Kanah Belflower

I need that Polish fantasy metal/funk/whatever the fuck is in the Tainted Grail main menu to be pumped directly into my veins and fed to me through a straw. If you could see my play history on Xbox last week, it would consist of me spending 7 AM to 11 PM for about 2 days straight playing Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, with 7 PM to 12 AM scattered throughout the work week. I knew I would like Tainted Grail when I heard it was "Indie Skyrim" or whatever the internet is running with these days; what I didn't expect was for the game to more closely resemble a first-person Dark Souls with Skyrim DNA wrapped into a triple helix of Cool Shit™. The player experience (immediate combat, crafting, inventory, perspective, etc) resembles the Elder Scrolls, while the game's setting, writing, and certain important design choices more closely bear pre-apocalyptic Dark Souls on their sleeve. The bonfires for fast travel, rest, crafting and equipment management; the more prominent ...

If the title could get any clearer, it would be crystalized. I played the Outer Worlds 2 mainly because I had 120-odd gigabytes of space on my wife's Xbox, and also because I didn't have to pay full price for it given that I already pay $30 each month for GamePass. Decided to binge the game, pretend I got it for half price. And I liked it. Didn't love it. I enjoyed the combat more, the stealth more, the dialogue  systems  more, and the general level of polish put on the prior game's rough edges. I also liked how the game world tried to take itself more seriously, in the level design if not the writing. The levels in this game  feel  grittier, more real. Less campy. But where the areas have a successfully darker tone, the writing seems to lose a bit of itself in the "will they, won't they" of being corporate satire or serious commentary. I listened to a video from Berendir on YouTube where he captured it pretty well: Obsidian listened to critiques about the...

There is a piece of me, a very small one, that I never realized had been left behind on my Xbox One S hard drive back in 2017. It stayed put, hidden from view, soaking in Pacific salt from the air as years passed on an unchanging, unflinching Oregon coast-town. I left a piece of me in Arcadia Bay, with Chloe Price and Rachel Amber. In October of 2025, I felt another piece - perhaps a twin to that one from so long ago - break free from my soul and come to bear within the SSD of my personal computer. It hums pleasantly, nodding to the faint beat of Bershy's  Radio , basking in the budding romance and familial bonds at the core of AdHoc's debut game: Dispatch. The game that gave me a similar, yet not identical, sense of love and loss that came with the conclusion of Life is Strange: Before the Storm nearly a decade prior. Am I too emotional about these things? I don't know, maybe. But never, not for a second, would I want to take those pieces of me back. Because wherever I am,...

Tyranny , the 2016 dark fantasy CRPG from Obsidian Entertainment , never received a sequel. Not all games warrant a follow-up, as we're starting to see in this modern landscape of under-performing franchise players, but some titles simply don't feel complete without one. Tyranny is one of those games. Short enough to not overstay it's welcome, long enough for your choices to be impactful and varied, but lacking any large-scale resolution for the pieces laid out in it's final hours. And at this point in time, nearly a decade after release, there is zero indication that Obsidian has any intention of revisiting the universe. As a fun thought experiment, I want to discuss some short ideas for how I would follow this game up in 2025. Part One: An Archon of Our Own The idea is pretty cut and dry: Overlord Kyros is gone, and the Empire is fracturing into warring states ruled by the Archons . The main character's actions in the first game proved to the world that Kyros is ...

It started when I couldn't finish Fallout: London, despite loving it. Then my exploration of Enderal was cut short after reaching Ark, when I didn't want to go back out into the world that wanted to kill me. I purchased Syndicate and never finished it; I then bought a ton of great games on GOG and Steam during sales, playing introductory bits of all of them just to get an idea of where I stood with them... and I barely felt a spark beyond that initial intrigue. I wasn't quite sure if it was a problem with my tastes, or my health, or my time. But then I played Tyranny for the first time, having never played Pillars of Eternity, and I powered through 25 hours of gameplay without skipping a beat. Tyranny managed to grab my attention quickly, and maintain it throughout a relatively short (but deep) gameplay experience. I don't have any plans for an actual review of it, but it kept me going for a while and I appreciate it for not wasting my time. The sheer excitement and fun...

God, I have no idea how to start this. Perhaps the beginning will be a good place. I am taking a Humanities course in college at the moment, and my final project is a research paper about my personal views of art as a whole. What does art mean, how does art feel, the whole shebang. But I don't know much about "traditional" art. I'm a relatively smart guy, I know that art is multifaceted and has a litany of purposes depending on who makes it and who sees it. But I don't actually have much of a dog in the fight, you know? That's why I'm changing the game - rather than focusing on painted works or written words, I want to spin this paper around the thing I love talking about more than nearly anything. Let's talk about videogames. I know, I know - this isn't exactly a novel approach. Videogames under the lens of art are the "get out of jail free" card for every nerd in high school who doesn't wanna touch classical forms with a ten foot po...