Weeknotes 27

I’m feeling much better this week, thanks for asking. I eventually had a CT scan which took about a minute. Tune in next week for the exciting results.

Having a week of holiday has been brilliant. In some ways it’s a shame to not be able to travel anywhere, but it’s also very nice to feel justified in staying home and relaxing. I haven’t been in an airport for about 9 months now and I’m not sad about that at all.

The Last of Us Part II continues. It’s taking a long time because Nat & I both want to play it spoiler-free, so one of us plays ahead in private to generate some runway, then the other joins in and catches up. It’s not the fastest way to play a video game but seeing lots of it twice is definitely helping me to appreciate its detail and nuance. It’s particularly interesting to see the same encounter go very differently depending on luck and individual choices; the degree to which the player can decide how to approach a situation is very impressive.

As I suggested before, it’s as much a role playing tool as an action/horror game. If you can suspend your disbelief and wholeheartedly participate in the theatre then it has the potential to be a gripping and immersive experience. Conversely if you want to scoff at everything and focus exclusively on “the gameplay” (basically walking between cutscenes with occasional cover shooting) then you’ll have a bad time. I’m firmly in the former camp and am constantly impressed by how much work has gone into giving me a completely convincing world in which to pretend to be terrified of zoms.

Still no spoilers, but: there are lots of surprises in both the story and the mechanics of the game itself. I love this. I’m always keen to have my expectations subverted and that definitely happens a lot here. It’s ridiculously ambitious and I hope it sets a new standard for how good and interesting and unexpected these kinds of AAA games should be. There’s loads of fun stuff I want to talk about but it feels too soon to be giving anything away in public.

We rewatched Moon and The Prestige to begin a mini-season of films with a loose thematic connection. I’d like to conclude with Oblivion and Never Let Me Go at some point, but we ended up watching Shutter Island for the first time instead which was good but definitely watered down the theme to “vat a tvist!”.