Most of the time when I am playing a video game it tends to track along a fairly predictable trajectory. After the core conflict has been established we generally follow a path that leads to its resolution without much deviation. Occasionally there are minor set backs but nothing really unexpected. Greedfall however managed to do something that few games do in that it caught me completely by surprise and threw some events out of left field that I was in no way planning for. There was a moment yesterday while playing where shit absolutely got real and I was forced to make some really hard decisions really rapidly without much time to mull them over. I am uncertain if I made the right decisions, but I appreciate that the game managed to catch me off guard like that.

Of note… predictability isn’t really something that bothers me much in as game. I actually sort of like moving forward checking off boxes as I go and reaching the conclusion that I see in front of me. I think this is why spoilers in general don’t bother me either, because so often I am sitting down and watching something and in my head I am predicting the next move or the character that is going to unexpectedly betray the on screen party. All of that said I am extremely pleasantly surprised when media manages to pull the wool over my eyes and shock me, and often times those experiences are much more memorable. Everyone remembers the first time they watched Seven, The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense if they managed to go into them without having the major spoilers revealed. The thing here though… is I think this shocking turn of events was caused by my own actions and I need to do some research to determine if I am in fact right about that.

I said yesterday how I tend to stick to playing the same handful of characters and ignoring the rest of the party. I think Greedfall is finally a game that is going to make me reconcile that sort of behavior with a vengeance. Now however I don’t really want to deviate from it because I am curious how deep this well goes. I’ve also noticed that at various points during the games I have failed quests that didn’t factor into my head as something that would be closing off to me by my actions. So I have this feeling that there are machinations going on behind the scenes in the decision tree that I am simply unaware of. While there are still some issues with Greedfall, the more I play it the more compelling I find it. I absolutely get why this made it onto the games of the year show.

Now since this is what my readers really want… some gratuitous pictures of Josie. She is such a sweetheart and this weekend we need to figure out how to start introducing her to the other cats. Kenzie has more or less stabilized and I have been trying to give Mollie and her the bulk of my attention. I spent about an hour in the office upstairs with Josie and they seemed to not mind at all. Kenzie returned to sitting on the box beside me while I played Greedfall immediately afterwards and didn’t act pissy about it… so I am guessing that is progress.

My wife has been getting the lion share of bonding time, and that is fine by me. She tends to follow me around anytime I am in the office so she absolutely knows who I am and that I am friendly. Right now I just think she wants constant attention after having come from a shelter environment. My hope is that we can start introducing her to the wider house and if I thought she would actually stay with us on the sofa we would do that. I would try and get Kenzie and Mollie to hang out with me on my side of the sectional and then wife could have Josie on the other side. Things with cats however never work out as planned… so we will see how everything shakes out.

This is one of those mornings where I am baring skirting by and don’t feel like I have much at all to talk about. I am fully enthralled by Greedfall at the moment and will be pushing forward until I have reached the ultimate conclusion of the game. The experience is far from perfect, but it does make me wonder what other gems in the rough are out there. Paradox for me at least has been a very hit and miss publisher and I guess this is just going to happen with the sheer number of titles they are willing to put out there. This is my first game developed by Spiders, and from what I can tell this is sort of their thing… releasing interesting but flawed game experiences. I do plan on poking my head into The Technomancer at some point which was their last release prior to Greedfall.

I guess I should at some point expand a bit on what I mean by a flawed game. It is just the little things that are not quite as well implemented as they could be. The camera and movement feels a little off in a way that is really hard to explain. Combat while enjoyable also feels a little less fluid than it maybe should be, and it gets real tiresome listening to your companions spout the exact same line over and over every time you engage anything and often times multiple times during that engagement. The character models and facial animations are maybe just a little stilted as well, nothing to the extreme of pre-patch andromeda but still not quite there. As a whole the game is extremely enjoyable and I am very impressed by the voice acting, which while not going to win anyone an award doesn’t drop me out of immersion into the world. What I mean by flawed is that everything feels just one or two degrees off what it should be and as a result it feels like an imperfect experience, but nonetheless one still worth experiencing.

I think more than anything what is keeping me tied into the game is the setting and its story, because I feel like this is someplace video games have not really successfully gone yet. The colonial era is a stain on the many countries who participated in this age of conquest and it isn’t often that you see this played out in any manner other than through a 4X/Strategy game. I choose to play the Legate of the Congregation of Merchants as anything but a neutral party. I side with the native population and have been doing my best to mend the way between the colonists and the original inhabitants of Teer Fradee. As a result I am more or less always running around with Siora the daughter of a tribal chief and Vasco the Naut that brought us here and seems to be a similarly inclined character.

On the opposite side of this… I have no interest at all in running around with Father Petrus a missionary of Theleme the faction of religious zealots. I am also not at all interested in running around with Aphra, who at face value seems fine… but is representative of the Bridge Alliance a group of scientists that seem to do all manner of nasty things to the native population in the name of progress. Kurt is more or less neutral and I am fine using him whenever I need to, but I am just way more comfortable with Vasco and Siora as my primary party. This is a thing that happens when I play these sort of games, is that I develop a group that I prefer to run with and then never really mess with other characters unless I am doing side quests that require them. I played Dragon Age Origins almost exclusively with Morrigan, Alistair and Leiliana.

While I feel like I have spent a lot of time dwelling on the imperfections, I feel like I need to drive home the point that I am extremely well engaged with this game. I am going to be playing it to a fault of pretty much everything else until I make my way through the story. It took me a bit to engage with it due to those flaws when it initially released and as a result it was placed on the shelf until I recently restarted it. However now that I am in the mix of the game play I am driving forward towards the eventual conclusion of the story arc. One bit of warning that I give for players however is to maybe look up some guides on the romance options, because I almost accidentally found my way into one without really knowing that was where I was heading. Unlike Dragon Age there will be no icon with a heart on it to tell you that you are heading in that direction. I legitimately look forward to seeing what the next game from Spiders looks like, because based on my reading each time they release a new title they improve and iterate slightly on the one that came before.