Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Expedition 33 is art.  Quite literally.

67 years ago the people of Lumiere found themselves cut off from the world where a mysterious god, a Paintress paints an ever decreasing number of a cliff.  Everyone of that age or lower turns to dust - and each year an expedition sets off to try and stop the Paintress.  You are Expedition 33.

The story is truly a masterwork of fiction, the world you are in and beyond is both beautiful and intriguing and the Paintress is just a small part of the story.  The tragedy, the heroism - it was alldone amazingly well, I felt for these characters - I despaired when they did.

In the end you are presented with a sort of moral dilemma in how to resolve the ultimate conflict.  I feel like I made the right decision, but it felt like a punch in the gut doing it.  So good!





Saturday, May 17, 2025

Fallout 76

There is a sweet spot when to play a game.  I missed that sweet spot with Fallout 76.

The game was fairly buggy and sparse on release, but at least the story made a bit of sense.  Since that time, there have been multiple expansions and content patches, so that now in addition to the main story quest you have NPCs giving you all of the additional content quests they've added.   

For an efficiency gamer this is fantastic, I can go to one area of the map and knock out 5 quests.  But doing that is akin to binge watching multiple shows simultaneously.  I have only a general idea what's going on -- I'm not "on" any of those quests, I'm doing the tasks of them.

I'm not going to say it's bad ... there are people still playing who are level 791 and such, obviously people are enjoying the silent world of reading decrepit old computer terminals for log entries.  It's a well crafted world ... I'm just bored exploring.