It’s exactly the same game.
This is what kills me. There's so much squandered potential in AC with this kind of thinking. Instead, Ubisoft just wants to be EA by re-selling the same game every year, but doesn't have the sports licenses to pull it off.
After the initial couple of hours I started to feel like everything is a chore.
Exactly. I don't know what I expected, but that was my experience as well. The game more or less told me this:
"Hey, did you enjoy the first chapter? Well guess what? We're going to throw that at you x20 with the occasional plot beat thrown in for variety. Have fun!"
For the obvious boatload of cash poured into Odyssey's development, I feel like half as much game done twice as well would have been a better experience. Instead, we get something that is seemingly padded for play-time, in the same way a 4th grader adds extra blank lines to hit the required page count on a book report.
Seriously. Why stand, miss, clean up your own piss (now or later), then repeat all that every time? Also: standing causes splashing - it NEVER all goes into the bowl.
Blood Dragon?
The sheer genius of both Hades games is that dying is absolutely one of the best parts, since the hub-world is full of fun things like this.
Hypnos: My list says you got killed by a REDACTED. What's that even mean?
A few deaths later...
Hypnos: REDACTED got you again, huh.
There's a section where, if you continue to avoid the narrator's prompts to take a specific door, it just brings you to an unfinished room - dev textures and all - while the narrator gives you grief for screwing up the game.
Classic Doom even razzes you a little bit on the difficulty selection screen, with "I'm too young to die" as the easiest one.
I don't recall Heretic or Hexen giving you guff for quitting, but I could be wrong.
Portal and Portal 2.
GLaDOS' constant mockery of your person, your ability to navigate tests, and general spite pretty much make both games. It all even manages to provide a lot of world-building without lore-dumping. 10/10, would get roasted again.
I'm actually starting to think it's on purpose. Just like with spam email with misspellings and the kind of ear-marks that warns off smart people, the only ones left to click on "win a free iphone" are easily duped. Going after people that are drawn in by iconography and optics, but fail to understand nuance and the substance behind them, may be entirely the point.
Just like with Starship Troopers, satire like this goes flying over people's heads so low and fast, it breaks the sound barrier and loosens dentalwork.
TL;DR: viable last-ditch option would resemble Highlander 2 in terms of putting one corporation in charge of "protecting" the planet.
Okay, so I was keeping the idea of using deliberate "global dimming" in my back-pocket just so it wouldn't worm it's way through the zeitgeist. It's a viable last-ditch option, but it comes with steep drawbacks. But since we're here now, fuck it.
We already know that, thanks to requiring shipping vessels to use low-sulfur fuel, cloud seeding can actually reduce solar gain. The problem is that it also blocks out a lot of the light needed for photosynthesis. So this approach punches down on the environment in a completely different way. As for people, while global warming will absolutely impact agriculture, so would less sunlight.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/
So we could just use airplanes and cloud-seeding. Or we could increase particulates in the atmosphere. Or, as Elon suggests, fly satellites to do the job. The tradeoffs here are awful: disrupt where rain happens, raise lung cancer risks globally, or catapult one man into multi-trilliionaire status while they charge every government on earth for the privilege. Plus, each of those options are more or less forever if we never get around to carbon sequestration that actually works.
We should seriously considering doing anything else first.
Edit: I know I didn't invent this idea. Rather, I just didn't want to add to any consensus around it.