This is only like the seventh best LucasArts point-and-click, but it's also the third best Indiana Jones movie which absolves a lot of its sins. And sins it has: the percentage of obtuse puzzles is substantially higher than in, say, a Monkey Island; the combat is both boring and too densely packed (granted I accidentally selected the combat route, but this is even true in the route-independent Act III); and it requires a tremendous amount of slow traversal when you're trying to find the one pixel you didn't click on in the entire accessible game world.

But the writing and plotting are both fun, and it really does manage to capture that Indy spirit in the way the recent films absolutely didn't. The lack of Harrison Ford is pointedly felt, but everything else about it really does hit. It's also doing some interesting formal things: it has a few moments of genuinely inspired design, like the experience of feeling around in dark rooms while your eyes adjust, and its multi-route structure presages the team's later replayability strategies for Humongous Entertainment games. I'm quietly impressed, even if I don't actually want to play the game again.

thinking abt this from the 2014 goty event.. while i appreciate recent fromsoft to various extents, I think this is their last work to really capture my imagination, for all sorts of reasons. (Not to say that their post-DS2 games don't have great moments of their own, but that's a matter for another time). I think the main reason is DS2 feels like the the turning point for their focus more towards a very specific sort of action which interests me less overall.

Dark Souls 2 is honestly a little fucked up! But that's what makes it good. There's more levels than there should be, stuff is stitched together nonsensically..

The game keeps going on for like 10-20 hours more than you'd expect with the dragon islands world, the shrine of amana, etc... each area feels like this dense zone that the creators wanted to share, even if it didn't perfectly fit. It kind of has this texture of madness to it and theming that feel so video gamey but manage to work as a coherent and memorizable world. idk. It honestly has that energy of those sprawling wild adventure platformers (think ecco, kid chameleon, dragon slayer 4..), that feeling of 'why NOT add a sick dark green poison cave with gigantic impossible to see giants'). But it's all kept so densely knit, just wild little idea after idea.

The thing is though, when I do pick it up it feels really hard to get into. I have a lot less patience for the whole 'die and run back and slowly try again' thing since i've already done that a lot in the past. i should just make a cheese build or play with save states or something