March 9, 2025|

Filed under: Editorial, Featured

Passing the Buck Chapter 10: Sleeper, Kassandra, Hoagie, and Chai

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’ve finally hit March! After a strangely emotional pair of weeks, “Passing the Buck” enters its final month. Our goal is simple: there’s not a lot of time left, so while we want to finish a lot of things, the most important goal is to try a lot of things. The more the better, though I’d prefer to try things I’ll like enough to keep playing. Ergo, it is now time to abandon concerns of overstepping, overexerting, or feeling like I have to complete a game. Instead, I must become something more, something grand and extreme.

Thankfully, nothing is more extreme than video games, at least according to all the ads I saw in Nintendo Power as a kid. And this week we’ll be adding a fascinating set to complement Minecraft, Avowed, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the three games left in the rotation. In fact, to facilitate my desire to ascend into video game critic godhood, I’ve also chosen to abandon an unspoken rule I had for this project up until today. Previously, I would never play more than five new games in one week; today we try five. An initial draft had the five in scary italics as a joke, but this is actually something of a risk. There’s less time than ever. And yet, amidst everything else, I can’t deny feeling an odd sense of serenity. I’m excited simply to try more and more and more. Perhaps I simply replaced my anxiety over having to complete every game I try with an anxiety over trying every game, and while that’s not ideal, it’s also a lot more fun.

Image: Source Gaming. It also lets me try a lot of bonkers games, so that’s good.

Look, I’m not pretending this is or was an amazing idea. Even if my list of recurring games has shrunk it’s incredibly dangerous to my schedule and sanity. But hey. What’s a bit of overconsumption among friends?

All five games are interesting and worthy of discussion, but just like last week with Doom Eternal, one was added as the anchor to drive and guide the week’s discourse. Specifically, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, one of Ubisoft’s few marked successes of the past several years. I started it on Sunday and uninstalled it the night before publication. This sampling format is a great way to add a certain kind of huge game that might otherwise take too long or bore me. Of course, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is unlike Doom Eternal, and its differences caused the week to move in a… slightly different direction.

What I played:

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: It’s the Ancient Greece of 431 BCE—except for when it’s secretly a framing device in modern times—and Kephallonian mercenary Kassandra finds herself on a quest across the Mediterranean to kill her father, the Wolf of Sparta. She can strike from the shadows, fight in combat, and make decisions during quests.
Avowed: After avenging Fior mes Ivèrnvo with extreme prejudice, the Envoy moves to the desert of Scattersharp and recruits the amorous Yatzli, her final companion. They fight through an archmage’s improbable ice palace, find a temple for the Envoy’s patron god, but in an attempt to kill the halt the Dreamscourge, the Envoy chooses to sacrifice dozens of civilians rather than support the murderous Inquisitor Lödwyn.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Indiana finds the next stone in Sukhothai’s hidden temple after fighting an ancient snake and Locus, the enigmatic giant who kicked off Indy’s adventures back in Marshall College. But amid a hail of bullets the two make a temporary truce, one that looks to be tested after Gina is captured by Voss’ goons.
Minecraft: The work on Johto continues! It’s harder to commit to, though, with both the terrain differences of Pokémon Gold & Silver and my increasingly full roster of games.
Citizen Sleeper: A Sleeper, an android with a digitized human mind, has fled indentured servitude and obsolescence to the space station Eye. As they try to escape detection, they spend each day doing temporary jobs and quests, all things you have to decide are worth pursuing through an innovative system of randomness and role-playing.
Hi-Fi Rush: Would-be rocker and newly minted cyborg Chai is on the run from the megacorp Vandelay Technologies, slowly amassing a cadre of sidekicks to bring them down. And thanks to the music player conveniently embedded in his chest, his brawling goes to a whole other level of power when he times his hits to the beat.
Dead Cells: Trapped in an endless, shifting crypt of an island, a headless Prisoner fights their way through monsters. The twist of this hardcore roguelike is that its permanent progression comes in the form of new abilities, adding a search action flavor to the brawling.
Day of the Tentacle Remastered: In this reissue of a point and click adventure classic, you jump between three college friends whose efforts to stop a super-intelligent tentacle have stranded them across four centuries. Roadie Hoagie accommodates the pompous architects of the American Revolution, unhinged Laverne navigates a future where humans are enslaved as pets, and pasty Bernard is stuck in the present trying to get them home.

Sunday, March 2: started and completed the quest “Penelope’s Shroud” in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, killed Captain Aelfyr, entered Shatterscarp and Thirdborn, and recruited Yatzli in Avowed, bought the Rebreather in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and continued on the project in Minecraft.

It’s been a long time since I abandoned Assassin’s Creed. Back when I was in undergrad, it was the coolest thing on the planet that wasn’t written by Grant Morrison, and ever since finishing Assassin’s Creed III and swearing off the franchise I’ve never found an exact replacement. There’s no substitute for that mix of light social stealth and stylish parkour. But now I’m able to try Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, seemingly the best regarded entry in the series since its big 2017 reboot. It was right to play at least one Ubisoft game for this project—if nothing else, so I don’t have to give them money—and this was easily the ideal option. And to an extent, some of that energy was there. Leaping off a roof to shank a dude is still fun, and the franchise’s well known graphical splendor is here as well. Kephallonia and Ithaka are truly picturesque. The framing device about a millennia-old rivalry between different secret societies seems as idiotic as ever, the controls are just as needlessly complex, the fighting’s still bad, and there’s a ton of stuff to do, though the game is at least willing to ease up on the waypoints. While the series is far less urban than it was in those original games, it’s definitely AssCreed and captures that sense of historic digital tourism with no less campy fun.

Image: Source Gaming. Kassandra doing the plunging attack, the most important move in Assassin’s Creed.

That being said, you really can’t go home again. Here, that’s primarily due to the reboot’s big change: Assassin’s Creed, the premiere “map game,” is also an RPG. Kassandra levels up from exploration, combat, and quests, and the system feeds into everything. Armor and weapons are gated by level, meaning you’ll be grinding a lot to get better gear. The combat, always the worst part of the entries I played, is bad, but it’s also much more dependent on skill trees and leveling up. And although stealth has always been the series’ core fantasy, in the early hours it often felt bad, unreliable, and distinctly secondary. Hiding isn’t super clear, every enemy gets signaled if one of them sees you, and although this hasn’t happened to me yet, the new mechanics make some high level enemies immune to instant stealth kills. Presumably that’s the reason behind the bizarre prologue, one that casts you as Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae. Given that you can’t throw a rock these days without hitting a third person action RPG where you attack by pressing the trigger buttons, the game feels indistinct whenever you enter active combat.

As for the other games? Well, Avowed is still only a couple weeks old, and I don’t know if anyone reading this is also playing it, but you’ll have to take my word on this: killing Aelfyr is the only reasonable outcome of that encounter. The boss fight is hard, fully justified, and history will vindicate me. Incidentally, the stealth mechanics are pretty bad in Avowed, arguably worse, but it’s also a much smaller part of the experience. Now, Indiana, that one’s good. Not amazing; the fascist encampment I raided for gold is pretty linear and strict (and in general the softer, Hitman-esque immersive sim structure seems to be gone, which is a shame). But it’s nice knowing that you can make a mistake and recoup from it. There’s a spectrum of what it means to be hidden or exposed. In the first stealth section of Odyssey, I did a mission, got spotted by one guy, and even after killing everyone the game chided me for my failure. The mission that sends you to steal from raiders at Odysseus’ alleged home did give me a lot more room, but it does feel somewhat constrained.

Monday, March 3: started and completed two quests in Citizen Sleeper, completed the quest “Don’t Look Down” in Avowed, completed Siam in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and killed the Cyclops, left Kephallonia, and completed the prologue in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

I don’t know how much time Citizen Sleeper will take in these reviews. So far, it’s a compelling but quieter experience. The gist is that every in-game day you wake up, you’re given a certain number of die rolls. You spend each roll on the vast majority of actions you can take, from investigating a node to doing manual labor. Naturally, the higher the roll, the more likely you are for success, progress, and cash. It’s a fascinating way to play with randomness; you’re given dollops of luck and have to decide where best to spend them. And since the setting is a barely functioning, ultra-transactional space station—a place so soul-crushing that this is one of the only games I’ve seen where going to sleep depletes your stamina—you’ve gotta make good on every roll you can. Another neat feature is that a lot of stuff is on timers, from bounty hunters blackmailing you to jobs whose availability quickly closes, to say nothing of two health meters that are always ticking down. You feel the pressure in a very intense way, so while it doesn’t have combat or standard movement mechanics, it’s a hardcore RPG. That being said, the slightly irritating interface and the dialogue-heavy story make it something I’m more liable to play in the background, an hour a day until finishing its seven to ten hour runtime. But I’ll give it the time it deserves.

Image: Source Gaming. Much of your time in Citizen Sleeper is like this, but it’s impossible to capture the constant lo-fi energy.

One of the goals I set myself for the week was to finish Sukhothai in Indiana Jones. I certainly did not intend to do that on the second day of the week. It just… kinda happened; one minute Dr. Jones was swimming past a subpar Del Lago ripoff and the next he was falling into a pool of murderous leeches. Which is fine, all things considered. Siam was mostly full of that more directed structure, and to be honest, I’m coming out a bit disappointed. Less in the watery sandbox itself (although today was just full of irritating one-hit kills), and more that the immersive sim lite ethos is largely gone. The rivers of Thailand made it harder to go off on your own, levels are smaller and more linear, and in general it’s a more overtly “cinematic game” with far less self-direction. The game I assumed it was going to be from the start. The Great Circle going in such a different direction was really cool, and it’s a bit frustrating that the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way. Though credit where credit was due: it was a delight to see Tony Todd kill a blackshirt with a boat.

Yesterday, I mentioned knowing that high level enemies in the new Assassin’s Creed games can’t be killed with stealth takedowns. Well, today I got to see that myself! At the beginning of the story, this sleazy local gangster called the Cyclops hires a henchman to slowly chase you across the island, kinda like Mr. X on an open world scale. After matching him in level, I decided to do what came naturally to me in those older games and stalk him… only for my “assassinate” move to be a “sneak attack,” cutting his sizable health bar before he gutted me. That was pretty deflating. Things got hectic when he followed me into the Cyclops’ trashy lair for the main plot, something that’s neat as game design but certainly put a kink in my plans (including an impromptu side quest about rescuing some snotty Athenian, since the guards will stab him to death if you don’t kill them first). I did win, mostly by knocking him off a wall. I dunno with this game. When it’s just scrambling around buildings and running around, it’s got that energy. And when you do get to assassinate a target in a single strike, it’s even better. The kill animations are more ridiculous than they ever were in the original entries. But Odyssey seems almost dismissive of the stealth. It’s strange. Fortunately, now that I’ve actually gone so far that I got to see the title screen, I can slow down and just do this for one hour a week, as Zeus intended.

Tuesday, March 4: started and completed Tracks 1 and 2 in Hi-Fi Rush, completed the quest “Gain Ethan’s Protection” in Citizen Sleeper, and continued playing Avowed.

Given that my interest in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has already plummeted since writing that last paragraph (I’d still like to keep playing it before we uninstall it, but it simply doesn’t merit the attention that Doom Eternal warranted), it’s time to start another major game. And even more than Odyssey it’s one we had to try. It would be journalistically irresponsible of me to not play Hi-Fi Rush; the game, perhaps more than any other, represents the power and paradox of Game Pass. For one thing, it owes its life to the service, since it could justify itself on the merits of diversifying the catalog over garnering sales. And it was a huge Game Pass hit, to the point where those sales happened anyway. But none of that mattered when Microsoft closed Tango Gameworks last year, citing contradictory and fundamentally disingenuous reasons. Those include the departure of studio founder Shinji Mikami, a shift to gigantic “high impact” titles like Fallout instead of successes that are not decade-long productions, or simply a lack of willingness on Microsoft’s part to spend money on productions at all. Thankfully the studio and half of its former staff have since been picked up by Krafton—the PUBG publisher with many stories of workplace abuse—but it was the clearest symbol of how precarious it is to live in Xbox Land. Tango was punished not for failing but for succeeding. Makes the game’s anticap posturing feel strangely prescient. You can see why I need to cover this game, and if I have any chance of finishing its roughly eleven to twelve hour campaign, doing it at the start of the month is paramount. Of course, that only matters if I end up liking the thing.

Image: Source Gaming. Sadly, the image isn’t as good as ones I took of the game from later in the week.

Fortunately, it took no time for Hi-Fi Rush to earn its place on the team. Unlike my first Tango game, The Evil Within, it’s stylized and really fun, if somewhat shallow. The easiest description is that it’s Bayonetta meets Crypt of the NecroDancer, with a cel shaded comic book aesthetic and a rockstar power fantasy. You’ve got your light and heavy attacks, your gimmick long range attack, your Hookshot, but it’s all set to a beat. And I mean all, including enemy attacks and tons of background animations. I’m… not amazing at following the pace and struggle much more with it than NecroDancer, though it’s less demanding, and my brawling feels just as incoherent as it does in Bayonetta. But it’s fun, the original and licensed music is superlative, and the art style absolutely rules. I’ve never been one for the rock god fantasy, but this musical revolution is fun. That being said, I’d probably be smart to not play more than one chapter at a time. The levels are sizable, the bosses beefy, and it’s just a very sensory experience. My original plan was to start Dead Cells tonight and talk about it tomorrow, but the second chapter took so long that we’ll just have to push it into tomorrow. C’est la vie.

Wednesday, March 5: started and got the Vine Rune in Dead Cells, completed Track 3 in Hi-Fi Rush, and continued in Citizen Sleeper.

I am fully aware that my schedule has become, shall we say, logistically problematic. Hi-Fi Rush has twelve chapters. That’s the same number as Dead Space, and they’re around the same length. If I stick to doing one chapter a day and playing Citizen Sleeper “in the background,” that’s creating a situation where I’m doing so many things in increments that we’re not making sizable progress on any of them. A sea of marginal pushes. That all these games have wildly different control schemes does not help! Fortunately, while I’ve always been proud of my acumen for multitasking, it’s gone through the roof over the past two months. So while I’ll try to play Hi-Fi Rush most days, I can play it more regularly and do more than one chapter if I want. It’s hard to explain, but having less of an attachment to it than Dead Space makes it easier. As for Citizen Sleeper, it’s too addictive for that “I’ll play a little bit a day” structure to work, so let’s just finish it by the end of the week. Boom, done. While I’m itching to see the next sandbox in Indiana Jones, finishing Sukhothai so early makes anything else more of a bonus, and judging by the rest of the game I’m close to the next area in Avowed. And while Assassin’s Creed will still come up in the rest of the week, it being boring and unfun makes things a lot easier.

Oh right, I started Dead Cells. You might recall a couple weeks ago, when I played Inscryption. I was open about not expecting to finish the deckbuilding roguelike in less than two weeks, if that, only to beat it in one. Do not expect a reprise here. I’m pretty bad at the combat and don’t feel confident enough to think I’ll actually finish it by March 31st. But this is actually nice and brings me back to that sense of serenity I’ve been feeling, because I don’t care about beating Dead Cells. Whatever progress I get is neat, but what I actually care about is having fun. And “fun” is exactly what came out of my first two hour-long sessions with this banger of a game. It’s fast, it’s dynamic, and the graphics are something else. Unlike Hi-Fi Rush, whose cel shading is so thick that the color “gradation” of its light sources are just blunt jumps from one hue to another, the pixel art here is immaculate and soft—except, of course, when blood splatters. It’s not, like, Hotline Miami or anything, but the carnage is pretty. Top notch atmosphere, too.

Image: Source Gaming. Ideally I’d like to change the character’s outfit every day, but starting off with the Santa suit puts us on another level.

What most interests me about the game isn’t its somewhat baffling genre mashup of the roguelike (a genre with impersonal, procedurally-generated spaces) and the Metroidvania (a genre whose spaces and progression should feel very personal). It’s that I’m coming in after years of updates, additions, and indie crossovers. Within a half hour I found a bench and Nail from Hollow Knight, a clothing store that let me dress up as Santa Claus, and a book filled with references to indie games that wound up in this game, like Guacamelee! and Blasphemous. When I started Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I deliberately avoided any of the bonus post-launch armor that would make Kassandra dress like Ezio, both out of performative distaste for the franchise and because I wanted to experience the original progression. Not that I’d want to do the same here anyway, but that would be impossible. These features and weapons are fully integrated into the world of Dead Cells. Which is pretty cool! I’m getting to experience a very full game, with all sorts of fun bonus content and, in a few cases, references to a few favorites. This is another reason why I’m okay if I don’t beat the game, strangely enough. As long as I’m seeing new stuff and getting fun details, that’s enough for me right now. Not that I’m not trying my best.

Thursday, March 6:, completed Citizen Sleeper, completed the quest “Face Your Fears” in Avowed, and gained the Teleportation Rune in Dead Cells.

I powered through Citizen Sleeper this morning. Thing is you can hit the credits in only a few hours, if you know what you’re doing. If you only care about one character or are trying to speedrun, that’s entirely fine. But you’re probably not gonna do that on your first time. During this playthrough, it felt only natural to keep exploring the Eye, finding new characters and new stories, before slowly focusing on what mattered most, at least to me: the flotilla of refugees fleeing some insane cosmic mass destruction. The story I got out of that felt satisfying, and I didn’t really mind not getting the other endings that I’m certain are just as good. In fact, there’s a beauty in an RPG not allowing you the chance to see everything. I can’t say that this game isn’t an acquired taste; I’ll freely admit to skimming at least some of the dialogue. But this was a powerful and well-told story about corporate abuse, personhood, and community, and it’s a shame that so many more Game Pass players have probably missed it entirely in favor of spending hours bored in Starfield. I’m looking forward to trying the just-released Citizen Sleeper 2 before the end of the year, but for all you out there who haven’t tried this one, give it a whirl.

Image: Source Gaming. Sometimes you just want to highlight some dialogue.

Today was kinda weird. I woke up sick, got out of bed late, and since I didn’t want to have something as sensorially intense as Hi-Fi Rush, I played a bunch of Dead Cells before deciding to just finish Sleeper then and there. Objectively I’ve put in my time; I made progress on two games and only care about progress in the third when my beautiful, headless corpse explodes into a tsunami of lost Cells. But the tone feels slightly off. I’m very suspicious about that kind of thing Perhaps, then, we should get into a topic I’ve referenced more than once: my disrespect for Assassin’s Creed and the love for it I had as a young adult. Because with my interest in Odyssey plummeting by the day, we might as well. It started with me in college, having just purchased an Xbox 360 and Assassin’s Creed II. I was a History major; AssCreed loved to make simulacra of history. It wasn’t particularly amazing or accurate, but the power to leap over Renaissance-era Florence and Rome was utterly captivating. After experiencing stealth almost exclusively through Metal Gear Solid and with Hitman far from my mind, it also gave me the first taste of a social stealth game. And, look, Altair and Ezio had really cool outfits and wrist knives. These were largely shallow games, but they were good at making you feel predatory and special in a gorgeous toy set. I dove into Assassin’s Creed II and Brotherhood. Thanks to a preorder, I even had a keychain of the Harlequin from Brotherhood’s stupid multiplayer mode (which I’ve since replaced with a big rubber Ultrahand from Tears of the Kingdom. It’s kind of a pain to actually have in my pocket, but it’s Tears of the Kingdom; I can’t not have it with me). The first three games simply hit a lot of notes that just worked.

It was around Assassin’s Creed: Revelation that my love began to curdle. It was impossible to ignore bloated mechanics, egregious reused content, and that the historical fiction was being pushed further aside for an exhausting conspiratorial saga. Revelations put so much time into an elaborate system of bomb making that I never wanted to use, but it seemed to barely care at all about letting us understand Constantinople. Assassin’s Creed III only worsened this, giving you a stricter and more linear direction. I don’t remember the basic gameplay beyond the image of evading Redcoats on a tree limb. What do I remember? The stupid DLC levels where you have to move in one way or die instantly, the idiotic final set piece where you chase Charles Lee across a dock, and how it doesn’t let you get revenge on George Washington for killing your people even though that’s been your only motivation for the entire game. All of this made it impossible to ignore the hollowness. These were huge worlds, but worlds of nothing but Capital-C Content. A farm with me as livestock. I was beginning to develop very cogent beliefs about what does and doesn’t constitute good game design, and what I saw was wanting. It was clear that the only thing to do would be to wash my hands of the property. Before Odyssey, the last time I engaged with the series was the FMV trailer for Assassin’s Creed IV—and, I guess, Captain Laserhawk, that abominable Ubisoft crossover anime from a few years ago. And out of it sprung my antipathy towards open world games as a concept. So in a fashion, Assassin’s Creed was incredibly important for my development as a player and critic. Though I’m not sure exactly where Assassin’s Creed Odyssey falls in. Hopefully we figure that out by the end of the week.

Friday, March 7: completed Track 4 of Hi-Fi Rush, started and got the Tentacle disguise in Day of the Tentacle Remastered, got the Ram Rune in Dead Cells, and completed the quest “Shadows of the Past” in Avowed.

Let’s get this out of the way: I am using a guide. It’s not like I instantly looked up every solution to Day of the Tentacle; I want to treat it with respect and try my best. But we’re on a schedule, and… look, the issues endemic to 1990s adventure games (or, in this case, one’s sumptuous 2016 remaster) are known to me. If there’s a puzzle that’s too inscrutable or takes me too long to figure out, we’ll look up the solution. Mostly, this involved me learning that seemingly fixed parts of the environment, like a gigantic drawing of an alien tentacle’s anatomy, were actually collectable objects. Or realizing that one character had an item in his inventory because it was the most convenient way for him to find a can opener in the 18th Century. In general, though, I’ve found the puzzles clever and inventive, with the time travel mechanic a particular point of genius. See, the three characters are trapped in time—Bernard in present, Hoagie in colonial times, and Laverne in a dystopian future—but you can swap between them at any point and send items from one to the others through a time machine. This multilayered structure allows the game to juggle tons of puzzles of different sizes at the same time, and although you have to eventually do the more complicated ones, you’re always working on self-contained missions. That it’s all set in the same physical location with largely the same shortcuts and layout is also a stroke of genius. The motel / laboratory is small enough to keep in your head, but the changes of four hundred years means that every version has its own eccentricities.

Image: Source Gaming. One of Day of the Tentacle‘s best jokes is its depiction of the Founding Fathers and neurotic lunatics with Rocky & Bullwinkle voices. Ben Franklin spends his time talking like a JRPG bad guy.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered is one of the grandest remasters I’ve seen, to the point where calling it such feels inadequate. That timeless pixel art has been replaced by gorgeous 2D animations, and you can instantly switch to the old graphics with a single button press. Using the right stick lets you jump between every interactable part of a room. Just like the original, you can play the entirety of its predecessor Maniac Mansion, which was unheard of in 1993 (though it understandably lacks anything new). There’s an option for developer commentary in which the original game’s creators discuss it, and I’m just a bit annoyed that the scope of this project is gonna keep me from listening to it. And all the fun of the original is kept in full, as far as I can tell. The dialogue is witty, the voice acting wonderfully loopy, and the general atmosphere fun. It’s got that kind of surreal, quietly unhinged energy that I’ve loved in Homestar Runner and Mystery Science Theater 3000. Like, in Laverne’s time humans are slaves, but they’re enslaved to be pets that their Tentacle owners enter in show contests. Naturally, her overarching goal is to make a Tentacle disguise—something Hoagie can trick Betsy Ross into making—win a contest with a character’s long-lost descendent, and somehow that’ll grant her access to an underground lab. The logic here is a very special kind of nonsense. Outside of a few minutes of Grim Fandango, the closest I’ve come to traditional point and click adventures are visual novels like Ace Attorney. It’s very nice getting to see the genre from two ends: their grim and gritty modern take in The Walking Dead and their comic heights here. I’m gonna make time to retry Fangado’s remaster after this project is over.

That being said, I’m also taking it a bit slow. It was always a bit of a stretch for me to finish a roughly five hour game in one day, and besides, I’d like to soak it in. The dialogue is really good, so even if I’m not choosing every single dialogue option, I don’t want to miss it. Fortunately, it’s still a short game, and just by getting Laverne’s disguise I’ve done a lot. I know I said it about Citizen Sleeper and proved myself wrong a few days ago, but it’s hard to imagine me writing a ton more about this over the coming days. Unless the game throws a truly wild curveball, I’ll probably want to spend more time in these articles discussing things like my wildly murderous decision in Avowed.

Saturday, March 8: continued playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Dead Cells, and convinced Ben Franklin to go indoors in Day of the Tentacle Remastered.

“Continued” is doing a heckuva stretch. I did a couple runs of Dead Cells, but I couldn’t give up on Odyssey fast enough. It’s sad because it really was right when things opened up, and by a lot. After some of that silly ship combat I remembered from Assassin’s Creed III, I was given a wildly open amount of freedom. My “job” was to weaken the Athenian presence, and I could’ve gone about that in a lot of ways. Various quests to help their rival Spartans were available, and it seemed like most were optional. I could assassinate a governor, and while it’d be easier to kill him after doing more missions, he was still an acceptable target. That’s… that’s Breath of the Wild stuff right there. And while the original games would instantly kill you if you veered off script by killing civilians, I offed a bunch right after blackmailing them to finish a quest. I’m a hero!

Image: Source Gaming. This is probably the funniest part of the experience for me. I don’t normally go for evil options in RPGs, but after so many days of frustration at the RPG mechanics, I just wanted to… break the game open.

But there was just something that kept me from enjoying them, not unlike how the game kept me from stabbing a Grecian child during the slaughter. I’m not crazy, it’s just a game, but I couldn’t help but want to test the system. Break it. I dunno. Maybe it was all the little annoyances in the combat and stealth. Maybe it was thinking about all the grinding I’d already seen in just a few hours of play. Or maybe it was me knowing all week that there is nothing in this sixty hour role-playing game that would convince me that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was worth keeping in my hard drive. The thing with my rule about cutting some games after just a week is that secretly, I want them to convince me to rescind the rule—or, at least, to try to convince me. Doom Eternal actually got there; I might like to revisit it someday, if not for a long time.

Saturdays are kinda like bonuses in this series. I work on Saturdays, and when my shift ends and I get home, I’ll upload the article to WordPress, put in the images I’ve picked out over the past six days, do edits, so whatever I play after that is secondary. Finishing Inscryption at 9 PM is the exception, not the rule (as it should be. These take a long time as it is without a last minute spike in what to write). That doesn’t mean they are meaningless or can’t feel substantive; they often are in some way. But they’re still, well, shorter. Lesser. And that’s what today felt like, more than Saturday has for the past nine weeks. Just me… noodling about for twenty minutes, then jumping to Dead Cells as comfort food, then “solving” a puzzle in Day of the Tentacle whose solution I saw in a YouTube video a decade ago. That’s not a great feeling when you’re excited and slightly desperate to finish things. But whatever, you know? It’s okay. Sometimes you just gotta accept these kinds of things as what they are. Hopefully next Saturday will be more additive, but if it’s not, I’m sure the rest of the week will have great things in store.

Outro: Everything I write is a test. Each article is an experiment, each game a new subject, each act of writing and playing a teachable moment. I treat it all like an exercise, knowing that whatever’s out next will improve whatever’s after it, and the thing after that in turn. Primarily this is in how I write, what words I use, the diversity of sentence structure. Other times, it teaches me something more practical. For instance, you may remember some trouble with Doom Eternal last week. I took screenshots while the Xbox was offline and didn’t know how to export them into the online drive and, by extension, my phone. Well, the very nice Photo Mode in Hi-Fi Rush sends pictures to that offline drive. I wanted those pictures and taught myself how to export them. That was kind of a bugbear, and now I understand it and Xbox’s online services just a bit better. Not every piece needs me to understand the architecture of a video game console, but I want them all to bolster me as a thinker and critic. Naturally, I also want to push my own boundaries with every published work. The process of creation, much like escaping a sinkhole, should be an upward climb where every step raises you closer to the sky. That’s why it’s hard for me to reread articles of mine that are more than a couple years old. That’s the lesser, worse me. He’s still stuck in the sand.

Image: Source Gaming. A constant in all my Hi-Fi Rush images is how Chai’s guitar is constantly bending during attacks. It brings to mind all the things we’ve learned from Masahiro Sakurai about attack animations.

Still, “Passing the Buck” is a step beyond. I’m in a state of constant experimentation, whether that’s in trying a game unlike anything I’ve ever played or making mental connections between works that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Things started complex and have only gotten increasingly so. How I write has changed, how I approach the games I write about has changed, and I’ve been open about my fear of feeling stagnant. So on top of constantly trying new games, I’m also trying to reimagine what it is to go through this time-consuming process. This is the reason why I’ve kept trying gimmick weeks and theme weeks; it gives me a goal to try something new. When I did Chapter 1, that was me testing the waters and seeing how the project worked at all. When Chapter 3 had me try a ton of new games, it was borne out of a concern that I wasn’t stretching myself enough. Chapter 5 was all about focusing on a few things just so I could reach a few conclusions, while Chapter 7 tried pushing me out of my comfort zone by doing almost all new things. And Chapter 9 had that fun “let’s play Doom for a while!” structure.

…Apparently the odd-numbered ones were the most explicitly experimental. No, but really, every week has been like this to some extent, me trying to understand this project by pushing it a bit in one direction or more. I can assure you that we’ll be staying on that track until the series ends. After all, this week was an experiment, too. We did a test the previous week, liked the results, and tried it a second time with a second subject. What we discovered was that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is no Doom Eternal, and while I could play the latter every day of the week and come out smiling, the former didn’t have the juice. So that “every day for a week” structure was ignored, saving me the trouble of going out of my way to be unsatisfied and allowing the other games more room to breathe. Instead of trying to perfectly recreate my experience, as I had intended, it became a new experience.

Image: Source Gaming. For all my issues with the Thailand section in Indy, it’s still a gorgeous setting. My real complaint is that you start out with the big sandboxes and then move entirely into the small ones.

Another new experience was bumping up the number of new games. While that was mollified a bit by my abandoning Assassin’s Creed and Yakuza: Like a Dragon leaving the schedule, it was still a big jump. The obvious change is that I’ve got more things to juggle than ever, which makes my work both harder and more exciting. Getting to see Assassin’s Creed and Citizen Sleeper and Hi-Fi Rush and Dead Cells and Day of the Tentacle was special, and I think I gave them all a decent amount of attention. I think I was even able to do the same to the games I’m trying to finish from previous weeks, too (other than Minecraft, whose project is still woefully incomplete). But it was hard. Jumping between so many things is extreme. There are also strange knock-on effects I hadn’t considered, like how having more games means less space for every game to discuss—at least, so long as I maintain that “no more than three paragraphs” rule for the regular entries. Which I have to maintain; it’s so good for my mental health as to be hard to quantify. The last thing I did in Avowed involved choosing to kill dozens of random people, but there’s not a ton of space to discuss such a big story beat. That was the day I started Day of the Tentacle, and that demands more attention. It’s a classic, and the only Double Fine game I’ll be able to cover for this project. But will we cover it at all after this week? I dunno, because I’ve to some extent sacrificed depth for breadth.

Fortunately, the benefit of treating every single aspect of your life as a testbed to learn is that you do, every so often, actually learn! And my writing has gotten better because of it. I’ve gotten better at cutting and editing, and it’s easier for me to connect multiple games, subjects, and ideas within a single paragraph. My photography skills are stronger. Whether or not it’s actually helpful for me to incorporate as much of my personal life and feelings, I do feel secure that I’m better at incorporating them. So for all of my concerns, for all that this is a deeply intensive project with little but disappointment waiting at the other end of the tunnel, things are okay. That serenity hasn’t gone away.

Image: Source Gaming. Again, I know that if any of the people reading this are going to play Avowed, it’s probably in the future, but you have to believe me. You gotta kill this character when it comes up.

On the topic of April 1 and the end of the project, though, I’ve come to a decision. With my three prior weekly and monthly series, there was always a natural stopping point. “Dispatch from the Dive” wasn’t about beating “every Kingdom Hearts game” but every one that had been released by 2022; I’m not going to revive the series for Kingdom Hearts IV, if I even play it at all. “Pikachu in Pictures” was about Pokémon movies and animation, but it was through the lens of the character Ash and its end coincided with him leaving the show. And while I considered the idea of continuing “Gun Metal Gaming” with other retrospectives of 2009 games, the twelve games I picked were organized as a set, and there’s not a reason to add to that set. If I want to talk about something released in 2009, I’ve plenty of other avenues. These were natural breaking points. But “Passing the Buck” is different, because it’s the most based around an experience, and that experience is sampling. Absolutely nothing connects the thirty-eight games I’ve tried beyond the fact that they’re on the same subscription service. And since my goals with the project are nebulous and not tethered to concrete progress, it could be done or revived at any time where Game Pass exists.

Do not take this to mean that I’m totally, definitely, one hundred percent bringing “Passing the Buck” back. It’s definitely not to say that this will be extended into April. God, no. You can’t hold me to that. As fun as this series has been, I’m also exhausted and probably a bit overstimulated. This is just idle chatter. And if I was to bring it back, there’d be changes, most notably that I certainly wouldn’t do it for three consecutive months and not for a long time after this adventure. But let’s say, I dunno, that the Switch 2 has a two month slump in new first party Nintendo games in the fall of 2026. ‘Cause Switch 1 kinda had that in 2018. If that was the case, maybe I’d do it again for a month. The header template Phantom made isn’t going anywhere. To me, this is the best of both worlds. If I want to spend thirty days trying tons of new games in a state of constant, hyper-attentive play, this provides a relatively simple avenue.

Image: Source Gaming. The sword and flintlock weapon is extremely fun in Dead Cells. In general the game’s great at that roguelike trope of letting you have crazy combinations of abilities.

Now, for next week. I’m excited to announce that I have a wonderful new gimmick, one that will cement Chapter 11 as no less wacky or stupid than any of the other odd-numbered entries. Oh man, it’s gonna be ridiculous. And even better, it’s designed in a way that shouldn’t be too obtrusive! Emphasis on “may.” But this should be good. Plus, maybe we can finally beat Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. I do know there’s only one area left, and I cannot tell you how ready I am to beat that pasty lil’ Nazi’s face in.

Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!