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Originally recorded: November 10, 2024
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Now that Halloween is well and truly behind us, it's time to return to my usually scheduled programming. It looks like Darksiders is going to be my last "big" game of the year. That being said, my schedule this year has fallen out of control. But if I can knock out two more games this month, I should be safe to finish everything up before Christmas, which is my hard deadline for this sort of thing. Honestly, I've sort of let the bonus games get out of control in recent years -- I used to be able to go on my end of the year break around November back in the good ol' days. But it's not like I didn't bring this on myself...

Much like Hollow Knight and Spec Ops: The Line, I've thought of the original Darksiders as one of those games where "I need an audience to force me to play it". But unlike those earlier two examples, my reason for not wanting to play this one on my own isn't connected to any real grudge against the game. Rather, I think I've watched at least four attempts at streaming this game in the past -- and two of them were from the same person -- so I just couldn't really muster up the motivation to play it on my own. Fortunately, I didn't get nearly as much exposure to the sequels, so I'm willing to play those on my own. But hey, if they get requested for future streams, I wouldn't have a problem continuing the saga that way either.

Admittedly, I've never really been a fan of the whole "start the game at full power before getting stripped of all of your abilities and sent back to zero" set piece. Coupling it with tutorials as you slowly regain them just makes it worse. Fortunately, I've seen this gimmick enough times from other seventh-gen releases that I don't find it nearly as annoying as I used to. If anything, I'm a bit nostalgic for the days of the Xbox 360, the Wii... and to a lesser extent, the PlayStation 3. While waypoints are still found in modern games, the settings themselves are a bit more streamlined compared to the ubiquitous open-worlds of today -- all bloated with empty space to show off the processing prowess of 8th and 9th-gen hardware.

IT SICKENS ME.

On the plus side, I got about as far as I was hoping to this time: I wrapped up finishing off this first session with the completion of the game's first true dungeon. Granted, I did have some issues with the boss fight itself, but I think that's mostly because I was being a little too cautious, given my low health. It seems a bit presumptuous to think that this will be indicative of how far I plan to make it in each subsequent livestream, but a man can dream, right?