A Continued Blight
A change of plans
Not a completionist
I didn’t think I would be here so soon. When I started this journey, I really thought I would be able to play only one game until I rolled credits, and then move to the next and the next and the next. But, what I should have realized, is that I’m not that type of gamer. It’s also not really the point of my self-imposed challenge to complete more games in 2026. I started with a very small game to give myself that quick dopamine of completing a video game and making progress towards my 2026 goal, usually this works with my book reading goals.
Then, I switched to Rogue Trader. Maybe, I made a mistake by jumping so far from a 2 hour game to one that will take me 60+ hours to complete. After last week, when I decided I wouldn’t be able to beat Rogue Trader without playing other games between sessions, I decide to try a fun little puzzle game, Is This Seat Taken?. I thought it would give me that hit to let me complete a game and maintain completion momentum. Alas, it didn’t achieve that goal. I played it for a night, getting through almost two pages of levels in about an hour. Then I tried to pick it up the next day…and the next. But I couldn’t get back into the puzzle flow, and now we’re here on Friday, with no completed game and no progress on the large game looming in the background.
Or not the right game
I’m uncertain, though, that the issue is the length of the game. It could be that the dialogue isn’t all voice acted, in fact most of it is not, and there is a ton of text to read. One of my favorite games of all time is Baldur’s Gate 3, which also has a ton of options and dialogue to read, the key difference being that it’s fully voice acted, so not having voice acting with all of the dialogue in Rogue Trader could just be making the lore harder to absorb. Thus, not allowing me to immerse myself in the beautiful environments and the more aggressive character they’re trying to make me be; this universe being much more harsh than that of Faerûn in BG3. Alternatively, it could be that the world of Warhammer 40,000 just isn’t my jam, or some mix of the two, or some third, nebulous reason. Therefore, I’m giving myself permission to move on.
The question becomes then, move on to what? I’ve hit the same slump I always get into when awaiting a new game to come out that I’ve been anticipating, as mentioned in my last article. However, Fable is just too far off. Luckily, as I was perusing my Steam library, wishlist, and the store, after catching up on Sony’s State of Play, I noticed that there’s currently a sale on Steam for the Resident Evil Remake games (RE2, RE3, & RE4).
History with the Spooks
Let me bring you back to early 2005. I’m a 13-year-old kid who has never been good with things that go bump in the night. I spent most of my junior high years avoiding scary movies, pretending to watch and read Goosebumps, and lying about having watched the latest horror film, all because my friends had seen them and I didn’t want to be left out, probably due to being a middle child. If I found myself in a situation where a scary movie/show was on the TV I would find a way to look away when I knew something was going to happen or a creature was on screen. Or I would feign that I had fallen asleep. I had a pretty severe fear of the dark combined with an overactive imagination, all the sugar a child can consume, and undiagnosed ADHD. I skirted watching Signs once at a friend’s sleepover by feigning I wanted a turn at the DOTA mod for Warcraft 3, despite not really caring for the mod as much as my friends, it being near-midnight, and being told to stay in the basement by his parents. I lied and said I had seen the movie and didn’t really like it, and promised to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake his sleeping parents.
Then, leading up to my freshman year of high school, I had heard that Resident Evil 4 was coming out, and probably saw a preview of it on G4 or something similar, and had a few friends that were really excited for it. At some point after it came out in 2005, I went over to a different friend’s house, who had it on the Gamecube. He picked up where he had left off, some point talking to the mysterious stranger to buy new weapons, and showed me what it was about. Despite the creepy atmosphere, sound effects and music that activated my fight or flight, and getting jump-scared more times than I would like to admit, I had quite a lot of fun staying up late playing it. Did I go to bed after playing it? Absolutely not. I was newly fourteen that Summer and subsisted on hot pockets and Mountain Dew. Instead, I stayed up while my friend went to sleep, and I continued to explore the world of RE4. Chugging a can of Mountain Dew every time I started to feel my certainly red-streaked, dry eyes starting to close.
The next time we went to Blockbuster, I convinced my dad to let me rent RE4 on GameCube, which technically belonged to my older sister, but she hardly ever used it. I spent that next week consuming the game. And avoiding sleep as much as possible, keeping the bathroom light that went into my room on so that I would have a bit of a nightlight when I needed to sleep.
Despite being terrified of every human head that was replaced by something akin to a centipede connecting to the rest of the body (maybe that’s why I get grossed out by centipedes still), eventually I grew to enjoy the sound they made when I exploded their human head and watched the centipedes grow. Okay, after looking at the image below from IGN I guess they don’t look anything like a centipede, but in my memory they looked a bit different.
Anyway, I also have a fond memory of discovering that you can find a rocket launcher before one of the boss fights near the end of the game and just blow him to bits with like two or three hits with it. It did trivialize the encounter, but I was a teenager so I just liked that I got to watch him explode a few times before the victory cutscene.
That Christmas, RE4 came out on PS2, and it was mine. I replayed it over Christmas break. Since then, I haven’t replayed it. I’ve also tried to get into subsequent Resident Evil games, but none that I’ve tried have really stuck with me. I also have grown accustomed to spooky things. I no longer need a night-light. I no longer drink copious amounts of Mountain Dew at midnight. I no longer jump every time there’s something that pops out at the audience; most of the time I’m laughing because it’s so obvious and yet everyone else around me jumps, and probably a bit laughing at myself for ever having thought Signs was scary.
There it is. I’m going to play Resident Evil 2 and 4 at least. I’ve heard mixed reviews on RE3, so not sure if I’m going to give it a shot, but it depends, I think, on how I feel after playing RE2. Then, if I’m not over the genre by the end of RE4, I’ll pick up Resident Evil Requiem(9) when it comes out later this month.