ELO

I need to try that after I make my way through Planescape. I started BG1, but it just didn’t jibe with me all that much, which apparently is true for a lot of people. I probably should’ve just jumped to BG2.

Yikes. What a precipitous fall that studio has taken… This sounds antithetical to the most abject degree. The majority of people that spend time playing mobile games and brain-rotting their way through tiktok are more likely than not just going to swipe their way through the dialogue options and just walk around revachol until they are exasperated by all the reading.

@Zagorath I did but I couldn’t get into it and quit so early that I didn’t even see the save function.

Broadly speaking, I enjoy stealth in games as long as it’s implemented correctly and doesn’t break the game or function poorly and leave you at a disadvantage. Despite the many qualms I have with tlou2, the added mechanic of going prone and all the upgrades associated with stealth was quite fun—and, of course, the functionality of the bow and arrow, and how you can conserve ammo. Parsing an area with dogs and navigating their heightened scent through long grass and deciding when to pick off certain enemies or ninja though is tremendously fun for me.

Desperados III and Shadow Tactics are two other stealth games that I love that use a design similar to The Commandos series. You can navigate through their detailed environments deciphering a path through on your own, using whichever abilities your party has to your advantage. I think the ninja/feudal Japan game world fits better with Shadow Tactics (I also prefer the characters) but Desperados III has just as good, if not better level design.

To add a somewhat weird one, I’ll say a good save feature. Saving with an ink ribbon in RE was so freaking awesome—especially in regards to how it adds a level of complexity to item management. Another cool example that doesn’t add anything to gameplay but was neat: ICO and how you save your game with Yorda on the couch. So wholesome; I can hear the music in my head, even.

E: Also, Demon’s Souls’ character and world tendency mechanics were so incredibly imaginative. The fact that you can unknowingly die too many times in human form, turn an area into black world tendency, and get eviscerated by black phantoms for seemingly no reason is wildly brutal and awesome.

Man, I feel exactly the same way. Litterboxd has the most obnoxious, effusive reviews of that film, acting like it is the most groundbreaking film ever. Inglourious basterds, Death Proof, and Kill Bill was like his last stride of phenomenal film making IMO. Everything after that has been edgelord garbage for me…

The OG Dead Space completely blew my mind back in the day and probably is still the game to frighten me the most, but I tried to replay it—twice—and dropped it because of how much worse the controls felt than what I remembered. The juking necromorphs were much more irritating to dismember on replay. I thought about getting the remake but people say the controls are the same; and regardless, that’s my own issue with the AI, not really the controls…

I don’t normally care for roguelikes but I think I’ve put more hours into Noita than any other—and I’ve never even made it very far at all. I just panic my way through hoping I chose a good way down and don’t have the dumbest wand in existence.

I think the only game I played for the first time during this year was Disco Elysium. And, like many others, I was wowed. I won’t devolve into purple prose or string together a maelstrom of superlatives, so I’ll just say this with possible slight spoilers:

Despite starting and stopping the game after being lambasted by the immediate consequences of my character’s deplorable, ethanol-fueled behavior that hit way too close to home, I finally came back to it with the utmost enthusiasm. Harry’s abject level of rock bottom that hits you over the head as soon as you start the game was so disturbing for me as someone with similar struggles. The helplessness to change your sorry state and to win over your partner’s approval was so affecting. It makes me wonder how many people in the throes of addiction picked this up and put it down immediately from getting too triggered.

There is so much I would love to just go on and on about so I’ll just hit some aspects that really stand out for me. One thing that I loved, so freaking much, was the wondrously imaginative nomenclature. One of the biggest killers for my immersion into a work of fiction is the vapid or lazy naming of the world—which is sadly often. I mean, come on: Revachol, Insulindian isola, Graad… Harry’s rank as “double yefreitor” or all the character paths like “Electrochemistry”… I thought it was all so very inspired. Never mind the incredible inner dialogue of each upgrade character type—Half Light’s biting dialogue is totally savage, Shivers prose of the world, Inland Empire’s unhinged musings… unreal.

I went on much longer than I meant to so I’ll just say the game world is just as inspired. It is enigmatically dystopian to the most agonizing degree. Which honestly felt just as alluring as deeply distressing for all the neat people you come across. And to segue to the last point of the characters/VAs: what a glorious menagerie of souls… I fell in love with some, wrinkled my nose at others, and found myself enraged at a few.

Hard to not write a novel, but what a freaking game.

I’d also give it up to Carhartt. As someone who has worked his entire life in the tree business, they are pretty freaking tough. I switched to crewneck, though; got tired of the kangaroo pouch filling with sawdust. One caveat: the sizing skews large—substantially, IMO. At least when the fit says “loose,” in any case.