Play on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Current goal: Kill a god or two
Guardian of the Veil it took me a long time to get hooked on him. For the first dozen or so hours or so, everything felt like a video game, a bit of an amusement park, the fairly compact areas I was in, so hyper-designed, so full of little boxes of coins and resources for me to find, so I never survived for more than a few seconds without some little reward for a hit of dopamine. And it still has these problems, exacerbated throughout by how familiar the structure is, so clearly “Mass Effect-2-but-make-it-fantasy. So rigid and tightly controlled that it sometimes seems lifeless. And yet I liked it concept some of the characters enough to keep me going, even if it took a while for the characters themselves to become deep and complex enough to intrigue me. I mean, Neve, the private detective and political rebel who wields ice magic and wears a dwarven prosthetic leg instead of a lower right leg? It’s awesome as hell!
And so, now that there are many of me, many After a few hours of play, I feel a connection to these characters, not only to their concept, but also to the stakes of the conflict they face. (I just played the siege sequence in the second act, which was quite thrilling and helped remind me how grave a threat the fleeing elven gods actually are.) In some ways, the fact that each member of the party has some problem they need aid with seems very fancy . “Oh, I just can’t focus on something that threatens the entire world if we don’t deal with my personal problem first!” That’s it again very Mass Effect 2in a way that seems quite conspicuous and artificial to me. But if submitting to this structure allows me to get to know Neve better, then so be it. I get it, it’s a game. You got me. —Caroline Petit
