I haven't played Lost Ark. I bounced off Diablo III, for fuck's sake; it may be that the genre has simply lost its grip on me. Or I can't grip it, or something. It's a grip issue of some kind. Gabriel was able to determine that he wasn't interested anymore very quickly and told me so.

I've been trying to figure it out. My first guess - it's my only guess, I stopped after this one - is that I have a strong sense of what the play experience will be like throughout. I think it's a calcification of the process we're all using to conserve energy. Decisions have a physiological cost.

I need it to proceed in a way I can't model and predict from the very beginning. What hat falls out of a scorpion's asshole isn't a sufficient source of deviation. PvP in a freemium game is not what I want. I need the chaos that other people provide alongside a set of kaleidoscopic variables, which is why Storybook Brawl is still a daily play. And I've never had two Halo matches go the same way, especially if they're trying to compel me to earn Samurai shit with a mode that starts every player with two random weapons. I can play an unlimited amount of it. It's like a buffet - a nice one, the kind with crab. If you want to stop me, you're gonna have to fucking kill me.

If I want to take a game purely medicinally, it's Vampire Survivors. It was hot for a second and it might still be hot, I don't know. You can play it on itch.io, and that should tell you whether or not you are interested in more stuff for three bucks on Steam. It's a bullet hell type game, except the bullets are very slow and they're also monsters. You level up and get new weapons, but they fire automagically. You literally control the whole Goddamn thing with the arrow keys. I was surprised to learn yesterday, after hitting a hard cap on my skill and damage output, that these weapons can be evolved into crazypants forms. If you ever want the wicked world to disappear briefly, Vampire Survivors is the amount of cognitive load just this side of brain death.

(CW)TB out.