events of the first two games. Murkoff is the corporation with their hands deep in some truly horrific stuff. Housing the Reagents in a secret underground facility name Sinyala where they conduct ghastly experiments on the Reagents themselves aside from the Trials. Being able to see Murkoff from the inside, operating openly on the table is delicious. And what was already a great horror series has been made even better with how consistently Red Barrel, Outlast developer, is knocking it out of the park with each story/season update.

As a Reagent your days are spent sleeping and waking. Sleeping and waking. Sleeping and waking. Only to be thrown into fresh horrors every time you open your eyes. Sound familiar? Gestures again to the world around us. There's not much you can do as a Reagent (lots of chess) when you wake up in the comfort of your Sleep Room. The Sinyala Facility your home away from home, honestly reminds me of the hallways of my high school. One of the many jokes among students at my high school is that it was designed after a prison. Well that's sort of right. My high school wasn't designed after a prison but it was designed by a prison architect. Picture this; four main wings "halls" two levels all concrete and a big ass courtyard with the cafeteria and gymnasium on the other side. It was the most prison school ever. This is what the Sinyala facility captures or at least as much as you can see of the facility. The stuffiness of concrete hallways. The stale air that only matches the temperature outside and can't actually be adjusted to a comfortable level. The dead sound that seems to hang in the air, echoing of nothing. And through it all the only thing to do is the Trials.

This is what I keep coming back to. The Trials. Both literally and figuratively. As a horror fan I already use horror as a way to put scary things in front of me. I like that feeling of dread hitting a core part of me that makes me both curl up and question why the fuck is this thing scary? I know that's the very surface level of that answer but again I don't want to go to deep in one direction or this news letter is going be drawn out. The Outlast Trials captures a specific type of horror for me. One I do understand more fully and can turn over in my head to point at a thing in my life and say; yeah, that thing, that's what this represents to me and helps me process. In this moment The Outlast Trials has been making me question two things. One; what the fuck have I actually been doing to pursue my aspirations? Two; The games industry is a pile of corpses.

One of the main things you'll hear time and again from Dr. Easterman the head of Sinyala is how much he knows you don't want to leave the Trials. He says a number of other horrible things to you voice always crackling through bad wiring and tin speakers. It's when he talks about not leaving that I do perk up a little. Dr. Easterman's reminder to me hits that part of me that knows what I should be doing. The part that is confident in it's decision making to push forward through whatever horrors or woes life might throw at me. And I've been through a lot. I had a friend earlier this year comfort me in the fact that they had never met a person (me) who they've seen life throw constant challenge after challenge at and somehow always pick themselves up. It was an immensely proud moment for myself and made me reflect on the type of person I am. Who I want to continue being and become an even better version of.

Up until Season 3 of The Outlast Trials there was an option available to your Regent for a final Trial called Rebirth. It has you assuming a new personal and public identity belonging to Murkoff, having destroyed your own personal and public identity in the tutorial Trial. Now I've been through so many rebirths it does feel appropriate to relapse (side note: I have been sober from alcohol for just over two years now I understand the weight of what I'm talking about knowing my own struggles with alcohol.) I'm going back to something that has always been true in me loving to think about media and knowing how much play means to me. I don't need to be reborn anymore or discover who I am because these parts of me have always been there either having been put away and neglected or waiting to be fully uncovered.

Bringing us back to the games industry and its pile of corpses. It is industry and it chews through people like they are bodies and nothing more. Obviously, these people go on with their lives. Its the horrific nature in which we, those of us who fucking love games, love media and love writing about and covering this stuff get thrown to the Trials and decimated in the process. I'm limping into the exit half bloody and looking around to see who else is with me as we move on to the next Trial. Who is going to get thrown to the grinder this time? Before Season 3 started there was one special mission Season 2 had been building to called Escape. With the help of a woman named Amelia we were finally able to break free from Murkoff on our own terms. It was a truly well executed level where players saw themselves making their way through the disposal are of Sinyala which has been left to rot a corpse eater hiding among the bodies. This is when I knew I wanted to start this newsletter and writing about games again fully. I was looking around at the absolute ruin that is the disposal area littered with truly hundreds of rotting corpses not shown a single once of respect or decency by the very institution that took them in. And its knowing that these institutions these corporate overlords always see us as meat to be ground and nothing more. What experiments can we get out of them what can we learn? Number go up.

I'm here to stay. I'm here for the trials. I'm here to talk loudly about the things I love. Even if Dr. Easterman controls the board he doesn't control me or us. It's why there is a constant underlying panic in his voice whenever he gets angry. Or a sadness whenever he tries to comfort you. He will never be anything but a small man behind a voice box shouting loudly for the things he wants but never being heard. I really don't pay attention to what he says too much and I think Red Barrel almost designed it that way on purpose. Like here's a big man of importance who doesn't actually have a lot to say. But those of us participating choosing to say "we ball" there's no control over us. We are playing the game by our own terms and we are better for it. We are running the mad-house and we stole the keys.

See you next week for who knows what! Have a stellar weekend.

-Saturn