With the mixed reception, failure to meet financial expectations, and eventual abandonment of Anthem, BioWare became yet another victim of EA's money-driven decisions hollowing out the spirit of the company, and the disappointing release of Mass Effect: Andromeda just two years earlier made this blow hit just that much harder. Before all of this happened, though, their legacy as a studio responsible for continuously making innovative and gripping RPGs was virtually untainted, and since Mass Effect is probably their most popular original IP, I wanted to have the first game in the series serve as my intro to their games. Although I have been quite busy over the past month and had to devote most of my time to other things, my actual playthrough of Mass Effect only took roughly 12 hours, and while not every element of this game clicked with me, I still liked enough of its elements to say that I've enjoyed my time with it overall.

When it comes to these kinds of space opera games, I often find their core stories more interesting than their backstories and other bits of extra information, but I was surprised to find that this wasn't the case here. Don't get me wrong, the plot of Mass Effect had me invested right from the outset, but I found the game's lore to be genuinely fascinating, and I ended up having a lot more fun reading about the different races, wars, planets, politics, and technology that surrounded Commander Shepard's attempts at stopping the reawakening of the Reapers than I thought I would, and they also complimented the sleek art direction and awesome synth score. The varied cast of characters in Mass Effect also helped sell this game's world to me, because even with the stiff, robotic animations and use of real-time cutscenes where textures only render about half the time, the game's solid writing and especially great voice acting made each member of my crew feel three-dimensional. Despite the binary morality system at play here where you can only really choose to be either explicitly good or explicitly bad, the more major decisions you make throughout Mass Effect are able to transcend that entirely, as they heavily affect the outcome of the story while also having enough layers to them to make choosing the best option a much more complicated process than it initially seems.

In terms of its writing, presentation, and role-playing elements, Mass Effect was really strong, but what held it back for me was its actual gameplay. The game's combat is definitely playable, but it shows its age in almost every way, with the imbalanced weapons, clunky menus for using your abilities, and a barely functioning cover system made each shootout feel less like a game of tactical decision-making and more like randomly firing at whatever's in front of you and hoping that you don't get killed in the process. Speaking of which, the squad-based elements of Mass Effect didn't work at all for me, as the limited commands and genuinely awful AI from my squad mates just ended up making me use them as distractions or human shields more than anything. The worst element of Mass Effect would easily be the Mako, with its unreliable controls and the repetitive enemies and layouts for its sequences made using it feel like a chore during the campaign and a complete waste of time whenever it came to the already forgettable side content. Despite its flaws, I still enjoyed my time with Mass Effect overall, and while I do plan on completing the trilogy at some point, I'm pretty sure that my next BioWare game will be Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

I found myself actively paying attention to it, during both gameplay and story, so it's better than Diablo 3 all across the board.

It was fun over a free weekend trial. But I'm not buying a $70 premium currency storefront that wants me to treat it like a 2nd job / smack habit.

People are still playing the latest giant-ass tentpole fantasy titles by the likes of Larian and FromSoft; not because they're built around marketing-driven habit-forming FOMO hooks, but because they're cool games that are fun to play.

Maybe the real horror was the predatory practices that watered down the media experience along the way.

(Advertencia: el juego trata temas relacionados con la depresión y pensamientos suicidas)

En The Longing, la espera se convierte en la mecánica principal con la que te ves forzade a entender el mundo. Lo que años atrás criticaría Arin Hanson en su ahora olvidada reseña de Ocarina of Time como un accidente de diseño, aquí se explota y mezcla para crear una experiencia en la que las fuerzas de la soledad, la curiosidad y el aburrimiento juegan un equilibrio muy delicado entre ellas. A veces The Longing cae en el peligroso abismo de hacerte sentir que realmente estás perdiendo tu tiempo, que te valdría más la pena hacer trampas o jugar a algo que te dejase hacer más cosas más deprisa. Pero la oportuna salida de esta obra en tiempos de la pandemia debe haber calado bastante hondo entre una población de jugadores que, al verse imposibilitades de salir y mantener el contacto con el mundo exterior, tal vez pensaron apaciguar la soledad de esta Sombra aunque fuera un tanto. A mi manera de ver, The Longing es una ejecución soberbia de un concepto que, en cualquier otra época, se habría tomado a burla o como estrategia facilona con la que llamar la atención, pero que ahora, tras haber experimentado lo que realmente es sentirse sole, mucha gente puede entender por fin. Que algo así se haga, precisamente, en un molde como la aventura gráfica, donde el puzzle y la exploración mantuvieron desde siempre una alianza inquebrantable para contar historias de muy diversa índole, demuestra hasta qué punto este aparentemente minoritario género sigue teniendo la fuerza que tenía hace veinte o treinta años.

--------------------------------------------------------------
(Content warning: the game deals with themes of depression and suicidal ideation).

In The Longing, waiting becomes the one mechanic with which you are forced to negotiate the meaning of the world. What Arin Hanson criticized years ago in his now-forgotten review of Ocarina of Time as an accident of design, we see it here mixed up to bolster an experience in which loneliness, curiosity and boredom delicately interact with each other. Sometimes the game sits close to the edge of making you feel like you're really wasting your time, that you'd be better off cheating or playing something faster. But the timely release of this work must have struck a deep chord among players who, seeing how it was impossible to go out, perhaps thought about spending more time with their Shadow instead. In my opinion, The Longing is a superb execution of a concept that, at any other time, would have been received as a joke or as a gimmicky way to attract attention. But now, after having experienced what it's really like to be alone, I think I understand. That something like this is being done, so precisely, in the classic graphic adventure mold shows how much vitality this supposedly fringe genre still has, even twenty years after its "golden age".