Kanah Belflower

Short post, but I've been thinking about doing more stuff here. Actually reviewing some games that I enjoyed recently, giving my thoughts. My mind is drifting towards a review for Tyranny, but I'll just drop a few of my thoughts on games I've played since the last review and games I talked about briefly but never got back to: 1. Dragon Age: The Veilguard, late 2024. I liked it because it was another Dragon Age, and I played it to completion / to the secret ending because I love Dragon Age, but it is still my least favorite of the series up to this point. Dragon Age, but strictly by association. 2. Pillars of Eternity 1, early last year. What Tyranny lacked in completeness, Pillars made up for. That game knows what it is and it rides that modern Baldur's Gate 1 wave to it's fullest. Loved it, but I did burn out near the end. See Pillars 2 below. 3. Lay of the Land, at some point last year. I played more of the demo on Patreon, but I kinda fell out of it and never wen...

A lot of things make me mad. I've always been that way, getting irritated at the smallest things that happen, stuck on a persistent hair-trigger. But I'm not mad now. I'm just...numb. Numb as the world changes around me, often for the worse. Life has never been perfect. Or better than most. But it is, for what it's worth, exactly what you make of it. Laws change. Borders change. People change. The clock ticks on, and it's a lesson in letting go as much as it is a lesson in keeping up. I worry for those that can't keep up, or can't let go. And maybe, just maybe, I hope for those who can steer change down a kinder path. Because the light at the end of the tunnel seems dimmer than it did yesterday. And I almost don't care.

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 ...