Speed-daters ranked by how much I'd want to play this game with them:

1. Spooky Peter (He'd be a riot)
2. Dave (Pure positivity)
3. Gary (I don't think it'd help him, but I have to try)
4. Hattie (She's nice!)
5. Stephanie (She needs something to do)
6. Andy (Would arguably the best commentator)
7. Agatha (Same reason as Gary, but less desperate)
8. Vera (I think she might hate it)
9. Leon (He'd definitely hate it)
10. Kyo (They don't need this stress, bless their heart)
11. Drea (I think they might hate me)
12. Riley (Bye Riley)

I mostly feel bad for not being able to help Gary more, poor guy

lo-fi mushrooming with your granny to vibe/chill to 2016

A delightful little thing. Looks and sounds nice. The writing is sparse but what there is is very well done. A wonderful experience all around.

(This was in the itchio Palestinian Aid bundle as well as the Racial Justice bundle so you probably already own this, as well!)

Half a star for Lucius himself being pretty fucking cool but that's cancelled out instantly by the constant bigotry. The black guy gets the most brutal and detailed death. A maid is consistently referred to as "the latina maid". A fat woman is constantly demanding more food. You take photos of a maid getting fucked doggystyle. You peep on that same maid in the bath later on. Also, every single woman just has her panties sitting somewhere and you can pick them up. Why? No fucking reason! It genuinely reminded me of the Half-Life 2 Cinematic Mod and how Alyx just has a giant dildo on display in that. The cutscenes are just horrid too and the puzzles could be solved by a fetus that's still attached to the umbilical cord. Despite being as simple as it is, it manages to also be buggy as all hell. They decided to have some combat in this and yeah its about as dull as you'd expect. I wanted to check out the sequels because, again, I think Lucius himself is really fucking cool. Then I read about how the third game has KKK members lynching a black man and yeah, that's where I check the fuck out. Fuck this series.

I played both prior Dragon Age games in a binge that has stopped dead in its tracks due to this game.

smug 2009 atheists should be punched in the face before they're allowed to write narratives that centrally explore themes of faith, because they cannot fucking approach the topic with any empathy and it massively defangs their critique. DAI being from the perspective of a literal inquisition but having no coherent ideology behind it and not actually being founded in any religion is so craven, they deny themselves the ability to meaningfully critique these structures by never stepping inside them and this profound inability to even try to understand the religious mindset and its decisionmaking while simultaneously making it a large narrative component is continually the worst part of dragon age as a series. truly baffling that they play into it harder and harder with each successive game

if this first act was you being like an anti-rift militia and trying to manage the complexity of operating on both sides of a border that was hotly contested within most people's lifetimes, and as you pick up steam you eventually discover records of the ancient inquisition and take up its mantle that could be, like, a story! but no, instead the cool-down section after the obligatory stupid action setpiece tutorial has you immediately fucking start the inquisition, which is insane, that feels like an end of act 1 thing where the world opens up. as a result there's no weight to it, it doesn't make sense and doesn't fit any coherent expectation of what an inquisition is, and it muddles the shit out of everything from the start.

this is an agnostic-atheistic politics-free inquisition with no authorization by any political or religious athority performed in the style of a syncretized cult from a millennium ago, which makes about as much sense as disgruntled knights during the hundred years' war converting to zoroastrarianism because their lords aren't doing shit to help their countrymen. except zoroastrarianism still has a coherent ideology and set of strictures behind it.

there's no sense of place to Haven by the time you leave it behind for the hinterlands, the only way you'd know where it's at is by implication of the world map and if you recall loghain's descriptions of war with orlais back in origins. the town has no history, has no culture, has no attachment to the player past a bunch of MMO questgivers and menus. awakening does so much more with so much less of import within minutes of its opening action sequence and its aftermath.

cullen leads your troops and queen anora handpicked the quartermaster to help with the inquisition, despite the inquisition having been founded approx. 30 seconds before you visit, how the hell do the orlesian politicians not see the massive amount of fereldans who were teleported into the inquisition's ranks as they operate directly on the state border and perform extrajudicial killings of templars and not see that as an insanely partisan threat to their security? how are they STILL doing the "both sides bad" thing for their stupid fucking templar/mage conflict? how do they manage to have you fight both groups in the same encounter but not actually design encounters around these multiple enemy types, they just spawn in a wave of templars then a wave of mages? why did the time to decompress not give me any fucking time at all to meet the cast and get to know how they tick? i still have no reason to give a shit about solas other than his deeply unnerving design

bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and it makes me wish i'd never given these games a shot. no game in this series ever approaches its potential and they are all fundamentally compromised products. dragon age origins has constant bleeding chunks of its world be stitched back, gangrenous, via abhorrent 2009 DLC practices. dragon age 2 is completely unfinished, a vastly superior game when you skip all combat with the press of a button. and inquisition reeks of the same shit i see in every other frostbite-era bioware game: two years of prototyping and engine dev that led nowhere, followed by 18 months of crunch where nothing comes out in any sort of way that people are proud of. i fucking hate this company dude

Okay, hear me out on this, buuuuut... this game kind of fucking kicks ass? As the many upgrades make the game itself more complex, so too does the lore surrounding your empire. In the beginning, you've just got some cursors, some grandmas, some farms, maybe a few mines. By the end game, you have genetic fucking clones of yourself making cookies. God damn floating giant brains in space who are so intelligent that they conjure cookies into existence with a thought. You go to parallel universes, steal their shit, and use it to make cookies. It's complete and utter madness. And yet, its not just a funny "hehe haha isn't this so whacky?" game. There is some genuine criticism of capitalism here. See, there isn't actually any reason to bake the cookies. Seriously. You bake cookies to get cookies to get upgrades that helps you make even more cookies faster. There is no outstanding goal outside of just more, more, more, more, more, more. You're filling a cup that will never be full. You want to see the number go higher and higher but there isn't really any point in it doing so. And yet... it feels so good. It just feels good to see that number go up. And since we get to sit back in our chairs and pull the strings of this ridiculous little cookie obsessed universe, we are completely disconnected from the consequences of our number going up. Unless, of course, you choose to pay attention. The news will often give flavor text that is relevant to your actions. This can range from "everyone loves your cookies!" to "a cookie mine collapsed and killed 17 people". Even an apocalyptic event where your grandmas become eldritch abominations is simply a new mechanic for earning cookies. Its kind of spooky at first, but then it just becomes another normal part of the gameplay loop. Again, when you are disconnected from the consequences of your actions due to your position of priviledge and power, you have no reason to care about people. I'm not sure what else to say, but I'm going to quote one bit of flavor text for one of the many, many, MANY upgrades in the game:

"You started this whole cookie venture on the simple kitchen counters of your own home. Your industrial and research facilities, sadly, have long since outgrown the confines of the little house, but you always knew it was still in there, buried somewhere. With a targeted portal, you could, conceivably, pay it a little visit for old times' sake..."