Indoor Fiction

All my memories of Diablo IV from 2023 were great: my pottery-smasher Barbarian and Val's Necromancer queen; Lorath's voice and every Lilith cinematic; wandering through dark rain and shadowy interiors – in a painterly art style that was everything I'd hoped for; riding on a horse through the isometric open world… the golden light spilling from dungeon entrances… the evocative bits of dialogue from the tragic NPCs of Sanctuary… Kyovashad's theme!

The one thing I’d forgotten was the always online-ness of the game.

I was hellishly reminded of it a few days ago, when Deckard Cain’s return for an anniversary event made me curious enough to go back, only to be greeted by constant disconnects in the middle of single-player stuff. After a lot of tinkering with my router, the only improvement I found was using my phone’s hotspot… which is how I’ve finally ended up playing the expansions I’d been putting off.

Makeshift setup and all, I’m loving Skovos and the Lord of Hatred campaign. It deserves to exist offline too – all of it.

Someday?

The early hours of The Blood of Dawnwalker have a slice-of-grim-life feel that I really enjoyed. Strangely, the completionist monster in me was also not bothered by the intriguing quest threads I didn’t get to follow before the prologue’s in-game day ended. The narrative is working as a proper page-turner, and my favorite story beats have managed to come across as though they happened because my Coen was in the right place at the right time.

P.S. This whole bloody affair in the Cárpatos will probably be the last big new release I’ll play… before the arrival of the looming-and-already-mind-boggling Grand Theft Auto VI…

Everyone in Lil Gator Game is still as hilarious as ever, I'm glad to report. THREE YEARS after playing the base game with Val during one terribly hot summer, I went back for the In the Dark expansion over this ultra-chilly weekend and ended up collectathoning my way to a couple of true and happy endings.

On my way to Toussaint, I stopped by the orchards south of Novigrad. The white trees out there, welcoming you along the path into the Free City, are one of the first things I picture every time I think back on The Witcher 3 – and boy do I think back on it often.

And that's that… damn it.

I will always miss the great Dani Carvajal.

Unlike the year when Disco Elysium came out (incidentally, also a disastrous year for Real Madrid…), these days I’m thankful to have a PC at hand, all set for Esoteric Ebb. I took a short break just after climbing up the intro-basement stairs, already falling for it.

Spooky seasons in Infinity Nikki are very hard to resist; that haunting piano piece from “The Queen’s Lament” still gets played regularly in my writing sessions for Paperbacks, and I wouldn’t mind discovering more like it. Even though I still find it sad that all this stuff is limited-time, I ended up enjoying a lot of the ambiance and confusion of the twisted, fable-like story of the new event.

This detour through Elderwood Forest also builds on a bit of an open-world theme in everything I’ve been playing recently, and serves as a testament to my weakness for the genre.

As indoorsy in spirit as I am, there’s something about rivers and rain and other water simulations in games that will always make me stop and spend a good chunk of time fooling around with the camera. Add in dramatic wind conditions and an incredibly extensive fauna, and… pff. Progress in Crimson Desert is going to take a while.

P.S. Happy 20th birthday, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion! All-timer.

A new, unhurried playthrough of The Witcher 3’s opening hours turned out to be as absorbing as ever; the new camera seems to make everything more intimate and grounded, and Kaer Morhen’s music moved me in ways I didn’t expect.

Ten years ago, I feverishly played it first on my dad’s PC, during a long stay at his house. About a year later, I replayed it on Vic’s PS4, as I took refuge in his apartment in the days leading up to Blood and Wine. Back then I wouldn’t have dared to touch Death March, so I'm just now discovering how well it suits the experience.

As I write this, a sweet mix of anticipation lingers. It sits between the ever-closer Crimson Desert exploration… and this third run through a beloved trail that leads to Novigrad and Beauclair.

My indecisiveness over where to set my own fiction began at sixteen years old, with a terribly naïve first attempt at writing a series of nine fantasy novels. It has followed me ever since, in a never-ending parade of half-baked secondary worlds, most of them pseudo-medieval, but sometimes drifting toward Renaissance or Victorian aesthetics. And even though my heart was never drawn to making science fiction, I did once try my hand at a fantasy with some “urban modernity” in it.

I had totally forgotten about that modern-fantasy world. A collection of good names for public squares, train stations, and cafés remained buried in the ghostly outskirts of my head… until the tail end of last year, when I started to write and program a small slice-of-life game in clear need of a city.

Since then, the streets of Buresca have been spreading out, growing slowly into something more convincing than any of its feudal city-state predecessors. As the need for neighboring towns and cities came up (Onieva, Velamar, and others), I even found myself going into a bit of map-making. Of sorts.

Not that a small slice-of-life game would need a map… but still.