My cohort slash phylactery Mirsh Morshamasha maintains a policy of Maximum Adventure, and I do my God Damnedest to maintain precisely the opposite; such is the nature of the strange battery that produces "whatever you would call this site." In any case, he was telling me about the book he was reading, which has historically been a bad strategy for him.
When I was talking about Bloodborne before, I found an article on Forbes that explained its bizarre characteristics best and linked it, wondering how the coverage of the game could possibly synchronize with the fact that let's say, oh, seventy percent of gamers would never get out of Central Yharnam. But I'm not sure Dan Stapleton's article "How And Why Bloodborne Lost Me" had been written yet, which is what I would have linked instead. I love him for writing it; it can't have been easy. But as I've said many, many times before, whenever there is less than a hundred percent uniformity of opinion this context that's when this great, goblin infested engine is actually working. The game is evil. That just happens to be what I want.
Indeed, my ardor has only increased as its debt to Lovecraft becomes more apparent, in ways I would never rob you of by explaining them. The reason it's on Pause is because I got through an area I had identified as Very Hard, and have moved on to another area that is Fucking Hard, and I can see the great shape of the game in its fullness. It's like an incense coil, and I have burned the outer three rings, but the shape continues. It grows tighter and tighter, that's what's next.
That realization and the accompanying pause for breath gave Pillars of Eternity a crack to get in, so now I've got two huge problems. Gabriel grabbed a copy and I think very quickly realized that there was a mismatch somewhere. Pillars is a Heritage game, a gumbo of genres, a creature of another time which has somehow found expression today. And not really somehow, of course; tens of thousands of people willed it into being. And I get so happy when I play it that sometimes I have to stop. I'll explain all that later, if you want me to. But, like Bloodborne, we're very near to another Binary Proposition when it comes to this thing. I don't think it's a game you feel "okay" about. Bioware fashioned a place in my ribcage for this kind of experience almost twenty years ago, and I was alive then, which can't be extricated from any assessment. I've always wanted a book where in order to turn the page, I have to kill a kobold. That's what I got.
I wondered, idly, at a previous junction of excellence like the one we endure now, if it were possible to be as happy as a dog with three dicks. Thing is, I wonder if the theorized "three-dick model (TDM)" is itself sufficient. I'm now trying to model a happiness that requires no less than six dog dicks, whirling in welded unison like a Gatling gun, wholly unified in their purpose.
(CW)TB
