It's kind of the "Free Bird" of video games. It's thematically thin, but just fatalitic enough to feel poetic. It's a cornerstone of modern American AAA games the way Free Bird is a cornerstone of 70s rock. Both a very much for Your Dad. And its legacy is ultimately tied to its vastness.

Just as Free Bird goes on and on and crescendos with a long guitar solo, so does Red Dead Redemption go on and on and then crescendos spectacularly... although crescendo is the wrong word. This isn't a game that leads to a big, violent set piece, but rather leads a series of quiet domestic chores as you reacclimate to life around the family farm. But in contrast to how loud much of the preceding game is, it feels a bit like a crescendo, like an inverted guitar solo.

I do wish this game wasn't so cartoonish. It feels like a game that could easily bare more of its soul. Red Dead Redemption 2 certainly comes closer to doing that. But here, just about every mission from after you leave Bonnie's ranch until you get back to Blackwater is filled with nonsense comic characters, with a few exceptions (Marshal, Landon, Luisa). Nothing wrong with having a sense of humour but in a game that's attempting to be as sombre and "authentic" as this is, the stereotypes just feel lazy and insecure.

Anyway. Good ending. I liked riding around the old west. And when I first played this I wasn't a very big gamer and it spurred 16 year old me on. I still have a poster of Bonnie on the wall of my old room. I don't know that I'll ever be able to NOT see through all of this game's warts.

Narratively it feels like a bit of waste and like that meme of the picture of the horse that begins super detailed and evolves into a stick figure. The detective side of the game isn't very fleshed out. And then the ending throws all these big cyberpunk themes at you and gives you no real time to grapple with them. It's like someone tapped over last 90 minutes of Blade Runner to record the last 30 minutes of Ghost in the Shell.

I am not going to complain though. Visually striking and I dig that it's confident enough in itself to throw so much vivid imagery at you at every turn. Having just played Thirty Flights of Loving, this feels like the ideal AA or AAA version of that. Maybe it's ultimately too long to really hold up. But the ideal AA game, imo, should be this - a super polished and impressive looking 4-6 hour game full of sick images.

Much of Red Dead Redemption's most sincere moments exist in this Treehouse of Horror esque DLC.

Abigail bantering with her son, Jack, asking that when he returns after University to have spare her - "an old crone" - some pity when he's kicking her off of him in the street.

The silent look John gives Bonnie - and her silent, mournful acceptance - over her father's zombification.

The little way the nuns laugh when John calls the Mother Superior "sister".

The conversation John has with the 15 year old girl Millicent after saving her from some zombies. She says the curse is her fault for kissing a boy she isn't betrothed to. John reassures her if their sins are the cause, he has more blame than her.

These don't sound like much on paper. Nor are they numerous. But in a game full cheeky zombie humour - it's the kind of zombie game where characters can play around and have fun with the slow, half-witted zombies - these really stand out to me. And they even stand out compared to the main game, which I don't think has enough of these moments.

The reveal for the zombie curse in this game too is quite nice. I thought the game was just reusing a certain NPC model and I thought nothing of it and then, lol, the ending kind of minorly blew my mind for a second. Nothing to write home about but I dug it.

As a side note: I bought this in 2013 and only played it now. That eight years is the longest I've gone from owning a game to starting one. I wish I wasn't so afraid of zombie games and played it sooner.

trauma as primary subtext, or just 'text', needs to go away. shoo. vanish. or at least the horror community need to find another topic from the giant fishbowl of pain they mine for stories, because then you wind up with this: a game about a man with like, let's see... one-two-three-four-potentially five or six instigating traumas. two of them are so identical it genuinely feels like a mistake that they both made it into the game. criticising this game for doing a poor-to-damaging job of representing mental illness and trauma victims is giving it too much credit because it feels like a game whose writer fell asleep at the wheel and crashed through a convenience store. ignorance might not seem like a good defence but the intent seems harmless, driven by cliches and broad trends/modern conventions rather than intentionally calculating and cold.

on the flipside, i can't help but just vibe with the kind of horror design bloober are aiming to make. this feels like a better version of what resident evil 7 thought it was. the ending is maybe too painfully long and the game's moral and stealth systems seem broken and boring respectively. however, i love taking solitary walks in a big, beautiful scary forest. the monsters in the game are barely visible and present but terrifying as hell, genuinely feels like the woods themselves are attacking you. there's virtually no combat aside from a torch which i like. bloober's penchant for using video games to push physical spaces to insane proportions is on show once again too. a forest can become a warzone in a blink of an eye. a sudden burst of light can turn night into day. the blair witch house can be an insane horror maze. i love this shit, i can't deny it.

and the support the dog the game gives you. it's such a great catharsis. the dog affords the player almost the same level of comfort he offers the main character. you never feel alone or abandoned with him by your side. bullet is his name and he's one of the all-time video game pets.

i don't think bloober are capable of crafting a rich, compelling narrative. if anything, they're doing the opposite. but i do think they have a good head for horror design philosophy and can are making some of the richest visual horror games around. they're like the zack snyder/michael bay of horror games: dumb as a bag of bricks, but man they know to craft an image or two.

conceptually, i can see this being a hit at parties, where most people are already buzzed for the evening, as it's something one of the gamer friends can suggest that won't be too burdensome. maybe take 20 minutes to try and puzzle through it before getting distracted by trish taking her top off or joey falling over trying to wear a lampshade for a hat. it's the 2021 equivalent of, idk...twister.


but man, the story underneath it all: LMAOOOO.

it has one nice moment where you sit down for desert and dance in the living room. but once more, video games prove themselves incapable of approaching romance or domestically earnestly, and what unfolds is an unintentionally hilarious melodrama on par with the room.

i often wonder where the AA/AAA games about motherhood are. and while technically this is a game about siblings, the way both Amicia's brother, Hugo, and also occasionally young budding alchemist, Lucas, huddle around her during certain sections where she has to illuminate a path through a plague of rats with a torch felt really maternal to me. it's also really rare for a game with a female protagonist to be so devoid of paternal/male figures too. i think that's what makes playing feel so fresh to me (even if it's not the freshest concept outside of games).

i really fell for this game's emotional tricks. the way it throws you into a bleak, terrifying world and then - like a flower blooming in the mud, blood and shit of a corpse-ridden battlefield - gives way to these really relieving moments of young teen characters bonding as they clutch onto each other (figuratively and literally) through the hell of it all. i think the game really nails those little quiet moments between stealthing passed inquisition guards and piles of swarming carnivorous rats, there's often a real personality to them (sometimes they offer levity, sometimes, as wit Melie, you can feel a genuine tension that exists beyond merely being your new BFF).

odd note: but i appreciate that i didn't have to collect any journals (i don't know why that stood out to me). but the "environment storytelling" is mostly the actual environment, a few npcs maybe, but there's like no like walls of text or little notes left lying around. made the game feel more in the moment, more urgent and the world by extension less artificially constructed (even if by the end what it's doing with the waves of rats is some insane out of this world shit... game kind of goes too far there i think but oh well).

also appreciate that murder in this game - while painted as a necessary evil via lines like "there was no other way" - isn't completely written off as just another wanton act of regular video game violence. the first two men you kill feels genuinely harrowing. likewise there are moments where you have a "choice" to kill/let someone die and while there's no morality system characters may remark upon it and in those moments you can feel Amicia grappling with her actions. it made me wish the game put more thought into non-violent combat and scaled back the amount of encounters where you 100% have to brain a guard with a rock/sic rats on them (and by the end the game feels like it just said fuck it, kill everyone). a missed opportunity but possibly because of how considered it felt at other times.

I love it formally and mechanically. It's like Dear Esther meets God of War, which is pretty cool. It's all light combat, environmental puzzles and straight up story (almost entirely voiceover). In a lot of ways it's my ideal game set up.

It's weird though because what it reminds me most of is the movie, The Revenant, which I hated. A lot of long takes. A lot of staring down the lens. A lot of mud and blood and shit. A lot of "harrowing anguish". And I don't know what it means for me that when a game does something a movie I hated did, I actually dig it (The Last of Us 1 and 2 kind of similiar). My only guess is because games are steeped in certain (very teen-friendly) aesthetics and tropes that when something kind of breaks through those barriers I get carried away.

Like this is sort of the inverse of God of War. God of War presents on the face a very literal fantasy world, where mythology is vibrant and alive. But all the gore and violence is still cartoonish. None of the characters feel like real people. Even in 2018's God of War, it's basically just an R-rated MCU movie. And the stakes... aren't there because it feels so fake.

Whereas Hellblade's reality is our reality. It's all mud and sticks and fire and blood and burnt, gored bodies strewn up all over the world like Christmas decorations. It's more natural and rustic. And the Norse mythology that runs through the game is filtered through dreamscapes/psychosis; it's a formalist unreality that God of War only kind of gets into at the end of III. And Senua is not Kratos. She's vulnerable and alone, and (initially (sigh at an upcoming sequel)) not a console mascot whose fate is kind of predictable. She's more human and relatable.

Where this game falls down for me is... well I don't know if it falls down but what I don't like about it is how it uses mental illness/psychosis as a device to obfuscate backstory. And it doesn't only use it for that. But I couldn't help but feel this game would be better if it were blunter. If Senua's backstory wasn't a puzzle to be revealed over time. If Senua's mental health didn't also skirt into "is she crazy or a genuine soothsayer". Part of this game feels designed to make you google "what was REALLY happening" afterwards.

I don't know, despite -- or maybe because of -- the immediate and showy mental health advisor credit that opens the game, it seems like "mental health" is something they stuck on as a gimmick, like someone's pitch was "what if you play as a crazy person" and it sprang from there. And I don't know if that's the case a all but it's the impression they leave by opening the game that way. And I don't know how much research they did and how much care they put in, but the portrayal was so extra and overwrought and lacking in subtlety it doesn't wind up feeling all that delicate. That credits winds up feeling like insurance.

Despite all that I liked how hopeful the game kind of felt by the end. How much the game recognised your mental health is something that isn't conquered but how equilibrium is learning to live through it and with it.

Part of me wishes this could have just been as scaled down narratively/thematically as it was mechanically. Been more Valhalla Rising, less The Revenant.

all week i have been rewatching the same Conner O'Malley videos on YouTube. in particular, one video compilation from early 2019 named the Howard Schultz tapes. in it, O'Malley appears shirtless, at various active dumpsites (or construction sites). with workers often busy in the background, O'Malley (also wearing a new era Deadpool cap with 'Howard Schultz 2020' graffiti'd across in red marker pen) begins aggressively and manically (and very loudly) pleading to - and demanding Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to run for president.

O'Malley appears sweaty, unhinged, sometimes in a Master Chief helmet. he screams completely normal things like "we want medicare for dogs" ,"if we put a starbucks to Kabul the war in the Afghan will be over", and "please send me and my family a monthly envelope of pills". he declares himself, in an extremely murderous growl, a "slut for schultz" as he pounds his chest like Marky Mark in Fear. he laughs like a starving hyena. gradually, over the course of the videos, he appears more and more frantic; he becomes dirtier and dirtier. at one point he is covered in medical equipment. various oozing, bleeding/burn wounds start appearing on his face (these get bigger and smaller, change what side of his face they're on before eventually settling to cover 2/3s of his upper face).


it is a harrowing depiction of a deranged persona desperately seeking validation. it is basically just unfiltered social media comments. but O'Malley turns it into performance art.

eventually, his pleas turn more aggressively sexual. he talks about fucking his boomer friends in a Buick Enclave. he's gagging, awaiting these instructions from Howard Schultz that we, the viewer, presume will never come. then they do, through a forced kidnapping by Starbucks employees. they drag him off into a van and the videos escalate and begin to more vividly resemble Guantanamo Bay esque torture vids as they violently deprogram this avid Schultz devotee.

Eventually they dump O'Malley outside a mall, and the final few minutes of the video are of him walking around in a visible haze, trying to convince random mall shoppers that he is, in fact, normal. a nice normal person. he was weird, but Howard made him normal.

i describe this video in detail for this review because basically the complete lack of chill going on there is the exact same lack of chill going on in Dead Space.

you can't go longer than three minutes without triggering a combat encounter in this game, and triggering a combat encounter is always met with music and sounds that signify that this is THE SINGLE MOST DRAMATIC FUCKING THING in the world. every THREE minutes the game is like this. it can't ever just CHILL. well, there are a couple of moments where the gravity is turned off in an area and you're encouraged to maybe solve a puzzle, but even these moments ARE INFILTRATED with enemies. and all the enemies are gross and loud and like screaming in your FACE aarrrGGH.

most of your weapons are industrial tools. they're loud and clanky. my fave weapon, the ripper blades, sounds like broken glass being mixed in a demonic nine inch nails branded blender. every level in this game is some mix of oozing organic tissue, scattered human limbs, sleek sci-fi surfaces and razor sharp jagged metallic textures that make you feel like you'll need a tetanus shot after playing the game. and they're all lit like a halloween scare room. flickering lights and heavy shadows disguising god's abominations in every corner. graffiti is everywhere, over every surface, even though living people are not. you get the feeling you missed all the cool, demonic orgy action.

although i love that sense of isolation. there are like five speaking characters in this whole game and a handful of suicidal/homicidal NPSs you occasionally encounter. with all this isolation, death and suicide, on top all of JUMP SCARE COMBAT ENCOUNTERS, playing this game alone in my room for four nights (in the middle of a state-wide pandemic lockdown) was a weird trip.

but it's not a bleak game. it's not a power fantasy either. but with all the mining equipment and general atmosphere of feeling like a labourer (every mission is just you taking orders), i found Dead Space captured what my average work week feels like really well. every chapter a new day; every new day met with that cj "aww here we go again" energy (especially heightened by the game's seamlessly directed lack of cuts and cutscenes). isaac's whole existence is to work. he gets no time to chill until the end, and even then, spoilers, not really. the stress and the demons don't just melt away. you get a few minutes to yourself and then plunge right back into the meat grinder.

this one made me appreciate dead space 2 less because this feels like a purer distillation of its core concepts and ideas. would like to play the third one now though, mostly to see if its running theme of women as betrayers is broken, even if I feel dead space'd out and didn't like the combat in the hour of 3 that i played a year ago.

zen and the art of running zombies over with your motorcycle

...wait that doesn't sound right. huh.

feel like this game fundamentally misunderstands its biggest virtue: the zen of riding a motorcycle through picturesque Oregon wilderness. it sort of loses all its charm when you encounter a zombie -- or a "freaker". just sort of reminds me of how tiresome zombies are, especially in a post-apocalyptic setting. ever seen Mad Max? ever read the Road? ever lived through a pandemic? all stuff that evokes the end of the world, none feature zombies.

zombie stories can be fine, i guess, but usually when you're telling a mostly end of the world serious human drama the way this game is, the zombies are simply another faction between the several human ones and the wilderness itself. and this game isn't quite the last of us levels of nature is taking back the planet. this game is set 2 years after the outbreak, not 20. a lot of civilisation still exists in pockets.

i don't know why the zombies really bothered me. at a certain point i did stop noticing them. this isn't resident evil or dying light, they really are just background noise. in fact, for about 25 hours, i didn't even engage this game's big selling point: the hordes. i completely ignored them. and when i had to face them in late-game story missions, i simply failed the missions enough times in order to skip them because i was so not interested. i cleared zero infestation zones as well.

this game really failed to engage me on the zombie front in any meaningful way. it did spark my interest with its human characters tho. at least in act 2. i stopped playing this game for about 2 years because the zombie stuff bored me to tears and the early area characters you encounter are all various degrees of boring and despicable. you really have to push forward to its second act camp - lost lake - until you begin encountering oddly compelling characters like Rikki and Iron Mike, and even antagonist Skizzo.

i say "oddly" compelling because this is a game with characters named Iron Mike and Skizzo. its lead character is a devoted backwards baseball cap wearing former biker named Deacon St. John - one of the most ridiculous and beautiful character names in gaming history. his best friend is Boozer.

i wouldn't say Days Gone gets you to care about any of its characters, not too much. they're not loveable. you're not going to find much sparking fan art of them. but what i like about most of the characters in this game from act 2 onward is how real they're portrayed. in similiar open world games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Ghost of Tsushima or any modern Far Cry or Just Cause, you're going to find a litany of stock archetypes; charmless sidekicks and maybe only slightly more charming but redundant quest givers. Days Gones has limited dramatic ambitions. it's mostly trying its darndest to evoke cable TV shows like Sons of Anarchy and the Walking Dead. but that's a step up from most video games, imo. this game has characters who feel closer to real people than most, and for that i do respect this game. narratively, it does wind up forcing these characters down some really cliched paths, but thems the breaks.

i really wish this game's open world busywork was more character focused. it's such a shame to have these rich vistas, these rich characters, and then litter the game with thankless, mindless empty busywork. clear out these zombies. chase these idiots on bikes. very few scenes of you just riding with a companion and getting to know anyone personally. especially because Deacon is the loner/drifter at heart, who's clearly keeping people out but obviously the game wants to say "but he has a heart of gold". but does he? he does wind up spending most of the game alone, listening to a truther on the radio and then yelling at the radio. so many exchanges he has in this game with another human, he's curt, rude and dismissive. he feels like he was written by two different people. he feels like all his voice lines were re-recorded for cutscenes because in-game he's a real jerk.

part of me wanted to end really positive on this game but it's kind of hard when it ends by kind of walking back on all the goodwill it built just to get its very easy and cheap conflict-centered ending. there's a really interesting moral choice made by Iron Mike about halfway through that the game just winds up using to slap him in the face with that felt incredibly misguided. at the end of the day, it just felt like it wanted to justify all of the libertarian/truther bullshit it had been yelling back at for a majority of the game.

it's a game about the frontier. and frontier justice is rewarded. a lot of this game reminded me of a non-descript western. Deke's bike is his horse. his search for his wife Sarah not too dissimilar for Ethan Edwards search for Debbie in The Searchers. the hordes of zombies are, well... i don't want to say they're Native Americans, but the game does outright link the hordes of zombies to hordes of refugees so it invites this idea of thinking of the zombies in terms of "savages". it has characters lament how the zombie destruction isn't unlike how tourists used to clog up the idyllic Oregon wilderness. calling them Freakers too sounds like tweakers and the game's radio truther has a rant about the government using drugs to weaken (white) Americans. there are some pretty horrible implications going on here but Days Gone isn't nearly introspective enough to really say anything but it certainly winds up feeling like the libertarian's wet dream in game form.

eh. idk. i hated so much of the gameplay here but i wound up enjoying riding my dumb Aloy from HZD-skinned bike around maybe the second best looking video game American wilderness (behind RDR2) and thinking about how this game features one of the better wife characters. it's a rare good wifeguy game.

thinking about how hard it is sometimes to convince people that certain movies - especially blockbusters - are, in fact, actually high art. like Mad Max: Fury Road, or Titanic. people are so conditioned to view certain genres through particular critical lenses. i run into a lot of people whose "movie of the year" has to be something pristine and traditionally dramatic. there's a similiar phenomenon with pop music. of course, with pop music it's often more a sort of friction that comes from mn who views themselves as macho trying to consider what enjoying music that's typically deemed feminine means. i'll see guys admit they like Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" but only by first allowing it "guilty pleasure" status.

not that blockbuster movies or pop music don't receive their fair dues. Titanic was the highest grossing movie of all time for a while and won like 11 oscars. Taylor Swift dominates the Grammy awards and is maybe the most popular recording artist in the world right now. but often what's "popular" isn't what's considered cool or critically lauded. it's easy to dismiss what's popular as shallow. and sometimes that's absolutely true, some popular things are shallow (see: the MCU or the music of Ed Sheeran). sometimes what's actually popular tho is genuine spectacle.

i think of the Uncharted games in these terms - as the definitive 'pop games'. they basically exist to ship playstation consoles so just about anyone with a ps3 or ps4 has played an Uncharted game. they also review extremely well. uncharted 2, in particular, won a ton of (relatively meaningless) GOTY awards and is the third highest reviewed ps3 game on Metacritic (for what little that's worth). but at the same time, i always get the feeling these games are considered lame by the cool crowd. or even by their own fans. uncharted 2 is lauded, sure, but i rarely see people exalting the blockbuster virtues of Uncharted 3 even though it's like the exact same game (it just can't compete in the shadow of Uncharted 2's train set piece - a stunt that burrowed into gaming folklore first).

after replaying all three mainline Uncharted sequels this year, I can't help but feel the series 1) remains somewhat underrated and 2) get better as it goes. sure, uncharted 4 hinges somewhat on the foundation (and your familiarity with) the ps3 trilogy, but i don't think you need to have strong emotional ties to Nathan and Elena's relationship to appreciate the best A Thief's End has to offer - which is balls-to-the-walls action and the best blockbuster setpieces this side of Hollywood (or Bollywood). if this were a movie, I'd enjoy it no less than I enjoy Fury Road or the recent Mission: Impossible movies or Casino Royale or the work of Steven Spielberg. which at the end of the day is what Uncharted wants to be. it wants to be interactive Indiana Jones. it wants to be James Bond. it wants to be a Michael Bay walking simulator. and the game absolutely is that.

i read an article on Vice from former games critic Ed Smith, written around the release of Uncharted 4, and using a Nathan Drake thumbnail, about how games can't truly be cinematic. the main thrust of this argument was how crucial editing is to the essence of cinema and how games can't -- or certainly "cinematic" AAA games (like Uncharted) don't -- use editing techniques in gameplay. and i think i agree and calling games like Uncharted 4 cinematic would be a bit silly. but i don't think they have to be cinematic to be blockbusters. and i think the Uncharted series has completely nailed the gaming blockbuster formula. it's a bit of a narrow, somewhat linear formula. it consists primarily of light platforming, some shooting, some waking and talking sections and occasionally a puzzle. but that's honestly all i want out of a game. i love an on the rails action. when it works, the way it works in Uncharted 4, where you're jumping off falling buildings or being dragged behind a jeep through the mud while simultaneously shooting other vehicles, I feel more alive and exhilarated than I do bashing a wave of enemies with a sword or exploring some random empty rooms farming for resources.

...

random notes.

uncharted 4 is one of the most striking games i've ever played. a level of detail fidelity almost unmatched. pouring one out for the devs who crunched themselves into retirement making this (weird thing to say, idk)

i went into this with the original Amy Hennig pan for the game in my head - a game where Nathan's long lost brother would be an antagonist and the game would counter its ludonarrative dissonance criticisms by taking a gun away from Nathan for half the game. as much as i'd love to see Uncharted actually tackle and interrogate what Nathan's violence actually means instead of rewarding you a with a Ludonarrative Dissonance trophy for killing 1,000 enemies, i think this is the first game in the series to really limit your gunplay. there a lot more slower, walking and talking sections here. some uneventful driving sections. maybe 1/3rd of the game you don't actually shoot anyone. it's a step in the right direction. i kind of view those criticisms though as moot when so much of the game's fiction is steeped in hollywood tradition. it feels weird to criticise nathan drake for killing 100 goons when i don't criticise john wick or any harrison ford character for doing the same. and yes it's because nathan is a loveable rogue but, eh, i kind of come out of my replay of this series, with this questions in my mind, thinking it ultimately doesn't matter even if i wish they could do a better job at addressing in general.

i also appreciate Sam Drake's conceptualisation as the assohle loser brother more than the evil vengeful type too. he's a deadbeat loser, he's nathan if he didn't have an Elena.

it's got some nice deserts. the game never really takes you there though. it's almost afraid to guide you across its map, an issue Odyssey and Valhalla wouldn't have. feels like a huge waste of space.

i can see how the game wanted you to explore because you it really requires you to grind up enough levels to actually complete it. this is a non-issue if you wind up with an XP boost, however, which I ended up using because I found the combat so tedious and utterly unrewarding. of course this also winds up turning the game into a sluggish equally unrewarding linear experience. so like, even though this only took me 20 hours to finish, it was spread out over two years and i had maybe 2 hours of fun with the whole thing. not a great sign when I am left yearning for Valhalla's endlessness.

Bayek and Aya make an interesting couple, maybe one of gaming's most compelling, realistic romances. very rare i think to find a couple in a game who genuinely feel like friends. theirs is a strained relationship. they reminded me of my parent in a weird way: two people, who've known each other since childhood, destined to have been together on one hand, but also destined to be separated. it's a shame their relationship takes a massive backseat to an Assassin's Creed plot and the game rarely if ever finds a way to actually intertwine the two in a gameplay in meaningful ways.

i guess what's most interesting about AC Origins is still its setting. the whole series is built on iconography that's practically begging for pyramids and tombs. the whole Isu stuff feels particularly Egyptian. I remember when one of the games ended with a CGI scene of ancient Adam and Eve escaping some area and the whole thing felt like a hype trailer for an inevitable Egypt game down the road. that this is their ancient Egypt game feels like a downer to me, though. like that's it? i guess. it's cool to get a AAA game completely set in Africa though. i remember being disappointed that there was no Ancient Rome AC game but I guess i appreciate ubisoft's one run at being less Eurocentric for once and taking Egypt over Rome (even if maybe you get the sense it's just because the Egyptian mythology is more of a standout than Roman mythology esp considering the Greek pantheon was coming right after). wish they just did more with Egypt: the politics, the people, the land. it's all just AC window dressing and the whole game feels like a test run for Odyssey (which in comparison is the more well--rounded experience).


the best thing this game accomplishes is making me want to pick up a history textbook.

it took me 51 runs over 9 months to escape just once.

it was my most monumental gaming accomplishment since defeating Isshin in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

that's enough for me for the moment. i'd love to see out more of the story. every character in this game is hot and interesting. sucks huge amounts of shit that i, a massive gaming loser, have to navigate a roguelike to experience it all though. it reminds me of the one big shitty thing about all games: they'll never be as accessible as a book or a movie. want to fast forward to your fave part? sorry loser, fuck off. this is games, baby. 😑😑😑