Steam has a running tally of Gabriel's accomplishments in The First Descendant, and I don't doubt that they represent true valor in the war against whoever that guy was in the intro I played. I'm not a hundred percent sure what some of these things mean, though; it says he's completed ten Void Intercept battles, which seems like a nice round number. He's also combined modules seven times? That seems like a good, you know, number of… times. I was gonna describe the conversation we had about it, but I guess we did make a comic strip that depicts the general arc.

Just as was foretold in the last panel, I did install it. I had to. It doesn't cost anything, and there is a little green icon by the game in my Steam Library that indicates friends are always in there probably, I dunno… completing Void Intercept Battles or Combining Modules a bunch of times. It felt like Warframe to me, the shooting and the weapon upgrade system both - it felt so much like Warframe that I just reinstalled Warframe.

Warframe was always weird; you don't look at a frame and be like, "Yeah, I've seen that a hundred times." It does a bunch of things that only it does, so you really have to learn it - you can't necessarily map yourself onto it just because you know your way around a mouse and keyboard. I've left and come back in enough over the years to see how different eras have onboarded new players, and I feel like they have that kind of dialed in in the Year of our Lord 2024. I was exiled to the basement because of a cold a few months ago, and learned - perhaps dangerously - just how well it plays on a Steam Deck.

What's more, they've gone fucking crazy on the story front. It would be spoilerific to describe some of these items, but they've swerved into a mode of rewarding the faithful with batshit lore drops and surprises years in the making. Destiny is very philosophical with its storytelling, which I like. Warframe is visceral. Sometimes literally! These bio-yorganisms and their strange ways let them pull bonkers shit and they just keep fucking doing it.

They got their "TennoCon" coming up, which I always keep up with even if I'm not an active player at that moment. But it looks like I might have reinstalled just in time.

(CW)TB out.