Author: Trafficblast

There’s no better way to kick off spooky season in earnest than to settle in and binge watch one of Netflix’s scariest shows. The Haunting of Bly Manor is the next entry in the franchise that started with 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House and, while it may be an anthology series rather than a continuation of the Crain family’s story from the first season, it’s packed to the rafters with terrifying, heartbreaking moments–and some familiar faces in new roles to top it all off.

But, like Hill House, Bly Manor is anything but a straightforward ghost story. This year, the show adapts the short stories and novellas of Henry James, like Turn Of The Screw, The Jolly Corner, The Beast in the Jungle, and more. It puts a twist of its own on the gothic romance James was known for and turns it into a sweeping, interconnected story about love, loss, and grief through multiple characters. The question is, of course, what does it all mean?

Let’s break down the ending of the show to examine those little details you may have missed and, hopefully, help you assign some of your own meaning to the whole experience.

Obviously, we’re getting into major spoiler territory from here on out, so if you haven’t finished all nine episodes, proceed with caution.

Bly Manor is told by a narrator who starts the season by offering to tell a ghost story at a wedding party. The narrator, who remains unnamed until the final moments, is revealed to be Jamie, who was none other than the gardener at Bly during the show’s events. Of course, this narrative device also adds another layer of subjectivity onto the whole story. You can assign your own meaning to each part, and decide just how much metaphor she was using.

At the end of the show, we return to the wedding to see that Flora, Miles, Henry, and Owen have all grown older and found some level of happiness in their lives. Flora’s getting married, has completely lost her British accent, and has forgotten all about the traumatic events of her childhood. Neither Jamie nor Owen seems to have found new partners after theirs each passed away, but both seem to be coping with the loss–though we can see Jamie is still very much looking for Dani in everything she does. She leaves the tub and sink full hoping to catch her reflection, and her door cracked before she goes to sleep, hoping to let her in.

This is, of course, because Dani is now Bly’s new “lady in the lake,” a curse that was placed on her when she saved Flora’s life. This is where things start getting a little complicated.

Bly’s History

It turns out Bly Manor’s haunting is all the responsibility of one woman: Viola Lloyd (nee Willoughby), who was murdered by her own sister, Perdita, after struggling with a debilitating illness for years back in the 1800s. The real cause of Viola’s death was never uncovered and Perdita eventually married Viola’s widower and began raising her infant daughter.

It went down like this: Years after the tragedy, the family fell on hard times and looked for ways to settle their debts. Perdita suggested selling a trunk full of fine garments that Viola left under strict instructions that they should go to her daughter when she comes of age. Despite her husband’s refusal, Perdita decided to sell the dresses anyway, and snuck into the attic where they were kept. However, the act of unlocking the trunk inadvertently freed Viola’s angry ghost, which reached out from beyond the grave to strangle Perdita to death. Her husband found her corpse later and decided to move from the Manor with his daughter, but not before hurling the chest and all its contents into the lake on the property, believing it to be cursed.

This symbolic gesture condemned Viola’s ghost to a watery prison where she began repeating the same cycle over and over again, even as she faded from the memories of everyone who knew her. This creates a “gravity well” on the property that keeps the spirits of anyone who dies there trapped–a tally that Viola’s angry spirit occasionally raises. Anyone who is unlucky enough to step into her path as she walks the grounds meets a similar fate to Perdita–unless they’re a child. Viola’s ghost, unable to remember much of anything about herself and her life, is still able to recognize that she once had a child of her own and will take children in her path back with her to the lake to drown, rather than strangling them to death.

Over the years, Viola increased Bly’s population of ghosts, and now they lurk around the grounds repeating their own endless patterns as they’re eventually forgotten and left as faceless husks of their former selves.

There is a catch, however. The more recent ghosts–the ones who haven’t forgotten themselves yet–are able to possess and inhabit the bodies of living people. This process is temporary unless the living person willingly invites them in, which is what Dani did to lift the curse.

Surviving The Curse

Dani broke the curse by inviting Viola into her mind. Removing the curse allowed all of Bly’s trapped ghosts to move on, which included Hannah Grose, who died just moments before Dani arrived at the manor, pushed down an empty well by Miles, who was possessed by Peter Quint. Peter, too, was freed, saving Miles from a fate as his vessel, and so was Rebecca Jessel, who was intending on taking over Flora.

But Dani inviting her in didn’t actually free Viola, only “tucked her away” in Dani’s mind, which meant that after a handful of years spent with Jamie, it was eventually time to pay the proverbial piper. But, rather than allowing Viola to take her over, Dani laid her to rest by returning to Bly and drowning herself, effectively taking Viola’s place as the new “lady in the lake,” who would keep the pattern from ever starting back up again.

This left Jamie alone–or at least alone as far as she could tell. The final shot of the show is the older Jamie, asleep in her hotel chair before her open door, with Dani’s hand coming to rest on her shoulder–meaning that even though Jamie might not be able to see or feel Dani, her invitation worked and Dani remains with her.

Putting It All Together

It’s definitely tragic, but in the words of creator Mike Flanagan, it’s that moment that really drives home the theme of the entire show. In a roundtable interview with GameSpot he explained its importance. “That’s the thing for me, about a great love story. Even if you can’t see that person anymore, even if they’re gone–the idea that you’re looking for them puts them with you, whether you can feel it or not. That was the beginning and ending image that we really always wanted for this season.”

“For me,” Flanagan continued, “the whole season was always going to be about those couple of paragraphs Carla [Gugino] gives in the last episode, when you talk about ghosts and loss. In Season 1, we talked about the different things a ghost could be, we talked about a ghost being a wish the most. So [this season], that question of ‘I’ve found someone I love more than anyone else in the world, one of us has to die first–what happens to my life after they’re gone?’ That’s one of the most upsetting, uncomfortable, and haunting questions that I’ve ever wrestled with internally. I’ll never have a good answer to it. I’ll always be scared of the various answers to it. And it’s too uncomfortable to look at–but what else is horror? It’s the things we’re scared to look at. It took a whole season’s worth of work for us to arrive at and crystalize those last couple of paragraphs.”

The Haunting Of Bly Manor is available to watch now on Netflix.

Ahead of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla‘s release, I had the opportunity to check out how settlement building will work in the game. Though Ubisoft has described the establishment of a new home for Eivor’s people as a major motivation for the character, there’s been little shown about this aspect of Valhalla so far. I was a bit surprised to see just how much the settlement factors into Valhalla’s gameplay loop, serving as a place you’ll regularly visit and invest in throughout the campaign. It feels like an improvement to how home bases have worked in Assassin’s Creed in the past, largely for how it pulls you into Eivor’s life beyond their mission.

“It was really important when we designed [the settlement] that it felt exactly like when you come back home after a long journey away–you work in some other places, other regions, other countries, and you come back to your family and some element has changed,” explained David Bolle, level designer on the settlement feature.

In a video presentation, Bolle showed me how Eivor’s settlement evolves over the course of the game. Some of the changes are caused by you; for example, spending resources to build shops will, in turn, welcome settlers to set up camp in the area and join your community. Other times, the changes happen without you. For instance, you may return after a lengthy campaign mission only to find some traders have set up shop or that some of the people have elected to improve the architecture of certain structures and make the place feel more like a permanent residence for its people.

Unlike the home bases in other Assassin’s Creed games, Valhalla’s settlement is a permanent fixture in the campaign. You choose which campaign mission you want to tackle next from your war room and regularly return to the settlement after a mission is done to invest resources, talk to your allies, and pick up side-quests. You’ll also be returning to the settlement to improve Eivor’s loadout. Valhalla is the first Assassin’s Creed game to restrict blacksmiths, tailors, and most other vendors to your settlement. As a Viking, Eivor is unwelcome in most of the territories they visit, so they’ll have to regularly return home to do things that other Assassin’s Creed protagonists could do at pretty much any of the cities they visited.

There’s plenty of reason to return to the settlement beyond upgrading Eivor, as well. One of the allies who joins your group is Hytham, a Hidden One (the group that will one day become the Assassin Brotherhood). He’ll ask you to help him build a Hidden One Bureau as part of the settlement, reestablishing the group in England. Through this bureau, you learn about the Order of Ancients (the group that will one day become the Templar Order). Much like the Cult of Kosmos in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, you can hunt down the members of the Order, revealing clues to the whereabouts and identities of its leaders. Killing them allows you to take their medallions, which you can turn in to Hytham for rewards and new tidbits of lore. “[Hytham] will teach you some key elements of the Assassin lore and some abilities too,” Bolle said. “And by cashing in medallions to him, he will teach you more stuff related to the Assassins and skills, and even give you some weapons.”

Although I didn’t get the chance to check out every single structure that you can build in the game, quite a few caught my eye. There’s the seer’s house (where you can speak to a woman who cryptically talks about allowing you to relive the life of Odin), the stables (where you can customize your horse and raven companions and also teach your horse new skills, like swimming), a museum (where you can store Roman artifacts you happen upon in your travels), and quite a few more. As you build Eivor’s renown–either through the construction of new buildings or completing specific quests–the settlement will level up. With each level, the settlement grows in size, and new types of services are added for you to invest in.

To encourage players that the settlement is worth investing in, the place is designed to feel like there is a life to it. “In the settlement, everybody’s unique, they all have their name, their house, their job,” Bolle said. “So when you go to the house of someone, you will see them working there and doing their thing, but you can also [see] them talking to each other in the middle of the settlement and stuff. They all have their own agendas. And they are also parts of main quests tied to the settlement.”

And as you get to know the people who you’re making a home with, romance may bloom. “Some of those characters will offer romances, and even a relationship,” Dolle said. “So you could go on a date with them and decide to be in a relationship with them. And that, without spoiling too much, might lead you into trouble sometimes–be careful who you choose to be with.”

I wasn’t able to see how a possible relationship could end badly or get you into trouble, but I have somewhat of an idea after seeing the last core gameplay aspect of the settlement: passing judgement. In a scene that played out almost shot-for-shot like Dragon Age: Inquisition‘s Sit in Judgement side-quests, I saw Eivor drawn into being the final say on a dispute between two members of the settlement. It was a minor argument–one that seemed more played for laughs than anything else–but I can see how this system could come back to bite you on more substantial disagreements or settlement-changing arguments, especially if someone your Eivor is in love with is one of the parties involved.

“Without going into much detail, because that would actually spoil the story, some [decisions] are just tiny impacts in the world, really tiny,” Dolle said. “Some have a deep impact in your relationship with some characters. I can’t say more, but yeah, sometimes [a decision] is just there to have something to evolve, to see a character evolve. And sometimes, it’s much deeper.” I did happen to notice that you can build a cemetery for your settlement, so I imagine some of your choices might end with a character’s death. Additionally, in the preview I saw, not everyone is on board with Eivor being the de facto leader and having final say on all decisions in their brother’s absence–I’m curious to see whether Valhalla builds on that and asks you to make difficult choices where you have to weigh the peace of the community against maintaining a friend or lover’s trust. Choices like that would be new territory for Assassin’s Creed.

At the very least, I’m intrigued to see how the settlement might impact how Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s story is told. Pretty much every Assassin’s Creed game has had a home base–and a few have allowed you to upgrade and improve them–but they’ve never been designed as mandatory parts of the story. The stories in previous Assassin’s Creed titles are all designed as lines in which you steadily travel from one place to the next, only really returning to the home base for specific cutscenes or optional quests. Valhalla’s story sounds more like a loop than a twisting line–you’re regularly returning to your settlement and helping it grow before setting out again. Eivor isn’t some solo act on their own quest. In Valhalla, you’re an active member of a group of people.

With this set-up, Valhalla seems ideally primed to get at the heart of what an Assassin is supposed to be. They’re not supposed to just be killers of tyrants (though, that is a major part of the job description), they’re also very aggressive proponents of social justice and personal freedom who invest resources into the people that they protect. It could be pretty cool to see if Valhalla’s story is where that aspect of the Assassin Brotherhood is born. And if this new gameplay loop works out and is well-received, I could see it being iterated on in future sequels (similarly to what happened with naval combat) because of how much it feels right for an Assassin’s Creed game.

We’ll find out just how well this settlement system works out when Assassin’s Creed Valhalla launches for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, and Google Stadia on November 10, before also releasing for PlayStation 5 on November 12.

The upcoming Monster Hunter movie divided fans when its first trailer focused on a group of US Army soldiers, showing more machine guns than giant swords. However, in a new interview with Polygon, director Paul W.S. Anderson talks about being a long-time fan of the game, and promises his film will do it justice.

“I’ve long been a fan of the video game. I discovered it in Japan 12 years ago when it was pretty much a Japanese-only phenomena, before the rest of the world discovered what Monster Hunter was,” Anderson explained. “I started talking to Capcom 10 years ago about adapting it into a movie. This really is a long-term passion project of mine and I’m approaching it not just as a filmmaker but also as a kind of long-term player and fan of it.”

Anderson has worked extensively with Capcom in the past, as the director of six Resident Evil movies. He also directed the 1995 Mortal Kombat film–with Monster Hunter, this past experience allowed him to get ahead of the game.

Anderson says that the success of Monster Hunter World sent much of Hollywood scrambling to secure rights to a Monster Hunter film–only to find that he had done it years back. “Every Hollywood studio in the world was chasing Monster Hunter because suddenly they’re like, ‘Oh, big sales! Lets go grab it!'” he said. “And they were all very disappointed to discover that I already had the rights to it.”

People who are concerned about whether the movie will feel more like Monster Hunter than the clips we’ve seen so far can rest assured that the team behind the game at Capcom have had plenty of input on the film. “We talked through the script and what that would contain, what creatures would be in the movie, which landscapes would be in the movie,” Anderson explained. “When we were designing the costumes, we’d send photographs of all of the costumes to Japan and they’d say ‘Well, you know, the, the hunter’s collar should be little smaller.’ ‘You know, the Admirals axe could be a bit bigger.’

He confirmed that both Ron Perlman and Tony Jaa’s characters will wield suitably giant weapons–Perlman an axe and Jaa a greatsword and bow–while Milla Jovovich’s character will have dual blades that the actress favors using in the game. Anderson also mentioned that the movie would feature the Palico character Meowscular Chef, who first appeared in Monster Hunter: World.

Anderson also explained why he inserted characters from the modern world, rather than just sticking to the Monster Hunter universe. “Milla is the avatar for the audience. She’s the newbie going into this world,” he explained. “She’s the person from our world that knows nothing about the Monster Hunter world that’s going in for the first time. And what’s nice for the game players about that is it kind of recreates your first experience when you first played Monster Hunter.”

After a number of delays, Monster Hunter’s release date has been moved foward into 2020. It’ll be coming to cinemas on December 30 this year.

Monster Hunter fans who aren’t sure about the movie still have plenty to look forward to in the franchise, with both Monster Hunter Rise and Monster Hunter Stories 2 planned to release on the Nintendo Switch in 2021.

Disney’s live action Mulan remake caused controversy, both in China and around the world, when fans discovered notes in the film’s credits thanking several government entities that have been linked to the cultural genocide of the Uighur Muslim population. Now, the company has defended the decision, calling it part of a “standard practice across the film industry worldwide,” Variety reports.

Parts of Disney’s new Mulan film were filmed in the region of Xinjiang, where internment camps have been located since at least 2017. A new statement from Disney has downplayed the extent of filming done in the region, as well as palming off responsibility for acknowledgements made in the films credits–including thanks to the Turpan Bureau of Public Security, which has been sanctioned by the US Bureau of Industry and Security for “human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups.”

The statement by Disney’s Sean Bailey was sent to British politician Iain Duncan Smith–who was not all that impressed by the response.

In short, the letter downplays the filming that was done in the Xinjiang region, saying that only four days of shooting was done there, comprising just 78 seconds of the finished film. The letter also passes responsibility for the film’s controversial credits to Beijing Shadow Times, the Chinese production company Disney partnered with for its shoots in China. “The production company Beijing Shadow Times provided our production team with the list of acknowledgements to be included in the credits for Mulan,” the statement reads.

Despite its clear attempts to keep everyone happy, Disney has struggled to have its cake and eat it too with Mulan. The film hasn’t been as successful in China as Disney might have expected, with China declaring a media blackout around the film in response to the controversy.

While Disney hasn’t released numbers for purchases made through Disney Plus, the film has seen a generally lukewarm reception from critics.

Tenet’s run at the top of the US box office, where it has sat for six weeks almost unopposed, has ended. The film to finally topple Christopher Nolan’s palindromic action spectacle is War with Grandpa, which earned $3.6 million in the US during its opening weekend.

Deadline is reporting that War with Grandpa has overtaken Tenet this weekend, and that 90% of cinema-goers were satisfied that they’d had a safe experience. The film, which is unrelated to DeNiro’s earlier grandpa movie Dirty Grandpa, sees a grandfather (DeNiro) and his grandson (Oakes Fegley) break into an escalating prank war after the old man moves in with his daughter (Uma Thurman) and her family. It also stars Rob Riggle, Cheech Marin, Jane Seymour, and Christopher Walken.

Tenet earned $2.1 million, meaning that the box office take of the weekend was still, on the whole, extremely low–and that War with Grandpa opened well below Tenet’s $20.2 million opening. Tenet has enjoyed six weeks at number 1, earning $48.3 million at the domestic box office so far. The film’s drop off means that it has been viewed as a disappointment; if it had performed better, we might not have seen movies like Dune, No Time To Die, and Black Widow get delayed into 2021.

There’s really no precedent outside of COVID-19 pandemic times to compare these numbers to. Tenet’s numbers have been viewed as disappointing, but internationally it’s done better, bringing it a total of $323 million worldwide. This makes it the third highest-grossing film of the year. For the first time ever, the year’s highest grossing film is not an English-language picture–the Chinese film The Eight Hundred has earned over $441 million.

Here’s the US box office top 5 for the weekend, via Box Office Mojo.

US Box Office, October 9-11, 2020

1. War with Grandpa ($3.6 million)
2. Tenet ($2.1 million)
3. Hocus Pocus ($1.2 million)
4. The New Mutants ($685k)
5. Unhinged ($660k)

While there aren’t too many new games being released for the PS4 as we move closer to the PS5 release, Sony’s most downloaded games of September show some old favorites going strong. Although Rocket League only switched to a free-to-play model on September 23, it quickly rocketed to number one for the month.

As far as paid downloads, NBA 2K21 dominated the US PlayStation Store in September, joined by Marvel’s Avengers, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, Madden 21, and Fall Guys. You can also check out the stats for the EU market here, which are slightly different.

However the free-to-play ranking is where it gets interesting–Rocket League sits at the top of the list, over newcomers Spellbreak and Genshin Impact, after only one week of being free. With Rocket League’s Endo Starter Pack sitting in the top ten DLC purchases for the week, it looks like going free-to-play may have paid off for the quirky sports game.

In PS VR games, Vader Immortal was going strong for its first full month of release, after coming out on PlayStation on August 25. The Star Wars VR game occupied the top spot, followed by the Star Wars-inspired rhythm game Beat Saber.

With the PS5 launching on November 12 it’s an awkward period for new releases–with new games like NBA 2K21 also coming to next-gen consoles. Some games, like Cyberpunk 2077, are offering a free upgrade to next gen for players who purchase the game on the PS4 or Xbox One.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

Microsoft has partnered with one of the biggest food companies on the planet for a new campaign focused on Halo Infinite. If you’ve been to a grocery store recently, you might have noticed an assortment of Halo-branded sweet snacks, and this is the result of a new deal between Microsoft and Mondelez, the company that owns brands like Oreo, Cadbury, Sour Patch Kids, Nutter Butter, and more.

Packs of Mondelez snacks with Master Chief on the box will come with codes to unlock special content for Halo Infinite, like the Monarch multiplayer armor for Halo Infinite. In Canada, this promotion is called Snack On With Xbox and in the US it’s called Level Up Your Game.

The fine print of the promo states that the Halo Infinite DLC included with the snacks will be available as a timed-exclusive for three months following the game’s release date in 2021. These promos are rolling out now presumably because the deal was in place before Halo Infinite’s delay to 2021.

Microsoft also said in its blog post that this campaign with Mondelez is just one of many for Halo Infinite. The company will release a follow-up blog post collecting all of these in the time ahead.

Halo Infinite was originally expected to release as a launch title for the Xbox Series X/S, but it was delayed to 2021 due in part to complications related to COVID-19. The game is also coming to Xbox One and PC, and it will feature a lot of explosion sounds.

Now Playing: Halo Infinite – Everything You Need To Know

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.