The original: Resident Evil

As I mentioned, let's start talking about Resident Evil, the first game of the saga. 

 

I had this game when I was a teenager, for the original PlayStation, but I never played it long enough to finish it, I always got stuck at some point or died and had to redo a lot and abandoned it. The best run I had was when I played till the second snake combat.This game was one of the first popular survival horror games, and I remember seeing it with my cousins or talking about it with classmates, and it had lots of important new concepts. Maybe there's other games that also did the same, but this one for sure was the one that popularized them. 

 I played a remastered version, so it's the same game but with better graphics, and it seems some reshuffled puzzles, sometimes.

 The game starts after a very cheesy live-action video of some soldiers/police being hunted as they try to arrive to the house by strange monsters, which seem to be basically dogs. You can play as Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, and depending on your choice you'll find different allies and the plot will vary slightly. Chris playthrough is harder plus I always like to play as the women in games, so of course I chose Jill. Jill starts with a gun and has more inventory space, which is important. 

The game starts in the house you arrived, which apparently is owned by Umbrella Corporation. As you navigate the place, you find your first zombie, followed by more zombies and other monsters, and you discover that they're this evil organization that creates bioweapons in the form of viruses and the associated monsters. 

You spend a lot of time in the initial house before moving to other areas, and the creepy music, changing camera angles and insane puzzles give it a very nice atmosphere. The voice-acting is quite exaggerated, but considering there's not much cutscenes, it's fine. You keep finding journals of Umbrella employees, some of them quite sadistic, others just workers that got slowly infected and turned into zombies. Plenty of them talk about the weird house that requires emblems to open doors and other such things. During the game you also find occasionally other members of your group, although most of the time they're dead or dying. As you progress you discover that you may have a mole in your team, and that not all is as it seems...since in the end is your own boss, Albert Wesker, one of the bad guys that secretly works for umbrella. He keeps appearing in the series, and keeps being an annoying antagonist, although in this first one you discover this just at the end, when he's apparently killed by the final boss, a humanoid monster with a big claw that you end up killing with a special grenade launcher after surviving some minutes of combat with it.

The gameplay is the original one: You point to raise your weapon, and then you can rotate the character, point higher or lower, and shoot. You run around with a fixed camera showing you the room you're in, and sometimes the camera changes and then you may not know anymore which direction you're moving, which is kind of funny. Also sometimes the angle makes you not see that there's a zombie coming your way, so you also need to pay attention to the sounds around you, since different monsters have different sounds. 

The puzzles are not very hard, you just need to apply some logic, although some of them may take a bit longer than others. There's not a lot of variety in enemies, although soon enough zombies give way to faster and deadlier foes. Once you leave the house the areas manage to still be creepy, with special mention to the section where you meet some type of zombie prototype that is immortal. Related to that, there's an occasional boss fight, although they're not very hard in general but feel more like draining you of resources. The difficulty of the game is based on scarcity, and killing every monster you encounter, while making it easier for you to move, can make you run out of ammo or health items. 

The inventory system where important quest items, weapons and ammo all share the same limited space is a bit of an annoyance, I have to say. Usually it causes you to either go unprepared sometimes or having to backtrack to grab an item, leave in the the storage, go back to grab another one and so on. This extends the game unnecessarily, but well, it's more realistic than carrying everything with you, that's true. This reminds me that the health system deserves a special mention: You use "herbs", the green one heals you, the blue one cures poison and the red one increases the green one potency (1 red + 1 green is the same as 3 greens). How do you use the herbs is never addressed, but when you combine them they look suspiciously...joint-like. You do have also healing sprays though, to heal fully.

The original graphics were quite primitive, although groundbreaking for their time. This remastered version has improved models, but still feels similar in how some elements of the background that you can interact with are clearly more visible because they're a 3d model and not a more realistically painted wall fixture. However the whole thing feels just charming and not bad. 

 The game has a few different endings based on your actions in key moments of the plot. While not very different exactly, I always think more games should have this philosophy, since it makes it more interesting to replay it and try to see what did you miss last time, with the best ones doing it in a way that you get the whole story after finding all the endings. This first resident evil doesn't quite achieve this, but it sure adds an extra layer of wanting to do all the correct steps to get the best one. While i've never played with Chris, the game is almost the same, changing only the companions you find along the way. I also have to say that Jill, even if the protagonist, gets some annoying damsel-in-distress moments where this other big guy has to come and save you, something that feels totally unnecessary.

Overall it's a great first game, a bit long I have to say, that starts in a great creepy tone while putting strong bases for the next ones.

Latest Confinement Games

This past year I've strongly reconnected with my gaming side, since there was not much else to do sometimes.  I'd like to comment on a few of these games that I've played or I'm still playing.

 

 First, there are the Resident Evil saga. With plenty of time and seeing as we were in lock-down, I decided to get myself most of the resident evil saga games, from 1 to 7. There are other spin-offs, of course, but some of them I never really finished or played properly. Others were just re-maked recently, and seemed like a good idea to replay all of them. They have faults, but it's one of the first horror games I played and it's still fun to revisit and check it. For them though, I've decided I'll write a post for each one, and here I'm just mentioning them for the moment. I will just say that it took a while to get through all of them...

Then, Control. I've talked about Control before and it's still awesome, but recently there was some new DLC. I've done the first part and it was as good as the rest, introducing some new mechanics and being overall really good. Now I've heard that the second part of that DLC includes a section that ties with Alan Wake, and I'm very curious to play this soon, as Alan Wake had lot of potential but it was at the end that this potential shined, to then be left hanging and unfinished, with the protagonist still stuck in a nightmare dimension of some type. I don't know what will happpen in the DLC, but I'll be happy to try it soon and see if there's some closure finally.

 A game that I also talked before about but that I left unfinished was Alien Iolation. This game was very very scary, as mentioned, and playing it required a special state of mind. However during this period I finally played it for longer periods and more seriously. Once I got into track, I have to say that it's still scary, but also a bit frustrating and a bit too long in the end. There were sections that felt a bit repetitive, and also there's a limit to "and then things got worse" can happen without being tired about not catching a break ever. Nevertheless the game is still pretty good, and I consider it as a horror masterpiece for sure. I was very glad to finish it I have to say....

For a while now I've heard good things about the Doom remake that was published some years ago. This year Doom Eternal was also published, a continuation of the other one, so I decided to give the first one a try. Doom would correspond, by number, to Doom 4. I've played 1st and 2nd, of course, and they're classics. I didn't play the 3rd one because at the time I didn't feel like playing as much, and what I've heard is that it tried to be more like survival horror, something that Doom should not be. Well, I have to say that this new Doom recuperates very well the spirit of the first ones. It's brutal, it's fast, and it's a lot of fun. Playing it feels like dancing, you don't stand in one place for a second and you transition from enemy to enemy, from gun to gun, in a complicated pattern of jumping/shooting/evading/crushing that feels organic and challenging. It's not an easy game, but it feels rewarding. 

I've started Doom Eternal recently, and it looks amazing and more open, with lots of things to explore, but also the difficulty seems ramped up even more and I'm struggling a bit with that. I didn't get stuck that fast with the previous Doom. I believe this is not ideal in any game, but well, we'll see. It does have even more mobility and tools, so I'd say it's a more complex type of dance. Also, plot-wise it lacks a bit of connection between the two games. I don't know if there were expansions or something that I missed, but original Doom and original Doom Eternal should be enough to understand what has happened in a linear way, and currently they're not, which detracts a bit. Still feels like a good game though.

As part of promoting their new game shop, Epic games have been giving awesome free games, and one of them has been Civilization VI. I didn't play any other Civ games, although I've heard a lot of good things about them, so I gave it a try. I have to say it's quite addictive, quite complicated and well, overall awesome. I understand a lot better now what other people have been saying about them. It's a complex strategy game with different paths to victory (science, military, religion, culture...I feel I'm missing another one. But you get my point), although some seem easier than others. It has a crazy amount of options and combinations, and it's turn based and rather long, I'd say. But well, I've played a couple of games against computer and yeah, definitely recommending it if you like strategy and civilization-building. Reminds me in a good way of the table game 7 Wonders.

For Christmas, in my new place we got some credit to buy in amazon as part of a Christmas basket. I took the chance to get some of the games I comment here, plus I also got Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2, a remake of the skateboarding games. I played 2 and 3 when I was a teenager and I really loved them, 2 more than 3 I have to say but 3 was still rather good. I know that after 3 it got all weird, but the original idea was simple, amazing and good. You just have different scenarios with goals, and 2 minutes to do them. This version has much better graphics, although I remember the scenarios as if they were the same, because of how immersive the original was. You have a selection of skaters to use, you can max up their stats, and in the end you get a video of the real-life skater doing cool stuff. The things you do inside the game are quite unrealistic, but it's still really enjoyable to do different tricks, combine combos and mess around. One thing that helps a lot is that the soundtrack of the games was quite amazing, and it motivated you into doing tricks. It's a game where you keep learning how to do increasingly more complex goals, and while simple it's strangely compelling. I've finished all the main goals already of all the stages, but there's still plenty of secret goals, and skater videos to unlock, and it feels relaxing and fun to play it.

Finally, I'd like to talk about Hades. Hades is a rogue-like slash-them-up game, similar to Bastion. It has an isometric perspective, you control the son of Hades, Zagreus, trying to escape the greek Underworld, armed with a sword or some other special weapon, and you find random rooms with random monsters. When you die, which is normal, you appear again in the underworld where you can interact with the people there before trying to escape again. Every time you may recollect certain items and experience that may make your life easier, unlock new weapons and in general get better, so next time you get further. What's more, that's a bit of a spoiler but even when you finish the escape successfully, you end up dying again and having to repeat the whole thing, around 10 times to reach a point where the main plot is "complete", while leaving subplots and branches to investigate. That may seem tedious but it's not. It has amazing art, great voice acting, the gameplay is intuitive and fast and never boring, and every time a number of gods give you special boons to help you and the different combinations are quite interesting and change things quite a lot. The plot is developed between escape attempts, and characters are rich and interesting. This game is an independent game that has received quite a lot of praise, and it's very well deserved. Also, the developers of this game have folowed rather ethical practices, so I'm more than happy to support such things. I really recommend it.

 

That's all for the moment, I'll try to write posts for the Resident Evil games soon :)

Declaration of War

 We're at war and we don't know it. 

 For a long while now we've been at war. And it's a world war. And we're losing it. It's a war with casualties from mostly one side only, but it's a very civic war. In this war, most of the time, it's not like someone will come to us and shoot us, oh no. That's not polite. In this war we lose little by little, our lives and our time. Although in some areas you do get shot, where the fight is in its worse shape. It's an asymetrical war, both sides are rather different in numbers and power. But it's a war nonetheless. 

This war has been raging for all our history. Sometimes there's calm periods and truces. Sometimes there's small victories. But lately it's going worse for us, after a period where it seemed we could achieve some level of victory, or at least a reasonable truce. 

 We've had recent battles in plenty of places. In Brazil, we lost to ignorance and stupidity, and because of its current culture it may take some time before any victories can be achieved. In Chile there was a recent stand off that gives us hope after a long period of darkness, but it needs to be developed and to grow into a victory, and it may not be one just yet. In Bolivia we won after almost losing an important battle. Hong Kong seems lost, the battle continues but the enemy is too brutal in there. In USA we were defeated so long ago nobody remembers our side, but lately there's been some movements towards a change, although it's still in its infancy, and the latest results are not really a victory. Poland was never in our side but maybe after the latest abuse some reaction will be triggered. I'm not informed enough to talk about countries in Africa but it seems there's been an ongoing change in there too, little by little, in some of them small victories for us. Turkey has been conquered after a period of hope, and we need to recover it but won't be easy. Russia had some chances but the opportunity was not taken. Most religious-based countries mark a huge defeat for us.

Spain was lost since 1939, and is still lost to this day. Catalunya has a chance to be a small win, but Spain will fight us to the death. 

One side is always the same: Fascism, dictatorships, unchecked corruption, economic power, religious power. The other is just the average person. 

The war is simple: Average people want to have nice lives. Lives where you do work, but you also have free time, health, friends, and where you can work with what you like. Lives where you can allow yourself presents, for you and your friends and family. Where you can have vacations and visit places. Where you can have moments of rest and calmness. Where you can believe whatever you want and no one imposes their views on you. Where you can retire and you don't need to die right away. Where people help each other. and where we can collectively decide things for ourselves. Then we have internal struggles about how to achieve these objectives, but that's the idea.

The other side wants to have these things only for a few of themselves, the chosen ones, and everyone else should suffer and die slowly to provide these things to them, It's a simple as that.

 Maybe this seems simplistic or evident. But what I want to remark, is that this is WAR. When people get kicked out of their houses, people DIE. When factories are closed down, people DIE. When hospitals are privatized and medicine is not affordable, people DIE. Those are casualties. When some rich or powerful bastard takes a decision to withheld resources for the common people, this person is PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for the impoverishment, misery and death of these people. Same way I would be accused of not helping someone that was bleeding to death in my house if I ignored them and didn't call an ambulance nor did anything at all.

All this was to explain a few things regarding the current struggles:

 1-This war is all the same war. Catalan people wanting to vote and getting beaten by police is the same war as Hong Kong people wanting to decide for themselves and getting beaten by police. It's the same war as BLM in USA. Its the same war as medical professionals asking for more resources. It's the same war as workers asking for better conditions. It's the same war. So, support all of them and don't be blinded.

2-A lot of idiots are supporting the wrong side because in their little evil minds, they think they're part of the powerful side and that they will get better lives through it. The reality is that they will be squashed and discarded with all the rest, but since they will not be the first ones and the first ones are a group they don't like, they think this is good and later they'll be spared. 

3-Being neutral or equidistant, or "centrist" here means support to the powerful. As they say in Germany, a table with 1 Nazi and 9 people that let them be there is a table with 10 Nazis. And thinking the one doing the beating is the same as the one being beaten is morally abhorrent. 

4-Civility is not an option when it results in one side always winning because they're the only ones that can be nasty and violent and brutal while the other side is expected to put the other cheek and accept their fate and "be nice". Doing a "smart" economic operation that can force a building full of people to be kicked out to the streets should be responded with the same rage and pain that it has caused and the person responsible should suffer horrible consequences for it.

5-The current health crisis is making everything on hold, but we should not forget that we're at war, and you can see whose lives have been the most affected and who's reaping benefits from all this, and understand then who needs to be defeated. 

Any approach that doesn't take this into consideration, that doesn't understand this is a war, that doesn't understand that we're all going to suffer and die unless we turn the tide strongly to the other side will not succeed. To go back to USA, the current election results will not achieve anything at all, things will just get worse a bit more slowly in there, the important defeat there was in the democratic primaries and after that one the end result would be bad or horrible, but never good.

The "agree to disagree" and moderation is for cake, not for the worth of human lives. And Nazi Germany was not defeated with hugs and good intentions.

Minecrafting

My son loves Minecraft

During this pandemic, we had extended periods of time when it was not possible to leave the house nor do any activities outside, so I went to videogames, because I like them and they work great to pass the time at home.

The idea was good, and I managed to spend most of April doing an indoors activity that me and my son enjoyed without getting too nervous about meeting friends and going out. For sure it's not good to do this all the time, but during this period it was nice to do so.

With my son I've played together some games. When he was little he was obsessed with helicopters, so I played Just Cause 2 without being violent, just grabbing vehicles, and he liked that. This moved later to Sonic 4, which was probably the first one where he actually played, with the 2 players mode in part 2. This made him interested in other Sonics and other platformers like Cuphead, and well, we just kept trying different ones and different options.

In this way he has learned how to use the basic controllers, plus it has always been a nice bonding activity. I love video games and it's fun to introduce some of them to him and to try new ones together, when they're age-appropriate. For example, I think Nintendo is over-hyped because they tend to repeat themselves way too much and this pathological need to fit their same famous characters with same plot (rescue the princess) everywhere is detrimental, but it's true that their games are rather good for children. Getting the switch has allowed us to play great games, like Luigi's Mansion (that's a good example of detrimental, the game is great but King Boo as the ultimate bad guy really kills the scary but child-appropriate tones because Boos are too cartoonish), Towerfall or Untitled Goose Game.

However, for a while now he has asked to play Minecraft after trying it  a few times as a demo I had on the Xbox. And since I was curious as well, it was cheap, and we were confined, I ended up buying it.

And minecraft is great.

First, while there is combat, this is optional: You can pass the time in creative mode where you cannot die or be attacked, and in this way you have a relaxed atmosphere that allowed him to understand the usual control setting of camera/movement using both joysticks. In other games there was too much action or they required too much fine control right away of this mechanic for him to learn without getting frustrated, but in Minecraft you're allowed time.

Then, the game itself is incredibly detailed. The graphics are what they are, but this allows for a game engine that focus on functionalities rather than in showing off. And by doing that, the game offers a lot of items and different uses you can make of them. It's impressive how can you make castles, rollercoasters, traps, automatic processes and more complex stuff, like basically functional siege cannons,  RAM memories or even basic computers.

The game itself has no point whatsoever, but letting you create and move around freely gives you the tools to let your imagination create your own objectives: Building a house. Then building a tower. Then building something more complex, and so on, and so on, and in this way it stimulates a lot of creativity.

Basically, Minecraft is a computerized Lego with infinite pieces, so of course it stimulates creativity and it's quite addictive. And this made me also try, on my own, the survival mode. This is a bit too hard for him still, he prefers to be able to create things at will even if sometimes activates survival on creative worlds, but it's still interesting.

Survival mode is not that hard, but it forces you to create a home and slowly build things up from there. Very early on you realize you will need a lot of iron, so you start mining, and then you want to improve things, make a better home and a better mine, create new equipment, personalize things, and so on. It's also quite addictive and fun, even if there's no purpose either and you're just passing the time and trying to go a bit deeper and achieving an easily sustainable situation. 

The way he plays sometimes can be quite, just repeating actions or spawning lots of mobs, but he also creates more complex things like houses connected to rollercoasters, fish tanks, tunnels, structures, traps, etc., and it's quite cool to see what he thinks and makes, some of them are quite complex and cool. 

 

If the original game is not enough, they sell extra worlds that offer retexturing, new fucnionalities, new models, etc. You have to pay for most of them, but some of them are quite original and give new opportunities to create new things or play with a new concept. 

Overall it has been a great finding and it's really cool to have an infinte lego-like world to explore our creativity.

It's the end of the world (as we know it)

So, we're again in Interesting Times. And maybe we have had enough for a while.

Nevertheless, this has created an opportunity at least. Yeah, it's a horrible thing what's happening and it would be better if it didn't, but it's giving us lessons, really important ones. And I'd like to mention some of them, as I think about them.

1-In lots of workplaces, it is possible to work from home. This one is written from a privileged standpoint, of course, shops and industries and the primary sector is not included in this. But there's currently a lot of new jobs, based on services, where we have been forced to go there every day and stay there for a lot of hours, to be present just out of a certain old fashioned panic that if we don't have someone breathing on our neck, we won't work. Well, not the case, clearly. At the same time, there's meetings and such things that in the end were not as necessary as we thought and can be shortened or eliminated without that much problem. For sure in-person contact has its advantages too, but this should really made us rethink how we work, and try a more balanced system where maybe we can easily be home at least half of our time.

2-Really essential services are the primary sector, the food shops and the cleaners. Jobs like working in a supermarket or cleaning offices and houses should be better valued and paid nicely. Also better considered.

3-Healtchare must be public. Private healthcare that depends on profit has no advantage in dealing with this, because it requires a lot of resources and hours and it's overall too expensive. Also, public healthcare must be well-funded and have enough resources. And given this learning, I would go further: Just straight up ban and nationalize private healthcare companies. Also, if you're all for private healthcare and vote for parties that are against public one, it's only fair you refute any treatment nor help in public hospitals and facilities. Or reconsider your vote next time.

4-Capitalsim doesn't work. The system is totally broken and this crisis is showing its worst sides. Under pure capitalism, we would need to continue working right now, as we die left and right. Under pure capitalism, now people should just go hungry and starve and die out as they cannot work. Under pure capitalism, any business that was unable to function for this period should just close and disappear, or leave its employees to die out at least. This is neither a sustainable model nor a model we should want to keep. This needs to go. I'm not advocating for communism, but we must get rid of the idea that the market is great, when the truth is the market would see humankind destroyed in order to keep benefits. We have seen this before, in the people that lose track of the real world and require workers to do extra hours to finish a project that will ultimately have no meaning 2 weeks after completion. Well, I'm exaggerating a bit on this example, but this same attitude is the one where some manager considers that maybe people should just work, because the company needs it, without realizing this means people will die.

5-Related to this, we need to make people in power responsible for their actions. Managers who have disregarded warnings and asked people to work have killed people. Governments who haven't taken action once it was clear how serious the situation was and have not followed medical expert's recommendations are guilty of personally killing people. One thing is not knowing what to do, another very different is thinking that since your friend the banker prefers people to die than to close some of his business, you can allow it. Or allowing it out of some political agenda. This means you are killing people. And this is not the only situation when this happens: when a government allows banks to kick people out of their homes from unpaid mortgages, both the bank and the government are directly killing people. When a manager over stresses their workforce to the point of people having nervous breakdowns, they are directly killing people. When a rich bastard not only doesn't pay their taxes but also pressures the government to close public hospitals, they're directly killing people. No more fucking euphemism, if you do these things you're a killer, and you should not be allowed to get away with it.

6-Centralism doesn't work. Look, I think Spain is a failed project and I'd rather be left out of it. Maybe you don't think the same, that's fine. But what is undeniable, as we've seen in companies, countries and other organizations, is that when you centralize everything, when you try to manage personally more and more and more things, when you're further away from the real action separated by layers of responsible people, well, you have a less clear image of what is happening. In this crisis, hospitals and small towns or neighborhoods can know better what's the best actions to take. They can know better what resources they have, what do they lack, what to do. So you leave them be, unless they prove to be doing a bad job out of it. Then, if they lack things, if you have organizations over them you can manage that from such a higher level, and so on. But when you try to, basically, micromanage everywhere, that doesn't work. So let's not do that. From a government point of view, I believe regions should be more independent and able to take their own decisions, since they tend to know better their own needs. For example, now Spain has declared we can go back to work. This is idiotic and will cause deaths as the experts are saying (see point 5), but I'd say that for some regions it may be OK. However, should be managed region by region as I said, to see which ones can do it and which ones cannot.

7-Spain's traditional parties plus the right wing parties are useless. Right wing, we know, they're here to steal and lick their rich friend's anuses, and people can die as far as they care, we all know that. However, I hope it also helps to show that PSOE is almost as bad: they militarized the crisis instead of giving funds to healthcare, and since their members are professional politicians that don't know how to do things but know how to get paid from public funds, we've had the situation were resources are not reaching the people, or they buy the wrong things and millions are wasted, plus time is lost.

8-Left-wing parties do not deserve special protection just because they're considered left-wing. We made this mistake before with PSOE, letting it do things that were not left-wing just because we labelled it as the left-wing party. So, the same applies now to Podemos. They're part of the government even if they're not big enough to make some changes. I understand they're not able to criticize some of the government actions without creating a conflict, but that doesn't make them untouchable. We should criticize the fact that they let military to lead this crisis. We should criticize that they're not protecting workers by allowing people to work. And we should criticize their silence or their praise to the current government, when it's not right.

9-USA, UK and Brazil, as very capitalist and right-wing countries, are far from the worst of it, and it will be a massacre in there. Spain is already one because of several of the mentioned points, and forcing people back to work now will kill and numbers will grow again.

10-Catalunya's proposals have been a bit more smart than Spain's (because duh, it's not very hard to be), but far from effective, and one of the involved parties has also been de-funding public healthcare, and that's something we should not forget either.

There's plenty more things I could say, but politically speaking I find these are quite relevant...

Control

This confinement period sucks, but the good side is that I can play more videogames.

Since last Christmas I got a couple of new xbox games. One of them was The Outer Worlds. The other was Control.

The Outer Worlds seems nice, it's like a different version of Fallout, it's made by Obsidian and they tend to make amazing RPGs (like Pillars of Eternity). It has nice touches but I haven't explored it more yet, because as an RPG it can be a bit overwhelming at times with the number of quests. Plus taking decisions and selecting sides can be sometimes a bit tiring. But I hope I'll get to it.

The one I've just finished now it's Control. And I have to say that I loved it.

In Control, you are Jesse Faden, a girl that is trying to find her brother who disappeared after a mysterious accident, abducted by an organization called Federal Bureau of Control, that investigates paranormal things. So you start the game finding the building where the Bureau is located, entering it and realizing it's in an emergency lock-down because it has been "invaded". You see people floating around and frozen, and start to investigate.

Soon enough you end up gaining a special object, a "magical" gun, that converts you automatically in the director of the place. And you discover that some people are being possessed by the "Hiss", some type of red corruption/vibration/chant that is trying to take over.

This is a horror game, but it's a subtle, mental horror, the type I love. The initial enemies that you find are just people with a reddish glow on them, using guns and weapons to try to kill you, but the weirdness escalates slowly but surely. You find all these log messages and videos explaining some of the core concepts of the game, like the existence of Altered Items (common items that have gained supernatural effects from repetitive use), Objects of Power (beefed up versions of the items that allow people to have cool skills like telekinesis or levitation) and Thresholds (places that basically are intertwined with paranormal stuff or other dimensions).

The building is not normal nor a stable entity, and sometimes it shifts and changes, although mostly you see this happening only after cleaning an area of Hiss. Its proportions are not normal (definitely bigger in the inside) and the atmosphere is that of a bureaucratic office that normalized dealing with strange things, very grey and white. It feels cold somehow, very official, with pictures of the directors on the walls. The graphics are awesome though, and they're mixed sometimes with real-life footage and with the atmosphere it's hard to tell the difference in some cases.

The atmosphere is eerie, and as you advance you keep hearing the whispers of the hiss and see the red lights that mark their presence or areas where they're strong, giving you a certain anticipation but also this feeling of tension. Enemies respawn in certain areas but it's not a sure thing and they don't respawn in the same way, so you're always wondering what will appear this time, if anything. Enemies have levels, even if you don't leel up in the traditional sense, and this helps indicate the difficulty of the game.

The main plot is interesting and suspenseful, a bit typical but executed quite well, and the different videos you find of the people that ruled the building before the breach gives you a nice insight into how things were (plus they're usually fun/creepy/interesting. And the actors doing them are great, special mention to Dr. Darling). Luckily you also find survivors (I don't like games where you never find anyone else, seems unrealistic) and this also creates some safe areas and some sense of normality. The side quests are really good most of the time, and while the main plot there are no "bosses" apart from the occasional named enemy with more life and armor, in the side quests there's a variety of encounters with weird stuff that is quite enjoyable, although also quite frustrating sometimes (I've died a lot in some of them).

Related to dying, if you do die you don't exactly lose progress but you respawn in the nearest control point. Whatever you have done is saved but enemies tend to respawn if you didn't pass an area. Also, you lose money/points/whatever, a percentage of them (I haven't check what happens if you run out. I think nothing, it's just annoying because you don't have any, but killing enemies gives you back lots easily). The game has no levels but it has a point and crafting system, and you accumulate those points, plus strange materials (they have very very strange names), that you can use to upgrade weapons and create special mods for them and for yourself. Even without levels, by increasing your skills and adding these upgrades you can later on breeze through earlier places of the game where enemies remain at low level.

Where the game shines is in certain moments of...wrongness, caused by some paranormal thing. It can be in the side quests, or sometimes in the main plot, but it's these moments where something is not right: The room you're in is too big, the walls are bending strangely, the room is twisted, some door that was not there before appears now, there are strange coloured lights around the room...or stuff like the Oceanview motel, which needs to be experienced, and while not scary per se, it's just...not quite right. And I love games that can pull off this effect, because it's not easy to do and it really fucks with your mind in ways that explicit gore and blood will never manage.

Having said that, there are some unnerving enemies. Without spoiling much, Hiss can also deform their hosts resulting in body horror. Also the more deformed ones tend to scream in  a way, especially next to you, that is quite disturbing (Special mention to the fucking Hiss Distorted, which is also invisible until it shouts and appears next to you and halves your life in one hit). But again, it's not about blood and gore, it's very well done how it creates tension by showing you something clearly very wrong.

Another side that the game does very well is the dream-like moments or the moments when you're clearly in some other dimension, like when you see the foundations of the building or the active threshold (and I'll leave things at that to be all cryptic and not spoil the fun).

One little detail that I loved is that the authors of this game are the same ones that did Alan Wake. Alan Wake was a nice horror game, but while nice it felt somehow a bit repetitive and it lacked a certain something during most of the game . Alan Wake shined the most at the end and in its expansions, but sadly the final 3rd expansion was never released. However, in this game they got a small vindication by including Alan Wake as part of this world, and commenting on the events of the game as part of an Altered World Event (AWE), an event where something para-natural has happened and has altered the normality of a place.

Finally, I have to say the ashtray maze section, done while heavy metal music (the game's company is Finnish and it shows :p ) sounds all around you, it's fucking amazing. Even if they say so in the game...

Highly recommended.

Interesting Times

There's this English saying, with unclear origins (read more here), that says that there is this curse: "May you live in Interesting Times". Terry Pratchett used it in one of his books too. The idea, of course, is that the history moments that are most studied and explained are those of turmoil, chaos and strife.

We are indeed in one of these periods. and I'd like to talk about two subjects related to that, the election of a new President in Spain and the latest judicial verdicts and actions by the UE tribunals and parliament.

First, it seems finally a President has been elected in Spain. This President has been very difficult to elect, since the party he belongs to didn't have enough representatives in parliament to be elected on their own. This means the party needed to pact with others, and traditional parties in Spain are really against that. They're used to order around and dictate, starting from a clean majority, if possible an absolute one, to rule whatever they want, regardless of the program they had. This party, PSOE, is no different.

PSOE has been defended during this period as a leftist party, and the election of this president has been indicated as a triumph for progressive forces. However, this is totally false. For a long time now, all around the world, powerful forces (aka rich people and the newspapers and news agencies/broadcasters they buy) have been moving what is considered the centre of the political spectrum more and more to the right, to accept certain policies as "moderate" when they're clearly right-wing and conservative, and to promote neo-liberal economies. Because of this, PSOE is being considered as "left", but that's blatantly false (at national level at least. it´s different at regional or city levels).

PSOE has accepted authoritarian ways to rule, has maintained laws that restrict freedom of speech and has used repression as a tool while governing temporarily in this period without majorities. PSOE also reformed labour laws in Spain in favour of the big companies, have delayed retirement age and all around applied neo-liberal policies for some time now, refusing to act on things like house prices or bank control. PSOE has refused boats full of rescued refugees that were at sea. PSOE has done nothing to tax more or stop giving public money to the Catholic Church. Their attitude till now regarding Catalunya has been exactly the same as PP, the extreme-right wing party of Spain, of sending police and tribunals and twisting legislation to punish people. And so on.

The only thing that PSOE has done that can be considered more "leftist" has been defending abortion rights, defending LGBT+ rights and Women's rights, and proposing to legislate on issues like Euthanasia or drug use. While these are noble causes, these alone do not define a leftist party, and plenty of moderate or right parties in Europe nowadays defend some of these positions too, so it's not like revolutionary radical leftist of them.

What's more, PSOE had the chance of ruling with a true centre-left party, Podemos, since last elections, but because they're centre-right they wanted instead to pact with Ciudadanos (another right-wing party) or rule alone, which is why they repeated elections. Problem is they lost votes and Ciudadanos sank even more, so these two options were definitely not possible and they were forced to pact with Podemos instead and, all of a sudden, defend themselves as "progressives" when they're far from that.

Having said that, this is better than the alternative. The alternative was the three extreme-right-wing parties of Spain (yes, we have three of them, we don't have a "new extreme right wing" now, we always had it, it´s just now split in pieces and that's good) ruling together, but thankfully they have been fragmented and don't have a majority to rule even if they pact. PSOE alone will not do much, but since it will have issues governing, the fact that they need to pact and negotiate is a good thing. We will see if Podemos and the other leftist parties can twist its arm enough for them to actually act and do some progressive things.

There´s people in Catalunya that say that PSOE is the same as PP, and to let them rule is bad. This reminds me on the campaign started in USA to convince progressive voters not to go to vote Hilary using targeted ads, that infamous scandal. While I agree that PSOE is not good, the reality is that the possibility of the extreme right parties ruling again is catastrophic. I´m not sure whats the best course of action really, but seems to me a scenario where they need to pact with left and independentist parties is better than one where all right-wing parties ally themselves and rule.

However, as a final note: This government won't push leftist policies enough and will still pretty much protect the powerful. If you want real change, PSOE is not the party, you need to vote more left. There's several options there (which is a problem, when there's this fragmentation too), but there are better left options. It's a matter of selecting one. And yes, they're not perfect. The curse of the left is that there's no perfect ruler, instead of the right where this doesn't matter because you just obey your leader. But still, vote the best left option that there is, or change is impossible.



As per the second topic: The UE tribunals have ruled that three Catalan politicians that could not swear on the Spanish consititution because they were in exile or in prison are members of UE parliament, regardless of the fact that they could not swear on it becasue members are elected by people voting, not by posterior procedures, and therefore the Spanish tribunals cannot prosecute them without the approval of the UE parliament. Two of them are exiled and will join the parliament on 13th of January, and the third one is in prison in Spain, but this verdict makes his trial void (and would need, legally, to be repeated after UE parliament allows it).

This has been followed by the UE parliament ordering Spain to fulfil the law (indicating without explicitly saying that they need to liberate the prisoner), since the UE Tribunal is the highest instance and the Spanish tribunals need to follow it.

This links nicely with my previous post. The problem of how Spain reacted to the Catalan independentists is that it's not legal, it's not democratic, and in general it's not how a progressive democratic country works. Spain has acted like a dictatorship, has twisted laws, bypassed rules, done whatever they wanted however they wanted it, ignoring their own legislation and just going for punishment, revenge and blood. Anyone defending that doesn't understand about democracy, regardless of your opinion on independence, and that's something that I really hope that those who do not defend independence understand, finally, with he help of Europe: Every Single Time that Europe tribunals have been involved, since they're really independent and democratic, Spain has been shown to not follow the law and to act incorrectly. Every time. And there's more to come, once other sentences reach UE tribunals too.

What's more: For all the ones that say they defend legality: As per the law, this prisoner should be freed and given access to UE parliament. I'm not going to say all laws are just, because I've previously stated that you should always question them, because dictatorships also have laws. But if you're not hypocrites, now you should defend his liberation, and ask Spain to follow the law. Or ask for the Spanish Government and the Spanish Tribunals to be accused and judged, same way you asked for the Catalan politicians to be judged.

Or you truly, really, believe that Spain is a better democracy with a better judicial system than all the other UE nations combined?

Time for questions

So I haven't written in a while, especially about politics, because mostly the current situation can be summarized by screaming to the void at top volume for 4 hours....but I'd like to try to explain some things.

You probably have seen that the people that organized a referendum in Catalunya have been condemned by Spain to lots of prison years. And that people here got tired of this crap and started to protest in a more hardcore way, blocking roads and stations. And then police started to beat people up, and people responded by barricading and setting things on fire, and we're still in this situation.

So, let's start by saying that Barcelona is not a war zone, you can live perfectly well here unless you're right next to some  very conflictive point. So, yeah, newspapers are exaggerating the situation to make it look so much worse than it is.

However, it's bad what's happening yeah. And it's bad only when police act. Otherwise, there are no issues. So, police is doing a horrible job, because they're supposed to keep the peace, but instead they're guaranteeing there's problems and chaos. Police is used as a punishment for protesters instead of trying to establish normality, and it shows.

Anyway, I'd like to try to explain that what is happening should horrify a lot more people than it does, and why.

So, let's say you're not pro-independence. That is fine, each person can have their opinions. You feel that Spain is a nice country, or you feel that Catalunya will do better with Spain, or you're against Spain losing Catalunya. Or some other reason like that. That's fine, I repeat. But even then, there are things that I believe concern you.

The Spanish government and judicial system condemned people to lots of years for organizing a vote,  debating it in parliament, trying to organize a protest and declaring "independence" without any real chance to back it up for real, kind of symbolically. That's it. That's the summary.

Now, you may say, "oh no, but the vote was illegal/declaring independence was illegal". Well, first of all, that's debatable, Spanish laws could be interpreted either way about this. Second of all, laws are not pillars of morality. Laws are rules written by governments. Dictatorships have plenty of laws. If something is illegal, sometimes it's good to also ask yourself, why is that, and if it really should be. As mentioned before in other posts, to assume all laws are just and good is dangerous, submissive and can give birth to horrible monsters like Nazism and Stalinism. And well, when is a vote something that should not happen, really? Why voting is so bad? Could you ask yourselves that? You may say that all of Spain should vote, which is fine, but then why not get the region's opinion first since we're at it? Doesn't it sound...fishy, that you cannot even vote? Today it's this topic, but tomorrow it can be another important one (like reducing CO2 emissions or transitioning to green energies) and the result may be the same, "oh it's illegal to vote about this!". This is a slippery slope, really. It's ok to vote but only if you like it? That's the thing here?

Then you could say it was not the vote, that it was the independence declaration. Only thing, it was symbolic. No administrations changed control. No infrastructures were taken. No efforts were made to change taxation mechanisms nor implement any type of real independence. The declaration was made and then nothing was done to implement it. While I could accept that declaring independence is illegal under the current constitution, the point is that it was not implemented. So, with no effort to do it properly, they should be condemned to lots of years just because they said it?

Then you could say it was the protest a few days before where some police cars were vandalized. Which is true, but the people condemned didn't personally do it either, and they asked for tranquility and peaceful protesting at all times.

Then on the trial, the main argument about violence happening in Catalunya was to say that 1-Screams and looks of the people were "violent" and 2-that the police brutality was the cause of organizing the vote. The first argument means that "violence" can be anything now, as long as the people in power decide something is violent. So you cannot protest against anything that you consider unjust, because it's "violent. The second point is the same defense rapists use, "she was asking for it".

Also on the trial, it was not allowed to use videos or images that contradicted the witnesses statements. They were shown later. So no witness could be considered false and to be removed from  the trial during the trial itself. And there's a lot other things that happened during it that plenty of international organisations have condemned, saying that it didn't guarantee proper rights. I mean, I understand you may be against independence and you didn't like the fact that people tried to vote about it, but isn't it...troubling, how forceful it was? The Spanish government disagreed with the idea, accused people and then proceed to not follow their own laws and checks and balances to make sure these people would be condemned. Isn't it worrying this can happen, regardless of who's being tried and for what?

This was a vengeance, plain and simple, not really a justice matter. Isn't that something that should not happen at this levels, inside the justice system, regardless of your political believes?

Then there's the matter of  the following protests. Of course there has been protests, and there's been people organizing them. They have been disruptive, they have been intense and they have been a lot of them. Well, guess what, that's how all protest that achieved something have worked. That's how we got the 8-hours workday. That's how some other regions and colonies gained independence. So, that's how protests work, they're disruptive or they're useless. Did they put bombs or killed people? No. Did they use firearms? No. Did they enter into direct fights with the authorities? Well, some people have, but the vast majority haven't, and the ones that have are mostly using it as defensive strategies. There has been burnings and fires, yes, and it's not good they happened, but not with the intention to harm others, just to protect from police charges. The thrown objects are bad, ok, but again, these things have been more as defense from charges.

Well, this is now being considered terrorism (not a joke). And again, let's say you agree, those stupid pro-independence bastards are bothering you. Thing is, next time you want to protest because you have a shit salary and rent is being controlled by investment funds that want to make you pay a lot more? Forget about protesting. Any demonstration, any type of road blocking, any type of disruptive action can and will be considered terrorism. Don't you think this is worrisome? That it's establishing precedents? That real democracies should not consider this terrorism?

Let's also talk about the police charges. You can also say that police tell protesters to leave and if they don't they should be hit and arrested because they're not following the law. But then, police are hitting people on the head, on the neck, on other areas where it's clear in their procedures that they cannot hit. Isn't it a problem that the law doesn't apply to them then? Isn't it curious that rubber balls are banned in Catalunya and police used them anyway? Doesn't make you wonder,  that police can arrest anyone in the street,beat them up, jump on top of them, touch them (to women usually), and that's all fine? Is police above the law? And then, why is wrong to defend from them also not following the law? Are you ok with all this because "they would never do this to me, why would they?". Because this is for protesting, for demonstrating, with ideas that are not the officially approved ones. Should you be hit in the head for not running away fast enough when police charges to make people move? Is this proportional? Is ok to beat anyone in the area just in case, even people that are leaving?

And following also this topic, isn't it weird that fascist have been running around Barcelona and beating people up, and in these cases there has never been police beating them or stopping them? Or that when unionist, let's say, have slapped pro-independence people in front of police, police did nothing whatsoever? Isn't it a problem how friendly police is with fascists? And also the same fascist, how friendly they are always judged when they beat someone up and such things? Similarly when it's about rapists that belong to police forces, as shown in La Manada?

Then, considering all this, and consider how the Spanish government refuses to talk. About anything, really. Isn't it strange that no one on the Spanish side is willing to sit down with no pre-conditions, and try to see what can be agreed on or what can be done to improve the situation? Not saying agreeing to anything, I'm just saying to talk.

I will also add for those that put both sides at the same level, do you think it's the same to hit someone and to defend yourself from someone hitting you? Is it the same to control police charges than to have some people among thousands that do fight back? And even then, do you think it's at the same level, police charging and people protesting? An organised force beating civilians is the same that a few disorganized violent groups? And given the last images, is it ok that police infiltrators are trying to rile up these people so there is some fights and some chaos? Do you think it's the same to organize a voting and send police to beat people up? Do you think it's the other's side fault when, during a negotiation, one side just says "No" without further comments and proposals?

Also, consider this: It has been proven that the Spanish government, in the past, has used police to try and incriminate people, accuse them, make sure that minimum you get big news about it by filtering information to the press, prepare charges, etc. Doesn't this concern you a bit? Doesn't this makes you doubt the whole judicial process?

I keep adding: Spanish tribunals are usually decided by the two main parties that are in charge of all this repression and that have alternated ruling the country for the last 40 years. A lot of these judges have been members of the party "in the past". A lot of these judges have clear preference with a certain political spectrum. There's even some that are the same ones that were ruling during Franco's dictatorship, they never moved or were never removed from the position. Isn't that something to make you wonder about the quality of Spanish judicial system?

Just to finish, there's Catalan politicians that left the country and are staying in Europe to internationalize the conflict. Spain has send extradition orders to several of them. Don't you find it curious that Germany and UK and Belgium have, in general, ruled that the detention orders were wrong/didn't apply? Don't you find it disturbing that, in places where there should be separation of powers, the Spanish government is threatening diplomatically other governments about the outcome of a trial in their respective country, which is made by the separated judicial power? Do you think it's normal that the Spanish judges have only asked for the detention of certain people, and that they have withdrawn the petition depending on the political moment?

Now that there's other protests in the world at the same time: do you trust China's and Chile's Governments regarding their actions and declarations with their respective protests? Whatever are your thoughts about independence, don't you see parallelisms between all three cases and how police and governments are acting? Do you disagree with how Hong Kong people is being treated when they protest certain laws? Do you like that Chile protesters have been shot?

Do you still think independence is the problem here? Do you still think it doesn't apply to you? Do you still think Spain is being fair and just with their reaction? Do you still think that, when the time comes, your protests will be treated differently because yours will be just and necessary?

Do not defend independence. If you don't want it, that's ok. However, wonder what is at stake here, because it ain't about the independentists.

No good deed goes unpunished

I finished Life is Strange a while ago,  although I spoiled myself about lots of details of the game before that. Anyway, I wanted to comment on it....

I really like this game and liked playing it. However, after finishing chapter 3, I encountered something that bothers me a bit.

Without going into much detail, at the end of this section you discover you can go back in time lots of years to certain moments if you have a picture of it, and you use that to save someone's life.

Of course, the moment you do, someone else's life in that family gets completely screwed and ends up in a wheelchair.

This bothers me in some games and stories. I understand that stories were everybody is always happy are boring and you need some type of tension or drama...but in some stories it seems some people are predestined to have shitty lives and they can only choose between shitty outcomes...that's especially true in time-travelling stories. In reality, most time travelling stories should be boring because you can just jump back and forth until you fix all the little details, but plenty of such stories don't do that, even if it makes no sense...most of them just jump between drama 1 and drama 2...Stein's Gate is another good example, I loved the anime but the predetermination was very annoying because it made no fucking sense.

If your time travel story is fixed and you cannot change facts, that's fine. It gets annoying when you can actually change facts but there's personal people that get screwed always no matter what.

I mean, if the point was to stop a war (the let's kill Hitler scenario), I understand a certain predestination level because such things are never caused by single events, it is an accumulation  of them...but someone getting killed or in an accident? not that many variables...

Seems to me a lot of time-travel stories have these lazy moments where something "cannot be changed" and everything is like "dramatic" and "sad" and all this.....and well, it sounds ridiculous because as said, usually the solution is stupidly easy and it's so clear this is done for the drama of it, it takes away value in the end. 

Then there's the other type of stories that abuse the drama and bad things happening, the superhero stories where they are responsible for the well being of everyone (I'm remembering daredevil first seasons). The moment they deviate from this or decide to take a day off, the evil guys rape all their family, kill their dogs, behead their romantic interest and make them to be fired from their normal job because they failed to protect everyone by taking just a few moments to actually rest (which is something necessary for people not to go insane). Everything is overly dramatic and grey morality gets punished instantly in some cases (i'm also remembering Spiderman and uncle Ben,  of course).

Regarding indie games, I read an article a while ago where it was mentioned the overly dramatic tone plenty of them have, and I have to agree on that....again, I understand the need to have plot by having struggles and dramatic things happening....but come on,some of them are so over-the-top that it ends being comical sometimes, like that joke of a story where a girlfriend without ovaries gets a transplant from her boyfriend that ends with "share if you cry every time".

I´ve played What remains of Edith Finch recently too, and that's another example. I mean, the premise of the game is based on that, that everyone in that family died too soon with different type of causes. You get to experience all the ways in which this happens. Some are dramatic, some are funny with their black-humour, some are deep, some are nonsensical, but in the end it´s a bit...I don´t know, it leaves you with a feeling that nothing matters much because the characters will suffer regardless.

I read this sentence recently, I believe from Terry Pratchett now that I think of, saying that you can make your characters suffer and go though gruesome ordeals, but you must have hope, there should be hope for a better world, or people will just go numb and not care anymore.

Indie films, indie games, and other artsy things tend to abuse on the drama sometimes to the point of nonsensical, and at the end it feels like bad world-building, in my case it removes interest in the story. I would say that if you set up a situation that is dramatic, no matter how unlikely, as a start, that's ok, you need conflict of some kind to make stories interesting. But if you compound it by adding more and more drama, it becomes ridiculous. It moves the narrative from "this people have problems" to "this people are basically cursed". I don't know if you remember Police Squad! movies, but one of the gags was always an exaggeration of bad things happening to some character, they don't only get shot a thousand times, they get hit in the head, put their foot into a bear trap, bang their fingers against a table, catch fire, and drown. So you have the dramatic unlikely event, getting shot, and you add all the other things and the unlikeness of it just makes it funny. Same applies for content that is supposed to be serious, if it starts resembling a Police Squad! gag of bad things happening, it gets ridiculous to the point of taking your attention out of the content....   

A Story worth Playing

A while ago I mentioned that I started playing Pillars of Eternity(PoE) and I liked it, but that it was very story-based. Well, this is true, and I just finished it recently actually because it required some commitment to follow all the quests and explanations and all that.

It was an amazing experience and I want to review it.

As I mentioned before, Pillars of Eternity is an old-fashion RPG with isometric perspective like Baldur´s Gate. You have a main character, that you can customise at will, and you can get a number of companions with different personalities that assist you in your quests and travels. If you´re not convinced with the named companions, you are free to hire random Adventurers that fill the space and help you with fights and such things, but I'd say it's really worth to travel with characters that have their own plots and personalities.

The game is similar to D&D but uses its own classes, lore, skills and rules for combats and interactions. And it's based around quests. You see, killing enemies in PoE doesn't give you experience, so there´s no grinding possible, you only advance by making quests. There´s lots of them, and they're quite varied and with lots of options and possible resolutions, really using the different skills that you may have. Not many require to kill enemies, and the ones that do tend to be about one single big enemy, no need to bring back 10 wolf pelts and similar stuff.

From the start, you can feel the game is heavily story-based. Shortly after beginning, you find a moment where the game explains a situation with narration and text, where you can choose a course of action, but where your skills points and previous experience can change the outcome or the options. This is really immersive and opens thousands of possibilities outside the normal game mechanics, where having high intelligence or good athleticism does matter and can get you the best results. For example, you find some kind of mechanism next to a closed door. If you have good strength, you can break the mechanism. If you have good mechanics, you understand how it works and operate it. If you have a high intelligence, maybe you recall a previous mural and understand the steps to use it. All are different options that result in the same, opening the door, but unless you have the required attribute they will not even appear to you, or will fail if you try them. This moulds your character a lot more than what I´ve seen in other games.

Similarly, the concept of morality, good or bad, has been developed here much further than other rpgs. Things are not as simple as good or evil, with good points or evil points. Here you have reputation. And reputation includes lots of things. You may have a reputation from being clever, diplomatic, honest, cruel, violent, benevolent, tricky, misleading, rational, etc. This depends on your conversations, on what you say and on what you do, and having a high reputation in one of those aspects does not mean you cannot use a completely different action in a certain situation....but it also opens chances to use this reputation for your advantage. For example, being honest allows people to trust you at your word. Then again, because people trust you on your word, if in certain moments you lie people don't expect it and trust you anyway. Or if you´re rather diplomatic, then new conversation options will show up that will help you resolve conflicts differently. Or if a certain town or faction has a good impression of you, their interactions will change. You may get more rewards, more information, better prices, etc....At the same time you can gain bad reputation with cities, factions, etc. At some point of the game, for example, you need to choose between some factions, and good reputation in one will probably be obtained because you will get bad reputation with another.

In general these details add a big layer of complexity to the gameplay when you interact with others, and allows you to really shape your character. You´re not limited to the goody two-shoes or the evil psychopath with more moderate behaviours being punished by not having special interactions. Here you can develop a benevolent character that lies and still will fight at the drop of a hat. Or you can be cruel but honest. In general, you can really, really personalise the way your character is perceived and interacts with others, and there's no out-of-character, you could be honest most of the time and still trick people sometimes, or be diplomatic and once or twice straight up murder someone who´s being  a total idiot. The level of flexibility you have in this is amazing, rewarding and really interesting. And this same reputation changes conversation options and also these scripted-text only interactions where you choose different actions, so it manages to expand your choices and the way you resolve problems.

The story itself is rich and detailed. PoE creates a different world, with lots of races, factions and interests, that sometimes it's a bit hard to follow from scratch. It immerses you in a complicated zone with conflicts and troubles, where a plague is making children to be born without a soul, not dead but not moving or reacting to anything. In this world souls can be fragmented, used, reborn, split and manipulated, they can be ripped apart or be eroded, and a big part of the lore is around these things. There are gods that oversee the world with different skills and responsibilities, but they seem far from the daily lives (at least in the beginning). All the world has also ruins of some ancient civilisation that manipulated souls at will, with strange machines of unclear purpose that can provide light and power or just as easily convert to dust all the people nearby. As the main character, from an initial moment where you don´t have any clear purposes, you get inflicted with what seems to be some curse/blessing that may drive you mad, and in your travel you're searching for a solution to your problem, while helping others, influencing the local politics and trying to find clues about the plague that the region is suffering. Things start slow but turn into epic proportions after a while, unravelling a complex plot and discovering several refreshing takes on the fantasy genre.

The named companions you can get help you along the way but also have their own motives and stories, and you can help them resolve their issues and know them better, gaining their trust and learning about them. There's also a sense of familiarity created as you travel with them and they talk with each other and interact also with people you talk with. Some of them are less interesting or do not fit quite as well with your style, but all of them are worth exploring, and most of their quests are really interesting, although sometimes you need to wait to advance a lot in the game to complete them. The shame is that you're limited to 5 of them, and also that, of course, they need to adapt to your class to combine well as a party, so you usually have a strong core of characters that must be with you at all times and then one or two slots where you can change things and explore different options.

Apart from the stories and conversations, there's combat of course. The fights can be challenging and intense, with a lot of micromanagement needed to succeed, but also very rewarding. You can also keep doing quests, go up levels and make your life easier by reaching top levels early on, and this way have a kind of god-like strength. Combat is based on endurance, which indicates how tired you are, and once you run out of it you pass out. This means you can still win the combat with other characters, or even restore yourself with some healing skill. However you will be hurt and will need to rest afterwards to recover. You also have life, which cannot be restored really except with one or two excepcional skills, so when  it's low you also need to rest. Characters that run out of life are dead for real and cannot be recovered, and if your main character dies or all your party becomes unconscious, it's game over. However there's lots of autosaves every time you enter a map, so you're never that far behind after this happens. Even with top level, some fights are really really hard, but also some of those have Pacific ways to resolve the issue or avoid conflict, although it may depend in a lot of other factors.

I played the main game and 2 expansions, and made sure to left the end boss for last.  All the storylines were really great and it was extremely satisfying to reach the last boss extremely overpowered and manage to defeat them with ease, by that point you're really involved and want to finish them. I played as mostly good, and I'd like to try the opposite in another playthrough, but I dont know if i'll do that or just play the second part that seems also very very nice.

All in all a great experience, really immersive and interesting, and I highly recommend it.