Last night was one of those evenings when I just straight up crashed. I wound up heading towards bed a bit before 9 pm and as far as I know I largely slept straight through without waking up. I’ve felt like I had been coming down with something for a few days, but what I think instead is just that the allergens are going haywire. The pollen index it seems has been stuck in the “Very High” state for the last few days which can absolutely account for why I have been generally sluggish and miserable. All of this and the work load I am under has somewhat blunted what is generally a magical time for me… convention season. Right now both GamesCom and QuakeCon are happening and in a few weeks it will be Pax West. This is in theory the time of the year when a bunch of announcements get made, but thusfar there has been nothing terribly groundbreaking. At the moment I think the game I am most interested in of those announced this week is BioMutant by THQ Nordic. While I generally don’t go in for the whole “Anthro” thing… this game does however check all the forgotten and post apocalyptic world boxes. I love games that are set in a time where technology is almost treated like magic and you have to scavenge the wastes to fortify yourself. I wasn’t super sure about the game until I watched 11 minutes of gameplay footage that got released by IGN.
I really like that the game has a narrator, and that it chooses to have the characters speak in some sort of native animal language that we don’t understand. Part of what made Bastion so damned infectious was the relationship between narrator and your actions… and I am hoping that BioMutant in many ways will feel similar. Right now the game seems like Horizon Zero Dawn with TMNT style mutant animal people…. and in some what this reminds me a bit of Rage. It is being described as a Post Apocalyptic Kung Fu Fable… and I am generally okay with that notion. The game play seemed really fluid switching back and forth between jumping swordwork and gunplay. I have a lot of love for the concept of this because back in the day I was a HUGE fan of the After The Bomb setting in in the Palladium games Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pen and paper game. It already has a page stubbed out on Steam so I am guessing it will be an early 2018 release and not something we are going to wait a super long time for. The worst part about the game convention cycle is that you see a game well before it is set to release… and then by the time it actually launches the excitement has died down significantly. I’ve long through the Bethesda system of announcing a game within six months of release is probably the ideal window. Sure there are always rumors circulating before hand… but it is damned nice to see a trailer and see a firm release date at the end of it so that you know “this is how many months I have to wait”. The truth is I find it harder and harder to muster the fever pitch levels of excitement that I once had for games… I think in part because we are deluged with so much information about it. Every single rumor or half heard sentence gets dissected and churned into “exclusive” YouTube content…. that then gets copied by a half a dozen places because they are all desperate for eyeballs and clicks to try and pay the bills. I think once you see the strings… or the great and powerful oz behind the curtain… the whole experience is a little less interesting.