Good Morning Friends! I hope you are safe and warm and have completely avoided the snowpocalpyse. The northerners will think we are crazy down here… but this is a lot of snow for us and we have no real infrastructure to deal with it. My wife is a teacher and is effectively going to be out on snow days all this week. The positives and negatives of the pandemic is that I have been working remotely going on three years now, and as a result my job continues to function effectively the same regardless of how much snow is on the ground. I pulled this shot from our front porch camera where it caught activity around midnight, and since then the snow is effectively even with the front porch with drifts much higher.
As much as I have been enjoying Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I decided that I needed a break from it. The world of ancient Greece is so freaking huge… and honestly there are so many boxes to tick and objectives to discover that I can get a bit lost. On the podcast we have a phrase “leave the hinterlands” to denote that we should probably stop chasing the minutiae in a game and move the story along. This comes from Dragon Age Inquisition, where the game dumps you into the Hinterlands which are vast and full of detail… and completely a mistake if you waste too much time there. I am having one of those moments with Odyssey where I have spent the last several nights roaming around and doing all sorts of things… but also not really feeling like I am making any progress.
Instead I spent last night playing Control. This is a game I have wanted to play for quite some time and I figured something with a smaller scope might be beneficial for a little while. I am completely in love with the visual language of this game. It feels more movie than game… and very much lives in this weird space of how we remembered movies from the late 70s and not how they actually were. The game is super cheap pretty much everywhere right now, and I had a few copies of the game on various platforms that were given away. For anyone familiar with the internet phenomena of SCPs, this game draws heavy inspiration from that genre of an illusive organization trying desperately to keep a tight lid on reality. The game itself feels a bit like a truly modern version of Half Life… because things start out feeling pretty normal and then event unfold around you.
It has hooked me enough that I feel like I need to know where this story is going. Additionally I like the character of Jesse Faden quite a bit already. The game is not terribly forthcoming with a lot of details and I feel like there are going to be some major revelations in the middle act of this game. There is what feels like the main character is addressing us directly… like she knows we exist and I am not sure how that is going to shape over time. For the last few years I have had this notion in my head of playing more narrative focused games, and this year seems to be the time when I am actually doing it. I am sure I will get lost along the way again and mired in an MMORPG… but for now I am enjoying the variety.