Wrestling With the “Too Many Games” Problem

Posted on by Nimgimli

There are a lot of great games out there, with more coming all the time. There are more that I want to play than I have time to play; there just aren’t enough hours in my days, even though gaming is my only real hobby. I’m sure the same could be said about other media that folks are passionate about, whether that is books or movies or heck, even online content. In some ways it’s a good problem to have — at least it’s better than the opposite problem: not having enough content to keep you entertained.

But I struggle with it because I am constantly sliding towards making gaming a kind of a second job. I feel pressure to finish the game I’m playing because I really want to get to the next game I want to play, so there are times when I play because I feel like I “should” or I “have to” in order to get the current game done. I have learned that if I put a game aside I’ll at best have to start over when I come back to it, and at worst I’ll never come back to it.

The knock-on effect of too many desirable games is that I’m never comfortable stopping to smell the roses (even though I am the World’s Slowest Gamer) in big games.

This all came into focus the other day when Oblivion Remastered dropped. I got through the tutorial and started roaming around, and soon enough got caught up in some side activities. I was having fun, at least at first. But by the end of the first day of playing I was already scolding myself for not getting on with it and moving the main quest forward. In a game like Oblivion I really think powering through the main quest is kind of defeating the purpose of playing, no? What my heart thinks I SHOULD be doing is just experiencing things. Putter around. Join a guild, explore a new area, talk to everyone to build up my speechcraft. Learn to pick pocket. Then learn to flee from the guards. Just LIVE in the world and enjoy it. Immerse myself in there. Lose myself in Tamriel.

But I just can’t seem to find that gaming ‘flow’ state for this kind of thing very often these days. I can’t ignore the fact that another game I want to play is coming out tomorrow or next week and already I’m super backlogged.

It struck me that this is why I’ve drifted away from MMOs, too. In Ye Olden Days I’d log in and just be in a virtual world for hours at a time without a care in the world. These days when I dabble in an MMO, at the end of a session I think about the time I spent, and what I got accomplished, and make a value judgement on whether or not that play session had been “worth it”. Usually the answer is no.

At least part of this very #FirstWorldProblem is Game Pass and Playstation Plus. Having games constantly being “given” to you (in quotes because of course the sub isn’t free) for a fixed but not infinite period of time is mostly a blessing, but also a little bit of a curse. When I have to open my wallet to play the next enticing game, I’m much more critical of what is worth my time. Having games constantly get dropped into my lap makes them hard to resist, particularly since I know if I don’t play now, that game might leave the service.

There’s no real point to this post…sometimes it just helps me organize my thoughts by writing them down. I don’t know how to re-condition myself to just ‘let go’ of some titles so I can comfortably wile away the hours in a given game for weeks or months. I mean sometimes a game just hits right and does push everything to the side for hundreds of hours: Genshin Impact, Snow Runner and Fallout 76 all have done it in the past couple years. Maybe that is what this post is about… convincing myself to go find a game where I just can’t RESIST spending time in it. (Death Stranding 2 soon, please??!).

The one practical thing I’ve been doing is uninstalling stuff from my consoles. Just not seeing 100 games installed helps a little. I winnow things down and get rid of the “Hmm, this could be interesting” stuff and I only leave the “I know this is a solid game” titles. But there are still a bunch to pick from!

I’d be curious to know if anyone else struggles with this situation and if you’ve found any coping mechanisms that help.

“Years and Years” Creeped Me Out

Posted on by Nimgimli

We recently re-subscribed to HBO for the new season of The Last of Us, and given how crazy expensive HBO is, I wanted to get Max (ha! see what I did there?) value out of it, so I went looking for other series to watch while the sub is active. That’s how I stumbled onto Years and Years. It’s a one season, 6 episode BBC show about, basically, the downfall of the way of life we’re all accustomed to in the West, and specifically in the UK.

The story starts in 2019, rapidly advances to 2024, and ends in 2028 or 2029. In it, the US starts a trade war and tanks the world economy. Russia invades and conquers Ukraine which causes a huge refugee issue, which leads to countries closing their borders. Climate change is wreaking havoc, and a pandemic grips the world. The governments start clamping down on the press, and sifting the truth from all the lies becomes more and more challenging.

Sounds familiar, right?

Here’s the kicker. The show came out in 2019. It really creeped me out how accurately the writers anticipated all the bad things that were about to happen. The only major thing they got wrong was how fast it would happen. In real life it’s all progressing more quickly than it did in the show. The show posits Trump being re-elected in 2020, and Pence (who is referred to as a Trump puppet) in 2024, so they got that wrong and STILL bad stuff is happening faster in real life than it did in the series.

Years and Years follows the lives of the Lyons family: Muriel and her 4 grown grand-children, their partners and their kids. All are living fairly comfortable (and in some cases VERY comfortable) lives as the story begins, but with all the upheaval happening that doesn’t last. The family tries its best to roll with the punches with limited success. One of my favorite lines is when a character says “I miss the days when the news was BORING.” Don’t we all, friend. Don’t we all.

I don’t want to go into too many details because that would ruin the fun (?) of watching and comparing this fictional future to our messed-up present. Personally I was just fascinated. And a little depressed. As mentioned, it’s on HBO in the US and maybe on the BBC in the UK? Not sure about that last bit.

Thoughts on South of Midnight

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you were to play Compulsion’s South of Midnight in a wireframe mode, devoid or art or sound, it would feel pretty ordinary. At its core it’s a fairly standard third person platformer. As the camera floats behind your character, you traverse along mostly linear levels, earning new movement skills as the game progresses. In fixed areas there is combat; you have to beat these fights to move forward. And that’s pretty much it.

Honestly this is not my preferred genre any more. I crave, at minimum, a semi-open world where I at least have the illusion that my choices matter. In fact as I was realizing this I wondered how present-day me would respond to a game like the Uncharted series; I LOVED those games back when I played them but I wonder if I still would today.

Hazel spots a cow on the peak of a barn roof
When the waters rise, the cows start to climb, I guess!

Anyway, back to South of Midnight. I loved this game, mostly because of its art style, music and story. It’s the story of Hazel, a young girl living on the outskirts of the Louisiana bayou with her mother. She and her mom get into an argument as they’re getting ready to evacuate from the path of incoming hurricane. The mother sends Hazel to check on some neighbors. While she is gone, their entire house is swept away by the rising flood waters. Hazel, who is a successful runner in school, chases after the house but can’t catch it. Driven by loss and guilt (due to the fight) she plunges into the swamp and into a mystical, creepy and eerily beautiful world that she’d been unaware of.

Hazel approaches a spinning wheel with a magical distaff attached
Dear Fiber Arts friends: Don’t get too hung up on the fact that they call her a weaver when really she is mostly a spinner

It turns out Hazel is a Weaver, a kind of magic user. Her gear, as she finds it, is related to fiber arts: over-sized crochet hooks, spindles and distaffs. Each comes with a new skill. By the end of the game Hazel will be double jumping, wall-running, grapple hooking and gliding to get from one spot to the next.

This gear is all one and done; you don’t ever replace it or anything. Hazel has some skills that can be leveled up via a currency called “Floofs” which she earns via combat or some light exploring. You can spend these floofs to level up skills. In my playthrough I unlocked all but one skill so floofs are fairly plentiful. Aside from the skills and the equipment (all of which is found very early) the only other character progression is increasing the size of your health bar via collectibles. There are no levels or exp or anything of that nature.

Combat is against “haints” — spectral creatures in various shapes and sizes. For the most part it is melee-based combat, and when an enemy’s health bar hits zero Hazel can “unravel” them and get a burst of health from doing so. There’s a lock-on camera that I found hampered me more than free aiming. Once the enemies in an area are conquered Hazel can untie a knot which dissolves walls of “stigma” — a mass of boils and thorns that tend to block Hazel’s path.

Here’s a random 60 seconds of combat to give you an idea of what it is like:

In between all this are some boss fights and some chase sequences. Each boss fight has some kind of mechanic you have to figure out but the game is pretty liberal with hints.

I had some technical issues with the game; there are some invisible walls here and there that will prevent you from making a jump that otherwise seem manageable, and there were a lot of times when I felt I was getting some input lag or just missed button presses. I feel like maybe they tried to put too many actions on too few buttons. None of this was game breaking or anything, but it made the combat, in particular, feel a bit frustrating. I eventually turned down the difficulty so I could focus on the story.

A worn old man stares into the camera
Itchy has lived in the swamp all his life, and the man has seen some things…

And the story is really good. Along her way Hazel encounters various creatures from the tall tales of the bayou. I’m honestly not sure how many of these are real stories and how many are made up, but my Mississippi-raised partner recognized at least some of them. There’s a boy who has turned into a tree, and a grieving mother who has turned into a kind of sea monster. Hazel is “helped” on her journey by a catfish the size of a school bus. Most of the stories are sad and the best Hazel can do is to try to give these spirits and creatures some kind of peace. Oh and her rather horrific-looking home-made childhood doll, Crouton, can now come alive and travel into tiny burrows inhabited by rabbits having tea and other such Wonderland-ian scenes, to get to areas Hazel can’t get to on her own.

The sound design is really good too. There’s a wide variety of folksy, bluesy swampy music and the voice acting is top notch and authentic. Heck there’s even a dance number. I thought about posting a video of that in this post but I think it is better appreciated if you experience it in context.

I also want to talk about Options. There are SO many. There are 5 difficulty levels (I played on #2 because of my combat issues) but additionally there are options to just skip the boss fights, or to skip the running sequences. You can even skip combat completely if you want. There are just a ton of options so you can tweak the game to be comfortable no matter what kind of gamer you are.

It’s not a very long game; my playthrough (and you know I am Mr. Slow Gamer) was under 14 hours. There are no real gameplay reasons for a second playthrough unless you just want to experience the story again. So keep that in mind. But damn, is it ever good. One of the better games I’ve played this year.

Hazel looks at a couple of abandoned stuffed animals out in the swamp
Sad stories are everywhere. Who lost these beloved toys?

Do Better By Your Customers, Playstation

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m a fan of the Playstation hardware and lately it has been my preferred platform for gaming. I love a lot of Sony’s first party IPs and I’ve liked a number of their execs over the years.

But damn do their store policies suck.

The biggest issue is their refund policy, or lack thereof. If you buy a game on Steam or Xbox and it just sucks, you can ask for a refund (assuming your playtime is under a few hours… I don’t have the exact numbers at hand.) On Playstation, not so much. Even if a game outright fails to run, the only way to be considered for a refund is talking to customer support and hoping you get a reasonable representative on the line. The official policy is that if you’ve downloaded the game, you are no longer eligible for a refund. Which is completely ridiculous.

But that’s old news. What prompted today’s outrage is learning that Bethesda is running a sale on ESO Plus. You can get the 1st month of a recurring subscription for 50% off. Of course there are some conditions, depending on platform:

Steam: Sale is open to anyone, even if you currently have a sub. Steam wins! (again)
ESO Store: Anyone without a currently active sub can get the sale price
Xbox: Anyone without a currently active sub can get the sale price
Playstation: Only people who have NEVER had a sub can take advantage of the sale. Game has been out on the platform for 10 years, so if you signed up for a month at launch, no sale for you!

Why are Sony’s terms so much more strict? Who knows? Because whomever makes these store policies hates their customers, I guess.

Anyway, that’s my rant for today. I wish I could feel as good about the Playstation Store as I do about the Playstation hardware.

Commenting on Comments

Posted on by Nimgimli

Having some issue with comments here at Dragonchasers HQ. Specifically in Chrome, at least for me (the comment box isn’t displaying). But I need to get to the day job so will have to circle back to this tonight.

Update: It actually might be more than just comments… I think my new hosting plan has some ‘features’ I’m not aware of and I’m having strange caching issues…

OK I think we’re back. When I switched hosting plans the ISP turned on a really aggressive caching system. Since I already was caching via Cloudflare I think things were getting gummed up. Sorry to throw around these highly technical terms. LOL

But if anyone sees anything wonky PLEASE let me know. I appreciate you!!

And now that I have time we tentatively re-enable some caching options to keep things snappy…

Daredevil: Born Again — Spoiler Free Thoughts

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Last night we finished up Season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+) and I wanted to share some thoughts on it. Not a review but more like “this is the vibe I got”.

So first some background on my preferences. When Netflix was doing a slate of Marvel ‘street level hero’ shows, I really enjoyed most of them. Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and The Punisher were all really good, but Daredevil was my favorite. (Sorry Iron Fist, you don’t make my list…you staring at your hand all the time wasn’t that entertaining). Also I’m not a comic book reader so I don’t have any issues along the lines of “This is not who he is!” that I’m sure true fans of the original material might have had. This was all before Disney bought Marvel, which put an end to the Netflix shows.

It’s been a few years, but Disney decided to revive Daredevil. I don’t know if Daredevil: Born Again is the start of a new slate of shows or a one-off, but I was happy to see Charlie Cox return as Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and Vincent D’Nofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin, because in my mind these two actors ARE these characters. Not to root for the bad guys but D’Nofrio just slays every scene he is in; he’s the best Marvel villain on video, in my opinion.

Anyway the season (9 episodes) was a little uneven for me. The premise at the start is that Matt Murdock has put aside the Daredevil gig in favor of helping people in his day job (he’s a lawyer). And while he was doing that bit, the show hit a bit of a lull for me, but towards the end it ramped up — as the title gives away, Daredevil is back, baby! — and the final episode left us on the edge of our seats and wanting more (a second season is coming).

Actually that’s not exactly true. It wasn’t so much that mid-season was a lull as more a change of focus on Fisk’s Machiavellian criminal dealings. I promised no spoilers and I’ll stick to that, except to say that the show kind of reflected real life is some pretty disturbing and obvious ways. The whole season felt like a long set-up to a new world for these heroes and villain to cavort in.

In addition to Daredevil and Kingpin, a few more characters from that universe pop up and I hope to see more of them next season. I mean what I REALLY want to see is a whole new set of shows focused on these characters, most of whom I find a lot more interesting and entertaining that Iron Man, Capt America and Thor.

Anyway, maybe I’ll circle back to this once the show has been out for a while and I feel more comfortable spoiling things, but for now I just want to say Daredevil: Born Again is in my opinion well worth watching. (The critics don’t seem to agree with me but what do they know, right!? Actually I dunno where I got that idea but after I posted I went off to read some reviews and they’re actually pretty good.) If you started but stopped partway through the season I’d urge you to go back and finish because it gets really good towards the end!

Kingpin and Daredevil profiles, back to back
Copyright: Marvel.com

Farewell S, and Thanks For All the Memories

Posted on by Nimgimli

I learned this weekend that an old friend of mine had died and it keeps creeping up and saddening me. It’s strange because this is a high school friend and I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in probably 40 years or so. And it would be highly unlikely that I’d every speak to him again even if we both lived to 100.

But still, knowing he is gone is a bummer.

I guess the worst part is how he died. If he’d had cancer or a heart attack or something it would be tragic but, y’know, just one of those bad things that happen. But the facts are much sadder. Basically he drank himself to death.

He’d been dating the woman he married last time I saw him; heck they may have been married. After that he got a good job, got a nice house, had a couple of daughters who grew up and gave him grandkids… and then he started drinking heavily. After he was arrested a few times for DUI, he lost his good job because he couldn’t get to it. Then he got a local job but lost that one, too. He lost the house, the wife and kids split, and he wound up back in his boyhood home. His parents had died a year apart from each other so he was living alone in the country with no driver’s license.

He’d been in rehab for a month, but when he came out he was right back to drinking. Three days later he got drunk, fell and hit his head and laid there, alone in his childhood house, for a few days before someone found him. He was still alive but his brain was swollen and he later died in the hospital. I got all this background from the friend who took the time to seek me out and tell me S was gone.

I still remember him as this good looking, easy-going young dude. We were really tight through high school. There were 4 of us and we had ‘our’ table in the cafeteria and later on when we could all drive, we’d cruise around at night, drink beer, smoke, chase girls, go beach riding, skateboarding and throw the Frisbee around. Just normal stuff. We weren’t angels but we weren’t bad kids either. Just regular guys. He got me out of a few bad binds over the years, and vice versa. The four of us were always watching out for each other.

We were all into model rockets in a big way too; he had an incredible attention to detail and his rockets were always gorgeous while the rest of us were just slapping ’em together to shoot them off as soon as possible. That has always stuck with me…how much time he’d spend on something that generally had a limited life span, model rocketry being what it is.

Since those days, I’ve done nothing significant in my life and I often feel remorse about that. I’m not the hero of anyone’s story, just a generic background character. And I felt kind of bad about that. But now I see how much worse things can get. I don’t know what happened to S between then and now; I don’t know what kind of demon he had eating away at him. And I wonder if we’d still been in contact if I could have helped.

All too late now. I read his obituary and the picture they had was of an old man (he was 63 or 64 when he passed). I guess that means I’m an old man, too. I just kind of find it hard to believe.

Notes on the AI used in this post.  Image created at DeepImg with the prompt “A well maintained and realistic graveyard. Close up to show just a few graves. Daytime, clouds in the sky. A few trees. No people or wildlife. It should look like a real place. No buildings, just a few graves.”

 

Bi-Annual Blog Soul Searching Time

Posted on by Nimgimli

Based on the joke a friend made, I apparently go through this every time my blog comes up for renewal. I’m talking about trying to decide if I want to keep the lights on here. I don’t blog very often these days, but when I do get a fire in my belly to say something I’m happy to have a place to say it. Plus, y’know, it’s been running for something like 23 years and that’s tough to walk away from.

Money is tight these days and bound to get even tighter what with the state of the world, so I was even more tempted to let it all go. Or I think I was… honestly I don’t recall how much soul-searching I did last time. But in the end, assuming everything works out, I think I found a significantly cheaper plan that should be sufficient given how little traffic I get.

And traffic is another thing; I’m not sure I care about growing an audience (and if it hasn’t happened after 23 years it’s not very likely it will). In fact I might not WANT to grow it all that much. I mean it’s cool to know lots of people are reading what you write, for sure. On the other hand, it’s cozy and comfortable thinking it’s only people who you know and generally get along with who are your audience, y’know? I’m not here to court controversy or get into a big debate about topics, even though I’m sure both of those activities are great traffic drivers.

Every time I make the decision to renew I also make a declaration about how if I’m going to keep paying I’d better blog more. So I’ll say that again. I need to blog more. I actually enjoy writing blog posts, but I don’t enjoy the meta stuff around it; taking, re-sizing and alt-tagging screenshots (or coming up with images for posts like this one), checking the SEO variables, sharing to services and so forth.

But if I accept that I don’t care about traffic then I don’t really HAVE to do any of that, either. I can just spew out whatever is on my mind on a given day and hit publish. Which is what I’m going to do right now. So we’ll see, eh?

 

 

March 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

It’s the end of March and I still haven’t done my taxes. Adulting sucks! But here’s the recap. Short and sweet this month!

Playing

Death Stranding has been my ‘main game’ this month and I’m having a good old time just puttering about. I spend more time building up and maintaining the world’s infrastructure than I do actually moving the story forward. Eventually I will move forward though as I find it really compelling (and really weird). Death Stranding 2 will probably be a Day 1 purchase for me in June! I have a deadline to meet!

Deadman leaning close to Sam Porter Bridges to whisper to him.
“Death Stranding is NOT a walking simulator, Sam.”

Dragon Age Veilguard hit Playstation Plus and I started playing. I like it well enough but not enough to pull me away from Death Stranding when I’m playing on the PS5. I don’t honestly know if my issue is with Veilguard itself or just that I’m so hooked on DS. I’ll probably circle back to this and start over at some point, but it certainly didn’t hook me like Dragon Age Origins or Inquisition did.

Borderlands 2 is the one game I finished this month and I had a good time, but everyone has already played it and I already posted about it, so I’ll just leave it at that. If I had infinite time I’d replay it with a different class but there are SO many games to play!

Atomfall turned out to be a bit of a disappointment for me personally, but I already wrote about it. It is short enough that I figured “OK I can just plow through this.” but after a couple sessions of playing I thought to myself, “Why?” and uninstalled. I spent $25 or so to upgrade to the Deluxe Edition so I could play early and boy did I learn my lesson doing that. Honestly it’s a lesson I have learned before but every few years I seem to need to burn myself to remember why pre-orders and deluxe-versions are rarely a good idea.

Some kind of nuclear plant seen from a distance

 

Watching

Arcane (Netflix) was amazing. This animated series is based on League of Legends but you don’t have to know anything about the game to enjoy the show. It’s 2 seasons long. Season 1 is a relatively straightforward origin story for the characters. Season 2 gets pretty weird and is dense. I think I could watch Season 2 several times and get something new out of it each time. Which season is ‘better’ really depends on your personal preferences but both are really good. Heck it’s worth watching just for the gorgeous animation style (and the soundtrack is really good, too).

The Wheel Of Time season three has been really good so far, for me at least. I honestly am not a fan of the books since they just feel way too drawn out and Jordan re-used certain phrases so often I find it distracting. Or at least that’s how I remember them; it’s been a while. So this is a rare case where I enjoy the show more than the books, though PartPurple, who is in the midst of a re-read of the books, grumbles about how much is different. We went back and re-watched S2 before diving into S3, but now we’re caught up and waiting for more episodes to drop.

Reading

Armageddon’s Children — Book 4 of the extended Shannara series. It’s I think 60 years after the end of Angel Fire East and the apocalypse has arrived. The demons and once-men are working to exterminate the remaining people. We meet some new Knights of the Word and a group of street kids living in the ruins of Seattle.  I liked this one quite a bit but I do love a good apocalypse!

Elves of Cintra — Book 5, and oh guess what? Elves have been here all along, remaining hidden from humans. With most of humanity now gone, some of the characters from Children team up with the elves to try to save the elven race from the demons. But I’m not finished yet so not sure what is going to happen. Enjoying this one so far, too!

 

So yeah, that’s the March highlights. I’m taking a 4 day weekend in April and hope to spend those extra 2 days in a gaming stupor, yay! And I guess do my taxes. Oh and sign up for Medicaire which, omg I have been sent about 50 different junk mails with different companies wanting to be my Medicaire provider and I’m just so confused. Like I said, adulting sucks!

Sam Porter Bridges runs down a road with a person strapped to his back
This is what a Lyft ride looks like in the world of Death Stranding. Yes, that is a living person in a body bag that Sam is carrying; the bag is to protect them from TimeFall

What I Don’t Like About Atomfall

Posted on by Nimgimli

I don’t usually do posts about games I don’t like, but I figured I’d make an exception in this case since I happened to buy the Digital Upgrade for Atomfall and got early access, so have been playing the past few nights. If the things that bug me about the game save someone from spending their money on normal release day tomorrow, I’ll feel like I helped.

I should also hasten to add that I don’t think Atomfall is a bad game; it’s just a bad game for me and my personal preferences. In fact I think it’s a pretty good game for the right gamer, and even then there’s a lot I do like about it: the setting and the exploration are both top notch, and the voice acting is very good, though the cast is small enough that a lot of characters have the same voice. Also worth noting that it is launching at $50 and is on Game Pass at launch.

Finally, I’ve only played 4-5 hours so far so things could change. On the other hand I’m told it’s about a 20 hour game so in theory I’m a quarter of the way through.

OK enough with the pre-ambling. Here’re some of the things I don’t like about Atomfall.

Character Progression

I have to admit I’m a shallow person who likes seeing numbers go up. The industry’s RPG-ification of virtually every genre is something I embrace. Atomfall doesn’t have a lot of character progression. There’re no levels, there’s no experience points. The only character progression is via a skill tree. To get a skill you have to do two things. First you have to find/buy a Skill Manual. Reading one of these essentially puts the set of skills in that manual into your skill tree, but it doesn’t actually give you the skill. In order to unlock the skill you have to use some serum things that, again, you find or buy. It’s an interesting system but I do miss “leveling up” and getting skill points. Essentially the serums are your skill points, and how many there are in the world is anyone’s guess.

Gearing

The only gear in Atomfall are weapons. Weapon stats are not numerical but like “High damage, slow reload times.” Weapons come in 3 tiers: rusty, normal and pristine. You can combine 4 rusty weapons of the same type (along with some gun oil) to create a normal weapon, and I believe 2 normal weapons to create a pristine. Guns are fairly rare and so is ammo, so you’ll probably use melee weapons a lot of the time. Weapons don’t seem to degrade but of course ammo runs out which again nudges you towards melee. I kind of miss having more stuff to search for like armor or trinkets or something, but this just isn’t a looter-shooter (nor does it claim to be).

Combat and Expendables

There’s no real point to combat in Atomfall unless removing the person(s) you’re fighting is required to complete a task. The only upside to killing someone is searching their body and they don’t often carry all that much. Your health is replenished by bandages that you craft or find, and there are various potions (again, craftable once you find the recipe) that’ll buff you. But the game seems to really be pushing you towards avoiding combat as much as possible. The resources you need to craft things like bandages or Molotov cocktails don’t respawn, but the enemies do. This means you have to really weigh the pros and cons of each fight. Are you going to use more resources in winning the fight than you get back from looting the body? If so, probably best to sneak on by if possible. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this system but I’m more a guns blazing kind of player and I get bored with sneaking around pretty quickly. I also get a weird low-level anxiety about running out of materials in the world.

So those are my biggest issues, and none of them are flaws with the game; not in the least. They’re just systems that don’t really fit my particular playstyle, and if you think these things might bother you too, might be worth waiting for a sale or something (and of course if you have Game Pass you might as well try it). It is, in my opinion, an amazing setting and an amazing set-up and I really, REALLY want to love this game, but I’m just too impatient and too shallow for it to really hook me. I’ll still finish it and all, but buying the upgrade to get early access was a dumb move for me. Maybe this post will help someone else.