Alice in Borderland S02

This is long overdue. The second season released in December 2022 and we've just been putting it off regardless of how much we enjoyed the first season. 

But we finally watched it! And it was amazing!

That last game was *chef's kiss*.

And yet they still don't know why or how this whole thing happened. But it looks like we have another season coming!

Arisu and Usagi finally got their shit together ♥ Chishiya is still my favourite character ♥

Resident Alien S01

We wanted something to laugh at and this seemed fun from the trailer so we picked it up.

It was really great and we both liked it although it turned a lot more serious than we initially thought it would be from the goofiness of the first couple episodes.

It's about an alien who comes to Earth with a mission, but his ship crashes and he is forced to assimilate while he tries to find his device and make his ship functional. There's a lot of crazy happening while he tries to learn to be human.

When the first season finished we looked up whether there was more and found that season 2 and 3 in Sweden are exclusively on the streaming service of a ISP that we don't have :C 

Honestly, genuinely, fuck exclusives. 

The show is great though. Watch it!

The Umbrella Academy S04

Last season of The Umbrella Academy and as great as it was to see the characters have their own lives and struggle in their own ways with the mundanity of being without their powers it makes for a very underwhelming start to the season. 

My favourite episode this season is probably the one where Lila and Five are lost in the subway.

Jean and Gene were highlights of this season (also known as Ron and Tammy lol).

The ending of the season (and the entire show) left a lot to be desired, and I've heard even the actors didn't like it, but that it was due to Netflix shortening it so they scrambled to rewrite and make a final ending. So it wasn't supposed to be this way, dammit.

Dealing with backlog: Evil West

This has been a long time coming. Once we finished Redfall back in May, we chose Evil West as our next co-op game. It's vampires meet the wild west with definite weird science and gothic noir vibes and I love the aesthetic and general vibe.

Unfortunately the gameplay aspect seemed haphazard and the co-op aspect seemed like a last-minute addition without much thought to it. 

The haphazard feeling came mainly from the key bindings, which was probably intended for a controller, but even then I feel like it'd be too many buttons to keep track of. Why not just have a weapon wheel and 1,2,3,4 for abilities? Instead pressing X for this, Y for this, Z for this, F for this, R for this, Q for this. Click 1 for this weapon, click 1 again to switch to this other weapon. It was confusing af to keep track of with the result that we ended up mostly using the same 2-3 things all the time because it was what we could each remember how to use. 

And why we got the feeling that co-op was a last-minute addition? Because we were both playing the same dude. Only the host gets gameplay progression. And the game literally doesn't allow you to explore without the other person tagging along behind you.

For generic enemies the game went with the tactic that "more advanced means more HP" which in reality meant that higher tier enemies were supreme bullet sponges and tedious to fight. 

Why does the game tell me what I missed in each chapter if it isn't going to let me go back and replay that chapter in an attempt to find what I missed?

The boss fights were all really cool, though! The fight against William especially. All of the boss fights required tactics and figuring out mechanics, which was a nice pace from "dodge when it charges and hit it when it doesn't".

The story was pretty generic as far as vampire stories go. Enslave humanity, blot out the sun. The usual. But the different varieties of vampires and how they were made were really interesting. Some of them were very wtf.

I got a bug towards the end where every time I opened the skill perk menu the game sound would vanish and when I exited the skill perk menu the game would lag and stutter considerably until it simply crashed to main menu, where I still had no game sound. I needed to restart the entire game to get game sound back, and yet the same thing would happen every time I opened the skill perk menu. To the point where I didn't dare to assign my new perks until we were safely behind an autosave. Because there's only autosave, you can't save manually at all.

So all in all, amazing vibes, poor execution.