This week was seven hundred years long and featured hospitals and shingles— the disease, not the roof covering–, neither of which I was directly involved in, but I’m tired and utterly refuse to brain in any significant capacity right now. Luckily I have massive megacorporations providing entertainment to soothe me. So: two brief mini-reviews.
I have watched both episodes of The Mandalorian that have been released, and it’s pretty solid. It’s definitely Star Wars– the series not feeling right was my second biggest fear behind the fact that it was going to secretly be about Boba Fett, which it isn’t– and while I wasn’t sold on the music or the humor after the first episode I was right in suspecting that I just needed to get used to it. My favorite thing about the show so far is that it subtly reinforces the idea that Mandalorians aren’t actually the big tough badasses that Star Wars have been pretending they are for years– Boba Fett got killed by a blind man with a stick and a monster that couldn’t move, and the Mandalorian (who still doesn’t have a name) gets his ass kicked by Jawas in the second episode. I mean, it’s hilarious, but still. I don’t know that this is worth getting Disney+ for all by itself, but if you’re a Star Wars sort of person you probably already have your subscription and have watched the show already.
I have beaten this now, and everything I said in my early impressions post still holds: this is basically a Fallout game, only more Westerny and less post-apocalyptic, and with Mass Effect/Dragon Age-style companions. If you like that sort of thing, you’ll get along with it perfectly well, and unlike the last Dragon Age game I was actually able to finish it without dying of boredom, but I’m starting to think that unless someone does something to radically shake up how this genre works I think I’m going to tap out of it now, because long quest chains and ceaseless fetch quests just aren’t fun for me anymore. I damn near turned the game off when one character literally asked me to go ask another character if a poster he’d ordered had arrived yet, and I accidentally screwed up a quest late in the game involving modeling for an NPC and when I looked up what might have happened had I not messed it up I realized that there were 10,000 more things to do for it and I’d have been howling and throwing shit at the walls by the end of it. It’s mostly well-written and entertaining beyond that, but this game demands a bit more patience than I actually have available to me right now. I might go through it once more to see how some quests might go when I make different choices, but it won’t be happening for a while.
Part of me feels like reviewing this game is pointless, because it came out way the hell back in 2016, but I never pay attention to the year books came out before I write about them, so to hell with it: I first downloaded Salt and Sanctuary for my PS4 a couple of months ago, played it for a couple of hours, and for whatever reason it felt unreasonably hard and didn’t click. I jumped back into it for no good reason a week and a half or so ago, and it immediately proceeded to eat about 20 hours of my life between then and beating it on Sunday. So I’ve been playing quite a bit of it later, and watching videos about it when I wasn’t playing it. I don’t know why it didn’t hit at first, but maybe running a mage build made all the difference.
Anyway: S&S is a 2D Soulslike combined with a Metroidvania, which is an utterly impenetrable sentence if you don’t speak fluent Gamer Nerd, so let me unpack it for you: difficult combat, tons of different ways to build your character that will lead to you fighting with anything from magic and giant hammers to whips and guns and scissor-swords, difficult boss encounters, penalties at death, collecting materials (in this case, salt) from defeating enemies that you can use to level up and are lost if you die unless you defeat the beast that killed you, and an absolutely enormous map (that’s only maybe 2/3 of it, if that; I don’t think there’s a complete map on the internet anywhere yet, which is unreal) with tons of shortcuts and secrets and replayability and lots of backtracking. Combine all that with a seriously cool, unique art style and we have something I’m going to be very into:
It’s an interesting combination of cartoony with gory; killing enemies results in a surprisingly satisfying explosion of blood and body bits, and the overall aesthetic is just Lovecraftian enough that it never got old, although in general I found it a bit too dark a lot of the time– you will be lighting a lot of torches in this game, and there’s a particular enemy that lives in completely dark areas and keeps a light on its forehead like some sort of bipedal angler fish, and the way my build worked out I often had to choose between being able to see and being able to attack it, because you can’t hold a torch and a two-handed weapon at once, and all of my weapons were two-handed. Which got complicated.
Another thing the game does well is the addition of what it calls Creeds, which are basically your character’s religion; there are about seven of them, three or four of which are available at the start of the game. When you find a safe area in the game (a “sanctuary”, where you can level up and there aren’t any enemies) sometimes they are already dedicated to a creed and sometimes you can choose what creed to dedicate them to; you collect items throughout the game that can let you add things like blacksmiths and vendors and fast-travel points to sanctuaries, but you can only add them to sanctuaries that belong to your creed. Sanctuaries can be converted between creeds, too (and you can change yours,) but that can lead to violence if done too many times to the same creed. Connecting vendors to a collectible item leads to a bit of strategic thinking about where to place them, but if you find all of the guides you can put a guide at nearly every sanctuary, so it’s not as big of a deal: more important is that the vendors and such also add bonuses to areas, so you get a salt bonus if you add a Stone Leader at a sanctuary, for example.
I just finished my first run, and it’s distinctly possible that I’m about to dive right in with a second, although I’ve got my eyes on a couple of other games too. But any game I play through twice before heading off to something else is pretty special. If you’ve found that your tastes in games line up with mine in the past, check this out.
It turns out that the game has three of what I’m going to call “epilogue” missions; the interweb is fond of calling them secret endings but they just give them to you as regular missions if you keep playing, so it’s not like you can miss them so long as you don’t quit after the credits. (Which I wouldn’t blame you for, for the record.) Two of them are just nice character bits, but the third was 1) unexpected enough and 2) genuinely jarring and scary enough that I’m awarding the entire game an extra (and meaningless) half point to its score.
Then again, if you wait until after the credits for your most original and disturbing moment, maybe that’s a sign that the game really is the perfect 7.0 game, because a fair number of even the folks who finish the game won’t see this.
At any rate, the scene I’m talking about begins just after the 3:00 mark on this video. It probably won’t have the impact it should if you haven’t played through the game but still. Even if you don’t know what’s happened in the game, if nothing else you’ll get a good idea of why I praised the facial animation by watching this.
After spending a couple of months playing almost nothing but Sekiro, and hitting yet another boss– the very last one I have to beat– and getting stuck for several days again, I decided that I needed to take a break and go back for the last few achievements later. Enter Days Gone, a game I’d been aware of for months and months but which poor reviews (and, well, Sekiro) had kept me from picking up. I found it $20 off and off to the races.
And, well. I beat it last night– or at least the credits rolled, although there’s still some stuff to do– so I might as well talk about it a little bit. As it turns out, Days Gone is damn near the Platonic ideal of the 7/10 game– a game that has enough good things about it that I beat it, but enough obnoxious things about it that I’m complaining about something almost the entire time I’m playing it.
Interestingly, this means I have more to say about it than I might have had I really enjoyed it, because the ways this game fails are as fascinating as they are ridiculous. So I may rattle on for a bit. We’ll see.
Let’s start with the good stuff– the game’s basic feedback loop (go here, shoot something, rinse, repeat) is fun. There’s a decent variety of weapons and craftable items, and the game does a pretty good job of making everything useful in some scenario or another. Toward the end of the game, where you’re taking on huge hordes of what the game calls Freaks and everyone else on Earth calls zombies, there’s a great frenetic poetry to the way you have to set traps, use the environment to your advantage, and know when to best use everything in your inventory. The largest hordes have 450+ zombies in them. Taking them all out is awesome.
Okay, so, it’s a zombie game, right? What else is it? Well, really, not much, except for the inevitable post-apocalyptic Maybe The Humans Are The Real Problem shit. You shoot an equal number of people as you do zombies, if not more, although you don’t see the hordes and people tend to shoot back rather than just chase you forever. You play as the rather extravagantly named Deacon St. John, a biker. Now that you know he is a biker and that he is the protagonist of a video game you know his entire personality. At the very beginning of the game, you see St. John put his injured wife onto a helicopter, give her a ring, and tell her that he wants it back. The game then jumps ahead two years; the apocalypse has apocalypsed and Deacon never found his wife. Insofar as the game has a plot, it’s “Deacon tries to find his wife.” It’s one of those games where you know from the jump that there’s no way they won’t be reunited by the end; it doesn’t even count as a spoiler to me because it’s so obvious from literally the first few minutes of the game.
An interesting thing: the zombies may as well be aliens. There’s constant talk about a virus, but at no point during the game do any of the characters display even the slightest concern about becoming a zombie or contracting the virus. There’s no concern about blood, or being eaten, or being bitten, or really anything at all, and you never come close to that zombie apocalypse trope where you tearfully shoot someone in the head to keep them from turning. There are a couple of points where people burn bodies to “keep the freaks from getting them,” but there’s not a moment of concern about anyone catching the virus, ever. It’s weird. There’s a brief scene near the end where (this also will not surprise you) Deacon’s wife figures out that her company had something to do with the apocalypse starting, but it’s so underwritten that it’s barely worth taking seriously. How Everything Started gets barely any attention at all.
The game also has a major problem with Idiot Plot, where characters keep secrets from each other for no particular reason other than that the writers thought they should, and it never makes any damn sense. For example, this is a decent look at Deacon’s neck:
He has his wife’s name, Sarah, on one side of his neck, and the word Forever on the other side of his neck. Late in the game there will be a scene where Deacon joins a militia camp where he believes he might find his wife. He gets into a conversation with a character about his previous life and they discuss his wife. The other character asks him her name.
“Beth,” he says, after transparently thinking about it for a moment.
Dude you have the phrase “Sarah Forever” tattooed on your fucking neck.
Not only will no one ever mention this to him, once he finds Sarah, neither of them tell anyone they’re married, he continues the “Beth” thing, and the fact that her first name is Sarah and they are conspicuously associating a lot never comes up. Plus, the guy he’s talking to in the first conversation is wearing the ring that he gave Sarah, a fact that he does mention to him once but which does not receive anywhere near the follow-up that you think it might.
A compliment: the game has amazing facial animation, and watching Deacon and Sarah in particular have conversations is incredible. The voice acting is pretty good except when it isn’t– I’ll get to this in a bit– and while the load screens before the copious cutscenes are obnoxious the direction, for lack of a better word, is generally pretty compelling. The score and the sound effects are quite well-done as well. Again, I’m complaining, but I did put 30+ hours into this thing before I beat it, and chances are there’s still gonna be a few more hours before I get tired of killing hordes.
(Also, and I’ve never said this about a video game before, and I wouldn’t even mention it had the game not commented on it, but … Sarah has an amazing ass. Like, there are a couple of cutscenes where you have to walk behind her for a while. They put some work into animating this woman’s posterior. Forgive me; it needed to be said.)
Let’s see, what else? I mentioned the voice acting. If anything, the game’s biggest gameplay weakness is that damn near every mission boils down to “Go here, and kill everything that moves.” Every mission. Sometimes you’re killing Freaks and sometimes you’re killing people, but it’s every mission. Now, I play lots of video games, and I’m used to the notion that the main character in every game is going to have killed thousands of people by the time the game is over. Days Gone does this thing with Deacon, though, where by about the 1/3 point of the game I really felt like someone ought to have sat him down and had him retire to gardening for the rest of his life.
Deacon is really really angry, guys, and he really likes murder. The shit that he mutters to himself while he clears out an ambush camp or a Ripper enclave is fucking creepy, and I’ve never played a game where I so fervently felt like the main character needed serious psychological intervention. He talks about murder so much, while murdering, that it just keeps driving it home to you that, most of the time, these are people he’s killing, and it creates this weird sort of guilt about all the killing you’re doing. Yeah, yeah, I know, just a video game, but … man, this guy really likes murder. And not in a fun slapsticky sort of way.
(I spend five minutes trying to find an appropriate YouTube video, and fail, but check this out.)
Also, you spend far too much time having to listen to far-right political nut job bullshit than I want to have to do in something I paid for. Way, way too much time.
Anyway. I can’t give this an unqualified recommendation, but once it’s down to $19.99? Grab it if you’ve got a hole in your gaming schedule you want to fill.
I took a shower after getting up this morning, as I do every day before work, and I had a coughing fit after my shower, as also happens damn near every day. I don’t know why this happens, but it’s been a feature of my life since college: finish shower, coughing fit.
The coughing fit going on for so long that I puke was new, though. As I have A Rule about these things, I quickly amended my half day off because of Ongoing Medical Disaster to a full day, took the boy to school, hoping that no further esophageal eruptions would occur, and took a nap. Then I got back up, finished reading a book, and beat a video game. Then I puked again, right after beating the video game.
It was some kind of day, I’ll tell you what.
I have read one Sam Sykes book in the past. Well, started. His The City Stained Red bounced off of me hard, in the sort of way that leaves you suspecting you’re being unfair to the book somehow, but I like him enough on Twitter to be willing to give him a second chance, and man, am I glad I did, because Seven Blades in Black is a monstrously good book despite the terrible, Monty-Python-esque cover. It’s nearly 700 pages long and I blew through it in about three days because I didn’t want to put it down– and right up to the last 100 pages I was pretty convinced I was reading what would eventually become my favorite book of the year.
Unfortunately, the book could probably stand to be about a hundred pages shorter, and this may be a consequence of having read it so fast, but a number of its tropes started feeling really damn repetitive toward the end and it started to wear on me a tiny bit. This still leaves it good enough that it’s a solid candidate for the end-of-year list, but I liked the first 5/6 more than I did the end. This is gritty, violent, profane fantasy literature that somehow manages to be high-magic and low fantasy at the same time, not a combination that I see all that often (or would have thought possible before reading this) and the most amazing thing about it is that Sykes makes it feel so easy. I don’t know his process at all, but this feels like it was written in seven or eight ten-hour bursts over the course of seven or eight days, and in case it’s not clear I mean that as a compliment. For all I know, he agonized over it for a really long time, but on the page it just feels … I dunno, I don’t want to repeat “easy” again but the whole thing just comes off as really organic somehow, like it wrote itself.
And I love Sal the Cacophony, even if she looks ridiculous on the cover. Check the book out.
I finally finally finally finally finally finally finally fucking beat Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice today, a game I started playing approximately six years ago, and no shadows die at any point in the game and in fact the word “shadow” is never uttered once anywhere by anyone and it’s the worst subtitle in the history of video games but that’s okay because Sekiro might be my favorite game ever right now. That said there are four endings and I just got one of them, and the one I got involved beating a different final boss than the other three do, so … I’ve got some more fucking work to do, because I’m getting every damn trophy this game has to offer and no one and nothing is going to stop me.
You should buy this game and you should dedicate your life to getting good at it because it is insanely Goddamned difficult and it will break you down and make you cry and force you to play on its terms no matter what you want to do. And you will do it anyway because the game is just that fuckin’ good. 15/10 would cry again. Probably will tonight, as a matter of fact, because I have two active save files on two different last bosses and I only beat one of them today. Time to go back to the other one.
I’ve mentioned I’m playing through Dark Souls 3 again. This was my third playthrough. The first one, I hit a wall and had to stop playing because I couldn’t come even close to beating any of the game that was left. The second was as a strength-focused build and, while I beat the game, there was still one boss I couldn’t come close to killing no matter how hard I tried. He was optional, though, so I could just skip fighting him and still beat the game.
I was playing as a sorcerer for this run, for the first time. Playing as a sorcerer in Dark Souls 3 is kinda strange. You’re frankly just not that tough for most of the game until all the sudden at the very end you turn into a monster. My wife went to bed early last night, and I’d gotten to the point where I had three bosses left to beat the game– Lorian & Lothric, who I’d beaten once with the strength build, the final boss (ditto) and the fucking bullshit-ass Nameless King up there and his bullshit-ass dragon that he rides in on that you have to kill first. I had never beaten the Nameless King. Never even really come close. I told my wife I was gonna take a couple of stabs at the last couple of bosses and then come to bed, hoping that I’d get through one of them in half an hour or so and then make a sensible decision.
I beat Lorian & Lothric on my second try, and frankly I only lost to them the first time because I got overconfident and sloppy, and Dark Souls is a series where the most basic enemy in the game will demolish you if you stop paying attention for a minute. It took over an hour of trying on my last build to get through them and I still felt like I’d gotten kinda lucky at the end there.
“Screw it,” I thought, “I’ve been playing for less than ten minutes and I’m still not ready for bed.” (In my defense, it was barely nine– I wasn’t kidding when I said Bek had gone to bed early.) “I’m gonna give the King a try.” Now, this was dangerous– I know what I’m like, and it was entirely possible that I was sentencing myself to a night where I was still up at Goddamned midnight frustrated and tired and still losing to this annoying-ass boss and his annoying-ass dragon over and over again. Because, again, I’ve never beaten this bastard.
And then I demolished his ass– over half my health reserves left– on the first try. And everyone else in the house was in bed, so the proper response to an achievement of this magnitude– tearing my pants off and running around the house yelling swear words while waving said pants over my head– seemed inappropriate. So I just sat there in mild disbelief for a moment, thought “Ah, fuck it,” and went and beat the game. Which also took two tries, but mostly because the last boss does something halfway through the fight that I’d forgotten about and I got way too close and he wasted me.
So, yeah. If you’re a Dark Souls fan? Try a sorcerer build. It won’t come together for a while, but when it finally does? Holy shit.
I am, in general, very skeptical of “give it a chance, it gets good later on” types of arguments for anything I had to spend $60 to get. For $60 you need to be fun in five minutes and you need to stay fun for however long your game ends up being, and I’d rather have a lean, entertaining 30-hour game than a 100-hour game filled with … well, filler.
I’m nonetheless very, very glad I stuck this one out– I just beat it half an hour or so ago, although I’ve left a number of the mop-up tasks for later. I may or may not get back to them.
But: forget the game for a moment. Spider-Man PS4 is one of the best Spider-Man stories I have ever encountered, in any medium. Comics, movies, whatever. And even that, as I said in the piece from earlier today, takes a good long time to get rolling. But once it does … wow. I was in tears during the final act. I’m not gonna bullshit around. I’m a grown-ass man and a video game just made me cry because the story was that good and they get this character that thoroughly. Fucking tears.
And then, the three movie-style stingers after the credits?
*kisses fingers*
Can’t wait for the sequel. And if they put the same people in charge of writing it, I’m not gonna have shit to say about the gameplay. Because with a story this good, I’ll chase fucking pigeons all day if I have to.
Yeah, I know. Another Spider-Man post. Lucky for you, this website’s free.
I’ve quit playing this game forever at least three times now. There are still a number of things about it that are enormously goddamned annoying, most of them related to the endless number of side tasks they put all over Manhattan for you to do. Yes, I know I can ignore these things, but they’ve actually done a really good job of incentivizing hitting every stupid little glowy mark on the map and I’m enough of a completist that I have trouble ignoring shit like this even in games without good incentive systems. I’ve got this game firmly slotted in Witcher 3 territory, another game I quit playing a whole bunch of times, where the shit that annoys me is just never going to stop being annoying and I need to focus on the stuff I like.
… which, holy shit, when this game is firing on all cylinders it is ridiculous. And I got to a point last night where something happened that I absolutely wasn’t expecting to happen at all: the game surprised me. Like, a lot. At about the 70% mark.
That’s not a thing that happens very often.
It’s difficult to balance an open-world game properly, right? These things must be utter hell to code. You want your game to have some sort of main storyline, usually expressed with some sort of discrete mission structure, but you also want your players to explore, so you sprinkle a few dozen enemy bases and a few dozen side missions and a bunch of things that you’ve scattered 40 of around the map for people to find and stuff like that. This game has a mission where, no shit, you’re supposed to find and recapture a dozen pigeons for some random guy. These pigeons fly at the speed of a military jet for some reason. You gotta catch ’em all.
But the thing is, your “main story” missions have to be compelling enough that they get done, but not so compelling that players ignore all the other stuff that you want them to do. You want them to be able to take a couple of hours and go hunt for backpacks or glowy orbs or whatever it is that you’ve scattered fifty of all over the place. This will break immersion if your main missions have a ton of immediacy to them.
And up until the beginning of Act 3, I’d say Spider-Man wasn’t doing a bad job of straddling that line. Do a mission, go find some backpacks, do a mission, clear out a couple of bad guy hideouts, do a mission, find some pigeons, take some pictures of New York landmarks, move on.
And then Act 3 hits, and the criminals at Riker’s Island all break out, and the criminals at the Raft, the nearby superpowered prison, all break out, and all the sudden Electro, Mr. Negative, the Rhino, the Vulture, the Scorpion and Doctor Octopus are all beating the shit out of you at the same time– not that it actually affects gameplay, but Spider-Man mentions fourteen broken bones the morning after escaping the beating– the whole fucking city is on fire and Doc Ock releases a massively contagious bioengineered virus that you quickly find out has already infected half a million people by the time the first mission properly ends.
Also, two of the six supervillains up there spend a big chunk of the game being mentors to Peter Parker, so there’s all kinds of personal angst wrapped up in suddenly discovering they’re evil.
Shit gets really dark, really quick, is what I’m saying, and all the sudden the idea that you’d stop doing missions to catch pigeons stops feeling like a fun diversion and more like criminal negligence.
I had to force myself to quit playing and go to bed last night, and I went several missions in a row back-to-back-to-back just because the conditions the game set up made it impossible for me to believe doing anything else was remotely reasonable. Like, I hope shit goes back to normal soon, because there’s still a couple of pigeons out there that need catching.
(I hate catching pigeons. But I’m going to do it anyway.)
Also, while I’d prefer to have a powered Miles Morales in the game, every single scene between him and Peter has been absolute gold. This game gets Miles really, really well. I want the sequel to star the kid.
Red Dead Redemption 2 came out on Friday. The first RDR is one of my favorite games ever. Reading between the lines of some of the early press, I’m worried that the sequel isn’t going to work for me. Part of the reason I’ve been playing Spider-Man so much this week is that I want it off my plate so I can play RDR2. It would be deeply upsetting if I didn’t like this game, especially if I’m following my usual “I don’t like playing this game, and the whole rest of the world loves it” thing that I’ve been so good at for the past few years.
I will, of course, keep y’all posted, since it’s not like I talk about anything other than my PlayStation around here anymore.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 
