i love playing through mass effect again and making the exact same decisions as i always do. the real trick of the series is you'll be going along laughing at every single line of dialogue and suddenly you hit ilos and the menu theme starts playing and you're instantly in tears. maybe that's a symptom of my brain problems more then anything. the asset and layout reuse is egregious at almost all times but it never grates in the ways it can in other titles. a sprightly and quick game that's probably the best introduction to a world that i've seen across any medium. still ultimate kuso though lol

i make a lot of shitty mods for bad games for one specific friend i have for no reason other then i think it's really funny. i think i'm super hilarious. video games are the only thing i ever think about and so obviously i have aspirations for designing one someday, creating these mods is a good way for me to indulge in that impulse while also not letting me fool myself into putting "makes games sometimes" in my twitter bio. one time i made a house party (2017) mod that had a ton of bespoke, branching paths with unique endings based on really minute player actions and decisions. when i watched my friend play i was in agony seeing how often he had to restart the entire run because it was just impossible to create convenient save points where he could quickly branch the story to a new ending. i think who's lila suffers from this same problem most of it's playtime. you'll end up in the interrogation room for what feels like 2/3s of the endings but the path to getting there has to be meticulously played out ever so slightly differently each time. each time you finish a story you feel like you're building up to a conclusion that ultimately never arrives.
i've never played another game (or read a story or watched a movie for that matter) that parlays this kind of an anticlimax into the main themes in a really elegant way. it's not a particularly revelatory experience, and the whole Deal with the story is kinda obvious and slightly overdone in general. but it wraps itself up nice and feels like it said what it wanted to say and got out. my biggest beef with the whole package is the obsession with working in 'Lynchian' imagery and items for no reason other then this guy probably likes lost highway too much. it's good and normal to draw on your inspirations but at a certain point it dilutes the actual author's voice and style. and i'm just super sick of david lynch i have to be real. he made like one movie that i can fuck with and everything else is just so over referenced and uninteresting.

mostly a game of unrealized potential. the first half of the guest house opening is so strong but almost as soon as you leave the area the demo covered it stops being scary. unfortunate. i like the idea behind the item placement and pseudo random boxes peppered around to supplement the player but the level design doesn't feel strong enough to really support the concept. rooms are small and simple enough that you're rarely ever actually uncertain whether you've cleared an area. i totally forgot how exceptionally braindead the entire story was but it's funny honestly. the whole conversation with the cop lol

bad techland. a foul omen when you first boot the game up and they reference Who Do You Voodoo Bitch from legendarily awful game dead island. much ado in the marketing about the Factional Systems and how they would effect the Storytelling and Map in this game but it seems to have come at the cost of the actually solid straight gameplay systems that the first game cultivated. and then the story fucking sucks!! it's just as bad as the first one and there's so much more of it! there's more to do on a purely technical level but it's all dispersed randomly across the map and it feels useless. the only mildly interesting idea this game has is the darkness timer that still feels wasted by not being tied into any core gameplay loops. it's like if you had volatile stealth from dying light 1 but only in certain building interiors and nowhere else. and now there's gonna be a fucking layers of fear 3. what is happening in poland right now????

the new xbox lets you suspend a game and pick it back up whenever so every now and then i'll boot this up and do a couple of towers and an investigation and then play something else for another week or so. insanely weird game that i love even though it's actually kinda terrible. making a game set during the third crusade is already just so different and out there and the layer the animus adds on everything is so nuts. the present day stuff only exists so that every single system in the game is completely diegetic, which is probably why every entry after this one immediately started spinning out and crashing with the desmond shit. i can't think of many other games that lay themselves out like this one. it isn't actually good but i think it's very cute.