In continuing this year's trend, it has been months since the last time I posted anything here, so here I am with a blog that is simultaneously too long, and yet covers too many games to go in depth enough on any one of them to be a good read! And I think it's only fitting that I start this with the most stellar of quality games that I've played in those last couple months.
For those who might want to skip past certain segments, this blog includes: Beyond: Two Souls, The Surge, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, Celeste, Metal Gear Survive (somehow, but not that much), Hyper Light Drifter, XCOM 2, Absolver, Destiny 2 expansions, and finally some very timely thoughts on E3 and games coming out in the rest of the year.
Beyond: Two Souls.
A lot has been said about David Cage, and the studio he works at, Quantic Dream. Especially lately. But I don't have anything to add to that, aside from the fact that I played this game when it was free on PlayStation Plus, I've managed to never pay for any of David Cage's games in my life, and that trend will most certainly continue as I find myself hoping Sony will stop bankrolling Cage's fiascoes and supporting that (allegedly (almost certainly)) toxic work environment.
But what about Beyond: Two Souls? It's a mess. Aside from the performances of the recognizable people like Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe that were somehow tricked into being in this game, there's not really anything especially good in it. It's a game that at its best, is accidentally funny, but at its worst runs face first into hackneyed racial stereotypes, sexist tropes, generally nonsensical storytelling, and inconsistent game mechanics/illusions of choice.
Rather than try to analyze, or seriously criticize this game (because I have much better ones to dedicate this space to), I'm simply going to list some bullet points of the more absurd things I remember from the game. I guess I'll put it in a SPOILERS block, if you really care, but also don't play this game. It's really not worth your time unless you're like me, and enjoy things for their badness. Especially don't pay for it and support creeps like David Cage. Anyway, I digress.
All that said, I think I still liked it more than Heavy Rain. No, I'm not going to replay Heavy Rain now that it's free on PS+ too. I redeemed it. I have access to it. But I'm not putting myself through that again. I don't care if I enjoyed it at the time, there were a lot of things I used to enjoy that I don't now. That game doesn't even have the benefit of decent acting like Beyond does. Conversely, it does have laughable acting, so...
Thankfully I have other things to play instead.
The Surge.
Remember The Surge? It came out last year, and was the second "Souls-Like" game from Deck 13, the first being Lords of the Fallen. That game was okay, but between technical issues, and it just feeling like the most generic of generic fantasy games, there wasn't really anything memorable or interesting about it. But The Surge, on the other hand, is pretty good!
If you're wondering how I came about playing The Surge, the answer is that I happened to be online (which is spotty given my usual routine of being constantly online all day every day) one day when the complete edition with the DLC was accidentally made free on PS+. But, unlike Beyond, which is not a game worth spending money on, I actually feel a little bad about not having spent money on The Surge.
Anyway, The Surge's spin on the Souls-Like formula is that it's set in and around this future factory, where all the workers have exoskeleton things (painfully) bolted into their regular skeletons, and it is onto this "EXO" that main character Warren (who is about as interesting as the name Warren would suggest, but at least I remembered it) equips new weapons and armor. And to get those weapons and armor, Warren doesn't just find them lying around, he needs to get them from enemies. He does this by physically cutting them off.
Targeting specific body parts to weaken them, and then cutting them off to get the armor (or blueprints to craft them and the parts with which to craft) is an extremely "this only makes sense in a video game" sentence, but fun in practice. There's also armored and unarmored parts on enemies, meaning there's strategy in deciding whether to focus on trying to get specific parts for crafting, or focusing on areas that do more damage to defeat the enemy quicker. It can get pretty tough too, so there's good reason to want to focus just on doing damage. On the flipside, I ended up using early game armor through the whole game, and just upgrading it. So far as I can tell, everything can be upgraded the same number of times, so early game stuff is presumably as useful as anything found late game. I used a fire sword that I think was from a DLC pack through most of the game too.
And like any good Souls-Like, the areas are labyrinthine in design, featuring a myriad of shortcuts, little hidey-holes with things to find, and plenty of tough enemies to fight. There are loading screens between areas (and even inside the final one at the end), but the level design itself is generally pretty good. The very final area got to be a bit much, but otherwise I had a lot of fun through the game.
I will say that the game doesn't have as much variety to the enemy designs as it probably should. There's a few robots/flying drones, but aside from those (and the bosses), all the enemies are just other people with EXOs. Which is not to say they all fight the same, because they often fight differently, but at least visually, they blur together. And that happens really early in the game, too.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the DLC area is set in a corporate theme park, which is extremely good. The setting is extremely good, at least, the DLC itself I would say is pretty good, like the rest of the game. Just in terms of level design, that sort of stuff.
And it integrates itself into the main story in ways that are both pretty good, but also kinda not so good? It's weird because there's a train station in the second area of the game that leads to the DLC, and playing it around then (like I did) fits in with the story really well, but then that's only the first half of the DLC. After a while, the NPC in the DLC says to go find a person back in the main game, who was the next story thing I was after anyway. He made it sound like finding and talking to her would also be tied into the DLC somehow, but there wasn't any mention of any of that until quite a bit after that section, when the DLC guy called up Warren again. It just felt weird, and like something might have broken at first. But I found some other people online who had also been confused by that, so I guess it was just an oversight in the DLC design.
That said, it was still a really good piece of DLC, and fighting animatronic candy bars and evil robot cats in a theme park built by a corporation to keep its employees from going on actual vacations was good. Speaking of, the game doesn't really do anything revolutionary or new with this stuff, but I do think their dystopic corporate future where climate change is ravaging the Earth is pretty well realized, and the satiric stuff around it (like said theme park, and the occasional "motivational videos" that play through the game) are well done too. At least compared to the previous game they made.
Conversely, I do think the game had a big missed opportunity story wise. When the game opens, Warren is taking a train to the big corporation for his first day on the job. During the ride, the camera is positioned behind Warren's seat, and all you can see are his head and shoulders. After a minute or two, the train comes to a halt, and it's revealed that Warren is in a wheelchair. Later on there's stuff in the game that indicates the corporation was specifically recruiting people with disabilities like that, the idea being that their EXOs could help them regain full mobility.
The problem is that as soon as Warren gets the EXO, everything goes wrong, and the game proper begins. Zero time is spent on Warren adjusting to the EXO, being able to walk again, or really anything like that at all. It just has him able to perfectly walk, run, and dodge like a pro. I'm not saying the game needed to have 45 minutes of him slowly learning how to use it, but unless I missed something, there isn't even any dialog about it. It really felt like wheelchair bit existed only for that intro, and then was promptly forgotten.
Which isn't completely true, because in the DLC there are some audio logs from Warren and his girlfriend that range from one time when they visited the corporate theme park for fun, to being about Warren wanting a job at the theme park so he could be able to walk again. Now, I don't understand why they were strewn about the theme park, but I'm pretty sure that's still the only real reference to the wheelchair past the intro.
Aside from that, I thought The Surge was pretty good. Good enough that I'm kinda looking forward to The Surge 2. The Surge was a big enough improvement over Lords of the Fallen in basically every single way that I'm legitimately excited. If they can keep improving their work that much from game to game, I think it could be something really great. Maybe just get a more interesting protagonist next time. Nothing against Warren, he's just, you know, a generic video game protagonist.
The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit.
Part of me wants to be snarky and say, "More like the MEDIOCRE Adventures of Captain Spirit," but that wouldn't be true to how I actually felt about it. This is a harder one to exactly put my finger on. This isn't like Beyond, where it was a bad game that I got enjoyment out of laughing at how ridiculous it was. But it's also not like The Surge, where I just had a good time with it. I didn't enjoy Captain Spirit, but not because it's bad.
I'm just going to activate SPOILER MODE now, because it's a short game.
Which brings me to the fact that Captain Spirit is basically just a demo for Life is Strange 2. Life is Strange certainly dealt in heavy subjects, arguably heavier than child abuse (such as suicide), but those weren't the upfront things that game was sold on. Life is Strange was sold as a teen drama with time travel, which is what it mostly was. While I do think it's probably good that they're going in a different direction with this, rather than more teen drama, I think I've had enough already. Especially since Life is Strange seems content to never let the main characters be happy in the end. If they don't let the teen lesbians be happy, they're probably not going to let the kid be happy either.
I dunno. I'm sure plenty of people will play Captain Spirit/Life is Strange 2, and go on and on about how important of a game it is for dealing in the issues it does. Maybe I'll watch a playthrough online. But even then, probably not.
Also, final thing: Captain Spirit (and surely also Life is Strange 2) should probably have some more apparent content warnings on it. I could absolutely see someone watching the E3 trailer, thinking this was just some cutesy thing, then playing it and having it do a lot of harm because they lived through similar experiences, or anything of the sort. Captain Spirit doesn't even have an ESRB rating, for crying out loud! I didn't realize they could get away with that for "demos." That, or the PSN page for the game hasn't been updated, at least. Anyway, you get my point.
Celeste.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, here's a game that deals in a serious subject that I quite enjoyed. Though, I feel like anxiety is a more common, less tricky thing to handle in a game, but that probably has more to do with my having anxiety troubles of my own, and thus feeling more confident on how to actually discuss that (this game does a pretty decent job of it!). Because while the story in Celeste is good, the real star is the platforming, which is great! Honestly, I don't really have that much to actually say about Celeste, other than it's a great platformer that I highly recommend playing. I know there's a lot of options out there for pixel art indie platformers, but Celeste is honestly one of the best ones of those that I've played. Maybe the best. Maybe.
The main path through most of the levels is doable enough that I think just about anyone could get through it (especially with the accessibility stuff to make it easier (though those options are a bit more hidden than they should be)), and there's plenty of collectibles and harder versions of levels to provide that "Indie Precision Platformer Challenge." Speaking of, I should get back to those B-Sides eventually. I got through, I think five or six of them? I remember the last one I tried had something up front that was immediately hard enough that I just felt like taking a break, and that was several weeks ago.
The music's real good too.
Metal Gear Survive?
Okay, I should say, I only played a free trial of this, one weekend when that was a thing. I don't really know how far I got into it, but it was...better than I expected? I...sort of enjoyed it? I mean, it wasn't great, and I heard it gets hard later on, which would probably sap a lot of said enjoyment out, but what I played...Well, if it got cheap enough, I might...
Hyper Light Drifter.
I really should have played this game sooner. I'm not sure why I didn't just buy it when it was new, but I do know that I got into this state of mind where I kept not buying it because I was waiting for the price to go down. Even though I was sure I wouldn't feel bad about paying the full price ($20), I just didn't want to pay that, and then have it go on sale the next week. You know? It's a bad line of thinking, I know, but it kept me from buying the game for a full two years.
Anyway, it's a great game. It's great at evoking a very specific sort of melancholic mood with its world, the music, etc. But it's also a really good action game, with challenging but fun combat. There's one ability that sends enemies backward, and it can be used to bonk them into others, or walls, and it does damage to boot. One of my favorite things that not enough games do is have the ability to knock enemies into each other, and have that be an effective strategy. Mirror's Edge Catalyst did it, and that was my favorite thing about the combat there. MGSV sort of does it with the CQC combos, but that's a lot more scripted. Anyway, Hyper Light Drifter's combat is fun beyond knocking enemies into each other, but that's a thing I like.
I feel like I've seen some people compare this game to A Link to the Past, but that's not a fair comparison because Hyper Light Drifter has fun combat, and reasonable checkpoints that didn't lead to me needing to save state my way through the game out of obligation because it's "the best Zelda game" and I felt a need to finish it. No, you're venting about how people's nostalgia is blinding them.
I didn't like the map, though. It doesn't show exactly where the Drifter is in any area, just a generic icon that it changes when you pass through loading spots. It made trying to find hidden collectibles and the like a lot more of a chore than it should have been. Which isn't to say I didn't still enjoy combing the world for hidden stuff, but it would have been nice if the game did a better job of A. Letting me know exactly where I was, and B. Letting me know if I had already gotten everything from an area.
It's worth playing, if you haven't yet! It definitely took me a bit to get into a groove with it. If you do play it, make sure the first upgrade you get is the Chain Dash. That's the thing that makes the whole game work. At least mechanically, the ambiance of the world works on its own.
Oh, and it has a button dedicated to sitting down, which is extremely relatable.
XCOM 2.
Long time readers with memories that are too good for their own good might remember that, years ago, I played the previous XCOM game when that was on PS+. Well, it's happened again, only this time, I had a lot more fun.
Part of that is because I went into XCOM 2 knowing it was going to be hard, so I just set the difficulty to the easiest setting (Rookie) from the start. Did playing on easy let me blow through most of the missions? Yes. Did I miss out on the "true" XCOM experience by not having soldiers dying left and right? Probably. But did I enjoy my time with this game and end up happy I played it? Absolutely.
Playing on easy isn't the only reason I enjoyed this a lot more than the previous XCOM. It also helps that 2 just seems like a better game. It felt like it has better enemy variety to me, though maybe still not quite enough for as long as the game is. And sadly, I didn't play with the Chosen expansion, because $40 felt like a lot to pay when I was only giving the game a shot because it was free. I think it did go on sale since then, but it's way too soon for me to start a new campaign. Never mind that with the technical issues already present in the game, I really doubt that tacking that much more on helps.
It also has much better character customization, including the ability to change soldiers' gender, so I no longer had squads of all dudes except for one lady, which is what I remember happening in XCOM 1. So instead I ended up playing most of the game with squads of either all ladies, or just one dude. Which I thought was funny, though by the end I ended up with two dudes on my A Team.
And beyond the cosmetic customization, I like the classes better in this game. The rangers, with their swords are really fun, especially with some of the later abilities. The specialists, with their gremlin drones, that can focus on hacking or healing, are incredibly useful! I focused more on healing for most of the game, because even on easy I still wound up in situations with people almost dead a lot, but the hacking stuff later on is extremely good too. The grenadiers and snipers are a bit more straightforward, but also super useful. I've heard there are also psionic characters, but I never built the lab to get them, because I was so focused on other stuff in the early game that I didn't have the resources, and by the end game, it didn't feel like it'd be worth it. Or, at least that I wouldn't have the time to level up any psychic characters enough to be useful.
While it's still nothing exceptional, I do think this game is a step up in terms of story and voice acting, at least from XCOM 1. That helps, even if it is spread a bit thin through the length of the campaign. Which is probably my biggest complaint with the game. I'm sure a more optimal playthrough would have gotten through the campaign faster, but I was ready for the game to be over a fair amount before it actually was.
I know I was saying I missed out on the "true" experience by playing on easy, but I did still come fairly close to game over-ing. The thing that XCOM is working against in the game is this Avatar Project meter, that goes up or down depending on if the aliens are making progress, or if XCOM is destroying facilities/taking other actions to stall them. I wasn't too worried at first, but then it jumped up really high, so I spent a few hours of the game really working to bring it down, and it stayed around the halfway point for a good chunk of the campaign. Then I got complacent, and spent more of my time just getting supplies so I could upgrade things. Before I knew it, not only was the meter high, it filled! I was afraid that was the end, but then the game gave me 24 days to do anything at all to bring it down, and I was able to destroy a facility before it was too late.
After that, I was able to keep it under control, and I refocused on trying to finish the story stuff, so I could complete the game. Which I did! The final mission has a fun gimmick centered around a goofy pun, which I quite liked.
Another thing that helped me enjoy this game more than XCOM 1 was that I approached it with a different mindset. After months of watching Austin Walker and Rob Zacny stream XCOM 2 (with the Chosen expansion), and specifically seeing Austin roleplay characters instead of just picking the abilities that seemed to be the most useful, I decided to roleplay mine too. Maybe not to the extent that I headcanoned one to be the son of Odin, but more than I usually do in games with procedurally created characters.
For example, in the first mission after the tutorial, one of my soldiers got mind-controlled. Which, I gotta say, the game (set to the EASIEST DIFFICULTY) mind controlling one of my characters immediately after the tutorial seemed really rough at first. But, as I was trying to take out the Sectoid mind controlling my character, I realized that my ranger, Jane (later nicknamed "Crash") Kelly, had a better chance of taking it out with her sword than her gun. So, she went in with the sword, and the alien was slain in a single hit (I forget if it had already been damaged or if it was a crit (being on easy helped)). So, even though at first glance the stealthier ranger abilities seemed more useful, there was no way "Crash" (as I came to know her) would be anything but a Blademaster. I did pick one of the non-Blademaster abilities at some point, because being able to move after a kill seemed more in character than the auto-sword attack if an enemy gets to close, but again, that's just roleplaying.
I didn't run into too many moments worth mentioning like that through the campaign, but I had enough that I was able to project my headcanon onto the characters, which I never did with the previous XCOM. It was fun! And, I did think it was perhaps fitting that on the very final mission of the campaign, "Crash" herself got mind-controlled, and the rest of the squad came together to rescue her before anything bad happened.
All that said, the game does have issues, both technical, and design wise. While I don't think this PS4 port is as bad as I remember the PS3 port of XCOM 1 being, it's still not great. Load times are long throughout the game (I timed one once, and it was over a minute and forty seconds), and the framerate gets bogged down too, but mostly in the more urban levels, with buildings and stuff around. That, and sometimes there are long, awkward pauses before the aliens take their moves, and just weird little things like that throughout the game. None of it enough to ruin it (though it did crash on me once), but enough to probably dissuade me from ever buying that DLC and playing it again.
And the design issues. I went back and re-read what I wrote five years ago about the previous XCOM (but don't go do that, my writing was worse then), and it turns out, I still have the same issues with how far soldiers can see. It's too short! And on top of that, XCOM 2 introduces a concealment mechanic, which is neat, but flawed. The idea being that on most (but not all) missions, the squad is sent in stealthily. The aliens don't know they're coming, and that can be used to set up ambushes, which is rad.
There's a couple issues, though. The extremely small distance that most soldiers can see leads to situations where I accidentally moved just one square too far, and got seen by some aliens that were standing right out in the open, but I had no idea they were there. That then breaks concealment for the whole squad (unless specific soldiers have an ability that doesn't break it for them). I get that the developers don't want players knowing exactly where everything is at all times, but I still think this is too much.
It also leads to bizarre situations where I was able to game it to make for much easier fights. For example, while still in concealment, I'd come across an enemy squad, and while in the process of either setting up an ambush, or trying to skirt around them, I'd run into another group, usually of tougher enemies. Now, if I started a fight right then, I'd deal with both groups. But if I just moved the one soldier who saw the other group back, sometimes even just back a single square, then that other group would be shrouded in the fog of war, and I could deal with the first group of enemies alone. Of course if the other enemy group was patrolling, they could happen upon my squad during the fight, but more often than not, when this happened, I just managed to deal with the enemies separately, even when realistically there couldn't have been more than a hundred feet between them.
And then there's the nature of concealment itself, which doesn't adhere to what I usually think of when it comes to video game stealth logic. See, in most stealth games, if you get seen, but then deal with whoever saw you (or escape), you then go back into stealth, and the enemies don't know where you are. Certain soldiers (rangers, mostly) can get the ability to re-enter concealment (once per mission), but otherwise, once you've been spotted, stealth is over for the mission. Now, all I'm saying is that if I can game enemy AI by staying back a few feet, I should be able to re-enter concealment, because clearly the enemies don't know my squad is there until they come into sight. It's not like the aliens send out an alert to every enemy in the mission, because if they did, then my other trick wouldn't work. Maybe the whole squad being able to go back into concealment would be overpowered, but the way it is in the game, it just doesn't make a whole lot of logical sense.
But hey, it's a game! And it didn't ruin the game for me. Just something that I took a bit of an issue with. Overall, I enjoyed my time with XCOM 2. To the point where I've kinda got this itch to play more tactical games. Weirdly enough, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is the first one that comes to mind. Especially with that game having more bespoke levels, and not having the overarching thing to manage in between missions like XCOM 2 does. Something a little more laid back in that regard sounds appealing to me. Plus, it has Luigi.
Too bad I don't have a Switch. Anyone want to give me $300? (I'm joking (sadly)).
Absolver.
This is another weird one to wrap my head around. I'm pretty sure I finished the game, but the fact that I can't quite be sure is testament to that enough. Absolver is a game that I spent hours wandering around, feeling lost almost the entire time, during which I beat up a bunch of people, and eventually fought what seemed to be a final boss. Then an NPC gave me a cloak, told me to keep training, and the game put me back at the start.
Is there more to the game than that? I'm really confused. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it! I think the combat is a lot of fun. I'm sure I didn't even scratch the surface with the amount of customization of the attacks, but I enjoyed it enough that I'd want to do more of it. But just wandering around the same areas I already wandered feels...weird.
There's also some sort of currency I never got any of through the game? And a shop that sells stuff and I never had anything to buy the stuff with, and I'm just so confused.
By default it's also an online game, with other players just wandering around as well. I think I played about ten minutes of the game online total, in two separate instances. In both cases, the only other players I encountered just kept attacking me, so I put the game in offline mode. This game was hard enough without having other players to deal with.
It's a weird game. But at least the punching and kicking are good. Music is too.
Destiny 2 Expansions.
Well, it happened. The Expansion Pass was on sale, and I bought it. Frankly, I don't think either of the current expansions (Curse of Osiris and Warmind) are great. Warmind is okay, but Curse of Osiris is pretty bad, overall. So, getting both for the price of one was, well, not the worst thing I've ever bought.
The saving grace of this, and the reason I bought it in the first place, is that it's got me playing Destiny 2 with my friends again. And while I suspect me saying this publicly will result in jinxing myself, we've gotten into a good groove of playing it one afternoon each week, and it's fun. Just enough to goof around and slowly make the numbers go higher, but not enough to burn out on the game. That's about all I have to say on the current state of Destiny 2, which brings me to...
Very Timely Thoughts on E3.
I didn't get around to posting a bunch of goofy predictions about E3 like I kinda of wanted to, which is probably just as well because even the serious ones would've been wrong. Still no F-Zero, which didn't surprise me, but left me sad nonetheless. Neither was there Splinter Cell, which after all the leaks, did surprise me. Maybe next year?
But in terms of good surprises, Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely the thing I left (figuratively, I wasn't there, obviously) E3 most excited about. That was definitely the slickest, best trailer, and everything I heard about the demo shown privately sounds rad as heck. Though, as much as I love The Witcher II & III, I would be lying if I wasn't just a smidge leery about some aspects of Cyberpunk 2077.
Specifically, as good as the writing can be (and often is) in The Witcher III, that game isn't always great with women. I had a friend (who I haven't spoken with in a long time, and if you're reading this, we should catch up!) who once described it well. If I recall, she said there's only one woman in the game who is A. Not reliant on Geralt to get everything done for her, and B. Not sexualized in her design (also that woman isn't Ciri, whose shirt is weirdly unbuttoned in the middle). Given things like, the demo they showed involving rescuing a naked woman, and cyberpunk (lower case c, as in the genre) as a whole having a lot of issues around gender stuff, I dunno. Hopefully the game won't play into sexist tropes too much. Or at all.
And then, you know me, being queer and all that, it's a bit disheartening that at least at the moment, the character creator is very binary in terms of gender choice. Maybe by the time the game is out in the year 2077, it'll have more options for that stuff, and the game will have plenty of well written queer characters in general. Because, if you assume that in the real world these sorts of things are only going to get more accepted and commonplace (they should!) as time goes on, then by the 2070s I'd hope that sort of stuff would be so common that no one would bat an eyelash at it.
But I'll be honest, I'm not setting my expectations too high. I don't want to end up disappointed by an otherwise cool game because I let myself expect too much from cis-het developers. Which is sadly might also be true of the real world.
Conversely, a game I'm excited for specifically because of who is involved in the writing, is Dying Light 2. That Chris Avellone guy has written on some games I really like (New Vegas and 2017 Prey come to mind), so that alone has my interest. That, and Dying Light being a mostly fun game, outside of its bad story. Was not expecting to leave E3 with that one of the games I'm most excited for.
And then there's Death Stranding. I guess, I really had three different reactions to three aspects of the trailer. The first is that I was really into the "walking simulator" part of it. There is something that I love about games that are willing to put you in really big, wide open spaces with nothing in them. Very few games do it (Shadow of the Colossus being the best example), and different though it obviously is, that part of the trailer had that same vibe to it. And I am absolutely down for traversing those environments.
The second reaction was to the story aspect, which... I dunno. That game appears strange in a lot of ways, which I'm fine with, I wouldn't expect anything else from Kojima Productions. But it's not really the sort of strange that I liked about MGS. That was a franchise that was simultaneously dedicated to a certain level of "military realism," Cold War-esque (and sometimes literally Cold War era) spying, and just complete nonsense. That juxtaposition of the attempt at realism while also being dedicated to weirdness is one of the things I love most about MGS. One minute someone is talking about the dangers of lost nuclear waste, and the next he's breaking the fourth wall about the back of the case the game came in. Death Stranding, on the other hand, just seems like a weird fever dream, and I worry that Kojima's need to cast friends and women he has crushes on will get in the way of whatever story they're trying to tell.
The third is to the, I guess, stealth-horror part at the very end of the trailer. Now, you know me, I love stealth games. I have very specifically loved the stealth games that Kojima and crew have worked on over the years. But what I saw in that trailer, of Norman Reedus crouch walking around ghosts out in the open while covering his mouth... Let's just say I hope that's really, really early stuff, and the final game will have a lot more than that going on. I'm fine with stealth in survival horror style games, when it's done well. That's why I liked The Evil Within 2 so much last year. But when it's done wrong, it can really drag down a game, and I hope that doesn't end up being the case with Death Stranding.
There's a variety of other games in the coming years that I got excited for, but not really enough to say anything about. In terms of closer releases, I'm still so excited for Spider-Man. Between the MCU finally making consistently good movies with Spider-Man (well, at least Civil War and Homecoming, I have some issues with Infinity War), this game, and the Multiverse animated movie coming this year (featuring Nic Cage as Noir Spider-Man!!!), it's never been a better time to be a Spider-Man fan. Spider-Fan.
That, and finally being able to play an Assassin's Creed game as an easily flustered lesbian are what I'm excited for this year.
Actually, that's not quite true, because the Destiny 2 Forsaken Expansion looks really good! Thus completing the Destiny cycle of, "Game releases, leaves a lot of people disappointed, then the first expansion is bad, the second is better but still not great, and finally the expansion a full year after release makes the game into the thing people wanted from the start." It's coming full circle. If only it wasn't the same week as Spider-Man. Capitalism is bad.
Also, I'm predicting here and now that either Cayde isn't actually dead, or they find a way to bring him back by the end of the expansion.
Oh, and that DLC for Prey. I should play that. It looks neat, aside from the perma-death-y stuff.
Okay, I think I've gone and rambled on long enough. Sorry I haven't been keeping up with posting stuff here, but it is what it is. Hopefully I can muster up something to write about at least Spider-Man once that's out. We'll see!
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