Games

Control
Yep, here I go starting something else! But this one has intrigued me for a while, and is currently free* on Luna — though only for another 11 days, so there's every chance it'll follow in the footsteps of Dungeons of Hinterberg and I'll have to abandon it uncompleted (unless I spend a lot of time on it over the next week-and-a-half, that is), and then buy it and start over if I want to finish. Or give in and subscribe to Luna+... though Control goes for so little nowadays, it would be cheaper to just purchase it and play via my Steam Deck.

Anyway, I played for 2¼ hours this evening, part of which was because I couldn't work out a way forward on the map at one point, which turned out to be I just needed to go to a closed door on a side of a large room I'd missed. Having these big "open world"-style maps is all well and good, but sometimes I feel like good old fashioned level design was more straightforward. I mean, sure, there's loads of places I can wander back to, but I don't need to — they exist as a permanent distraction/confusion from where I need to head next on my most-recently-assigned mission.

That's also one of the reasons I wound up playing for so long: there's no levels like "when I was a kid"; games these days all seem to be rolling updated objectives, one never-ending experience. Which is more immersive and whatnot, but does make it slightly less clear when/if you should/can stop; especially in a game like this, where I found it unclear when it was saving, and if I'd actually resume at that save or back at a checkpoint.

On the bright side, it has an immortality setting (amongst several other personalisable difficulty bits and pieces), so I can just play and follow the story and kill bad guys without having to worry that I'll have to die and start over or get stuck on a tricky boss or something. As ever, I'm sure some "real gamers" find such things distasteful (heck, the game itself asks you to consider playing and see how you find it before you start adjusting the difficulty. I ignored it and just made stuff easier), but I don't care, this is how I like to play. (It's going to be annoying when I eventually dive back into something older and I can't just 'not die', isn't it?)

* "Free" with an Amazon Prime subscription, obv.