The easiest way to tell if someone has spent a lot of time playing Hitman is to ask them what their impression is of the franchise. Someone who has never played it before will usually think it’s a very gritty, serious series where the main character is one of the most boring, dour people on the planet. But if a fan of the franchise was asked the same question, they would say it is one of the most hilarious IPs in the games industry, filled with the most delightfully macabre, black humor. Whether it’s intentional or not, this disconnect between the stern face of Agent 47, everyone’s favorite murder boy, and the comedy which he is party to, sits at the seat of what makes Hitman such a gem in the eyes of those who play it.
The genius of Hitman is that no matter how absurd the situation he’s put in, no matter what is happening to those around him, Agent 47 will always look on with the same blank, completely humorless expression on his face. This visual can be amusing on it’s own, in the right situation, but when all the various opportunities IO has afforded the player kick in, hilarity ensues. In other words, 47 is the ultimate straight man. There is never a moment when he loses his composure, which means that he can play off of absurd situations in a way that very few characters are capable. He’s an extraordinarily boring character on his own, and that’s largely the point.
Will Never Smile, No Matter What
And yet, if Agent 47 is the straight man, who is the funny man is this comedy duo? Normally, one might think it is his handler, Diana Burnwood. While she’s certainly got her own brand of humor, and isn’t shy about making quips at her partner’s, or their target’s, expense, she often plays it just as straight as the assassin she feeds intel to. No, the funny man is someone else entirely: It is the player, in collaboration with the writing team at IO Interactive, that forms the second half of what would more accurately be described as Hitman’s “comedy quartet”. This dynamic between the characters inside the game world, and us outside of it, is the most fundamental building block from which all of the series’s best moments can be traced back to.

Agent 47 (deadpan): “Do I look fabulous?”
In hindsight, it should have been obvious from the very first episode of the 2016 game. When I directed Agent 47 into the Paris Fashion Show, and found that he happened to have a very similar facial structure to the star of the show, a supermodel named Helmut Kruger, I knew the game was tempting me to guide my murder boy in ways I couldn’t resist. Ever the consummate professional, 47 followed orders to a tee, all with that signature scowl emblazoned upon his visage. Yet, our performance had only just begun. Dressed in Helmut’s dashing garments, I commanded my Agent to rush to the dressing room and get his makeup on, so that no one doubted the veracity of his disguise. And then, together, we walked the runway. What sells this scene is not 47’s swagger, nor his confidence and poise. While they contribute to the image, the humor comes from intensity of his perpetually steely gaze. It is clear that, to him, walking the fashion show is both as easy and uninteresting as watching paint dry. While the crowd is bedazzled by his performance, he’s just putting in another day at the office, and couldn’t possibly care any less.
This is only one example. Whether it’s a guitar solo, taking a selfie with a drug kingpin’s wife, or selling a poisoned variant of “Florida Man’s Coconut Balls”, 47 faces any situation, no matter how hilarious, with the same grim expression. His ability to remain straight faced at all times exacerbates the comedic value of these scenarios through the juxtaposition alone. Because he would otherwise not be the type of person to place himself in absurd scenes, and the rest of Hitman is deliberately presented self-seriously to further heighten the humor of the in-game hijinks, this can only work in the context of a video game, with a player directing the action.
The Many Absurd Faces(?) of Agent 47
Much is lost when transitioning it to a non-interactive medium, without a player directing the spectacle. This becomes abundantly clear when watching something like the 2007 Hitman movie. Although the lore is altered and they stuck an unnecessary, awkward romance into the movie, that’s not really the core of the problem. The problem is that the movie takes itself deadly seriously. It sees Agent 47 dressing up in disguises and manipulating circumstances to get closer to his targets and says to itself, “Look at this badass professional assassin. No one can beat Awesome McCoolDude.” While that aspect is certainly part of the character, it doesn’t capture his full essence. It’s missing the absurdity that he needs to play around in for his otherwise dour persona to function. Other media, like the books and comics, have a very similar problem, as people like Super Bunny Hoppoints out in his video on one of them.
Pictured: An Entire Film Crew Missing the Point
Without the player to guide 47 into absurd situations, he loses out on opportunities to showcase what makes him special. He becomes another boring, middle-aged white protagonist. More than most characters, he needs the hand of a skilled (or even better, unskilled) player to work with and pilot him into situations where the dissonance between his eternal scowl and the zaniness of his actions combine to create truly memorable moments. It takes two to tango, and Agent 47 doesn’t work as a solo act.

First off, allow me to begin my apologizing once again for the quality of the video footage in this upload. For some reason, OBS begins to falter once I start to enter areas in Hitman 2 that have large crowds. I suspect it has something to do with the toll it takes on the GPU. After this recording, I spent an hour coming up with and testing a solution to this problem, which should fix the broadcast for the next recording. Please bear with me until then.

That said, after spending nearly a year playing Hitman (2016), you didn’t think I would let this new Hitman go quietly in the good night so easily, did you? Of course I was going to play it on stream. And, like with the Dishonored series, I want to get into the habit of “failure” shape my run in interesting ways that I don’t usually get to see. That becomes a lot easier with a crowd keeping me honest.

Enter the Hitman 2 Improvisation Run! Today, we took on the tutorial mission, and the first real mission of the game, in Miami.

In addition, because I wanted to savor my Hitman experience a bit more, I opted to end the stream with an Escalation Contract. (Again, apologies for the video quality.)

I won’t talk much about Escalation Contracts here, since I already spent already spoke about them in my original Hitman (2016) series, but it was great to do another one live on stream.

And here is the link to the Rock Paper Shotgun article I was talking about in the Miami map.

Since the original ICA tutorials are included in the base package for this new Hitman game, it really calls into focus how much of a bummer this new opening mission is by comparison. It’s no Blood Money tutorial by any means, but it does nothing to help players get into the correct mindset to play Hitman, nor does it introduce some of the zanier elements of the series that make it as great as it is.

That said, there are a few really smart decisions there. For one, the fact that nobody is in the house when the player first touches down means that they have time both to get used to the game’s basic controls and explore the area before they have to start performing inside it. By the time the target arrives with her entourage, there’s a strong chance the player will already have a plan if they’re familiar with how Hitman works. In that sense, it still has the sense of escalation that the original tutorial does, but it’s not as strong and doesn’t go far enough in instructing players.

Further, the map is small, since it is only the size of one house. However, it is still big enough to big players quite a few options for how they wish to break in to the house and deal with the target. There are several places and moments where both the target and her boyfriend are left wide open, and the “loud” option is always open if that’s what players want to do.

Despite the complications towards the end, I’m ultimately happy with how Miami turned out. It’s moments like this where Hitman truly shines. The best part of Hitman is that no matter how dire the situation is, the player always knows that there is a way to succeed. It might not be elegant, nor will it give you the best score, but there’s always a path.

We’ll talk more about that next time. 🙂

After finally wrapping up Russia, the Closure Alert band returns to Taipei to finish what we started in the pursuit of the insidious unknown assassin attempting to murder Ronald Sung.

Don’t forget that if you want to see content like this as it’s recorded live, be sure to check out my Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud.

First off, props go to anaphysik here for his very involved research into the nature of Taiwanese/Chinese relations and the political quagmire that encompasses it. Up until he started talking about it off camera, I was completely unaware of the finer details behind it all. Though Obsidian gets a lot of that wrong, it colors the whole Taiwan section of the game in a way my younger self couldn’t possibly appreciate.


As we were talking after the recording ended, he also made note that while they did mess up their version of the Taiwan/China conflict, talking about it at all is a brave and risky move. It could very easily have gotten them blacklisted in China, which would be disastrous given how large the market there is. And it doesn’t feel like there was any maliciousness behind the various mistakes they made in representing Taiwan/China relations. Rather, it feels like a combination of not having the time/resources to research into the subject with an already aggressive production timeline.

The last time we were in Taipei, when we did Disclosure Alert over 5 years ago, I made a point to talk about how the entire plot behind Omen Deng makes no sense, and that’s only grown more clear with time. Not only is there no reason to suspect that Deng has any involvement with Sung’s assassination, but his actions are only plausible if we go under the assumption that he is involved (which, as we said in the episode, he isn’t).

He has no reason to guard this thumb drive with the details behind the assassination attempt with a program that deletes the files if it gets hacked, because he wouldn’t want to destroy the only proof he has to give to Sung. Further, why wouldn’t he be aware that Thorton (as we will show in the next episode) went directly to Sung to share said information. It just doesn’t make sense, and the fact that Scarlet is only tangentially related is such a missed opportunity, because a lot of problems would have been solved if she was more directly involved.

I wish the writing in Taipei was stronger, because there’s a ton of fun stuff there. Stephen Heck, voiced by Nolan North, is a fun character. The hotel mission is one of my favorite concepts (even if the execution leaves a bit to be desired). And most importantly, I got to rub Sis’s death in Albatross’s face.

Post Script:

Anaphysik sends you this, with regards.

Poor Sean Bean. He’s a legendary talent, and an incredible actor. But despite that, there’s one thing that he’s more famous for than anything else: Dying in almost every single role that he’s done.

So when IO Interactive not only makes him the very first Elusive Target for Hitman 2, but gives him the code name “The Undying”, they know exactly what kind of challenge they are giving to their player base.

And I, being a very prolific Hitman/Elusive Target player, had no choice but to answer the call.

First off, props to Sean Bean for being such a good sport about this, and to IO for getting him to agree to it.


As people might remember from the last time I took on these Elusive Targets, the following rules are imposed for them:

  • An Elusive Target can only be attempted during the designated window
  • The player may restart the mission as many times as they like, but once a single objective is completed, or the player dies, they may no longer restart the mission.
  • Once the mission is failed or completed, the player may make no further attempts at the Elusive Target.

In other words, it is high-stakes Hitman, where every move counts.

This means it’s all the more important to properly scout out the mission in dummy attempts, fishing for a viable strategy, before one makes their final attempt.

My attempt is no different. While the above is my final attempt, I spend a good 30 minutes before hand poking around before I found a winner. Though the footage is choppy due to my stream setup/graphical options, you may watch/listen to it here.

My first instinct was to find a way to poison the coffee or to get him to leave the meeting via my favorite coin. There wasn’t a good way to sneak in the poison though. As for the coin trick, you’ll see in the scouting video that it ends in disaster. That outside area is well guarded. (And by the way, it was a little chilling to have Sean Bean call me out for two different strategies I already considered when I actually sat down for the meeting.)

What tipped me off to the hallway was the realization that aside from those two guard, there wasn’t a single person watching Sean Bean go down this hallway. This made it the ideal place for me to strike, if only I could get rid of those guards.

I kept following him looking for a way, but I didn’t see anything. I got one of the guards with the coin trick in the lab area, but I couldn’t safely get rid of the other. It wasn’t until his walk back that I saw the bathroom, and since it had a closet I could dump bodies into, that became my best option.

But that still left one problem… the fact that I had been caught on camera during every single attempt while climbing up the stairs. To get Silent Assassin, the player either can’t be caught on tape, or needs to destroy the evidence on CCTV. From playing the Miami mission proper, I knew that security room was on the top floor, and going for it was just too risky. That left one option: Shooting down the camera before it has the chance to see me. There were no other cameras in the section of the map I was working in, so dealing with it was no big deal.

And now that the stage has been set, and I had a viable approach to getting to a vulnerable Sean Bean, I only had to figure out a method. I could shoot him in head, snap his neck, or blow him up, but all 3 of those options led to the very real likelihood that the body would be discovered. When going for Silent Assassin, the player cannot have a body be discovered, except for a few scenarios.

What I failed to explain in the video is that if the death was due to a poison or and accident kill, it can be detected and not count against the “No Bodies Found” criteria, so long as there are no witnesses to the attempt. Since the target was completely away from prying eyes, this meant that the Modern Syringe was the best possible method to take care of him.

It’s a deceptive simple contract, but it requires the player to be cognizant of their environment and aware of the options at their disposal. That’s the key when it comes to Hitman.

One of the biggest selling points behind The Quiet Man is that the game has little audio, to help viewers better understand the viewpoint of protagonist Dane, who is born deaf. (Which, considering this means the player can’t understand things he clearly can, isn’t helpful, but I digress.)

So what should be an adequate reward for beating The Quiet Man? Well, beating The Quiet Man awards the player with the ability to play the game again, but this time with audio and subtitles. And to get the full experience of The Quiet Man, Chris and I decided jump back into it.
The article Chris mentioned, written by OneOddGamerGirl, can be found here. This is an amazing article the brings up a lot of baggage that I couldn’t even begin to get into as someone who is not part of the deaf community.
And thank you to Twitch stream viewer Nelson Demifur from making this highlight clip during the broadcast, which very accurately summarizes my feelings behind The Quiet Man.
I am honestly astounded at how much better The Quiet Man was without any audio, because this story is really badly written.
Some aspects of the story just go completely unexplained even with the added context afforded by dialogue, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any supernatural aspect to this story. Things like Dane’s dad, Robert, dressed in the Bird Mask (the titular “Quiet Man”) disappearing randomly during a fight, or Dane mysteriously coming back to life from being shot, then taking out a whole organized squad of goons. Not to mention the scene where Dane apparently goes crazy and starts wholesale slaughtering Taye’s goons dressed in the Quiet Man mask. In a story that otherwise presents itself as “grounded”, for lack of a better term, these are bizarre plot points that don’t get explained.
There’s also the whole thing where the context behind Dane and the detective’s (Robert) relationship is just missing in the voiceless cut. As the clip above demonstrates, the physical actions, outside of context, give a completely different impression than you get when subtitles and audio are added to it. What I thought was a touching moment of a police officer reaching out to a young man who needed help to cope with the loss of his mother turned out to be an abuse father blaming his kid for his wife’s death. This goes double for every other scene where it looks like he’s innocuously talking to other people. But worse than all of that, they have the absolute gall to try to redeem this garbage pile in human skin randomly, without warning, after he’s been nothing but bad news for all of Dane’s life. This character is one of the most messes in the game.
But he’s not the worst, that would be Lala, who doesn’t seem to have any real reason to be doing what she’s doing throughout the game. It’s clear that see set up a gang war between the two faction leaders, Taye and Issac, by staging her own kidnapping with Robert’s assistance. But drag dealing aside, Taye seems like a very benevolent boss from what we see, only losing his temper after people who work for him start dying and/or ending up in the hospital. It’s not clear why she felt the need to do this in the first place, or what Robert did to convince her.
I could go on, but this story is a complete mess, doubly so when it’s presented in full context. At least I understood what was going on in Detroit: Become Human.

Post script (added on 11/30/2018):

I didn’t even talk about how some of the most irritating aspects of the game’s presentation. One of which is the subtitling. You’d think since the story is about a deaf person, they’d be cognizant of how to build effective subtitles, but The Quiet Man fails in even this aspect. Firstly, there is no outline around, or black box behind, the stark white text. This means that when they are displayed over something like a bright white dress, I have a hard time reading them. On top of that, there subtitles aren’t often up long enough for me to read them, and Chris had a similar issue during the stream.

There’s so the many, many times where people are talking to Dane, who cannot hear, when he is positions where we could not possibly see their lips move, and thus would have no idea what they are saying. Once I started noticing it, it became a massive distraction.

I knew going into The Quiet Man that it wasn’t going to be a good game, but I was absolutely shocked by how terrible it truly was. What should have been a mediocre FMV game about a deaf person turned out to be one of the most pretentious and confused piles of bad decisions I have born witness too.

And, if you’re so inclined, you are welcome to join me on this adventure into The Quiet Man.

And yes, for all my trouble playing The Quiet Man, my reward was for it to freeze just before I unlocked the ability to play it again with audio and the trophy for completing the game.

The next day, I tried again, and it froze again. Here is the video evidence…

It’s honestly hard to understand exactly what happened behind the scenes to turn whatever idea spawned this game into such a bad experience. It seems hell bent on making sure that the player is left as confused as humanly possible.

Part of that comes from the game’s most infamous design choices: To remove audio from most of the game. Verbal/word-based communication is only one way to convey thoughts and ideas to other people. With this in mind, a good script writer/director would take advantage of those other ways (expressions, costuming, body movement/positioning) to clearly signal the big events of the story to the audience.

But The Quiet Man doesn’t do that. Instead, they spend their time on long stretches of shot/reverse-shot dialogue scenes where people are just speaking to each other. This is pointless in a game without audio, because we can’t hear what any person is saying, and their aren’t enough non-verbal queues to understand the conversation.

This would be a fascinating choice if it was meant to help us sympathize more with protagonist Dane, who is (allegedly) deaf or hard-of-hearing, but that can’t be true. If the lack of audio was supposed to draw us into Dane’s viewpoint, then we would have subtitles when he can understand what other characters are saying with words or ASL. This is clearly not the case, as there are plainly times where Dane isn’t just understanding what is going on, but actively responding back. And since there’s no audio or subtitles, the player is left in the dark with regards to what their own character is doing.

This ambiguity extends to the combat. I got the basics down, with light/heavy attacks, grabs, and dodges. But when it comes to the finer details, like counter attacks, parry windows, “focus meter”, and guard breaks, it was impossible for me to figure out what was going on for most of the game. I didn’t even realize the game had counter attacks until the one boss where I had to learn how to do it, over 3/4 of the way through the game.

There’s no real way around it. This game is bad, shockingly so.

Edit:

Square Enix issued a copyright claim. If you’re having issues viewing the stream, that would be why.

Our first major boss fight has been completed, and we were able to show off quite a bit.

If you wish to watch content like this as it’s recorded live, be sure to follow my Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud

One of the most pointless cruel things you can do in this game is murder a young girl and then throw it in her parental figure’s face. You’d only ever do that if your goal is to make Albatross as angry as possible.

Going through Brayko’s mansion again, especially in the version where Thorton has a high enough Technical Aptitude to save your partner and get the data, makes me wonder what this mission was intended to be like before Alpha Protocol transitioned to having more linear levels, when the hubs were going to be wide open sandboxes. You can tell there’s some fudging, since the vault with the data is located in the same building we first entered (the courtyard we enter to go back there is ever the same courtyard we began the level in).

There’s also the point Wil/anaphysik made about how it seems likely that players were always supposed to go in with SIE, since Albatross gets a less intense cutscene and frankly would not be on site for a mission like this. Artifacts like this are part what make Alpha Protocol so fascinating. It excels in a few key places, but there are also so many glaring imperfections to discuss as well.

As for Brayko, he’s a small sample of what the other bosses are like. By far, this is one of the strangest choices Alpha Protocol made. These bosses are so different from every other point in the game that it makes me wonder where they came from, especially if you specialize in Stealth. It’s very similar (though not quite the same) as the problem Deus Ex: Human Revolution had with their bosses.

Aldowyn, anaphysik, and I continue our redemptive journey with Closure Alert – Part 3. Here, we finish dealing with Shaheed, and discover that the Halbech missiles weren’t stolen. In the ensuing chaos, we’re turned loose to stop a cold war from turning into a real one.

Way back in the day, I was one of the few people who defended Alpha Protocol’s timed dialogue system. At the time, I liked them for the way they kept the conversation flowing at a good pace, to keep up the illusion that the player is part of a spy movie.


To some degree, I stand behind that. However, I’ve had a chance to reevaluate my opinion in the time since. After all, Telltale uses a similar formula for their games. In hindsight, there is a crippling flaw with the system: You are making dialog choices without their full context. Not only does the player need to choose what your character is going to say before the other person finishes speaking, but often they are doing so with one word phrases like “Sarcastic” or “Comfort”. So with only a rough idea of what is going to be said, and what the other person is actually saying, the player is expected to make a decision of what they are going to say.

While Alpha Protocol does alleviate this by using it’s tone system (every response is either Aggressive, Suave, Professional, or a special dialog gated by choices/skills), and characters do have tones they generally respond well to, it’s not perfect. There are still moments where players are asked to make snap decisions without having the time to put in much thought. Despite improving the pace of conversation, there are still areas with awkward flow. And like real people, the cast of Alpha Protocol sometimes change their mood and respond to different stances differently, and it can be hard to keep up in the moment.

A good experiment, but with mixed results.

It’s no secret that I was a big fan of Tomb Raider (2013). As my friend Sam and I explored in our Interactive Friction season on that game, it wasn’t perfect, but it served as an excellent branching point to build a whole franchise off of. When the credits rolled, both of us were excited to see what direction Crystal Dynamics would go in future games. But now, after playing through the following two games, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I’m left feeling snubbed. It’s less certain now that there is a clear direction for the series. Bluntly, both games are emblematic of a wasted opportunity to really explore Lara’s character and expand on it, repeating too much of the 2013 reboot’s story and systems in contexts that don’t make sense.
Lara Croft from Tomb Raider (2013) is a fresh-faced archaeology student thrust into a perilous survival situation. Separated from the rest of the expedition, she braves the elements of the island she’s crashed into, discovering her own capabilities. This is expressed mechanically in the game’s experience system. As she hunts animals, completes story beats, explores tombs, or defeats enemies, she gains points which she can spend to learn new skills that help her in her journey. Where she starts off on unstable ground, with no real training or knowledge in how to fend for herself, by the end of the game she has grown into a capable hunter and fighter. In building up XP and upgrading her gameplay capabilities, the player takes that journey with her. They feel the difference when heavily armored enemies that were once intimidating can now be killed from stealth in a single blow, or while shotgun-blasting foes in direct combat. When the story starts building up Lara’s confidence and determination, that bleeds into all other aspects of the game. This culminates in the final scene where a young Lara Croft defeats the forces threatening her and the remains of her team by taking up her signature dual-pistols, ascending to become the legendary Tomb Raider her previous incarnation was known as.

And yet, despite laying the groundwork and setting her up to become a daring adventurer, the sequels blunt this character arc to uncomfortably preserve the status quo. While it’s true that Lara becomes a more proactive character in Rise and Shadow, the game never escapes the tone of the original. She still feels like a victim, constantly having to reinforce her self-worth and determination with chants of “I can do this” in a tone that implies she’s not sure if she believes herself. Meanwhile, she’s gunning down large numbers of mercenaries, either through stealth or in firefights. The series seems torn about whether she is a trauma victim barely holding on or a mass murderer who has no issues with taking out whole military bases’ worth of personnel. This is undercut by the fact that she’s taking initiative in both stories of her own free will. It’s hard to feel sympathy for her when she’s talking about how difficult her struggle is when she can literally just leave at any point and wash her hands of the whole story.

This push and pull between Lara-the-trauma-victim and Lara-who-smiles-at-death is felt mechanically as well. The skills and arsenal built up over the course of the 2013 reboot, including the dual-pistols iconic to the character of Lara Croft (which are never seen again past that point), are gone at the start of the game, except for some choice implements. Both her and the player are almost back down to square one. Where Tomb Raider (2013) used the leveling system and new gear in order to show her development, the sequels seemed to keep with the structure for no other reason than obligation, with the idea that Lara can’t be an explorer, excited by the thrill of adventure. She must simultaneously be scared and helpless enough that the audience feels they need to protect her, but independent and assertive enough for us to believe that she wouldn’t just back down after realizing she’s in way over her head.
For all of the things Rise and Shadow kept without consideration, they were quick to abandon most of the cast. The reboot goes out of its way to establish a whole host of background characters in the expedition team that work with Lara at various points in the story. They all run the gambit of established tropes, from the grizzled mentor figure that helps her grow into the person she needs to be to stay alive, the kidnapped best friend, the nerdy tech guy, et cetera, but they all serve as Lara’s support as she begins to take a leadership role. Quite a few of them perish throughout the story (in fact, over half of them do), but the ones that survive are shown to have an implicit trust in the young Croft heiress. By following her lead, they are able to both save their captured teammate and escape the island they crashed on.
In fiction, it’s common for a lead character to be backed up and supported by a number of side characters that form their core support structure. No matter how great the obstacle is, some combination of people in this group will have the skills/expertise to overcome. When I saw this cast of characters in Tomb Raider (2013), billed as a new origin story for Lara Croft, I naturally assumed the survivors stranded on the island with her were going to grow into her “Scooby Gang”. In previous Tomb Raider games, Lara always had help to get through her adventures on the other end of a radio, so I naturally assumed they would do the same for this new version of the character, using the cast of this first reboot game to front load and establish character relations.

But this never happened. In both Rise and Shadow, the only returning member of the cast is Jonah, a person whose character was so underdeveloped in the 2013 reboot that I would have had difficulty remembering otherwise. (This is especially curious since Sam, the woman Lara spends much of that game trying to rescue, is supposedly her best friend who goes everywhere with her as a videographer.) Sure, he does offer support as one might expect, but he’s only one character. Ideally, there would be multiple people for Lara to play off of, work with, and learn about. It’s such a missed opportunity to not take advantage of all the relationships developed in first reboot game and build upon them in the sequels.
While Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the catalyst for this piece, many of these thoughts and feelings have been stewing in my heart since I played Rise of the Tomb Raider a few years back. It’s extraordinarily frustrating to see this character misused in this way, and that is only one avenue of criticism. Other people, like Dia Lacina at Waypoint, have approached this game and series from their own angles. I walk away from this “origin story trilogy” disappointed, finishing it mostly out of obligation. Were Tomb Raider to continue, I honestly don’t know whether or not I would actually care.

Normally, I stream Magic the Gathering: Arena every Saturday at 8-10 PM EST on my Twitch channel. As someone who has gotten really into Magic over the past few years, I’ve enjoyed sharing my appreciation with others.

But this past weekend, Arena’s servers were gearing up to be reset in anticipation of moving from Closed Beta to Open Beta, so I didn’t feel a strong urge to play it. Instead, I decided to stream a bit of a game I’ve been slowly diving into. It’s called Eternal, and it was made by professional MTG players.

The MTG influence is pretty easy to see, but they make a number of intelligent choices both to alleviate some of the problems inherent to it’s inspiration, and take advantage of the fact that the game exists in a digital medium, rather the physical cards that define Magic.

The stream audience and I had a very pleasant back and forth about it, and I thought it would be worth it to share with the rest of you.
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