Game completed: Grounded

Our next co-op game after the We Were Here series became Grounded. It's a survival crafting RPG and we had a lot of fun with it.

Storywise this game takes place in the late 80s and you play as 1-4 school kids who mysteriously get shrunken to ant size and find themselves in a garden. Your job is to find out how you ended up there (because you can't remember) and how to get back to normal size, all the while exploring the garden, fighting insects and figuring out how to better survive. 

You start out with nothing, but as soon as you get your first axe things start to move along. Berry leather became the first hurdle, but via exploration we found out where there was a bunch of berries and I could easily shoot them down with my bow and arrows while climbing around inside the berry bushes and Toni picked them up as they fell. The next hurdle was underwater exploration which took a fair bit of time to overcome and in that time I expanded our modest shelter into a grass fortress with the help of Toni cutting grass and weeds.

Eventually we had ziplines across the entire yard to easily traverse it.

The most annoying boss fight was easily the robot assistant manager in one of the labs. Took us three attempts and a guide to defeat it, but otherwise we managed the game well and there were no hurdles too big so as to not overcome them. 

Spiders were very scary in the beginning, but in late game they were easy enough. Except that one scary infected wolf spider by the oak, that one was still scary even though we defeated it. And the black widow never stopped being scary. 

MIX.Rs ended up being simultaneously annoying and fun to me. They're like tower defense things spread throughout the yard and once you activate it you have to protect it from insects trying to attack it until it's done. Towards the end we had so much crafting mats that we just brought a bunch of stuff with us to the MIX.R and built walls and roofs around it to keep the insects from even reaching it while we fought them. Mushroom brick walls and feather roofs are great. 

So while we finished the game storywise and decided to move on from it, I kept it installed on my computer because I can really see myself playing around with crafting and building some more at some point.

Black Mirror S06

This season was very morbid. It wasn’t futuristically dark like the previous seasons, but rather it explored darkness in other settings aside from dystopian futures.

Joan Is Awful is about people signing the rights to their lives away via the Terms & Conditions nobody reads before signing up to a service. In this story a Netflix equivalent has taken over Joan's life and an AI produces episodes of her life as they happen. As a result she loses her relationship, her friends, her family and her job. 

Loch Henry is about a couple studying movie-making, returning to the small seaside town where the guy grew up to make a documentary. The girlfriend discovers the dark past of the town and convinces the guy that they should do a documentary on that instead. So they start digging and discover something really dark. I enjoyed this one.

Beyond the Sea is a futuristic story about two astronauts living in space, but they can transfer their consciousness to body-doubles (androids made to look like them). When one boyd-double is destroyed by cult activists along with his entire family getting murdered, his colleague agrees to let him borrow his body-double so as to not go crazy from the isolation of being alone in space all the time. It starts out as a nice gesture and ends up going very, very wrong.

Mazey Day is about a paparazzi photographer in 2005 always on the lookout for the next big scoop to sell to the magazines. She finds out about an actress called Mazey Day who has quit acting and is hiding out at a secret rehab facility in the mountains and along with her friend she goes to investigate. What they find is incredibly dangerous and life-altering.

Demon 79 is about a mousey immigrant girl in 1979 Britain who accidentally summons a demon and now has three days to kill three people to stop the world from ending. It's really interesting to see this girl embrace her inner rage and attempt to fulfill her contract. The character growth is immense in this one. 

All in all we had a good time with this. My favourites being Loch Henry and Demon 79. All of the stories were really dark in true Black Mirror spirit, while still taking a step away from the usual theme of slightly futuristic but still oh so relatable. 

Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom

Last time I was this excited for a chapter was Greymoor, and before that Morrowind. We're back in Morrowind and it’s all about my beloved Hermaeus Mora. 

I didn't like Leramil in the prologue, but she really grew on me as the chapter went on. I loved Scruut! Gadayn is super cute. 

The story offers some pretty strong implications for the entire lore with Torvesard and Ithelia, and if Mora could do that, then what else has he covered up in his endless pursuit of hoarding knowledge?

Peryite never gets to take much space in the games so it was pretty interesting to see more of him. 

I originally played through the chapter with my main and then I created a new character in the new Arcanist class and played through the chapter once more. The Arcanist class has potential to be one of my favourites, so much fun to play! 

As for the zone(s), it was pretty much the same deal as usual: world bosses, skyshards, tiny little things discoverable in the world that count towards exploration achiecements... The Bastion Nymic daily quest was entirely too much work for a daily and probably the one thing I wasn’t a fan of. To start with you have to run around the map looking for 3-4 world boss level Seekers, defeat them one after the other and then bring their ichor to specfic locations where you can open a portal to Mora's Bastion Nymic. Which is sort of like a weaker group dungeon set up like the public dungeons in Blackwood/The Deadlands in that you enter from different places each time and get different bosses. I entered my first one by myself and managed to get all the way to the last boss on my own, which I then constistently got to 50% HP but then couldn’t get any lower. I continued to be in groups consisting purely of DDs every time I did this, and once I did it just me and another guy when we couldn’t find any others to join. Nymics are too much work and so not worth it. I did it four times while I was playing the chapter as my main, comparatively I did the delve and boss dailies six times each in the same time frame. 

I loved the look of Apocrypha. First time you enter as part of the story Scruut tells you to not lool up as their sky can be disconcerting. So ofc I had to look up and that sky was beautiful ♡

As for side quests, my favourite was probably the one with Ysgild and Vorm, and the one with Morian Zenas, and the one referencing Sotha Sil's past. But I really loved exploring every place in Apocrypha. Azandar is an Arcanist so cool by default, but I can’t stand his personality. Sharp on the other hand quickly gained my approval and he became my Arcanist's steadfast companion.

The story played out pretty expectedly, but I’m still happy with it and I can’t wait to see what will happen next! This one had some pretty cool fights at the end :D

I love Meln.