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?
It’s February! Let’s try to start off the month with some progress, some fun, and some cool games. Mostly, the new stuff I picked was simple, small, and short. You know, like last week. Perhaps this speaks to my own lack of confidence or a fear of starting something too big, but this was another relatively modest chapter. Any and all complaints about that are, to be honest, totally acceptable, but I do think there was some fun and interesting stuff to discuss. Including where to go from here, but before that…
What I played:
- Resident Evil 3: Suspended after investigating a zombie attack, police officer Jill Valentine finds herself in the midst of a far greater outbreak devouring her home of Raccoon City. She fights the undead, picks locks, survives infection, and works with hunky soldier of fortune Carlos Oliveira, all the while stalked by the seemingly unkillable Bio-Organic Weapon Nemesis.
- Hypnospace Outlaw: twenty-five years after the Mindcrash virus killed six users, Hypnospace is long dead. Your moderator from before the collapse joins a group of former users trying to archive the site’s remains, only to be roped into an investigation over the virus’ real origin.
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: After collecting the stelae of Gizeh, Indiana and Gina raid Voss’ office. They fail to find Gina’s sister, accidentally reveal themselves to Voss, and although Indy finds the Idol of Ra and the piece of the Great Circle therein, the piece is lost to the Nazis.
- Botany Manor: As research for an 1890 book on forgotten flora, British botanist Arabella Greene grows and studies rare plants. She coaxes seeds to bloom by recreating their environmental conditions, from feigning weather to manipulating light.
- Fable II: Our hero, now at the village of Oakfield, does various deeds to raise her profile and open the gate to her next destination. While she splits logs, buys a house for rent, and battles a cadre of bandits, an errant freeze on the part of the game stops her adventure dead in its tracks.
- Peggle: in each round of this mid-Aughts casual gaming classic, you try to hit orange pegs with round balls. And although that idea is basic and satisfying on its own, a selection of crazy powers and obstacles take it into overdrive.
Sunday, February 2: started and got to the second Carlos section of Resident Evil 3, found two lost pages and was given an investigation in Hypnospace Outlaw, and found the third Stele in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
So far, Resident Evil 3 is a good time. It directly and thankfully lifts the gameplay loop of 2019’s exquisite Resident Evil 2 remake You know, figuring out which zombies you should shoot, deciding to throw out the Green Herb because the mines are rarer, opening shortcuts, finding pouches that expand your inventory. A great mixture of survival horror, shooting, Zelda-y dungeon design, and grisly monsters. What we inelegantly call “RE2Make” is one of those games that’s so seamless it makes others seem sloppy and slapdash, and it’s good that core is still here. The graphics are very pretty, from Nemesis’ grisly Cenobite airs to the fires that keep Raccoon City a flickering, crackling, burning, steamy boiler room. It may be Capcom’s single sweatiest game. This was one of the Game Pass games I wanted to hit the most, and I’m glad I’m getting the opportunity. Glad that our first week in April kicked off with something so lovely. That being said, I… kinda feel like the most interesting things to write about the game are criticisms. Relatively little things that are keeping it from its predecessor’s level.
Image: Source Gaming. The very fun Resident Evil 3.
The biggest little thing is Nemesis himself. Back in the late Nineties, the original Resident Evil 2 and 3 had these ugly bad guys who never died and never stopped. Mr. X and Nemesis, their respective main antagonists, would hound you for the whole game with a tenacity that must’ve pushed the original PlayStation to its limits. The Resident Evil 2 remake took this idea and ran with it; 2019 Mr. X stalked players with a skill that wasn’t technologically feasible back then. He’d stomp all over the Raccoon City Department (which gets a fun cameo here and is, incidentally, the subject of an article I’ve been writing on and off since 2023), smash holes in the walls, and outside of a few moments none of the chase was scripted. It was a triumph of hardware and software that let him do what his ancient original self could only imply. And it was damn intense. 2020 Nemesis… does not do that. His sequences are aggressively and very obviously scripted. One fight against him almost requires a specific weapon. He looks super gross, but the mechanics make him less interesting or threatening than both his cross-game counterpart and, from what I gather, his original version. Actually, the game as a whole feels more directed and less exploratory. It puts a much greater weight on set pieces, whether that’s the super strict chases from Nemesis or fighting through a nest of spider-like monsters. And the city streets are wider than the cramped police station of the RE2Make, but with less personality. Whether this was due to development issues or a creative decision—perhaps Capcom got cold feet after seeing online complaints about how aggressive Mr. X was—it definitely makes the game feel lesser to some degree. Again, though, still having a blast.
Beyond that, this just felt like a good start to the week. For one thing, while Resident Evil 3’s really short runtime was a point of contention, I’m pretty sure I’m at the halfway mark of this big budget survival horror romp without exerting much effort, which is great for someone trying to play dozens of video games in ninety days. I’m also in this crazy new era of Hypnospace Outlaw that’s flipped everything on its head. Flagging comments is out, and what’s in is effectively building the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Each of the three time periods from last week are now accessible through a capture system; I just press a button and instantly see what a page was like on November 5, November 26, or December 31. It’s now possible to see older or newer versions of pages I missed or wasn’t realistically able to find. Secret pages that were always available if I had the knowledge to find them are potentially at my fingertips. The world has expanded in truly crazy ways, this has already led to unique puzzles and solutions, and I’m finding the comedy pairs nicely with a new drama. All that’s left of Hypnospace are weirdos who are older and united by this kinda horrible shared experience. But on the flip side in terms of both tone and gameplay sessions, Indy showed me that you can play the game for just a half hour and have a good time. I don’t expect that this will happen a lot, and it was dependent on the stele I found being untethered to a longer quest, but I was wrong last week. There are times where the game works in short bursts. Let’s keep this Raccoon City train a-rollin’.
Monday, February 3: completed Resident Evil 3, found the fourth (and fifth!) stele in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and archived 53% of pages and found a free version of HypnoCure Pro in Hypnospace Outlaw.
My reading from yesterday has held up exactly. RE3Make is a fun but somewhat inessential addition to the modern Resident Evil canon. It’s in a strange position where it feels more like DLC for the Resident Evil 2 remake than its own game, even though releasing a remake of a major game in such a manner feels wrong. I don’t know if selling it as an expansion would’ve worked, but we have what we have, and what we have is a game that probably shouldn’t have been fast-tracked to come out a year after its predecessor. Also, it could stand to have a taste of classic Resident Evil camp. RE2Make cut down on that a lot too, but the silliness of the police station worked really well. There was a grand guignol energy this lacks. Jill and Carlos are kinda too… “modern action movie protagonist-y,” I guess, in their dialogue and writing. I’m not saying that what the game needed was for their voice acting to be stupendously bad instead of pretty good, but “you want S.T.A.R.S.? I’ll give you S.T.A.R.S.!” is a great final quip, and it’s crazy a line so iconic was wasted on a generic chase sequence. Jill just grunted it yesterday before crawling into a cate, as though the team felt forced to include the most famous line of the original game. None of her new and extremely generic lines come close to matching it.
Image: Source Gaming. I had an arguably better-composed screenshot of Jill fighting Nemesis in the tank, complete with the cool purple glow of the mine round. But the fire works better with the other screenshot. Like I said, lotta fire in the game.
Re: Hypnospace Outlaw, I’m definitely back in that situation of having no idea where to proceed. There are currently two goals: find evidence of the dangers of the Hypnospace servers and find evidence about the Mindcrash virus from before the timeskip. The latter, I’m lost. Searching for tags related to hacking and spying on the personal pages of people with computing skills hasn’t found anything relevant. But I’m confident I’m on the right track for the former, even if I’m not in a much better place. The theoretical tags should be easier, even if I’ve not come up with anything. As I do this, I’ve also been trying to simply log old pages into the system. It’s a fun process that has interesting dividends, like seeing how characters’ attitudes change over time. I’ve been able to see younger versions of people who I only discovered in the later timeskips and discover users who were hidden to me but seem far more essential to the world of the game. Context has just exploded.
I’ve talked before about how the game has forced me to marshal skills I regularly use in my job as a librarian. Things like following leads, expanding and contracting areas of study, using multiple search terms, and almost gaming the system to coax it into giving up the right material. And the game keenly understands how the tools used by databases and repositories to be helpful can be actively unhelpful and often need to be wrangled. Like, right now I’m searching for evidence that the headbands Hypnospace users wore when they slept might have impacted their health. Do I search for “health?” “Disease?” “Virus?” “Headband?” “Beef brain” because one user mentioned a fraudulent site whose obviously fake snake oil app supposedly guards against it? “Beefbrain” in case it’s used as an alternate spelling? You’re almost trying to find the questions before the answers. This kind of thing is largely nonexistent in the world of video games, where linear structures have one intended solution and open-ended ones are about giving you tools. There’s no way to realistically translate this into a conventional action game. But it’s here, and it’s incredible in its depiction.
Tuesday, February 4: started and completed Chapter 4 of Botany Manor, completed a quest in Oakfield in Fable II, and closed a case in Hypnospace Outlaw.
Yet another example of me trying to bite off more than I can chew. It was relatively late at night when I descended from the Botany Manor’s attic in triumph, only for its fifth and seemingly final chapter to just throw a whole mess o’ blocks in my way. Great ones by the looks of things. I only looked up help for one of the puzzles so far (the one with the tub), largely because I was impatient and wanted to beat Chapter 4. This was a somewhat messy day; I got one of my two big objectives in Hypnospace Outlaw and did a single quest in Fable II… before the game froze and I had to stop. I’ll confess that my enthusiasm for that one has dried up a lot since my week away. It’s just kinda janky and ungainly. With so many fun games at my fingertips, spending time on something that I find historically valuable but not actually fun is more of a job.
Anyway, Botany Manor. Another absolute delight of a cozy game, this 2024 gem is… I guess I’d call it a stew of Resident Evil mansion crawling, bespoke deduction puzzles, Gone Home-esque scraps of story, and a pleasing, painterly art style with bright colors. Kind of the Apollo to the Dionysus that was Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, my favorite game of last year. If you wish The Witness was less inscrutable (and, I assume, not made by a pretentious, anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist), this is your game. What you do is also really fun; since your goal is to grow various plants, you have to find or feign conditions that are not naturally available in a British mansion. After you scour every room for clues, you put a seed in a clay pot and find the right triggers. Maybe you’ll have to alter the room’s wind pressure or temperature to coax out the bud. Whatever it is, it’ll often involve juggling multiple things, like finding an optimal amount of sugar and figuring out which combination of fruit will provide that. That’s where those clues come in, and the game is great at combining them. The scope and quality of the puzzles are impressive—my only serious criticism is that you can’t actually collect the notes you get, meaning your options are limited to either writing everything down or walking across the increasingly huge manor grounds to reread documents—and I love how it helps sort clues. It’s pretty much another riff on Return of the Obra Dinn’s “you have to get X things right to get a confirmation,” but it’s convenient, even if it can lead your thinking. Before I stopped I was able to sort all the clues for the final three plants because I noticed which plant had enough open clues left to include a really cool-looking riddle about light patterns. That one I’m most excited to solve.
Image: Source Gaming. The first part of Botany Manor. This probably would’ve been the right screenshot in the header if the only usable Peggle image could have been slotted anywhere else.
Alongside these excellent puzzles there’s a satisfying throughline about Arabelle, the main character. She’s a silent protagonist only in the technical sense, as her sprawling estate is full of her personality, passion, and history. Her paintings and plants are everywhere. A few notes written by her are available, but they’re surpassed by notes about her and her life. More than anything, there are constant references to her struggle to get her botanical work recognized in an aggressively patriarchal London. This gives context to what you’re doing and makes you feel almost like a maestro of flora in an incurious world. That’s something I really like about games, how they can take what are essentially pieces of prose and gamify them through when, where, and how you find each one. Actually, I had an example of something like this today when I learned that one member of Hypnospace’s m1nx—a mysterious, disreputable scammer clique within the lore—was actually Counselor Ronnie, a mod or cartoon in the “Teentopia” server with a hilarious anti-drug song. I’m pretty confident it’s not plot-relevant at all; all I did was realize they share an ID number. Suddenly my image of these two characters became so much richer, but it only happened because I was, essentially, doing homework. These are very different examples, but they both highlight ways in which giving players scraps of information can be more than a passive experience. How you engage with each scrap, and when you do, matters.
Wednesday, February 5: started and completed World 10 of Peggle.
It was inevitable that I’d tackle Peggle for this series. Not just because developer PopCap Games made Plants vs. Zombies, one of the best things I played in 2024, although that certainly doesn’t hurt. Fact of the matter is Peggle was absolutely ubiquitous. It was one of the main casual games of the 2000s, got a ton of attention after being referenced in The Orange Box, and was a staple of Xbox Live Arcade when it released there in 2009. Peggle was everywhere and garnered sequels, spinoffs, crossovers, and clones. I saw it constantly whenever I’d load up the XBLA to download something like Limbo or Symphony of the Night. And yet I never played it. Casual games didn’t particularly appeal to me beyond the free copy of Hexic that came with my Xbox 360 (which apparently was the full game and not a demo, as I had assumed forever? And is apparently fully free now?! Well, that’s something for after this series ends!). By the time I got the console, this seemed bland and oversaturated. But it’s the horrible year of 2025, where there’s nothing stopping me from going to Game Pass and downloading seemingly anything owned by Electronic Arts. No reason I can’t try this; no reason I shouldn’t.
Image: Source Gaming. Peggle at about its most basic. Between the great gameplay loop and that kinda hideous art style, it was like a time capsule to the early Seventh Generation. I had a lot of fun with it.
For the uninitiated, the pachinko-esque gameplay of Peggle is delightfully simple. You drop balls onto a sea of pegs; a peg goes away when hit, and you win if you remove all the orange-colored pegs before you run out of balls. Since the screen is full of blue and orange pegs, this invariably leads to gigantic chains as a single ball cleans huge swaths of the screen. There’s plenty of additional gimmicks like crazy powers or obstacles or setups with how the pegs are ordered, but the game never loses sight of this core loop. It’s also just remarkably elegant. The game feel is excellent, from the rising pitch of a great combo to the zoom when you hit the last orange target. Blasting “Ode to Joy” is as abrasive as the piece is overused, but it’s wonderful seeing everything light up as the words “EXTREME FEVER” gets plastered on your screen. The levels are appreciably short and allow you to restart immediately. I don’t like it as much as Plants vs. Zombies, largely because I absolutely do not care for the art style, but this is great fun. In fact, after trying hard to go through all ten worlds only to find a few final, final challenges, I realized that this and games like it could be great for that “just have a few minutes” type of game. So it’s okay I didn’t finish it. Hell, I’ll probably play Peggle 2 before all is said and done.
But giving myself a break only goes so far. We’re now in the back half of the week. I still haven’t beaten Botany Manor, I’ve made almost no progress on Fable, and I feel like this part of Hypnospace Outlaw might be beyond me. I don’t want to look up guides for it because it makes me feel bad (which it shouldn’t; there’s nothing wrong with asking for help). The shape the next few days will take feels murky and bad from this end. Maybe we make tomorrow all about Indy and doing the last bits of these smaller things and… I dunno, see how Friday works after that. I’m so tired, though. I just wanna beat Hypnospace and try more things, new things.
Thursday, February 6: left Gizeh in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, got to the end credits in Peggle.
And with that, I’m off to the Himalayas. I’m not sure what other (if any) major sandboxes in Great Circle are left, but I’m looking forward to that one. Overally, Gizeh was a really interesting change from the Vatican. That was more linear, more structured; it was often about finding a fun side quest along the way to the next main objective. By having a more open and wide setup from the start, this part especially was very Nintendo-like in its structure. The stelae are like the Stars or Moons of a 3D Mario game, or maybe you could see them as the Divine Beasts of Breath of the Wild, and this created a powerful experience of discovery and agency. I can’t deny, though, that this final section—sneaking into Voss’ office, exploring a dark crypt, and fighting a blind giant in a tomb filled with coins—was the weakest part of the affair. The boss fight is bad, and I did miss the more open areas. That being said, there was still plenty of fun, from another mirror puzzle to the way you can go through the compound in different ways. Always, though, in such a way that you’re regularly assaulting Nazis with shovels, beer bottles, and hammers, just as the Lord intended. All that, and a Three Stooges cutscene that involves Indy repeatedly hitting himself in the head? Astonishingly fun, this thing and its command of tone.
Image: Source Gaming. Seen here right after activating a death trap, Indy once again remains a titan of “I made a huge mistake” energy.
I’m not going to play more Indy for a little while. Just as I’ve taken breaks from various games from week to week, including this one, I think I’ll hold off on starting the Himalayas until Week 8. We’ve got a good stopping point here. You know, there’s just so much more stuff I wanna try. Not just Yakuza, although it’ll be good to start that on Sunday. But I’ve got this itch, and if you look at my downloads, you’d see a bunch of unplayed Game Pass games downloaded over the past few weeks to scratch that itch. Like Lil’ Gator Game; it looks super cute, and I figured it’d be a good “one and done” short game like the, uh, not “one and done” Botany Manor and Peggle. That one could be a really lovely time. And after the similarly scary Dead Space and RE3, The Evil Within seems worth tackling, too. For whatever reason, those are the ones really calling out to me right now more than keeping up momentum with what I’ve got. Fortunately, when you’ve got a game as good as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, you can comfortably put it on the back burner because you know that picking it back up will be a good time.
Friday, February 7: completed Botany Manor, completed Hypnospace Outlaw.
The final puzzles of Botany Manor turned out to be very clear and satisfying, but I did need to use some guides for Hypnospace. Figuring out how to decrypt the Samwich files, finding specific clues, and remembering places to use the All-Seeing Eye turned out to be too hard. Perhaps my biggest sense of embarrassment is how I failed to find the in-game hint system at all. Though, as I do with my favorite puzzle games I did see how to find the clues and directions that went by me. I want to understand, not simply get a solution. And I loved using the Eye. Tools and mechanics like Ultrahand and the Holy Cross upend their games in delightful ways; they warp the space and empower dusty older levels. Moving the eye around a screen certainly made the space cluttered, but this was a tool that revealed secret links—some of which seemed suspicious to me hours and hours ago! It “broke” the game, even though this was always part of the game.
Image: Source Gaming. Hypnospace ends at its most overstimulating, as you have to juggle multiple screens at once while solving some of its most in-depth puzzles.
I talked about this a bit earlier this week, but I have been wowed by Hypnospace Outlaw’s dramatic turn in this second half / fourth phase / epilogue. It’s still very funny, especially in how the time capture mechanic can play with websites you’ve already seen. And many of the final twists still have humor, like the dark web chat room where people kvetch about this increasingly dangerous website but don’t, like, leave. But it’s also sad. Hypnospace is one of the most voyeuristic games I’ve ever played, as painfully intimate as rifling through the drawers in Gone Home. Zane and Chowder Man and the guy with the conspiracy theory about this universe’s sport of “trennis” give you an unvarnished look at their psyches. This makes them fun to laugh at, but it also makes their pain and vulnerability impossible to miss. Users like DarkTwilightTiff and the Sanders couple wear their hearts on their sleeve. And few wear it as loudly as Dylan Merchant: creator of Hypnospace, amateur musician, would-be gaming savant, backbiting boss, and someone whose modicum of talent is buttressed by ego, spite, and a desperate need for artistic respect. I’m never inclined to give empathy to the titans of Silicon Valley, and especially not now as they raid my country like a pack of gangly Visigoths, but he’s a great supporting character. Someone who can turn on a dime to be friendly, harmless, stupid, obnoxious, cruel, or threatening. He and the other characters feel real, but this strange webpage format adds an extra dimension. And it’s perhaps the most interesting thing about Hypnospace Outlaw.
Hypnospace is one of the great video game settings. It’s an ungainly landscape of pages made by eccentrics, and since all you do is sort through these pages, they act as levels, puzzles, NPCs, and story beats all in one. And that goes double for what’s in them, from tags and secret links to dialogue and images. Consider Gumshoe Gooper. One of the first missions is about flagging images of this copyrighted fish detective, because he’s a useful tool for explaining the gameplay. But he’s also a bizarre lightning rod; older, conservative users see him as an anticommunist symbol, and the controversy of Merchantsoft banning his likeness becomes a flashpoint in the second act. It highlights the site’s demographics, adds to the background story of the company’s corporate sponsorships, and gives you another mission. But this one is more complex and helps teach you about various searching techniques. By the time you find out about what actually happened to the slightly pathetic Stand with Gooper movement, it’s probably after the last timeskip and you’re now an archaeologist trying to understand what happened. Every mission and area is like this. There are practically no features—pages, flags, images, apps, logs—that exist only for story or gameplay. And so for all of the game’s abrasiveness, it’s a perfect marriage of player agency and narrative. Frankly, I’d like to write about this in my series on video game levels. Not for a while, but eventually, which should make it clear that this is yet another game I want to buy (and probably for Switch, the perfect indie machine).
Saturday, February 8: replayed a few levels in Peggle.
Now that I’ve hit pretty much all my marks for this week and don’t have much more to do, I’d like to end the week by thinking about a phenomenon that’s been on my mind for a couple weeks. In the past month-plus, I’ve played remakes of Dead Space, Persona 3, the Crash Bandicoot Trilogy, and now Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Now, of these, Dead Space is the only one where I’ve played the original. I can talk about what I know of the original Resident Evil 3, that its version of Nemesis was more interesting and its dialogue… look, no one’s under illusions that the original Resident Evil games were well-written, but Jill’s writing in that one had to be a lot more memorable than her writing here. But I don’t have that personal connection. Still, it’s interesting that several of the games I wanted to hit the most were remakes. And after my friend Lily shared this Jacob Geller video on the surprisingly stacked roster of horror game remakes from 2023 (Dead Space among them), I’d like to put some of my thoughts on this on the table.
Or you could also watch this Game Maker’s Toolkit piece on Capcom’s remakes that explores some of this. Anyway, video game remakes are incredibly strange. More often than not, they feel like they exist to replace their originals; the Crash games and RE3 are lost, Dead Space is largely trapped on Xbox hardware, and while ports of Persona 3 Portable are still accessible, the original is not. And that’s true of many remakes, because while I’d assume most companies would prefer a situation where you purchased both versions, it’s hard not to notice that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Silent Hill 2, Pokémon Diamond & Pearl, Yakuza 1, Demon’s Souls, and Shadow of the Colossus—all very important parts of the gaming canon—are unavailable. With video game preservation somewhere between poor and nonexistent, the industry has seemingly decided that making remakes and dramatic remasters is the ideal. It probably doesn’t hurt that these are known successes in an increasingly risk-averse Triple-A market. Which is fine, but they almost feel like kids swiping at echoes with a butterfly net, being faithful to a fault but never able to capture what made their source material important in the first place. Which is impossible, obviously. And of course, there are plenty that are simply worse than their source material. Plus, it’s hard not to notice that many of the games that could get the most out of a remake or remaster are ignored in favor of things that could probably be seen as modern games. I love the TTYD remake’s changes and tweaks and will probably only play that version of the game for the future, but the original could still exist in the modern gaming space. So they can be great for giving us riffs on things that deserve to be in the marketplace and a way of helping capture things that are probably stuck being lost games, but there’s a sadness I see in them. A glimpse of lost opportunity, perhaps. Or of remembering that my favorite adaptations are often divergent from the source material and several of these won’t, can’t, or at times shouldn’t be that. It’s not Blooper Team’s fault that Konami lost the goddamn source code for Silent Hill 2.
For the games I played, it was a mix. Dead Space is probably the best, as it incorporated its own ideas, ideas from Dead Space 2, and overall felt the most reactive. It was simultaneously what Dead Space (2008) clearly always wanted to be and a response to it; it’s not an attempt to replace what it’s adapting. Resident Evil 3 was the most actively different, but in ways that were both good and bad. And by being this strange dual adaptation of both the first Resident Evil 3 and the Resident 2 remake to which it’s a sequel, it felt inherently subordinate. From what I can tell, Reload was often about incorporating the aesthetics of Persona 5, the breakout game in the series, while holding true to the original’s sense of despair. So it’s more about bringing it into a new house style. All of these have limitations and successes, but I do appreciate that they all show that a video game remake doesn’t have to be a painstaking, one-to-one recreation of something that’s already fully acceptable as a modern day gaming product. These show that this thing I take issue with isn’t omnipresent or even a bad thing. Which is to say, “congratulations to all of you for not being the Until Dawn remake.”
Outro: This was a strange week. Earlier in the week, I started work on this conclusion, and it was primarily about this wave of mild depression I’ve been experiencing. A lot of that is external; it’s hard to read the news and not fall into either apoplectic rare or crushing despair, you know? And pertinently for this series, this has been percolating down and infecting my gaming, one of the few spheres that might’ve been safe from all this. Accomplishments feel less empowering, goals seem to stretch outward, and I keep glancing at my phone to see some horrible geopolitical update even though I agreed that I wouldn’t. If we look at this week objectively, I got a lot done: I reached the end credits on four games, moved into another act in one, and while Fable didn’t work out well, that’s still pretty good. But that feeling doesn’t last as long as I’d like. Maybe all of this has been catching up to me. Like Icarus, I soared too close to the sun, except all Icarus had to do after that was fall into the Sea of Crete and drown. My work has to continue.
Image: Source Gaming. If nothing else (and there’s a lot else), Botany Manor‘s graphics deserve a huge shout out. It’s so pretty, and it makes the process of playing even more fun because you’re contributing to making it prettier.
This may also be an issue of timing. The first version of this conclusion was written on Thursday, where a lot of the goals seemed to stretch out far. I hadn’t completed Peggle or Botany Manor or Hypnospace Outlaw, and they were kinda gnawing at me. I was, for the most part, starting something and had to come back once or twice to finish it. If we take that and my better mood on Friday, it’s more evidence of what I’m looking for is a sense of regular progress, success, and accomplishment. Wins. I want to do new things and complete them. But for the past few weeks, as my work schedule changed and the world got a whole worse, I’ve become scared of this. Scared of biting off more than I can chew or juggling too many things, partially because I don’t think it’s necessarily conducive to this series but also because I’ve become… gun-shy.
And that’s a problem because what’s fun about “Passing the Buck” is me biting off more than I can chew. I’m the one in the family who can’t help but go to a favorite restaurant and try to pick something different each time. I love trying new things, testing the waters, and pushing myself. My desire to rein in the project clashes with my desire to grab everything on the menu. Of course spending weeks trying to finish a few big projects was going to chafe. So if my mind is feeling nothing but overwhelm anyway, why not go for it? Why not make Week 7 all about chasing new things?
Image: Source Gaming. What are you looking so dang smug about? You’re the one who’s doing this terrible woodcutting mini-game for like a half hour just to buy a house to rent. Oh, wait, that was me who did that.
Here’s how it’ll be: we will have one old game, The Walking Dead (since I would like to keep my progress on that consistent), but that’s it. It’ll be that and four other games, that way those get to be on the header and I get to dine out. Now, I’ve already agreed to Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and I put forth The Evil Within and Lil’ Gator Game as possibles. These are all great together; from a distance not a single thing seems to unite them beyond their presence on Game Pass. Perfect for this confusing adventure. And while I could do another super short game for the fourth, but… what about something crazy? What about something that throws a wrench into this entire thing? What about Minecraft? Just from a cultural perspective, that’s probably the Microsoft product that merits my attention the most.
Yes. Yes, I think I’m ready for this. (Almost) all new, all crazy, and all downloaded as of Friday. A fun indie, a Shinji Mikami survival horror, a billion-hour JRPG, a game that will either not work for me in the slightest or be extremely fun, and the New Adventures of Lee Everett.
Image: Source Gaming. Damn, though… what a crazy game.
There is one strange twist in all of this. My subscription to Game Pass ends on Monday, March 31. I’ll either post a super-short finale on Tuesday or, more likely, forgo publishing on the 29th and simply have the last chapter be extra long. Either way, this series ends on April Fools’ Day, which is interesting because Nintendo has just announced the date of the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct: April 2. Naturally, we’ll be covering it extensively here, and I’ll be leading that. On one hand, this is slightly exhausting to have one giant project end and a giant presentation jump out right afterwards. But it’s also kind of a neat capstone. After living almost exclusively in Microsoft’s ecosystem, I’ll be back in my safe Nintendo stomping grounds. Perhaps that gives the rest of this adventure a bit of a… maybe not a “kick,” but something. A goal. A lodestar. The April 1 goal feels all the more powerful because there’ll be an entirely different adventure afterwards.
Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!
- Passing the Buck Chapter 6: Stele Dan - February 9, 2025
- Passing the Buck Chapter 5: The End Credits Annihilation Team - February 2, 2025
- Passing the Buck Chapter 4: Seeing Friction - January 26, 2025
