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?
After an utterly stocked week that led me to playing so much and for so long, I’m now facing a somewhat shorter amount of free time and a desire to not try eight to ten games within a seven day timeframe. Of the Microsoft games I sampled, only Indiana Jones and the Great Circle passed muster and stayed in my coterie of somewhere between three to five games. With Dead Space at the halfway point and Persona 3 Reload notably beyond it, it was time to start adding some new games, ones that’ll hopefully stay in the rotation. However, as it turned out, things went just a bit awry…
What I played:
- Cocoon: an insectile being carries a set of spheres across an unsettling alien landscape. However, each sphere houses an entire world unto itself, so any attempt to move forward entails diving into, juggling, and solving puzzles found within them.
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Indiana and dogged reporter Gina have found themselves in Egypt on the trail of Voss, a Nazi archaeologist intent on using artifacts like Indy’s lost cat mummy to unlock some sort of superweapon. As he’s begun unearthing ancient steles to find one, it’s up to Indy to nab the rest from Gizeh’s many tombs.
- Darkest Dungeon: a large estate, having dug too greedily and too deep, finds itself sunken and usurped by zombies, monsters, and Eldritch beings. The family’s sole, unseen heir can only fight back the onslaught by hiring, deploying, and brutally exploiting bands of mercenaries.
- Persona 3 Reload: although SEES manages to defeat the final Shadows, one of their number is killed by their mysterious rival Strega. And between that and a horrifying revelation that leaves them utterly unable to stop the Dark Hour, they’re caught in a stupor no suspicious transfer student can fix.
- Dead Space: A plan by Isaac and his shipmate Kendra to send a distress signal goes awry when the military spaceship it attracts gets invaded by a Necromorph. Isaac goes aboard the ship—and watches his other companion Hammond die—but no event is as haunting as Isaac’s short-lived reunion with his wife Nicole.
- Fable II: years after a young girl survives a murder attempt by a powerful lord, she quests through the fantasy kingdom of Albion in search of revenge. Through the mechanics of an action-RPG, she raids dungeons, casts spells, and sees the people’s reactions to her moral and immoral acts.
Sunday, January 19: started and reached 94% in Cocoon, began exploring the underground fountain in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
I really wanted to just hit the ground running today, but things took a turn. Starting the week by playing an entire game to completion seemed really cool, but Cocoon is hard enough—or, rather, this end game puzzle seems so insurmountable—that it’d have been smarter to just break this up into two days. Which I actually planned for when I wrote up a list of potential short games months ago; it’s absurd of me to have ignored my own advice. But focusing so much on it means that I’ve only done just a couple of puzzles in Great Circle, which has a puzzle of its own that’s taunting me because I still need to figure out how to enter the museum. Also, my right wrist hurts for reasons beyond me, and I had an eye exam late in the morning that shifted the mood into something a bit darker. Thanks to a mishmash of frustration, fear, and eye dilation that made me unable to see clearly for several hours, my running start turned into a game of QWOP.
Image: Source Gaming. The gorgeous Cocoon plays with space and perspective in ways I’m not sure I’ve seen since Gorogoa. Fantastic stuff.
Anyway, Cocoon. I feel a bit obsolete writing a glowing review a year and a half after dunkey’s two minute poem, but it’s brilliant. The pitch is simple: you have to constantly carry these orbs and find ways to move them, but the orbs are not just objects but the setting of an entire pocket universe. You go through one, solve a puzzle, leave the orb, and deal with the outside ramification of what that solution caused. But where it gets crazy is that the orbs can and at times have to be seeded within each other, and by the end it seems as though these layers are collapsing on you. Despite that, I’ve never had more than a few minutes of trouble on any of the many puzzles; this late game one is the worst it’s gotten, and I imagine looking it over another day will help. There are also plenty of lovely tricks Cocoon uses to help orient your thinking, most bluntly in how it regularly cuts off the places you came from. For all that I prefer nonlinearity and player agency, this is a great example of the value of a super-tight linear experience. There is no fat on this steak.
…Well, kinda. Like the previous puzzle games I’ve covered, there is one glaring issue, in this case that maybe this combat-free adventure didn’t need boss fights with no health and no checkpoints. The protectors of the orbs are all pretty exhausting and do spoil some of the atmosphere. Like with the stealth sequences in Chants of Sennaar, it’s a game that seems slightly nervous about shipping with only one impeccable gameplay loop. If I’m right, it was not just a wrong decision but an utterly unwarranted one. Cocoon is a delight of a game, and it’s worth your time, whether or not you have Game Pass. I’m just annoyed that I tried so hard to beat it in one day, to such an extent that it ignored everything else, only to give up at a point the game helpfully demarcates as exactly 94% the way through. Kind of a mild bummer. Then again, clearly the day was against me.
Monday, January 20: started and completed two missions in Darkest Dungeon, defeated Locus and left the Vatican in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and made a Social Link with the Lovers and maxed out the Hanged Man Arcana in Persona 3 Reload.
While a visit to a different eye doctor has given me a far more comforting diagnosis about what has turned out to be a hole in my left retina, a lot of this day was shot between appointments and another round of eye dilation. I could only actually play a video game after 4 PM (which is why I started writing this paragraph in the early afternoon relying almost entirely on my mad Mavis Beacon skillz with a z, to give myself something to do). Not great for fixing the bad vibes of this week. This became especially frustrating because it came right after I found an entirely new topic for this series: playing a game that is about to leave Game Pass. While I wasn’t necessarily planning on it, I had considered it. A natural part of subscription services is things leaving, and while that’s annoying, it’s also a big part of the Game Pass experience. It would be smart to see that experience in practice. So when I looked on the Xbox page last night and saw that Darkest Dungeon was leaving, it seemed like a smart topic.
Unfortunately, I… didn’t exactly have a good time. The main issue is that this is very much a game designed for a PC, with multiple concurrent windows needed at any time. The basics are cool. It’s a Lovecraftian dungeon crawling roguelike where your heroes gain stat bonuses for every completed mission, but also randomly obtained psychological or emotional states that usually make them more unreliable. Some features like the somewhat inscrutable positioning system are a bit much (though not the controversial corpse mechanic, which I think is entirely fine), but overall the basic structure is clear and smart. But the UI just frustrates me to no end, and while I’m confident I’d have this problem if I was playing on PC, it’s exacerbated by the Xbox controller. The way you have to repeatedly toggle different menus, the strange way you move through rooms that made me accidentally get stuck walking backwards; it’s just frustrating in a way that gets in the way of the more built-in friction.
Image: Source Gaming. Darkest Dungeon looks great, sounds great, has a great if painfully tough gameplay loop, but the biggest challenge I had came from just the controls.
It’s a shame, because I’ve been interested in Darkest Dungeon since it came out eight years ago. It was an early (well, a year and a half in) topic on Game Maker’s Toolkit, the series that made me become a games critic. Articles by Stephanie Sterling and others explored its themes of abusive leadership; since “curing” your units’ illnesses through booze or prayer is expensive, the smartest play is to dote on a few prized soldiers and treat everyone else as disposable labor. And I saw that right after my first mission! Of my first four soldiers, the plague doctor didn’t make it, and while the three survivors now had severe illnesses, I decided that the healer and highwayman deserved actual care. The knight may have begged me to not send him back out, but he led my three new recruits to a victory that left them scarred, injured, and, in a couple cases, actually mentally fortified. I love this core theme. Red Hook Studios’ system is fun, narratively interesting, and a great way to explore permanent progression in a roguelike. I just wish I could explore it with, like, any other user interface. Because of that, I think I’m going to take it a bit at a time for now. More time to spend on Tony Todd’s Catholic giant and, uh, Benito Mussolini.
Tuesday, January 21: completed Chapter 7 of Dead Space, started and learned a magic spell in Fable II, defeated Strength and Fortune, lost a party member, maxed out the Devil, Hierophant, Tower, and Magician and made a Social Link with the Sun Arcana in Persona 5 Reload, and entered Gizeh and began exploring the Tomb of Khentkawas in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
With a health scare at my back, a haircut at my, well, top, I guess, and a video by the aforementioned Game Maker’s Toolkit that repeatedly cited this very site (albeit our translations and not anything I’ve written), I had some drive. Well, that and a desire for any kind of distraction from the crumbling and destabilizing events of the day. Finally, it was time to make good on that hope for real momentum. So I got to see how Dead Space (2023) reimagines that silly level where you have to stick a beacon on a meteor. I saw a rather dramatic story beat in Persona, along with a lot of conclusions to the Social Link stories that really foreground the narrative’s sense of loss and change. I guess if Persona 5 was the Magician, this is Death. Perhaps we can discuss that later. But no step was greater than my decision to finally be a true gamer by starting my first Peter Molyneux game. I’ve been given a few recommendations of things to try for this series since “Passing the Buck” started, but Fable II is the only one that two separate people asked me to play. So for the things I’m going to say about it, and for any things I might continue to say about it over the next week or two, I am sorry.
Before we even talk about its material quality, we need to focus on the director. Molyneux is one of them gaming auteurs, like Masahiro Sakurai and Hideo Kojima and Ken Levine. Throughout the late Nineties to the late Aughts, he was an icon of the European gaming scene. No designer was as good at selling pie in the sky ideas for interactive experiences, particularly various forms of worlds that wildly contort and change based on what you did. These ideas powered the development—and especially the marketing—of Populous, Black & White, and most famously, Fable, which Microsoft purchased partway through development. Fable II in particular is his most well regarded success. Now, mythmaking is not abnormal; every auteur does it, even if they don’t like doing it. Far Cry 2’s Clint Hocking has never shied away from being both a vocal game designer and a vocal games critic. Sakurai ran a massive YouTube channel and made himself the face of Super Smash Bros. But the thing with ole’ Pete is that almost no A-list gaming auteur has ever been so much flash and so little substance. I think only Heavy Rain’s David Cage surpasses him. It’s commonly understood that none of Molyneux’s games ever come close to the scope he promises, and most of them wind up inscrutable or janky or fundamentally shallow. And that doesn’t even get into the giant NFT grift or his deceptive crowdfunding campaign, or how he feigns shame and humility over his many failures as just another form of mythmaking. This is a man who deserves to sink into irrelevance or be run out on a rail, not allowed a gigantic press circuit and plumb showing at Gamescom. And yet Molyneux has kept getting extra lives through years of bad releases, cancellations, blatantly falsified promises, and outright scams. I’d provide more in-depth citations and history, but frankly, that Aftermath article I linked to does it better than I ever could. So go ahead and read it. I can wait.
Image: Source Gaming. With all due respect to Fable II, it was trying for a degree of animation and fidelity that was still pretty novel in 2008. The rictus grins and bizarre postures are only part of the continuum of graphics.
With all that said, the first hour of Fable II is hilarious, and no one can claim otherwise. Stripped of the first game’s notorious “you can plant an acorn and watch a tree grow” marketing copy, this appears to be a very basic action RPG. Skyrim with Kingdom Hearts body proportions and Kingdom Hearts awkwardness. A lot of this introduction was superfluous set dressing where my heroine walked around a city before a man shot her and her sister. This part was… tiresome, and annoyingly hand-holdy, and most of my enjoyment came from my character’s goofy, almost Gollum-like contortions. After the timeskip, things got needlessly overcomplicated but thankfully propulsive. Sure, the game instantly trotted out stuff like the karma system, the importance of emotes and the danger of getting them wrong, and the potential for me to become a landlord (which I’d like to try. I think Pete would want that), but it also just let me walk around a bit. I suspect I’ll have a better time as the plot goes on and I can start throwing magic swords at people. And it would not be the first game I played with a stilted opening.
Wednesday, January 22: started (and abandoned) a third quest in Darkest Dungeon, played a couple minutes of Fable II, reached the seventh blockade in Persona 3 Reload, and completed Cocoon.
In the way that January 1st was the test case for seeing how “Passing the Buck” would work normally, today is the test case for me seeing how it fits within my work schedule now that my winter break is over. Truthfully, my hours are not long, but I’m also not a very good planner. It’s easy for one part of the day to loom over everything else, regardless of the actual time it takes. But, for whatever it’s worth, I managed to actually play quite a lot just before work. Little of it was particularly additive or eventful, but this was a helpful way for me to recognize how much space I can carve out when I want to.
Beating Cocoon is the only one that felt really, really good. I had planned to tackle it on Friday in the hopes that it’d be more interesting for the article’s pacing, but I was too excited to hold off. Playing this way did underline just how misguided of a plan it was to try this in one go, since A) taking a couple days off really did help me realize the obvious solution, B) its precision designed linearity means that you don’t get a lot out of immersing yourself, and C) I literally made a note during the planning for this series that I should expect to take two days to beat it. Unforced error. But since I’m done with it now, I am at a bit of a quandary over what to do for the last three days. I could pick a fourth game, but wouldn’t that be a poor plan when my work is concentrated on the back half of the week? I could focus on the games I have and probably need to, but would that be uninteresting for readers?
Image: Source Gaming. By the time this week ended, Daisoujou and his excellent passive abilities had already been fused into someone new. I’d have gone with Rangda, but she’s, uh, Not Safe for Work.
Beyond these questions, this was still an experiment, with some of the chaos and insecurity that comes from experiments. Mostly I simply jumped from one thing to the next with little in the way of substantial gains. In the case of Persona, it was that I completed my Tartarus homework; I rescued my Hanged Man Confidant, beat a few bonus bosses, and hit the border wall that guards the next section of the dungeon. Gains, but not exciting gains. For Fable II, it was because I turned it on during a phone call with a friend before realizing that this dialogue-heavy RPG doesn’t have subtitles and will demand my full attention at all times. And for Darkest Dungeon, it was because my third run went so poorly that I just turned the dang thing off. Nothing worked, I think I accidentally picked a harder level than I’d have liked, I’m gonna have to sacrifice one of those two favorite units I talked about on Monday, and overall I found the friction with juggling things to be a bit too much. Maybe I should just take my lumps in another session and really dig into the horror aspect of the experience. That can take up the time for an additional game. That, Fable, and really trying to beat two more Dead Space chapters in the next few days; I think that can work.
Thursday, January 23: completed Chapter 8 in Dead Space, entered Oakfield in Fable II, and continued exploring Tartarus in Persona 3 Reload.
We’re still experimenting, but this was a better approach that gave me that real progress I want. Persona was an exception, but it still laid the groundwork for jumping into the next boss fight. Fortunately, Dead Space and Fable got a lot more. In the case of the latter, I got to have a much better taste of what the game is like. Much of my time was spent in Bowerstone, the city from the prologue, and it was pretty enlightening. It has more NPCs that show the game’s comedic and British tone, and the town comments on stuff I did in the opening. But it’s what you can do there that’s most interesting. I’ve decided that my character (who doesn’t have a name but who I’ve taken to calling “Burgundy Sonja” for her impressive fighting prowess and largely nonexistent personality) should be a flirty but unscrupulous landlord who strings men and women along only to trap them in a cycle of ceaseless debt. Perhaps the biggest problem is that I keep doing the actions that improve my karma, but today, that meant spending a… very long amount of time on the awful blacksmith mini-game. That way I could buy the pie shop and get a passive income, but you can do this with seemingly every business and house in Albion. I don’t know what it does for the story, but it’s there and oddly charming. I suspect that this is all kinda surface level, and I didn’t really find the actual content exciting, but it’s interesting. I’m definitely committed to seeing more of this.
Image: Source Gaming. Fable II combat is fine so far, nothing special, but also not bad. It’s comfort food compared to the good and bad I’ve experienced over the past month.
In Dead Space’s case—and this is especially true when taking my session on Tuesday into account—it just feels good to blast through this. Like, the game is great, it remains a huge improvement on the 2008 original, and seeing these improvements in real time has been fun. This chapter had another excellent turret section (it’s still crazy to laud a turret section of all things, but both of them are genuinely brilliant and distinct from each other), and I’ve been slowly enjoying the tweaks to Isaac’s characterization. He’s got more agency, so he’s not just getting orders from Hammond and Kendra but also taking the initiative, and the stuff with Nicole is a lot stronger. So it’s all great, but, like, I’m also itching to finish this thing. There are twelve chapters in Dead Space, and I’m going through them by about three chapters a week. Spending a month on a game that should take thirteen to fourteen hours is way too long, even if it’d be bad for this project to spend a whole week powering through it. So I “need” to finish another chapter, probably tomorrow, and really commit to hitting the credits by the end of next week. This is all possible.
For both games, this is an issue of propulsion. As a player, I want my three to four game rotation to expand, contract, and regularly change. As a writer, I think it’s more interesting the more things I’m juggling, so turnover and expansion are necessary. And to go outside this project’s scope, as a man who thinks himself sensitive to the issues of the day, I need something to occupy my mind that isn’t just the news. My body wants to vomit and my brain is on fire. The world is a horror show, and the most natural coping mechanism I can think of is to overstimulate my brain. Watching Awesome Games Done Quick 2025. Eating mapo tofu. Throwing myself into any task at my job, whether or not that level of enthusiasm is actually useful. Writing dumb listicles. The playing and writing of “Passing the Buck” has been a strange and stable comfort, but for that to work even slightly it needs constant movement. That means adding new games and finishing old ones.
Friday, January 24: completed Chapter 9 of Dead Space, maxed out the Devil Arcana and defeated The Hanged Man in Persona 3 Reload, and completed the missions “Secret of the Queen Mother,” “A Thief’s Promise,” and “Seat of Eternity” in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
You might have noticed that for all my crowing about Indiana Jones last week, I’ve barely played any this time. There are a few reasons for that, namely that it’s a game that demands a chunk of time in a roster of games that demand chunks of time. It’s not as fun for me to poke around a tomb in Gizeh for a few minutes; I want to get to solve a quest or uncover a secret. Something that feels big. But in my session on Tuesday, I felt adrift. The game’s collect-a-thon structure of finding four steles is great, and I love that you can do them in any order, but the Tomb of Khentkawas felt frustrating. Figuring out the verticality and the secret passages was hard, and my progress stalled. And when I started today, that feeling came back immediately. I didn’t want to abandon the mission, but it was tiring going in circles looking for the one way to go. I eventually realized that I needed to look outside the tomb and made a poorly considered fall. Walls were too high to climb, the wooden floor too thin to hold. With my health low and no way to get out, I opted to fall to my death, this time onto a lower room in the hopes that the game would send me back to a safe neutral position. And yet as I was falling, I noticed something strange: the “RB” button prompt, the one you use to grapple onto points. So I pressed it. And Indy, bless his heart, whipped the grapple point! It didn’t even matter that I died to enemy fire within a minute. It was magical.
Image: Source Gaming. The other side of the hole. If you look carefully at the bottom, you can see the prompt for the grapple point itself.
It was at this exact moment that everything clicked. This is a game about options and opportunity, so of course it would supplement the platforming with a liberal climbing and grappling system. Why would I think otherwise? Suddenly, exploring the tomb felt so much more alive, and I relished getting to the end, bonking Nazis on the head as God intended, and looking for more tombs and puzzles. One was incredibly delightful, because it involved chucking artifacts over pits and smashing walls down. You know, like a good early 20th Century archaeologist. This makes me think that I might need to change my behavior. I’m realizing that I primarily play Great Circle in the late afternoon, which is, at least for me, a time less conducive to experimental or exploratory behavior. Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that I relegate almost all of my nighttime gaming to exploring Tartarus in Persona. Let’s test this soon.
With the completion of Chapter 9, we end the strange “distress signal” arc of Dead Space. Kinda strange calling it an “arc” for something so serialized and segmented, but here we are. It was yet another showcase for the remake’s sensitive tweaks. Unlike the original game, where Hammond dies offscreen and so obliquely that you’d be remiss for assuming he’ll show up right at the end, he gets a rather memorable death scene. And while I recall the Valor being fairly unrelated to the goings on back then, here we get an example of everyone trying to get in on this alien force. But what works is also better. The Twitchers—soldiers whose stasis powers cause them to be erratic and regularly jump in speed—are as good as always.
Saturday, January 25: returned to and failed the third run and started and failed a fourth run in Darkest Dungeon, reached the eighth blockade in Persona 3 Reload, and completed the mission “Sanctuary of the Guardians” in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Yeah, as sad as I am to say, I think this general UI and design is beyond me. It often felt more like I was fighting the menus more than any monsters. And as this fourth run started and immediately soured, I felt less good all around. The general atmosphere is supposed to be one of terror and overwhelming cruelty, but I very quickly found myself desensitized to my characters failing retreats and dying quickly. Perhaps my mind is unsuited for this kind of thing, but I can’t deny a sense of disappointment here. Darkest Dungeon has always captivated me from afar, but it’s not fun for me in practice (and I don’t think the game’s many wonderful QoI, difficulty, and accessibility options would help because the issue is primarily with the basic interface) Alas.
Image: Source Gaming. The game’s got this excellent vibe and game feel and energy, which makes my bouncing off it feel all the worse. Vastel here was a great fighter. She battled monsters with skill and power, fought even harder after her trials afflicted her with a violent masochism, only to die along with the entire party partway through a mission. It’s a bit sad I won’t get to see more stories like this if I give up on the game.
To keep the energy at a more mild negativity, I should mention a minor point of frustration with Indy. I was solving one of the various light mirror puzzles inside the Sphinx, and Indy’s sidekick Gina ended up blurting out the solution within a minute, before I had even noticed it myself. I understand that this is fairly common among Triple-A games for various reasons, but it was a shame I missed out on figuring it out myself. C’est la vie. Overall I think the game’s okay with this; the camera lets you opt into solutions, and I even did that in one instance. But maybe I can stand to end the week on more of a high note, so I’ll say that I found the game’s scorpion deathtrap really interesting. Because I could actually see how the scorpions constantly spawn in and out of the level to create the sense that there’s an endless number of them. I saw how the game starts with you fending them off with fire before bringing the mirrors back in. It’s just me seeing the underlying mechanics and appreciating those, even more than the fun they bring to the level. Makes me think of both furthering and reevaluating that comparison I made to Arkham Asylum last week.
Outro: Historically, I tend to shift between pecking at games or throwing myself into them. Jumping from one thing to another or immersing myself. And that tends to conform to my life schedule, so I’ll use the time before my commute to either make some real forward progress or futz around a few things. The return to my normal schedule reveals how “Passing the Buck” complicates the way I play games, as this project requires that I be in both states every day. I need to move far, and in multiple directions. As fun as this has been, it’s also demanding, and slightly more so this week.
Which fits. Because, more than anything else, the primary element tying this week together was friction. Pushing through challenging interfaces, repeatedly dying in Dead Space and Indiana Jones, seeing tougher enemies in Persona, the occasional difficulty spikes in Cocoon, and this ultimately fine health scare with my left eye (and the new glasses I got from that eye exam, which I’m still adjusting to). Some were more severe than others, some were more time consuming, and some were easier to handle or overcome. But they all coalesced to create this sense of pushback. Was it coincidental that this happened while I returned to work, or that it happened as I face a great wave of existential sociopolitical terror? Or was it that most of my time was spent on games I’ve been playing for multiple weeks already? Either way, Week 4 felt ungainly and kinda strange at times. There was just something off in an almost imperceptible way. And that’s why we’re going to once again do something different next week.
Image: Source Gaming. I had a more exciting screenshot of Isaac battling the Leviathan in outer space, but I haven’t actually done a shot of basic combat, so let’s rectify that.
First off, after almost a month, it’s time to finally finish Persona 3 Reload and Dead Space (2023). I want to play other JRPGs, other horror games, and get in my final thoughts about these very lovely remakes. Beating them should also be entirely doable; I know the Dead Space chapter progression thanks to replaying the original game, and it was easy to figure that Persona wouldn’t just end with that last Shadow (and also, I have been liberally looking up the high school quiz questions online, so I know the game ends in January). On top of that, I intend to do The Walking Dead Episode 3, which should be no less doable if I play it over two days. And of course, there’s more Fable and Indiana Jones, but those I can take more slowly. With that, we’ll have the two biggest time commitments thus far off the table. As strange as it is to prioritize them even further after they’ve been here for so long, it’s necessary.
Of course, we still need new content, but that’s where the big shift is gonna be. Since this started I’ve tried to have constant new content. There’s a lot of reasons for it: I want to do that, I think it’s more interesting for the articles, and, well, I like when the headers show more games and want every game I try to appear in at least one. This has led me to playing a ton and either throwing stuff out immediately or shoveling far too much onto one plate. It’s not good for long term writing, especially not if I follow this trajectory and add a new giant game to the pile every chapter. So, for Week 5, I’m only going to play two new games, not counting Episode 3. Indies, presumably, and ones I’m going to play to completion. Ideally, these will be powerful and distinct experiences that stay with me, like Cocoon has, and they’ll be nice counterparts to the blockbusters. And we’ll presumably see that in the header as Episode 3, Persona 3, and these two mystery games give us a rollicking end to January. If I pull this off, this could be really nice. I’ll still have new content, will add some real conclusions, and go into February with a lot of that propulsion I’ve been chasing. A more open slate.
Image: Source Gaming. All my beautiful spheres in one place.
That’s a… potentially interesting course for a week, right? Just go completely afield of my plotting and really dive into conclusions and more cogent games criticism. There’s a part of me annoyed at this idea since I feel a drive to just keep trying stuff, but I think it’s needed at the moment. And again, it’s not as though it’ll only be the… however many games I’m currently juggling. There’ll be two more, and I’ll make sure that they’re exciting and big and far afield of everything else. The only issue is which two games, which means I’m off to How Long to Beat, the world’s most simultaneously useful and useless gaming website. In a week, we can talk about what I picked. I’m sure there won’t be any complications…
Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!
- Passing the Buck Chapter 9: SEVEN DAYS OF DOOM!! - March 2, 2025
- Passing the Buck Chapter 8: Hell is Other Sidekicks - February 23, 2025
- Passing the Buck Chapter 7: Rated M for “Mario” - February 16, 2025
