Games

I beat Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. It's more Elden Ring, which can only be a good thing, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the base game due to some of the changes they made. The critical path of the DLC was plenty solvable without a guide, but there was so much of the map that I just couldn't figure out how to access because I didn't find the one way they wanted me to get there. After beating the final boss, I used a guide just to see how to get to those parts of the map, and I found out why it was so difficult. The kinds of passages that you'd use to get to those parts of the map would have been clearly indicated on your map in the base game, but here they purposely did not highlight them. A lot of the fun in the base game of Elden Ring, for me, came from the kinds of connections you made yourself based on what you saw on the overhead view of the map, but those easily identifiable things from an overhead perspective were purposely absent in the DLC. It's a shame, because it brought down my opinion of it. I had plenty of fun with the DLC and got my money's worth, but it's definitely a disparity between this and the base game.

I also felt like playing a metroidvania and had Shadow Complex in my backlog, so I knocked that one out in a couple of sessions. It was a simpler time where there was only one voice actor in video games, and his name is Nolan North. The game frequently does this thing where, even though it operates on a 2D plane, you can attack enemies in the foreground and background, not unlike certain parts of old-school Contra. It mostly works, which is cool until it doesn't work. The game wastes no time in giving you frequent cool upgrades, but kind of like Shadow of the Erdtree above, the map should have been better. Knowing that their map wasn't great, they frequently just showed you exactly the path you should take through the game world rather than letting you figure it out based on what doors you can now open, but those doors aren't well indicated on your map all the time, so they drew the path for you instead. This game was a good time for about 5 hours.

A friend and I are still making our way through V Rising. I have no interest in the kind of PVP this genre offers, so we're playing co-op PVE. The game is grindier than I'd prefer but otherwise pretty fun. As opposed to the quick pace of upgrades in Shadow Complex, here they take about 2 or 3 times as long as they probably ought to, but at least when you get to a decent boss fight or enemy camp, the combat is super satisfying.