Welcome to the Spotlight! Every month I roundup every notable gaming, viewing or listening experience I’ve had in the prior 30 or so days, and assemble them into one big article.
For the month of April, 2024, here’s what I’m shining the spotlight on.
Games
Stardew Valley
An agricultural pox has taken control of my household, which has led to an inordinate amount of time being spent playing Stardew Valley between my partner and I. For two years, I have tried to get my partner to play Stardew Valley because I knew it would be extremely their shit, but they were resistant for one reason or another. It wasn’t until I saw how much time they’d been putting into the Nintendo Switch’s online service version of Harvest Moon that I knew this was the time to push the issue once more — and this time it worked.
To be completely clear, I’ve never been a fan of Stardew Valley, but I had seen rumblings from people lauding the recent 1.6 update and figured I’d give it another shot. I thought it could also be a fun cooperative game for us to play, but the split-screen experience is really rough for people who enjoy being able to see and read the many necessary tool-tips in the game.
Our split-screen experience ended quickly, but since then we’ve both poured in dozens of hours into our respective farms. With this being the first time I’d really gotten into the game, I’ve been kind of shocked to see how different the PC version (that I’m playing) is different from the Xbox version, solely because that coveted 1.6 update is only on PC for the time being. But not having all of the extra bits of content I have hasn’t stopped my partner from engrossing themselves into Stardew Valley. And while we aren’t playing cooperatively, I am able to sit on the couch beside them and boot up the PC version on the ROG Ally and still play together in a manner of speaking.
Stardew Valley is very good, and I’m really happy it’s moved into our home.
Overwatch 2
I don’t know, man. This just kinda happened. My friend was streaming Overwatch 2 in our Discord, and it looked so colorful and vibrant that I just decided to install it. Having dumped a lot of time into Overwatch and ultimately falling off of it in a major way, it’s been kind of nice to occasionally return to this familiar world I had spent so much time in at one point.
Not having played for six years I was struck with the sensation of, “everything feels different,” and, “nothing has changed.” I still remember the broad strokes of playing certain characters, while others I used to play have been completely retooled. The player select screen is comprised of about 40% unknown characters, while most of the maps I played were old standards but at a different time of day.
I don’t know if I would say that Overwatch 2 is a good game, but I will say it’s built on the bones of a good game, and that still shines through. The shooting feels good, the levels are well designed, and the characters are fun and endearing. But none of that is exclusive to Overwatch 2, and it was all true of regular ole Overwatch. I think it’s best that Overwatch 2 remains a “sometimes food” for me and not something I play regularly, because I’ve burnt myself out on Overwatch before and I’d prefer not to do it again.
Open Roads
It is really difficult to talk about Open Roads because of how weird of an experience it was. For the uninitiated, Open Roads is an adventure game that follows the journey of a mother and daughter who take a road trip to unravel the mystery of a potential secret affair the daughter’s grandmother may have had.
On paper it’s a really interesting premise, and after completing the game I can confirm that the story is well executed and compelling. The main issues I had with Open Roads however, revolved mostly around the fact that you’re not really doing anything throughout the game, and the voice acting actively got in the way of “playing” the game.
You don’t really do anything in Open Roads aside from slowly walk around an environment, picking up notes and objects that may or may not be plot relevant, and waiting for your character to comment on them. Collect all of the plot relevant objects and you can move to the next scene where you do the same thing, and that’s it.
But you can’t do that too quickly because you have to endure the characters commenting and bickering over every little item you find, even if it’s not relevant to anything. Kaitlyn Dever and Keri Russell play the daughter and mother respectively, and they do a really good job with it even if the writing isn’t always top-notch. I understand that this is an adventure game, but at some point it felt like since the studio paid these actors to record lines, they overwrote the script.
Ultimately Open Roads is fine. I still think the story itself is neat, but it could have been told in half the time it takes to actually play the game. Regardless, for fans of games like Gone Home and the like, I’m fairly certain you’ll find something worthwhile here.
Botany Manor
Botany Manor is a pretty straightforward first-person puzzle game that, at its core, is about organizing and deciphering clues in order to correctly grow fantastical flowers. You’ll spend most of your time plodding through the grounds of the titular manor, interacting with every scrap of paper, book, and painting you can find in order to obtain the clues you need and add them to your ever-expanding book of horticultural facts.
It was satisfying to pore over newspaper clippings about weird natural phenomena that took place in a specific region of a country, and then apply that to what temperature some seed would best grow at. It gets a little more confusing when the game has you juggling several plants at once, meaning you have to figure out which clue is relevant to which plant, but I think that’s a good part of the challenge and not necessarily a knock against it.
What is frustrating about Botany Manor is how much backtracking you’ll inevitably end up doing because your clue book isn’t as helpful as you need it to be. For instance, I’d find a document about how different plants require different temperatures to grow, and one of the listed flowers happens to be the one I’m working on. When it’s added to my clue book however, it just adds the name of the clue itself rather than the information I need. Having “book of temperatures,” in my clue book isn’t helpful because the information I need is actually on the document, and to see that information again, I have to hike back to the location of the document.
There are a lot of little frustrations in Botany Manor that all boil down to either tedium, or arcane nonsense, which I suppose is par-for-the-course with a lot of adventure games. Ultimately, I did enjoy a lot more of Botany Manor than I disliked, but I cannot emphasize enough how much help it will be if you just keep a notepad by your side when you play.
Fallout 4
I’ll be talking about Fallout more in a later segment of this article, but like everyone else, watching the Fallout series on Amazon Prime emboldened me to once again attempt to play Fallout 4. On this (seemingly final) attempt at playing it, I’ve realized that I prefer watching a story told in the Fallout universe way more than I enjoy playing around in it. I’ve also realized that it is still a painful process to attempt and play Fallout 4 in a modern computer setting.
I don’t like the Fallout games very much for a lot of reasons that range from genuine issue with how janky they (and most Bethesda games) feel to play, especially when they first launch, to thinking it absolutely ridiculous that bottle caps are the fucking currency in this world. As if everyone turned into children when the bombs dropped, somehow bottle caps were the thing they valued the most. And I’m sure there’s some great lore reason for it, but you can save it for someone else.
As of writing this, the modernization patch for Fallout 4 hasn’t released yet, so understand where this next criticism comes from. I tried two approaches to playing Fallout 4, the first of which involved using the PC Gamepass version, and the second of which was on Steam. Both versions could not cope with the fact that I had more than one monitor, and refused to let me play at modern resolutions until I tricked them into thinking one monitor was my primary one, while disabling another. That alone was a enough of hurdle for me to not want to play the damn game, but there was more. For some unknown reason, the Gamepass version of Fallout 4 ran at about 15 frames a second regardless of what monitor or graphics settings I had selected. Pivoting to Steam helped, but the game still didn’t run great on a modern PC.
But even if I could play Fallout 4 properly, I know the first few hours of that game pretty well, and it’s fairly dull. My understanding is that the “good stuff” doesn’t really show up until after you get your feet under you, which in my opinion, takes a longer amount of time to happen than I’m willing to spend on stuff that I’m not enjoying. I’ll probably pop back in once the patch is released, but technical issues are only half of why Fallout games and I don’t get along.
Update: The patch didn’t really do anything. It still runs like garbage.
Celeste
Celeste is a very difficult platformer with a killer aesthetic that was more than able to power me through the more frustrating bits of this phenomenal game. I feel like lauding the accomplishments of Celeste is well-worn territory at this point, so I’ll just say that I also think it’s a fantastic game that’s more than earned every piece of praise its received. If you’re a fan of screaming at your television in anger, then you’ll love Celeste.
Role for Initiative
Updates from the Campaign
I’ve been running a modified Keys from the Golden Vault themed campaign for a few months now that’s been going splendidly. My players are engaged in my story, combat is challenging but not unfairly so, and my players are slowly but surely leaning into the role-play elements of D&D, even if most of them don’t do character voices. It’s remains one of the most rewarding creative endeavors I’ve ever participated in, even when you factor in some of the speed bumps and such that we, as a group, have had to navigate.
I hesitate to say too much, but a prime example is a recent session where my players got a lot of evidence about a broader mystery that’s been unfolding throughout our many sessions, and watching them piece together the different clues into something coherent was an absolute treat for me. It was this justification moment for me, where I had successfully written a compelling story that my players weren’t just letting wash over them, but they were actively perplexed by and trying to solve.
Moments like that, where I can watch my players try and figure out things and have genuine revelatory moments where something clicks, is just pure satisfaction for me. I honestly think it’s why I enjoy being a DM so much more than just being a player. I absolutely relish the moments where I can make them so flummoxed by a mystery, or feel genuine emotion about something good or bad happening. The best explanation I can offer is that it’s the ultimate form of feedback, better than someone just telling me they enjoyed something, when I can produce something people actively want to engage with.
There’s nothing quite like playing TTRPGs, and I cannot believe it took me so long to get onboard with this genre of game.
Watch List
Fallout
I don’t want to set the world on fire with my “hot-takes,” but I thought the Fallout show was really good. That’s right, I said it. But for real, the Fallout series managed to tell several extremely compelling stories in a universe that I historically have not enjoyed.
I really have nothing but good things to say about the series. I did find myself in the weird position of having to explain Fallout lore to my partner, despite being an unreliable narrator at best. It was kind of remarkable to see how much lore I had absorbed through osmosis, and most of it I got right — probably. I just assume the nastiest version of a thing is true in this world, like, “sure, they definitely drink their own piss.”
You can find dissections of the plot and such all over the internet, but I wanted to highlight my favorite one. I’m sure other people have pointed this out, but I had a realization while watching the story line dedicated to the Brotherhood of Steel, wherein there was a Knight who wore the silly looking Power Armor, and a Squire who followed them around with a bag of supplies. The Knight was clearly supposed to represent the player character in any given game, but the story focuses on the Squire, which in-game, is an NPC that’s more than willing to haul your shit around for you. Having the default knight be this murder-hungry try-hard was just icing on the tongue-in-cheek cake.
Once again, not a unique take, but I just thought that was a fun little nod to fans of the games. But the Fallout show is filled with fun little references to the games that all manage to avoid feeling pandering somehow, although I’m sure there’s someone who would vehemently disagree with that. As I’ve stated this earlier, but I’m not a fan of the games, but I really enjoy this show and cannot wait to see a second season.
It was only a matter of time before big-box stores started shuffling physical media out the door and barring them from returning. It’s weird to see it actually coming to fruition though, and not just persistently living as this looming threat. While it’s probably a prudent business decision, it still sucks.
Admittedly, I never was a big fan of the Little Big Planet games, but even I know how beloved these games and their creation tools were. While sad to see the community have the plug so unceremoniously pulled, it’s not entirely unexpected considering the last mainline Little Big Planet game came out a full decade ago. Hopefully something new is in the pipeline to fill the void, but it doesn’t change the fact that so many creations are now lost to time.
It sure feels like a lot of these kinds of stories have been cropping up over the past few years, yeah? This stuff is so over-the-top and would seem comical were it not actually impacting actual people’s lives, but that’s kind of the reality of things these days. Still, we need to constantly call this kind of horrific bullshit out at every opportunity until there is real, systemic change.
Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. We’ll be back at the end of May with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.
The Spotlight is a monthly summary that encapsulates some of the more notable media experiences I’ve had over the past thirty days. From insights on games played, to articles worth checking out, and even cool stories from tabletop role-playing games, it all has a place in the Spotlight.
For the month of March, 2024, here’s what I’m shining the spotlight on.
Games
Minecraft
Yeah, I’m confused about this one too. Earlier this month, my friends and I were looking for something we could all play together when someone jokingly mentioned Minecraft. Pushing past the joke, a few of us actually committed and rented a persistent server that we could just log into whenever we liked. It all happened so fast.
Admittedly, I didn’t play as much as my friends do, so it was a nice way to play something together without holding them back from progressing in any meaningful way. While they were laser-focused on hollowing out the earth and invading other planes of existence, I played the role of a wandering cartographer.
It was really nice to have a sort of asymmetrical, communal game in my back pocket that weirdly hearkened back to my MMO days nearly two decades ago. Typing that last bit hurt me a lot, but my point still stands: Minecraft was a fun, sometimes infuriating, sometimes emotionally challenging experience that I was able to share with my friends. And if I happened to leave a bunch of signs all around the world calling any potential readers a jabroni, then so be it.
The staying power of Minecraft however, wasn’t really there for me. You can only do so much exploring in that game before you actually have to hit the mines and collect a bunch of resources so you can defend yourself from the seemingly endless amount of enemies that want to kill you. So eventually I played less and less of Minecraft until I didn’t play anymore. It was a short yet fun experience, but I’ve gotten my fill of Minecraft for the time being.
Super Mario World
It’s been a long time since I’ve actually played Super Mario World, but for some reason the spirit moved me this month and compelled me to dive back into this 30+ year old game. Turns out that Super Mario World is still an incredible platformer that has way more puzzle solving in it than I remember, although it’s not surprising considering I’ve never technically beaten the game.
In reality it was my big sister was the one who beat Bowser’s ass into a bloody pulp back in the 90s, and she was kind enough to bring me along for the ride. Since then I’ve played Super Mario World plenty of times but always bounced off of it during the Forest of Illusion set of levels. For the uninitiated, those levels all have secret exits but only one of them will actually let you progress in the game (I think). Knowing that, I was able to make pretty short work of this world that would routinely stop my progress in its tracks. Once that hurdle was cleared, it was a straight shot to Bowser’s house where I could whoop his ass in the same way I did with his children.
And that’s exactly what happened. I stomped all of his children’s collective asses and then stomped his too. It was the first time I had ever personally beaten Super Mario World, and it was absolutely worth the 3 or 4 hours it took. Playing it on the Switch was a nice bonus too because I was able to make use of save states and the rewind feature a few times. Put an asterisk next to my accomplishment if you need to, but I could not care less. I beat Super Mario World and killed Bowser and his whole family. I am a hero.
Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen
In anticipation of the impending sequel, I decided to dip my toes into Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen to see what all the fuss was about. I had tried the original Dragon’s Dogma around the time of its initial release but was pretty immediately rebuffed by it. While I can’t say that I spent drastically more time with Dark Arisen this time around, I did finally understand what all the hubbub was about. More importantly, it cemented my desire to try out Dragon’s Dogma 2.
My biggest hurdle with Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen was just how poorly it aged. Coming to the game in 2024, it isn’t a great game to look at or even interact with. Although to be fair, I don’t think many of the games from the 360/PS3 era particularly aged well. From it’s drab looking color palette comprised exclusively of browns and grays, which was the style at the time, to its incredibly archaic and unfriendly menus, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen is undeniably a product of its time.
Looking beyond aesthetics, archaic menus, and unfriendly mechanics, there’s a really fascinating action-RPG to engage with in Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. I played a few hours of it before I decided to save my RPG bandwidth for when Dragon’s Dogma 2 releases — and if the previews are any indication, then I’ve made the right choice.
PowerWash Simulator
I’m fairly certain I’ve spoken about PowerWash Simulator before, extolling its meditative and mindless gameplay. Every so often I’ll check back in with the game when some significant piece of DLC is released, and this time around it was some Warhammer themed DLC that got me back into the cleaning spirit.
To be clear, I have never played Warhammer in any of its forms but I am aware of its existence and the many memes around it, so clearly I was the target audience for this piece of DLC. Turns out there’s a lot of gunk in the Warhammer universe, and it’s just as fun to blast that brand of gunk with my water gun as much as any other kind of gunk.
There’s some mechs, tanks and other vehicles of destruction that need a good rinse, and while it’s all just as fun as any of the other levels in the game, there seemed to be a lot more nooks and crannies that required more effort to clean than I was expecting. But yeah, if you’re into Warhammer and PowerWash Simulator, this is a home-run.
Immortals of Aveum
I’ll be honest with you, I only picked up Immortals of Aveum because it was 8 dollars and I wanted to play an FPS. Now, I could have sworn that there would be guns in this particular game, but it turns out that in this shooter you’re mostly firing off spells instead of a more conventional form of ammunition.
In Immortals of Aveum, you play as a guy who is swept up into this magic war because the bad guys killed his friends and/or family. He was going to die too but in a moment of desperation discovered that his magic was better than the magic a layman could cast, which led to a whole “chosen one” thing that wasn’t particularly exciting. I did think that the setting was kind of cool, especially the opening settlement which consisted of massive, tiered, interconnected city blocks that were built onto the support pillars of a gigantic bridge.
Aside from some cool designs though, I haven’t really felt compelled to press on with the game. The shooting is fine on its own but it’s in service of a loot system that feels kind of bolted onto the experience that I never felt emboldened to understand, let alone engage with. Immortals of Aveum also didn’t run that great on the Xbox Series X which was a turn-off. The frame rate was hit or miss when things started popping off and the textures looked kind of grimy and popped-in a bit too much for my taste.
I’m sure this game has its fans, but Immortals of Aveum just wasn’t for me.
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Earlier in the month I took a chance and dabbled with Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen and found it to be an engaging, albeit obtuse game that someone with a lot more patience than I had could enjoy. It served as a nice table setting for the sequel, and I decided not to burn all of my RPG bandwidth for the month on a game that was nearly 15 years old. Stupidly, I thought that Dragon’s Dogma 2 would be a more modernized entry in this long dormant series, ironing out some of the rough edges of its predecessor while retaining its obscure charm. I was incorrect.
I won’t belabor the point: Dragon’s Dogma 2 is too punishing for me. It isn’t punishing like a Dark Souls game is punishing, rather, there’s just a lot of weirdly archaic decisions being made that make it feel more like busy work than a rewarding gameplay experience. Fast travel is by design a chore, there’s no enemy lock on or dodge mechanic to speak of, just about everything in the open world wants to kill you, making those fast-travel-less treks across the landscape even more tedious, the early quests are mostly uninteresting and repetitive, and there’s not one accessibility or difficulty setting to speak of that might alleviate some of my frustrations.
I think the big issue for me with Dragon’s Dogma 2 comes down to an ideological difference with what I want from games I play and what this game is. Dragon’s Dogma 2 wants its world to feel treacherous and make you feel like you’re surviving in a hostile environment where every interaction is dynamic and chaotic. By all accounts, it absolutely nails what it’s going for. I mean this is the most positive way I can, but everything in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a hassle, and some people will read that and be stoked about playing this challenging and meandering game, while others like myself will just not have the patience for it.
I just want to feel powerful in this fantastical world without having to struggle my way through it. Often times it feels like Dragon’s Dogma 2 is so singularly focused on maintaining immersion, that any sort of modern game accessibility or comfort that is counter that immersive vision is cast to the side. This game is very much about the journey rather than the destination, but the fact that the journey is so arduous makes for a game I don’t want to play.
The best way to convey how divisive this game will be, is probably with a story that will either infuriate you or excite you. Early on, there’s a mission to travel around the map and clear out some monster encampments in the vicinity of the first city you visit, which is standard fantasy quest stuff. I loaded up, gathered my crew and proudly marched out the city at dawn’s light, expecting some resistance here and there, but nothing I couldn’t handle.
I made it maybe 500 feet outside of the walls of the city when I spotted a gang of goblins who were fighting some roving wolves. Shockingly, they all turned their focus towards my party and I and charged at me. But it was just wolves and goblins, “not a problem,” I thought. During the skirmish, I noticed a lot of my party members were going down for some reason, which is when I quickly discovered that a fucking griffon decided to swoop down and join in the fracas. On one hand it was really cool to see how dynamically Dragon’s Dogma 2 handled all of this, but on the other hand it was my first time setting out into the open world by myself and I nearly got one-shot by this angry bird in full view of some city guards who did nothing to help. I ultimately had to beat feet and hoof it back into the city with my main pawn on my shoulder. The ones that I summoned in from the internet — they’re in a better place now — or the griffon’s stomach to be more accurate.
It’s nice that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is being hailed as a big success among fans of series and masochism in general, but would it have been too much to ask for just a difficulty slider or a mode called, “I’m old and don’t have patience for this but very much want to experience some of your very pretty looking RPG.” I’m bellyaching and I realize that. I don’t even think that I’d say Dragon’s Dogma 2 is too difficult for me, but it’s a little too hardcore for me. Honestly, I really like a lot of what Dragon’s Dogma 2 is doing on paper, I just wish it was a little more welcoming.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
The Halo franchise holds a very special place in my heart. For many people my age, they were the go-to console multiplayer games for all of my friends whether we were in person or online. While the franchise may have fallen of the tracks at some point, the newer games haven’t undone my affection for the original trilogy and its spinoffs. That’s why it was easy to agree to a coop campaign through Halo: The Master Chief Collection with a friend of mine.
Instead of playing them in order of the stories, we just dove into Halo: Combat Evolved and figured we’d get to Halo: Reach at some point. We’ve made alarmingly little progress through that game for a handful of reasons, chief among them being how little direction you’re given. If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t think Halo: CE aged particularly well. Sure the pistol is a lot of fun, but every level we’ve played so far has been a meandering nightmare filled with identical hallways and repetitive encounters. I forgot just how much of that game was about clearing enemies out in an area and waiting for the story to happen at you. I guess that’s a reductive way of describing most shooters, but in Halo: CE, most of the time we’d be wondering what our next objective was, only to have to track down an alien that was caught on some geometry in the distance before we’d get any guidance on our next steps.
But shit, it’s still Halo, and Halo is still really good. I’m excited to dive back into the campaign and possibly dabble in some classic multiplayer. Halo is a very special series, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a phenomenal trip down memory lane.
Gato Roboto
Gato Roboto is a challenging, bite-sized, pixelly search-action game where you play as a cat that’s piloting mech suit. I had a lot of fun with this game even if there were more than a few instances where I felt under powered or like the game was being a bit unfair, but it was nothing that stopped me in my tracks. I would offer this advice to potential players of Gato Roboto: don’t just skip through the dialogue like I did. Doing that led to me wandering around aimlessly for a good hour or so in search of my next objective because there’s no good way to get that exposition again. Otherwise, I had a really nice time with Gato Roboto, and I think fans of search-action games with a heavier emphasis on the ‘action’ part will enjoy it too.
Trombone Champ
There isn’t much to say about Trombone Champ except that it’s one of the most delightfully stupid games I’ve played this year. At its core, Trombone Champ is basically Guitar Hero but with a trombone, except that no matter how good you actually are at the game, the songs will always sound ridiculous. It’s a hilarious goof that’s executed perfectly.
Watch List
The Bear
The Bear is an extremely intense show that did its best to push my partner and I away with its first few episodes. It’s a chaotic glimpse into the life of a world-class chef who returns home to run his late brother’s greasy spoon of a restaurant. The employees are resistant to change and stymie his every effort to turn his money pit into something worth a damn.
Luckily, The Bear did not push us away and we were treated to some of the best television I’ve watched in quite some time. Watching the characters grow and regress in equal measure, being won over by seemingly irredeemable figures, and feeling my own heart rate accelerate as shouting voices overlapped one-another in what I can only describe as some of the most authentic dialogue ever written or delivered, all made for an unforgettable viewing experience.
I didn’t think I enjoyed The Bear as much as I did, but when I sat down to write this, nothing but positive thoughts came to mind. It has maybe one or two episodes that missed the mark for me, but overall I cannot recommend The Bear enough.
American Ninja Warrior
I was surprised to find that I enjoyed watching American Ninja Warrior as much as I did, especially considering that when I used to watch old Ninja Warrior episodes on G4TV back in the day, it was always a signal to change the channel because the video game stuff was over. But shit, American Ninja Warrior is kind of a blast to watch.
You get to see all of these people in peak physical condition and terrible gimmicks, tackle an obstacle course devised by what I can only describe as a very hateful person. The leaping, climbing, jumping and everything else in between is just crazy to watch. I’ll admit that it doesn’t feel great to watch American Ninja Warrior, and hear things like, “they just don’t have the core strength needed for that one,” come out of my mouth while I’m balancing a pizza on my stomach cause the table is too far away, but that’s a me problem.
I will say that I found it really weird that a large portion of the contestants seem to be outwardly religious folks. There must be a page in the bible or some Mormon proverb that says something like, “and lo’ my child, get a shredded core so thou might overcome the most righteous set of obstacles in Las Vegas, Nevada for a shot at one million dollars,” but apparently a lot of other people did and they’re competing in American Ninja Warrior.
Game Changers
I’ve had a Dropout subscription for years exclusively because of my love for Dimension 20, one of the best TTRPG actual play shows around. Only recently, spurred on from a series of random comments on the internet extolling the value and quality of the content on the service, did I actually try and watch something not RPG related. That’s where Game Changer comes in.
Game Changer is a game show where the game is different from episode to episode and the players have to figure out what the game and its rules are in order to win it. As the host, Sam Reich says at the beginning of every episode, “the only way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning.” Whether it’s mimicking increasingly more absurd noises, being trapped in an escape room, playing a knock-off version of survivor or engaging in the most brutal version of Simon Says ever, just about every episode of Game Changer is gold.
Listening Party
Albums & Artists
Instead of writing a whole thing for each artist or album I’m listening to, here’s just an unorganized list of notable albums I’ve been jamming on.
I Am The Avalanche – I Am The Avalanche
Mean Everything to Nothing – Manchester Orchestra
Reconstruction Site – The Weakerthans
Enema of the State – Blink 182
The Rest
The Songs We Sang
I wrote a whole thing about the band Brand New that I’m pretty proud of. It’s an article about a band that heavily influenced me at one point, but no longer holds that same place of reverence for one reason or another. It was a pretty emotional write up and I encourage you to check it out.
Piranesi
I finished up Piranesi this month and I’m delighted to report that it’s a very good book that managed to catch me off-guard with its ending. Without spoiling anything, there is a moment in Piranesi where it got really captivating and held my attention for the next 100 or so pages, right up until the ending.
Piranesi isn’t a flawless book by any means though. I found the second chapter to be a really long slog that was essential in hindsight, but was very slow in comparison to the pace and events that immediately follow it. I also thought the ending was a little underwhelming primarily because of how rushed the final chapters felt. The climax of the story doesn’t really get a ton of breathing room before you’re ushered into the epilogue, but it’s still a very enjoyable read nonetheless.
Fantasticland
Described as a “modern take on Lord of the Flies meets Battle Royale,” Fantasticland tells the story of the titular imaginary Florida-based theme park and the harrowing events that occurred within its walls after a massive hurricane cut it off from the rest of the world. Told through several interviews with the survivors, Fantasticland chronicles the series of events and communications breakdowns that explain how a theme park filled with roughly 300 employees devolved into absolute chaos
I like Fantasticland, but I did find some of the leaps in logic to justify the descent into madness that occurred a bit too farfetched at times. It’s entertaining in that it’s both thrilling and horrifying in places, but it is very much a work of fiction that embraces a fantastical kind of anarchy very early on and runs with it.
Regardless of how believable the premise is or not, it’s still an entertaining read. I found myself pretty engrossed in the escalation of events, partially because they were intriguing, and also partially because each interview effectively hypes up the same event for half of the book. It eventually got to the point where I got sick of hearing characters mention how impactful this one event was, without actually describing any of the things that happened until much later in the book. Despite all of that, I ultimately found Fantasticland to be an entertaining read.
News
Turns out Marty O’Donnell Sucks and Wants to be a Congressman
Who’s that finishing the fight against woke culture and rampant immigration issues? Well it’s former Halo and Destiny composer, Marty O’Donnell. Running on a platform of, you guessed it, “traditional family values” and securing the border from the “millions of people coming in,” Mr. O’Donnell will be trying to get that coveted congress seat in Nevada’s Third Congressional District. So why do I think Mr. O’Donnell sucks? Well there’s a line at the bottom of that article that says, “Whether he wins or not, O’Donnell said that he’ll vote for former president Donald Trump in November.” So, like, that’s a red flag.
Gamers Fear Diversity
That’s right, yet again gamers are all up in a tizzy over the perceived notion that a narrative design company, Sweet Baby Inc., is “ruining” games with forced diversity and identity politics. Unsurprisingly, they’re complete idiots and just want to be angry about something.
The reality here is that Sweet Baby Inc. helps make sense of narrative beats within a story as they relate to the characters and world. It’s not about injecting diversity into a project, but ensuring that if there’s a character who is part of a marginalized community, they are granted a level of authenticity and handled with the level of care you would expect.
I feel like we get one of these stories every month or so, and it’s never not exhausting. Representation and inclusivity are good things.
The Battlefront Collection Lands in the Sarlacc Pit
What an absolute bummer it is to hear that the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is a heaping pile of poorly optimized garbage that’s missing core features and content. What should have been a home run, feel-good moment for the series and the Star Wars license at large, turned out to be a tremendous letdown.
Larian is Done With Baldur’s Gate
While it’s sad that Baldur’s Gate 3won’t be getting any Larian-made DLC or sequels, it doesn’t necessarily mean that some other studio won’t step in and try to release an expansion for the game. Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but Wizards of the Coast would be insane to not get someone to support this beloved game any further. I’ve personally never been so offended to see a company not try to milk more money out of me.
But consider the possibility of Larian making something else and what it would look like. In my heart of hearts, I’d like them to try making a Witcher-esque game that maintains the RPG bona-fides the studio is known for, with a type of combat I enjoy. Imagine what the Larian equivalent of Skyrim or Mass Effect could look like. It’s probably not what they’re going to do, but I can dream.
Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. We’ll be back at the end of April with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.
Have you ever had that moment when you went back and revisited something you really enjoyed when you were younger, only to come away with a feeling of despondent ambivalence? Like, I remember thinking Street Sharks action figures looked so cool despite how objectively horrifying the commercial was and — okay this is a bad example because these toys are still rad as hell, but not everything from my past holds up that well, even when they weren’t things as trivial as buff shark action figures. I had this moment recently with a band that for a long time, was a very big part of my identity.
I want to tell you about Brand New.
Brand New was my favorite band in high school and the majority of my twenties. They were this ever evolving band that came out of Long Island, that in my mind, represented the pinnacle of the early 2000’s pop-punk scene. But it wasn’t just their first album, Your Favorite Weapon, a loud and brash pop-punk album with thoughtful lyrics and head bop-able melodies that made me a long time fan, it was that as I grew up their music grew up with me.
By the time their second album, Deja Entendu came out, they sounded like a vastly different band than they did before. It was a more effects and reverb driven album with lyrics that read like poetry and was a much darker and more earnest experience from top to bottom. Deja Entendu was an evolution that was emblematic of the band’s willingness and ability to change, whether it be out of artistic expression or just boredom with something they’ve already done.
That trajectory of stylistic and tonal evolution would kind of be their thing from album to album. That transformation was also aided by the fact that album releases were few and far enough between one another that I was a very different version of myself by the time a new record hit. It made it feel like every album was tailor made for me and my growth as a person, marking checkpoints in my life.
Over the past few years my relationship with Brand New and their lead singer, Jesse Lacey in particular, went from complicated to non-existent. Specifically the allegations about his grooming of underage women when he was younger, (a claim that he all but confirmed when he issued an apology for it) complicated things. You can read about it if you want to, but needless to say it was a real slap in the face for someone who at one point idolized this man’s ability to make music.
I’m not here to re-litigate that whole mess. What happened was gross and clearly the actions of a young man who bought into his own hype and took advantage of people where he could. People grow and people change, and I hope that this 40+ year old man isn’t the same person he was in his mid-twenties, but I don’t know him, nor do I care anymore. The worst part of all of this isn’t that he killed his own band with his actions, it’s that an actual human being has to live with the consequences the selfish things he did. In my mind this is settled law. Jesse Lacey sucks and did something horrible to someone. While he ruined a band that I loved, he actually did damage to another person out there, and that’s unforgivable to me.
It had been years since I actually listened to any of their songs, let alone sit through an entire album. I more or less purged them from my music rotation which was a difficult adjustment at first, but it eventually stuck. The errant song would pop on on Spotify from time to time, but rarely would I let it finish. It felt weird to listen to anything written by Lacey, not only because of what he did, but because of how much of an impact he had on my life.
I didn’t personally know the guy or anything, but I was so heavily influenced by Brand New and Lacey that I attribute them with the reason I ever learned how to play the guitar in the first place. They were the architects of my musical tastes and styles. They were my road-dogs whenever I went driving anywhere, whether it be an interstate trip or a quick jaunt to the supermarket. They meant so much to me at one point in my life, but now they can’t even get airtime on my personal radio stations.
Recently I was in a funk one night when one of their songs came on and it hit just right, leading me down a rabbit hole of binging these albums straight through without stopping. I had this musical relapse and for better and worse, I felt like I did when I was in high school — back when I could block out all the noise in my life with this music that “spoke to me.” But now as a thirty-something year old, with all the context and time that I could muster, their music rang hollow, doing little more than provide background noise.
I think that for the last few years my mentality had been pretty defeatist in the sense that I’d lament the fact that I ever was such a fan in the first place. I was upset that I’d ever had this feeling of hero worship that ultimately blew up in my face. It was that old saying of, “don’t meet your heroes,” come to life, despite never actually meeting any of them. But listening to these songs again I realized that while my relationship with their music will never be the same, I can’t ignore the fact that they did mean a lot to me at one point. It was this weird moment where I had to come to terms with everything that happened and just accepted Brand New‘s latest role in my life: They were important once and influenced me a lot, and now they aren’t and don’t matter.
It was actually kind of nice to re-listen to their final album, Science Fiction, because this far removed from its release and the general concept of being a fan of theirs, it turns out that I don’t think it’s a very good album. A younger version of myself is screaming at me for ever considering this “wildly erroneous” take, but it’s just not that good. It has a few decent tracks, but overall it feels like the last desperate gasp of a band who was ready to call it quits anyway. Science Fiction, along with the album before it, Daisy, (which I do think is a good album) had a real nasty tendency to insert a bunch of non-music bullshit into every single one of their tracks, making casual listening an absolute chore.
For instance, Daisy opens with a grainy, old-timey gospel song that halfway through explodes into a mess of screeching wails and sickly guitar riffs. Meanwhile, Science Fiction opens with a recording of someone describing their dream, although the song that it fades into is pretty good. I understand these are supposed to be thematic mood setters, but they only ever hit once if ever at all, and I am well past the point of being mesmerized by that stuff. It all feels so pompous and self important. I can appreciate the artistry and talent of a song just fine without having to skip the first minute-and-a-half of scratchy audio that’s been inserted because it’s “deep” or whatever.
That’s not just a Brand New thing, that was a huge trend for indie rock albums of that era that was always terrible. It feels like they don’t want you to be able to just listen to a song and move on, but I guess it is kind of a moot point to complain about albums that came out so long ago. Ultimately these are the kinds of things that I failed to notice, (or willingly overlooked) as a once staunch defender of this band that really standout now.
I’ve never really spoken about any of this to anyone, probably because I was really the only person I knew who was that into Brand New. And sure, this isn’t important or world changing stuff, but it feels nice to actually articulate my feelings about all of this considering I don’t think my recent thoughts about the band or the singer went beyond, “fuck that guy.” Let me be clear, “fuck that guy” is still in full effect, but I can’t try to undo the impact his band had on me as a young man. I am grateful for their musical influence but can never reclaim my joy of listening to them again.
Before we dive into the meat of this post, I feel that a little housekeeping and contextualization couldn’t hurt. This is the Spotlight, a new feature I’m launching here on The Bonus World. It used to be that whenever I’d do anything tangentially related to my hobbies I’d find a way to turn it into a piece of content for this website. As time wore on however, I felt that impulse to transcribe any meandering thought into an article diminish significantly.
The Spotlight is effectively part newsletter and part blog post. It’s meant to encapsulate what’s been going on in the TBW orbit for the past month. Games played, articles read, movies watched, an so on and so forth, The Spotlight is intended to be the big bucket that everything falls into. So here’s the bucket, hopefully you enjoy digging through it.
Welcome to the Spotlight, a monthly recap of what’s been going on in my particular corner of nerdiness. Whether it’s a rundown of great or miserable gaming experiences I’ve had, movies or television shows that I found engrossing, books, albums — truly anything I can recommend, it’ll be here in the Spotlight. With this being the first one of these, I’m going to cover both January and February of 2024, mostly because at this point I can’t differentiate between the events of each respective month.
Let’s dive in.
Games
Baldur’s Gate 3
Starting with a big one, Baldur’s Gate 3 continues to be an obsession of mine, although I can feel its grip on me starting to loosen. I thought I did a pretty good job of combing through everything during my first playthrough of the game, but surprising no one else but me, it turns out there’s a lot of hidden goodies left to find and experience.
I will say though, I’m finding it a little hard to muster up the enthusiasm to progress the story forward. Knowing what the main beats are already and being overly familiar with the fights and locations I’ll have to trudge through doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement to experience that stuff again. It’s a tremendous game with great story, but I have so little interest in emptying the Goblin Camp or navigating the Shadowlands ever again.
What I am curious to see is how long until the Baldur’s Gate 3 community goes all Skyrim on me, and creates total conversion mods that reshape the bones of this spectacular game into a completely different experience altogether. It’s bound to happen at some point, especially considering that official mod support is on the way. I think putting BG3 on the shelf for now makes sense, even midway through my current playthrough, that way I won’t burn out on it completely and never return to it.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Back in the middle of January, I was looking for something I could really sink some time into that wasn’t Baldur’s Gate 3. Coincidentally, I had heard pretty phenomenal things about Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a search-action game that, by all accounts, was a “must play” for 2024. If you’re deeply into the search-action genre of games then there’s definitely something here for you, but I was left feeling a little cold from the whole experience.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown isn’t a bad game, it just never clicked with me. I found it overly punishing to a degree that really thwarted my willingness to explore and go off the beaten path. In some of the tighter platforming sections, I had a lot of difficulty getting the controls to feel responsive. I know I’m getting older, but I’m not ready to blame my failures at safely navigating enemy-free areas on my old bones and wavering reflexes.
I’m sure that I’m in the minority on this, but I just didn’t have a ton of fun with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. It’s also worth mentioning, it’s basically a full priced game, retailing for 50 bucks which might be a little steep for what you’re getting, but that’s an entirely subjective matter and I get that, so your mileage may vary.
Fall of Porcupine
Fall of Porcupine is the most Night in the Woods-ass looking game since Night in the Woods. Talking animals? Check. An fun art style that makes you think that the subject matter couldn’t possibly be that dark? Check. A lot of talking to seemingly depressed anthropomorphic animals who seem to be trapped in the day-to-day drudgery of modern life? Yeah, that’s there too. It’s eerily similar to Night in the Woods, one of my favorite video games ever, except for that Fall of Porcupine isn’t very good.
Truly heartbreaking for me, but this game doesn’t hold a candle to Night in the Woods. But I can’t just keep comparing it to that game, so here’s what’s up with Fall of Porcupine. You play as a pigeon named Finley who recently moved into a small town named Porcupine where you just started your residency at the local hospital. The game is supposed to shed light on the mental, emotional, and sometimes physical turmoil our healthcare workers experience, which is absolutely a story I’d like to play through. But from the jump, the game exposes itself to be this overly verbose, meandering and listless experience, where nothing makes sense and everyone talks way too much about nothing.
I know that’s a weird criticism to drop on an adventure game, but everyone, especially your main character, talks way too much about everything. Not one ounce of subtext remains as Finley will tell you in excruciating detail his conflicted feelings about the offerings in a vending machine. It’s brutal and the game isn’t great about letting you quickly breeze through dialogue. Everyone pontificates about nothing for so much longer than they need to, and it’s such a slog.
I can’t even tell you if it gets better though, because after about an hour of playing Fall of Porcupine, I’ve reached a point in the game where I need to go to a certain part of the hospital, and every time I reach the first floor, the game crashes. I would love to know if Fall of Porcupine gets any better, and I would probably see it through regardless if it just could hold together long enough for me to do so. I guess I’ll never know.
A Little to the Left
To me, there’s nothing like a good “vibes” game. That doesn’t necessarily mean it makes you feel good, but the overall atmosphere and gameplay are just really pleasant. A Little to the Left is absolutely one of these games, even if it occasionally veers off into obtuse puzzle territory from time to time.
A Little to the Left is a puzzle game about organizing household items, sometimes to an excessive degree. The game starts simple enough, having you adjust some crooked picture frames and put some cat toys back into the wicker basket they came from. Several puzzles even have numerous ways to complete them, reflecting different organizational impulses, one of which involves a shelf of multicolored books of varying sizes. The game accounts for several gut reactions for organizing, and will accept organizing them by color or size. Once you complete the level it’ll let you know that there was another way to do it, so you can go back and tackle it again.
Things get a little weirder later into the game, where the granularity of the items you’re organizing is kind of odd — at least to me. Several levels involve you finding room for single thumbtacks, a gold tooth, and a handful of bent nails. That last one strikes me more as an opportunity for throwing it away rather than finding a way to fit it into your life. Like, when am I going to need a bent nail? A lot of the later levels feel nonsensical in relation to the overall organizing theme, because more often than not it’s a smokescreen for a pattern recognition puzzle dressed up as tidying your home.
All things considered, A Little to the Left is a chill puzzle game that isn’t too taxing. Despite being available on the Xbox, I’d suggest doing this one either on PC or mobile purely because interacting with this game via a controller isn’t spectacular.
Brotato
The first time I booted up Brotato I thought it was a stupid game with bad art. While my opinion of the art hasn’t really changed, I was eventually won over and pleasantly surprised to find a game that played into my love for Vampire Survivors without being a carbon copy. Just like Vampire Survivors, Brotato is an auto-shooter that’s focused on random drops that upgrade weapons and stats that you can then use to make your potato person more deadly and effective against the ever growing onslaught of weird alien enemies.
In Brotato, you start a run by picking a particular potato character from a list of well over 20 potatoes. Each of these guys has stat bonuses, specialties and in some cases, significant drawbacks. You’ll get guys with no armor but incredible health regeneration rates, or classes that can only use melee or explosive items. You pick your opening weapon and difficulty, and square off against your first wave of enemies. Once the wave ends you can buy new or upgrade weapons or bump up your stats if you’ve leveled up during the wave. That’s kind of it, really.
While Brotato can be tough, I found it to be an overall kinder and gentler game than Vampire Survivors is. While the art never won me over, the gameplay certainly did. If you like auto-shooters, maybe give this one a whirl.
Enshrouded
Enshrouded is a game that by all accounts I should not enjoy, but I really do. It’s one of those stick and rock games that has you punching trees to collect resources and what have you, but it quickly reveals itself to be something much different than your run-of-the-mill survival game.
The core conceit of Enshrouded is that the world is covered in these pockets of “shroud,” which is basically an area where zombies and other baddies are spawned from and hang out. These zones range in deadliness, with the earlier and easier versions just slowly ticking away at your health, while the worse ones will just insta-kill you the moment you step inside of it. How do you avoid that? Unsurprisingly, the answer is crafting. But in a shocking twist, it isn’t just crafting.
Enshrouded is a very lightweight survival game, which is probably why I enjoy it so much. The core idea is that if you engage with the survival mechanics, you’ll find it to be exclusively additive rather than punitive. For instance, drinking water just makes your stamina meter bigger, and food makes your health bar larger and helps with regeneration. Not engaging with that stuff isn’t a death sentence like it is in other survival games, it’s just something that only helps you.
Aside from the light survival mechanics it’s also a decently fun action game. Fighting enemies in these kinds of games is usually a slog, rewarding the items you bring into a fight more than your ability to fight. So if you crafted a better sword than your enemy, you can just hold the attack button and whittle away more of their health than they can of yours. Enshrouded is not like that. Combat feels good and weapons have some weight to them. There’s also a good dodge roll that allows you to tumble around your enemies like some sort of bootleg Dark Souls game.
I haven’t dug too deeply into Enshrouded just yet, but I’ve really enjoyed what little I’ve played of it thus far. It’s a game that’s interested in letting you explore the world and spec out your character however you want with a wide variety of skill upgrade paths for you to explore. A lot of survival games I’ve played in the past felt like they were more interested in me building a safe zone where I could be sustainable, whereas Enshrouded feels more about exploring and fighting bad guys.
Ultimately I think Enshrouded is great and I can’t wait to see how it evolves over the course of its early access period.
Warioware: Move It!
I don’t know about you, but I love myself a good Warioware game, and Warioware: Move It! is a very good one of those. There isn’t a ton to say about this one other than it’s got a lot of fun and sometimes inscrutable micro-games that come at you fast and furious.
My partner and I played the hell out of Warioware: Move It! for the few sessions it took us to completely annihilate it, save for a handful of micro-games that are, in my professional opinion, absolute poppycock. The fidelity of the Joy-Con motion controls aren’t great which led to a lot of my frustration, but they were good enough to get us through 90% of the game without issue.
Warioware: Move It! is great and if you’ve liked those games in the past, you’ll enjoy this one too. Oh, also I should mention, if your body is like mine and is constantly betraying you and making new and horrifying noises everyday, try to remember that the game is tracking the movement of the controllers and not your actual human bodies. There is a particular micro-game that was responsible for me throwing out my back, twice, because it encouraged me to dodge something as if I were Neo in the Matrix. So look out for that one.
Return to Grace
Return to Grace is a first-person adventure game that tells the story of a space traveling archaeologist named Adie as she goes out in search of the titular Grace, an AI god who went mysteriously went dormant centuries ago. In the most reductive terms, Return to Grace is a walking simulator that, for better or worse, has a lot to say.
That isn’t a knock on the actual content of the story of Return to Grace, which I think is pretty decent for what it’s worth, but quite literally, this 2 to 3 hour adventure game is mostly about listening to dialogue, whether it be in the form of the many bickering AI fragments of Grace you meet along the way, or the dozen or so audio logs you find throughout the retro-futurist facility you’re exploring.
Exploring the abandoned facility in Return to Grace feels a lot like how I would imagine it would feel to wander through a long abandoned Rapture from Bioshock. It’s unnerving being the only living soul walking around this gigantic (for lack of a better term), space station. This place served as the holy site for all of Grace’s followers from across the galaxy, but there isn’t a body or skeleton to be found. It’s the visual presentation of Return to Grace that really does a great job of engaging you with its mystery and really goes a long way to keeping you on the narrative hook.
But for all of my praise for Return to Grace, it has one massive shortcoming: it’s an absolute slog to play. You’d think that the story wasn’t well written or paced or something to that effect, but it’s none of those things that ultimately slow Return to Grace to a crawl, it’s outrageously stupid gameplay decisions that kill any momentum you start to build. In a game about walking, talking and inspecting things, you would expect to be able to do some of those actions simultaneously.
Truly the cardinal sin of Return to Grace is how often it stops you from doing anything until dialogue is over, and like I said earlier, this game is 99% talking. Those AI fragments of Grace have a lot to say, and bicker constantly. Should they be doing that while you want to open a door, that’s too bad for you. Even worse, if you decide to listen to an audio log, you’re not even allowed to move at all. You just have to stare at your fancy wristwatch as an audio file plays at you. It feels like the developers didn’t want you to miss any dialogue, so they ensured that you couldn’t by stifling your ability to move forward.
Return to Grace‘s biggest strength is in its storytelling, but it suffers dramatically in the act of telling you that story. Because of this weird limitation in your actions, this 2 hour game effectively doubles because your character is incapable of listening and opening a door at the same time. Even with that though, I still think Return to Grace is worth playing or at least watching a playthrough of. Sure, the story it’s telling walks through some well-worn territory, but it’s still effective in how it does it. Just know that this is a game that you cannot rush, no matter how hard you might try.
Role for Initiative
Updates from the Campaign
A little while back, my TTRPG group and I finally wrapped up our 2+ year long Eberron campaign that much to my dismay, didn’t have the narrative payoff I was hoping for. We were pressed for time and at a weird spot, so I had to basically cut a boss fight in half and rush through a lot of stuff — but we had fun nonetheless. Shortly after that campaign ended we pivoted into our latest one, took a long break because someone (me) had to move, and eventually picked back up.
I found that between moving and job searching, having to write an entire campaign from scratch was going to be a nonstarter, so I opted to run the very well-received anthology book, Keys From the Golden Vault, as a campaign. Me being me, however, I decided to write a whole-ass story to exist in parallel to the missions in the book. Honestly though, I’m finding this story to be infinitely more coherent and engaging than my previous one.
Additionally, I feel as if I’m doing a much better job of taking my hands off the wheel in this campaign than I did in our last one. At some point in our last campaign, I kind of wanted the story to end and was maybe a bit more obvious about which thing they could do would advance the story. I’m sure I’ll get around to telling some of the weird stories about our current campaign, like the time one our characters used a dead body to mulch their garden, or how one of my players is 2 for 2 on ending up in a jail during a mission, but now isn’t that time.
Watch List
Modern Family
At the time of writing this, I think my partner and I are pretty close to rounding the corner on the tenth season of Modern Family and begin its eleventh and final one. Despite being around for 11 seasons, this is the first time I’ve ever watched any of it, and to be honest, I think it’s a pretty funny yet flawed show that’s just endearing enough to keep me from tuning out completely.
My chief complaint lies in the fact that while there’s a lot of character growth that’s implied to be happening at the end of just about every episode, none of the characters ever seem to stop engaging in the toxic behaviors that we’ve just spent an entire episode witnessing. From season to season the characters never actually learn the lessons of their past and continue to act like caricatures of themselves, continuously neglecting and manipulating one another. Most of the conflicts in these episodes could simply be resolved with marginally better communication, and it’s very frustrating to watch that theme be so pervasive throughout the dozens and dozens of episodes we’ve watched.
That kind of lack of growth normally bothers me in long-running shows. I tuned out of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia a few seasons in because I found none of the main characters redeeming at all. No one grew or learned a lesson, they were consistently shitty to each other and everyone they met, and I felt like I could never root for these people, because they’re ultimately bad people. Modern Family does just about everything I didn’t like about It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, except I think it has a lot of heart that makes it incredibly endearing. At the end of the day, they prioritize their family and make the right decision, even if by the next episode they’re just pulling the same shit again.
The other real sticking point for me is how haphazardly the show adopts and abandons plot points and characters. Maybe it’s intentional, but it feels hilariously sitcom-esque in how new characters and plot devices are constantly rotating in and out. For example, there’s an episode about a character having a job interview that goes hilariously badly, but in the end they still get the position. It’s been like 15 episodes and that has not been addressed again. Does that person have a job? It sure seemed like it, but I’ve yet to see that come back into play.
For all of my kibitzing though, it has proven to be a consistently enjoyable show for my partner and I to veg out on the couch and watch, even if it does mostly serve as background noise these days. The jokes still land and we still laugh. I am scared for what we’ll do once we exhaust all 11 seasons though, because we have a tough time agreeing on things to watch.
Trial By Fieri: An Ill-Advised LTTP Randomized Run
This is probably going to be a theme in these Spotlights going forward, but I’m a big fan of the McElroy Family and a lot of their content, including the very funny Trial By Fieri: An Ill-Advised LTTP Randomized Run. To break the title down for those who just see a jumble of nonsensical words, Trial By Fieri: An Ill-Advised LTTP Randomized Run, is a randomized playthrough of the Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, where all of the items and enemies have been jumbled up, and Link has been replaced with an excellent Guy Fieri sprite that dies in one hit.
If any of what I’ve said sounds remotely interesting to you, then I heartily encourage you to check it out. Despite having watched it before, I find it to be excellent background noise for when I’m playing a game or half-focusing on something else.
The Daily Show
Not since Jon Stewart retired back in 2015 have I watched an iota of The Daily Show, not because I doubted it was still a decent show, but because I couldn’t really imagine anyone but Jon Stewart behind that desk. That was then and this is now. Jon Stewart is back, only if it’s just on Mondays, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve always liked Jon Stewart and his interpretation of current events, and it’s good to see him back in the saddle. Here’s hoping that he does more than just Mondays at some point.
Listening Party
The Artist in the Ambulance – Revisited
If you ask me, 2003 was an excellent year for music. I twas jam-packed with some of my favorite albums of all time, from Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, The Postal Service’s Give Up, Fall Out Boy’s Take this to your Grave, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Take Them On, On Your Own, Brand New’s Deja Entendu, and of course, The Artist in the Ambulance by Thrice.
Twenty years later, Thrice decided it would be super cool to remind every fan of that album about the passage of time and our mortality by rerecording and releasing the whole dang thing with some help from some other musicians. Wouldn’t you know it, these 40+ year old men still have got it. This album has always ripped and continues to do so even in its rerecorded state.
Not many things from 2003 have aged particularly well. The Artist in the Ambulance – Revisited is certainly one of the more pleasant time capsules you could open up, granted you’re into that kind of music. Regardless though, 2003 was crazy good for music. Seriously, look at this list, I’m sure you’ll find something excellent.
The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula
I told you that this McElroy Family stuff was probably going to be a consistent theme throughout a lot of these posts, so here we are again. The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula is the latest D&D 5e campaign that the McElroy Family is running, and it’s an absolute laugh-riot.
For the uninitiated, The Adventure Zone is a podcast where the three McElroy brothers and their father play role-playing games together, the first arc of which, called “Balance,” being my favorite campaign by far. It’s ebbed in quality and won’t gel with everyone, especially considering the group’s, “rules-light”, approach to playing games. The priority is telling a fun story over stringently adhering to the rules, which I find to be a great on-ramp for TTRPG-curious folks.
I’ve had a pretty complicated history with The Adventure Zone and a lot of the campaigns they’ve run, often times feeling a lack of grounding or sense of place. In the past I’ve felt that some of the game systems they’ve used in the past weren’t particularly interesting to listen to people play or weren’t conducive to the kind of story they were trying to tell, which is why the return to 5e was somewhat comforting.
I approached this campaign with cautious optimism, but was immediately won over within minutes of the first episode. Not only is it hysterical, but the players have excellent chemistry with each other and just enough familiarity with the game that they’re playing that keeps the pace of play and jokes nice and quick without letting the show from getting bogged down in rule clarifications. The setting and story are fantastic, and I’ve yet to feel overwhelmed by the information that DM Griffin McElroy has doled out thus far.
As of writing this, only a handful of episodes are out, so maybe the quality falls off a cliff or something. But as it stands, I think I’ve listened to that first episode about a half a dozen times, and it still hasn’t gotten old. If you’re looking for a D&D flavored way to kill an hour, I’d give the first episode of The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula a listen.
My Horrible Upstairs Neighbors
If you’re a fan of silence and quiet contemplation, then I’d recommend you don’t actually listen to my horrible upstairs neighbors. I’ve never met these people, which is honestly a good thing cause I don’t think I’d have anything nice to say, but they seem like some of the most inconsiderate folks around.
I’ve identified two of them based on the noises they make. There’s what I presume to be a teenager in school, because the noise they make tends to stop occurring during school days from like 7am to 3pm, and another who doesn’t show up until later in the day, who apparently does everything in their apartment in the clackiest heels you’ve ever heard. Together I think they have bowling ball dropping competitions or practice juggling hammers, and we get front row seats to that every night.
They drop a lot of stuff, they have either one or seventy small yappy dogs, the teenage one may or may not be a streamer because they play video games in the most over-the-top fashion I’ve ever heard of, ever. I legitimately thought there was an actual problem at first cause all I would hear through the ceiling was someone shouting, “Help me. Save me. Stay away,” and other things of that ilk. Soon it was followed by taunting other players or screaming for revives in a way that let me know that they were just a HARDCORE GAMER who occasionally uses some pretty miserable language.
If you’re wondering why I’m writing about this at all, let me just provide some context here and say that my office is directly underneath where the uber-gamer does their thing, and they may or may not be doing it right now. Ultimately, the saddest part about this whole experience is that they aren’t the worst neighbors we’ve had.
The Rest
Piranesi
Turns out that they make books that aren’t just reference materials for running TTRPGs. I know that because I’m actively reading one of these books, and there isn’t even a single goblin in it — yet. Piranesi is a very tough book to describe, but at its basest form, it’s a fantasy novel unlike anything I’ve ever read before.
The titular Piranesi is an inhabitant of this massive, seemingly endless 3 story mansion boasting decadent halls filled with marble statues and little else. It is written as a series of diary entries that this man is making as he chronicles his days and expeditions into more unknown sections of this endless mansion.
It’s been a while since I’ve engaged with a piece of media that’s hooked me in purely on my curiosity alone, but Piranesi truly has me in its clutches. I want to know more about literally everything that’s happening in this world, which may or may not be a bad thing to some extent. The early portions of this book are a bit of a tough read purely because of how ephemeral everything feels. There’s very little to ground yourself with because everything is being described by someone who may or may not have any understanding of the real world, if there even is one in the fiction of this book.
While I’m still not done with it, I’ve heard it eventually gets to the, “I can’t stop going,” point and really pays off. A few chapters in though, and I’d gladly recommend the one fiction book I’ve read in the past 5 years to anyone who would ask. Although I guess technically my many TTRPG books are fiction.
A+ Certification
CompTIA is the voice of the world’s information technology industry. (PRNewsFoto/CompTIA) (PRNewsFoto/)
I’ve been studying up for my A+ certification test for a few weeks now and boy let me tell you, there is no more miserable feeling than voluntarily watching the rug be pulled out from underneath you. I thought I had a decent grasp on technology, not an extensive or particularly great one, but a decent one. I’ve built computers, I’ve troubleshooted lots of hardware, software and network issues in the past, so I thought I wouldn’t be too far behind when it came to pivoting onto this career path.
It turns out that I knew absolute bupkis before and somehow know less now. Despite hours of reading and researching, tutorials and study guides, the internet to me is basically invisible magic what sometimes makes pornography appear. Seriously, 75% percent of what I’ve learned so far has been jumbled mess of letters and numbers. LDAP, 802.11, 802.3, TELNET, SCADA, DMARC, plenum-rated cables, subnets, octets — there’s so much of this that it feels borderline impossible to learn.
It’s overwhelming and time consuming but it’s also what I want to do professionally. I’ve spent a lot of my life meandering and not committing to anything career-wise, but this is the first time in a while that I’ve felt consistently motivated to fight through those instincts that are shouting at me to “just quit.” It isn’t just about getting my career going so I can maybe be in a better financial situation, but it’s about proving to myself that I’m capable and smart. So it’s back to the IT mines for me.
News
The Riffmaster
They’re making a new plastic guitar for Fortnite. While not a player of Fortnite, I do play a lot of Clone Hero, and my Guitar Hero 3 Les Paul guitar finally stopped working, so I think I’m legally required to buy this thing whenever it comes out.
Xbox, Everywhere
What’s that behind you? It’s an Xbox. Making a sandwich? That’s not ham, that’s an Xbox. Getting frisky with your partner? That’s actually them, but there will be an Xbox in the corner, watching. There will be an Xbox everywhere, even if it’s on a PlayStation.
Baldur’s Gate 3: The Toxic Community
Oh look, another story about a fan base harboring some truly repugnant figures who just can’t seem to not harass the developers of a game they claim to love because a feature isn’t in the game yet. Seriously, what’s wrong with these folks?
Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. We’ll be back at the end of March with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.
I could argue that 2023 has been one of the best years for video games ever and I don’t know that I’d get too much push back for that. 2023 was jam-packed with games that would take top marks had they been released any other year, but somehow they all got smushed into one, very overwhelming year.
To set the stage a little bit, I played and enjoyed a lot of games this year, and tons of them aren’t on my hodgepodge of a list, primarily because I didn’t want to make this list a top 30 or whatever it might pan out to be. I also had a lot of positive experiences with games that I really didn’t have more to say about them other than, “I liked them.” Games like Sea of Stars, Super Mario Wonder, Super Mario RPG, Stray, and plenty of others just didn’t make the list because I don’t really have much more to say about them than, “they’re good!”
With that said, let’s just dive in.
Honorable Mentions
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
What better way to start off a Game of the Year list than with a decade old video game for a long abandoned platform? This year, in an attempt to find more games my partner and I could enjoy together, we both found ourselves getting hopelessly addicted to Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the Nintendo 3DS.
Our addiction and obsession stems, not only from being long-time fans of the series, but also because the latest entry in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, played a key role in our burgeoning relationship back during the early part of the pandemic. It helped us stay together during a time when people were forced to be apart, and going back to play New Leaf together has really reinforced how special this series is to us. It also helps that Animal Crossing: New Leaf is arguably the best entry in the series, jam-packed with content that, despite our ravenous rate of play, we’ve only scratched the surface of.
Disney Illusion Island
Another game that my partner and I bulldozed our way through, Disney Illusion Island was a fantastic platformer that was easy for both of us to enjoy. It was interesting and varied enough for my seasoned gaming sensibilities, yet accessible and welcoming for my my partner to enjoy. Beautiful art and the decision to not have any combat in Disney Illusion Island, also really helped grease the wheels. Having to only focus on navigating the world without the headache of some random enemy try to ice us, really made for a more enjoyable cooperative experience that wasn’t subject to the normal difficulty spikes one might find in other Metroidvanias.
While the game was a little too long and simplistic for my taste, it was an excellent way to spend some time with my partner, and that alone earns it a spot on this list.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage
As someone who never really got into the newer style of Assassin’s Creed games, Assassin’s Creed Mirage was a refreshing return to form for the series that I found very mechanically satisfying, even if the story and setting weren’t my favorite. For the first time in well over a decade, I had a lot of fun playing an Assassin’s Creed game.
Narrowing the scope of these games feels like a necessary change to the bloat and grandeur that’s invaded the more recent entries, both in terms of mechanics and concept. I like just being an assassin and having to focus solely on doing a good job at that, which is the majority of what this game gave me. If Assassin’s Creed Mirage is the foundation for the direction of the series going forward, then I’m onboard for whatever is next.
Lil’ Gator Game
Lil’ Gator Game is an earnest and relaxing take on the recent Zelda formula, that I was absolutely taken with this year. You play as the titular “lil’ gator,” who conscripts every person who lives on their home island, to play along and effectively be NPCs in the adventure game they’ve concocted. As the gator, you go on a DIY, Breath of the Wild-styled adventure across the island, slaying cardboard cutouts of enemies and solving puzzles, all in an effort to get your older sister to stop working on her college coursework, so she can play with you like she used to.
It’s a very sweet and very fun examination of responsibilities and growing up, while also being incredibly low impact and not demanding. I really enjoyed Lil’ Gator Game on just about every level, and I think it’s worth checking out.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Two Spider-Men and a Venom? That’s right folks, for the price of one video game, you can play as two Spider-Men and one whole Venom. That’s just the excellent value you can expect from Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, the very good sequel to two very good games.
Realistically though, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a really good sequel that takes what you loved about its predecessors, shaves down some of the rough edges, and sprinkles on more of what people liked about those earlier entries in the series. They even brought back those bad stealth segments where you play as Mary Jane, except this time they gave her a stun gun that’s more effective than either of the Spider-Men you play as.
While I found the enemy variety, move sets, expanded world and story pacing to be greatly improved over Marvel’s Spider-Man, there were some really lame bits of storytelling and uninspired mission design on display. There’s also the fact that the good, Spider-Man-based stealth, has been minimized both in terms of opportunities for it and its effectiveness. It sucks because I really enjoyed the stealth mechanics and focus of the previous entries, and now it feels like you can only get away with so much before combat is foisted upon you.
The overwhelming sentiment I was left with once I rolled credits on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was an excited curiosity to see what Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 was going to be about, because despite my criticisms, I still am very invested in seeing this story continue or resolve.
Runner Up
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a phenomenal game, just like its direct predecessor that came out over six years ago. It is the successor to one of the most groundbreaking open world games of all time, and if not for the next game on this list, it probably would have been my game of the year. But despite all the well deserved praise, it’s a very iterative experience that didn’t deviate too far from the winning formula that Breath of the Wild established.
I truly loved The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and all most its new mechanics, some of which really changed the way I approached combat and puzzles, and some of which could be completely ignored if you just didn’t want to deal with it. Fusing objects together to make ridiculous weapons was great fun, even if it was a bit tedious and a way to backdoor crafting into the game. Ascending through ceilings and being able to reverse the flow of time really changed how I approached platforming and navigating the environment, even if I kept forgetting I had access to them.
But then you have the absurdly named Ultrahand ability, which allows you to build all sorts of vehicles that can help you, quite literally, fly across Hyrule faster than any pathetic horse could ever hope to. It’s an amazing feature in its execution, but it’s a total bummer for people like myself who have no interest in engaging with building things in games. I just don’t have the patience to sit and finely engineer the perfect flying machine that won’t flip over the second I board it, when I could just walk to my next location. And even if I did want to engage with that system, I’d have to spend ages grinding away to build up enough battery capacity to run these things for more than 30 seconds. It’s this entirely optional system that’s been added, that’s responsible for a good portion of what’s new about Tears of the Kingdom, and it’s just something I had no desire to engage with.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a great example of taking what worked, and giving the player more of it. “Not enough dungeons? We added a bunch more. Not enough boss fights? Here you go! Not enough korok seeds? How’s about we triple the amount then?” Hell, they even added a bunch of floating islands above Hyrule, as well as an underground area that’s just as big as the mainland, just to see how much they could strain the CPU of a Nintendo Switch. Granted, the floating islands are cool, albeit fairly empty and more limited in number than I’d like. Meanwhile the underground area is just one large grayscale nightmare zone that isn’t fun to explore and filled with things that want to kill you.
I don’t mean to harp on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, because I really did enjoy it quite a great deal. But just about every positive aspect of it is something that I got out of Breath of the Wild, six years ago. Sure the sky islands are cool, sure the traversal options are fun, and sure, the story is much better than the one in Breath of the Wild. I’m not denying that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an excellent game that is worthy adoration, but it does sometimes feel like the “director’s cut” version of a movie I’ve already seen before.
Game of the Year
Baldur’s Gate 3
Defying all reason or logic, Baldur’s Gate 3, a tactical role-playing game, is my game of the year in a year that was filled with some of the most laudable games of all time. A genre of game that I absolutely do not enjoy, didn’t just win the top spot on this year’s list, it’s forever cemented as one of my favorite games of all time.
Initially, I bounced off of Baldur’s Gate 3 when it first was available in early access, opting to spend more time with it once it fully released rather than battle against constant progress-wiping updates that were to be expected in its preview state. When it finally did release fully back in August, it did so to a deluge of fanfare that left me excited to get my hands on it in a, “eventually I’ll have time, but not right now,” kind of way. I put it off until this October, where I proceeded to pour about 100 hours into a game I thought I’d just like.
And despite how I felt about it in 2020, where I thought my familiarity with D&D mechanics would be the thing pulling me through the game, it turned out that the combat was my least favorite part of the whole thing. The story, the setting, the characters — most of the characters, they were the things that kept me coming back with ravenous desire. They were the things that made me restart the game 4 times until I “got it right.” While I don’t think there’s actually any choices you can make that will force a fail-state in the game, which I should point out, is an incredible feat of game design and execution, I still didn’t want to chance it and accidentally doom the future of my campaign.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is not a game without its faults, to be sure; the path finding is a joke, performance is spotty, the camera hates indoor spaces despite how many of them there are, quest tracking was iffy at best, and there were some sections of the game that I did not find to be fun at all. There are sections that I’m dreading having to do again in an inevitable second playthrough, but those low points are incapable of outweighing the towering highs of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was easily the best and most addicting game I played this year. It wasn’t just because of excellent world building and punchy combat, but its writing, acting and narrative that all worked in tandem to deliver some truly emotionally impactful moments. Very few games have ever moved me, and I did not expect Baldur’s Gate 3 to be the latest addition to that list.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was an adventure I got to go on with this group of ragtag NPCs that, for the most part, I grew to genuinely care about and get invested in. But most importantly, it’s a game that adapted to me and actually accounted for the things I did and chose. I wasn’t just playing a game, I was writing my own story, and the game was going along with me. Baldur’s Gate 3 gave me the most personalized and unique gaming experience of the year — hell, the most unique gaming experience of my life, and that alone makes it worthy of calling it my Game of the Year.
Thanks for taking the time to read this list, I really appreciate it. The Bonus World, if nothing else, will return in 2024 to make another one of these lists. Hopefully more stuff is posted as well, but at the very least, another Game of the Year list is scheduled.
Regardless, I hope your holiday season was as stress free as possible, and your new year is better than the last. Have a good one, everybody.
Life is tricky. My partner and I witnessed several plans and backup plans completely fall apart before our eyes for most of 2023, which made things difficult, to say the least. But we made it through to the other side, and I feel like I can breathe for the first time in well over a year.
I want to keep this brief and just kind of put it out there that I haven’t abandoned The Bonus World, I’m more just trying to figure out how it fits into my life these days. Aside from this tiny sign of life, I do plan on writing up some sort of Game of the Year thing this year, but I don’t know what else gets posted here to fill the void till that post eventually goes up.
Regardless, thanks for popping in and reading this. I know it’s nothing particularly fun or interesting, but if nothing else, it is a sign of life, which is more than I can say for a lot of video game blogs… but not much more.
“I just want to feel the sun on my — well, I just want to see the sun for once.” Wrapping the arm of a legless warforged over her shoulders, she and the remainder of the party made their way to the outside of the facility to get a view of the desolate landscape. They placed the unnamed bot down and leaned it up against the base of a statue to a long forgotten god, letting them bask in the sunlight for the first time in their life. Four adventurers sat beside them in a somber silence, and marveled at the setting sun. Admiring the sprawling outdoor vista through the lens of someone who had never had the privilege to do so before. Content for the first time. The light flickered and faded from its eyes, and their body slumped slightly to the side — motionless.
“This sucks,” said one of my players, breaking the silence.
It did suck. That was the point. We had spent a massive portion of our campaign inside of a place that was supposed to be miserable and oppressive, but I was never able to truly make things feel as bleak as I wanted it to. But right there, right at the end of our campaign, I was able to gut-punch them real good.
But the truth of the matter is that I also gut-punched myself, because I realized that moment was the last non-combat thing they were going to do before they sailed off into the final encounter. I’m proud to know that the last role-playing moment they’d have was seeing their characters finally experience sadness, which is a huge accomplishment for me. Bittersweet as it is, this marks the end of our Eberron campaign.
As of writing this, we still haven’t actually done the final battle, but we have exhausted all of my prepared content, something I thought I’d never actually be able to confidently say. I’ve tinkered and fiddled with the final session plan over and over and finally have it at a place that I’m satisfied with, but I still wonder if it’s going to be good enough?
Did I make good on the story? Did I help the characters grow? Have I accounted for every plot point I put forward over the course of the past two years? Definitely not that last one, but even if I somehow did I still would be tense at the very notion that this thing is finally ending.
I think what I’m going to miss the most about our campaign is the world that we crafted together. Our version of Eberron was fairly by the book when we started, but the story and the player’s actions have so dramatically changed the world around them. It’s going to be really tough going back to a vanilla setting that my players haven’t thoroughly sullied. I’m positive that whatever we do next will get just as filthy, if not more so than our Eberron world, but it’s going to take time.
I don’t know about my players, but there’s a lot of emotion wrapped up in this final session for me and I don’t know how to process it. This is by far the longest creative project I’ve ever worked on, and to finally be able to complete it is a massive accomplishment for me. It makes me wish I had been documenting our journey better, something I’m considering doing for our next endeavor.
Ultimately, I’m not looking for my players to have an epiphany or anything from the conclusion of this campaign, but I am curious to see how they react. This is the ending their characters have earned, and I hope that what I’ve prepared for them meets at least some of their expectations. Although, all of this could be for nothing considering they still have to survive my devious gauntlet. So maybe the ending they earn could be a shitty one, and that’s on them — mostly.
I’m normally not one for engaging with spoilers, often chastising certain people in my life who are so deep in the spoiler game that they do things like dangle the plot points of unreleased Star Wars movies in my face because they needed to talk about it with someone. I’m usually pretty good about not engaging with that kind of stuff, but recently my normally steely resolve crumbled into dust when The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaked all over the internet, making for the most tantalizing of minefields I so carelessly wander through. While most of what I’ve seen is cause for excitement, building upon the sensational foundation of Breath of the Wild, I’m getting pretty worried that it might not be the game for me.
Note: There will be a clearly marked paragraph with a non-story spoiler later in this article. Aside from that, this article only references things seen throughout the various trailers that have been officially released by Nintendo.
So how could the upcoming release of sequel to one of my favorite games of all time be cause for panic above anything else? Simply put, it looks really difficult. I know a lot of folks like to debate how difficult Breath of the Wild was and if it should have been tougher or not, but I found it to be an extremely challenging and punishing game, both in terms of the mechanics at play like weapon degradation, and simpler elements like how hard everything hits you.
I recently started another playthrough of Breath of the Wild in preparation for the sequel, and found myself getting my ass kicked up and down Hyrule with minimal resistance. I struggled with some of the bosses, and have been so thoroughly stomped by the slightly tougher variants of the basic enemies that I go out of my way to avoid any and all conflicts. I don’t remember the game whipping my ass as much when it released 6 years ago, but maybe in that time my “gamer skillz” have atrophied. Or maybe I just don’t have the time or desire to bash my head against the rippling abs of a Lynel that’s dead set on skewering Link and making him a delicious, blonde, shish kabob.
So when these leaks reveal a whole litany of bone-crushing, skin-melting enemies lining up to pummel Link into dust, it makes me a tad worried that this game might be a bit much for me. I’m all for more enemies and challenges, but I’m not looking for something that’s basically Dark Souls dressed up in a green tunic. Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I enjoyed Breath of the Wild in spite of its combat mechanics, not because of them.
What really made Breath of the Wild so special for me was that feeling of limitless exploration mixed with endless possibility. Combing through every nook and cranny of Hyrule was the best part of the game, but it was constantly undercut by being ambushed by some enemy or enemies that were not only eager to but exceedingly capable of turning Link into toothpaste.
Breath of the Wild was one of the only games I’ve ever played that was so good at encouraging exploring and charting a wild, untamed world. That feeling of cresting a hill only to spot some far off anomaly that necessitated further investigation, whether it be a curious stone formation, a forest shrouded in darkness, or the gentle puffs of smoke coming from a distant campfire, Breath of the Wild was unparalleled in fostering that sense of discovery and wonder.
MILD SPOILER FOR TEARS OF THE KINGDOM BELOW
I’m not saying that I want no enemies or combat whatsoever in my Zelda games, but would it be too much to ask for an easy mode or the basest of accessibility options? Tears of the Kingdom apparently boasts a massive underground map that rivals the size of Hyrule’s overworld from Breath of the Wild, and that sounds really exciting to me in concept, but I’ve also heard that some of the hardest enemies in the game reside down there, making it one of the most challenging areas of the game. The area is positioned as incredibly tough and punishing, a fact I’m sure plenty of people are thrilled about, but I am most certainly not one of them. Hearing about the depths just fills me with a looming dread that gives way to the realization that I’m going to have to head down below eventually, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to overcome whatever awaits me down there.
SPOILER OVER
I don’t know what the optimal balance is for me when it comes to a game like Tears of the Kingdom, but I fear that from what I’ve seen already, it’s going to be a much harder game than I am prepared to take on. I get that Zelda games are all about Link stopping some, usually Ganon-centric, world ending calamity, which Tears of the Kingdom seems to absolutely be leaning into, but how about a “story mode” for me and my fellow aging gamers?
What’s really frustrating is that Nintendo could address these concerns with some difficulty options, or heaven forbid, any accessibility options whatsoever, but that seems like a bridge too far with them. Seriously, just allowing me to be heartier or make enemies less formidable would be huge for opening up the game to more players, but it just doesn’t seem like they’re interested in that.
Maybe I’m just psyching myself out and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom won’t be that difficult, but some of the stuff I’ve seen really makes me think that I’m being set up for disappointment. A lot of what I’ve seen, hell, most of it is really exciting and makes waiting for May 12th even harder than it already is, but I keep being brought back every time I see anything about the difficulty. Hopefully the people saying this stuff just suck at playing video games more than I do.
I sometimes think back on the numerous, half-formed neighborhoods and townships I’ve left behind to fend for themselves after some catastrophic occurrence led them to ruin. I wonder if the people there are still suffering the effect of polluted ground water, coastal flooding, rolling blackouts I inadvertently inflicted upon them through a combination of ignorance, amateurism and neglect. I’d routinely rub up against some society ending issue that I’d opt to run away from rather than stay and attempt to fix my terrible city planning blunders. This is my endless cycle in Cities: Skylines, the rinse and repeat I find myself in as I search for the perfect city.
I’ve enjoyed Cities: Skylines a lot in the past, mostly by disabling all economic restrictions and building idyllic utopias to my heart’s content, as if some altruistic Scrooge McDuck was financially backing me. But after a long hiatus from being such a prolific mayor, the new console remaster of Cities: Skylines released recently, and I’ve fallen right back into my old ways. There is a big difference this time around however, which is that this time I’m playing by the rules. No cheats, no mods, no deviations from the standard, city-building experience, just pure, uncut mayorship.
It has been an adjustment to say the least, as suddenly I have to account for the fact that I can’t just give the people a fire station to preempt a burning building. I can’t just give people an elementary school, nor can I just take out the trash or even provide a steady supply of electricity. I kind of have to let the people tough these things out until the finances work out in such a way that building that service won’t doom the entire city. It’s required a patience that I’ve had no choice but to learn, but it’s been kind of satisfying to see my city experience these financial boons that ultimately allow for extremely expensive boondoggles that usually result in my unceremonious abandoning of the city.
This is NOT a picture of a city I doomed. This is a nice zoo
The first city I started, Lakeshore, a city with a ridiculous name that Cities: Skylines ginned up all by itself. Lakeshore, as the very good name would imply, had access to water, albeit a river and not a lake, but whatever, there was water. It was only a few months into the simulation before I learned the harsh lesson about how generalized industrial zones pollute the ground beneath it, making that a pretty shitty location for a water tower that would supply a burgeoning city. Not having a hospital really compounded that issue, which led to a sudden drop in the population and the income Lakeshore was enjoying. People were just dying off in droves, collapsing in the streets or not being found until some conscientious neighbor came to check on the smell next door. The snowball rolled faster and faster downhill, gaining speed and size with every unattended moment. Eventually it got so big that I turned tail and walked away towards my next unintentionally dubious endeavor.
That next endeavor was where I experienced an unyielding success that resulted in me being brought down by my own hubris. San Ramos, (again, stellar name generation) was a cozy, sun-soaked beachfront city with a speedy little river running through the starting landmass. Picturesque in its natural beauty, I built waterfront properties, thriving business districts, and a vast logging and farming operation that funded so much of the services and utilities that the citizens had come to love and expect. It was also a place that had significant waste management issues, particularly when it came to wastewater.
See, in Cities: Skylines, the only tool you get to deal with sewage when you start a town, is a literal shit-spewing pipe that you can either output onto land or into the water. I chose to place that output line far enough downstream that it would be some other Cities: Skylines player’s problem. Side note: I find it fucked up that the only option, aside from buying DLC, to deal with shit in this game is to dump it in the ocean. It wasn’t a huge problem unless you angled the camera in such a way that you’d see all of the rivers in the distance had turned a nasty brown, but the water in San Ramos was totally fine.
You can’t see it from here, but the traffic is terrible
As my city began to outgrow its predefined borders, I had to buy up the surrounding land to expand my fledgling empire, which also meant that the nasty shit pipes had to be moved. Not a problem though, it was an easy fix. As the city grew, however, so did our need for energy. The best option at my disposal to handle this growing crisis was by building a hydro-electric dam, which with my overwhelming success as mayor, I could easily afford and would solve the energy crisis 30 times over.
Here’s where I have to mention that in the console remaster of Cities: Skylines, you don’t have the ability to freely look at the plots of land you don’t own. Maybe there’s a setting I could toggle, or maybe I could have just gone to the display for buying more land to get a better look, but either way, I could not actually see the areas of this continent that I didn’t currently own. This is an important detail that the jury should know.
Upon placing the dam down two things immediately happened. The first was that rolling blackouts were a thing of the past and everyone in the city was stoked out of their minds about it. The second thing that happened was that I’d see the icon for “this shit is flooded,” pulsating faintly over stretches of highway that I did not own and could barely see at best. Unable to actually do anything about those locations, I continued on my way.
What happened next took time. It was a gradual thing that I might have seen coming had it not been for arbitrary camera restrictions, but ultimately it was something I did not have any ability to fix. It was too late for intervention. The river of San Ramos flowed from east to west, the latter direction being the place where my city’s nasty toilet leavings flowed away into. So you can imagine my surprise when that same fetid, toxic sludge rolled back through the river, only this time from the east.
Yes, it turned out that the dam raised the water levels in the east enough that they poured over into the river that housed our wastewater, which wrapped around the continent in just such a way that made these two separate bodies of water, one menacing flume of doom whose endpoint was right at my dam.
The brown water splashed up against the front of the dam, settled and collected there. Our hydro-electric plant wasn’t fast enough to process this hideous sludge, which created this massive Ouroboros of shit that wrapped around the entire world, starting and ending in the heart of San Ramos. When that slime finally came back around and made a perfect loop around the continent, that’s when things got really bad.
The shore was quickly overtaken by the shit-slurry we had created. It washed over roads and neighborhoods, slowly and completely infiltrating every artery of the city, painting districts a heinous brown as it flowed across the ground. It consumed so much of my city, so fast, and there was nothing I could do but watch in horror and think about how to better plan for this situation in the next city. Surely in the next place I’d get it right.
So I left. I abandoned San Ramos in its greatest moment of need. I did the mental arithmetic and the only answer was that this place was doomed and nothing could save it. The water was poisoned, the people were sick and the roads and buildings were destroyed. San Ramos was done for, and I got out while I still could. Since then, I’ve moved on to a new city, and this time I’m going to do it right. Surely nothing could go wrong this time around. Right?
When talking about anything related to Harry Potter, it’s important to remember that its creator, J.K. Rowling, is a bad person who does not deserve your attention. It’s a damn shame how much of a shadow she casts over this beloved franchise by being a bigoted asshole, particularly in the wake of the release of Hogwarts Legacy, which is a good game with its fair share of faults. It also raises the very good question of, “should I play this game knowing that she benefits from my purchase?” To that end, I don’t have a good answer. All I can confidently say is that Hogwarts Legacy is an enjoyable game and Rowling is a bad person.
I’m not very well-versed in the Harry Potter franchise, having only seen the movies for the first time this year, but even I was intrigued by the idea of being able to explore a fully realized Hogwarts Castle and its surroundings. In terms of presentation and world construction, Hogwarts Legacy is an absolute triumph. Nearly every house and room is immaculately designed and explorable, packed with shelves overflowing with books, knickknacks and all kinds of magic minutia, well-worn chairs and the clutter of everyday life strewn across the floors. The houses are cozy and lived in, the shops are dense and stocked with all sorts of baubles and trinkets, and in-between all of it are sprawling meadows, hills and forests that hide dank and dreary dungeons and other curious oddities to discover. Every ounce of the world is filled with evidence of a development team that truly loved and understood what fans of the series were looking for.
I was surprised to find just how much that presentational excellence actually worked for me, considering I was more interested in the gameplay going into it. I was curious as to how you make magic-only combat interesting, fun and impactful, especially over the course the near 70 hours it would take to see everything it has to offer. It turns out that all you really have to do is give the player an absurd amount of magical powers on short cooldowns, and graft the Arkham Asylum combat onto it. It didn’t take much time before I was pirouetting my way through enemies, 360-no-scoping everything that so much as threatened to attack me. A dozen hours or so and the only real wrinkle in combat has been when enemies use magical shields that require certain types of spells to dispel them. The combat is serviceable and visually exciting, but has yet to be overly challenging or exceptionally interesting in any way.
That actually leads me to one of my biggest issues with Hogwarts Legacy, you know, aside from the obvious one, which is how clunky playing it can feel. Early on, you’re given access to more spells than you can actually use at once, as spells are mapped to the face buttons and there’s only so many of those. Using another spell requires you to open your spell book and map the new spell to one of the face buttons in order to cast it. This makes for a real clumsy experience when you need to use something new to accomplish one of the many collectible-based challenges that litter the open world. Through upgrades you can open up more sets of mappable slots that you have to page through with the d-pad, but even that feels impossibly awkward to do when you’re in combat and dodging attacks.
Hogwarts Legacy follows the classic open world format that has you running from map marker to map marker, gathering collectibles, crafting items and so on and so forth. It isn’t reinventing the wheel with its structure, rather, it’s just a really solid one of those kinds of game, with a very cool and fan-service-filled setting. It doesn’t really deliver on the promise of being a student at this school either. The classes start out as fun little tutorial levels, but devolve into montages of wacky magic imagery, followed by the professor giving you a checklist of objectives to accomplish before the next story mission.
Hogwarts Legacy is a lot like AI generated art in that at a glance looks it phenomenal, but once you start to look a little closer at the details you notice how the hands are all fucked up and the NPCs are kind of phasing through the floor. Textures don’t load in correctly and the game hitches a lot both in and outside of the magic castle, whether it be décor, lighting or the people themselves. In fact, the other students seem to be nothing more than ephemera that you sprint through from objective to objective, listlessly lingering in common areas and meandering up and down hallways. It’s clear that developer Avalanche Software tried to make the world feel alive and lived in, but following NPCs around for more than a few seconds breaks that illusion when you see them get hitched on the environment or disappear into the walls. I know that walking through walls is a thing in Harry Potter, but these were not clever little nods, these were glitches.
But that’s all of Hogwarts Legacy. The game is a little messy and buggy, but it’s so expansive and filled with things for Harry Potter fans to experience. One of those experiences however, happens to be engaging in a significant aspect of the story that’s about crushing a goblin rebellion, which doesn’t seem great considering the already problematic portrayal of goblins in the world. Like I said, I don’t know much of anything beyond what I vaguely remember from seeing the films, but even I can see just how bad the depiction of the goblins is.
The moment to moment stuff in Hogwarts Legacy is very good though. Juggling enemies with endless magical combos, solving the bevvy of micro-puzzles that are scattered around the world, and jetting across the massive landmass, which I’ll call Wizardville, on your broom is a blast. In the open world, there’s definitely that, “just one more thing” aspect to exploring, where you just can’t help but take a little peek at what lay beyond the next ridge.
There’s a lot of game here, and even 12 hours in I’m still being introduced to new mechanics and concepts that open up entirely new questlines, activities and abilities. Oh, and if you like seeing numbers go up, then you’ll love the sheer amount of scored loot this game hurls at you. Genuinely, it becomes a problem with how frequently you have to do inventory management, and how you have to manually change the appearance of every piece of clothing every time you equip something new in order to avoid looking completely ridiculous.
There’s a lot for Harry Potter fans to like here, and it’s evident that the people who worked on this game poured a lot of love into crafting a love letter to the universe, and they deserve praise and reward for their work. While some could argue that most of the things we buy benefit some shitty CEO with horrendous views, something about the visibility of Rowling makes it harder to ignore than the usual bits of soul crushing capitalism we have to engage with on a daily basis.
As someone on the outside of this fandom looking in, I feel like there’s also an aspect of betrayal that permeates this whole situation. Someone creates this wonderful world that captivates a generation of children who literally grow up alongside these beloved characters, only for the creator to come out as a hateful piece of garbage. Maybe I’m completely off base, but even as someone who doesn’t identify as a fan, I kind of feel that way about this whole mess.
Ultimately it’s your decision as to whether or not you want to engage with Hogwarts Legacy and handle all the baggage that comes with it. You may want to support the people who made the game, which is fantastic, developers deserve adoration for their good work. But I also recognize that there’s no way to do that without kicking cash over to the shithead who thinks Trans people aren’t people, which is objectively wrong. Hogwarts Legacy is a fine game, made by people who clearly cared, based on the wonderous source material of an miserable and awful person. So do with that information what you will.
The Bonus World 