Archon of the Tiers

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This morning I am flailing quite a bit when it comes down actually sitting here and composing a blog post.  Its been one thing or the other… like a cat that decided she had to be held before she would relinquish the keyboard to me to actually type.  Or the fact that I spilled coffee on my shirt and needed to go change it.  Now that I actually sit down at the keyboard I am not entirely certain what I have to talk about.  Last night was a night devoted to Tyranny because Saturday we are recording our March AggroChat Game Club game show and I wanted to be able to participate in the conversation fully.  I like the idea of the Game Club, but I am a poor member.  I am highly susceptible to whims, and tend to get focused in on a game… or number of games at a time.  I am also super bad at forcing myself to finish some thing when I am really not that into it.  This is evidenced by the fact that my night stand is filled with partially finished books discarded when the mood left me.  There was a time when I was actually rather good at finishing games… in fact I spent one entire summer competing with a friend of mine trying to see how many Nintendo games we could finish.  The difference there however was that I had very limited options….  and now thanks to the commodity that games have become…  I have all of the options in the world to distract me from actually focusing on a game once the going gets less than enjoyable.  As a result I tend to bounce back and forth between the games that excite me the most and when any one of those games slows down…  I tend to stall and eventually stop playing it.

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Playing games for the game club often times feels like homework, and I either avoid it entirely… or put it off until the point where I cannot reasonably finish the game before the show.  There is a big reasons why I don’t really do reviews, because I never really have that drive to finish games.  In fact I have the opposite drive.  When I get sucked into a story and a world, there is a part of me that never wants the journey to end.  So I have found myself constantly reaching points in games where I am a few hours from the end… and then I simply never make that finish push.  It is like so long as I do not cross that hill then the adventure never has to end.  All of that said… I didn’t want this to be the case with Tyranny because I had a really amazing first weekend playing the game…  but stalled out at some point during the middle section.  However over the last few weeks I have tried to put in a few hours, every few nights hoping to pull through on the other side and get to a place in the game where the pace quickened once more.  Last night I seemed to hit that stride and found myself completely unable to stop playing as I circled the ending and finally finished around 11:30 last night.  I was not going to sleep without completing this… or at least what I hoped and apparently guessed right was going to be the ending.  All of this said…  I absolutely crave a continuation.  I want dlc or a sequel that lets me continue on from the point I reached in the main games arc.

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I don’t really want to go into a lot of details because I am largely saving them up for the podcast, but I have to say…  this was a really great game.  More shockingly it goes on the pile of games that I want to play through a second or third time because along the journey you have to make so many choices.  There are things that I did that I might have done differently.  The game is absolutely brutal in forcing you down a path based on your actions, and not letting you wriggle out from under those actions without consequences.  In many ways it reminds me of the way Undertale did this, with the exception that at least here you can reload a save file and try again.  However usually by the time you reach one of these branching points… it is too late because a series of tiny decisions will ultimately make or break your choices when it comes to a larger one.  The game flips so many conventions on its head, as you play through as the functional “bad guy” in the story…  but one that is entirely capable of making fair and just choices in spite of this fact.  In many ways there are chunks of my play through that remind me of what it was like trying to play a Light Side Sith in Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic.  I did not succeed entirely but in the grand scheme I thought I was doing a good job of walking the line…  until I reached the end and was forced to account for all of my past decisions.  This game remembers… and winds up rubbing your nose in them…  forcing you to confront the ramifications of each minor choice.  All told start to finish I spent 14 hours… and could have probably easily spent another 10 hours were I not rushing towards a fixed goal.  I highly suggest checking out this game if you are into classic Baldur’s Gate era PC RPGs.