What a disappointment - I was really excited for this game. Unfortunately, the gameplay completely ruined the experience for me. The immersion into early 20th-century Poland in the Russian partitian was easy to focus on over the gameplay until the dialogue tried to fit in quirky modern gaming references... ugh.

Anyways, I thought it was insanely cool to see a game not BASED around early 20th century Eastern Europe, but actually SET in the area and time itself. I thought it was insanely cool that it seemed to follow SMT in a way with the ability to collect + fight with different demons from the area. I am a big fan of SMT and a big fan of Eastern European history, I thought this game would be a natural 5/5 for me! The story and setting are amazing. I loved the historical humor, I loved seeing the mixing of so many different cultures (something I rarely seen mentioned in the West when talking about Eastern Europe), and I love-love-loved gathering my demons and seeing which they would give me next... especially since a good chunk were from Slavic Paganism.

As much as I enjoyed these aspects, the lows of the game are just too low, to the point that I was dreading turning it back on and playing through. The fight sequences are awful, I don't know if I was doing it wrong, but they're painfully slow and very tedious. You never get a move that lets you attack everyone at once, instead forcing you to attack one-by-one. There's never an attack you can do that one shots people either. I mostly started focusing on just making them lose their sanity and hitting them then, or by draining them with a move Wiktor has that has the enemy slowly lose HP each round, and then hitting them with the demon they're weakest to. I dunno, I really started to dread getting into fights, which is a big part of the gameplay. The other part of the gameplay I was fine with, but that's all I could get myself to reach, just being fine with it. That part is finding clues to fight your next enemy. You simply right click to see what's around you to investigate, and then move to the next part in the map to continue doing the same until eventually you reach the group you need to fight. It's my least favorite adventure game form! Just go from point A to point B to point C until you reach a boss fight. Rinse and repeat. The involvement of the Polish Revolution is super interesting, but when you go to do things involving the culture, they don't show you the area, they often just draw you a picture of what the cultural event was; such as telescope viewing, cola tasting, or even visiting a gentleman's club. It's a small complaint, but it bothered me... totally not because I was so excited to see that Gentleman's Club! But it's okay, your character goes to a very depressing brothal later LOL. Later in the game, they also start adding in modern gaming references such as saying "I gotta catch them all!" - it was super awkward, I really didn't like it.

I would say you should check out this game if you're interested in the history, but I had a better time just reading a history book. The gameplay just hit all my pet-peeves and then some, even with the gorgeous (AA) graphics. I unfortunately couldn't bring myself to finish it because of these issues. Check it out if you'd like, otherwise I would recommend playing an SMT game or reading a book on the 1905 Polish Revolution... I think I might go pick up one myself.

2/5

persona 3 was a game with identity, intent, purpose, intentionality, heart, and, most importantly, creativity. i don't enjoy the lot i've been cast in life where i have to play bad versions of persona 3 and say why they're bad, whether it be the answer, portable, or this. reload is not just a bad remake of persona 3, it is a bad game that tells an interesting story in a ho-hum and pedestrian way. it takes so many narrative risks and choices from the original presentation and either waters them down or overly explains them to make sure the lowest common denominator doesn't have to interpret art. even divorced from its source material, this game fails to create a gameplay experience worth investing time in. as a remake, it fails to capture what persona 3 meant. as a JRPG, it is a dull affair with little challenge or complexity. persona 3 reload fails to be worth the effort it takes to play it.

the design doc of persona 3 reload had a very clear goal: leave no one behind, whether it be in story or gameplay. this results in story cutscenes being more explicit and less interpretive (compare the opening FMV with yukari) and gameplay that refuses to obstruct the player in meaningful ways. to be more specific, reload sacrifices any need for the player to become competent with its systems to make sure that anyone can beat this game. theurgy makes the game brainless and poisons basically every boss fight (ken can get a theurgy skill a little over halfway through the game that casts mediarahan + samarecarm + tetrakarn + makarakarn on the entire party). resource management is embarrassingly easy to trivialize (yukari can cast media for literally 1 (one) SP; there is a veritable buffet of SP items that you can trip over in daily life for little to no investment; theurgy overall negates the importance of SP and running out of SP is not the death knell it could be in orginal). social links as a whole are extremely easy to manage both due to point requirements being lower to accommodate for needing to spend more days on new content like linked episodes. hell, remember persona fusion? now it's been greatly dumbed down such that even triangle fusion isn't available anymore. this game is a concession that persona 3 was too ambitious and needed to be toned down. this is a remake that asserts that persona 3 did too much and tries to do less instead.

i'm not even beating the dead horse that is my opinion on party control because there's so many more issues to address. on basically every level, this game has either simplified or deescalated the complexity of its mechanics to accommodate a mainstream audience. i don't think there's inherently anything wrong with making persona 3's systems more accessible, but i think these capitulations go overboard and rob the game of compelling gameplay moments. there are no bosses in the game that truly force me to approach a challenge in a new way or think outside the box in the way that bosses like change relic did. every boss in this game is made longer to accommodate for theurgy damage values without any sort of intelligent design to make the fights feel more exciting for that length of time. boss fights are longer and easier because it's more cinematic to see mitsuru skate around and use her theurgy instead of letting the player use their own competency-based skills and strategy to end the fight. i am not the person who's going to cry that atlus sold out or whatever, but i am the person who's going to tell you that persona 3 reload feels like an undercooked experience because it consistently refuses to ask anything of the player. this game is easy, this game is simple, and this game is uninteresting.

above all else, this game begs one question: who on earth is telling atlus/sega that persona games need to be longer and have more content? persona 3 was a game that had a slowburn start that reload now turns into a bloated nightmare. everything takes so much longer in reload and everything feels more belabored, so i can't blame anyone for getting burnt out or even fucked off from this game's plot by the time things start picking up steam. on top of this, a lot of the new slice of life content wastes so much of the player's time. why do we need multiple scenes dedicated to kenji's performance on job day? i remember when saying that persona 3 was 70 hours felt like i was talking about this gargantuan piece of art. meanwhile, in reload, i hit 70 hours somewhere between september and november. these games do not need to be this long, and it actively ruins the experience to do so. persona 5 being a triple digit hour experience was a bad thing, not something to aspire to.

it's hard to not be at least a little offended because, whether or not P Studio intended it, they have basically hollowed out what made persona 3 so unique, so special. reload looks drab and unimpressive in UE4, and so much of the moody visuals get lost in the graphical fidelity. iwatodai dorm feels too bright, and then when january rolls around, they make the color scheme so muted that it is genuinely comedic. and there's just some really baffling and ugly visual decisions they made, like how everyone in club escapade stands motionlessly in pose. meanwhile, lotus juice has his fingerprints all over the OST in a way that just doesn't work ("mindin' my biz, so mind your own biz"). persona 3 was more than just a game with impressive systems that engaged the player, it was also a piece of art that had an aesthetic that gets lost here. this game feels completely identity-less when compared to the original because the original was both a deconstruction and a hybrid of genres. in many ways, reload doesn't just fail to live up to that artistic intent, it outright doesn't seem to know it was even there in the first place.

and i get it, as a fan of persona 3, my opinion has a giant asterisk at the end of it. why listen to a star wars fan tell you about why phantom menace is the worst movie ever? i will own up and openly admit i expected this game to be bad and had greatly wanted it to not exist. i had a feeling atlus would fuck it up somehow. i don't like being right about that. at the same time, i think there are missteps here that would stand out regardless of familiarity with the source material. yukari's edginess is completely deleted from her character here and she now just sounds and acts like chie on vyvanse rather than a girl with abandonment issues and trauma. fuuka got turned from "weird girl who serves as the empathetic core of the cast" to "girl who could have a thrilling conversation about spoiled milk". and reload isn't the first time akihiko's been sanded down to "protein fanatic who trains a lot", but it's probably the most offensive here. wouldn't it be really fucking funny if, the whole time you were studying with him, akihiko was doing something wacky like squatting above his chair instead of sitting normally?

these characters have been reinterpreted so much that they've lost their core identity that was integral to the plot of persona 3. i don't get the feeling that i'm seeing akihiko or mitsuru, i instead sense that i'm getting how someone interprets them after nearly 2 decades of fandom and spinoff content. yukari still has those "mean" lines but they lack any emotional root, so they come off as nonsense mood swings rather than a scared girl lashing out. and i'll just say it, karen strassman clears the fuck out of dawn bennett when you compare the final aigis monologues (fwiw, in both these instances, i blame the direction, not the VAs). these characters have been done better and it's really jarring that reload tries to flatten them rather than give them more dimensionality.

there's room to broadly interpret these characters, but constantly trying to make a self-serious character like akihiko the butt of a joke that he's in on speaks to how much he's being mischaracterized here. when akihiko was in a comedic scene, it was because he was the straight man, not because he was a this big goofball constantly playing to the crowd. these characters don't feel like themselves in a profound way, and i'd have to wonder how much that comes across to anyone who hasn't played original. does akihiko just seem like a wildly contradictory character to new players? truthfully, i have no idea if any of these people would've resonated with me had this been my first exposure to them.

i don't hate what all of reload's new content wrt characterization, and i honestly really liked some of the stuff they added for shinjiro and ken. but there's just as much that is unnecessary and outright bad. when we said they wanted more backstory on strega, we didn't mean that we wanted you to turn takaya into another akechi. if you're going to remake persona 3, why even bother if you're going to do such a disservice to its characters and setting? sure, you made some of the UI stuff look neater and more Persona 5-y, but what does that meaningfully add to the experience? when i saw the trailer for reload, i immediately asked myself "what does the water motif have to do with persona 3? why is the main character sinking into water? what are they going to do with that?" and it turns out they just wanted a cool main menu animation and nothing else. i want to say that P Studio was just misguided, but some of this content is so actively bad that it makes me wonder if any of them even liked persona 3. so much of this feels like it's trying to fix something that isn't broken, like it's an apology for the source material. this isn't a persona 3 remake for people who liked persona 3. but, then again, who else was it supposed to be for if not people who wanted another persona 5? persona 5 is the new cash cow and my dread for this being a P5ified version of persona 3 was well-founded.

i kept trying to go "how would i feel about this game if it wasn't a remake of a game i love?" and that's an impossible question for me to answer. i can never know because i will never play this with the eyes and ears of someone who didn't play the original. again, as much as i've come to detest this game, i don't have it in my heart to give this a lower score, mostly out of pity, but also out of overcorrecting my harsh opinion as a fan of the original. still, i think many of reload's failings come from a place of trying to simultaneously be a remake and game for everyone. i don't think it's wrong for games to put off people. in fact, the best games often aren't for everyone because they can't be. P Studio emphasized making a game that was so mainstreamed and accessible that it would never present any obstacle or mechanic that could alienate players at the cost of making a game that players could actually be engaged with. i can't think of a broader way you could miss the mark with a persona 3 remake.

The understandings that come between characters worlds apart, rendered blissfully through everyday life, from absurd to natural. Nasu's most interpersonal poignant work I feel, largely by nature of being invested in the day-to-day growth between its cast, reflecting on people throughout their days of steely clouds, fallen snow, and fairy tale amusement parks. Ever more blissfully held up by how Type Moon's characters are given such vibrancy, with each interaction always flowing off the page for me into a real group of multifaceted people ^/w/^

I will admit though, that I found myself wishing there was more to chew on than what's here. There's a crazy good juxtaposition between the changing architecture, the diametrically opposed functions of old and new, nostalgic and living-in-the-present, but it ends up becoming more cornerstones of the players of life rather than delved into thinkpieces. Which is largely the point, after all, as this is coming-of-age in its truest form. Everything is open, wide, and turning pages into a more difficult cityscape that demands resolution from you as you're just starting to figure out what you're looking for. And in that way the platitudes, the stories of making the most of your life, the ending divvying up of regrets you still have of the life you've led so far, all culminate together into something deeply fulfilling.

It's a wonderfully graceful work with all that. I'll really have to think on it a lot more as I leave it.

brutal doom for the video essay generation well, color me impressed. this is actually cool!

if you're anything like me, you've grown tired of metahorror. it seems like every other day i find a new indie game or analog horror video in my youtube feed using hackneyed "subversions of expectation" and arg elements for spooks. imscared was cool, but imscared came out 12 years ago. so when i heard about myhouse.wad, i brushed it off. it wasn't until last night that i bit the bullet, and let me tell you: i should have done it sooner.

the house of leaves inspiration is blatant enough as to call it an adaptation. there's no point in dissecting it, but i'd like to use it to explain why my house doesn't suffer from the pitfalls you might expect. remember how house of leaves has a bunch of hidden shit inside of it that redditors have been talking to death for years? well, you don't need it to enjoy the book. it's an addendum for people who wanna go crazy over that kind of stuff. my house is the same way with its metahorror. the creepypasta elements are contained in the downloadable journal rather than the game itself. the "deeply emotional" (read: tactless and generic internet psychological horror) themes fans don't shut up about are contained in secret content that you won't find unless you're looking for it. in that case, why should you play the wad?

cuz it's a damn good time! if you liked lost in vivo's combat-heavy take on otherworld from silent hill, you'll like my house. the maps are super pretty and fun to explore. there are cool new enemies too! if nothing else, play it to see a modern action horror doom map with strong atmosphere. it only took me 30 minutes and i'd recommend it even if you already know the "twists".

as much as i still want to mock the fandom and compare it to brutal doom, i do hope this inspires people to take full advantage of gzdoom's special features. maybe someone will make a map that uses similar technical tricks to make something in a genre other than horror. as it stands, i super enjoyed my time in my house and i recommend it to all the skeptics. this one's different.

SOLD

Probably the first game in a while that's made me regret not doing scores for games on this website; Children of the Sun is as unwieldy and aggravatingly trial and error as it is aesthetically captivating and mechanically cathartic. I've seen others besmirch it as a poor puzzle game or shitty action game individually -- perhaps it's within that straddling of genre conventions that it never quite finds its way -- yet it's difficult to recall any other game I've played recently that's so confident in its fusion of puzzle-solving and reflexive execution. And while the latter is what ultimately allows Children of the Sun to carve out impactful moments in the player's mind, it's also its most egregious pain point (followed by the semi-optional "strategy phase" whose varying (in)elegance will inevitably filter a lot of players).

It becomes especially damning during the game's later stages where it's possible for the player to have figured out a few viable solutions, but executing the longer sequences of kills can be absolutely excruciating when failure is as easy as a simple misclick -- or your perfect solution gets fucked over by unreliable RNG (?) cycles, among other fiddly (to say the least) annoyances. I imagine this is going to vary wildly from person to person as well; some levels I completed in a single try while others took me upwards of two hours (not including the breaks I'd sometimes have to take). It's a shame when the player's momentary satisfaction is upended by the realization that the next level is the same thing but even more overwhelming intricate. That'll probably satisfy the people who really fuck with Children's unique gameplay toolkit and jazz-like structure, but for others it's going to make playing the game a draining experience, which maybe isn't what you want in a game that doesn't have a whole lot of content in the first place (or maybe that's its saving grace, I don't know! I'll let the gamer reading this decide). The last level was particularly harrowing as unraveling its solution required executing individual pieces of the what is the longest kill sequence in the game ad nauseam, and with its length was probably every single issue I've talked about so far along with it.

This is where I'd love to tell that this is all worth it somehow, that Children of the Sun's ludonarrative adds up to anything, and I... I don't think it does? The striking aesthetic and the revenge porn premise certainly elevate the experience, but the narrative itself feels exceedingly played out. Maybe this will do more for somebody who has had real life experience with cults, or maybe it's just that its story is portrayed through slideshows that are largely disconnected from the gameplay that, despite having pretty great art, don't really impart much upon the player outside of "this cult did bad things, the player character wants to do bad things back to the cult". Which like, understandable, good for her! But it just didn't do a whole lot for me personally. I want to say the ending is maybe saying something? I dunno man, I think I've played too many irreverent and/or Dark Souls-influenced indie titles that I'm just so desensitized to endings like this. Maybe I'm just a heartless bitch tho.

Children of the Sun has its moments though, like, there's a pretty fun quote towards the beginning of the game that I'm expecting fans of the game to repeat an annoying amount. I looooove the main character's design and the cover art itself (honestly it's why I ended up playing it in the first place lol). The whole game has this vibe to it that for some reason dug up forgotten memories of games like Project Rub/Feel the Magic: XY/XX; honestly it'd kinda fuck as a DS game now that I think about it (Killer7 DS real???). Not sure if I'd recommend Children of the Sun to everybody, but if it catches your interest in any way, I'd say it wouldn't hurt to give it a try once it's on sale for sub-$10 or so.

Taipei ➡️ Zuoying (Kaohsiung City)
Duration: 01h34
Train Model: THSR 700T
Train No: 0145
Number of carriages: 12 (1 business car, 11 standard cars)
Number of seats: 989 (66 seats in business car, 923 seats in standard cars)
Seat allocation: 2+2 in business car (4 seats each row); 2+3 in standard car (5 seats each row)
Top operation speed: 300 km/hr
Length of train: 304 m
Electric system: 25 KV 60 Hz AC

Welcome aboard Taiwan High Speed Rail! This train is bound from Taipei, to Zuoying. All seats are reserved. Please make sure you are in the correct seat. We wish you a pleasant journey. 🌸

Slim but unquestionably reverent and adorable. Maybe I'm gassing this up too much but it's nice to see the Trainguy subgenre have a little more meat on its bones beyond polygonal simulations and instead could be secret FMV games - accelerating and decelerating your train like it's a really meditative Superhot or something. Railfan seems very keen to show you a brief look into late-00's rail transit life, right down to explaining the historicity of the locales the line calls at, the specs of the train, even local cuisine!
Looking up the devs of the Railfan titles to find that they are predominantly dedicated to educative tactile train driving simulations, still making use of full-motion video rather than computer generated sims. I dunno man I think that's neat. I've seen people with the Densha de Go joystick but now I want a carriage door peripheral for me to lean out of.

the discomfort zone got too comfortable so we made the comfort zone discomfortable. samus: meet samus

where super dove uncritically into the power fantasy that metroid II (the game with a literal Genocide Counter in the UI) unmasked and deflated, this feels like it's turning it inward against you personally. Your body, Your likeness, and Your autonomy hijacked; Your celebratory past tense role as (repeated) casual annihilationist to reckon with and cower from

it operates as something of a Super Negative Image Metroid: an inversion right down to the uncomfortable, choking grip of the direction. all that clammy ADAMsplaining, those sequestered zones, the redline urgency; everything's dialed perfectly into the exact same channel with uniform intent. even the woozy alien psychedelia's been spirited away in favour of clinical, detached interiors and astroturfed xerox biomes with some of the most appropriately sterile Oops No Backlight lighting on the GBA

and no, it obviously doesn't accomplish the same things as its predecessors, but it's not attempting to. this is a game about lack of control, and altering the format would be akin to breaking the spinal column that holds it upright. fusion's big successes (the pacing, brevity, tonal and thematic consonance, and delicate curation of tension and challenge) are the result of its structural changes. being shunted around a tiny sarcophagus isn't a flaw, it's the entire premise. duh

even without all that though it's impossible for me not to love a game with nightmare, the Profaned Baja Blast Suit, AQA's sunken banger, shots like this, and those absolutely psychotic ridley screams

quite possibly the best SA-X heavy fusion since the sultry sounds of steely dan

I have put off re-reviewing this for months. Partly because I dont have the words to express the hold this game has over me, and partly because every time I start thinking about it I get too excited. I havent felt this way about something in a long time, likely since I was a girl in the height of my infatuation with Ace Attorney.

This game is just absolutely astounding, from all angles. There is nothing it does poorly and nothing I would change. I didnt really understand the draw of roleplaying till now, which was the downfall of my first experience, but it is absolutely incredible the things you can learn about yourself pretending to be someone else. Thats not something I can say about any other game, ever. And I can only feel just so grateful, because it's given me so much joy over the past 3 months. Its barely left my mind at all, which feels like an issue at times. I dont know if I'll have an experience like that ever again, after all I created the perfect character and ran through the campaign as him, twice. More or less doing the same thing because I just enjoyed what I had made so much. It grieves me that I kind of have to let go of it, its one of those games that was painful to finish because I just got so attached. It feels like mine, and its one of those autistic things where I cant stand it when anyone else brings it up cause you and I definitley dont see it the way, like a dog hyperaggressive over its food. Specifically dark urge, which feels like it was tailor made for me. Its all so special and I care about it very, very much.

Everyone who worked on bg3 is immensely talented. It's kind of staggering just how talented everyone is. There is not a single voice actor that preformed poorly or out of place, the text is immaculate, nearly every single decision one could make is neatly planned for and has a script. It is just perfect and I could marvel at it forever, cause it really is a feat of human accomplishment to me. The driving force behind my love for this game though is of course the cast. I adore absolutely everyone (minus you Minthara I will always kill you and take your clothes), there are so few games that manage to pull it off, that take you through a journey so long and so profound that you feel a sense of family. Withers' after party is the perfect amalgamation of all this, the joy I felt seeing everyone happy, finally grtting to live their lives was unmatched. Going through the letters of the people you met along the way and seeing that theyre all alright. Astarion specifically holds special meaning to me but I cant talk about that I get too protective. It never fails to make me tear up thinking about it and always makes me feel so grateful that this is in the world and that I got to experience it.

Immensely love all my friends and Scratch and Owlbear and that one weird ox I didnt get to see in act 3 because it glitched out. I will think about you all forever, an autistic girl's promise

Crusader Kings 2 was shat out into the world about 12 years ago. By the time its successor came out it'd developed a reputation as a game that was barebones without any DLC but was a gripping and indepth time-abyss if you had most/all of it.

Crusader Kings 3 decides to iterate on its predecessor by being a game that's barebones without any DLC, and still barebones even with all the extortionately overpriced DLC.

It is an inevitability in first-party Paradox titles that the player will eventually stumble into a period of empty space where all they're doing is advancing time at 5x speed until some events pop up and let you do something. Even Stellaris, the game that most often has you actively doing things, tends to fall into it at some point.

CK3 is sadly the worst for it, in part due to numerous under-the-hood changes that at first seem beneficial but in reality seem drab. Paradox's approach this time round involves dissuading players from attempting to colour the map as in past games and instead focus on a small corner of the world - whether it be a kingdom or an Empire, they don't want you playing with adult colouring books this time.

Instead the focus this time is on roleplay and/or kingdom management, with hefty penalties to expansion and harsh limits on how much you as an individual can control directly before needing to shove things onto your vassals. The game, including its tutorials, not-so-subtly nudge you into grabbing hold of a title and clinging to it. New and reworked mechanics like culture/religion/councils/language and more with DLCs all add to this; the focus of this game is in finding a place and staying there.

Unfortunately this focus results in a lot of waiting, as almost all of the mechanics up above boil down to clicking a button and waiting for a scheme to resolve. The much-praised Tours & Tournaments and Royal Court DLCs are much the same despite their praise, simply offering you more buttons before the wait begins rather than just one. It's all rather at odds with the intent to make you more actively partake in your realm's management, because in practice it's all very passive.
Further dulling matters is that many events often boil down to very static, very predictable stat checks. Oh, someone's trying to murder your son - who is 9th in line to the throne and has more defects than limbs? It's just a passive intrigue and scheme power check. Duelling? Martial and Prowess stats.
Much of these additional stats like Prowess were added to make the game less binary, but given how they scale it's relatively easy to stack the deck in your favour unless you gimp yourself...

But even then, this game's biggest problem is that it's easy. Metagaming is no longer required to stack ridiculous bonuses in your court, especially given the relative prominence of random lowborn courtiers with insane stat spreads. CK3 tries its damndest to have consequences for this, but what use is a hit to your legitimacy when you can pump out children that're functionally immune to rebellion, assassination, or the perils of inbreeding?
The DLCs just make this worse, as most of them are nearly consequence-free. Tours & Tournaments is a series of easy resource/stat boosts for relatively low risk, Royal Court is the same and both of them make socializing so much easier. Northern Lords supercharges a lot of the northern factions, and-

You know, CK2 had a bit of a problem with Eurocentrism, to the point where most non-European factions needed a paid DLC to be playable. Even then, it was almost always the titular Crusader King nations/cultures that got all of the updates and boosts.

CK3 seemingly averts this by having everyone on the map be playable, but it doesn't take a genius to notice that the non-European factions feel distinctly undercooked. Muslims can't even observe Ramadan. As expected from a CK title, Paradox sell the fixes back to you via Fate of Iberia and Legacy of Persia, but even these feel half-hearted and empty compared to equivalent CK2 packs. Go even further East and it's like wading into unfinished content.

I think what really broke this game for me is the lack of impact anything has. The first time a council member blackmails you with your own incest/kinslaying, it seems like a grand obstacle to be surmounted, but oftentimes it's a total non-issue. In my most recent game, everyone and their mum tried to expose me for pulling a Habsburg on my bloodline, but the end result was a few minor opinion penalties that were easily swept away by holding a Grand Wedding. It feels a lot like playing a mod for CK2 that's perpetually in beta; wowed by all the options available until they fire and you realize that you've functionally just skipped a stone across bathwater.

...Also I realized halfway into my conquest of Britannia as the Irish that the devs had forced a Legitimacy mechanic on me and that I couldn't meaningfully engage with it without forking out money for the recent Legends Of The Dead pack. Hurray!

The best way to experience this game is to read people's (probably made up) campaign stories on Reddit, for much of this game's remaining appeal is in doing stupid shit like banging the pope, and for once that's attainable without touching the game.

It's been four years and CK3 still feels as hollow and unfulfilling as it did when it came out.