games

I'm probably two-thirds through the new Indiana Jones and I've kinda gone a bit more cold on it. It's still pretty good, but it does feel kinda limited in its design and with the locations never quite feeling as ambitious and unique as the first one, it kinda runs out of steam somewhat predictably. It is very well designed with a minimal amount of distractions or friction, but that also makes it feel pretty limited once you get over its surface level qualities, like the incredible production values, it falls quite short from its promise. Like if the game was a little bit more ambitious with its puzzles, had more in-depth item management and dialogue trees, this would actually be pretty close to a real first-person version of the old style of point-and-click adventure games, which would have been really amazing.

spoiler for an area halfway through the game

biggest disappointment so far must have been this: there is a part where you suddenly wake up in shanghai and it isjust absolutely gorgeously realized, with tons of details, many different districts and landmarks and different types of architecture, but your entire stay there only consists of a ten minute scripted setpiece of the city being bombed by the japanese, with lots of explosions and ridiculous action setpieces, but which is also weirdly bloodless and tame otherwise. like the entire point of the sequence seems to just be to brag about how many assets they crammed into there and how willing they are to waste them by just blowing them up in highly detailed explosions. for how much detail they put into the first vatican section in the game this just feels pretty iffy.