I was in the mood to play a CRPG and looked at all the well-known classics and modern hits of the genre that I have yet to play... Disco Elysium, Pillars of Eternity, Planescape: Torment, Tyranny.... the list goes on. And then I installed Geneforge: Mutagen instead - I game I knew nothing about and no one I know had ever played it either. And hey guess what. It isn't very good. The pitch of being a summoner-type guy who can alter the genes or whatever of the creatures you summon is such a cool pitch but then it's an extremely basic system of "spend 2 extra points to boost their strength and 2 extra points to give them an aoe attack" type shit. Wildly underwhelming! And the writing here is so so so so so basic. You wash up on the shore of an abandoned island that is full of "Serviles" (aka humanoid creatures summoned by The Shapers to serve as slaves) and there's three factions and you have to pick one to ally with to get yourself off the island. Will you join the ones who want to peacefully be equals with the Shapers, the ones who want to destroy the shapers, or the ones who just really really like being slaves. I only got a couple hours in but absolutely nothing of what I saw made me think this is worth trudging through the forty hours of playtime to see this thing through so I'm just gonna quit before I get too invested in some dumb shit and go play a Good video game instead.

It's very funny to me that when you create your character the game says "okay you can play as the cool summoner who has the gimmick that the entire game is built around or you can play as a knight or a rogue, if you wanna, I guess." Who is doing that. Who is looking at the game about summoning critters and saying "no thank you, I would like to hit things with a sword instead"

They really made a Bethesda Fallout-like but they also made the quality of writing about on par with a Bethesda Fallout so it's all either stupid or bad or boring or some combination of the three. So I guess it really shouldn't be surprising that I came away from this feeling the same as any Bethesda RPG of the last decade or so: I didn't generally like it but I sure did put 60 hours into it.

I know this game is all satire-y and jokes about capitalism and corporations and whatnot. But it strikes me as strange that whenever I came across a person or group who were explicitly anti-corporate that they were just as big a joke (or sometimes just outright evil). It's like here's a group that is anti-corp but for very personal spiteful reasons or here's revolutionaries who are actually paid off by The Board to be a fake revolution and here are people who are anti-corp but only as long as they can make lots of money off of it. It's like not a single person here has ideals? No one wants a better world? I am far from a satire expert but it feels like if you have someone who isn't a joke be like "here's what I think we should do to Fix Shit" then maybe it might feel like the game actually has something to say because, as it is, it makes it feel like the very South Park-y "we make fun of everyone equally" type centrist-y shit that is so exhausting.

This game is so weird about alcohol in a way that few other games I've played have been and it makes me so uncomfortable. It's like they've got that mindset that a ton of people I knew in college had that drinking and getting drunk is so cool and fun and awesome and getting super wasted frequently is the best thing to do with your time. And then the couple times when it's not being like that about alcohol it is instead doing some tired "wow we just saw a terrifying thing, time to drink until we forget about it!" type comedy and I hate it! Having multiple companions for whom drinking/getting drunk is a big joke is just exhausting. What a tiresome attitude, idk.

Speaking of companions: Parvati fucking rules!! She's so cute and so much fun. Immediately endearing and highly relatable. I love her so much. I would protect her with my life. Even if she is the very naive "aw shucks captain, surely we can find a better way to solve this problem and make everyone happy!" type character. Her companion quest being about helping her with asking out Junlei is extremely cute!! I think it's one of the better examples of romantic writing in games! It's too bad literally none of the other companions are interesting to me at all! Ellie is occasionally funny when she chimes in with bad doctor advice, Nyoka is alright, and Vicar Max is okay. SAM is a single joke which isn't very funny the first time I heard it, much less the hundredth. And Felix I struggled to remember he existed for most of the game.

I thought Murder on Eridanos was the first DLC so I went into that one about halfway through the main game but it turns out it was actually the second one so the enemies were much more bullet-spongey than expected and also when I finished it the gear I had was so much better than everything else that rest of the game was totally trivialized. Oops! Generally speaking, I like it when a developer uses DLC to experiment with their game and try to turn it into some other genre or to introduce new mechanics. So, for their murder-mystery DLC they give you a Talking Detective Vision Gun that detects clues and explains them to you. Which is very funny on a conceptual level, that that's how they decided to shift the genre they were working in. I wish the talking gun was funnier. But when you have moments of following footprints and every twelve seconds it's going "beep beep beep you've found more of the same footprints" it made me want to throw that stupid gun into the sun. I'm not one to really complain about video game quest markers being too clear or guiding you too directly but, in this specific case, it really ruins the "mystery" part of the murder-mystery. Sending me to a hotel room and telling me to "search for clues" but then putting a big green quest marker directly on the one clue I need to interact with is very deflating. Like, damn, you really don't trust me to have to look around or thing at all, huh? This is, like, the one genre you want people to have to think about! Let me think!! MAKE me think!!! But, I guess, ultimately, the mystery doesn't really matter because of the twist. By the time I got to the point of having to accuse someone of murder I had already guessed the general shape of the twist because nothing else really made enough sense. And I think it felt kind of unsatisfying because of that! I think I'd really prefer an actual murder-mystery that asked me to search for clues and then accuse someone and maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, either way the case is closed. Maybe I fuck up and send an innocent person to space-jail but if a villain outsmarts me then so be it!

Next up was Peril on Gorgon which frames itself as a mystery but there's really barely any mystery to be solved here?? It's a pretty straightforward series of dungeons. I mostly think this is interesting because this sort of game has never managed before and gave some actual lore reason as to why there are so many crazy murder junkies running around. Granted, it's just "they did a lot of drugs and are crazy now" but at least they try to frame it as a more scientific/medical cause and not just weird reactionary "people who take drugs are inherently bad people" sort of logic.

The game's finale area having extremely clear options for non-combat/stealth/speech type playstyles but then also having allies from the factions you're friends with show up and go absolutely hog wild attacking people is so funny. What, you really think I'm gonna sit and watch my buddies have all the fun so I can speech check some guard?? No way, I'm breaking stealth immediately, they don't get to have all the fun here.

The actual moment when you rescue Phineas from jail is so funny because he suddenly does not give a single shit about the frozen colonists and is like "we've lost contact with Earth!! this is way more important than anything in this game!!" and there is so much here to set up the sequel and make sure the player is interested in purchasing Outer Worlds 2 for seventy dollars or whatever. But, like, come on!! This is the end of a game!! Make it feel like you give a shit about the plot here, please!! ALSO, I already talked to people about the colony having lost contact with Earth and no one seemed particularly worried about it!!

idk man this game kinda sucked, see y'all in a few years when i can get Outer Worlds 2 with all the dlc for a couple bucks

idk, man, it's Diablo 2, what do you want from me. one of the greatest to ever do it. hang Diablo 2's jersey from the rafters. frame it and put it in the louvre. let it retire to a peaceful life in the countryside.

A few years ago I reinstalled Diablo 2 from my battlechest disks and tried playing it and, man, all the quality of life type stuff that all the other ARPGs of the last twenty years is really nice and having zero of that in Diablo 2 was kinda rough because I am a big baby. But also it turns out Act 1 on Normal also just kinda sucks (at least for the classes I tend to play). You level up pretty slowly and it takes so long to really get going. So back in the day that made me put the game down pretty quickly. But not this time! I persevered and also they added just enough nice little QoL things that I truly do not mind the ways in which the game didn't get "updated".

I played all the way through on the updated graphics and they are, largely, fine but they really make me glad there's a quick toggle to swap back to the old graphics because it's so easy to see how artistically inferior the new shit is. Yeah, sure, it's all 3d rendered and got nicer lighting and particle effects and whatever but the vibe is wildly different. The darkness isn't as consuming and oppressive. There is so much more gray and brown. If you are interested in Diablo 2 as a Game To Click On Things then it doesn't really matter much but if you care about Diablo 2 as Art then it extremely matters!!

It's kinda wild to me that they've made balance changes and even added new items and runewords and shit! Somewhere there are people hiding in a basement hoping that the bean counters don't find out about them and ask "wait, you're spending how much time on this? for a game with no battlepass? or microtransactions? from how many years ago?" and I love that for them. It's cool to see it get items with some new mechanics and also they fixed Summoner Druid to be Actually Viable and I appreciate that a lot because I love all my killer puppies and big bear friend and weird forest spirit tentacle creature.

Act 2 was always my favorite act as a stupid teenager. But oh my god duuuude the fucking Maggot Lair!! All-timer for Worst Dungeon. Gotta be one of the worst. Trying to just move around is bad enough but then having to fight shit, too?? And good fuckin' luck if you're a dope like me who likes to play summoning classes. The rest of it is pretty alright. Just gotta watch out for those stupid lightning beetles, y'know.

Diablo 2 Nightmare Difficulty is still the sweetest sweet spot. You've got solid gear and you've got quite a few skills leveled up. You can actually kill shit and not immediately fucking die. It feels so good to play. It's the best part of the game. And then you get to Hell Difficulty. And it is so aptly named. You really gotta do a lot of extra farming for more levels and more loot and it's so miserable. I am simply past my "spending all day farming stuff" days. I got better shit to do. Apologies to socketed items and runewords and high-tier set items, I am simply in a different part of my life now.

Act 3 isn't good and it was never good. Annoying-ass maps with annoying-ass enemies, fuck Durance of Hate, fuck Mephisto, fuck Act 3, all my homies hate Act 3.

Playing this with someone who played the game once many years ago (long enough that this was essentially a fresh experience) was an absolute treat because so much of this game is deeply burned into my brain. Hearing reactions to story beats that I basically didn't remember because I was a hardcore ladder girly who didn't care about the story was fun. The first time we hit some beetles in Act 2 and got wrecked by lightning, they made some noises that were somewhere between a shriek and squeal and it was a delight. I highly recommend this extremely specific experience of playing the game.

The end of Act 4 is so fucking funny, dude. Like, imagine getting Diablo 2 before the expansion and the game just fucking ends there. Modern games could never. Extremely funny.

There's a new thing with "Terrorized" zones and I have no idea what's going on there? Like, the affected area has all the enemies made to be your level +2, so you can use areas you wouldn't normally be revisiting to get level-appropriate XP and loot but I don't fully understand if that's better than just your classic Baal runs or whatever-the-fuck.

Act 5 sure is Some Shit, huh. This time around I really noticed the small changes in things here. How, even back in 2001 or whatever, they were iterating and pushing on what was possible in the game.

I still haven't ever gotten to level 99. Or fought an Uber Diablo. Or gotten and Annihilus or Hellfire Torch. And I probably never will. And that's okay! But if I ever somehow get that desire, then this is a very solid version of the game to do it in!

In an industry that is so obsessed with franchises and selling you the same shit over and over and loves to do "remakes" that fundamentally change important aspects of games, this is one of the absolute least egregious examples of modern remake-thinking.