I was hoping for a Last of Us 2 sense of dour self seriousness, with the scale of Shadow of the Colossus, a sprinkle of the challenging Baby Souls-like gameplay of Jedi Fallen Order, and the urgency of what a one-shot camera and 'Ragnarok' subtitle imply.

Instead, it's basically just Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy redo. Same kind of ragtag motley crüe. Similar late 2000s PC wallpaper aesthetic. Similiar kind of after school special writing and tone. Similiar repetitive gameplay. Same meta fakeout credits scene at one point.

My expectations aside, playing this just felt like a chore. The way the gameplay loop is set up. Get some dialogue about how killing is bad. Leap over a rock. Press O to shimmy through a wall. Swing a weapon to nonchalantly dismember some googly monsters while your companions tell you if you're on fire or not. Leave combat arena. Do a light puzzle, get a shiny do-dad. Repeat.

And sure, that's generally how video games go. But because of the slavish devotion to the one shot camera, the game has this very long, drawn out feel. The in-game walk n talks are expository dumps and always feels calculated and robotic, never naturalistic anf in step with the rhythm of the game. The fast travel feels that way too, always timed to end when the convo dies. And the game just feels like it's artificiality padded, all the little elemental puzzles in my way feel there to keep me around another hour. There's no fluidity to the combat.

This would he fine for me if the story was good but it's just as rigid and cliche as the game itself. No surprises. Every line that's walked feels like the perfect script one writes in their head when one imagines themselves after the therapy the plan to take one day. Kratos' authentic edge has been smoothed completely out. He says all the right things and feels all the right things. Atreus misbehaves but all in the good ways one would like their rebellious child to misbehave. Sure, he strays from the path, but he's quick to see the err of his ways and reign himself back in. Freya's rage toned down as well, and what could have been an interesting dramatic web to untangle becomes just another edge sanded away to make room for a simplistic stop the bad man story. The bad man being Odin, another character completely underwritten. There's just no edge to any of this. It feels utterly without consequence.