Passing the Buck Chapter 1: Downloads, Assemble!

In “Passing the Buck: A Game Pass Study,” Wolfman Jew has bought a three month subscription to Game Pass. With only ninety-one days he can’t get back, it’s on him to try as much as he can. Every day he’ll play something, anything, even if it’s only for half an hour, and write down his thoughts. How many games will he play? How many will he finish? How many revelations will he find? And how much of his sanity will be left by April Fool’s Day?

Welcome to “Passing the Buck!” After years of raising my eyebrow at Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service, after years of railing against their uncontrolled expansion, I’m now more in their ecosystem than ever. I’ve got three weeks of winter break left before my job starts back up, so this is the best time to go hog wild and hit the ground running. Did I accomplish that? Well… yes. Yes, I did. But I do think the details are neat, so do read on.

What I played:

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons: two brothers explore a bucolic kingdom in search of an ancient tree in the hopes that its water can revive their dying father. They solve puzzles, evade monsters, and it’s all done with you controlling both characters at once.
The Walking Dead Episode One: in the wake of an onset zombie apocalypse, Georgia professor Lee Everett tries to marshall a group of panicky survivors, tend to lost child Clementine, and hide his past as a convicted murderer. As he explores a farm and abandoned pharmacy, you routinely make painful choices of who to side with and who to save.
Persona 3 Reload: a high school transfer student discovers a Jungian shadow world hidden within a “Dark Hour” of the night and joins the monster-fighting Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad. His time is split down the middle; he’ll go to class and hang out with friends in the daytime and explore the twisting maze of Tartarus for clues after midnight.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge: Leonardo, Donetello, Raphael, Michelangelo, Master Splinter, and April O’Neil fight a Manhattan-sized gauntlet of their greatest enemies, unaware that Shredder and Krang have an all new scheme behind the scenes. Naturally, this comes in the form of a retro pixel brawler inspired by the Turtles’ classic arcade games.

Wednesday, January 1: installed Game Pass, started and completed Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, started The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season and got to the pharmacy in Episode 1.

Loading Game Pass was painless. As it should be; Microsoft has so thoroughly made this the core of its identity that the service should have its own magnetosphere. I didn’t find the dedicated Game Pass page to be of much help, admittedly, but it was no trouble redeeming the code I bought from the surprisingly not super sketchy CDKeys. After that, I downloaded Brothers, Shredder’s Revenge, Gears of War, Dead Space, Persona 3 Reload, The Walking Dead, Resident Evil 3, N. Sane Trilogy, Peggle, A Little to the Left, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Chants of Sennaar. That seems like a lot—I mean, it is a lot, it’s twelve games—but they’re taking up less space than you’d expect, and given the time downloading these took I’d rather have it taken care of in advance. As time goes on I’ll delete and replace.

A few months ago, I prepared a tentative schedule for the first few weeks. This was never meant to be strict (I already broke it by playing Walking Dead), just a way to add some structure and avoid decision paralysis. But something I wouldn’t budge on was my choice of first game: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. It’s touted as one of the greatest games of all time for its approach to having one player control two characters, and having that gameplay form the core of the story and emotional impact. Unlike the tired and finicky Mario & Luigi, whose “two characters, one player” approach has always been a dopey branding thing, the two brothers are individually controlled with a separate thumbstick and trigger. You’re pretty much always moving both boys at once instead of zipping from one to the other. They are co-leads and symbiotic. I’m always a believer that gameplay is the core of this medium, so games that have unique mechanics or inputs will always draw me more than ones with more prestige trappings. It’s also, conveniently, very short; about two and a half hours all told. Seemed like a smart move to kick things off with a game I could beat in one session in the aftermath of a rather late New Year’s Eve celebration.

Image: Source Gaming. The opening minutes of Brothers sets things up nicely: both brothers have to move the cart. It sets up the gimmick in a very clear way.

And I’ll confess that those controls led to one big issue, which is that you have to hold the triggers for agonizingly—like, actually, physically agonizing—long amounts of time. It was painful to grip the controller for life for several minutes, knowing exactly how far I was from a checkpoint were I to loosen my hold for a second and take a picture (and sure, I could’ve done it in separate sessions, but it was so short as it is and the issue was always gonna be there). This wasn’t a problem for me when I was younger, you know. But now, writing this hours after it’s done, the pain is more of a memory. The willingness of Brothers to so singularly focus on this idea and marshall every bit of game design around it is commendable. I can think about the sequence where the sons, tied together with an impromptu bungee cord, swing their way around the ruined walls of a castle. Or them having to move in tandem to evade a beast or solve an intricate puzzle. I wouldn’t say I found it emotionally stirring in the way I found its very obvious inspiration Ico, but like Ico it makes everything serve this fairly basic but well explored core and is better for it. Two thumbs up, will never play again.

Thursday, January 2: started Persona 3 Reload and completed the tutorial in Tartarus.

I realize that, realistically, I won’t be able to get through too many giant RPGs for this project. At the same time, there are a lot I really want to try. Yakuza 7 has been beckoning me since it came out, my niece likes Ni No Kuni so trying that would be good, Fable’s important, Avowed will actually be from 2025, but hey: Persona 3 Reload it is. Maybe it’s because it’s the first 2024 game I’ve played in the new year and my tenth overall, or because Persona 5 is my favorite game of 2016, and that was a year that had Hitman and DOOM. I played for an hour and fought my first battle, so I’ve gotten a decent vertical slice of the game. We’ve got grim imagery, great menu design, amazing J-pop and rap, reams of dialogue that’s only sometimes voiced, a tight daily schedule, a lot of high schoolers, a gormless protagonist, kinky demon allies, the Major Arcana, and some very stretched out pacing. So… it’s Persona. I will say I’d have liked the pace to be a bit faster. Because I’ve got this time limit, I kinda need to blast through these games, so I did feel a bit antsy walking through the school and will probably feel the same until April 1st. But I’ll play more tomorrow.

Image: Source Gaming. As a rule I’ll try to get images that correspond to the day I got them, but this shot from the 1st is the nicest way to show The Walking Dead. Lee, Clementine, the dialogue system, and that sense that every decision you make is gonna come back to bite you.

As for The Walking Dead, it’s great. I think what I like about it most comes from its place in the history of adventure games. Its big innovation for the genre was to strip it to the bare essentials—you poke around the world for keys to open locks—and replace the wackiness with human drama. Lee Everett mostly doesn’t finagle zany solutions to puzzles; his challenges are sadistic choices without an obvious (or possible) best outcome. I’m fully aware that these games’ approach to moral choices and branching paths is fairly limited and that the importance of each choice is pretty small in the long term, but where I think they sing is through this constant pressure. When you’re trying to shore up all your lies and realize you can’t, or when you just have to go for saving one child over a teenager, it does feel intense. The sensation of making the choice is, at least in Episode 1, more important than its consequence. Eventually, this style would become played out as Telltale spiraled into making constant riffs on the formula, but it’s really good here. It helps that Lee is a fantastic protagonist and viewpoint character.

After dinner, I went and played a bit more of Reload, getting through the tutorial that sort of explains Tartarus, the predecessor to the Mementos of Persona 5 that I know and love. This wasn’t a lot, and it was still very hand-holdy, but it was nice to try some of the battles and sample that excellent Persona music. Since I have basically no familiarity with either the original Persona 3 or its many ports and remasters, I’m not able to compare them. But I also don’t really feel a need to. For me, for right now, this is just new Persona, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

Friday, January 3: got to Floor 16 of Tartarus in Persona 3 Reload, completed The Walking Dead Episode 1.

I’m gonna pop down from Normal to Easy. I don’t want to drop further than that, but after dying to the first mini-boss of the game—twice—without making more than a dent, I remembered that I had a great time with Persona 5’s second-lowest difficulty. For me, the appeal of that game’s combat was less about fighting unstoppable enemies and more about outlasting the dungeons. To see how long you could stay in Mementos, how much you could do before pulling out. My understanding was that neither Persona 3 nor 4 had the bespoke Palaces I’m familiar with, so it might just actually be Tartarus. And, again, if I’m gonna try Yakuza and Avowed and Fable II and (probably not) even more, it’d probably be best to keep the RPGs moving at a clip.

Image: Source Gaming. Persona 3 Reload, looking fancy.

On a similar note, after taking some advice I think I’m gonna do the opposite for Season 1 and stretch it out. Maybe every other weeks I take a day or two to go through an episode. It’ll be good to give Lee and his charge Clementine some room, since I’ve found their drama to be really impactful. I often try not to binge shows, so I should take my advice for an episodic game. Except Resident Evil: Revelations 2 when I replay that for an article, but whatever, that’s a replay. Now, that one’ll be on the easiest difficulty.

…Was Glenn from the show? He had that “fan favorite character showing up in a spinoff pilot to paper over any fan complaints that the spinoff is like Frasier and has basically nothing to do with the original” energy. Like Picard at the start of DS9. And that would explain his insane idea of leaving the party to meet up with his friends.

Saturday, January 4: got to Floor 22 of Tartarus and got the Magician, Chariot, Hierophant, Emperor, Strength, Hermit, and Temperance Arcana in Persona 3 Reload, started and completed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge.

Much better. It’s not like Persona is a walk in the park or anything; it’s still Persona. But this trims some of the friction and allows me to enjoy more of the game more quickly. Like this loser Confidant who keeps calling me to go out for ramen. I’ve hit a roadblock that the game’s gonna unlock when its good and ready, and returning in a later night unsurprisingly did nothing (I went back to an earlier save so as to give myself the evening to do anything else, like studying homework or trying and failing to work at the coffee shop). So I suppose it’s now my job to sit and wait for the plot to happen. Apparently I’ve very good at that since Golden Week has ended, the creepy child who’s obviously a young me has a prophecy that’s supposedly getting fulfilled tomorrow, and I’ve met seven Confidants with a prospective eighth at the local shrine. She was the prospective seventh, but then I accidentally forgot about recruiting her and ran into that French transfer student.

Image: Source Gaming. Just look at the fingers of the Foot Clan typists! Look at those sword trails from Leo! Look at that big “8 HITS” logo! This game just sizzles.

I have no real history with or nostalgia for beat-‘em-ups, and I have no love for the Ninja Turtles, so Shredder’s Revenge wasn’t about seeing old favorites. Fortunately, it doesn’t lean on that and is just a crackerjack action game filled with crazy enemies, generous difficulty levels, and style. Especially style. The crunchy pixel art is amazing; it’s a delight to see a Foot Clan goon wielding a car battery like he’s in a Late Eighties Batman comic or slurping popsicles or bursting out of conspicuous background laters. The music’s perfection even before it hits you with a Raekwon song for the first Shredder fight. And between the oodles of background graphics and animations and the sound effects and the excellent game feel, the presentation here is phenomenal. Sumptuous, even. I’m not sure if I’ll keep on with it after this. Since I couldn’t figure out how to switch characters, I was just Leonardo for all sixteen missions, and while I was interested in trying out April and Casey Jones, I did jump back in my save afterwards to try Donatello first and… look, when you’re just button mashing, every character feels a bit similar. So I’ll probably delete it, which is fine. The game was fun, and I’m glad I got to not just try a demo but actually go through the whole thing in an hour. This is, I think, the appeal of this service.

Outro: Overall, I had a really good time with this. For all the problems I see in Game Pass, for all the problems I think it exacerbates for this industry, it’s incredibly convenient. Even with the many games I’ve downloaded already and many more I hope to download within the next several weeks, I can’t help but be excited to play even more. Which is good, because by my estimation I’ve already beaten three games. Every episode of Walking Dead is its own game. They got their own releases and everything.

Image: Source Gaming. My boy Igor!

More to the point, I found the experience pretty easy. Writing feels simpler since it’s shorter, and at least at the moment I don’t have that drive to write obsessively. Brothers had that hand pain, and getting this ready for publication still took some futzing, but this was a delightful experience. I wasn’t repeatedly frustrated like with my first few hours of Dragon Age or pretty much every hour of Kingdom Hearts. I just really wanted to play video games. Even taking pictures felt like less of a hassle. Still a hassle, to be clear, but less so. So, ever onward.

Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!