Honestly, I think The Witcher: Monster Slayer - their take on the "scour your neighborhood for beasts" genre - looks kinda cool. They're trying to approach it their way, which is sorta Questy. That's what they do best. That's why I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was gonna be cool, independent of any issues with basic functionality - because they knew how to tell inspiring little stories inside a relatively small amount of gameplay verbs. I played the whole thing on PC, where the worst of its technical behavior never expressed itself, so I think I understand what they intended, but… the problem is that it had no Andrzej Sapkowski and it very, very much needed a Sapkowski. The game is like a shopping list without a recipe. I recognize everything that was intended to invoke Bolognese but the ratio of every ingredient is fucked.
Obviously Monster Slayer is for intense gentlemen like ourselves, gentlemen who maim and kill, and not dumb babies. We have three swords - one for men, one for monsters, and the third sword is the mind sword, called Wisdom, that tells us when to use the other two.
In truth, I mostly played phone games when I was travelling from place to place all the time in The World Before. I haven't used something like this in a long time and it might be a minute before I put my hand back in the hollow of that particular haunted stump. The amount of money you can spend on free games is… well, it's unlimited. I was trying to encapsulate it in a word, a fancy one, but the fact of the matter is that you can spend an infinite amount on them. I was trying to explain this to Brenna's parents when they were over last weekend. "So, it's free, but… it costs money?" said the Matriarch, tentatively, as though she were shuffling out onto early spring ice. "Yeah," I said. "Imagine a casino, but in hell." I took a moment to knead the language a bit, to give it a silhouette that would aid in absorption. "It's basically a hell casino."
(CW)TB out.
