Let’s Talk About Salt

Looks like it’s time for another late night blog post everybody. Let’s talk about something random again today. This time let’s talk about one of the most common things that can happen when playing a videogame and that is salt. Obviously I am not talking about sodium chloride here, but that feeling you get in the back of your head that says if something happens one more time to cause you an unnecessary death, then you will throw your controller at the wall. You see getting salty is one of those emotions that I think is important to playing a game. The reason being that at its core, gaming is quite an emotional experience and for some the most important thing about the activity is being able to use it as a stress reliever instead of an actual punching bag. Let’s face it, I’m not about to go to the gym every time I am feeling stressed about something. There are other outlets at my disposal so why not use them? I would only be doing a disservice to myself if I didn’t find way to cope with it. Not to say that I personally feel any stress of any kind okay? Anyway, the reason why the ability to get salty is important to me is because it indicates a certain level of passion for the game. You cannot feel salty about a game that you didn’t have any expectations for in the first place. Sometimes games use a little bit of RNG to make you question every single decision you ever made. Let me give you an example.

Now for those of you who have been following this blog, first off I would like to say thank you. I am not really very good at expressing myself, but do know I appreciate that people are reading these things. Anyway, those people may know that I have enjoyed to a certain degree playing The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and the corresponding DLC that was released for it. I don’t know if I could consider it my favorite game, but it is definitely one of the ones that I have played the most. I am currently encroaching on 1000 hours of playtime right now so….. yeah. Even with all of that time, I still haven’t completely finished it yet and that has honestly been how I have spent most of my videogame time for the past few months. Those past few months were filled with a lot of deaths to be honest. Don’t ask me how many because I lost count. I will say that the number of times I died as Tainted Lost is well into the hundreds though. that isn’t to say I haven’t made any progress. I am slowly but steadily clearing each completion mark with each character. Also, before you ask let me say that I did finish Tainted Lost. I’m committed, what can I say? Anyway you are probably wondering how salt come into play here. It comes up a lot actually, especially considering how good I am at choking away good runs. However, that is usually do to my own skill so I can only be a little upset for a while. It happens. What I can’t forgive is what happened earlier today.

I was trying to go for a particular possible in the came that requires you to go through an alternate route to reach it. You need two particular items to combine to have access to this boss. Now I had a pretty decent start to the run and was able to safely make my way to the area where the second piece was kept. I managed to grab it and was running away from the thing that chases me down during the sequence. As I was running, a trap door opened in the ground and to my surprise, the door wasn’t locked. I thought that I might as well check it out, so I went down to see what I could find. Turns out that was a big mistake. You see, the game spawned a key in that room that I needed to clear it, but once I left the room by going into the crawlspace hatch, it no longer felt the need to spawn a key for me to progress and it also deleted the one I had for the puzzle. Not ideal. I tried to bomb the rocks to maybe find away across, but to no avail. That meant I was stuck and doomed to die. Now unfortunately, there was no way out of this one unless I had an extra life. I did not. I lost a perfectly good run because I accidentally softlocked the game so I couldn’t progress. I just had to stand tend and suffer torment until the moment I died. I can usually chock up my deaths to bad luck or me being dumb but this felt so unfair. Never have I felt so cheated before. In fact I was so salty that I came up with this entire blog post just to vent about this single instance. Had I been in the right mindset, I would have taken a screenshot, but as I was upset at the time it sort of slipped my mind. Oh well I guess. This won’t stop me from playing, especially when I am so close to success, but my goodness was that annoying. Thanks for listening. Take care now.