March 2, 2025|

Filed under: Editorial, Featured

Passing the Buck Chapter 9: SEVEN DAYS OF DOOM!!

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?

We are now nearing the end game of “Passing the Buck.” This is our last week in February, meaning that I’ve only got four weeks after this one to get my ducks in a row. When I started this project, I came in with the full understanding that I wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t play through the entirety of every game on Game Pass, or every game on Game Pass that interested me. The story of this series is one about a man biting off more than he can chew and seeing how big of a bite that can be. And since we’re reaching for breadth over depth, it is, and always was, important to have games that I try but do not finish. If a game gives me tsuris, it’s gotta go. But also, there’s a value in just trying something and discarding it within a matter of minutes, hours, or days. This rule has been… fitfully followed, but now we need to expand on it. There’s only so many days left and so many dozens of games of interest. It’s time to start something new.

Or rather, something from six weeks ago. Back in January, I had an exercise where I tried four Microsoft games with no intent on finishing them. It worked really well, as I was able to try important to semi-important parts of gaming history and liked one of them so much that it became a semi-regular guest (and is, incidentally, back for this week. Hooray!). Why the hell didn’t I try to do that again when it worked so well? Why didn’t I have, I dunno, one game every week that was only ever planned as a sample?

Image: Source Gaming. This is mostly so I can show off more of Doom, but I also do recognize that these intros and outros are getting pretty long. If I can’t cut back on those, I might as well make them more fun to look at.

This week, we’re trying an experiment. Every day, let’s say from thirty or so minutes to an hour (or two on the first day so I hit the ground running), I’ll play Doom Eternal. It will not be the only game, but I’ll give it the attention owed to a major release. That it’s a sequel to a game I adore helps, since I’m liable to actually have a good time. After Saturday, around when this article is published, it’ll be deleted from my hard drive. Finito. It won’t enter the rotation, it won’t take up more than what’s admittedly a huge chunk of time, but it’ll potentially drive the conversation. Depending on how this goes, I could potentially try this on gigantic Triple-A properties for the rest of the project. Either I kick myself for not thinking of this sooner or it just becomes one random venture. You know, the Microsoft standard.

That being said, I do feel strongly about finishing games, and a big appeal of “Passing the Buck” has been seeing as many as I have to the end credits. While I don’t know how far I can get in beating Yakuza or Indy, I want to finish at least something. And that’s just what we’re gonna do with the super-short horror game Still Wakes the Deep and the inevitably tragic conclusion to The Walking Dead. Killer shark simulator Maneater is also along for the ride before it swims off of Game Pass. Consider this, I don’t know, a test? A prelude? Whatever the case, time to hit the ground running.

What I played:

Doom Eternal: after having battled his way through Hell, the Doomslayer fights across an Earth fully overridden by demons. It’s still that classic, polished first-person shooting, but now he has to also juggle the Flame Belch, the Blood Punch, and a bevy of new monsters like the cybernetic Doom Hunter.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon: Ichiban begins to finally uncover the conspiracy engulfing both Ijincho and his home of Kamurocho, one that connects the conservative moralists at Bleach Japan, the treacherous Omi Alliance that his patriarch joined, and the mysterious Tokyo Governor Ryo Aoki. And after his home is destroyed by the Omi invasion into Ijincho, Geomijul assassin Joon-gi Han helps Ichi rescue the charismatic Liumang boss Zhao.
Avowed: The Envoy journeys to the Emerald Stair, a lush but dangerous forest whose soul-weaving animancers are suffering the Dreamscourge. She recruits the prodigy Giatta Castell to find the source of the problem; they uncover shocking revelations about the Envoy’s heritage and horrific devastation courtesy of the Steel Garrote, the zealous arm of the Envoy’s empire.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: From the Himalayas to Shanghai to Thailand, Indy and Gina find the real power of the Great Circle: that it’s a massive teleporter capable of sending people—and most scarily the Third Reich—across the globe in seconds. They wind up in Sukhothai, poised to raid Voss’s Nazi camp and find the next piece of the Circle.
Minecraft: With the base Kanto model mostly done, I have decided to expand the project by adding Johto. This has become… difficult due to the comparatively lesser and worse reference material of Pokémon Gold & Silver and their various remakes.
Maneater: After her mother is killed by a professional shark hunter, a baby shark slowly grows to become the apex predator of the Florida waters. She chomps on fish, survives and eats human shark hunters, all the while enjoying narration that reveals the entire game as an ongoing documentary.
The Walking Dead Episode 5: No Time Left: Although successful in his attempt to rescue Clementine before succumbing to death and zombification, Lee Everett’s last day on Earth is an unmitigated nightmare. He gets his arm chopped off in a failed attempt to slow the infection, Kenny is killed trying to atone for his misdeeds, Clem’s kidnapper tallies Lee’s own sins in an unsettling standoff, and Clem herself is forced to kill her dying surrogate father before fleeing Savannah altogether.
Still Wakes the Deep: Caz McLeary, a 1970s Scottish oil rig electrician hiding from an assault charge, finds himself in a nightmare as his station becomes enveloped by some deep sea monstrosity. The thing destroys the rig’s structure, turns his coworkers into monsters, and he can only run, hide, and scramble around collapsing walkways and stairs.

Sunday, February 23: started and completed Chapters 1 and 2 of Doom Eternal, maxed out Adachi’s bond and completed Chapter 8 in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, completed the quest “An Untimely End” in Avowed, and entered and left the Himalayas in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

…And we’re off to a great start with some problems. To get everyone up to speed, typically a modern online game requires some sort of account with the game’s publisher, but over the last decade we’ve seen a surge of publishers requiring this for single player games. Sony, for instance, only just started walking back from a requirement that Steam users have PlayStation Network accounts for their games, even though many of those users are from countries that PSN doesn’t support. It’s all part of forcing you into some stupid metaverse that makes you feel like you can’t ever be unplugged. Bethesda demanding one for Doom Eternal, a predominantly single player game with a popular multiplayer mode, is not the end of the world. But I still don’t want to make an account. Consider me an old man yelling at a cloud. Fortunately, after downloading and deleting the game because of this, twice, an online search after a third download taught me that I can just turn my Xbox offline to skip that. Unfortunately, what I did not know in my two-plus hours playing Doom Eternal was that if you’re in offline mode, your screenshot captures don’t work. The dozens of mostly okay snapshots are trapped offline in Microsoft’s photographic panopticon, where they’ll eventually be deleted but are seemingly inaccessible until then. The workaround for that is to go offline, turn the game on, start the campaign, turn the online on, and then the capturing works. It’s only mildly annoying. I started a second playthrough on Easy just to get a few, though almost everything from those ten minutes was very blurry. This is presumably part of a visual setting I changed when restarting, which is fine. Honestly, it’s high time I started exploring visual settings more with these games. That’s why my Indy screenshots for the foreseeable future will be in the ultra-cinematic widescreen mode.

Image: Source Gaming. And Arachnotron thinks his day is going bad.

I’m about to lay a lot of criticisms at Doom Eternal, so before I do that I’m going to preface this by saying that it’s still Doom. It’s still really good. I’m still having a wonderful time ripping and tearing. And I’m sure I’ll have a lot of positive things to say over the following six days. But, right off the first two chapters I do think it’s a step down from Doom (2016) in a number of ways. Aesthetically, pushing the glib corporate satire and lore doesn’t really work when the lore was already boring. The smaller ammo pools are presumably there to make the Chainsaw a more important part of the rotation, but with only three weapons at the moment I’m spending a lot of time running around with no ammo. Its new counterparts, the Flame Belch and Blood Punch, haven’t yet felt central to the gameplay loop. Giving enemies specific weaknesses often makes any other plan of attack feel like a waste—why bother shooting a Cacodemon when I know a grenade can stagger it into an instant kill?—and some are dependent on precision shots you can’t reliably do. I’m not inherently opposed to first-person platforming (I’m a huge fan of Metroid Prime and am excited to try Mirror’s Edge), but this form is rough. And there are a lot of tutorials, ones that pause the game or physically whisk you out of it. They’re there because Eternal is more heavily based around these themes of resource management, and you need to know them. But the presentation for introducing them feels like a step back. Levels that exist to be tutorials can be frustrating or condescending, but I don’t know if it’s better to stick Doomguy in another dimension so we can learn about how setting people on fire summons ammo shards. These are all natural responses to Doom (2016), itself a response to prevailing shooter wisdom. My main concern so far is that id Software may have not found a response to that game’s biggest problem: an inability to leave well enough alone. The game is way too long, kinda samey after several hours, and the attempts to mythologize the Doomslayer are… gilding the lily. Yes, I am asking for smaller portions.

This was kind of a weirdly negative day, even if I did have a good time and made good progress. Indy’s Nazi boat was full of instant kills and drawn-out bits, almost like the various Indy-inspired linear games that exist. The main puzzle was good, but for some reason it was just beyond me (thanks to the game’s hint system, though, for helping me out). As for Avowed, I’ve decided to jump down from Normal to Easy. There’ll still be some pushback, but I’ve been repeatedly dying again and again to some of the most basic, early game fights. That’s not what I play these games for, it’s not fun for me, and now I can concentrate on magic instead of potentially putting points into health. Though… probably should put at least one more point into health. The exception here was Yakuza, which was short, fun, and gave me a conclusion into Adachi’s story. It’s a bit disarming that party members’ stories are so short, but hell; I’m not gonna start complaining about that. Good for Adachi, lovable loser and suboptimal party member that he is.

Monday, February 24: completed Chapter 9 of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, completed Chapter 3 of Doom Eternal, entered and left Shanghai in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and continued in Minecraft.

Apparently, the theme this week seems to be friction, again. I died several times against the bosses of this chapter, and while there’s a logical sense of me struggling in a fistfight against a wrecking ball, it’s also abundantly clear that Like a Dragon just isn’t meant to be played like this, with me going through entire chapters in two hour sessions. The boss was Level 27, and Ichiban’s Level 25 and the strongest in the party. Because of that, it’s time to stretch things out a bit more and soak in Ijincho once again. Do more sidequests. Fight more, especially for those Part time Hero missions. Return to the Yokohama Underground, which was turned into an optional dungeon a few chapters ago. Get some more cash from the management sim (which I did for a bit today, actually, and would be good if party members leave again and I need to rely more on Eri). My original plan was already to give it a lot of time like Persona 3, so while I’ll try to keep pushing hard, maybe going back to that image of the game is best. Still, beating two chapters in as many days is undeniably good. I’d like to get at least one more done by the end of the week. Two would be better, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

As for Doom, we’re still learning. My initial plan was to play for just an hour each day, like what I did with the sampling of Microsoft games in Chapter 3. Yesterday was meant as an exception so that we could get up to speed and give me a better view of the game from the start. It made me confident that I could just replace “hour” with “chapter” and get the same result. Hoo boy, that is not the case! The Cultist Base level took over two hours! This game’s levels are too damn long, which is not good since its predecessor’s biggest weakness was that sheer bloat. So, we’re changing back to the original plan: just one hour, plus or minus whatever gets me to the next checkpoint. Boom, done. Despite my complaining, I’m having a lot of fun with each encounter. Juggling the sizable number of guns, tools, and mechanics is pretty overwhelming already, but the Rocket Launcher is a delight. And the music, god, the music. When the “At Doom’s Gate” remix started on Sunday, I was floored. And have stayed floored since.

Image: Source Gaming. The crazy Shanghai escape of Indiana Jones is kinda mixed, and it does get away from the game’s greatest pleasures, but it’s fun as a palette cleanser (that admittedly came right after another palette cleanser, but I had fun).

After Shanghai turned out to be a lot shorter than I expected—it’s got the same frustrating “do the level in the exact right way or die instantly” school of level design as the Himalayas, but it’s also a lot crazier—I loaded up Minecraft. You know, it felt a bit silly spending so much time with Doom; I wanted something else before ending the day. My work began building on the mountain range above Kanto, once again making Mt. Moon all the higher, and after talking with someone about how the region has a neighboring land in the Pokémon series, they pushed me into adding Johto. I’m a bit scared, just because Gen II is less well mapped. My primary source so far has been the very detailed official map from Pokémon Let’s Go, a document published a decade after and with significantly more detail than the map of the two regions from Pokémon Heart Gold & Soul Silver. But we can work with it, and this person pointed out that I can add some of my own flair. My plan is to work westward, starting with the link between Routes 22, 23, 26, and 28 (this’ll kinda mess with some of the geographical features, but I’m not gonna sweat that too much). First, though, I’ve added a lot of dirt blocks to just set up the space for Mt. Silver and the regions’ general northern mountain ranges. Ideally, that’ll lead to Blackthorn City and New Bark Town. Unlike Kanto’s Saffron City, Johto doesn’t really have a clear centerpiece, which kinda fits its rustic, historic character. But it will make things a bit of a pain.

Tuesday, February 25: started and reached Level 8 in Maneater, entered Emerald Stair and Fior mes Ivèrnvo, played an hours’ with of Chapter 4 in Doom Eternal, and recruited Joon-gi in Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

I just got a message from Xbox. Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which I’ve actually had in my wishlist for over a year, is currently on a huge sale from now until March 4. I think my being a Game Pass subscriber also gives an extra cut. So, yes, time for another change. I’ll keep playing Yakuza until Saturday, at which point I’ll purchase it and remove it from the rotation. The goal of this project is to play games I only have access to via Game Pass, and by then it won’t fit the criteria. Obviously, I’m not abandoning the game by purchasing it; after we’re done here I’ll go back and give it all the attention it deserves. Get to see all the side content. As much as I was looking forward to finishing the game before the end of “Passing the Buck”—it’s one of the four games I used to advertise this project—there’s something poetic in a lowbrow way. We’ve got this big new direction, running out the clock, and now we’re running out the clock in a very different context. It’ll probably foreshadow how the last week or two might feel.

Image: Source Gaming. The big mom shark chomping down in the prologue. The game has that “you start as another, stronger character as the prologue” trope, but it’s kinda hilarious when it’s, you know, about a shark.

Sometime after the great Tony Todd passed away last year, I got the urge to watch something of his. Not his best films, or his famous guest spots, or his charming turn as the giant in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle; I wanted something dopey. Something he could elevate merely by his presence. I went on Peacock and picked the abysmal Vampire in Vegas. He plays Dracula, obviously. While I did not enjoy playing Maneater, largely because I don’t like its gameplay and it’s surprisingly grindy and the controls are unpleasant, I am glad to have tried it for the same reason. This is, like Vampire in Vegas, the kind of stupid nonsense you want to stumble upon in a service like this. It’s weird. You remember Carrion, that The Thing-esque reverse horror game from 2020 (that’s conveniently also on Game Pass)? Maneater is a worse take on that, replacing the Eldritch alien tentacle thing with a shark. You eat little things to grow up and eat bigger things. You have a skill tree for improving your sonar or, uh, electricity teeth. You battle alligators and shark hunters, all to get revenge on the guy who killed your mom. And all the while, there’s this ridiculous nature documentary-style commentary by Chris Parnell—Dr. Spaceman, Cyril Figgis, and My Adventures with Superman’s sexy biseinen Slade. He reminds me of the narrator on Fishing with John, and few things in this world can make me happier than by reminding me of Fishing with John. Again, I don’t think this is a good game, but I think it’s one that makes the games industry better. Certainly makes Game Pass better, and its leaving in a few days is a loss. That crazy shark box art on the storefront is fun. Was fun.

While I’ve only been in Avowed for a few hours, all things being equal, I’m glad to finally be in a new sandbox. Emerald Stair is a gorgeous place; it reminds me of the spectacular swamps and forests of Xenoblade Chronicles. While I’m confident the game will eventually patch in some sort of photo mode that removes the HUD elements, it’s a bit of a shame right now seeing these instructions and gauges and icons over the grand mushrooms or the spooky, desiccated houses. Currently, I’ve got a three-part quest whose three parts seem… extensive. One has taken me from the center of the map to the top left corner. This isn’t bad, although it’s still a lot and I just keep chugging health and magic potions. On that note, I’m largely using the common level spellbook. Using the radial menu to pick spells isn’t fun at all, so I’d rather stick to the books, which give you a much more direct combat menu. Plus, I don’t feel particularly strong from any of the spells, whether these basic ones or the higher level blizzards and fireballs you can use from rarer and unique spellbooks. All the points I’ve been putting into magical attributes seems to barely make a change, so I dunno. This is just a game with a very high difficulty, apparently.

Wednesday, February 26: started and completed The Walking Dead Episode 5: No Time Left, completed Chapter 4 of Doom Eternal, and continued in Avowed and Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

And thus, I say goodbye to Lee Everett. Taking cues from the season’s rising escalation, this was an action-heavy climax filled with pain, consequences, and an amazing Ennio Morricone-style music sting. What it avoids is any real downtime, one of the game’s great tools, though for very good reasons. It’s the end of the season, we’re trying to save Clementine, and it’d be nuts if Lee was as chatty as usual given that he’s hours away from turning into a zombie. And I think I subconsciously roleplayed that. I didn’t bother as much with what optional dialogue there was, partially ‘cause I just wanted to keep going but mostly because it didn’t make sense for him. Under my orders and his compounding stress, we kept making godawful decisions that went against the cool-headedness Lee stands for, most notably snarling at Christa to chop his arm off and telling everyone to retrieve a walkie talkie that was absolutely not worth a human life. RIP Kenny. It’s a rough time, and the tenderness of his last scene with Clementine shines dimly through that roughness. Exceptionally written and acted, but also painful, mournful, and unsatisfying by design. We finally know the identity of the creep who’s been stalking us—he’s the guy everyone but Lee and Clem robbed at the end of Episode 2—but he’s more of a ghost than some conspiratorial supervillain. Clem finds her parents, and they’re obviously Walkers. Lee asks Christa and Omid to take care of Clem, knowing those two are maybe not up to the task. The friendly cancer support group stole the boat, but was the boat ever a viable option? It never seemed like more than Kenny’s wishful thinking. I think the last advice I gave the girl was to just keep moving. Man plans, God laughs, and this one has a cruel sense of humor.

Image: Source Gaming. The uncomfortably intimate climax of Season 1. After an episode with no down time, no comfort, the quiet is somewhere close to terrifying.

In my Episode 4 review, I suggested that it felt like a culmination. This one is even more so; like, the kidnapper literally acts as a judge damning Lee for every choice we made on our journey (and to drive the point home, Episode 5 ends with a big, two-page infographic for the whole story. I considered adding it, but this article is getting too big as it is). After five games of forcing you into horrible situations and their occasional consequences, this game provides a twist by having a character interrogate you over the reasons for your choices. And it’s “you” in the singular and plural, as he asks us by asking Lee. It’s a really cool give-and-take. Like, I only chose to save Carly in Episode 1 because I thought she was a more fun character, but the theory of this entirely unreliable creep is that Lee only chose to save her because he had a crush on a cute woman that would, tragically, go unmet. Obviously, he can’t ask us, only our character, but it leads to a unique kind of role-playing where the player and the character’s motivations feel more intertwined and complex than they do in most games. Some of the biggest or most dramatic decisions didn’t get referenced, but that’s okay. Perhaps ironically, my real criticism is that I think it should’ve been the one time where the dialogue didn’t have a time limit of any kind. Make you stew with your choices and bar you and Lee from the option of saying nothing.

I could talk more about Like a Dragon. Ichi’s new side adventures include defending a dominatrix from the bullying of other dominatrices and digging a homeless man out of a mountain of yakuza trash, because this game continues to have the best side quests. Did we ever get into the story of that fallen Korean movie star or my rescue of Nancy the crawfish? I could talk about Avowed, which if I’m being honest feels less fun each day due to a very high difficulty curve. There’s a required boss fight I could skip with a much different character build, but even the basic enemies in Emerald Stair are so beefy. But given how negative I’ve been towards Doom, let me say this: hail, Doom Hunter. This boss—who will inevitably become a semi-recurring mini-boss like the Baron of Hell—is insane. His lower torso’s a hoverboard, his left hand’s a double chainsaw, he’s got regenerating health and homing missiles, and the craziest thing about him is that I actually beat him, and then his two clones that collectively make up his boss fight, in one try. I love this dude. He’s hilarious, and despite being tough he also feels relatively fair. You kinda have to use the Plasma Rifle to break his shield, which perpetuates that issue of enemies having weapon-specific weaknesses, but it’s not required and his size makes him a great target for the Rocket Launcher. He’s got crazy moves and phases, yet evading him is relatively straightforward; Doom is kinda like Cuphead in that you’re spending as much time dodging as you are shooting. And he complements the classic demons like the Revenant, Cacodemon, and my beloved Pinky, whose reappearance yesterday delighted me. I looked this dude up today and was pleased to confirm my assumption that he’s a creation of Doom Eternal, not an evolution of someone from Doom 2. This game has a lot of new stuff that’s not amazing, but the Doom Hunter is not one of them.

Thursday, February 27: started and completed Engineering in Still Wakes the Deep, continued in Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Doom Eternal.

I didn’t have an amazing time with the first half of Still Wakes the Deep, but that’s not on it at all. See, I think I’ve got this sixth sense that alerts me to wake up whenever there’s a Nintendo Direct, even if it’s an inevitably boring Pokémon Presents that I had forgotten about. So I woke up hours earlier than normal, played the game for about an hour, foggy-eyed and kinda out of it, before collapsing in bed for a couple hours and playing the game again afterwards. “Hazy” is often a good quality in a horror game, but not this kind. That being said, as a narrative horror game, I’m liking it a lot, and a sight more than Soma, my last dalliance with the genre. Caz is a good main character, and he fills my soft preference for horror protagonists who are already haunted before they meet Leatherface. The general aesthetic of this aching, barely functioning Seventies oil rig is great; it’s a good setup and furthers the theme of Caz being trapped by institutions and communities. It’s also a very distinctly and appreciably Scottish story, with themes, dialogue, and even a location; Scotland experienced an oil boom about a decade before the game was set (the game also offers Scottish Gaelic subtitles which I didn’t use). You look at the unsafe platforms and nonworking lifeboats, the abusive boss who inevitably turned into a monster, and you can feel life closing in, the jaws of economic and geopolitical shifts no less dangerous to the people working here than the Lovecraftian thing beneath the sea. In fact, you could potentially axe the monsters entirely and still wind up with a pretty good horror game. There’s just a lot of personality, character, and specificity to the proceedings.

Image: Source Gaming. While much of Still Wakes the Deep is spent in claustrophobic interiors, the outdoor fog you see for much of the game is intriguing.

After the first brush with monsters, I went down to the easy difficulty. It’s not a “safe mode” like Soma’s, enemies seem to still kill you in one hit, but I think the timing’s more forgiving? This has confirmed an assumption I’ve long tried to hide that my tolerance for survival horror is predicated on my ability to fight back. Perhaps I can’t call myself a “true” fan of the genre, but… no, no. Screw that. It is perfectly fine to have limits for what works and genres you can engage in, and it’s perfectly fine to have a lower threshold for things, especially when those things are designed around friction, fear, and other flavors of discomfort. Besides, Still Wakes the Deep developer The Chinese Room put in this lower difficulty option for a reason. Namely, so that people like me can play this without having a panic attack. Not that I didn’t come close a couple times. God, I have never been so relieved to see the ubiquitous yellow paint, the kind that makes sure every video game hero knows where to go.

…Whisperingly, I don’t think I like Avowed. I feel bad saying it. At its best, it’s the Western version of Dragon Quest XI, pure RPG comfort food. That’s not a bad thing, especially since we’re thirteen years out from Skyrim and with no clear successor to its light pleasures. And there are times where I get that same sense of wanderlust. Maybe I’ll find a towering wooden outpost whose view of the forest is jaw-dropping or finagle my way into a dirty secret in a governor’s mansion. But these moments are somewhat fleeting and have gotten more so as the plot goes on. Honestly, it might just be the difficulty; the game seems almost hostile to magic builds and getting better magic tomes hasn’t helped. I think I’m gonna give this one more week. There are parts I like, and it’s significantly more fun than Fable II or The Evil Within, but if it’s just gonna be this for the rest of the adventure I’d rather gamble on another major release. The only problem is that if I lose it and Yakuza, I’m out an RPG to play for the entirety of March. And, well, I’d really like to play and finish at least one more of those. It’s pretty commendable how many Game Pass has snatched up.

Friday, February 28: completed Still Wakes the Deep, continued in Doom Eternal, made it into the Top 50 and got a new headquarters for Ichiban Holdings in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, recruited Giatta in Avowed, and entered Siam in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

I’m not sure if I’ll have time for Ichi and the gang on Saturday, so let me give his game something of an epilogue today. Yakuza: Like a Dragon was one of the biggest priorities of this series. It’s been of interest to me to some degree since it came out and especially as the years have gone by, and its success—as a reboot that brought its franchise to a wider audience—came partially off being a breakout Game Pass hit. This was a target I needed, and I put it in the very first header for just that reason (more on that process in the conclusion). My interest paid off; I love Like a Dragon and though it’ll go unfinished until after “Passing the Buck” ends, it became one of my favorite experiences of this project. And in some ways, that’s pretty surprising. The RPG combat is stylish but not deep in any meaningful way, the world is utterly stuffed with time wasting nonsense, parts feel slightly embarrassing to play when someone else is in the room, and it has hours and hours of long-winded cutscenes. Someone was with me while I played the opening of Chapter 10, and they, a person who doesn’t play games and rarely cares about the gameplay side of the medium, was surprised by how long the scenes were going without actual gameplay. These are not my values when it comes to game design. How did it become an instant favorite?

Image: Source Gaming. So much of this game, from the insane enemies to the fanservice to the wild digressions, shouldn’t work. It should be pure discord. And yet… it works.

Ultimately, it’s down to the eccentric, lively world of Ijincho. Like a Dragon is a crime drama about the “gray zones” of cities: homeless camps, brothels, fetish clubs, smuggling factories, counterfeiting, and seemingly all other forms of vice (other than narcotics and gambling). Somewhat uncharacteristically for a crime drama, though, it doesn’t really leer at these places as exotic or dirty. It’s deeply tacky, to be clear, not to mention silly and zany and patently ridiculous. Saeko has sung magical healing pop songs and spanked religious fanatics, while Ichiban proves that being middle-aged doesn’t have to keep you from breakdance fighting. You sing karaoke, race in the streets, play darts, or help a naked man buy a nice set of threads. You get health bonuses by eating bulgogi and tend the garden of a bartender played by Solid Snake actor David Hayter. But what the game does really well is to treat all of this as comparable, that it’s all on a spectrum of entertainment, culture, and human interaction. Sensory stimulation is king, hence our heroes constantly getting drunk. And that’s why Ichi is one of the best heroes I’ve encountered in an RPG. He’s someone whose personality has a bit of room for you, the player, but his personality and backstory are conducive to living in this world. Yakuza players are digital tourists, but even though he’s not from Ijincho, this district-sized gray zone built out of gangland politics is a natural home for him. That he’s compelling, funny, tolerant, and unflappable certainly doesn’t hurt. He and Lee Everett are of a piece; they are strong characters, in no small part because they have the power to bend and not break.

When I said “one more week” for Avowed, I semi-subconsciously meant “one more day.” After seeing the powerful ending to Still Wakes the Deep and goofing around with Dread Knights and Ichiban Confections (now Ichiban Holdings and billions of yen in debt, yay me), I gave myself another session to determine whether this stays in the rotation or I gamble on a new RPG for March. And, almost to my surprise, it worked! I walked through Emerald Stair, upgraded a spellbook, found enemy camps and houses to rifle through, and that boss that gave me hell? Turns out if you pick the stern dialogue options and don’t try to be nice, she’ll just give you the thing she’s guarding. That let me recruit Giatta, sending Marius the millstone off to the party camp with a tap of the button. This confusing, rambling process was affirming. It made me feel that confident that we—I consider you part of this process, for whatever that’s worth—can reach the end credits. The structural issues are still there, but this made me want to keep going, and in a series that needs to lean towards my immediate enjoyment that’s critical to keeping Avowed on the team. Of course, now I have a new problem: I fielded some ideas for an RPG that could replace it, some of them sound cool, so… do we try to add one to the selection?

Saturday, March 1: got the last two Achievements in Chants of Sennaar, completed the quest “Ancient Soil” in Avowed, and completed Chapter 5 in Doom Eternal.

You know what? For all my complaints, for all my assertions that this is a downgrade from Doom (2016) on all fronts, Doom Eternal is still pretty damn good. Every fight is a roller coaster that’s fun to fight your way through, deaths be damned. The animations remain top notch (I planned on using a Glory Kill for this week’s header, but even after I decided on the Doom Hunter I just kept capturing mutilation after mutilation). Blasting away at Revenants, exploding a Mancubus, fleeing to carve up a zombie with a Pinky on your tail; all of that remains delightful. And sure, maybe the Flame Belch is the only addition that feels positive, and maybe the upcoming Doom: The Dark Ages kinda looks like it’s in the exact same boat of diverging from what I like about the series, but what I said on Sunday is true. It is, indeed, still Doom. And there are far worse, far crueler things to be in this world.

Image: Source Gaming. And the week ended as it began, with a lot of Arachnotrons and me being low on ammo.

This did not stop me from uninstalling it right after 9:00 PM. We all know that the game isn’t gonna get measurably different. This is a series that has historically prided itself on providing rather singular experiences. “You do the same thing for hours” is a bit of a weird complaint when the basic loop is so good, but I would resent mainlining the thing just to hit the credits before March 31st. My enjoyment would curdle, it’d get in the way of everything else, and it’s not like you need me writing yet another set of paragraphs that boil down to “it’s more Doom.” Plus, it’s still kind of a pain to do the silly “go offline” / “go online” trick. However, I’m definitely willing to consider picking a used copy up some day. And more than anything, this shakeup really worked for me. We can, and will, be adapting it for the next four weeks. For the rest of this project, I’m going to sample several games—all blockbusters, all very big and important—for just a week’s time before sending them to the bin. Maybe I won’t play each one every single day as I did with Doom; maybe I’ll decide to give up on one or any of them before hitting the arbitrary limit. They will certainly not stop me from trying other things and finishing whatever I’d like to finish. But this worked out quite well for me, and I think we can adapt and expand on it in the future.

I’m glad I was able to get past the next big story beat in Avowed. I’m liable to hit the third sandbox in the next session, and judging by a very brief Google session there’s only one more to go. I’m happy to see Microsoft put so much scratch into advertising a world that’s small and intimate. Just as yesterday made me feel more able to keep going, this makes me feel more confident about handling the whole story. Seeing more than the bare minimum the Living Lands has to offer. But perhaps the most important thing I did today came out of a promise I made six weeks ago. Look, Achievements are dumb, Achievements are silly, Achievements were a tool by Microsoft to give its platform an identity of meaningless competitive machismo in the stupidest, most arbitrary way imaginable, and their adoption by Steam and Sony wreaked an incalculable level of harm on gaming discourse. There’s your hot take for the week. But, in a different sort of farewell for the week, I went back into Chants of Sennaar and got the only two Achievements that I hadn’t gotten by just playing the game. It’s the first time since maybe Õkami on PS4 that I’ve actively sought out Achievements or Trophies, at least ones on a gaming console and not in-game like the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate challenges. For whatever reason, the idea of nabbing them seemed right. It doesn’t “prove” my love for a game I’ve spent plenty of time evangelizing already, nor was hunting them particularly interesting, but it was a nice way to reminisce about a work of art that a lot more players should check out. It was a goodbye to a great part of Game Pass, and probably to Achievements as a whole. Right after this, I marched right into the settings and turned off Notifications for them, and also the one for taking and uploading captures because god, is that annoying when you want to read captions or just enjoy a harrowing scene of a man desperately trying to justify his actions to a man whose own morality is so utterly, irreparably warped. Look, the next four weeks are going to be quite full, and today was light. I’d like to keep promises, especially the stupid ones, and this was the best time to honor it.

Outro: Although my intention was to keep these relatively short, I feel the need to go off for longer this time. I am sorry for that. This should not be ideal for a project that tried to keep itself short of word, but hey. What are ya gonna do. We can justify it on this being another month down. A lot of big things happened this week, and a lot more are on the horizon.

With The Walking Dead up at the top of the page one last time, let’s get into something I’ve alluded to in the past: how the look of the header informs this series. For basically every other thing we do on this site and probably the rest of the internet, it’s the reverse. You either have a template and pick whatever collection of images fits it best or you just make an entirely original header. That’s logical, and it’s true here; I pick things based on how well they fit the four triangles I’ve got to fill. But because I have four, the obvious conclusion I drew after the first week was that they need to come from different games. By extension, the ideal was to play at least three new games every week, maybe with one game getting referenced twice. This has worked since I should be doing that anyway. It’s important to try more, to push myself. So the header’s this constant reminder to try new things, again and again and again. And when that’s done, it becomes the best way for me to show off what I did. It pushes out and draws back in.

Image: Source Gaming. Let’s take this totally unrealistic image of Nazi skipping about like a braying jackass. You’ve got a profile of a character, that’s good, though it’s not a character who matters. And it’d be good for the top or bottom, but not the left or right thanks to the film bars and captions.

But it’s also become a more important part of the actual writing process. My original idea was to just, like, throw it together on Saturday night. That was a bad idea! Because it involves editing and publishing, Saturday is the hardest day of the week and rarely allows a lot of game time, so as the weeks have gone by I’ve tried to alleviate this. Preparing the header even one day early takes a lot off my shoulders. Like everything else in this series, this has been an evolving process of figuring out how far I can go and how to make that easier. It’s also, like a lot of other parts, filled with oddities and rules that only make sense to me. For instance, if a game gets on a header more than once, it’s not allowed to be in the same slot. There’s no actual worth to this, though I’d still rate it as more worthwhile than an Achievement, but it adds a challenge. Composing the image is a puzzle as much as it’s an ad, with each slot showing a game at its best or reflecting the experience or fitting the space. For last week, the shot of Hammer replaced one showing the Fable II hero so all the images could show sidekicks and party members. I’ll capture a lot just for the header, particularly cutscenes or gameplay whose UI elements can be hidden. You probably didn’t see the HUD in the Maneater part up at the top of the page, but I’ll always know it’s there. Sometimes I retake or stage them, like deciding immediately that I wanted the shot of Crash Bandicoot falling in the intro of the N. Sane Trilogy and taking dozens trying to get the best one. After all that, I sift through the selection and see how to slot them in. For Resident Evil 3 I knew I wanted a profile of Jill, so I took a bunch, decided on the best, and realized it could only easily fit on the left or right side. Throughout all this, the taking and sifting and culling, I’m constantly figuring out the most eye-catching ones and mixing them so you get as many colors and tones as possible. The more, the merrier.

There is… one interesting thing with how I approached this, though. After I made the rule of “have a different game in every part of the header,” I made a corollary: every game needs to be in the header at least once, ergo I can’t do more than four games in one week. This was probably a subconscious way for me to stop the project from getting out of hand. Or maybe it felt wrong to not adequately reference everything. Which is smart and perhaps needlessly honorable, but there were times where I would’ve liked to push past the limit. As we move into the final month, I’ve decided to forgo this rule, at least when it suits me. In fact, I’d like to see if I can try five new games a week from here on out. At least, I’ll explore the option. Perhaps the new rule is “every game needs to have a screenshot in the article at least once.” That’s doable. I mean, it’s not like Maneater needs more than that.

Image: Source Gaming. Lee and Clementine’s final scene is utterly agonizing. It’s all tragic, and while I’m not sure how much of the rest of the series I’ll try, getting to have this experience was touching.

For something of a transition, it was a few weeks ago that I realized Walking Dead was in a position to be shown off four times. It’s all well deserved for… whatever actual value such an honor actually has. But what I want to impart is that this was only planned as this project went on, because The Walking Dead was never a priority. If you were to look at the tentative structure I put together in early December to conceptualize the first three weeks, it’s not there. Week 1 was just Brothers, Shredder’s Revenge, and for some reason Gears of War. Persona only shows up in Week 2, while Fable and Lil Gator Game are in Week 3. It was only a day or so before I started “Passing the Buck” that my excitement for the game launched and it was shoved into the left slot on the header to replace… This War of Mine. A game I’d love to try but have resigned myself to missing, at least for the rest of the project. There are aspects of this that are interesting to me personally (though I doubt you feel the same), but the thing I want to emphasize is that my deep love of Telltale’s greatest adventure was entirely organic and unexpected. Ori was on the header because it’s an important Microsoft thing, Avowed because it was an upcoming Microsoft thing, Yakuza because that was the Triple-A game I was most excited to try, but Walking Dead, added as the symbol of the 360 era and an entire genre, simply wormed its way into my head hours before the entire project started and wormed its way into my heart with every episode.

As for Doom, I’m glad at how well the experiment worked and am ready to try it again. Every week from here on out will feature one game, or perhaps more, that I only intend to play for that chapter before uninstalling. I’ve made some choices already, primarily things I don’t expect to love, although if they surprise me beyond all expectation I am fine with keeping them. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Game Pass subscribers are there to play the blockbusters, not the indies that probably wipe the floor with them in terms of quality. And the vast majority of gamers, subscribers or not, don’t finish games. I don’t, you don’t, it’s not a problem on an individual level but probably is on a cultural or institutional one. I’ve been skittish about playing these Triple-A things, partially out of disinterest and partially out of concern over how to handle their size, but this was always a good idea and one I should’ve considered from the start.

Image: Source Gaming. The Emerald Stair, a beautiful, lush portion of the Living Lands.

Now, for which game takes this role next week, that’s easy: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It’s a huge Ubisoft open worlder and the sequel to a series I loved and soured on hard, which means it’s the perfect thing play for a week and abandon. It will will probably be fun and disposable, so I feel good about my chances to want to explore it for just seven days. Not sure if I’ll follow that “I have to play it each day” rule. We’ll figure that out as we go along. And I’ve got more options in the ensuing weeks, though maybe I’ll keep them under my hat. I also had an idea to double up on the process with Crysis, though I might push that one back, and I’m thinking about Hi-Fi Rush and Day of the Tentacle but… there’s that recurring issue. Less time than ever, more hunger than ever, and those other options for role-playing games are right there. Whatever the case, I hope it’ll make us happy.

Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!