My son has been patiently working away at the Path of Pain since I got home from work, four hours ago. The person who put the video above together is some sort of divine creature; I never even attempted this feat when I was playing Hollow Knight, and if I had I would have invented twelve new swear words and killed one of the cats by about the halfway mark.
This kid hasn’t let a single swear word or even really a single sound of frustration pass his lips the whole time. No controller tossing. No muttering under his breath. Just persistence and patience.
I don’t know where the hell he got it from. Sure as hell not me.
I mean, come on. This year had some slight competition, but there was no way that the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima wasn’t going to be my GOTY. It’s not close. This was the sequel to one of the best games I’ve ever played and was at least of equal quality. The only thing holding it back from being obviously better than the original was I had some idea what to expect going in.
Absolutely fucking amazing. Fifty-eleven stars out of five.
Wow, that’s bigger than I thought it was going to be.
Oh well. Scrolling’s free.
I finished the seventh and most recent book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series last night, staying up too late to do it. The eighth book comes out in June; I pre-ordered it the literal first day it became available to do so. Dinniman has an unrelated book, Operation Bounce House, coming out in February, and I’ve preordered that as well. The series is currently expected to be ten books, and apparently might be eleven.
I don’t think I’ve reviewed any of the books as I’ve read them, and I don’t really intend for this to be a review yet either, as a multi-book review really ought to be for the whole series and even as fast as Dinniman seems to write, we’re at least two or three years away from that. I will say this, though: I started this series mostly out of FOMO, something that y’all know good and well catches me on books all the time. I don’t like not reading good books, even if their premise– aliens invade Earth and a guy and his cat get thrown into an intergalactic competition that somehow mimics the genre tropes of role-playing video games– is completely ridiculous. “LitRPG” is its own entire genre; having read and enjoyed eight books in it, other than reading more of Dinniman’s work in the future I have no plans at all to dip my toe into any other examples of it.
I’ve been reading about a book a month in this series since picking up Dungeon Crawler Carl in May. The first one was at least a little bit against my will; I wasn’t expecting to like what I was reading all that much, but again, FOMO.
I plan to restart the series in December so that I can have read it twice by the time A Parade of Horribles comes out. My wife picked up the first book on a whim a couple of months ago and is currently reading book five, and she’s read them back to back to back to back to back. Which means the same as “back to back” but sounds like more of a feat. This is not a thing she does, guys.
These books have no fucking right to be this good. They’re too ridiculous and too raunchy to be as good as they are. And yet somehow this series is the best new thing I’ve encountered in a long time, and having read four thousand pages of this series this year I am about to start over and do it again.
Plus Bounce House and the first book of another series of his called Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon, because right now Dinniman is tied with BrandoSando for the author I’ve read the most books from in 2025, and I can’t let Sanderson win that contest.
Just do it. Trust me. Put aside your reservations and pick up the first book. The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited if you happen to have Amazon Prime, so you don’t even have to pay for it. Get them from the library. I know, I know, this feels like it has to be dumb as hell. Go give them a shot anyway.
I love y’all but I’ve got a book to finish and I haven’t touched Ghost of Yotei in a few days and I intend to rectify both of those problems before bed.
Finished Alchemised tonight, and I’m going to use the evening to decide if I have anything interesting to say about it. While playing Ghost of Yotei, of course.
One quarter down. Man, this school year is flying by.
I’ve been playing Ghost of Yotei during my scant free time lately— it’s kind of nuts how busy the last couple of weeks have been, now that I think of it– and so far, about ten hours in, it’s at least the equal of Ghost of Tsushima, its predecessor, one of the best games I’ve ever played. If you go look at my review of Tsushima, you’ll notice I keep harping on how amazing the facial animation is– and, yes, I used the same line about Pong, which will keep being relevant until I stop playing video games.
I hit a moment last night that absolutely floored me, to the point where I decided I needed to be done playing for the night because there was no way anything else I was going to do in that session was going to top it. I’m going to dance around some spoilers, but I’ll do my best to be as ambiguous as possible.
There is a moment in the game where a character encounters another character who they believed was dead. And there is a good three or four seconds where you realize what is going on before either of the characters speak, just from the look in the eyes of the character realizing what is going on. Their eyes moisten, just a little bit, and the look that crawls across their face is this amazing and perfectly readable mix of disbelief, joy, relief and shame, and it is quite simply the most complex emotional moment I have ever seen a digital character convey in my entire life.
(To be clear, that’s a random screenshot above. I found some online that were from right around the moment I’m talking about and decided not to use them to avoid even that much of a spoiler.)
And this is just ten hours in. I’m sure there is more to come. That said, Sucker Punch, if you fuckers kill my horse again after what you did to me in Tsushima, we’re gonna have a problem.
I dunno what the headline means either, but a new Atmosphere album just came out and I’m listening to it and that lyric from “Neptune” stood out for some reason(*). I have been playing Silksong for several hours, hating most of it, and I still stand by my thorough review from the other day. The game’s fucking masochistic; it’s not fun-hard, it’s bang your head against the wall until the pain stops hard, and I can’t explain why I’m still playing the fucking thing. I’m not relaxed when I’m playing, I’m stressed out and angry, and that’s … not only kind of shockingly immature for a motherfucker who is going to be fifty in less than a year, it’s also not really a good use for leisure time? Like, there are other things I could be doing. There are even any number of other unpleasant things I could be doing that would at least result in, say, the house being cleaner or some sort of shit like that.
It is possible that I spend too much of my leisure time doing things that actively make me unhappy. I should find a therapist and have a conversation about that.
(*) Also don’t know why the album is called “Jestures,” but I’m on my first listen so it might become apparent eventually. There’s no title track.
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