I finished Hellblade and am feeling ready for the sequel that’s coming soon. It wasn’t a perfect game, but I really appreciate what they tried for and I think a lot of it was successful. The visual and (especially) audio design was stellar and the narrative is really interesting and touching and the presentation was mostly great. The trials were my favourite part, in particular the blind one where you have to navigate by sound and controller vibration and ignore the scary enemies. I almost wish they went all in on that sort of thing. Or if not, that they tuned the combat encounters differently. I actually quite enjoyed the combat system but there wasn’t much of a reason to fully explore its nuances.

After that, I finally started Red Dead Redemption 2, which is my current game. So far it’s mostly living up to the off-the-charts hype, though as usual I had to tweak some things to taste through mods (yes even on a first playthrough). I’m really enjoying it so far and can see myself either spending 400 hours on this game or get completely burned out (as I was by Ghost of Tsushima). Curious to see which it will be. I also sadly got the ending spoiled for me (way back) and I’m really sad about it because I can already tell the impact it would have had on me and I’m deeply sad I’m never going to get to experience that.