Knob of Door - Blue Glow/Not Review (Patreon)

Here's me being a stupid silly idiot while playing a cool new video game about Hunting Boars, Opening Doors, and babysitting. So much babysitting. It's GOD OF WAR. Epic! Err... no.. wait... I forgot epic was the buzzword for 2008. In 2018 the buzzwords are "mature" and "deep narrative experience". 

Judging from my incessant complaining in this video you might walk away with the impression that this game is a horrible nightmare, and another sad example of modern Triple A gaming sensibilities mucking about and sullying something good by turning it into a generic, boring, Last of Us Clone. Well, all of that is true...from a certain point of view. HOWEVER, I have played a lot more of the game since recording this and have realized I was way too hard on it. So I'd like to offer a more complete review here, Now that i'm a couple hundred hours into it.

This game is WAY better than the first few hours and all marketing for it so far have led me to believe. Right around the time you get a boat, the game opens up and becomes... well... an actual game. There's a big focus on exploration, and after the extended intro the experience is surprisingly big on gameplay, with cutscenes and story beats never wearing out their welcome. 

The combat itself is not perfect, the camera is way too close up Krato's butthole and there's no reliable way to attack anything coming from behind you, so fighting multiple enemies often feels like those wacky Vietnam flashbacks I'd rather not relive. 

But in the grand scheme that issue became a minor one. The combat takes some getting used to, but once you start unlocking abilities and leveling up your junk it quickly becomes... dare I say... fun. Quite fun, actually. Once you get the hang of it, it feels like a pretty satisfying blend of quick and frantic beat em up style brawling, and more cautious, hacky slashy dungeon crawler-esque combat. Sort of like if Dark Souls had a baby with... well, with God of War, and surprisingly it gels pretty well. 

To call the game Dark Souls inspired is an understatement, which is to be expected. Every game is dark souls inspired nowadays. It's got all the exploratory backtracking and fucking uhh fucking whatever i'm bored of this paragraph. 

One thing i didn't see coming was the depth and complexity of the weapon crafting and RPG elements. I've spent a lot of time going off the path of the main story to do side missions, grind, collect loot, dig up enchantments, craft armor, upgrade my weapons, level up, and turn myself into an overpowered God of Fighting or Killing or something. It's on the tip of my tongue. God of Fisticuffs? God of Violence? God of Pugilism? Whatever I'm sure it's not important. 

I wish the marketing for the game had focused more on these elements that the game does well, instead of shoving the supposed maturity of the script down everyone's throats, which was guaranteed to result in a backlash from a sizable portion of the crowd. The constant reassurance that the old games' stories were shallow and juvenile compared to the oscar bait complexity of babysitting a toddler was bound to evoke Last of Us comparisons from gamers who can't stand that kind of thing. 

That kind of marketing comes off as insincere, pretentious, and degrading to the medium itself, not to mention disrespectful to the fans who enjoyed the old games, and the talented writers who worked on them. 

It's understandable that choosing to market the new game that way put a lot of us on the defensive right off the bat. The "gaming journalism" reviews might be unanimously positive but the actual player reviews are less so. I'm sure more of them would give the game a fair shake if they didn't feel so betrayed and disrespected by this dismissive attitude towards what they loved in the old games.

But upon actually playing the game, and giving it a chance to grow on you (preferably without recording it as that's no way to immerse yourself in any game), it becomes clear that this isn't God of War selling out by turning into The Last of Us. This is The Last of Us becoming cool by turning into God of War. 

On the topic of our new baby-boi, Atreus... i like him. I approve. He adds a new dimension to combat that's easy to control and immensely satisfying. It's fun to level up his attacks and easy to use them in tandem with Kratos during the heat of battle. While some aspects of the combat occasionally felt clunky, Atreus never did. 

I also enjoyed his dynamic with Kratos, the idle dialogue while exploring or rowing is charming and funny, switching between father/son bickering and later to interesting tidbits of lore once an equally enjoyable 3rd party member joins the crew. 

I never found Atreus annoying, or at least no more annoying than a child his age *should* be. The character is naive, immature, and foolishly optimistic, but that's the point. As a foil to Krato's grim, cynical pragmatism his inclusion works well. 

The game's story itself, despite the low expectations brought on by the marketing, is actually pretty good. There's no shocking twists or turns, and of course i disagree with the notion that more somber automatically means more mature, or that the depth of a narrative can be quantifiably measured in hours spent bonding with a child or staring off into space regretting one's dark past, but what's there is compelling, and well-written. 

There's nothing new about this story, it's Logan, it's Unforgiven, It's The Dark Knight Returns, it's every Undertaker match for the last 9 Wrestlemanias. Old scary badass desperately trying be a better man and live in peace, pulled into a situation, usually for the sake of protecting his loved ones, wherein he must once more kick ass and take names as a grizzled old fuck. You've seen it a million times before, but if ever there was a character ready and waiting for that narrative archetype, it's Kratos. 

Kratos was a monster in the old games, who started out sympathetic and gradually became less so to the point where by the end of the journey many players had begun rooting against him, which for the record i think is just as deep of a story as anything in the new game. But the point is, who better than Kratos to lace up his boots for one last theological genocide, not for vengeance, but for love. The love of his hot dead wife, and bastard son. Someday I hope to kill people for those reasons, but for now i'll settle for blaming my upbringing. 

It's refreshing seeing Kratos as a good guy, with his sins behind him and having achieved some degree of peace, before that peace being threatened sends him back into fight mode. Kratos has an entirely new personality now, but it's a personality that it makes sense for him to have. It's not an example of a character being wildly and fundamentally changed for no reason, it's example of logical character development. 

Kratos lived a life of violence and vengeance, losing everyone he cared about in the process and becoming a monster so horrible he could only atone by stabbing himself and crawling into the sea. So now he's this guy, grim, quiet, humorless, living off the grid, trying to stay out of trouble, desperate to honor and protect his family, and even more desperate to keep the truth of his past secret from his son. 

In other words he's exactly the guy he was always going to become once his rampage was complete, or at least the guy i always hoped he would become. I didn't like what Kratos became in the 3rd game, the sympathetic core of the character from the previous games had been buried under bloodlust. Having seen how far from grace this character had previously fallen i felt happy for him that he had become a better man and built a better life. So when the Aesir Gods show up and start fucking with him, once again the character has my complete sympathy, and i am all in for embarking on another journey with my scary old friend. 

Anyways i haven't beaten it yet, but i think I'm pretty far in, and I gotta say I really like this game. It's won me over as a worthy successor and natural evolution of the old series. I always hate to catch myself being negative or dumping on a game too much, especially in the early part, and in this case i think i was probably too hard on a game i ended up getting really invested in, once the microphone was off and i actually allowed myself to sink into it. 

There's two problems here. For one thing, games just start bad now. We just have to accept that. Every game starts with 2-3 hours of slowly walking around a forest/city/dmv line and listening to people talk about how much green Lucky Charms goo was in their shit this morning, and all judgment must be reserved until the boring part is over and the game finally, mercifully allows you to start playing it. I don't like it, you don't like it, nobody likes it, but that's just the way games are now and we all might as well get used to it. 

The other problem is just let's plays in general, you have to say *something* about what's in front of you, and since you always stupidly want to start recording and showing people the game right away, what's right in front of you happens to be the boring beginning part. 

So the result of this is you get 50 million youtube channels uploading identical let's plays of them cynically complaining about the first hour of every game, but what you never see is the fun part once the game opens up. By that point most people have either given up on playing it, or gotten too invested to care about recording it. 

That's why whenever i make a video like this about a big new game, especially if it's mostly me walking around the forest and complaining about the same shit everyone else is complaining about, i try to put in the extra time and effort to edit out most of that shit. I would rather watch a 20-30 minute highlight real of funny jokes and observations than a 3 hour snore-fest of some old jaded asshole complaining about every little thing. I think most viewers feel the same way. 

I just want to make people laugh and share things i enjoy. Not bring people down and prevent them from enjoying things. When i release a video like this and most of the comments are people agreeing with my stupid complaints and writing the game off before playing it, it sort of feels like I've done a bad thing. 

I don't want to contribute to a culture of knee-jerk criticism or pessimism, and i certainly don't want to feel like I'm being unfair to a thing a lot of talented people worked on, especially if I'm influencing others to make a purchasing decision about it. I'd rather encourage people to give something a chance for themselves. That's why my reviews are Not Reviews and my lets plays are silly bullshit. I don't want to sit in judgment, i just want to sit in The Blue Glow.