So for the new year I’ve decided to reactivate my virtual photography accounts @aloyphotoshootand@dpdwarf-photography. For Horizon Zero Dawn expect regular updates (either bi-weekly or monthly). For anyone interested I’m also active as DP_Dwarf on both Instagram and Twitter and will be posting regularly there as well.
Bread’s Game Journal 03/05/22: Oh No I’m Playing Elden Ring.
You know, I really shouldn’t have bought Elden Ring before I finished Horizon Forbidden West. It’s not like I’m about to drop Horizon or anything, but I do know that, as of right now, I have too much on my plate. But does that really matter, because frankly, both of these games rule.
I’ve only played Elden Ring for a little over four hours at this point but damn if I’m not enthralled! I haven’t felt this way about a big open world like this since Breath of the Wild, which of course this game shares a lot of it’s DNA with. I mean I’m not even really out of the starting zone and I already have some wild stories to tell. A dragon keeps trying to kill me, a treasure chest tricked me and teleported me into some terrible mine somewhere far away, I fought a big group of goblins in a pitch black cave!
The game, thus far anyway, is both easier and more difficult than any Souls game before it. Easier in the larger variety of options and places to see and explore if you just don’t want to fight any big bosses or anything. Harder, that when you do stop to go fight those big bosses….they’re bigger than ever. Some of the enemies in this game are absolutely brutal, too. In just four hours I can no longer count on only two hands the amount of time some horrible creature has just annihilated me before I could get a good handle on how I need to deal with them!
I’m sure I gonna have a lot more fun the further I get into the game, meanwhile playing both Horizon Forbidden West and my old Standby, WoW, so that I don’t completely lose my mind of course. And hey, if I could beat Sifu, I can beat this….I think.
Bread’s Game Journal 03/01/22: What Garners An Emotional Response In Horizon Forbidden West, Stays In Vegas.
*Mid Game Spoilers for Horizon Forbidden West*
Horizon Zero Dawn is a game I had a complicated path to enjoyment in. Mostly just in that, for whatever reason, it took me like four separate tries to get into the game, with each start and stop increasingly more random in ways that never really made sense. Happily, I haven’t had that problem with Horizon Forbidden West. Something about this game has clicked fairly quickly, and I’m finding a ton to appreciate every time I play it.
I wanted to write, tonight, about one part of the game in particular, the ruins of Las Vegas, and the surprising emotional payoff it brought with it. Horizon is good at mining meaning and pathos out of things that, we as the players, understand mean little or nothing. Most locations in the game world aren’t even ever referred to by their actual past names, even if it’s clear to the player what those names are, but interestingly, Vegas is spelled out to the player from the start.
The basic plot of the section is simple, Aloy needs the Poseidon Program, which has entrenched itself in some kind of dome underneath the ruins of Las Vegas, and there’s a team of salvagers already there when you arrive, this is of course, where things get interesting. The salvagers aren’t rough and tumble types looking for riches, they’re looking for “Embers”. It isn’t immediately clear what an ember is, but the first real thing you learn is that the leader of this group has a deep emotional attachment to them, and you fully buy into his need to get them out of the watery grave they find themselves in.
In the kind of ironic twist these types of stories love, it turns out “Embers” are little more than cheap holograms used to advertise casinos. Importantly though, that doesn’t change anything. There’s no reveal that crushes the salvagers spirt, he’s fascinated by these things in an incredibly genuine way. He speaks of seeing a hologram of a buxom woman directing him towards a buffet as a child, and describes it as high art that changed his life without even a drip of ironic humor. The best part is that the voice over performance is so well done, and so well directed, that you really do believe everything he says.
And it’s not just the salvagers either, throughout the quest you find brief but enlightening data points filling in a little bit of the backstory of this zone in fantastic ways. The story makes it clear that, long before the world died, Vegas was abandoned. Unable to sustain itself in the middle of a climate change ravaged desert, everyone left, which devastated one man who truly loved the city. Without getting too much into the details of the story, the important thing is, that when Vegas was truly lost, that man made the decision to simply leave Vegas “On”, so to speak.
Even knowing that it was all hacky lights and tricks, he believed in Las Vegas. In simply leaving all the machinery on in standby mode, he hoped that someday it would mean something to someone else again. He was right, of course, as I said before, Morlund, the salvager thinks of Las Vegas a paradise of wonder on this earth, and he’s keeping the dream of this long ago mogul alive.
All of this is really a long way of saying: Horizon Forbidden west specializes in finding pathos and genuine emotion in areas that could otherwise be filled with cheap jokes and other played out tropes. It can spend an entire main story quest set in the now underwater ruins of Las Vegas hammering home how important this shackle of ruins is to two people in this world, and it never feels out of place. Those two characters have such a genuine love, that you might find yourself like me in the big payoff at the end. Tearing up a bit because someone, somewhere, just made the choice to leave the lights on, and influenced more than they could have possibly known.
manipulative space lesbian milf girlboss with carrie anne moss’s face makes brain go brrrrrrrrrr. i wanna say more but god if you ever want want to play this game pls block spoilers and dont look up who tilda is bc fuck ME it had me screaming at several plot points.
