Diving into the Bug Ruins of Hollow Knight

 I briefly played Hollow Knight at my sister's place a couple years ago, using my now-brother-in-law's console. The game, I think, is not one you can get a great feel for in a half-hour session when you feel very conscious of the fact that you're a guest in someone's house.

I had apparently gotten the game long ago for free from Playstation Plus, knowing its reputation as one of the great indie games of the past ten years.

Anyway, I've now put significant time into it.

Any comparisons you'd be tempted to make to the Metroid series, particularly Super Metroid, would, I think, be pretty apt. You arrive at a desolate village with a well that leads down into a series of caverns, but the caverns branch out to make an enormous, labyrinthine world.

Unlike Super Metroid, or its recent successor, Metroid Dread, Hollow Knight does have some more modern gameplay ideas, including a fast-travel system (notably one that still requires you to trek to your nearest fast-travel location, so it's not like you can just nope out of a scenario if you get lost). There is also a Souls-like element with Geo, the currency you collect around the world, usually getting a handful from each enemy you defeat. Dying, among other things, causes you to drop your Geo, and you have one opportunity to regain it before it's lost and you have to start your collection from scratch.

Like in Soulslike games, this incentivizes spending that cash as soon as you can, though it can be frustrating when you have just shy of the amount you need to unlock, say, an elevator, and then die while collecting more of it. The amount dropped by foes does seem to go up as you get into more difficult areas, but it's a real pressure.

Power progression is de-emphasized even from Metroid levels. Playing for several hours, I've only gotten one health upgrade and only the first fragment of a Soul upgrade (we'll get to what that means). I did get my sword - sorry, not sword, nail, because we're a little bug-person - upgraded, which I actually wasn't sure was going to happen. With rare exceptions, every enemy's attacks only deal one "mask" of damage (the units that your health is measured in) and only recently have I started encountering non-boss/mini-boss monsters that take more than three or four hits to take down (which then got reduced to around that number thanks to my weapon upgrade).

Hitting enemies will build a resource called Soul. The primary use for this, as I see it, is to heal yourself. A full soul meter will have enough to recover three of your masks, of which you start off with 5. Thus, you're going to need to take the fight to your enemies to heal yourself, which of course puts you at risk of losing more health. Healing requires you to concentrate on pouring soul into it, and if you're interrupted, the soul you've spent is still expended even if you didn't get to heal.

This is easier to manage when fighting regular enemies in the world, but against aggressive bosses, it seems like the intent is for you to just get better at dodging their attacks.

Dying causes you to leave a ghostly apparition in the room where you bit it, and you'll need to fight this ghost to get your Geo back. The ghost can hurt you, so it's technically possible for you to die to your own ghost.

In addition to dropping your Geo, though, you also have a fractured soul vessel, meaning you can only store up to about 2/3 of the Soul you can normally. This also means that if you just give up and leave your ghost somewhere, you're going to be fighting at reduced strength (though I suppose if you die again and permanently lose all that geo, your ghost will relocate to the new spot, which might be less of a pain to get to).

The game is hard, requiring some really precise platforming, sometimes forcing you to execute complex maneuvers like striking some bouncy fungus to get some air, dashing to a wall and hopping between spikes. The bosses can be very tough, too. And the runs back can... to be frank, get a little tedious.

One thing I really appreciated in Elden Ring was that, unlike basically all the Soulsborne games before it, most bosses had either a Site of Grace (bonfire) right before the boss room or at least had a Stake of Merika nearby that would let you respawn nearby (though in the latter case, not access the various things you could do at a Site of Grace). It meant, essentially, that once you had gotten to the boss, the game was only really concerned with whether you could handle the boss, and not the big run-up to the boss. It also saved time.

I honestly think a big reason I gave up on Dark Souls was that the run back to Ornstein and Smough was just so tedious. I knew I could fight the things in there, but probably not without losing a precious Estus Flask charge or two. I was nervous enough about the boss itself that I'd make mistakes running to them, and that just made it harder for me to actually beat them.

There's a little of that here - some bosses are buried deep in dangerous territory - I didn't realize the Mantis Elders were something I could come back to later, so I spent a long time running back through their village (where I had opened a bunch of shortcuts, but it was still a lot, especially because I had to stop and fight my ghost there) and showing up for what I can only assume is a super-tough fight with like one or two health, and getting almost instantly destroyed.

I know that this frustration is just part of the difficulty, but it is something I'm struggling with.

Now, art-wise, the game is really interesting. It's both creepy and cute - the fact that all the characters are some kind of bug-person is a nice unifying aesthetic, and the music and art style are both charming. It also means that when they want to get creepy with it, it can get real freaking creepy (I've stumbled into a waterway area - where I am struggling to even find the map - with worm-creatures that split into two separate creatures when you kill them, each attacking in different ways. It's nasty.

While not quite Dark Souls level of bleak, the world of the game does seem pretty bleak, with the caverns leading toward a ruined civilization - one that claims to be the only civilization that ever existed.

This game does not hold your hand when it comes to lore, but I suspect that there's some interesting stuff there if you take the time to synthesize it all. For one thing, I only just found a monument to the Hollow Knight, after thinking that that was my character all this time (or maybe they both are?)

I Can't Stop Thinking About Alan Wake 2

 For basically a year, after I finished the game the first time around in about two days, I've been sitting around going "man, I'd love to play a game like Alan Wake II." But that's the catch: what game is like Alan Wake II?

The whole thing, the whole reason for this obsession, is that it's really unlike anything I've ever experienced in a game before.

Last year was my induction into the Cult of the Remedy, playing first Control, then Alan Wake Remastered, that a few months before the release of Alan Wake II, one of the longest-anticipated sequels in video game history.

However, unlike most games that are stuck in development hell for over a decade, AW2 wound up being a masterpiece - a game that, upon finishing, I went into my apartment's front room and told my best friend/roommate that this game was the most artistically ambitious game I've ever played.

Was it perfect? Hell no. I struggled on the Cynthia Weaver fight because some bug kept locking me out of doing anything (something I think later patches fixed - the fight's also just plain hard). Alan Wake II is messy, but messy in a way that feels entirely because the game is striving so hard to do something so unique, and in most ways, it nails it.

I've written before that I like the action-gameplay of Control better. I cannot wait until Control 2 comes out, though I know that it won't actually start full development until next year.

I would love to go back and re-play Control, but I keep getting cold feet every time I get the prompt on Chapter Select or New Game that warns that doing so will erase all of my saved progress.

Really, Remedy? Really? You couldn't give us a couple different save files? You couldn't give us a New Game Plus mode? You really need me to just throw away the fact that I beat Mold-1, Hartman, all of those mini-bosses and side-quests, if I want to just experience the game again?

Even if I do bite the bullet and start a new game, I realize that nothing will compare to the feeling of entering the Oldest House for the first time. The profound mystery, my first time seeing Ahti, the nervous laughter I shared with said roommate as I facetiously repeated "oh yeah, everything looks totally fine here," while encountering monitors with "lockdown in progress."

But as much as I adored playing Control, and will still hop into my endgame save file and just look for Hiss to fight for the fun of it, it's very clear to me that Alan Wake II saw a quantum leap (not a break - I never played that one) in narrative ambitions.

I mean, when I sat in Poet's Cinema and realized that Yöton Yö was beginning to play, and then realized that it was a 20 minute arthouse horror movie just... there, for me to watch if I wanted. Holy shit.

The live-action, FMV experiments in older Remedy games, from Alan Wake 1's writer's room videos and Night Springs episodes, to the probably-too-far "TV-show in a game" concept of Quantum Break, to then, the more restrained Darling videos, Hotline calls, and occasional glimpses of Courtney Hope in live action when the Hiss try to take Jesse over, it's something they've been trying to refine.

Alan Wake II feels like it utterly nails the use of live-action. It's... it's just incredible.

This game has lodged itself in my brain - the three main chapters for each of its player characters feel as iconic as Brinstar, Maridia, Norfair, the Wrecked Ship, and Tourian do (those are the regions of Planet Zebes in Super Metroid, for those unfamiliar).

One of my favorite relaxation activities is watching video essays on YouTube - about lots of things, but particularly games, especially for people who have really interesting takes on them. While Jacob Gellar has not yet come out (at least on YouTube) with an Alan Wake-dedicated video (given his focus on indie games, this might be just on the other side of the mainstream line for him, though I believe it was his top game of 2023) I've also, in my searching for excuses to just think more about the game, become a big fan of Monty Zander's 5-hour long "Beyond the Lake" critique.

I've watched it 3 times. I don't think that it'll be the last time I watch it either.

To give you an idea of how amazing this game is, it inspired this Scottish YouTuber to make a 5-hour-long critique that, just like the game that inspired it, is a transmedia experience with poetry, original music, and a fucking interpretive dance routine.

The game is an incredible work, and one that really has interesting things to say - about depression, about memory loss (Zander makes a compelling argument that the game is, in part, about dementia), about the art and the value of collaboration, this last point being driven home by how the public-facing "auteur" Sam Lake, Remedy's creative director, made a game that emphasized how much he needs other artists around him to create games. It's honestly a beautiful idea, especially in an era of egocentrism and growing isolation.

And it's thorny - our title character's moral standing is left up for you to interpret: is he just trying to survive and not at fault for the bad things that happen because of his story, or is he using the people he writes about? Likewise, is the character revealed in the post-credits sequence to have been guiding him all along a secret guardian angel or a manipulating gaslighter?

I think you could make the argument that the game engages in some Mystery-Box storytelling trickery that has grown extremely sour in the past 20 years. I'm willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt because I don't know that it's really making any promises about revealing anything.

I have been following the stories about the game's profitability - I think it may have just broken even, after about a year, which I'm sure is not what AAA-studios want, but if this at least means that the game is now officially profitable, I hope that it will also mean that Remedy can continue putting out works of art like this.

The game's year-later DLC, the Lake House, is intriguing in its own way, a sort of micro-story (that is also apparently accessible from the main game, though I have to imagine it would be a very weird, pacing-wise, as I think it basically comes right before the Dark Ocean Summoning climax. Also, while I did beat the final boss of the DLC, I went back and replayed it and just couldn't seem to repeat that (not sure if it reset the difficulty to Standard, come to think of it).

But the Lake House honestly mostly just whetted my appetite for what comes next.

I know FBC Firebreak is coming out I think next year (trying not to think about what else happens next year) but while it does seem to be a PvE-focused game that will tell a story, I'm not sure how likely it is that I, as someone who doesn't really do online games other than WoW (grandfathered in from playing it for like 18 years now) and Magic the Gathering Arena (a game with next to zero actual non-game interaction with other players) I'm...

Look, we'll see as details emerge.

It's tough, though: I do have a friend who introduced me to Control, but he also doesn't do horror games, and so while I think he's seen a Let's Play of Alan Wake II, I don't know that he'll be as into such obsessive discussions as I really want to have.

So, I'm basically shouting this into the void of the blogosphere. This game has lodged itself in my consciousness. I feel lucky that it exists.

But it's all we're going to get for a while. So, I started playing Hollow Knight. I might write about that in a bit.

Martials and Monster Design

 In 5E D&D, there is no such thing as "magic damage." However, for the last ten years, a lot of monsters have been designed in such a way that weapon-based adventurers must use magical weapons in order to overcome the resistance or even immunities some creatures have from the three "physical" damage types, i.e., bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage.

What this created was a sort of unspoken moment of progression: a martial character, getting their first +1 weapon, is essentially initiated into the ranks of people who can actually do something about truly supernatural monsters.

It's always been a funny restriction, given that a level 1 spell caster straight out of character creation can damage, say, a Flesh Golem just fine (though I wouldn't send a level 1 character against a CR 5 monster). Given how much power spellcasters have, it feels like an extra "screw you" to martial characters.

Now, we don't have the full Monster Manual yet, but we've got almost all the pieces of the 2024 version of the game.

Notably, Monks and Moon Druids have features that let them turn their melee attacks into a rarely-resisted damage type. Monks can deal Force damage with their attacks at level 6, while Moon Druids' attacks in Wild Shape can start dealing Radiant damage.

Neither feature mentions "your attacks count as magical for the purpose of overcoming resistances and immunities," because that, as a concept, is going away.

The monsters we've now see that have the old "physical resistances" are mixed. The Stone Golem has no damage resistances at all, and immunity only to poison and psychic (the standard construct immunities). Whereas previously they couldn't be hurt by any physical weapon except one that was magical or made of adamantine (I'd like to know how many characters in the last ten years of D&D had an adamantine weapon before they got a magical one. Aren't adamantine weapons already magical because of the adamantine?) now, any dingus with a club can chip away at them.

However, Fire Elementals go the other way: they have resistance to Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing damage - full stop. You could be attacking them with Blackrazor and at least the slashing damage would be halved.

Anticipating this change, I had wondered if they were going to make some blanket thing about magic weapons dealing Force damage now, similar to the Monk's empowered strikes. But no: it seems that there is no such alteration.

So, where does that leave us?

I suspect that when we get the full Monster Manual, we're going to see far fewer creatures with these resistances, and very, very few with immunities. The Imp, for example, in 2014, had non-magical weapon resistances, but still has the classic devil fire immunity and cold resistance. I imagine this might extend all the way up to things like Pit Fiends and Balors.

In other words, I suspect that the creatures that do have these resistances will be exceptional - a rare case in which you martial characters might want to take evasive action while the spellcasters handle things. The Fire Elemental's new cold vulnerability reinforces this idea (I hope we see more vulnerabilities).

Scions of Elemental Evil Teases Some Updated Monster Manual Stat Blocks

 Recently, a new adventure became available for free on D&D Beyond - Scions of Elemental Evil, which is a relatively short adventure taking players into the fabled Temple of Elemental Evil, along with some pre-made stat blocks of the kids from the D&D cartoon from back in the 80s (who seem to be among the most favored "example adventurers" in recent things) along with an extra Cleric character.

I suspect you can play this with original characters, of course, but it's clearly meant as an intro to the new system, and each 4th-level pre-made character comes with their signature item, like Diana's Quarterstaff of the Acrobat.

But, for those of us who make almost all of our own adventures (genuinely, in 9 years of playing D&D, I think I've run one short published adventure) what we really care about is what the monsters look like - because we have several monsters in the adventure that are definitely from the Monster Manual, and they're definitely the updated, 2024 versions of those stat blocks.

The full list of stat blocks is as follows:

Berserker

Cultist

Cultist Fanatic

Fire Elemental

Gray Ooze

Incubus (big asterisks we'll get into here)

Knight

Ogre

Pirate

Pirate Captain

Stone Golem

Succubus

Tough Boss

Now, obviously a few of those are brand-new - the Pirates and the Tough Boss (as I understand it, "Toughs" are going to be a family of humanoid NPCs like "Pirates" and the Boss is one of those.

But let's talk about the updated ones. I'm not going to go into fine detail here, comparing ACs and HPs and all that, but instead focus on what I think are the key changes.

Berserker: The major change here is that Berserkers get advantage on their Greataxe attacks if the target doesn't have all of its hit points. As with most humanoid NPCs (or some undead creatures,) it lists the gear they're carrying, so you know what players can loot off of them other than gold (though I feel like you're within your rights to say that looted armor might need to be repaired).

Cultist: Small detail, but their weapon (a Sickle - I think it used to be a dagger) also deals 1 point of necrotic damage (though when looted it's a normal weapon, so I think this is part of their cult power).

Cultist Fanatic: These have a "pact blade" that deals a d6 of extra necrotic damage (on top of 1d8+2 slashing). They still have some spellcasting, but your standard practice for pure damage is going to be attacking with the pact blade and using a bonus action for Spiritual Weapon. (Again, it's not that they're not casting spells, but they've really made a clear direction for the DM to run them).

Fire Elemental: This one got a fair number of big changes. First off, they have an aura that will not only deal fire damage (just from being near them, not only if they're attacked or otherwise touched) but it will also cause the burning condition, which their attacks also cause (I believe this does either 1d4 or 1d6 fire damage at the start of a creature's turn, and can be put out as an action). Notably, the Fire Elemental is resistant to Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing damage - full stop.

    What's interesting about this is that I had thought, perhaps, that magic weapons like a +1 Mace or the like would change to potentially do Force damage or otherwise get around this kind of thing.  Not so! Now, if you attack a Fire Elemental with a +2 Longsword, that damage is getting halved no matter what you do!

    However, Fire Elementals now have vulnerability to Cold damage. That's kind of huge, but also very fitting for an elemental. Earth Elementals even in 2014 had vulnerability to Thunder damage, and I wonder if each of our CR 5 friends will have an appropriate vulnerability. Vulnerabilities are one of those things I think most people would like to see more of in D&D (except on boss monsters you really want to be able to last a few rounds) so players can feel like they've got a special way to deal with them.

Gray Ooze: The Gray Ooze has resistances to Acid, Cold, and Fire damage (I don't remember if they had that before,) but also their armor-destroying attacks now make it clear that someone can use Tinker's Tools and the Utilize action to repair it (with a DC 15 tinker's tools dexterity check).

Incubus: Big thing: the Incubus and Succubus now have different stat blocks. But they're still the same creature - when they finish a long rest, a Succubus can transform into an Incubus, and vice versa. (As a cisgender man, I'm going to leave it to the trans community to comment on whether they like this or not, but I also think you could easily imagine that these are just two different modes of a fiendish entity, and that in your game Incubi are not automatically masculine-presenting and Succubi are not automatically feminine-presenting. Mechanically, though, it's pretty interesting). The two versions of the creature have different abilities - the Incubus's Nightmare Touch can curse a target to prevent them from taking short rests. The curse lasts 24 hours, but if you want to ruin a Monk, Fighter, or Warlock's day (also possibly Druid's), this'll do it. Also, they have a bonus action that can potentially knock out (nonlethally) a target. Basically, these are looking pretty darn mean, and could be a real challenge against a tier 1 group.

Knight: Knights do some radiant damage with their attacks now. A good way to keep their damage appropriate to their CR without having to give them a crapton of attacks.

Ogre: Nothing stands out to me as particularly different here, except that it specifies that they have 3 Javelins in their gear (not sure the old version had a javelin attack, actually - like their greatclub, the damage dice are doubled).

Pirate: So, this one is new. I think the old MM told you to just use Bandits for Pirates. This one has more flavor. They have daggers to attack with, but they can replace one of their two attacks with a charm effect called enthralling panache. At CR 1, this is probably only going to start feeling like a minion-sized threat in late tier 1 or in tier 2.

Pirate Captain: Also new, this builds on the themes of the Pirate. Their weapons have doubled damage dice and their Rapier has a kind of pseudo-vex (though it wears off on the end of their turn - which is honestly a godsend for DMs who should not have to track that). They also carry a pistol! As a bonus action, they can attempt to charm someone with Captain's Charm, and they also get a Riposte ability, which I will probably never remember to use!

Stone Golem: Ok, another big, headliner monster. Notably: no immunity to bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage, or resistance. Mundane weapons work fine on them. They're only immune to Poison and Psychic damage (sorry Soulknives and anyone who has ever tried to make a Poison-damage character of any sort). They "Slow" ability now just casts the Slow spell. They also have a ranged Force Bolt attack, and their Slam is a mix of bludgeoning and force.

Succubus: As discussed above, the Succubus can become an Incubus after a long rest. They can cast an 8th level Dominate Person (so it lasts 8 hours) at will, and as part of their multiattack. Their Draining Kiss (which can replace one of their attacks) can target a charmed creature and on a failure or a successful save against the ability (it's a Con save,) the damage they take from this reduces their max HP (a successful save halves it).

    Basically, I think these Fiends are going to be pretty nasty. They don't have an enormous health pool, but they really have some abilities that really push the party to retreat and take a long rest.

Tough Boss: I don't know exactly what the defining trait of Toughs will be, but these have Pack Tactics and their Warhammer effectively has the Push property. They seem better-armored than Thugs (they wear Chain Mail).

So, overall, I think it looks like they really made an effort here to go through each stat block and punch it up significantly. The 2014 PHB I think took some shortcuts, and left us with a lot of monsters that didn't really have much going on. The Ancient Green Dragon we saw before felt a lot more distinct than its 2014 version, which was not too different from all the other ancient dragons. I'm eager to see what the various giants are like, which all felt like they really needed more to distinguish them.