Viewers Vote Runie Ruse’s Homemade Horror RPG to an Ending With Every Named Character Alive

PHASE CONNECT — Runie Ruse closed out her October run of streams on Halloween with a survival horror game she built herself, and her viewers steered it to an ending in which every named character survived. The Phase Connect streamer ran “Potato Daughter Raising (Part Four)” in RPG Maker, playing for nearly five hours while chat voted on where to go, whom to bring along and when to heal.

The game joined two of her formats. The first is her evil potato raising series, in which viewers raised a sentient potato named Drew Drop as her father. The second is the interactive horror stream she debuted last year, Escape Raccoon City. Runie said that one turned out too easy, so she set out to make this year’s harder, and chose RPG Maker so the computer would roll the dice and track health. In battle a roll of one meant a counterattack, a two or three a miss, a four or five a hit and a six a special move. Drew Drop could take a bite in place of friends who would otherwise be infected.

“I’m telling you, next time I do this, I really am going to make it hard.” — Runie Ruse, after the finale

The story put Drew Drop in a school dormitory during a weekend lockdown, with classmates turned into plant zombies by mutated moon vines spreading from a mass she called the Mother Flower. Chat picked the routes, solved a color-coded puzzle, cracked an eight-digit door code and worked out a four-armed statue riddle. Runie said a hidden item that unlocked a party member would have stayed hidden unless a viewer had joked about pressing the interact button on everything in a room. Viewers then collected the ingredients for a herbicide potion that would have destroyed the Mother Flower along with most plant life on campus. In a close vote they chose not to make it. Runie said the choice would carry into future installments.

The finale revealed that Sister Seline, a faculty member, had caused the outbreak and was using Drew Drop’s friend Diana as a source of holy magic. After a glitch in the Mother Flower fight, Runie used a fail-safe she called “I am God” to end the battle and free Diana. The party then defeated Seline with a rail gun and critical hits, and everyone got out before the school’s self-destruct system went off. Runie said she had changed the ending that day so that Seline was killed rather than captured.

Runie said afterward that she had again made the game too easy. “I think I’m always so afraid of making it too hard that then I just still by accident make it too easy,” she said, and she read out lines she had written for characters who never died. The chat included 84 Super Chats and stickers, and viewers called for a nerf to Barenise, the chainsaw-wielding party member. Runie said she would post her schedule for the week the next day, and that Halloween-themed events delayed from October would come next month.