Free Write 20

I finished up playing Nioh, which was a fantastic game - made even better by the realization that it is extremely based in history. Much like Assassins Creed, all characters were real people, really alive when the game took place, and the events were based around their real timeline, meaning that anyone you kill, you do so when they would have actually died. Hell, even the player character was a real person - the first known Western samurai. How cool is that?

And then to go from that to Horizon Zero Dawn, which takes place in future of our world so far that our present is considered ancient history. And that's not an assumption - you can literally find scatter remains of the distance, destroyed past, and it makes direct reference to America, Boston, and advancements that we today talk about trying to make in the near future. It takes a fascinating mixture of Native American culture and advanced robotics. You hunt massive robot animals using bow and arrows crafted from their corpses. You find ancient technology, forbidden for having gone against the gods, that lets you create holographic projections that analyze your foes and shows you their weaknesses. The world and the characters within are incredibly interesting and well written, which is not something that can be said of games incredibly often.

And on top of that, it's just fun. The controls are tight, the mechanics are just forgiving enough to not be frustrating, and every kill feels satisfying. You are given a mass amount of freedom once you step outside the boundaries of the beginning area, and the walls that are normally created by story can be passed by merely exploring and playing the game. And the more I play the game, the better it gets - I don't even know how it pulls that off when I was completely sold on it from the moment the game began.

I have two more games I want coming out within the next week, and I expect to pick them both up on the day they come out, though I'm not sure when I'll get around to them with this game in my possession. I don't want to drop this game, because I have a feeling it will be hard to come back to - most games are for me. And some times I'm ok with that, though admittedly not often. But this game is too good not to play all the way through. But good lord, are the options coming out this early in the year good.