Tag Archives: Xbox One

Xbox – Past/Present/Future

I rarely get on my soapbox and post rants on here but all of the news around Xbox has been inspiring me to want to write something for a while now. Every time the feeling subsides without me typing anything up, yet another piece of news drops that starts the process all over again. So, here I am, finally putting pen to paper, as it were.

Xbox: The Good Times

Instead of jumping right into all of the (mostly negative) events around Xbox lately, I figured I’d give a little background on how I became an Xbox fan, and what that journey has looked like through the years.

“I actually never had a ‘Duke’ of my own. Viva la Controller S!”

In something of a redux of me using one of my first paychecks to bring home a shiny new Nintendo 64 and a couple of games in the summer of 1997, my brother came home from a shift at his new job in, I’d guess, 2002 with a new Xbox and a couple of games. Being fairly checked out of gaming at the time, I don’t remember hearing too much about the Xbox or any of its upcoming games. I’m sure it didn’t help that, despite continuing to begrudgingly run Windows as my primary OS, I didn’t consider myself to be any great fan of Microsoft; I probably dismissed a lot of these rumors with a casual roll of the eyes. Not unlike the inspiration behind my N64 purchase, my brother had first tried an Xbox at a friend’s house and was blown away. I, on the other hand, remained skeptical.

One thing that hopefully isn’t too evident is that I’m often a bit of a skeptic when it comes to new things, especially technology and popular trends. Popular technology trends? Right out! I try to be open-minded and I’m certainly no Luddite, but I think “cautiously skeptical” would be the best way to describe my mindset. When my brother fired up Halo: Combat Evolved, I was both impressed and also a little judgemental, knowing how much the FPS genre had progressed in recent years on the PC. But, to steal a line from my Halo Fest post about Halo: CE, “I was quickly won over by its unique aesthetic, mysterious science fiction storyline, slick, polished execution, and almost perfect early implementation of dual analog stick FPS controls.” Of course, all of the good times playing split screen Slayer with my family and friends didn’t hurt either.

At around the same time I’d built my first new PC in years and dove back into PC gaming, particularly online, with a vengeance. After months of being absolutely glued to my monitor for hours every evening, I decided it might be nice to take some breaks away from my computer, as well as focus on some single-player games for a change. I knew from my brother’s Xbox that I liked the hardware, and never being a massive fan of JRPGs or fighting games, Xbox’s more western aligned library spoke to me a bit more than PlayStation’s. When it did come to Japanese games, however, some of my favorites were those standouts from my short time as a Sega Dreamcast owner, and as most fans of either console are well aware, Sega went hard on supporting the Xbox early on, releasing superior ports as well as sequels exclusively on the Xbox. I was particularly stoked to play Jet Set Radio Future (still an all-timer for me!) and to finally play Shenmue II.

During this time, I noticed that I had developed an unfortunate habit of buying every new game that caught my eye, playing it for a few hours, and then never playing it again whether I liked it or not. While I suspect quite a lot of gamers play this way, at some point I realized I wasn’t really getting my money out of these purchases, and I vowed to start beating every game I played. This intentional shift in my behavior around single player games is still something I do to this day – usually if I play a game, I fully intend on seeing it through. Maybe not 100%ing it, but at least completing the main single player campaign. One big downside is that I play a lot less games as a result, and by the Xbox 360 era I still had a huge library of original Xbox games I was slowly working my way through. Feeling left behind and determined to get an Xbox 360 “soon” I made a concerted effort to finish playing through the rest of my games, which was especially hard since my library kept growing. At some point I had to draw a line in the sand, or I’d never move on. Despite this being a bit of a grind, I have fond memories of this time.

When I finally joined the 7th console generation in 2007, I’d developed a similar habit of stocking up on every game that interested me, although by then it had shifted to the more frugal approach of buying used copies of games from GameStop, usually taking advantage of their sporadic “buy 2 get 1 free” sales. To this day, my collection of physical Xbox 360 games is absolutely massive and contains quite a few games I never got around to playing despite having every intention to. Regardless, those first few years of owning an Xbox 360 were great, with some of my favorite games at the time being released back to back, and having a lot of fun playing multiplayer, both online and offline, with a large group of local friends. While this blog was born around that time, it was just a year or two later, so unfortunately a lot of those games were not covered here.

“It’s a thing of beauty, although I rock the Slim model these days…”

By the time the 7th generation finally started to wind down, I’d decided to reduce my gaming footprint down to only a single machine going forward, and it… wasn’t an Xbox. Don’t get me wrong, I hadn’t regretted my time with either the Xbox or the Xbox 360, but if I could only have one machine, it had to be a PC. Not only could it play most everything a console could play that wasn’t an exclusive but it could do so, so much more, and gaming is only one of many hobbies I have based around computers. Plus, as mentioned, I still had plenty of great Xbox 360 games to work my way through. On top of that, I had to begrudgingly admit that if I were to get a console, the PlayStation 4 was looking more like what I wanted – I didn’t care about the Kinect and while the Xbox One’s media integration was neat, it wasn’t what I was there for. Meanwhile the PS4 was much more focused on playing games and playing them well, and Sony had been building an impressive staple of exclusives over the years to boot.

I’ve told this story here before, but those notions all fell through in spectacular fashion in 2016 when I went out one Sunday afternoon to stop by work for just a couple of hours, only to return home to discover that my house had been broken into. One of the (thankfully) relatively small selection of things the burglars made off with was my Xbox 360. Because of my renter’s insurance company’s generous replacement program, not only did I get paid out for the depreciated value of everything I lost, but they’d also pay the full dollar amount to replace certain items. With the Xbox 360 no longer for sale, I got myself an Xbox One S for free. “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

With both my partner and I having already invested so much in Xbox, it only made sense for us to continue down that path, especially given Microsoft’s continued treatment of backwards compatibility as a valued part of its ecosystem. While I never upgraded to the impressive Xbox One X, when the Xbox Series came out, I wasted no time upgrading to a Series X. Since then, I’ve only continued to do more and more of my game hoarding with Xbox, although pretty much exclusively digitally. Not unlike Steam, the Xbox Store has had regular, generous sales multiple times a year, making it all too tempting to load up on anything I’m even vaguely interested in. Despite the lack of many exclusives that really excite me, I’ve really enjoyed my time with the Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles, and I still do.

But things have gotten a little weird…

Xbox: The Not So Good Times

While the Xbox 360 arguably won the 7th generation with superior online features and only a few notable missteps (the whole “red ring” fiasco chief amongst them) compared to Sony’s slew of facepalming blunders, it started off the next generation quite poorly indeed. As mentioned, Microsoft seemed to be marketing the Xbox One as more of a multimedia machine than a gaming console, and you can’t downplay how much damage the whole always-on DRM fiasco did to their reputation with “core” gamers. Whether or not rumors about Sony planning to follow suit and changing their minds last minute were true, you can’t deny that Sony played that whole thing out to their advantage. Microsoft course-corrected, and a lot of people loved the Xbox One Slim and the later Xbox One X as much more gaming focused machines, but the damage was done and the silliness around all of this (“we have a product for people who aren’t able to get some form of connectivity; it’s called Xbox 360″ – Don Mattrick) lives in gaming culture infamy.

The PS4 was also a lot more powerful than the Xbox One which only reinforced the notion that the Xbox was no longer the best option for “core” gamers. This flip-flopped with the later releases of the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X, but the damage was done. While a bit closer together, the Xbox Series X is also more powerful than the PlayStation 5, but the release of the Xbox Series S as a less expensive, lower spec model which Microsoft required studios to support is often blamed for the lack of more impressive technological advancement in the current generation. While this is debatable, if nothing else, there are some specific examples where this clearly impacted availability on Xbox, with the delayed release of Baldur’s Gate 3 being a notable one from recent years.

“You know, I still really like the look of the One S!”

Then we have the matter of Xbox exclusives. While this has always been an element of every console war debate, it truly became an issue for Xbox with the Xbox One and has only gotten worse. Xbox’s exclusives are few and far between, and very few of them have had the appeal of those associated with the PlayStation brand. That’s not to say there are no good exclusives, but a 1:1 comparison isn’t all that favorable. To make matters worse, Xbox started making more and more of their first party games available on PC. While I personally think this is a great thing, it is almost always used as a negative against Xbox in such debates – these titles are no longer platform exclusives, but console exclusives. Since a lot of gamers either own gaming PCs and consoles, or game on PC exclusively, it’s hard to deny that the wider availability of these games means there’s less reason to own an Xbox. Fast forward to 2025, and Xbox is even launching games on PlayStation, with them more or less stating that exclusives are an outdated concept, which raises questions about whether or not Microsoft sees Xbox as more of a publisher than a platform these days. Meanwhile, Sony has recently announced that its taking the opposite approach, and stepping back from its relatively recent move of porting more of its games to PC – they seem to be joining Nintendo by walling their garden back up.

When it comes to particular exclusives, I’m a Halo fan, and it’s hard to not talk about how much cachet the Halo series has lost since Bungie left Microsoft. There have been non-stop issues around the series since the hand-off to 343 Industries. It’s been fixed and further improved since, but the Master Chief Collection, one of the Xbox One’s most attractive exclusives, was a bit of an infamous blunder when first launched. Halo 4, Halo 5, and Halo Infinite are all surrounded by their own controversies as well. A more negative perspective on this could paint this as Microsoft essentially killing the goose that laid the golden egg. While I don’t view the situation quite as harshly, there’s no denying that the Halo franchise isn’t what it used to be. Still, I suppose it won’t be able to consider itself an Xbox console exclusive soon anyway.

Speaking of killing those golden egg laying geese, one odd thing about Microsoft’s acquisition of development studios over the years is that they’ve reportedly been relatively hands off when it comes to managing most of these studios and/or their projects. Going against the stereotype that publishers meddling in development is one of the primary reasons for so many problems with specific game releases, Microsoft has been accused of not meddling enough – leaving studios and their projects to fail due to mismanagement instead of lending their resources to ensure successes. Overall, it feels like we’ve seen more interesting games get cancelled than come out lately. Despite this, Microsoft has continued to gobble up more and more developers, including the insane acquisitions of ZeniMax Media and Activision Blizzard, bringing them under the Xbox Studios umbrella. Complaints about consolidation aside, Xbox fans wouldn’t be silly for thinking these would be massive wins for Microsoft, and yet very little of note has come out of most of these acquisitions.

Despite all of this, Microsoft has since conducted mass layoffs, even closing entire studios. This could be seen as (and indeed, was sold as) trimming the fat, but nothing encapsulates the controversy around this quite like the situation with Japanese studio Tango Gameworks. Tango released Hi-Fi Rush as a bit of a surprise announcement in January 2023, which went on to garner critical acclaim, and yet Tango was included in the May 2024 announcement of studios being shuttered. If the backlash from fans wasn’t already loud enough, Xbox Game Content and Studios head Matt Booty mentioned that Xbox needed more games which could secure “prestige and awards”. The contradiction and lack of logic around that situation was blatant, sealing yet another infamous chapter in Xbox’s history.

It’s hard not to blame a lot of this on Xbox’s focus on their Game Pass service as their primary sales strategy. For fans, it has been hard not to love Game Pass – access to most first party titles and a huge selection of third party titles, including day one access to new first party games. It’s always felt like a great deal, and the number of times a new game has been released that had some of my friends worrying about justifying the purchase, only for me to have it for “free” would have easily justified the cost if I was the type of gamer who played more games on day one. Still, from the early days critics have wondered how this was sustainable – surely Microsoft and individual third party studios would be leaving a huge amount of money from sales on the table in many cases. It can also be argued that services like Game Pass, along with huge sales on platforms like Steam, lower the perceived value of games, which isn’t a great thing when games cost more to make every year. More relevant to the discussion of studio closures, however, is a shift from looking at critical reception and sales numbers to looking at how launches of new titles on Game Pass impact subscriptions.

“The Series X. I love that hint of green!”

Another more recent controversy related to Game Pass has been the price hikes. Game Pass Ultimate went from $14.99 a month to $16.99 in 2023, then to $19.99 in 2024. At that point, the price was feeling a bit steep, but still felt like a fairly good deal, especially with the inclusion of Game Pass on PC and other services like EA Play. In 2025 the price went from $19.99 to $29.99, which kind of blew up the Internet. So many people cancelled their subscriptions as a result that Microsoft’s account management went down for a bit, and even I, someone who has had Game Pass since its inception, and Xbox Live Gold before that, downgraded from Ultimate to Premium. The price crossed over what I was willing to pay every month for a service like this, which is double the price of PlayStation Plus Premium, for the record, and unless this was a deliberate move to justify moving away from their Game Pass strategy, it felt like a massive blunder on Xbox’s part. Of course I have no idea what the numbers actually look like, but if social media is to be believed, a lot of people chose to jump off the Xbox bandwagon at this point.

When it comes to changes in strategy, starting in late 2024 we saw an advertising campaign that focused on, between Xbox on PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming, the ability to play Xbox games on just about anything, with the slogan “This is an Xbox”. This aligned with the previously mentioned gradual shift to have just about all first party games available on PC, this has had people wonder if we’d see another generation of Xbox, and if we did, if it would be made by Microsoft themselves or perhaps licensed out to other manufacturers as some other consoles have done in the past. The release of the ROG Ally Xbox handheld suggested that neither of these is an impossibility, since despite the branding, it was made by Asus, and only supported PC games with no Xbox compatibility layer to boot.

Most recently we’ve had a bit of an abrupt changing of the guard at Xbox, with Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond both out. Phil Spencer has been a divisive figure, as despite being the CEO of Microsoft Gaming since not long after the Xbox One launch and therefore being, in one way or another, accountable for most of the negative things listed here, he seemed to do a lot right in terms of recovering from that terrible Xbox One launch, and his passion for gaming actually felt genuine, which is pretty rare in the industry. Still, his boilerplate corpo-speak communications around things like the aforementioned layoffs and studio closures does bring some of this into question. Still, it’s much more concerning that he was replaced by a former executive in AI at Microsoft, especially when AI is already being blamed for so many layoffs and other random enshitification in gaming and in tech in general. While I don’t think she was put in place to kill Xbox, as some doomsayers have theorized, I do suspect this will herald some sort of major changes in direction for Xbox.

Yet, when you add all of this up, it really does seem like Xbox has taken themselves out of the game. Sales have suffered so much this generation that there was a news story being widely discussed about the third largest retailer in the world, Costco, based just down the street from Microsoft, no longer carrying Xbox consoles. Things sure seem pretty damn bleak right now.

Xbox: The Future?

To end this on a bit more of a positive note, the next Xbox, code named Project Helix, was officially unveiled at GDC 2026, and I’ve been surprised by how positive a lot of the response has been. As suspected, we know this next generation of Xbox will be yet another step towards the platform essentially being a Windows PC, but given the impressive Windows 11 “Xbox Mode” that debuted with the Rog Ally Xbox, I think we’d be safe to look at this more as an Xbox that can play PC games than a PC that can play Xbox games. That said, I’m particularly curious about how this new Xbox will handle allowing other stores, like Steam, to run on the platform, and indeed, if they will port their entire experience (including backwards compatibility with older Xbox 360 and original Xbox games) to the Windows based Xbox app. Here’s hoping any skepticism around Project Helix and Xbox Gaming’s new CEO is just that, but I can’t blame anyone for betting against Xbox at this point. Even then, as impressed as I’ve been with the PlayStation 4 and 5, I don’t think we’d want to exist in a world where Sony doesn’t have any legitimate competition – if you were around in those days, and not a Sony fanboy, I’d guess you remember Sony’s insane hubris during the first couple of years of the PS3 era. Yikes.

Images stolen from some low effort Google Images searches.

Politicians and Other Psychopaths

Returning to something more traditional for my partner and I, the good old narrative heavy modern take on the adventure game, which we’d played so many of together over the years, we played our very first ever Supermassive Games title, The Quarry. Supermassive is probably best known for its PlayStation exclusive Until Dawn, and from what I gather, there are quite a lot of similarities between the two games – I’d even read that The Quarry was the product of an aborted attempt to make an Until Dawn 2. For better or for worse, since I’ve yet to play Until Dawn, I won’t be tempted to fill this entire review with those kinds of fun comparisons. They’ve also got the Dark Pictures Anthology series, which I gather consists of similar, though smaller and generally less ambitious games that each tackle different horror subgenres.

“In true horror movie style, it doesn’t take long for shit to get real.”

Like those titles, The Quarry is also a horror game. I went into it somewhat blind, and was pleasantly surprised by having my assumptions about what the game was about quickly challenged – judging it by descriptions I’d read and trailers I’d seen, it looked like your stereotypical Friday the 13th style slasher affair. You know, a bunch of teens at a summer camp in the woods getting picked off one by one by a deranged psychopath, that sort of thing. It is that, but, being vague so that others might have the same experience as I did, it also, almost immediately, introduces monsters, witches, and weird Southern family tropes, which kept me guessing about where the story was actually going (at least for a little while) while being appropriately creepy throughout.

I have to say that The Quarry, overall, looks fantastic. The graphics are fairly realistic to the point of occasional moments of “uncanny valley” when it comes to those trickier to nail things like facial animations. Even more so because of their preference to base character faces on their actual voice actors, including some you’ll likely recognize – David Arquette’s character was featured heavily in promotional material, for instance. Overall though, the game looks really, really good. For the most part, the UI, hell, the entire presentation of the game, is also really nice and quite polished. Being that this was my first Supermassive game, I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of quality, but this definitely feels a million miles away from your stereotypical low budget PC-only modern adventure game. Oh, and the audio here is all great too – the effects, music, and voice acting are very good, and more importantly, they’re all used really effectively too. On a technical level alone, most of my hesitation about jumping onto the Supermassive bandwagon quickly disappeared.

“Choices are usually binary and often timed.”

Gameplay-wise, The Quarry feels like a weird melding of your minimally interactive modern FMV or “interactive movie” games, like Late Shift, your old school, very interactive point and click adventure games, and the middle ground, something like Telltale’s Walking Dead series, for example. I think it works quite well, providing opportunities for puzzle solving and even action sequences as well as dialog choices and other decision making, while leaving a ton of room for setting the scene or advancing the narrative via long cutscenes. Interestingly, you’ll be jumping between playing each of a group of camp counselors, and the co-op mode lets you assign who plays which specific characters, and even lets you divide up the entire cast to different players via the online “Wolf Pack” mode. My partner and I divvied up the characters based on their profiles and swapped the controller as needed, which, in terms of who gets to play for how long, was more than a little random at times, but was fun and more tonally consistent than having to take turns making sometimes contradictory decisions as the same character.

“YESSS! A game the ridicules me for missing useless collectibles!”

I’m still of two minds over whether this is a actually bad thing, but sometimes these major branching moments didn’t come about by an obvious decision. For example, early in the game there was an action scene where, if we had reacted quickly enough, we could have killed a character which would have had a huge effect on the rest of the story, and the fact that this was based on a semi-twitchy, high pressure scene definitely caught us by surprise. Oh, and speaking of which, yes, major characters can die or be affected in very big ways that have ramifications throughout the rest of your playthrough, which was one of the charms of Telltale’s adventure games as well, and feels cranked up to 11 here. I understand this was also the case with Until Dawn and most of Supermassive’s other adventure games, and while this could be criticized as being gimmicky, personally, I’m a fan.

I can’t say I absolutely loved every character or every story beat, plus the ending felt a little sudden, which sadly isn’t an uncommon issue in these types of games. In this case though, I could definitely see myself playing through it again one of these days, especially given all of the fun extras and collectibles and the insane amount of deviation and branching your choices and actions can bring about – apparently there are 186 variations of the ending available. As I said, insane. In the end, we enjoyed it enough to buy the entire first season of the Dark Pictures Anthology the next time it was on sale. ‘Nuff said!

Next up, wanting to play an actual cooperative game on PC that wasn’t yet another tree punching survival game, I came across the We Were Here series of asymmetrical co-op games. Now, we’ve played a few co-op focused games, most notably the Hazelight ones, but reviews made We Were Here sound like it was much more likely to test the strength of our relationship. Now that’s true horror! 😅

“A creepy castle filled with creepy puzzles.”

The setup is simple: Without much further explanation, you and your partner are walking with a larger group through a frozen wasteland and split off to check out and then take refuge in a mysterious castle. The next thing you know, you’re both waking up to discover that you’ve been split up. One player takes the role of the “librarian” whose primary job is to, confined to a small area, reference books and other useful objects spread throughout. The other player is the “explorer” whose job it is to, well, explore. That mostly involves navigating from room to room and investigating the mysteries therein, which ultimately lead to the way to the next area, like multiple relatively simple escape rooms chained together. Each player is given a walkie-talkie near the beginning to communicate with one another (using in-game VOIP, a feature I always really like even though I usually eventually end up abandoning for out-of-game voice chat) and from then on, the game is on.

Naturally, communication is key to solving these puzzles – the explorer might need to describe symbols or pictures to the librarian, or vice versa. That communication needs to actually be good too, as a lot of the things you’re asked to describe are intentionally extremely similar, so the players need to be detailed to avoid mistakes. There are also puzzles that involve one person helping the other person navigate through mazes, and as typical as that sounds, a lot of these scenarios have some pretty clever twists. Look, I grew up in the UK in the 80s and 90s and watched a ton of Knightmare, so I was more than up for the challenge. (If you know, you know!)

“Guiding the Explorer around a maze as the Librarian.”

While obviously done on a budget, the presentation is pretty good, featuring the same kind of low polygon, colorful, stylized graphics I mentioned learning to love with Firewatch when describing a lot of other games recently (I really need to find a term for this style…) and yet it manages to be quite creepy a lot of the time too. It’s definitely a vibe, and your mileage may vary, but it works for me.

Interestingly, the whole thing only lasts a couple of hours, though you’ll likely want to switch roles and play it a second time, especially if you’re into achievement hunting. Still, the game is often free, and as such, makes a perfect demo for the rest of the series. That strategy certainly worked on us – we were impressed with it enough to immediately turn around and purchase the sequel, We Were Here Too, which I’m sure I’ll talk about here eventually.

Finally, we’ve just completed our playthrough of The Council. The Council is an episodic narrative heavy adventure game developed by Big Bad Wolf, who are probably best known for their later take on the Vampire: The Masquerade universe with Swansong in 2023. I don’t know too much about Swansong, but it appears to use a lot of the same gameplay mechanics as The Council, though it has significantly worse reviews. Hmm. 🤔 This might just be a result of The Council attracting more of a niche, adventure game loving audience than Swansong, which probably attracted a lot of players hoping for a sequel to the cult classic Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which it clearly is not.

“If you think these guys are ugly, you should see Sir Gregory Holm!”

I distinctly recall having some hesitations about this game when first coming across it on the Microsoft Store, but my partner was very intrigued and its reviews were surprisingly positive, so we eventually purchased it. It’s funny, we played them far enough apart that I didn’t really compare it to The Quarry while playing it, but now writing this compiled review, I can’t help but to weigh them against each other, at least a little, given that they’re in the same genre of gameplay. On the surface, this does not bode well at all for The Council, but in some ways, The Council is actually much more interesting.

The main reason for my hesitation was the visual presentation. Screenshots and trailers made this game look almost comically bad looking. You have a variety of historical figures, like Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington, with ugly, stylized character models, and hey, there’s some kind of a murder mystery or something afoot too? Seriously, what the fuck is this game?! While I have to stand by that initial impression of the graphics, particularly the character faces, as being bizarre, sometimes exaggerated to the extent of being grotesque, overall, I actually came to enjoy the style once I got used to it. This will no doubt be a divisive point though – I’d expect a lot of people will absolutely loath them. That said, the scenery, particularly inside of Lord Mortimer’s mansion, where you’ll be spending the majority of the game, was well executed. Really, the only technical issues with the visuals are around the character animations, which range from “eh, decent I guess” to utterly abysmal. Well, actually, the bottom of that range would be “not there at all” as we did encounter a few bugged moments where characters weren’t animated at all while their dialog played. All but one of these instances were brief enough to not take us completely out of the game though, thankfully.

“Flashback to classic adventure games.”

The bulk of my impressions were around the gameplay though. On the surface The Council seems to follow a Telltale-like take on the adventure game – a lot of dialog choices, decisions which appear to branch the storyline, and plenty of cutscenes. I’d say that there’s a lot more free roaming and even the odd inventory puzzle in The Council, and there are no real QTE scenes since there are no real action scenes, so this edges it a bit closer to the traditional point and click adventure game of the 90s. Where this gets interesting is that there is a layer of almost RPG-like mechanics on top of all of this: a skill-based system complete with experience points to advance those skills, traits that affect them, and using skills requires spending limited “effort points.” I was initially skeptical…

To go into that all in just a bit more detail, many of your dialog choices and some of your special actions in the game are tied to specific skills. Using these skills requires you to have the skill, of course, and the use of a set amount of effort points, which is reduced depending on what level your skill is at. You level these skills up as you gain experience from chapter to chapter, and there are also books that you can read in limited quantities each chapter, and traits which can sometimes grant you skill points as well. Interestingly, you will still see the options to use these skills even if you don’t have them, which can help guide you to where you might want to allocate skill points later, or in a subsequent playthrough, though every skill gets its turn sooner or later. Your pool of effort points grows as you level up, but can also be affected by items – you’ll find consumables that let you restore some of your points or even make your next skill use free. There’s also one that removes your alterations, which negatively affect the number of effort points you need to use a skill.

“The Council’s dialog system is surprisingly complex.”

The dialog system also has a few other surprises. First, there are “confrontations” which are special dialog events in which you need to choose the correct options in order to convince someone of something or win an argument, that kind of thing, and your success or failure will often cause a decision-like branching of the story. These all felt a lot more tense than normal conversations, even if the stakes weren’t particularly high. Confrontations are particularly affected by that character’s specific vulnerabilities and immunities to certain skills, which are usually discovered the hard way by choosing the wrong dialog option, though there’s another consumable that will temporarily reveal them to you. Finally, we have “opportunities” which are as close as The Council gets to Telltale’s QTEs – moments where you can, if you’re quick enough, move your cursor to an interactive hotspot that appears briefly, usually over part of the character you’re talking to’s face or body. These unlock special dialog or actions, often revealing new information, including vulnerabilities and immunities.

Overall, some of these systems were a bit bewildering at first, but in the end I think they work surprisingly well, and add a nice gamey component to the otherwise rather simple dialog system that most of these sorts of games employ.

Finally, there’s the story itself. If you’re the type of person who likes ancient and old world conspiracy theory along the lines of something like the Da Vinci Code, you might be as drawn in as I initially was. Right off the bat we have something of a “whodunit” mystery, all kinds of mysterious characters and related subplots, and a backdrop of political intrigue complete with secret societies attempting to pull the strings of events across the entire world. I constantly found myself wanting to learn more about what was really going on here, at least until the rather heavy-handed main reveal (something of a twist) comes in a later episode. While I found that twist, which brings in a supernatural element, and especially my character’s reactions to it to be a little silly, by then I was invested enough to say “fuck it” and just roll with it.

“Like I said, confrontations can feel a little tense…”

Unfortunately, the end of the game was a bit of a let down. There was a final confrontation which just… well, it just suddenly ended. As the game summed up how bad of a job we’d done in the last chapter and the post-game character wrap-up started to play, it took my partner and I a full 30 more seconds to realize what had just happened before we looked at each other and let out a simultaneous “OOOOOOooooooooohhhhh!” It was jarring enough that we did something we never do in these kinds of narrative games – loaded up our last save, corrected a mistake we made (an easy to miss but vital item we didn’t pick up) and went through it again, this time achieving a much better, even if it was similarly abrupt, ending. This does speak of one of the game’s strengths though, in that, not unlike The Quarry, there is a good amount of deviation and branching that can take place here, with over a dozen distinct endings. In fact, there was one major decision in the second to last chapter of the game that really had us debating amongst ourselves about which way to go, which should suggest it was an interesting and impactful one if nothing else.

That sums up The Council pretty well. Despite the weird, somewhat janky graphics and the plot that goes to some unexpected places, then ends faaaarrrr too abruptly, I enjoyed the game, especially its take on the narrative adventure mechanics, which has me suddenly much more curious about Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, a game that hadn’t really been on my radar even a little bit before.

Unfortunately my dumb ass didn’t take enough screenshots of any of these games, and some of the ones I did take contained spoilers, so instead I’ve opted to steal them from various random places on the net.

More Redemption?

Incredibly, I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 for something like two years now. It’s not because it’s a damn long game (though it definitely can be.) Rather, it’s a game I decided to play almost exclusively while my partner watched along, owing largely to the fact that she played it a few years prior and absolutely loved it, and was stoked to watch me play through it. In the end, I think I put something like 160 hours into it, and that is with barely touching hunting, fishing, herb gathering, or crafting. Unfortunately, I don’t really think our particular approach to playing a game sort-of together is very compatible with a game so time-consuming. That is, it can be hard enough for one of us to be both in the mood and with the free time to play a game like this, but for that to align for us both? Lessons learned!

“Probably my favorite Read Dead Redemption 2 screenshot.”

Still, Red Dead Redemption 2 was lauded by critics and fans alike when it launched in 2018, winning various awards and topping Game of the Year lists, so it’s not like I didn’t want to play it myself. I did have a bit of a strange relationship with the first game though – a fan of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, which of course RDR shares most of its non-Western genre related DNA with, it took me a while to finally get around to playing it, and when I did, I think I found it a bit slow to start, and a bit too mechanically similar to GTA IV. Still, like GTA IV itself, by the time it was over, it had fully won me over owing largely to its characters and its incredible virtual world, polished up with Rockstar’s usual massive production values and an attention to detail bordering on insanity.

Looking back at my impressions of Red Dead Redemption, it’s interesting just how many of my notes on RDR2 align with those of the first game. For instance, while I wouldn’t call RDR2 slow to start exactly, the introduction is still sometimes criticized as taking some effort to get through before the game really begins. I’d also say that, yes, RDR2 can still feel quite “clunky” with its priority for completing its incredible but often rather lengthy animations over player control, sometimes causing some odd object clipping or, more often in this game, characters to sort of slide to locations if they’re close to objects they need to interact with, but not quite close enough to do so. Perhaps necessary trade-offs, but this kind of thing can sometimes shatter the otherwise effective illusion. Just like the first game though, I’m sure most players will get used to the “feel” of the engine after a while, which largely alleviates those annoyances.

“The infamous Dutch and our boy Arthur”

One big difference this time around though, is that this animation priority combines with some serious control issues to occasionally result in outright rage inducing moments. The controls of RDR2 aren’t too dissimilar from the first game, or indeed GTA IV and GTA V, yet due to the additional level of simulation Rockstar was going for here, they’ve crammed quite a bit more complexity into them. A button tap versus a longer press here and there, sure, but the major culprit is context sensitivity. That is, having the same buttons do different things depending on the situation. As a relatively mundane example that happened to me right at the end of my playthrough, I’d just saved a “stranger” NPC from being attacked by a mountain lion. I approached him to talk to him, but forgot I still had my gun in my hand. It just so happens that the “focus on a character” and the “aim your gun” buttons are the same, depending on if you’re armed. Instead of having a friendly exchange, or maybe even getting rewarded for lending a helping hand, I pointed my pistol right at the poor bastard’s head and threatened to kill the man, resulting in him understandably fleeing in sheer terror. Whelp… This is far from the worst case of this happening to me, and wacky anecdotes of a similar nature abound all over the Internet. It’s less about not knowing how the controls work, and more about them not always doing what you want or expect them to do in the moment, and that perceived loss of agency over your character’s actions is far more aggravating. Couple that in with getting trapped in a long, unbreakable animation, and doing something you didn’t mean to do can be incredibly frustrating. There might have been some damn difficult moments in previous Rockstar games, but I don’t recall ever being as controller-throwingly angry as I was several times throughout my playthrough of RDR2.

“Dutch giving one of his speeches around the campfire.”

You know, with a lesser game, that could have killed it for me – rage quit, uninstall, move on, right? Thankfully, RDR2 is not a lesser game. RDR2 is a masterclass of building an incredibly immersive and detailed virtual world. With its enormous map representing huge swaths of the United States for a variety of beautiful and believable climates, flora, and fauna, plus towns and even a legitimate city this time around. As with my time in the first game, I rarely ever used its fast travel, preferring to ride between locations, which provided more opportunity to enjoy the amazing scenery, as well as organically experience its excellently implemented random encounters and side quests, helping the world feel a bit more alive than in previous games. When my parents stayed with us recently, it was the first game I whipped out to show them, and they just watched me travel around randomly, as enthralled as if they were watching a good movie. It’s one of those games. While nothing is perfect, RDR2 is a technical and artistic masterpiece, definitely snatching the crown from GTA V as the next evolution of Rockstar’s “RAGE” engine, if not the entire genre they helped create.

I also really enjoyed the narrative this time around. The way it tied in the characters and events from the first game was wonderfully effective. It might be one of the best prequels of any sort I’ve ever experienced, to the point where I had to wonder if a great deal of the context and backstory RDR2 provides to the first game wasn’t already written. In fact, it really makes me want to go back and play RDR again. Still, I suppose the fact that our protagonist, Arthur Morgan, wasn’t mentioned at all in the first game probably settles that though. Speaking of which, Roger Clark did a bang up job as Arthur, as did Rob Wiethoff and Benjamin Byron Davis as John Marston and Dutch van der Linde. Really, as a whole, the VA performances in this game were terrific, and the soundtrack, while a bit different than what we got in the first game, was also great. I mentioned the more serious tone in my RDR review, and I’m happy to say that with the exception of the occasional silly side mission, RDR2 is perhaps even more tonally consistent this time around, and while there may still be the odd Western movie stereotype here and there, the vast majority of its characters felt much more realistic to boot.

“Charge!”

So yeah, there are still some other gripes to be had, like the game save and the fast travel systems, the way the game always wants to put my weapons away, or force me to use certain ones, and the fact that missions still feel oddly derivative of the good old Grand Theft Auto formula (though they’re a bit better obfuscated this time around) plus it’s definitely a bummer that we never saw any DLC released for the game, and that Red Dead Online seems to have been something of a failure, but overall, despite all of these complaints, I think Red Dead Redemption 2 is a triumph, and its existence elevates the already brilliant first game. If there is ever another Red Dead game, I hope it’s with a whole new cast of characters rather than another prequel (maybe showing the Van der Linde Gang at an earlier stage) or a proper sequel following Jack Martson. I’m happy with this story where it is, personally.

(I just might make an exception for a Sadie Adler bounty hunting spin off, though… 😛)