Been a While

 Yeah, I find I'm using this less and less. I'd already pared down use to mostly commenting on entertainments and there's really only one or two people readily interested in such things anyway. But, I suppose I'm still subject to wanting to write down thoughts once in a while.

The most recent thing on my mind is A Plague Tale: Requiem. I knew from the first game it wasn't going to be a happy experience. I didn't expect it to be quite so easy for me to define in one word, though. The game is bleak.

The game follows Amicia and Hugo again (along with some new characters and a couple old ones) in seeking to find a cure for Hugo's condition connected to the supernatural plague rats. Things start off okay, then soon take a turn - and that sets the tone. A few times, the characters reach a new place that seems nice and peaceful and you just know it's going to soon devolve into a rat-infested nightmare. Only the most naive of players would have any illusion otherwise. 

The characters are well written and acted, but on some level hard to watch as well because they are so broken. Hugo is way too young to handle the emotional weight of being able to summon tsunamis of rats that can crush fortresses and leave disease in their wake. Amicia isn't really much older, and she is barely (or failing) to hold herself together in trying to protect him. She's also put through a physical wringer that would readily match Lara Croft's recent outings. They are reunited with their mother, but she is not really winning any parental awards - not that she doesn't care. Sophia, a pirate woman met later, is arguably a better maternal figure, offering support to the pair. Their alchemical apprentice Lucas helps along the way, and offers some grounding.

And then the end comes and it's... fitting and perhaps inevitable. At once, it makes everything that has come before feel pointless and yet it was largely necessary for the characters to be able to end the matter. It's not hard to see a path in which the De Rune family was never assaulted by a greedy and corrupt Inquisition, it's possible the family could have lived a simple, happy life. Once that die was cast, though, there are just enough bad people to keep causing situations that made Hugo's powers snowball into something uncontrollable.

There's room for a sequel of a sort, though I'm not sure I'd want to see it, to be honest. There's a lot of emotion in these games and that's admirable, but it's dark enough it needs to be taken in moderation.

Steelrising was a bit more straightforward. Aegis, the mechanical automaton, sets to at the order of the Queen of France to deal with the King's mechanical seizing of the state. You meet notable revolutionaries whilst battling through in Souls-style combat and setting design of Paris. The combat's not bad. The story is given just a touch more depth than most Dark Souls games. It all works pretty well.

I wish, though, it had delved deeper into the world lore. There's some interesting concepts that are largely glazed over where the automats (or at least the major ones) are in some way controlled or powered by the spirits of people. I would have liked to see some further reasoning as to why Aegis could speak and had free will when others did not seem to. That feels like a rich idea that could have lead to many things, but was only barely touched upon.

So... good ride, neat ideas, but not really something that will leave a lasting impression.

I also tried a deeply-discounted Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 - space combat in the Warhammer 40k universe. I'm kind of interested in the story. I generally like the strategic layer. Unfortunately, the tactical gameplay just didn't do it for me, so I really wasn't getting much out of it. There's an auto-resolve button, but 1) it's not available for important story missions and 2) even I could fight better than it seems to). This led to me petering out partway through the campaign as battles started to feel more like unfun slogs than anything entertaining. That's a bit sad.

I played through Alpha Protocol again. Nothing new there, though I guess it's been long enough that some games are interesting to me to replay. I find myself thinking that there are a lot of cool ideas that were put into this game that would have made iterative sequels fascinating, though the IP hasn't gone anywhere and Obsidian has been on to many things since.

The new hotness looks like it'll be Hogwarts Legacy, for which reviews are starting to come out and they seem generally positive. I think that's promising and it looks like a good game so far. But... I think I'm likely to miss out on that, as I find the Potterverse never really captivated me. And if you're not into the setting, I think that takes the appeal level for the game way down.