Secret Blogger Santa – Happy Holidays, Quietschisto!

Today is Christmas, a holiday all about sharing gifts as a gesture of affection to our friends, family, or total strangers. In the spirit of all three of those things, Ellen at Livid Lightning and Kim at Later Levels have worked together to bring us a fantastic blogging event all about secretly shouting-out the others in our community. Of course, it’s not so secret today that the recipient of my gift is a game blogger on the website RNG by the name of Quietschisto!

RNG stands for Reviews, Narrative, Game Design and that’s the perfect title for a website whose primary focus is those very things. Quietschisto’s bread and butter is the spoiler-free review, sometimes accompanied by a segment cleverly called NG+ where a greater focus on narrative or game design. Taking a look at the review policy (which is clearly and obviously displayed on the website for convenient access) reveals that Quietschisto goes hard when it comes to reviews. Not only are the reviews on RNG spoiler-free, but most games have been completed 100% – main story, side quests, collectibles, all the good stuff. This shows that the blogger has experienced everything that a game has to offer before offering his own thoughts on the title.

One of my favorite reviews that I read on RNG was the one for Return of the Obra Dinn. This is a game that I’ve been vaguely interested in but had not played, giving me the opportunity to fully appreciate the spoiler-free aspect of the review. In a game where the main focus is the narrative, Quietschisto manages to dance around anything not revealed in the game’s marketing to instead convey how the game mechanics convey the narrative in a way that is compelling. His description of how the gameplay works and how it challenges the player increased my interest in Obra Dinn while also leaving a lot of things to discover.

RNG discusses video games in more ways than just reviews. One insightful article I enjoyed was done as part of a 30-day video game soundtrack challenge, and it focused on the soundtrack in Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow. Quietschisto may not be much of a Pokemon fan now, but the soundtrack of the original games resonated with him and he describes skillfully how the music compliments and builds the narrative from route to route as you progress through the game. Another article I enjoyed was his piece on gaming pet peeves, which included many of my own pet peeves such as the issue of calling people “real gamers” as well as having a bad guy defeat you in a cut scene after you defeated them in gameplay.

Now for those who enjoy posts that go a little bit off topic, RNG features some articles that address Quietschisto’s love of food and drink. For example, he has a goal of eating at least one meal in every country in the world, and to start things off he focused on his own home country of Austria. It was neat learning about the staples of Austrian cuisine and learning how their meals are typically composed, as it’s a bit different from my experience here in the States. Another segment on RNG focuses on creating real-life versions of video game drinks, and the first drink to be highlighted was the grog from Monkey Island. I am not an alcohol drinker but I loved seeing the thought process behind each ingredient in the drink as well as the ways in which the more impossible ingredients were replaced with something that would capture the same feeling.

Now that you know a little something about Quietschisto, let’s talk about the gift I chose for him. I took inspiration from this article which tells the story of the origin of his screen name. Quietschisto is a play on words of sorts, a combination of the German word for “rubber ducky” and the character Mephisto in the play Faust. Apparently Quietschisto has been for some time an avid collector of rubber duckies and was known as “rubber ducky” (but in German) for a long time. I won’t spoil the hilarious incident that ultimately resulted in the new nickname, but suffice it to say that by the end of the article I knew a video game rubber ducky had to be the present of choice for RNG.

One video game series in particular heavily features rubber duckies as a recurring item: Hitman. The duckies are used in various ways throughout the series, but the one I felt was most appropriate given the personality of RNG’s principle blogger is the Rubber Duck Explosive. In Hitman these explosives are useful because they do not at first glance appear to be bombs, so they can be concealed on your character when they are searched without worry. They can also be placed on another person to be detonated remotely without that person becoming immediately suspicious. This seems like the perfect school for our ducky devil to pull off some Christmas chaos, and so that will be my present to Quietschisto for Secret Blogger Santa!

I definitely encourage you to check out RNG for yourself and to explore the large number of reviews and NG+ articles which are available there. Once again I want to extend thanks to Ellen and Kim for organizing this event, and although at the time of writing I don’t yet know who will be writing about me, I want to thank that person for the no-doubt lovely words they chose to share about Adventure Rules. Happy holidays to everyone reading and I hope you enjoy your Christmas and the rest of your year!