Hellblade II is almost certainly coming out this year, perhaps very soon, so I got Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice for a few dollars on the recent Steam sale. It’s certainly a looker, but I would prefer if the mechanics were a bit more sophisticated. Maybe it’ll get there, but I’m a few hours in now, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the entire loop. The combat and puzzle mechanics are both what I’d call serviceable, but it’s really the presentation in this game that they knocked out of the park, yet I still don’t know if that’s enough for me to give the game a glowing recommendation, even if I am enjoying the game.

I’m still making progress in Pillars of Eternity ahead of Avowed’s release, finally getting into some of the White March content, around level 6. The game remains great, but my biggest criticism thus far is still that the intended player level for a given area or quest should be better communicated. I end up timidly doing the stuff that I’m confident is around my level rather than the content that appears to be most interesting to me at the time.

Some friends and I started up a co-op game of Quake II in the remaster, and holy cow, this is so much better than our time in the first Quake, due in no small part to that compass feature they added. The era of FPS games I’m most into would be the era just beyond Quake II’s initial release, and the biggest difference, I’d say, between those two eras in level design is that the older “boomer shooters” would let you get lost in a maze while their successors would close off access to most of the areas that you don’t need to bother with yet/anymore, alleviating frustration. It also just feels so much better right out of the gate than the previous Quake, and the levels are somewhat trying to approximate a space that would exist in a fiction created for the game rather than just being a vague labyrinth with monsters in it.

In another co-op group, I’m in the early hours of Titan Quest, as a way of dipping my toes into the loot game genre, which I hadn’t really had a taste for in the past. I figured with the sequel on the way, and no desire to touch Diablo with a ten foot pole, this would be a good time to do it. We just had to fight a centaur that I’m not sure whether it counts as a boss or not; hopefully bosses in this game are more interesting than that one was, because with the skills we had access to in the early game (not many), the fight was mostly just running around in circles and taking shots at him when we could without getting pummeled.