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?
At the end of our last chapter, I made the decision to break from my tactics. Normally I try to play more and more new games that complement the ones I’ve been playing, but this process might’ve gotten out of hand. So for this week, it’s about finishing things. My ideal for this week is to hit the credits for five games: Persona 3 Reload (which I started in Week 1) Dead Space (Week 2), The Walking Dead Episode 3, and two indie games. Whatever content I see in Indiana Jones and Fable II is a bonus, if we see any. No promises. We’ll be starting a new month on Saturday, and I want to go into February with a more open schedule.
More than ever before, I started this week on a mission. And the first thing I wrote to myself was the note “beat Chapter 10 of Dead Space, start Hypnospace Outlaw, push hard into a Persona boss battle.” That I did hit, nonexistent boss notwithstanding. I mean, that’s not my fault there wasn’t a boss fight on the phase of the moon where there’s always a boss fight. But for what that entailed and the six days afterwards, you’ve got to read on to find out.
What I played:
- Hypnospace Outlaw: in an alternate version of the 1990s, you’re the newest agent for Hypnospace, an online playground constructed and used by consumers as they sleep. To maintain the ethical and legal standards of parent company Merchantsoft, it’s your job to sweep the server’s zones, flag their many rule violations, overcome malicious software, and survive strange jumps in time.
- Dead Space: A plan to stop the outbreak by bringing an alien Marker from the Ishimura to its home on Aegis VII goes awry when Kendra leaves Isaac and Nicole adrift. They chase her down to the planet, and while Isaac destroys the Hive Mind that protected the Marker, he’s haunted by the monolith’s psychic trauma—most especially by the revelation that “Nicole,” who had actually died before Isaac came aboard the ship, was part of a shared hallucination.
- Persona 3 Reload: given the choice between suffering a certain and cruel death or losing their memories so such a death comes without pain, SEES instead rebrands itself the Nyx Annihilation Team and fights to the top of Tartarus. They defy the apathy of humanity by destroying Nyx and the Dark Hour, and though they initially lose their memories of the year their bonds bring them back.
- The Walking Dead Episode 3: Long Road Ahead: thanks to roving bandits, a traitor, zombies, and a shocking murder, the motel is gone for good. The survivors are relieved to find a working train, but as Lee tries to get it started and teach Clementine self-defense, a Walker bite threatens to destroy the last bit of community left.
- A Little to the Left: there’s a variety of messes strewn about a home, and it’s your job to organize them. But sorting them’s a messy job and may require you to look at height, size, color, lines, or any other visual cue, all the while avoiding the paw of a capricious housecat.
Sunday, January 26: started and closed my first two cases in Hypnospace Outlaw, beat Chapter 10 and two optional missions in Dead Space, and got ready for the 12 / 2 full moon boss fight in Persona 3 Reload.
Bad news first. I… think I’m gonna need to take longer than I anticipated with Hypnospace Outlaw. The main story of this game is supposed to take like six hours, but in what felt like half that time I was only able to narc on three people for perfectly innocent copyright infringement and remorselessly flag ZANE_ROCKS_14 for harassment. That one I don’t regret at all, but it took a whole second session. Now I’ve gotta find people using third party currency, and the only profile I found that referenced it doesn’t seem to be actively using it. I’ll… probably be working hard at this one all week. Smart planning, starting today.
Now if the insanity in that paragraph didn’t make it clear, here’s the good news: this game rules. It’s Nineties comedy Papers, Please, with the brutal Soviet aesthetic replaced by humungous GIFs, poorly converted audio, and a lot of eccentric weirdos. Instead of being the last block against people fleeing a police state, you’re… kind of the inverse. A mall cop kicking people out of a walled digital garden. So you look through user-made pages and links, sift through terrible MS Paint art and reams of text, and bring down the ban hammer on anyone with the temerity to post an unlicensed drawing of a fifty-year-old cartoon goldfish detective. Going through it demands unconventional skills and interests, like trawling databases and studying niche information. This is acquired taste through and through. I can’t deny that the basic movement is tedious by standard metrics, and the art style was described nicely by my dear friend Rachel as something that “seems like a sensory nightmare.” But, it’s also brilliant. Is that because it’s a detective game where you’re tracking down leads and enjoying a voyeuristic glimpse into the lives or weirdos? Because it’s one of the few games that actually lets me use my skills as a librarian? Yes, but, more than that, it’s really, really funny.
Image: Source Gaming. Hypnospace Outlaw is full of memorable characters, but no one gives a first impression quite like Zane Lofton. He is every obnoxious white boy you knew in high school… or were in high school. An absolute pit of embarrassing tastes and ugly behavior. Do not chat with him online. But feel free to laugh at him; most users seem to.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a look into an alternate version of the 1990s, one where Microsoft managed to turn the last vestige of human individuality, sleep itself, into a capitalist storefront. People sleep in Hypnospace and turn their dreams into crappy GeoCities pages. They have random “support the troops” comments in profiles that detail their humdrum lives. They hock their art and anti-drug PSA raps (which you can actually download and import into an in-game player), along with corporate products and fake prophecies. They memorialize their spouses as ugly rotating angels and awkwardly profess their Evangelical Christianity. They cruelly insult each other, openly dodge the site’s rules, and present a level of emotional honesty that is as uncomfortable to see as it is easy to mock. It is a painfully accurate look at online communities. Because of that, every page you find is a gem. Also, the weird Clippy-esque skull icon that gives you notifications did accurately pronounce my name “Wolfman Jew,” sort of, so that’s something.
Monday, January 27: closed two cases and experienced a timeskip in Hypnospace Outlaw, made a Social Link with the Empress and Judgement and maxed out the Hermit, Lovers, Moon, Fool, and Star Arcana and reached the ninth blockade in Persona 3 Reload, and started, left the motel, and lost a member of the party in The Walking Dead Episode 3.
Remember how I was like “oh, yeah, beat all these things in one week. Totally doable!” Well… I’m slightly worried. I put a lot of effort into the stuff today (alongside recording a “Fighter’s Spirit” episode), and it still feels like I’ve barely dug into my goals. I suppose I shouldn’t be too down on myself. I’ve got one, definitely only one, climb up Tartarus left before fighting Persona’s final boss. And I can just do that tomorrow while maxing out as many Confidants’ stories as I can. And Hypnospace Outlaw seems to have just opened itself up, meaning things are more complicated, but I’m also a fourth of the way through. I… may have looked up how many cases there are. Just the number, not anything else. Not sure how well that aligns to actual plot progression. Still, I’ve definitely done work, even though I was kinda half-hoping to finish Dead Space in the first half of the week. And due to missing a semi-hidden clue next to the motel’s gate, I probably spent a decent chunk of my hour-plus with Episode 3 just puttering around and not progressing.
Image: Source Gaming. Poor Carly. I knew her death was coming, but it was sad and shocking.
Speaking of which, it’s nice getting one last look at Macon in what is shockingly not the season finale. The three episodes really got a ton out of this one decaying space, and going back to Lee’s family pharmacy especially was a lovely surprise. The game has gone to great lengths to make the setting feel alive and real and vulnerable, so its slow, inevitable collapse has carried a lot of weight. When we learn that someone has been stealing supplies to trade to the bandits, when we see Lee’s possible love interest Carly get shot in the head in a conspiratorial rage, when we fail to keep the bandits from overriding the motel only to see themselves be overrun by zombies, it hurts. Even the balcony where that one woman killed herself, now burned down and unsafe from some crazy misadventure we skipped, carries a whiff of nostalgia. But this is also why we need to leave. It’s hard to imagine wringing more distinct situations out of this place, and sticking Kenny and Lilly in an RV is ripe for a level of infighting I’m “dreading” to see.
Change is everywhere in Persona 3, too. Last time I suggested that the overriding Tarot card for this game was Death, and Death in the Major Arcana is about change through the end of things, not inherently through death but often. The Reaper brings death—the most definitive end of all—that may beget new life. He stomps over people of all classes, as neither God nor wealth can stem his tide. And loss, change, death, and the inevitable end are all over Persona 3. SEES learns that the world will be destroyed, with seemingly no way to fight it, and the team has to spend two agonizing months struggling to accept that fact before they decide to fight it regardless. Pretty much every member has a death in their life that in some way led them to change their perspective. Many of your Confidants leave town after their stories are finished, so in need of a new beginning that you lose access to them forever. One of them is a dying man, and your role is to change his perspective because that’s all he has. It’s a game about loss and closing the book and how we change when faced with that. Compared to Persona 5, which is about more propulsive energy akin to the Magician or the Chariot, this has an atmosphere of overwhelming doom. I think I prefer Persona 5 just in its tone, but this has a very distinct power. And it makes me interested in trying Persona 4 someday, too.
Tuesday, January 28: completed Chapter 11 of Dead Space, closed three cases in Hypnospace Outlaw, maxed out the Judgement and Justice Arcana, defeated the Shadow of the Void, and reached the tenth and final blockade in Persona 3 Reload, and completed The Walking Dead Episode 3.
Now this was more like it! I mean, it came at a cost and came with caveats. I did really want to get at least one more Hypnospace Outlaw case, and I didn’t expect the “first half” of Episode 3 to essentially be a prologue. All that and one last massive run through Tartarus only a few days since my last one… I mean, the shocking and dramatic penultimate chapter of Dead Space was almost the least burdensome event of the day. I only stopped right before midnight, so a lot of this is probably gonna be a draft I edit and clean up later. It’s becoming apparent that when this is all over, “Passing the Buck” is going to end up being the most intensive thing I’ve ever done for Source Gaming, even more than the time I did all eighty-something “Fighter’s Spirit” scripts in less than a year. What can I say? I come from a family that wouldn’t know a good time to take a break if it shot us during a cover up of an ancient human experiment gone awry. This joke is probably too unwieldy. Maybe I’ll delete it later. [I didn’t]
The last Chapter of Dead Space is ready for tomorrow morning, so I imagine I’ll rope today’s and Sunday’s thoughts into it. I guess maybe we should just focus on Walking Dead, not just because it was crazy long but because it’s just great video games. There’s something astonishing about how successful it is at taking one interesting premise—in this case, an abandoned but working train ripe for the taking—and wapping all these problems and tensions around it. Classic zombie story tropes like the one traitor, the paranoid killer, and the person hiding a bite feel more powerful because there’s always this classic adventure game goal. You need to cover the other survivors just like you need to find a pencil to rub on a paper so you can uncover a code for operating a train. Or maybe it’s the reverse and Lee’s goofy genre puzzles (you have to give up your weapon to explore the shed?!) feel stronger because there’s this context. Even if there’s a lot of downtime and only certain parts have a real time element, you feel this tension of being watched and having all this pressure. Were I more of an adventure game fan, I’d know for sure, but there at least appears to be a fascinating meta element under the surface.
Image: Source Gaming. I feel like I haven’t given Walking Dead‘s graphics their due. I really love them. It’s hard to describe, but the art style’s both fluid and kinda wooden in a way that really works. Not sure if they fit the original comics, but there is a tangible comic book-y aesthetic here.
Tension is all over the games from today—well, other than Hypnospace Outlaw unless you’re scared of losing your Chowder Man fix. God, this is all gonna sound insane to anyone reading this, isn’t it? But, like, Dead Space is also a horror game and constantly undercutting you; I noticed about a week ago that while every enemy drops something just like the Resident Evil 4 remake, the vast majority of drops are credits, not immediately useful ammo or health packs. And if anyone was somehow not feeling the pressure in Persona, this march unto certain doom should fix that mindset. But neither of them had a jumpscare that made my father jump out of his chair and spend a minute trying to breathe and slow his heart rate. Neither of them had a death as affecting as Carly’s or Duck’s, ones that made the world feel like it was crashing down. There’s the part where Kenny is mourning his family and talks about how it’s karma for how Duck survived Episode 1’s big moral choice, the one where I saved him over a teenager. From a meta level, it’s a bit limited because we retroactively know Duck was doomed by virtue of being in the choice at all (everyone you have a chance of saving is seemingly fated to die later anyway and close the loop, like what happened to Carly). But at the same time, there is a noose undeniably tightening around the entire group. And not just that creep who’s got Clementine’s walky-talky.
Wednesday, January 29: completed Dead Space, found a login to the FLST site in Hypnospace Outlaw, and made Social Link with the Aeon and maxed out the Chariot Arcana (and, hopefully for the last time, rescued civilians in Tartarus) in Persona 3 Reload.
And now, I’m done with Dead Space (2023). Had this been any other time I’d have joyfully plowed through it, but this strange “a fourth of the game a week’ structure gave me a better look. And I think what really makes this work as a remake can be seen in its cast. So in Dead Space (2008), Isaac was a forgettable silent protagonist being strung along by two women. His wife Nicole would sometimes send him a hazy message, but she was actually dead the whole time, and these were hallucinations used by the evil Necromorph Marker to use him. His ally Kendra was a double agent trying to steal it for some vague payday. This keeps the bones, but everything is warped. The nature of the hallucinations are a lot more interesting, and they bring Isaac’s in line with various other characters’. You get far more scenes and audio diaries with Nicole that show her character, her strained marriage, and her own relationship to Unitology. I’d call it “fleshed out,” but she was barely a character back then. Kendra’s still evil—she executes two survivors in front of us—but she also has her own stuff. She’s trying to stop the Marker, assumes that there’s no coming back from its psychic scarring, and is fully aware that Isaac has been compromised and might have been sabotaging the mission for hours. And Isaac himself slowly goes from a fairly standard video game protagonist into someone a bit richer. The agency he now has improves both him and the characters around him. It adds drama to a story that was more about vibes and imagery than anything else, even if Hammond is still just an Aliens-esque space marine.
While Dead Space was a pretty typical example of a hyper-faithful remake, it’s good at changing a lot of things under the hood that distinguish it from its good but somewhat B-tier original. Stuff like these narrative changes. The optional missions could probably have been implemented better, but they’re one way of making the ship feel like more than a set of levels. I enjoyed going back to track stuff down after finally destroying the Hunter in Chapter 10. Tweaks like how you get guns to try them out work; that one led me to finally using the Pulse Rifle instead of scoffing at it as an obvious olive branch to conventional shooter fans. It was useful, and while it quickly left my rotation it did end up being my main weapon for the final boss. Similarly, the upgrade trees are a lot more accessible—i.e. you don’t have to spend two or three Nodes on one upgrade—without compromising the disempowerment. Its willingness to incorporate stuff from Dead Space 2 like zero-gravity flying and Necromorph impalement makes the combat much richer, and it’s a tragedy that Motive Studios won’t ever be able to try their hand at remaking that one.
Image: Source Gaming. One thing both versions of Dead Space do really well is to leverage the harsh light and outdoors of Aegis VII. It feels exciting but scary for how different it is.
For criticisms… well, the end boss is still pretty bad. The entire fight just doesn’t match the basic gameplay (hence why I brought the Pulse Rifle back; the sheer distance between you and the weak points and the short time you have to shoot them all but requires rapid fire). This is the most obvious artifact it’s lugging around: the late-2000s game with a bad boss fight because it thinks it needs to have bosses. But the new Leviathan battles are good, so maybe the Hive Mind just needed to be redone from the top. At the very least it certainly didn’t need that new last minute quick time event. That and a couple difficulty spikes are my only real complaints; the rest are things that could’ve been touched up more. Like, the Ishimura is a lot better than it was in the original, but I do think the rooms can still feel a bit samey. And it’d have been interesting to see a version of this that was more openly transformational like the Resident Evil remakes. Still, I had a great time, and I’m glad it was done for a game like Dead Space. It’s a close to ideal subject for a remake, at least for me, as it was good but not great and could stand another chance at life. EA might’ve been disappointed in its performance, but not me by a long shot. When this project’s done, I’m definitely buying it.
Thursday, January 30: started and completed the story campaign in A Little to a Left.
Having slowly accepted the reality that yeah, I’m probably gonna end up taking two weeks for Hypnospace Outlaw, even accounting for making a pause on Fable and Indiana Jones, I started A Little to the Left… only to have to finish it after work. A campaign that’s theoretically about three and a half hours took closer to five for me. But that’s okay! I like it quite a bit. What we’ve got is pure cozy game, just a montage of puzzles about organizing objects. Sometimes you’re sorting a list by height or imagery, sometimes you’re filling a junk drawer efficiently, and sometimes you’ve gotta juggle left field mechanics like gravity or a Tower of Hanoi-style block moving dealio. There’s a lot of shifts and twists that make each puzzle feel distinct. To be frank, it was not long before I was floored with the complexity and diversity of its puzzles. Perhaps I wasn’t imagining the possibilities as well as I could have, but developer Max Inferno clearly lacked such a burden. What’s even cooler is that the game secretly accepts multiple solutions. You’re not entirely stuck on one train of thought.
Image: Source Gaming. A Little to the Left is also a triumph of low key visuals. I wouldn’t say there’s no ambiguity, but there’s a general clarity that’s both needed and pretty.
And that’s kinda it. The game has a lot of nice features, like a really imaginative hint system that lets you dictate how much of the solution to reveal and the option to skip puzzles—though that has some issues, because I accidentally pressed the “skip puzzle” button like four times and had to go back to them manually. There’s also this overarching story about a cat that’s causing the disruption and occasionally comes to futz with the pieces you’re picking up. It’s fun. Any kind of broader story like you’d see in, say, Unpacking is either not here or aggressively well hidden, so I’m kinda stuck in this strange position of not having that much to talk about a very sweet and fun game. I guess I could admit that I’ve used both the (again, very good) in-game hint system and online answers, but a lot of that is my own restlessness. I have certain goals I want to hit this week, and maybe my resignation that I’m not going to hit all of them has led me to feel less willing to sit with a hard puzzle for as long. Though it should be said that the puzzles are mostly incredible, and really tactile. It’s fun to move items and see them shake, wave, and make noise as you move them.
You know, if I do need to take my time with Hypnospace Outlaw, that’s not bad, just as it wasn’t bad to take so long with Chants of Sennaar. Earlier today, I put the numbers together, and if we count The Walking Dead as just one game (even if the three episodes I’ve played were sold separately) and the N. Sane Trilogy as the same (as it’s one product that simply remade three previous things), I’ve played sixteen games for “Passing the Buck.” Sixteen games for a whole month, and while I want to shout that I’m “just getting started,” I’m already pretty tired. I can’t expect to keep the same pace for the next two, but I wouldn’t mind trying. Tragically, there’s no way to stop the relentless march of time like how SEES is about to stop Nyx, but perhaps there’s a worthwhile drama in that.
Friday, January 31: Maxed out the Temperance and Priestess Arcana, got the good ending, and completed Persona 3 Reload and hit the second timeskip (and now have to find a way to stop Mindcrash) in Hypnospace Outlaw.
After my first session with Persona 3 Reload today, I left to go to the gym and get some ramen in honor of the many, many trips to Hagakure Ramen that Persona 3 Protagonist enjoyed. And when I left, a certain thought kept up: “you should redo that session. If you restart from when you left Tartarus, give up on improving Mitsuru’s Social Link and just focus on Aigis’, you could’ve maxed out the Aeon Arcana along with Fuuka’s and Bebe’s. You can even hang out with Koromaru that one time and potentially get that last bonus Persona. Do it! Replay it!” But… that’s crazy, for three reasons. Most pertinently, that was almost two hours of play I’d be erasing, and for just one finished Social Link. Second, it’s probably only natural to max out every Social Link in a New Game+, something I never tried with Persona 5 but would like to someday with both games. Which I will; I’m definitely buying this when all is said and done. And third… it’s okay. The narrative is suited both for maxing out every Social Link and for failing to do so. If you reach it, your bonds are myriad and unbreakable. If you don’t, that end and loss are still there to some extent.
Image: Source Gaming. Persona 3‘s got the standard grueling, super tough final boss. Fortunately, I found Nyx’s true weakness: constant healing spells.
Ignoring the last and admittedly somewhat bland final, final section of Tartarus and the various fights therein, just focusing on the story, Persona 3 Reload was a delightful and emotional drama. It was shocking seeing characters I had largely dismissed like Aigis, Ken, and Junpei become these powerful, compelling bulwarks of the team. It was fascinating seeing a JRPG be about the inevitability of the end when they’re so often about absolutely insane power fantasies (not that this doesn’t let players kill God. Persona 3 Protagonist literally slashes a moon to death). More than anything else, there’s this sense of quiet upset over the inability to do the impossible. You’re not really changing things or fixing them beyond stopping Apathy Syndrome, but even that doesn’t really feel like a change. Just a return to a status quo run by an evil zaibatsu where the ads of comically evil con men rule the airwaves. Your victories are largely small and personal. There’s something sad and languid about the world of Persona 3, even beyond a seventy-plus hour runtime that largely consists of cutscenes and dungeon crawls. Maybe it’s right for the climate of 2025, where the sensation of powerlessness is itself an agent of powerlessness. Anyway, I dug it. I’m excited to see how it compares to the next JRPG of “Passing the Buck” and perhaps its polar opposite in tone, the wacky and frenetic Yakuza: Like a Dragon.
Last minute things. My final Persona team consisted of Lucifer, Cybel, Mother Harlot, Shiva, Mara, Yurlungur, Scathach, Loki, Garuda, and Abbadon—though the last three were just ones I picked up in that last session. It was only fighting the final boss that I realized I probably should’ve tried to get a few final unique fusions out of ’em. Still, I managed to get 91 or 92% of the game’s Personas. Not counting the plot-required ones, I maxed out my Social Links with Yukari, Bebe, Chihiro, Fuuka, Kenji, Hayase, Kazushi, Maya, Mutatsu, Miako, Suemitsu, the old couple, and Tanaka. It was a motley collection of characters I actively disliked, characters I loved, and a lot of people in the middle. As I was playing on the second-lowest difficulty my primary strategy was to rely on Persona 3 Protagonist, blasting in tons of magic spells before slurping out enemies’ SP with that boosted drain ability. I tried to sub in every member of SEES, though I did lean more on Yukari than anyone else thanks to her incredible boons that lower SP cost. I was interested in romancing her because she reminds me of Makoto, Persona 5’s best character, but I clearly missed any sign that it was an option. Alas. So after well over seventy hours, I can safely say I’ve done my due diligence. Person 3 Reload mastered.
Saturday, February 1: reached the third timeskip in Hypnospace Outlaw.
Let’s go back to where this all started with another look at Hypnospace Outlaw. This may end up being the last time I devote significant time to writing about it—which is not, to be clear, me giving up on the game. I do want to keep going and intend to finish it. That may just have to be over the course of a longer amount of time. I mean, that is what happened with Chants of Sennaar, and that’s totally fine. In fact, games like it may end up being a halfway decent replacement for all those times Persona worked as something to play for just a bit before bed. You look at something like Dead Space or the games I actually have beaten in one day, and there’s still a commitment in that. I wasn’t gonna play a half chapter of Dead Space! Some games are simply less satisfying to play in super short bursts. But the strange and loopy nature of Hypnospace Outlaw, how loud it is and how you can take challenges one bit at a time, actually makes it well suited for filling these smaller gaps in the day. If I can just get a clue or two, that can be enough.
There’s a lot to love about the game. The puzzles are really fascinating, and I adore how it manages to turn so many staples of internet culture and UI into avenues for investigation. That it’s made me bring out the old binder to jot down users’ profile numbers or useful tags. How it incorporates multiple timeskips and forms of character development as storytelling and an actual part of the gameplay is great, too. Plus, there’s just a lot of imagination with how you search and investigate, even though it’s probably much better with a mouse and keyboard instead of this bulky controller. And of course, there are those pitch perfect aesthetics, the graphics and writing and music. God, the music. Oafish, asinine rap-rock reject Erick “Chowder Man” Helman might be the best character of “Passing the Buck” so far (and perhaps my current pick for the next Super Smash Bros. fighter), and it’s great seeing all of his horribly catchy music everywhere. Plus, all of these things work together. Chowder Man provides the music for the SquisherZ and Hot Butter Ice Cream and Freelands pages, he’s part of the strange history and backstory of Hypnospace itself, and I’m already looking to his personal information as a possible source of leads for this current conundrum. It’s all interwoven in a way that really intrigues me.
Image: Source Gaming. Shockingly, this fake Y2K page is not the cause of my collapsing UI. It’s also not the cause of another virus that apparently killed six people and kickstarted a 25-year timeskip, but such as it is.
It’s definitely a challenging experience. I ended up using a guide for figuring out how to fix the Y2000 page, though thankfully all I took from it and all I needed was a push. Basically, you’re told to enter a password, and the goal is to search for more information on it, find private pages, download documents, and that will slowly reveal the actual password. I did all of those things, for what felt like a couple hours, and in doing so I, uh, ended up forgetting there was a password to enter at all. All the research was done and then some. Had I thought to go back to the start of this process, I’d have had it licked. But then again, this is all library work. It’s stuff I’ve done and stuff I’ve forgotten to do in my job. What I needed to do was done, and done well; I’m proud of that. And to the game’s credit, there are multiple ways to work through a puzzle. The Axxeleration malware can be found as both a challenging puzzle in the Freelands and given for free in an FLST profile, even if I’m not sure if that’s actually helpful when all it seems to do is cause a pop-up every minute. Most cases are about you simply hitting a certain threshold much smaller than the number of actual violations. There’s apparently even a site somewhere in Hypnospace where you can pay in-game money for hints. So if I’ve got to take a bit longer than I’d like, that just means more time to relish the experience. And after that I’ve already downloaded the spinoff, the DOOM clone made in-universe by teenage ne’er-do-well ZANE_ROCKS_14.
Outro: When I structured this week, it was built around finishing two games. My hope was for five, and I got four, but those two were the ones I had to finally beat. Dead Space and Persona 3 Reload, two sumptuous remakes from the past two years. Games that had taken up more of my time than any other one in this series. Everything else was built around that, from what new things to try to what days to play. So on Tuesday, I really pushed hard to beat Episode 3 so it would only take two days. On Thursday, I started A Little to the Left early so that Friday could be mostly for Persona, and I finished it at night so it was just a one-day experience. I knew I wanted to finish Dead Space on Wednesday morning because I didn’t want to talk about both games on the same day. To a certain extent, everything was planned around hitting these very specific markets. Each day, my work hours, the header template; by this point, it should be clear that far more than my capricious whims go into how this series is organized.
Obviously, there were problems with this scheme. I vastly underestimated my talents in Hypnospace Outlaw and should’ve given it a bit more time each day. I also certainly didn’t account for, say, difficulty spikes or sudden dungeon crawling adventures or that part in Episode 3 where you have to realize that there’s a building in the distance and how to proceed when you get there, and that took me so much longer than I expected. Even A Little to the Left wound up lasting far longer than expected. This is a me “thing.” I just take things slower.
Image: Source Gaming. Oh, don’t think I didn’t instantly see that Asbury Park reference…
Still, we are one month in! This is the one-third mark of “Passing the Buck,” meaning that I’ve managed to essentially play an absurd number of video games for an equally absurd number of hours. A lot of this was supported by the fact that I have a very long winter break, so huge experiments are probably not gonna be really plausible for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, I think finishing Persona is going to change how I play things, as I don’t have it as this all-encompassing project within the overall all-encompassing project. You can (and I did) play it for hours at a time, in small bursts, at any hour of the day, casually or seriously, and no matter what its sheer size looms over you. That time can now be filled by all manner of other things, and I’d like it to. It might be fun to, say, play half hours of things more alongside longer sessions. The likes of Hypnospace are perfect for this, so while I have less time I might be able to spend it on more individual things. More indies, more oddities. Well, so long as another gigantic game doesn’t just fully replace it.
On that note—and apparently this is just part of the writeups now—I suppose now it’s time to start thinking of next week. For one thing, I am, in no uncertain terms, staying away from a new RPG and especially a new JRPG. I’m itching to play Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and I will. The week after next. Going from one time sink right into another is a terrible idea for many reasons. That might destroy me. I would also like to, again, make progress on all of my current games, so ideally we’ll have time for Fable, Indiana Jones, and Hypnospace. Even if I don’t beat them or assault every Nazi or uncover Chowder Man’s assuredly tragic origin story, we can still move. Like, for Indy, let’s finish the main story in Gizeh and go to the next sandbox. That’s a goal we can easily hit.
Image: Source Gaming. Persona‘s aesthetics have always been great, and that includes the designs of its Tarot cards. I had actually thought to use one in a header, but that never shook out, so it’s here.
That being said, I do also know the three new games I’m going to play. I’ve realized since about Week 1 that it’s smart to figure out what to play before the new week starts. Plan ahead, download early, and maybe let you folks stew for just a bit on what I’m gonna be doing. But in the interest of both showmanship and padding, I’ll give you some clues. Two I 100% intend to finish by the end of the week, one I’d really like to, and if How Long to Beat is correct (and it repeatedly hasn’t been, at least for my personal pace), doing that for all three is entirely possible. They shall complement my attempts to push further in these other games. One is a classic of the XBLA era which has somehow escaped my gaze for two decades. One is a gem from last year, because I should really be playing some more new games, and also someone told me to. And one is the game I would’ve started in Week 2 if I hadn’t been led to play Dead Space. Can you find all the clues? You better, because last year someone actually gave me a 3D printed model of the snowman from The Snowman, so I’m very invested in finding clues.
…Man, does anyone on this site know what I’m talking about? “Mister detective, you could have saved her, I gave you all the clues,” that stuff? Man, that movie was a pile…
Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!
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