I spent a lot of time this week catching up on some tv shows. The new Shaman King reboot is kinda cool. With season 4 of Castlevania coming out, I figured it was time to watch season 3 at least. And I finished up American Gods season 3 and desperately praying that shows finds a new home somewhere now that it got cancelled on Starz.

As far as games go, I spent like 15 hours playing Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, mostly focusing on the new Wrath of the Druids DLC and also played through Hitchhiker.

Hitchhiker

In Hitchhiker, you play as an amnesia stricken photographer who is looking for his girlfriend. It starts off with you in the passenger seat of a car belonging to Verne, the raisin farmer and it only gets weirder from there.

The story takes a lot of twists and turns, and the presentation of it all is fantastic. Each chapter consists of sitting in a car next to a driver, listening and responding to their dialogue. Each chapter contains a story-within-the-story that the drivers are in some way relaying to you, and these switch up from being the regular 3D car environments to 2D animated shorts. Each chapter's little movie fleshes out the nature of your surroundings in a really neat way. Roads, gates and guardians are the symbols the game introduces as tools to understand your journey and in the context of the game actually makes a lot of sense.

Apparently, this game bears some resemblance to Virginia which I unfortunately have not played yet, but from what I remember people talking about when it comes to that game is that it's very light on the interactivity. The same goes for Hitchhiker, where you are mostly focusing on the dialogue with the occasional light puzzle. I tend to be impatient when it comes to games that mostly have you listening and absorbing your surroundings, so I opted for playing it in spurts, one chapter at a time with breaks inbetween. That way worked out really well for me, giving me some time to digest the goings-on of each chapter before diving into the next one.

I felt like it started off really slowly, but the pace picked up considerably the further along you go and as the scope of the world widens. It might also be that I watched the first 30 minutes of the game in the quick look and seeing the exact same thing play out makes you really impatient, especially in a narrative heavy game like this.

The game being what it is, though, hinges almost entirely upon the visuals and the voice acting, both of which are mostly great. I really like the art style of the drivers and the cars, that looked somewhat like a Dreamworks movie. The animated shorts are also a visual treat. The voice acting falls flat in some areas though, mainly the protagonist and the girlfriend. The drivers were all amazing, which made the 2 examples mentioned stick out like a sore thumb.

All in all, I was definitely on board with this story, right up until the very last few minutes where it just kind of ended abruptly, leaving me with a somewhat unresolved feeling. The 3 hours I spent with it were well worth it though, even if there are some problems with it.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla - Wrath of the Druids

The first DLC of the season pass for Valhalla came out this friday, and so far I've had enough time to basically play through the story campaign portion of it. It's mostly what you expect in terms of mission structure - escort this person, clear this camp, hunt down this order member, etc. What made me enjoy my time with it are the 1 stand-out character, Ciara, and how beautiful Ireland itself is.

In terms of side activities, I was somewhat disappointed. There is some new stuff - pidgeon coops that carry Royal Decrees (repeatable quick little quests that give you some resources) and a trading minigame being the big ones. The royal decrees felt mostly not worth doing. The trading minigame however is interesting.

The goal is to make Dublin a trading hub with a far reach, so you need to establish trading outposts throughout Ireland that when built provide resources over time (hovering over them gives a straight-up indicator of how many resources per minute you gain from any given trading outpost). All resources generated from these trading posts then go to a chest in Dublin that you need to empty about once an hour lest it reach its resource cap and all the newly generated resources go to waste. You then take these resources to Azar, another new character that is overseeing this whole trade business, and ship it off to distant locales in exchange for some new armor sets, weapons, ship decorations, settlement decorations etc. Making enough of these trades raises Dublins renown, giving you access to new trading partners (and new rewards). I've had fun with this system, and am probably gonna max it out to get all the different armor sets etc.

The open-world side stuff is the thing that has disappointed me the most. It seems like they took the most boring activities and made you do only those. Stone cairns, fighting arenas, treasure hoard maps, altars that require materials to be sacrificed. It's mostly stuff of that caliber, the more interesting side quests of the variety seen in the base game are nowhere to be seen, which is a shame.

Of course, there is also a new Order Member hunt of sorts, though this time instead of members of the Order of the Ancients, you're hunting down druids known as the Children of Danu. It's kind of exactly what you expect, but I find these hunts fun enough.

All of this leads me to a question. When it comes to a lot of this side stuff, I don't often enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay. However, I'm still going for 100% completion for some reason? Why? It still feels satisfying to see an area that is 100% complete, even if the individual pieces required to give you that percentage aren't that enjoyable. Which maybe says something about how damaged I am that when faced with an exhausive Ubisoft open-world checklist, my instict is to tick every box.

I'm looking forward to the next DLC, the Siege of Paris, because with these last games it seems the pattern has been that they first release an alright dlc, followed up by a really good one. I still enjoyed Wrath of the Druids, but I'm keenly aware that might just be because of Stockholm Syndrome.