The fact that adverts always depict summertime as a time to get outside and do lots of fun things is proof that the big advertising firms are all located in mild or cold climates. Summer has arrived and it is downright unhealthy to leave the house due to the ridiculous heat. Here in the US pretty much everyone on the East Coast got a taste of North Carolina summertime in the last week of the month as it was 100F/38C almost everywhere with high heat indexes. It hit a heat index of 110F/43C here and not MUCH cooler anywhere else from what I could tell.
So nothing to do but stay inside and play video games, I guess. I was kind of treading water for a lot of the month waiting for Death Stranding 2 to launch. I had pre-ordered it before Lola got sick and we became buried under vet bills, and Sony is awful about refunds so I just rode with it. Might be my last new game for quite a while until I get those bills paid off. Only 35 payments to go! Of course I’d pay 3 times that if we could get our little puppy-daughter back. Missing her as much now as ever. It has to get easier eventually. right?
Enough of the depressing stuff, let’s talk video games.
Playing
Planet of Lana [Xbox Game Pass] got finished. I’d written about it a while ago and most of what I wrote stands. Towards the end some of the puzzles got a little bit more finicky in terms of reaction times and so forth, but nothing too bad. It was a great little game. Kind of sweet, kind of scary, all environmental story-telling. Highly recommended. Took me 5.5 hours to play through. I could do a replay to chase Achievements and what not, and I don’t rule out that possibility at some point in the future.

Alan Wake Remastered: This is one of those well-loved (by the general gaming community) games that I’ve always meant to play but have never gotten around to. The Remastered version was on PS+ Extra and was short enough I figured I could finish it before my sub ran out, and sure enough I did. Took me 20 hours in total and… I honestly didn’t like it much. The story was fantastic and if they ever make a movie version (I keep hearing chatter about them doing that) I would be down to watch it, 100%. But the actual gameplay hasn’t aged very well. I found it vacillated between frustrating (clunky, slow controls) and tedious (the battles all feel kind of the same). I’m still glad I played it for the, I dunno, historical perspective, and now if Alan Wake 2 is ever on a deep discount somewhere I will probably pick it up, because the IDEA was fun, just the excecution wasn’t. It was probably fine back when it launched but, y’know, our expectations of how games should play change over time.
Ratchet & Clank (2015 version): I was just going through games that had been installed on the Playstation since forever and here this one was. I decided to play it a bit before uninstalling and ended up finishing it. It isn’t super long (12 hours for me) and the first 3/4 or so aren’t particularly tough. When I did finally start to feel a bit frustrated I just set the difficulty down to Easy and that made things REALLY easy but I was about ready for it to be over anyway. Overall it holds up really well for a 10 year old game, and the mechanic of everything busting into a ton of nuts and bolts that then get hovered up into Ratchet’s satchel is oddly satisfying. Kind of like hoovering up the bricks ins a Lego game. Overall, it was a good time!
Wuthering Waves is back in rotation after I heard yet again about how great the story is. Of course I couldn’t remember how to play, and you can’t start fresh, so I created ANOTHER account to start clean. That’s account #4 so far! I have made it further than I ever have and who knows? Maybe I’ll stick with it to get to some of the good story stuff this time.
Tales of Arise is another re-visit. I got it way back at launch but got distracted. Once again I started fresh. I am really struggling with the combat. I just don’t vibe with it. It’s an action-RPG system but it does not reward button mashing and I, I have to admit, am a natural button masher. I’ve gone so far as to watch long YouTube videos about the combat system. Worse comes to worse I’ll put it down to Easy or Story Mode or something because I really enjoy the look and feel of the game, the world seems fun to explore, the characters’ constantly bickering leads me to believe a romance is budding, and I’d really like to experience all that eventually. We’ll see.
Death Stranding 2 is the game I’ve been waiting for and so far it has not disappointed. It is similar enough to the original that it felt really comfortable jumping in, but there’s new stuff too. I haven’t gotten very far as it just came out; but I expect it’ll be my “main game” for quite some time. I’m in no rush to get through it and immediately got caught up in placing structures to help other players out and becoming friends with all the folks in shelters in the first area. The story will be there when I’m ready for it, right?! Loved the first game and so far I’m loving the second as well!

Watching
Shadow & Bone (Netflix) — We’d watched Season 1 of this a few years back I guess, but at some point they released a 2nd season and then canceled the show. Which is a shame because it was awfully good. Honestly we thought S1 was OK the first time we watched but for some reason felt it was way better on the re-watch. It’s a complex world and maybe it took a 2nd viewing to grok it all. Basically we have a world where some folks can wield magic of various sorts. In our world terms I would put it somewhere around 1880-1900 maybe? Technology is advancing to where magic isn’t quite the weapon it once was, we non-magic users fighting with swords and bolt action rifles. There are gatling guns but still at the hand-cranked level of tech.
Anyway this country is divided by “The Fold” which was created by the Black Heretic hundreds of years ago. This is a giant black cloud filled with monsters that divides the country in two, and passage through it is quite perilous. Into this mix comes a couple, life-long friends and both orphans. He is a tracker in the army, she is a cartographer, and the two of them get caught up in some world-changing events. There are other pockets of characters too, including a gang of n’er-do-wells always looking for a new job to pull off. It’s a great show we personal stories, geo-political issues, magic, war, forbidden love, monsters… I’m really sad that it was canceled, but it is based on a series (?) of books that I’m going to make a point to read.
Severance (Apple TV+) — I’d heard good things about this but it took us a long time to get around to trying it and… it is in fact really good. The premise is that these people work for some big tech firm on some super secret project. In order to do so they become “severed” so that when they are at work they can’t remember their outside life, and vice versa. The result is that the at-work entities know of nothing other than the office they work in. These “innies” as they call themselves, are the main focus of the show. The work they do is also very mysterious — it almost looks like they’re playing some kind of game. The company they work for is more or less a cult, just adding to the oddness of it all. It’s pretty creepy, sometimes darkly funny, and generally a good mystery. We haven’t finished the 2nd season yet but we’ve been really enjoying it.
Reading
Another month has come and gone and I’ve done very little reading, aside from constantly reading the news and feeling depressed about that. I need to figure out how to work reading back into my schedule!
And that’s that for June 2025. Aside from the continuing sadness/depression over the loss of Lola it has overall been a decent month, I guess. I am now officially a senior citizen, having turned 65. In the US that means signing up for Medicare which was oddly stressful because you get swarmed with junk mail and offers from companies that want to be your Medicare Supplemental provider. But as I still work full time and get insurance via the job I just did the minimum “Plan A” signup for now, which once I figured out that was what I had to do, was pretty easy. But yeah, I am now a literal [Medicare] card carrying “senior.” Ugh.