I arrived in the United Kingdom near the start of May. My first night back, in Edinburgh, I broke one of my rules by staying in a hostel. I was kind of forced into it; it was £140 less than the cheapest hotel room downtown.¹ I chose CoDE Pod — the CoURT² because it was well reviewed and inexpensive and they advertised separate compartments in the room. I figured I could stick it out for a night.

The good part: the WiFi was solid and fast. The bad part: everything else. To start with, the pods don’t have doors, just a curtain across the entrance. There’s no screens in there — fine, I’ve got a laptop — but they also don’t have outlets. They’re only equipped with USB connections, so there’s no way to charge a computer.³ That’d be more manageable if there were a workspace, but all they really have is a café/bar which is open to the public.⁴ The showers for the floor I was on were being repaired so you had to go to an entirely different floor if you wanted to wash up, and they didn’t provide any towels unless you wanted to rent one. It was a relief to catch my train in the morning.

Ever since I’ve been effectively stalled out. I’m dealing with some personal stuff — nothing catastrophic or health-related — but it’s meant I might need to suddenly travel back to the United States. That’s a heavy disincentive to making plans or booking transportation.⁵ In April I was thinking about visiting Japan but I worried it’d be hard to book inexpensive flights on short notice so that scuttled that. And I’d gladly have meandered across Europe, catching trains and hotels as fancy carried me, only I was still waiting to get Schengen days back. So I found an extraordinarily generous friend with a spare room and hunkered down for the better part of three months while I waited.

You might say I’ve gone to ground. There was nothing much around to see and I didn’t have ready access to transportation⁶ so I stayed put. I did run off to London for a weekend, where I saw some theater,⁷ went back for a day at Phantom Peak,⁸ and wandered through Punchdrunk’s new show, Viola’s Room (which I thought was excellent).⁹ I also went to Birmingham to meet a friend visiting from Belgium for a day.¹⁰ And the local Stafford theater put on a surprisingly good production of Twelfth Night which I saw with my friend.¹¹

I’m finally moving on, flying to Lisbon for another round of doctor’s appointments and medication refills. Nothing’s settled yet, least of all my Portuguese visa, but I can’t hide in a corner of England forever.¹² It’s good to be moving again, even if I don’t know where I’m going to be in a month.

I’ve spent the time between arriving and departing doing nothing of consequence. I’ve cooked a lot of vegan food.¹³ I binged a lot of television shows.¹⁴ And once I realized I was here for the long haul and my friend had a PlayStation 5 gathering dust, I ended up pouring literally hundreds of hours into video games.

When I mention I’ve spent the past three months playing video games, often people say they’re envious. Having done it, I can say that wouldn’t be my first reaction. I’m grateful I could do it; I’m at a place in my life where I can sometimes check out without worrying about money or food or having a place to stay. And I suppose its wrong to say I didn’t enjoy myself, although that’s not quite right either.¹⁵

But I’ve also been deeply critical of how we, as a society, choose to spend our leisure time. I’m not sure it’s correct that we have vastly more of it than we did in the past, although it’s certainly always been unevenly distributed.¹⁶ I’ve been rereading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and it feels ever more prescient with every passing year. Postman was writing in 1985 so their argument mostly concerns television, which Postman explicitly compares to Huxley’s Brave New World where the population gladly exchanges their rights and agency for entertainment.¹⁷

It’s hard to say whether video games are better or worse than television in that regard. On the one hand, they’re typically more engrossing. On the other, you’re required to engage with them rather than passively absorb them. My gut feeling is that video games have the potential to be engaged with on a more sophisticated level than television but that’s a double-edged sword. Your active engagement with the content means you’re required to think about what’s going on, but it doesn’t require you to bring a critical mindset to it.

I’ve got nothing against leisure activities, except at the point where they start to crowd out other things. And modern AAA games take a lot of time away from everything else.¹⁸ I’d have gladly spent the last few months wandering around Tokyo and Kyoto instead of sitting in a chair in front of a large-screen TV trying yet again to defeat some unreasonably difficult miniboss. And I worry, just like Neil Postman did, that with video games we’ve merely created another media environment where we’ve traded social action for inaction.¹⁹ But I had the time and I’ve utterly run out of projects to keep myself occupied. So I played games.

A lot of games. Since early May on the PlayStation I played through Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Miles Morales: Spider Man, Ghost of Tsushima, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Horizon Forbidden West, Immortals Fenyx Rising, Lego: the Hobbit, and Borderlands 3. I tried, but bounced off of, Returnal, Death Stranding, Control, Chorus, Red Dead Redemption II, Fallout 4, and Kena: Bridge of Spirits. What these have in common is they are or were completely free if you have a PlayStation Plus subscription, which my friend does. I wasn’t willing to spend any money, so I got to play the back catalogue. Luckily I haven’t been playing much since I started traveling, so there were a lot of well-regarded games I could catch up on.

Some hot takes: I thought Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel were the best and the most well-rounded. Ghost of Tsushima is a close runner up with a particularly well-balanced mixed of stealth and archery and melee. I found myself switching between those playstyles far more often than other games. If I felt more affinity for the Kamakura Period of Japan than the post-apocalyptic United States I might have ranked it first. God of War was fun enough that I’d have played the sequel if it was available, but it’s still just a fighting game with fairly elaborate cutscenes.²⁰ Borderlands 3 is dumb as a brick, the bastard offspring of Duke Nukem and Mad Max where your enemies explode into piles of guns.²¹ It’s amusing if not particularly enthralling, but you can tell the writers have BAs in English because the enemies sometimes quote Dylan Thomas.²² Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a great, relatively short game with surprisingly dynamic combat and reasonable stealth mechanics, although I was bothered by the rather slapdash fidelity to New York City.²³ I’m glad I played Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End if only to get a glimpse of the franchise. The puzzles are pretty interesting but the lack of any significant open world elements made it feel a little claustrophobic to me, and given how simple the combat is I’m surprised it was apparently able to support a robust PvP community. Immortals Fenyx Rising is mostly a puzzle game with some combat interludes and I appreciated having so many Greek actors playing Greek gods, but it’s a bit simplistic and like most Ubisoft games there’s way too much to do for its own good. Lego: the Hobbit is shovelware based on the Peter Jackson movies and somewhat amusingly their license ran out before they finished it so they just skipped the last movie in the trilogy.²⁴ The game ends with Smaug escaping the Lonely Mountain. I tried to get into Red Dead Redemption II because I know it’s so beloved but it just felt so cumbersome to get anything done that I gave up in frustration after 10 hours. Death Stranding felt the same but I figured that out in the first 20 minutes. I had a great time playing about three hours of Returnal before I realized I wasn’t ever going to be good enough to beat the first section so I tossed it into the Elden Ring basket.²⁵ Control has a great premise and fun graphics and a cool, creepy plotline, but I found the levels too confusing and quit after a particularly frustrating section where I got lost and the game responded by throwing the same boring encounters at me four times in as many minutes. And Fallout 4 was kinda fun but buggy as all hell, which as I recall is the traditional Bethesda experience.²⁶

The nine games I ended up playing front to back each took about 50 hours to complete, so that was all effectively a full time job. And I didn’t spend a lot of time dawdling. I could have spent a lot longer on each if I had obsessed about every thing I could have done. But I had to stop somewhere. So how do you know when you’ve finished?

Some video games don’t really have an ending per se. Most versions of Tetris will just keep getting faster and faster until you lose; there’s literally no win condition. I tend to find those games dissatisfying. I need some kind of goal I’m aiming for or I’ll lose interest. I tend to prefer games like The Legend of Zelda, where you’ve clearly finished the game once you’ve assembled the Triforce, defeated Ganon, and saved Hyrule.²⁷ You can’t keep playing. Your only option is to restart.

But as video games get more sophisticated they’re also getting more complicated and it’s starting to get difficult to tell when you’re supposed to have finished one. Have you finished it when you’ve reached the end of the main story and rolled the credits? How about once you’ve seen all the alternate endings? Finished “New Game +?” Completed all the side quests? Romanced every NPC? Played all the unlockable characters? Done the DLC?

I’m a completionist at heart, which is one of the reasons I try to moderate how many video games I play. One of the superpowers people with Attention Deficit Disorder tend to have is hyperfocus, the ability to block out the world and hone in on something to the exclusion of everything else. The steady drip of progress — one more quest finished, one more level unlocked, one more secret door uncovered — means I can sit down to play at 7am and keep at it for 16 hours straight with just an occasional break for a bite to eat. And I can do that day after day after day. It’s an incredible waste of time. But time is all I’ve had for the past couple months, so waste it I did.

Even then, I have to know when to quit playing a particular game. For some reason how much time something takes to complete is now seen as a mark of quality or value, so the time it takes to get through all the content in a game has been steadily increasing. It takes about 8 hours to play through The Legend of Zelda. To finish the main storyline in Red Dead Redemption II you’re looking at about 50 hours, and if you include all the side quests that gets bumped up to about 80 hours. If you play to 100% completion you’re looking at about 180 hours.²⁸

I tend to be drawn to open world games²⁹ which run on the longish side. What appeals to me about them is the ability to systemically and methodically complete every objective available. This was fine 30 years ago, when you’d kill every boss, finish off maybe a dozen side quests, and locate all of six data chips or feathers or corporate memorandum and get a small “You’re the Best!” popup for your trouble. But companies have learned a cheap and easy way to add content and extend the play time for these games is to add a bunch of side content. These things are now stuffed with racing courses and gambling tables³⁰ and proving grounds and hundreds upon hundreds of “collectables.”³¹ There’s logic to some of this; if I’d gone to the trouble of rendering a gorgeous sunset atop a waterfall, I’d damn well want a reason for the player to trudge all the way out there to see it. But much of it — most of it? — feels like a excuse to pad out the runtime in order to make people feel like they got their money’s worth.

Play time is a terrible metric to judge quality on. It’s like arguing the live action The Lion King is better than the original because it runs for an extra half hour. But people would apparently rather spend 200 hours replaying one game than spend 200 hours playing ten different games, so this is the world we have. I feel guilty enough wasting 50 hours on a game; I certainly don’t want to spend four times that for increasingly diminishing rewards.

I mostly focus on achievements. My basic goal is to earn all the achievements, and the PlayStation makes this explicit by offering a platinum trophy for earning all other trophies. In getting there you’re typically expected to finish the main quest line and all the side quests, along with the occasional alternate ending. You’ll probably need to collect all of one or two collectables and some minimum number of some of the others. And there’s usually a requirement to win some of the challenges or find and equip some specific gear or weapons or pop your head into all the areas of the game.

In other words, the achievements usually cover a pretty good range of what there was to do in the game, without being exhaustive. This is almost perfect for me, since it means someone already went through the work of arbitrarily setting a limit on what “finishing the game” means. I get a goal to work towards and I can just sit down and play the thing.

It doesn’t always work. For one thing, I am horrendously bad at hand-eye coordination³² and sometimes there’ll be an achievement like “Kill the Rampaging Terrordactyl using just a slingshot and a stick of chewing gum” which is completely beyond my abilities. Worse, often it’s not entirely clear that’ll be beyond my abilities until I’ve sunk dozens of hours into the game in the first place.³³ Games are getting better at this. Most of the games I played allowed you to turn down the difficulty without affecting your ability to unlock content or get achievements.³⁴ I usually started on “normal” difficulty and eased it down for places where the combat started to drag.

There’s a whole cottage industry devoted to publishing guides on the most efficient ways to reach 100%. It’s a little sad, because I’d rather just sit down and play a game without spoilers and then mop everything up at the end, but most games are terrible at signposting what you need to worry about at the start.³⁵ There’ll be things you need to look out for or you end up needing to restart the game. Sometimes the achievements will be buggy and you’ll need to know how to avoid getting your game softlocked. Sometimes making the wrong choice in a dialog tree can lead to five hours of grinding trying to find some crucial crafting material you missed.

So when I’m considering a game that’s going to explode a full week of my life, I’ll look around online to try and figure out how difficult it’s going to be and if the game play looks like something I’ll enjoy. I’ll then find some achievement guide and check if I’m going to get stonewalled at some point. I’ll see if the combat difficulty can be adjusted, and if that affects what you can do in the game and if it’s possible to tone it down in the middle of a run. I’ll look at the kind of accessibility settings that are available.³⁶ And then, and only then, will I start to play.

The games I liked the best were Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, so I’m going to use them to talk about the current state of open world games. Horizon Zero Dawn was released by Guerrilla Games for the PlayStation in 2017. Its budget was €45 million. It became one of the best-selling PlayStation 4 games and reviews have ranged from good to great. It’s done well enough to merit two sequels³⁷ with a third on the way. I’ve been curious about it since it was released, but I never had the opportunity to play it until now.

Part of the appeal was the setting; the game takes place in the 31^st century in a post-apocalyptic Western United States.³⁸ Humanity lives in small tribes and the world is now filled with machines which mimic animals: “Striders” and “Snapmaws” and “Glinthawks” instead of horses and crocodiles and vultures.³⁹ Figuring out what caused the apocalypse is a large part of the story. This isn’t the most original premise, but it’s a welcome change from the dreary plastic corridors of many sci-fi games and provides a lot of pretty wilderness to explore enlivened by the occasional cluster of robots to kill.

The various factions you encounter are generally well-written and interesting, with a distinct aesthetic for each and cultures which make at least some sense given their backstories.⁴⁰ Unfortunately, the game struggles with cultural appropriation, as you might expect from a Dutch gaming studio designing post-apocalyptic tribal societies. The biggest issue, or at least the most visible, is the visual design: for clothing the character artists seem to have scoured world cultures for elements and motifs and then reassembled them with minimal regard to their historical context; a given faction might be wearing elements suggestive of a half-dozen real world tribes without clearly referencing any single one. That’s not the only issue, and the game navigates some of them more deftly than others.⁴¹

You play as Aloy, an exile from one of the tribes who gets caught up in events and ends up saving the world. The plot’s reasonably engaging and I appreciated the many, many jabs at tech culture in the 21^st century.⁴² The actual play of the game is pretty standard for these kind of things. You’ve got a map you’re free to wander across as you choose, marked with various quests you can go on (some of which are necessary to advance the plot) and animals you can hunt or dungeons you can explore.

The first fifteen hours or so of the game was some of the best I’ve ever played in a video game. It did an excellent job of introducing the world and the characters, teaching you the kinds of things you’ll need to know to keep going, and dropping you into the story. There was even one particular moment, after you leave the starting area and start exploring on your own, which managed to evoke in me a genuine feeling of wonder and possibility.⁴³ The game eventually settled into something more run-of-the-mill as I began to understand the mechanics and see the seams. The design compromises started to show through.

The inventory system, for one, is horrific. You lack enough space to carry all the crafting materials you need — because the game insists on making you craft arrows in the middle of combat — so you’re constantly shifting around materials you don’t know if you have to hang on to to make room for stuff you want to sell.⁴⁴ The games also have a problem with puzzles, in that they’re tied to the typically janky physics simulator built into the game, so you’ll grab hold of a crate and suddenly be unable to move except in one of the cardinal directions. These games put so much effort into fluid combat and climbing only to drop you into a section where you’re dragging railway cars along tracks and backtracking across the map to punch switches.⁴⁵ This weirdness will sometimes extend to the climbing sections, where your character appears to be a world-class free climber but unable to scramble up anything less than a 90° angle.

My biggest problem with Horizon Zero Dawn is that I had done everything except the final quest and was running around the map finishing up some spare tasks when a small popup informed me the game was going to expire in 15 minutes. Apparently some of the games available through the PlayStation subscription are only available for a month.⁴⁶ I didn’t have time to finish the last quest and I didn’t fancy paying the $20 to buy the game just to do that one bit, so I never finished. I watched someone else play through the last mission on YouTube to close out the plot. I still had enough fun that I jumped into the sequel after a short break from the post-apocalyptic.

Horizon Forbidden West came out in 2022, with a development cost of €195 million. It was able to target the graphics capabilities of the PlayStation 5,⁴⁷ and it shows; the scenery is truly spectacular and the character animations are stunning.⁴⁸ The game is bigger in almost every way. Aloy can now swim underwater and there’s a glider which allows you to traverse distances in the air, which opens up a lot of possibilities for exploration. The combat’s been reworked and ranged combat is even more of a blast, where you can target specific components on machines (armor plates, or weapon systems, or cargo containers) and take down machines strategically.⁴⁹ The plots are more intricate and more epic, and it finally has you visit a few iconic locations.⁵⁰ The game looks better and feels freer.

It’s disappointing, then, that I’m mostly taking it as a cautionary tale. All those new and improved systems have been put into service creating an experience essentially identical to the first game. You can explore underwater, sure, but you’re still mostly looking for ways to get through blocked passages, same as you did overland in the first game. The inventory system is better but still annoying and you’re still crafting ammunition in the middle of battles.⁵¹ The hand-to-hand combat is something of a clunky mess. And the fast travel system needs some thought.⁵²

Playing through so many games in such a small period of time I’m realizing they’re all converging on the same thing. You can divide these games into different subsystems. There’s combat if you wanted to just beat some stuff up. There’s exploration which involves finding all the things hidden around the world by free climbing up the sides of mountains or performing improbable parkour across conveniently placed architecture. There’s explicit puzzles, small spaces you need to maneuver around and/or unlock by performing some in-game actions. There’s a whole crafting thing where you gather materials to turn into useful items. And there’s all the NPCs to meet and plot lines to pursue. Virtually all the AAA open world games contain all these things. Some are better than others at different pieces. God of War emphasizes melee combat. Red Dead Redemption II puts an insane amount of detail into the stories and plotlines. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End focuses particularly on climbing and puzzles. But all them do all of it to one degree or the other.

The swimming in Horizon Forbidden West doesn’t add much to the game, for as lovely as it is. They also added these small ruins which involve lining up crates and moving batteries around and punching in security codes to unlock artifacts which I always found awkward.⁵³ Both felt like features which checked boxes for some executive. And all the AAA open-world games are doing it. It’s the big-budget blockbuster Marvel movie problem. No one wants to risk their €195 million investment so all these these works converge on something which strongly resembles everything else. That may be a safe bet but it’s also a boring one.

I’d still recommend Horizon Forbidden West but if you’re only going to play one of the two I’d say play the first one instead. It’s a much better introduction to the world and I don’t think the improvements really add anything to the core experience. But having played what ultimately felt like variations on the same game over and over and over again, what I found myself really wanting at the end was a game with some fresh ideas. At a minimum I wanted something focused on being great at what it was, not tolerable as whatever you wanted it to be.

To that end, I played a few Steam games as well in the past few months: Hades II, The Talos Principle, and Tunic. These were all fantastic self-assured experiences which notably didn’t try to be everything to everybody. I think they were just as good, if not better, than any of the AAA games I played. I was particularly impressed by Tunic, which is kind of a reimagining of The Legend of Zelda and manages to surpass the original on just about every metric. It’s both adorable and gorgeous. You play a small fox saving a kingdom (although it turns out not to be that straightforward) and the gimmick is you’ve lost the game manual and need to locate the pages in the game world so you can figure out what your abilities are and how they work.

It’s highly, highly recommended. A better and more accomplished work of art than most of the games I played on the PlayStation. If you’re looking for a new game to try, maybe you should start there.

Next: Lisbon (LIS) to Helsinki (HEL)
Prev: Berlin (BER) to Edinburgh (EDI)

Footnotes

¹ There’s cheaper options if you go a mile away, but I wanted something stress-free and it’s brainless to get from the airport to the train station in central Edinburgh, which I thought I might need.

² That’s the full name, “CoDE Pod — the CoURT”, and the bizarre capitalization is their affectation, not mine.

³ There are some outlets in the room, but they’re not convenient and there’s no chairs so you can’t even sit and work or read a book while it’s charging.

⁴ If you’re looking for a place to work in the area, there’s a Black Sheep coffee just north of Waverley Station which I heartily recommend.

⁵ And given politics in the US over the last 90 days, I’m not exactly inclined to wait things out there, either.

⁶ My friend has a car but I don’t generally like to talk them into driving places just to keep me entertained, and the train station isn’t walkable. I haven’t been in much of a touring mood, truth be told.

⁷ A production at the Southwark Playhouse of a play based, extraordinarily loosely, on Sappho’s life. It had a lot to say about queer joy and democracy and expressed its opinions on both rather incoherently.

⁸ Phantom Peak has now settled into running “seasons” where they change up the quest lines, and if anything they’ve improved on a lot from when I first went. Maybe it’s just the quests we happened to get, but they seemed to integrate more of the scenography than they used to into what you’re being asked to do, like “follow the footsteps across town” or “trace the wiring through the walls.” This is both fun and smart, since it incorporates the physicality of the space. You still have about as much agency as in a first-generation MMO where your choices are do the quest or don’t do the quest, but it remains a nice way to kill an afternoon.

⁹ It’s running through September, and if you’re interested in immersive experiences it’s trying to figure out how to do things in ways that, as a designer, are worth thinking about.

It’s a fairy tale and one you’ve heard before, like most fairy tales. It’s also a bit on the expensive side, since the whole experience lasts for less than an hour and there aren’t any live actors in it. But I was charmed by it, maybe because it evoked a nostalgia from when I was a teenager and knew a lot of the moony kind of teenage girls the story is about. It was sad and wistful and filled with that adolescent longing for something that you never quite outgrow.

¹⁰ The Birmingham Museum of Art was largely closed for renovations but there was an exhibition on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which was excellent and finally explained to me what “Pre-Raphelite” meant. It had never occurred to me to wonder about it before.

¹¹ I suppose regional theater in the UK is bound to be better than regional theater in the US, both because the training is better and the size of the country means no matter where you are you can effectively commute back to London, where presumably your career is based, so it’s easier to attract talent.

¹² The West Midlands is more like the center of England, but you take my point.

¹³ Breakfast was overnight oats or vegan yogurt, lunch was typically leftovers or prepared meals from Tesco, and I’d cook up some vegan recipe or other I’ve wanted to try for dinner, often doubling it so we could have it the next night as well. I’ve made a superb spicy mushroom and tofu mazemen, an Indian curry recipe loaded with jalapeños, a dead simple gochujang and marmalade tofu, an outstanding chili relying mainly on fresh summer vegetables, and a whole lot of marinaded tempeh used as fish in tacos and bacon in BLTs and corned beef in Reubens.

I’ve discovered I can use an immersion blender on peanut butter in almond milk for the overnight oats and then either stir in raspberry jam or cacao nibs. Both are excellent, although I’ve found fresh pineapple chunks and coconut or lemon curd and fresh strawberries are pretty great as well.

¹⁴ Fallout (good, if silly), One Piece (great, if silly), Devs (thoughtful and elegiac), Hacks (the single best thing I’ve seen all year), The Acolyte (unrealized potential, but I’m hopeful for season two), and The Haunting of Hill House (slow boil Gothic horror, more spooky than scary).

¹⁵ The part of your brain which lights up when you’re having fun is very notably not the part of your brain that’s responsible for obsessive behavior. They’re linked in complicated ways; humans will notice how they’re behaving and make inferences based on it, and there’s lots of ways to trick them into getting that wrong. Addiction is the typical example. People will often do things long after all the enjoyment they used to get has drained out.

So while I often get a pleasant kind of buzz from the flow state of playing a video game, I don’t know that I’d say I’ve been having a ton of fun. I’ve mainly been warding off boredom and managing my anxiety through distraction. Those are good things, but not fun things.

¹⁶ Some current scholarship suggests hunter-gatherer societies may have worked as little as 10 hours every week. I suppose the rest of the time you’d lie around and wander if those mushrooms you just ate were going to kill you.

¹⁷ The argument is a lot more subtle than my summary suggests; Postman argues that different mediums are suited to conveying different kinds of information, and your ability to digest it and then do something — dubbed the “information-action ratio” — is incredibly low for television, thus priming people to be passive observers of events while enabling them to fool themselves into believing they’re well-informed.

¹⁸ That’s not even considering MMOs or multiplayer, where the time spent might be orders of magnitude greater. Apparently humanity has spent a collective 10 million years playing World of Warcraft.

¹⁹ I’m not sure MMOs qualify as real socializing, even if they give the illusion of doing so. It’s probably better than nothing, but it’s still primarily channeled into online activity, so you put your energy into actions which feel fulfilling but are ultimately unconnected to any real-world consequence. It’s the mental health equivalent of posting climate change memes to Twitter and feeling like you’ve done your part.

²⁰ Also, Mimir has a Scottish accent? I know they explain it in the game, but it’s still pretty odd.

²¹ This iteration contains a gun which shoots other guns.

²² You know the writers have MAs in Comparative Literature if the enemies sometimes quote John Donne.

²³ There’s no Chrysler Building. Much of the city felt like New York as filmed on location in Vancouver.

²⁴ I was also greatly amused because the game is designed for co-op so there always have to be two playable characters available. In the riddle scene with Gollum Bilbo is accompanied by a very confused goblin.

²⁵ Elden Ring was available to play and I kind of really wanted to get into it, but I’m pretty sure the difficulty would have been beyond me and I would have found that out 20 hours in. I have no interest in repeating boss fights dozens of times in the forlorn hope that I’d eventually get gud.

²⁶ I understand it’s a lot better if you install a metric ton of mods for it but that disables the achievement system, and I’m genuinely offended that Bethesda can churn out a buggy mess of a product and just expect the fanbase to clean it up for them.

²⁷ Uh, spoilers.

²⁸ Apparently the world record speedrun for 100% completion for Red Dead Redemption II is 35 hours. You can do The Legend of Zelda in about half an hour.

²⁹ Open world games are ones in which your progress isn’t gated by certain milestones, although the definition is a little vague. If you can’t traverse a mountain pass because you freeze to death without cold weather gear, and you can’t buy cold weather gear until you free a particular merchant, and you won’t get offered the quest to free the merchant until you’re halfway through the main story line, is that really any different from saying “you must be level 40 to cross the mountains?”

³⁰ It’s still supremely weird to me that you can fire up Red Dead Redemption II, guide your avatar to a table, sit down, and play a round of very anachronistic Texas Hold ’Em, effectively using a game to simulate playing a different game in an objectively worse version than dozens of freely available alternatives.

The one example of this kind of thing that gets a pass from me is the science minigame in Borderlands 3. The minigame is only moderately fun, but the puzzles are based on real data mapping the DNA of human gut microbes and by solving them you’re actually helping correct errors in the sequencing. In the first month of the game’s release, over 86 years of playtime was spent patching gut sequencing data.

³¹ In Ghost of Tsushima there are over 433 collectables, including 10 hidden altars, 59 pieces of vanity gear, 18 hot springs, 16 bamboo strikes, 16 Shinto shrines, 8 lighthouses, 23 “Pillars of Honor,” 49 fox dens, 19 haiku spots, 25 unique duels, 80 sashimono banners, 40 records, 50 Mongol artifacts, and 20 singing crickets. The DLC adds more.

³² To put it bluntly, my playstyle leans heavily towards cheese. Given any opportunity, I will diligently work to overlevel my character, acquire overpowered weapons, and find approaches to challenges that let me skip the difficulty curve entirely. I’ll spend 10 minutes perched on the edge of a cliff pinging some monster to death with a peashooter rather than spend two minutes just charging in and risking a scratch or two.

³³ This is what happened to me playing Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I played through the whole game, restarted and played through “New Game +” and suddenly discovered an achievement I just wasn’t going to be able to get. I set the game down and never picked it up again.

³⁴ I basically refuse to play games which require a playthough on HARDCORE difficulty to get 100%. Having to replay the game from start to finish is already a big ask. Life’s too short.

³⁵ When I start a game I have very basic questions from the get go, like “Which abilities should I prioritize to fit my playstyle” and “What of the dozens of scrap items I’m picking up are going to be important in the mid-to-late game and which are vendor trash?” and games barely even bother with tutorials any more. I had finished Borderlands 3 before I even realized legendary weapons have abilities which aren’t mentioned in their statblock. AAA games are relying on a lot of unpaid labor from their fan bases to catalogue and explain fundamental information about how their games even function.

³⁶ A big one for me is the ability to turn off the quicktime events where you’re expected to mash a particular button repeatedly. I like not having my hands ache when I set the controller down.

³⁷ Horizon Call of the Mountain was released last year, with a different protagonist.

³⁸ Horizon Zero Dawn takes place in what in the present day would be roughly between Salt Lake City and Denver, although with few exceptions it sticks to the wilderness. The sequel extends that to Las Vegas and San Francisco.

³⁹ There are still normal animals running around; the sequel in particular adds a wide variety of fauna scurrying through the underbrush from time to time, which you are expected to shoot if you want more inventory space. But you never see large herds of them, and the implication seems to be that the machines have outcompeted their natural analogues.

⁴⁰ The backstory of the apocalypse in Horizon Zero Dawn is more serious and grounded than something as goofy as Fallout, but it still takes a lot of pretty big leaps.

⁴¹ I simply don’t have the background to comment authoritatively on its missteps, and you could write a whole essay just on cultural appropriation in the game. Other, better qualified people, have. But I did a pretty deep dive on the debate about it online, so I feel like I can at least summarize the issues people have called out, beyond the costuming.

There’s been discussion about some of the language. Everyone speaks English — there’s a lore explanation — and further speaks in a slangy, modern vernacular with an American accents. Characters will talk about “cutting to the chase” or “bagging and tagging” the dead, which is a little jarring but does make them feel contemporary rather than primitive. Unfortunately the writers also chose to use terms like “braves” to refer to warriors in the tribes, which a number of commenters found offensive, even if it wasn’t used as a blanket term.

Many of the tribes use face paint. Face paint is tricky since it’s extremely common among many cultures and contexts but at the same time has been used so often in a disrespectful way, and it’s so easy to find similarities to actual cultural practices that a lot of people find it inherently suspect. Guerilla Games seems to have done a lot of work to avoid borrowing directly from real-world sources, but there’s an open question about how much that’s possible.

The tribes are all multiethnic. This is unremarked upon and racial prejudice is apparently nonexistent. The rationale for all this is alluded to in the lore, and since all of the tribes supposedly developed from a blank slate in the millennium after the apocalypse none of them are any more closely tied to real-world societies than “vaguely Roman” or “vaguely Viking.” But the protagonist is a red-headed white woman based on a Dutch character model and the natural structure of the game has you go from tribe to tribe, being smarter and more technologically advanced and a far better warrior than anyone else, and incidentally solving all their problems. So while the fiction kinda sorta explains how that’s not a white savior trope it certainly comes across that way at times. That’s further exacerbated by the fact that you get to unlock tribal armors and face paint and apply them to your character, so in a sense you are encouraged to directly enact cultural appropriation within the game itself.

The overarching problem is this: How do you create a world full of fictional tribes? If you ignore history you’re going to create a lot of wildly unrealistic elements and it’s easy to fall into stereotypes. If you take elements directly from existing historic tribes, it’s difficult to do that while remaining respectful to the sources. And if your game features a preternaturally skilled and technically brilliant protagonist — as these games almost always do — you’re inevitably setting up a power imbalance that’s going to make the tribal societies feel primitive or backwards.

But setting yourself an impossible task isn’t an excuse for doing it badly. I don’t think these missteps are game-ruining — some people do, and I can respect that — but I wish they had put more thought into what they were building and how it would end up being framed in the context of the game. I think they had other options.

⁴² Spoiler: the apocalypse turns out to have been caused by someone who feels an awful lot like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, someone with way too much money and lacking an ounce of self-awareness or self-doubt, blind to the idea that there’s any problems their technology might cause that couldn’t be solved with yet more technology.

⁴³ Spoiler: it’s when I stumbled across and subsequently overloaded my first Tallneck.

⁴⁴ I have no idea who these people are who love micromanaging inventory slots since I’ve yet to talk to anyone who was a fan of it, but it’s a perennial feature of modern games from Horizon Zero Dawn to Borderlands 3 to Balder’s Gate 3 and I find it infuriating every single time. I don’t want enemies to explode like piñatas full of gold and crafting supplies, I don’t want to explore a world so littered with lootboxes so the first thing you do when you enter someone’s home is rummage through the drawers looking for loose change, and I am horrified we’re somehow still stuck at the “steal everything that’s not nailed down” stage of worldbuilding.

⁴⁵ For some reason all the technology in the future is controlled by giant goofy looking buttons on well-spaced pedestals.

⁴⁶ No, I don’t know why Horizon Zero Dawn was only available temporarily but Horizon Forbidden West appears to be a permanent fixture. And I’m pretty sure you only get a 15 minute warning because giving someone a heads-up an hour or two earlier might mean you could finish the game instead of being pressured into paying for it.

⁴⁷ It’s available for PS4 but you really want to be playing it on a PS5 or PC with the graphics settings turned all the way up. It’s worth it.

⁴⁸ The first game got a lot of flack for having stiff or emotionless character animation in cutscenes, and it’s clear the team put a ton of effort into fixing that for the sequel, with incredible results.

⁴⁹ This was part of the first game as well, but the targeting systems are even better now and the new machines you can fight offer more options with greater tactical depth.

⁵⁰ I’d have thought one of the appeals of a post-apocalyptic setting would be to see the world we recognize in ruins a la the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes but I can’t recall anything like that in Horizon Zero Dawn. The sequel has you visit the Vegas Strip and explore the ruins of what is recognizably a megacasino and you also make a foray to San Francisco and climb a few oceanside skyscrapers, but I would have loved to explore an actual cityscape.

⁵¹ Most annoyingly, you can’t turn the flags in your HUD off for any specific crafting material, so I was constantly heading across a field only to discover the thing the game wanted me to gather was a bundle of sticks or a rock. By the end of the game I had thousands of sticks and hundreds of rocks. I was never remotely close to running out.

⁵² In both the first game and the sequel you can fast travel to any campfire you’ve discovered and they’re scattered very generously across the map, but you need to buy a fast travel kit to do so. At a certain point in the original you get the opportunity to buy a permanent one, and then you never need another one. This had the advantage of simplicity, but felt a little weak. In the sequel they did away with the permanent fast travel pack, but made it so you can craft fast travel packs by gathering readily available supplies. They also made it free to fast travel from any campfire. So now fast travel is gated behind a mildly annoying chore. I don’t know that that’s an improvement.

Worse, maybe, is the fact that there’s a spot in the game you can always fast travel to at no cost. That place has a campfire close by. So the optimal strategy, if you discount your time, is to directly fast travel there and use the campfire to head wherever you’re actually trying to get to.

I have a particular hatred of systems where doing the smart thing ends up always being mildly annoying, and given how many times you fast travel across the map in the game it was constantly bugging me. It doesn’t feel like it was ever fully thought through.

⁵³ The physics engine isn’t designed for precise movements, and the puzzles are the usual platforming kinds of things which had big “guess what the game designer wants you to do here” energy. I don’t like being pulled out of the story to solve a puzzle that makes no sense being in the game world, especially since you lack perfectly reasonable solutions: why can’t you position the mount you’re riding near the building and balance on that to reach the ledge that’s just a little bit too far to reach? I skipped most of them, and tended to look up the solutions for the ones I did solve online.