February 23, 2025|

Filed under: Editorial, Featured

Passing the Buck Chapter 8: Hell is Other Sidekicks

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?

Last week was a really good show for this series, and a nice reminder about how much breadth there is in the Game Pass catalog. But, after a week that was almost all given to new experiences, we’re going back to working through some of our old ones. Indiana Jones has a new sandbox to explore—which, to be clear, I did not see this week—and as much as my interest in Fable has waned, it’s there as well. Helluva way to talk that one up, huh? Plus, last week brought Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Minecraft into the fold. I’ve gotta try to finish my plate. Especially since, as always, I’ve picked up on new games.

Of course, what I picked up is a bit of an interesting choice. We have a small indie, a roguelike, and the newest Microsoft blockbuster. And although the former was always gonna be a longterm project, the runtime of the other two surprised me. It’s certainly led to an unexpected adventure full of twists and turns, and the best evidence for that is that I had to basically rewrite this paragraph after the fact.

I should also note that this article tries to not spoil Inscryption too much, but there’s only so much I can do, and the bulk of my entry for the last day pretty much breaks it open entirely. If you’re interested in the game, please skip Saturday’s entry and come back after you’ve hit the credits.

What I played:

Inscryption: Ostensibly, you’re a hapless victim in a cabin, playing your shadowy captor in a violent, animalistic card game and finding clues to save yourself off the table. But the roguelike horror trappings are revealed to unfold into a multilayered mystery of lost games, living cards, and the scrybes who craft them.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon: In his attempt to solve the murder of a brothel owner, Ichiban—now the newly-minted president of a company—has inadvertently led to a gang war between the “Ijin Three”: the yakuza Seiryu Clan, the Chinese Liumang, and the Korean Geomijul. The gang stop a brawl between two sides, meet the leader of the Geomijul for evidence of treachery within the Liumang, only to learn a dark secret about Ichi’s first partner Nanba.
Minecraft: The project to make a loose map of the Kanto region has continued, with me organizing the blocks by cities and routes. With each session, I learn a little more about the systems and become ever so slowly better at building.
Planet of Lana: In the wake of a mass alien abduction, the young girl Lana and her feral cat sidekick Mui flee, explore, and eventually find a spaceship to save her people. Getting through each obstacle demands the two work together, from distracting robotic enemies to overcoming geographical obstacles.
Avowed: Upon news of a strange plague in the fantasy world of Eora, the Aedyran Empire sends an Envoy to investigate the backwater Living Lands. And it’s all this spellcasting demigod can do to solve the problem as she fights infected beasts, vies with politicking factions, builds a squad of heroes, overcomes her own murder, and solves many a quest.
Fable: As the hero Sparrow attempts to improve her renown, she sedues and rejects a man who slighted a ghost. This sends her on a quest to protect the pacifist monk Hannah, who rechristens herself “Hammer” and joins the quest.

Sunday, February 16: started and beat the second boss in Inscryption, became president of Ichiban Confections and completed Chapter 5 in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and continued work on the project in Minecraft.

Around the end of 2017, I played Pony Island, a Steam game from the previous year. It’s one of those games that really got creepypasta vibes, more than most. The setup is that you’re ostensibly playing a crappy shovelware game about a galloping pony, only for the world to zoom out into horror. Satan, actual Satan, lives in the code, and as the sap playing it you’re trapped in there with him. You sometimes play the agonizingly boring game-within-a-game, but mostly you’re doing light programming, exploring, or finding puzzles to break the game. As a hook, it’s brilliant. In practice, it’s more okay. The intentionally tedious horse racing game isn’t complemented by more interesting mechanics, and the world building lacked something for me. On the whole it felt stronger as a concept than a finished work. Before I began “Passing the Buck” and had to give up on it, I started Alien: Isolation. That’s another 2010s horror game built around intentionally tedious mechanics, but it almost weaponizes them against you in ways that are nerve wracking. This one didn’t really, so while it was fun on the whole and I’m very glad I took the time to play it, the thing ended up being more of a curio than a true classic.

2021’s Inscryption, by Pony Island designer Daniel Mullins, is a natural evolution of the concept. It’s still a horror game, naturally; you’re trapped in a creepy, dimly-lit cavern with some shadowy monster, and every time you lose your character is killed. It also has a multilayered structure wrapped around a core gameplay loop. This time, it’s a deck-building roguelike, but at any point you can at any point stand up from the table, explore the cabin, solve puzzles, and rescue sentient playing cards that join the team. This even extends outward into the real world with an alternate reality game. What puts it above its predecessor—beyond a generally stronger production—is that central card game, which is excellent. It’s challenging, nasty (the core mechanic is that you have to ritualistically sacrifice your cards to summon other cards), but also engaging. The rules are clear, with a satisfying learning curve. That “one more run” itch you get from Balatro and Hades is here too, if muted just a bit by how viscerally creepy it all is. The monster Leshy wears masks to role play as the bosses, their narration crafts a scary folktale, and they’re evil and smug enough that you’ll probably want to beat them just to stick it to them. Plus, the puzzle elements fold into the card game by giving you useful but optional upgrades. It all comes together for a hellish and deeply unpleasant world that has been a gas to explore.

Image: Source Gaming. Top trier aesthetics here. Fun fact: this was gonna be the bottom image in the header, but without the top half you really don’t see how powerful it is. The inky black and the warm, unsettling red.

I’m not committed to strictly “finishing” the game, whatever that entails. I’m certainly not going to be doing the ARG stuff. For now, I’ll just keep playing and try solving the puzzles. I’ve done that already, having rescued three sentient cards, opened the wolf cage, gotten the eye-gouging knife, and unlocked the four cabinet drawers. I’m happy for this to be in my rotation, especially since I’ve developed more strict goals for the others. In the interest of pacing, I’m gonna try to beat a chapter in Yakuza every two or three days, which means I’ll have time for sidequests but won’t, say, dive fully into a shockingly deep management game. Minecraft still has its map, which has gotten a lot better even though I ended up destroying and recreating Mt. Moon twice. I can now fill water gaps and have gotten as far as Fuschia City. And although I didn’t divulge it until now, a few weeks ago my friend Lily (who’s all over this project, but we influence each other’s work a lot anyway) suggested that if I’ve lost the energy for Fable, I should try to at least recruit one party member. This’ll give it another chance and deal with the baggage of lugging something around that you don’t want to keep but feel like you should.

Monday, February 17: completed the Yokohama Underground dungeon in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, found the Stunted Wolf and Roll of Film in Inscryption, started and got to the spaceship in Planet of Lana, and continued work in Minecraft.

Well, the plan was to start Doom Eternal. Was. To make a long story short, I downloaded it twice after getting confused by the file name, found out that you need a Bethesda account to play the single player campaign, uninstalled it in an attempt to impotently rail at the system, and only learned right afterwards that you can actually skip it. Well, we make lemonade here at Source Gaming, so I moved Avowed up to this week so we can actually play a new game the day it comes out. Out of a desire to start something new, Planet of Lana was moved up from Friday, which is good. I’ve been putting short indies in the back of the week for too many chapters and wanted to go against the grain. I’ll confess I wasn’t sure what I’d be getting here. The extent that I knew was that people liked it, enough that I put it on a holiday wishlist in 2023 sight unseen. I tend to write huge lists, often full of stuff I don’t really know or care about, in the hopes that I won’t be able to predict what people actually pick. This technique does not work, incidentally. Family members just keep buying the obvious things.

Image: Source Gaming. This is a truly sumptuous game. It’s shocking seeing the fake brushstrokes in the clouds and trees.

The best way I can describe Planet of Lana is that it’s the rare funhouse mirror image that’s lighter than the thing it’s copying, in this case Limbo. You jog in 2D. You solve rudimentary puzzles. You avoid several spiders. Several puzzles and rooms are dead ringers for ones you’d find in the other game, particularly those that feature climbing ropes and physics systems. The twist—other than the cat sidekick, who gets some powers over time—is that it’s about the exact opposite in terms of tone. The monochrome, scratchy, grainy camera aesthetic is replaced by deep greens, brushstroke clouds, the ability to pet your cat, and a giant moon in the background. It’s graphically phenomenal, to the point where I was constantly snapping photos despite not liking what I was actually playing. And I wasn’t thanks to something more fundamental than a few crummy puzzles. Limbo came out in 2010, and this came out in 2023. That first game was a fantastic bit of game design, but it was also something of a novelty. It was many people’s first exposure to indie and “art” games. killer7 was my first art game, but Playdead’s cult classic was still important to me as a sign of what gaming could be. Thirteen years later, this borrows liberally from the old game’s textbook and feels slightly inessential for it. Even the aesthetic elements, like the bright sunlight and made up language, feel rather indebted to Ico (as well as Studio Ghibli, with the painterly color saturation, and the cinematic aesthetics of Limbo’s 2016 successor Inside). This is a work that’s very openly drawing from things I love without doing much to define itself, and that made the process a bit tiring.

That being said, I’m in what feels like the end game, and I’m getting a lot more on this thing’s wavelength. After several forest, cliffside, cave, and swamp areas, I’ve found a lost spaceship with a lot of environmental storytelling and some unique visual flair. It’s also the first part of the game that feels especially impactful; I’m finding the dead craft haunting and sad, much more so than the big alien abduction that kicks off the plot. I was considering giving up on it before reaching this part, but I’m so happy that I chose not to. It’s added a nice contrast to the shockingly deep management sidequest of Yakuza and the grisly eye gouging of Inscryption. And it’s still a short game, meaning that I won’t have all of this… stuff I’ve still gotta play.

Tuesday, February 18: recruited Eri and completed Chapter 6 of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, continued in Planet of Lana, started, recruited Kai and Marius, and cured the Strangleroot in Avowed, and continued in Inscryption.

And for the first and probably last time, “Passing the Buck” indeed plays a game the day it comes out! “Day 1 on Game Pass,” as the man says. And I couldn’t have asked for a better option than Avowed. It’s the latest game by Obsidian, they of Fallout: New Vegas and my 2022 game of the year Pentiment (which is, as a reminder, out on every platform and constantly on sale so you have no excuse not playing it), and the latest entry in their Pillars of Eternity series. Microsoft has been pushing this as a first quarter tentpole, and they’ve every right to. The Living Lands look stunning, as picturesque as it is alien. It’s got that first-person action-RPG dealio that New Vegas had, the standard of Western role-playing games since Ultima Underworld, but its magic is a lot more charming than anything you’d get in Skyrim. Pillars of Eternity is also one of a relatively small number of new recurring IPs owned by Microsoft—a list that will expand in the fall when Obsidian releases The Outer Worlds 2. That’s an impressive output for a fairly small studio. Throughout my three or however many hours with the game, my hero Glass Half Null whipped up dazzling fire effects to make an inferno, walked in the shadow of beautifully rendered giant mushrooms, and enjoyed very charming face and hair animations. She looks really cool, by the way, even if I took a conservative touch in the character creator. The Envoy is a godlike, meaning they need to have crazy facial features that you can turn off, but mine largely has cool eyebrows and a giant coral reef horn on her head.

Now, I have not played the original The Outer Worlds. The game was successful and acclaimed, but something made it seem less special from afar. Perhaps it’s not unlike the feeling I got about The Evil Within so many years ago; I’m sure I’d like it a lot more than that one, but they were both in the position of following up impossible acts. New Vegas is a marvel of game design, a thorny tumbleweed of quests, characters, Perks, plot lines, Rat Pack-era aesthetics, and everything Obsidian will make for the rest of its existence—Avowed included—will be found wanting. It’s not the fault of these games. It’s certainly not the fault of Avowed, which has a wildly different setting and tone. Obsidian has been open that New Vegas’ production was not good, in ways that were exacerbated by its intense complexity, and that they have no desire to put themselves in that position again. But I also can’t deny that the very first comments on the game that I’ve read were from people frustrated that this game isn’t that one. This specter is here already. For everyone, and for me, even as I enjoy myself.

Image: Source Gaming. Kai, your hot snake / shark man sidekick. He’s fine.

So to get this out of the way: no, Avowed is not a mythical New Vegas 2. There are important voice actors like SungWon Cho and Allegra Clark, but no stunt casting, and probably the biggest “get” is Brandon Keener—the voice of Mass Effect’s fan favorite sidekick Garrus—as the first main companion. There’s some humor, just not on the nose satire. You’re not likely to find a huge selection of golden oldies on the radio. What you are gonna get is something that is, so far, pretty fun. That action RPG loop of scrounging for loot and fighting monsters is fun and surprisingly tough. Magic is enjoyable; apparently the guns are even more so. The writing is okay, with a lot of worldbuilding brought in from the first two games and an in-game glossary that is weirdly finicky to activate. I think what it does best is one of my favorite parts of Western RPGs: their willingness to just let you go off. By that I mean the little avenues you can clearly explore on your own, but also the little things. Breaking crates open in the rare event they’re hiding ten coins. Finding lost notes. Making ridiculous dialogue choices, like hearing about an evil general who came back from the dead a mass murderer and deciding that my backstory included dating her after she became a mass murderer (they have a backstory option for dating her before her death, clearly aware of how insane of a choice mine was). Seeing an immaculate diorama of a town and stomping through it with muddy boots. I’ll cut down on these as I go on. Time’s running out, I can’t spend seventy-five hours on a second game, and as ever, I think it’s less interesting for readers. It’s why I’ve said goodbye to the management sim in Yakuza now that I’ve unlocked Eri, even if I’ll never use her since her combat ability is tied to the management sim. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t venture off the beaten path, at least once I get stronger. Again, this game is a lot harder than I expected.

Wednesday, February 19: played about an hour of Fable II, completed Planet of Lana, and continued playing Inscryption and Minecraft.

As a reminder, our goal in Fable has now changed from “finishing the game” to “recruiting my first party member.” This feels no closer after an hour of play—though you’d only see about a fifteen minute change if you looked at the save file. See, the only way for the story to progress is to raise my renown in Oakfield by doing various quests. You’re given a few, but as far as I can tell, it’s not a Mario 64 “pick what you’d like” thing. They all seem mandatory in practice. I fought some bandits last week, meaning I had two tasks left: commission an artist to make a statue of myself and solve a quest from a ghost. The statue I took care of, but the other one… Well, I’m told to seduce a man back in Barrowstone and break his heart, and then the game freezes when I get there. I boot it back up to the autosave after I modeled for the statue, go back to the ghost and Barrowstone, and accidentally fire magic swords at the guy I’m supposed to seduce. That’s not gonna get him in the mood! I boot it back up again, find an evil cult, join them by eating five live chickens, and… boot up the game again because I accidentally attacked the same sucker again. I did make a new save in Barrowstone with a few more properties under my belt (I’ve abandoned the evil cult, largely because I’ve gotta stay in “only the story” mode), so if I want to come back tomorrow I can. Granted, that’s a big “if” when the actual plot progression entails slowly, methodically romancing an NPC in a game that already has pacing issues.

Image: Source Gaming. The main character in an attempt at what Strong Bad would call “romantic entranglement.” It’s all very awkward.

The problem is deceptively simple: I think I should play Fable II, I know it’s important to play, I know a lot of people who have affection for it, but I hate it. I don’t even think it’s a bad game, it’s not like Balan or anything, just that it doesn’t gel with what I value in game design. Satisfying game feel, interesting conundrums, a sense of real agency; you can’t find that here. What you do get is an impressively massive amount of sheer reactivity, but what the game chooses to react to is strange. I don’t need dozens of emotes to elicit hyper-specific reactions in NPCs I don’t care about, nor do I need the ability to purchase properties and set their prices (though I am still doing that because it’s the best way to get money, especially since the rates are independent of when the game is turned on). It’s like the inverse of all the times I’ve hung out with Nanba and Sa-chan, especially since those come with good mini-games and compelling dialogue. And with a lot of RPGs on Game Pass that I want to at least try—Fallout 4, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Another Crab’s Treasure, Ni No Kuni—giving this attention as the time slips away feels like… well, spending all my money to own a pie shop and jack up the prices. At the same time, Fable II was one of the targets I’ve felt most strongly about hitting. It’s an important part of the Xbox story in good ways and bad, it was a big part of gaming culture when I was a teen, and it’s good for me to experience at least one Peter Molyneux product. “Product,” not “work.” Plus, I had already cut down my plans into something more manageable. Giving up on what was already a substantial compromise feels wrong.

Maybe I need to try again, and I’ve still got the updated save for it, but I couldn’t keep going after a while. Bad head space. Instead, I beat Planet of Lana, which like Limbo turns spooky and industrial before its (not like Limbo) emotional ending. In the final analysis, I’m glad I made time for it, and it stands as an example of a game that justified my giving it a second chance. After that, I poked a little further at Inscryption, proud that I feel more attuned to the gameplay with every run. I’ve even gotten to enjoy powerful deathcards that you make every time you die. I name them after TV shows, meaning that I’ve seen incredible power from the likes of “The Wire,” “Mannix,” and “Knight Rider.” And while I mistakenly used red glass on “Zapdos,” the Kanto map is sorted out at its most basic. It needs a lot of trimming, a lot of forests and mountains added, but the basic structure is there and there’s already a lot of color. The white picket fences on Route 1 and the maze on Route 13, extra-large foliage for Viridian Forest, a version of Cinnabar Island that references Gens I and II; even the Gyms are represented with colored terracotta. That’s what the glass Legendary birds are for. I probably shouldn’t for time, but I think I could potentially add Johto to this, too.

Thursday, February 20: defeated the Trapper, the Trader, Leshy, and passed Act I in Inscryption and continued playing Avowed.

Let’s get the bad news outta the way first: Inscryption may end up taking a while. If it took me this long to get to Act II, then I gotta be okay with the prospect of it being a three week experience. Also, its title’s deliberate misspelling continues to wreak havoc on this Google Doc, and although I’d like to buy it after the project I’m stuck with either starting over on Nintendo Switch or keeping all my progress here. Assuming that’s a real issue when all’s said and done, of course. Honestly, these are nice problems to have right now, especially since it’s good in short bursts and still pretty short overall. If nothing else, I’m happy to have a game that has radically, violently recreated itself. And there is a lot else, god yes. Forget those blockbusters Microsoft spent obscene money to own; this thing’s amazing and like Hypnospace Outlaw a real gem for Game Pass. C’mon, I know you nerds don’t actually wanna play Forza.

Image: Source Gaming. A far less ominous cabin.

We’re now in Act II. After playing a few runs, creating wildly overpowered cards named after such televised luminaries as Cop Rock and NBC’s The Event, I beat Leshy, got the film roll, and… oh, right. This was always a game within a game. So after a nasty finale, a found footage FMV, and a fun trick on the fact that you never actually press “New Game” when you start it up for the first time, Inscryption (and yep, autocorrected the moment I pressed the spacebar) is now an entirely different game. Like, it’s still a card game about animal sacrifice. There’s still a cabin, Leshy, the others. But it’s all warped in ways that are fun and unsettling. The graphics are now chunky Undertale pixels instead of a grungy first-person view. Playing the game now entails putting a deck together, and I haven’t seen any overt roguelike elements in the admittedly one game I played. The world is now a playground for a pantheon of four mythical cardmakers—one of whom just happens to carry the airs of my stinkbug sidekick from the first act. Biggest of all these changes is that it’s no longer an overt horror game. I’m sure the scary stuff will come back, but this has stylistically turned into a fairly standard retro adventure. Super cool. And until things inevitably swing back to spooky I don’t have to worry about playing at night, having a panic attack, and being afraid of the dark and windows for an entire year like when I watched Us.

I probably didn’t need to reveal that. Anyway, I think my game plan for tomorrow is simple: blast through at least one chapter of Yakuza, start up Indy, make more progress in Avowed than “find out there’s a weight limit and slowly walk to the camp to stick my excess weapons in storage,” and see if I can beat that Fable II ghost quest in ten minutes. If I can do that, it stays on the roster until we find that first party member. If not, I devote an entire paragraph to insulting Peter Molyneux. You know, it’s funny. I have so many ideas for writing projects. I’ve got plans for a retrospect of the Batman: Arkham quadrilogy, “Walk the Line” entries for Kirby Super Star, basically every other Super Mario entry, and the entire Mass Effect Trilogy, and while I only have intentions on a Control piece, I want to replay that after replaying Alan Wake 1 and before finally starting Alan Wake 2. My entire writing process is an elaborate network of schemes, and… well, a lot of them don’t happen. Hell, the only other thing I’ve worked on since January is editing three year old “Fighter’s Spirit” scripts. “Passing the Buck” is the single most intensive project I’ve undertaken for this website. It is exhausting. And yet, I don’t really miss juggling more things right now, probably because this is such an intense juggling session on its own.

Friday, February 21: Completed Chapter 7 of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, recruited Hammer in Fable II, and mapped out much of Dawnshore in Avowed.

Damnit, it worked. I was fully expecting the game to drag out the romance and give me reason to bail, but I managed to seduce the man and accidentally drive him to suicide within three minutes. It is hard to express the exact mixture of pride, satisfaction, and disappointment this engendered. Commissioning a second statue afterwards gave me enough clout to go back on the main path, which conveniently features a dungeon and Hammer, the first member of the party you spend the game amassing. She seems fine; she’s got a character arc. With this, I can give up on Fable II and move on. I can’t say this one was a good time, and honestly, it didn’t earn nearly as much attention as it got from me. But there was a point in Wellspring Cave where I felt kinda… wistful. Not during the combat, or the dialogue. Just the general exploration. There is a beauty to Fable that’s hidden under a mountain of tired British humor and bizarre avenues for player agency. The unique topography, the sunlight bursting between the trees, the attempts to create a sense of place.

Despite the fact that I completed an entire Like a Dragon chapter in one two hour session, this was not a mad dash from the Liumang turf (and the ludicrous fashion and personality of its leader Zhao), to the Geomijul’s spooky surveillance station. In that time I finished two quests, saving a fallen Korean actor from alcoholism and helping a homeless man work up the courage to ask a woman out, and changed classes for my characters. Nanba’s a cook now. Given that you gain more benefits for sticking with one power and that new weapons cost a ton, I should probably not change them too often. Especially since I was only able to replace this gear from all the money we made in the business sim, which is both incredibly fun and incredibly time-consuming. But it’s pretty great that I was able to blast through the plot without sacrificing the optional side stories entirely. The world of Like a Dragon is built on this stuff; that’s how it tries to make a coherent world, just like how Fable has woodcutting mini-games and the ability to fart on cue. Also, you still gotta do some of it to survive. Nanba has left the party for the time being after a dramatic left-field revelation, and the challenge does not let up, so the only way I scraped past those last mandatory fights was because Eri stepped in as a party member. Eri, who can only be recruited through the business sim. So, so grateful for whoever told me to stick with it. I love getting advice that’s just “keep doing this thing you like.”

Image: Source Gaming. The Ijin Three. Like a Dragon is commendable for how incredibly eccentric and wacky it makes its gangsters. It’s like they actively try to be crazy in a world where everyone already knows all the crime movie tropes.

As for Indiana… Look, I got a couple of phone calls that lasted a few hours altogether. Avowed has good music, but Indy’s sound demands to be heard, especially when you explore a sandbox for the first time. All those John Williams-style stings. So I played the new game on mute while talking about life, art, family, and the impending collapse of this industry. To be clear, I had a plan, namely to make substantial progress without engaging with the dialogue-heavy main plot. In practice, this meant scouring Dawnshore, the southernmost region of the Living Lands and the game’s first sandbox. This was incredibly helpful, as I opened up fast travel points, got the lay of the (living) land, and managed to find and solve a few quests anyway. Next time, it’s gonna be all plot and major missions, using what I did today to make exploring easier. I don’t know how additive this will be in the long run, given how many sandboxes there appear to be. But it’ll definitely make exploring this area a lot easier.

Saturday, February 22: defeated the Scrypts and passed Act II, defeated the Uberbots and passed Act III, and completed Inscryption,

Holy Mantis God, folks, we’re really in it now. While Act II wasn’t as perfect as Act I (largely due to introducing a lot of new mechanics that I… mostly ignored, like the gem stuff), it was still funny, frenetic, and continued Inscryption’s goal of constantly surprising you. For the first leg of the story, you’re trapped in this one dinky cabin; now that cabin is just a small part of a world map and oddly comforting. Where you spent your time poking at straws for context and history, now you’ve got a relatively big cast. What few NPCs you met have become, essentially, the Gym Leaders of Pokémon. The identity of the strange green creature you saw in your dream is revealed. All-powerful Leshy is just a small figure. Within just a few hours after the start of the game, this roguelike is now more of a conventional RPG. And after some fun and morbidly funny fights, we move to a final act that’s mostly back in the first one’s territory. Mostly. I should note that the first two paragraphs were written in the afternoon, after I started Act III and before I came back to finish the whole game. They’ve been edited (mostly the second) to account for that, but it’s another example of how these entries sometimes have to be written in chunks.

Image: Source Gaming. Inscryption going off the rails… at least, if it was ever on them to begin with.

Before we continue, though, a big SPOILER WARNING for Act III of Inscryption. I guess all of this should be considered spoiler territory, but if you have not played this and want to, ignore this paragraph and skip to the Outro. You should go in blind, especially for this final part, but I also can’t not discuss it. Good? Okay, let’s continue. Seeing the big twist that brings us into Act III—that the Stoat, the first talking card you get in Act I, is actually the robot Scrybe P03 and the real antagonist of the entire game—made me realize that this was a week about partners. Sidekicks, allies, companions… you know, party members. Fable’s play sessions were built around recruiting a single one. Avowed gave you one from the start and pointed really hard in the second’s direction. In Yakuza I got an optional party member, but my first main one left, and who knows when he’ll return. Planet of Lana’s got the cat. And in Inscryption, you’ve got these cardstock partners who become your foes, and naturally, it’s the weakest, the one who spends most of the time kvetching, who’s actually the most dangerous of them all. These are all wildly different games in terms of genre, but I suppose that they’re all, to some extent, about connections. Saving people who later come to your aid, recruiting people to join a cause, or finding tears in a connection you thought strong. Ichiban and Lana are more overtly about this, but it’s notable that Avowed keeps finding ways to ask you about the Envoy’s history. Who she knows, who she cares about, in one instance the history of an ancient culture hero who may be related to her in some capacity. Perhaps this is just one more example proving what I know, that video games are an inherently communal medium. Or perhaps it’s just that no one wants to make a single player game as claustrophobic as the original Metroid. Either way, P03 has used us, proven scarier than Leshy was, and it was clearly time to stop them and, I dunno, save Luke Carder, the influencer from the live action FMV clips who found a floppy disk in the woods and is now shackled to a table and forced to play cards forever.

At least, he was when I finished Act II on Saturday morning. Now he’s bleeding out in his nice house, with no one aware of his journey through hell. The final phase of the game is a bit too long, a bit too grindy, especially since you really just wanna finish things and get your revenge. Many of the new innovations are really good, a couple are less so, but I think we probably could’ve stood to have fewer encounters in between the crazy end game bosses. Incidentally, it’s a great revenge; Leshy, Grimora, and Magnificus kill that ‘bot real good. And the epilogue is also oddly sweet. As Luke has chosen to delete the game Inscryption, and with it the lives and being of every creature he met inside it, the end is simply… playing cards with them. Two come with wildly different gameplay, but the main theme is simply giving them one last game. No stakes, no losses, just throwing down cards because damnit, this is an amazing game and it’s also all they know. There’s a fundamental humanity to this world, no matter how bleak its ending. Or how bleaker its secret ending for those who play the alternate reality adventure, but that’s ultimately an aside. Something for those who need the search. As for me, I can simply marvel at this work of beauty.

Outro: This will not surprise regular readers, but I’ve become deeply neurotic. I keep thinking about the time I’m losing and the pile of games that seems to stay high up. I’m desperate to start more and to finish more, and I’m coming to grips with the fact that this project was always going to be about failings. Games taking longer than I wanted, games getting ignored out of disinterest, games I want to try but can’t give time to. More than anything else, though, this was a project about doing what I could in the time I have, not managing a “victory.” An experience of missed marks and lost opportunities and coming to terms with losses, which is fairly poetic but doesn’t feel so in the moment. This reality is something I’ve understood logically but haven’t really come to terms with. So even though we’ve covered twenty-six separate releases since January 1, it feels like nothing. And it’s sometimes hard to square that circle with how draining this can be.

Image: Source Gaming. Of course, nothing’s fully bad when Nancy’s on the case.

I gotta level with you. There was a time on Sunday or Monday where I spent a few hours simply not playing anything after enjoying Inscryption, just listening to Springsteen or something. Days later I was almost put off at myself for having the temerity to do something other than play Xbox. Sometimes I think about Chapter 2, a project that only added three new games (one of which I abandoned after two sessions) and feels like it could’ve added another game, even just one. This is absurd. Having a lighter week that helped me understand the contours of this project, even when that was a week I had off from work and had more time, is not a bad thing. Giving time to things that aren’t this project is not a bad thing. Rocking out to The River… I mean, why aren’t you doing that right now? I put a lot of work into finding ways for “Passing the Buck” to be more psychologically comfortable than all of my previous series, and those tactics have worked, but they only work so much. This was always going to happen, just as this was always going to end with me not trying as much as I’d like.

Anyway, a few days ago, I got a message from my father. I’ve been open with people in my life about the enjoyment and challenge this series has engendered. Apparently, the challenge part seems to take up most of my explanations. He was worried about the stress from this project and offered to pay for an extension on Game Pass. For him, it would be a very minor expenditure and a way for me to feel more relaxed about these. I could take time finishing these things. It’s a very generous offer and I’m appreciative of it. There is, however, a problem in his logic, and that’s because of a problem in my logic: if “Passing the Buck” were to continue, it would still be as time-intensive and stressful as it already is. It wouldn’t make me, say, more comfortable taking Yakuza slowly; it would simply push me to add even more to the plate. I don’t want Game Pass as more than a writing project because I have sincere philosophical and economic problems with it. At the same time… I’d also be lying if I said that I didn’t consider taking him up on his offer. There’s a big part of me that wants to keep going, even after April 1. Mostly because there’s so much to try, but probably also because that part of me thinks I can “win” if I just do a bit more, go for a bit longer, add a few more to that twenty-six tries. For all of my intellectual bravado, this is gamer trash nonsense talking and it should not be accepted.

Image: Source Gaming. I’m probably gonna give up on it in favor of the lightning magic, which has greater range and seems to be generally better, but the fire is really, really pretty.

And because of that, it’s time to make some decisions, which’ll come through yet another change in the week’s schedule. It’s gonna be built around a theme: Doom Eternal. I’ll be playing it starting Sunday, and every day, but that’s it. By Saturday night I’m uninstalling it, for the third time, no matter how good it is. I mean, I love Doom (2016) to death and still got burnt out on it by the end, so that was probably gonna happen anyway. The others are The Walking Dead Episode 5 (which we have to do and will be short), Still Wakes the Deep (also short), and Maneater (because it, um, leaves at the end of next week). This will hopefully have dividends. For one thing, as we move into the end there are a lot of Triple-A games I’d like to try, but emphasis on try; this can give me an idea of how that’ll work. For another, it allows a structure—just not such an onerous one that I can’t play other games. Plus, I do like changing the format of this on a dime. It feels really good. As an aside, I’ve begun working on a schedule for the rest of the project. It’s not a hundred percent set in stone, but this does help a lot.

Anyway, this was pretty dark, so let’s try to add some lightness. I had a lot of fun with this week’s material, and I did even before this last-ditch victory over Inscryption that admittedly made this article even harder to set up than usual. That definitely put things over the top. I was fully prepared to take another week with this thing and have been open about that throughout the week, and that would’ve been fine. Consider Chants of Sennaar and Hypnosoace Outlaw; I wanted to beat them in just one week each, didn’t, but ended up having a better experience that way. In retrospect, this wouldn’t have worked as well, if only because it’s a much shorter game with a much shorter final act than either of them. But actually shooting through it… well, there’s something kinda dramatic in that. That hard push through the last few hours, the excitement as you realize you really can do it in so short a time, the mild pit in your stomach when you realize how late it is, the pain of scarfing down rice pilaf so fast that you have to spend minutes snorting it out while the creepy background music is playing.

Image: Source Gaming. It’s often very hard to pare down the images for every article I use, culling and abandoning so many, but it was especially hard with Planet of Lana. I grabbed a bunch before I’ll inevitably delete everything from last week, and this isn’t the best necessarily, but it’s the one I wanted.

Granted, that’s a very specific experience. One I don’t intend to relive any time soon. Still, this was a wonderful ending for the week and a wonderful game to end it with, one I’ll think about for a long time. And although it was my favorite thing this week, that’s not for a lack of trying on the part of the other games. The Yakuza business sim is way better than it has any right to be, and I’m excited to see where the story’s going. Avowed is scratching an itch I haven’t bothered touching in years. Planet of Lana started out frustrating but ended delightfully. As much tsuris as this experience has given me, and continues to give me, past midnight and a few hours before posting time, I’m also having a lot of fun.

Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!