I’m not quite ready to write about Superman yet– and I’m hoping to see it again— so let’s throw this observation out real quick and then get back to the game.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has, at the moment, the most incredible flip-flop from an amazing game that was guaranteed a shortlisting for Game of The Year to what the fuck, are you kidding me that I’ve ever seen. Act 1 and 2 of this game are amazing. And then you hit Act 3 … and it’s all grinding. The story is over, basically, except for one thing left to do that you’re not powerful enough to do yet. So your job is to gain 20 fucking levels or so for each of your character and explore what’s left of the map, which really doesn’t do anything to help you know where you’ve been or where you ought to think about going, so there ends up being lots and lots of backtracking and “Oh, this area’s still marked Red for Scary, I guess I’ll check that other one over there and see if the game thinks I can handle it yet.”
I actually got a fair amount of adulting done today, getting my car scheduled for some long-overdue recall repairs and putting 150 pounds of salt into the water softener, thus allowing it to, y’know, keep working. Read three books. That’s not quite the achievement it might sound like, since two of them were novellas, but still. And now I’m going to try and get Clair Obscur to click. It’s close, but I’m still bouncing off it a bit. Hopefully tonight’s the night.
I can’t believe I mean this: right now a game called Crime Scene Cleaner is somehow one of my favorite games of 2025. That sentence is true. I have spent twelve hours or so mopping up blood, moving bodies, and picking up broken glass in a video game, and it may be the most chill and genuinely relaxing game I’ve ever played.
The premise is real, real simple: you’re a janitor who gets hired by a mob boss to clean up after his people. You take the job because you need money to pay for your daughter’s hospital bills, which makes this the most American game of 2025. You accept jobs through your computer and the occasional phone call from “Big Jim,” the guy who signs your checks. You have a dog. There’s an achievement for petting the dog 15 times. The crime scenes range from a small apartment to an entire museum to a giant warehouse. At the end of each job you get paid based on how thorough a job you did; money can be used, not to pay for your daughter as you might think, but to upgrade your cleaning tools, accomplished through a skill tree, so you honest-to-God might pay for an upgrade to how much blood your mop can clean up before you have to wring it out in a bucket, and you can also upgrade how many detergents you can add to the bucket at once. By the end of the game you’re able to dual-wield sponges, which is not a phrase anyone had ever said or thought of before this game came out.
There is something primordially satisfying about walking into this:
and walking out an hour later with the floor and walls spotless, the broken tables whisked away, the bodies safely stored in your truck, and everything that wasn’t broken put back exactly where it belonged. There are some collectibles– every level has a few cassette tapes hidden away, and there are secret areas all over the place that you can uncover, and exploration is a lot of fun, especially once you unlock the– again, I’m not kidding– upgrade that lets you walk across blood without leaving footprints all over the goddamned place afterwards. You’ll need to find keys and the occasional key card, and oh, you’ll also rob everyone blind while you’re cleaning. The great thing about working for the mob is the people they send you after tend to have piles of cash and jewelry and stuff just sitting around! They’re all dead, they don’t need it any longer.
There’s no real point in talking about graphics or sound; they’re good enough and no better. The rag doll physics can occasionally be kinda ridiculous. You can jump or fall from any height and be fine; it’s impossible to die, so there were definitely times where I was moving a body and just chucked it off a balcony and then jumped after it rather than carrying it down the stairs. My only real gripe is that if you’re a completist, like me, and you want to 100% everything, every so often there’s a single bullet that you accidentally knocked somewhere with your mop that takes an hour to find, or a single spot of blood that you just missed that is too small for your UV lamps or your “Cleaner Vision” (no, seriously) to spot easily. Having to end a level at 99% blood cleanup because you just could not find that last spot is kinda annoying, especially when the game really does need about an hour to an hour and a half per level.
But yeah. This was a blast. Twelve hours or so was enough to 100% every level and get all but five of the achievements; I’m gonna jump back into finish those off just because I’m that guy. It’s on Game Pass right now, so if you have that, you don’t have to pay for it, but it’s worth the $20 or so you’d pay if you actually buy it.
Oh, and I vacuumed the whole house today, because I’d been cleaning in a video game for several days and felt kind of guilty about the condition of my actual house, which is a real place with cats in it that needs vacuuming way more often than I actually do it.
This game made me, for the first time in quite a while, want to turn my YouTube channel back on.
I’m still not quite done with Khazan, thus the lack of a review yet. I’ve beaten it, and I want to get through New Game+ before I put it away, but I wanted a palate cleanser, something that wasn’t combat-focused and that didn’t brag about being difficult. Something chill, for lack of a better word.
How about a puzzle game about translation? How much more directly up my God damn alley could a puzzle game about linguistics possibly be? It’s unimaginable.
Here’s the premise of Chants of Sennaar: you’re the … person, of indeterminate gender and no name, in the faceless hood up there. You’re exploring what is effectively the Tower of Babel, which is occupied by five different groups of people, each of whom speak a different language. Your job is to 1) get to the top of the tower, 2) learn everybody’s languages on the way up there, and 3) get everybody to talk to each other. There’s a bit more of a story to it than that, but it’s a little on the obscure side, and gets downright weird towards the end of the game. That’s good enough as a gist.
Each language has 42 glyphs associated with it, and follows different rules as far as subject-verb order, plural marking, and other things like that. Sometimes the meaning of a glyph can be intuited by what it looks like, and one language lays glyphs on top of one another in a really neat way that, once you figure out what’s going on, lets you create glyphs correctly that you’ve never seen. Your avatar keeps pretty good notes, and glyphs are marked in your journal as you discover them while you explore. You can add your own notes to any glyph, and if you think you know what something means but haven’t proven it yet, your assumed translation will show up in a different font when you’re trying to read something, so that you can see what you’re still guessing at versus what you’ve definitely successfully translated.
(What will happen is every so often your notebook will have a page that will have three to five pictures on it, and if you match glyphs successfully to the pictures, it’ll confirm the meaning and translate that glyph automatically from then on. This will happen even if your guess at the meaning was wildly wrong. It does mean that it’s possible to brute-force your way through some translations, and there were definitely times where I was certain I knew three of the four glyphs and wasn’t sure about the remaining one, and just worked through my unknown glyphs until I got the right one.)
You will also occasionally find Rosetta Stone-style texts that will have the same thing written in more than one language, which can help you figure out new glyphs if you’ve already completed one of the two languages. This is where different word orders and different pluralization rules can really mess with your head, though, and there are two languages that use markers to make an entire sentence negative, which can also be fun. I loved this shit, y’all.
There are some non-language-related puzzles here and there, but they’re rare and generally not hugely challenging and the occasional very light stealth section; they weren’t difficult (and not very punitive when you screwed up) but I found myself kind of resenting them after a while just because they kept me from the stuff I was interested in. You’ll eventually unlock teleporters between the different levels, and you’ll be able to translate entire conversations between different groups that will cause the residents to start cooperating with each other and sometimes change things about some of the areas. These were my favorite parts, honestly.
Graphics and audio do their job; my wife commented at one point that she found the sound of my character walking around to be really satisfying, for whatever that might be worth, and the different areas are really visually distinct from one another, from a forbidding fortress area to a science lab to mines to a really futuristic area toward the very top of the tower. This took me nine hours to play through for $15, and I got a Platinum trophy out of it. I did have to consult a guide once, where I couldn’t figure out how to move forward and it turned out that I’d been meant to pick up an object that I didn’t realize I could interact with. That was it, so it really hit that sweet spot where some careful thinking could always get me past whatever obstacle had been thrown in my way.
This isn’t for everyone, I realize, but for me at least it was a hell of a game, and at just $15 you should definitely grab it if puzzlers are your thing.
You were supposed to get a review of a book series today, but my PS5 ate my entire afternoon and it’s about to eat the rest of my evening and possibly the next couple of weeks– I was playing Chants of Sennar all afternoon, which is a puzzle game based on translating glyphs, and now they’ve gone and released a surprise demo for Nioh 3.
The game doesn’t come out until 2026, and this is an alpha build, supposedly, but … I’m gonna go away now. For a while. Maybe I’ll finish that third book tonight and maybe I won’t. The boy’s on me to play Nightreign with him and I officially don’t have time for anygoddamnthing now other than Nioh 3.
So, yeah. Nice knowing y’all. I’m going to go abandon all my earthly responsibilities for a while.
WordPress appears to be having technical issues tonight, so I’m gonna just toss this up– gotta keep that streak going– and call it a night. The boy downloaded Nightreign tonight and watching him play has proven quite amusing so I’m going to go do that. Hopefully this will actually post.
(Randomly: listening to a Pearl Jam concert from May 8th of this year. I swear, Eddie Vedder has not correctly remembered the lyrics to Wishlist even a single time in his entire career.)
This is kind of an #iykyk image, I suppose, but I finally polished off The First Berserker:Khazan tonight after 78 hours, which is absolutely outlandish for an action game. This is a remarkable achievement in game design, even if it has a really stupid name(*), and everyone who likes video games should play it, but God damn is it difficult, to the point where I had to (not “decided to,” had to) turn down the difficulty for the final boss and even then it took a couple more hours. Got the true ending, though, so yay me. I’m actually planning on playing through it one more time to scoop up the couple of trophies I missed. Possibly not immediately, mind you, but it’s definitely happening.
(*) This game features no berserking and no berserkers, in case you were wondering, and in fact has no mention of berserkers in any way. I mean, Khazan’s pretty angry, but it’s a revenge story, so … he sorta has a reason for it? The really interesting thing is that this game is a combination of two of my other all-time favorites– it’s Nioh 2 with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice‘s combat system bolted on to it, and Sekiro also has a deeply stupid-sounding name that does not match up to anything in the game. Weird, right?
My wife and I went to this local consignment place today, just for the sheer hell of it. The place was 90% junk with a few interesting items scattered here and there– nothing to get us to spend any money, mind you, but some interesting crap– and this caught my eye.
This is the ACABiest ACAB that ever ACABbed, and fuck the semiliterate person who created it (I can only assume that “congol” means “cajole,” which is exceptionally shit spelling), fuck the person who decided to put it up for sale, and fuck anybody who eventually buys it. This is a supremely fucked-up thing to decide to hang on your wall as decor, and thinking of the police this way and approving of it borders on mental illness.
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