The kinda game you sink right into. I absolutely loved it.

There's something meditative about it. You don't feel rushed, or like you're plodding around aimlessly. You can pretty much explore this Swiss village at your leisure. Soaking in the wee cultural touches you've never seen before. Picking up clues to what's happening here and there.

Such a unique look with all hand drawn textures, and that off-white colour palette. Everybody speaking beautiful Romansh. Unsettling imagery paced just right. Man, this would have absolutely been my Backloggd 2021 GOTY if I'd played it last year.

Incredibly frustrating game. The core combat here is a ton of fun, and going through dungeons is a blast. The combat system really makes mowing down dozens of mobs at a time addicting.

The issue, however, is that these combat opportunities are drip fed to you over the course of the most generic, trite fantasy story possible that gets bogged down even further by the virtue of wanting to be an MMO. I just handled 40+ enemies at once in this dungeon, why is the next quest objective "Kill 4 bandits" or "Pick 3 flowers?"

I hear end game is where this games shines, and I'd believe it. When you can just do all the fun stuff without 90% filler? Yeah, that sounds great. But I won't see it because I can't imagine wasting anymore time delivering apples or some garbage.

"it's eat or be eaten in this cruel world" ~lost ark (2022)

you faced down the darkness living within you, but you never backed down. you overcame your inner darkness and protected your true self... now go forth and deliver these flowers for the local guard. we're counting on you

when you're done with that, feel free to mash your keyboard and dish out a variety of attacks that all feel exactly the same. will you press "w", or "q"? the possibilities are simply endless

currently redownloading path of exile

Needed to mull over this one for a while for plenty of reasons. Mostly my perspective coming into it, as hot off the heels of FFXIV that I was and with that game being my sole expectation of MMOs I decided to play pretty much every popular one under the sun thinking "yeah i'm into FFXIV so I must be into the genre." That and my SO played WoW since TBC, having put it away somewhere in the early patch cycle of BfA. She loves the series still, and keeps up to date to everything, and also her conversations of the stories she's made for herself in the fantasy world was strictly appealing to me. So I came in thinking well, nothing but the best. Add that to me coming in 'right' as Blizzard put in their New New Player Experience and I felt like I would be right at home.

If you have played WoW or tried getting into it recently then the end result will come as no surprise to you. But the scope of talking about pretty much everything deeply WRONG here is so massive and wide to where I understand how just talking about WoW in its current form requires such a historical and veteran perspective. In my spoiled brain I can only vent about the multitudes of anguish and information overload trying to parse several different types of content, all of which were mindlessly tedious to explore.

I guess to start the new island is as good as an intro as you can get to this. You get dumped into a very restricted world and taught very very basic fundamentals about your class mechanics and a very easy dungeon plus light worldbuilding and introduction to what exactly the fuck is happening. And while I didn't enjoy it, it's moodsetting.

But the sheer vertigo that happens after you leave there? Words cannot describe the world design transition. It's like walking out of a dark cupboard and then seeing a whole WORLD of everything fighting for your attention alongside quality of life features missing entirely by design. Walk slowly and head empty from place to place, picking up quests and doing what basically surmounts to bizarre grinding. Do your own research and realize that not only do you have to have 10+ some-odd add-ons to make your experience even slightly tolerable because Blizzard does not give a shit, but also that still won't save you from reaching pain points and having to take a gamble that it was either a) something by design, b) actually a major bug they didn't patch cuz blizzard doesn't finish their games here which i guess is also by design, or c) fixable but you had to go through a few wikis to realize the error and a couple guides and then you'll wonder why that was never taught or On by default.

And Battle for Azeroth is just a terrible first expansion for people to be forced through to reach endgame. Just mercilessly boring areas and the only half decent one is also a "whoops you're actually AGAINST the ghosts trying to fight back because their lands were being taken and being systemically genocided". Things are so lined with bile, and once you actually do reach endgame you'll still be required to gear up with even more of a grind because those quests were absolutely not designed to furnish a new player with wings. And to put a hammer to it all, once I'd gotten through all of that and made it with all my gear unlocked, shadowlands released the same day and the LFR for BfA raid stuff was just gone for me, never to return until well, just recently this patch. Honestly a good bit, but a deep shade of paint of what WoW really is. Driven by adamant hate for what's been juxtaposed with what has to keep going, a shell attempting to put whoever's left into a skinnerbox before rewarding, finally, with treats of endgame. I'm sure Mythic+ and certain other tangential aspects are worth it to some, but after the gauntlet I have now ran out of interest. One of the worst experiences of the last year for me, by miles.