Author: Smehur

Metal Hellsinger

This game has been an absolute delight. It’s a rhythm-based first-person shooter where you play a demon-like creature wrecking havoc though the circles of hell in search of her lost voice. The rhythm-based part means that you’re supposed to shoot (or otherwise hit) enemies, reload your weapons, jump and dash to the beat of the music. This is not only great fun, it’s also built into the mechanics. Following the rhythm helps build up the fury level, and two good things happen when it gets high: you deal more damage, and you get to hear more elements of the music arrangements.

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On Art and Writing

Feels like it’s been forever since I’ve written anything for this site. And not for a lack of ideas! I have a growing list of topics I’d like to talk about, including a long overdue review of The Abomination Vault (which will probably wait for me to re-read the book from my new POV of a year-old Darksiders fan), my thoughts on Darksiders III (which I only finished recently, after a playthrough that dragged out for months), and a series of posts with parts of my Darksiders verse that might never get explicit coverage in my stories. But I’m not doing any of that today, am I. I’m here to write about writing instead of actually writing — be it fiction or something from that list of planned posts — because I’ve hit something of a block, and it’s got a lot to do with my not-so-recent-anymore obsession with art.

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I now do traditional art too

🎨🖌️🖼️

After much hesitation, I decided to post some of my traditional artwork, which I started with last month. I mostly redraw random pretty photos from the web, in watercolor, more recently oil, and most recently acrylic.

Here are my first attempts at all three techniques!

My first watercolor
My first oil
My first acrylic

A pencil drawing of Death 💙

While not quite the illustration for, this was definitely inspired by a scene from Fury’s Embrace, the story I’m currently working on.  It’ll be the second of a series, following Death’s Blessing.

But then he found this cemetery and cleared every piece of angel, demon and undead filth in a one-mile radius around it, to be at peace while his creepy-ass ghouls dug a hole in the ground. Like for a coffin. He sat at the edge of that hole, staring in it, for a day and a night, as still as the headstones around him. I swear, if I didn’t interrupt him, he’d still be sitting there. Perhaps he’d eventually turn to stone.