I don't wanna seem like I hate this game so far, I think it's pretty obvious you're not supposed to *like* Kratos, I'm just skeptical that they're gonna do anything courageous with what they're establishing.

Anyway from this FIRST COMBAT it looks like they're trying to be what if dark souls but it's "difficult" because every enemy is a damage sponge. This guy was just one-handed carrying an entire birch tree that probably weighs over 2000 kilos that he cut down in like 3 swings, but it takes him 10 heavy attacks to kill one of these lanky zombie things? I don't think this is conveying "deadly, threatening world such that even Kratos is in danger" so much as "this is not meant to make sense and we don't know or care how to pace threats or establish a sense of impact".

These guys should be vaporized the moment the axe hits them, the only reason to use the establishing shot at the beginning of "look how easily he cuts down and carries this massive tree!" is if you're trying to establish that he's incredibly strong, and that only works if anything else in the context of the game is supposed to be proportional to something we, the players, are familiar with.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but there's no reason within the game's logic so far presented that "skinny rotting zombie" should be around 3x more difficult to hack through than "gargantuan birch tree". Having the first fight be against these twinks of steel really undermines the idea that Kratos is anything more than just some guy.

To be clear, it's a fun fight, combos such as they are at this point in the game seem to flow pretty nicely, blocking and parrying flow together nicely too. That's kinda to be expected, I mean what did they spend all that time on if not gameplay polish, right?

First thing we hear about the kid's mom: "Mom said never go in there."

Kratos: "We do what we please, boy. No excuses."

I do not like Kratos lol

Cool puzzle though, hopefully they don't go the whole game with the logic of most of the 3d zelda games of designing a cool puzzle and then just straight up telling you how to solve it like they did with this first one. It would have been cool if the axe's freezing ability had been demonstrated in another way through gameplay, but maybe I'm picking nits here. Not clear why hitting the gears freezes the machine up, but hitting the twinks of steel does literally nothing, that could have been a cool thing to add dynamism early game, whether it was some kind of slow effect, a damage dealt debuff on enemies (early game when you're most likely to benefit from a damage debuff on enemies), something.

Anyway this game has no idea where you're supposed to shoot a deer, no shit it's still alive, you should it in the spine because the game made me release the control stick to press X and you just kinda shot it wherever. Kratos, you suck. My dad was a shit dad too, but at least he taught me how to kill a deer... Well, not humanely exactly, there's not a humane way to slaughter an animal, but at least with slightly less brutality.

Atreus: takes 34 stone pillars to the face, is fine

Kratos: take 3 stone pillars to the face, barely survives

But the kid's the one who's not ready for... whatever it is. Aight lol

wait wait wait game wtf you waited until NOW, after the first miniboss thing, to establish that Kratos is capable of doing things like stunning and RIPPING APART HIS ENEMIES after a couple of hits? WHY was this not established immediately when it would have been super useful to establishing Kratos as one to be feared instead of making me hack through 3 trees' worth of dude before the twinks of steel would finally die? But NOW they're made of papier mâché?

Game you have a tone problem.

But also when he rips them apart it's extremely cool so points there lol

Atreus: "He doesn't know anything."

You are correct, Atreus. Your dad is trash.

man already though the fights in this game fucking own

also damn I hate Kratos lol

lmfao

Kratos: "The Fates?! Nothing good comes from them!"

Atreus: "Oh...kay?"

Kratos is like that one kind of really annoying antitheist who has very good reasons to have a violent revulsion to things like people saying "bless you" but it's for a good reason because a god literally made him kill his family in Sparta and he's got the most serious case of religious trauma you could possibly have, but he's just such a stereotypical man about it he won't fucking talk about his problems so he sounds like an absolute asshole and his son has no fucking clue why he's such a dick ALL the time.

Like here's this dude, apparently going all John Wick retired godkiller, saying things like "we shouldn't kneel before monsters", and then some FUCKING einherjar (I assume, anyway) shows up and now Kratos is like "well I guess I have to kill Odin now on my route to the top of Mount Not Olympus" and he's really annoyed about it because he just wanted to be left the fuck alone to try to live as normal a life as he could.

I like how Kratos can't read, or at least can't read these Scandinavian runes, but Atreus can. Kratos can't carry on a normal conversation with that dwarf dude, but Atreus can. Kratos can't intuit that the reason an animal won't move is because it's scared; that it has its own inner life and thoughts and he just absolutely cannot empathize with it, but Atreus can do all of this absolutely effortlessly.

Because like, Kratos is a bastard. He's a real piece of shit. Traumatized, sure, but he has chosen--and the game keeps reinforcing that he continues to choose!--to not show any tenderness even to his own son. It's not that he's not able, it's that he refuses. But he does care.

Does he believe it to be weakness? Is he afraid of instilling that weakness onto his son?

Like obviously he shouldn't trauma dump on his 9 or however many year old kid, right? I'm not suggesting that. But idk I just think maybe when he says he doesn't want the kid to fight humans, and then the kid's forced to stab a human in the face, maybe a hug wouldn't be the worst thing you could do, y'know? Maybe a little pat on the back or like, "ya done good, boy." I don't think it's a terrible weakness.

Also suddenly realizing I hate Kratos so much because he reminds me of my dad, not that my dad was some unstoppable death machine that ripped the faces off of zombies like Doom Guy, presumably you could just walk up and shoot him and he'd be dead like any other human which I'm pretty sure wouldn't quite work for Kratos and definitely not Doom Guy, but he was big and strong and had killed a bunch of people in war as an imperial boot.

So I have to admit it looks like they're definitely going for a toxic masculinity story and that also means I'm gonna be real pissed if they shit the bed with it. It's certainly artistic, I mean it's got me thinking about my own family dynamics and why I identify so strongly with Atreus and definitely NOT with Kratos, when Kratos is literally the POV character. It's not JUST the youth liberationist in me. Or, y'know maybe it is, in a certain way. Calling it Bad Dad Simulator is increasingly fitting.

Anyway antivater aktion, you will know the good dads by their fruits (their kids don't want to kill them and/or don't understand holding deadiversary parties).

Also design note: There's a human village here that a bunch of draugr have been killed at, with axes having cloven these things' chests open and stuff and like

okay well Kratos can do that *sometimes* because he's one of those very monsters that he believes humans shouldn't worship (take note, Atreus). Humans should fall to these guys like oats before the scythe. The villagers also clearly ate shit, but they put up a serious fight against the twinks of steel and that undermines Kratos' badassery, just like them soaking up way too many hits before going down, I'm getting the sense that they initially had the idea that the draugr WOULD have been substantially weaker than they are, and something got changed at some point, probably with regard to game balance, and they never went back and changed anything else.

There's some serious dissonance between worldbuilding and mechanics for an enemy that is basically the game's equivalent to mindless mooks and it's hard to not notice when it seriously just KEEPS coming up.

OH SHIT Kratos actually finally said Atreus' name. I would not have known it until now if not for menus, and needing subtitles to understand some of Kratos' growling. His name has not been spoken in game so far and I'm like, idk 2 or 3 hours in?

I take long and frequent breaks gaming, sue me lol

They have sacrificed a dramatic amount of verisimilitude in making the boats not a horrific pain in the ass to steer and this is a decision I am on board with.

Why am I live tooting this game I'm playing, anyway? I have no idea.

I like how I, as the player, am doing shit that Kratos says is a waste of time--helping lost souls, freeing a dragon, exploring--but then when Atreus is like "I thought you said we had to focus" Kratos just makes shit up, like "We're only doing this for resources to improve our chances of survival."

But when it's the dragon, he just got nothing. "It's what your mother would have wanted," he says, reiterating Atreus' plea to his father to help the imprisoned monster.

Also: It low key kind of annoys me the money is called "hacksilver". Yes, the historical Norse people used hacksilver as a sort of currency, taking silver obtained from trading or raiding and chopping it up into pieces to use it for trade by weight. They also did this with gold though, and they also used silver and gold coins from the Romans and other cultures that used coins. Hacksilver was just silver pieces--tableware, jewelry, goblets, just anything made of silver--that had been hacked up to use as currency for trade by weight. If you had, idk 10 merkur of silver Roman coins, it wouldn't necessarily be hacksilver, it would just be silver; y'know, except the large coins you hacked up to make change when you needed a thveit here and there. I'm just saying, it's very weird to call it all "hacksilver" implying there is no other type of silver being used in trade.

Is this an extremely petty gripe? Yes, yes it is. Is this just my autism complaining loudly about a particular niche special interest? Unquestionably. Does it still annoy me at a low but constant level? Yes, it kinda does lol

Atreus: "I wish we could have gone on a trip like this with mom. She could fight, couldn't she?"

Kratos: "She fought... beautifully."

Like what an interesting line. This woman was able to hunt well, fought in such a way that Kratos thought it was impressive (I mean, makes sense, what else would Kratos possibly have in common with anyone ever?), she could read and write, spoke multiple languages, she told lots of stories... She was evidently a really interesting woman.

I mean, she sounds like she'd make me weak in the knees, but what the fuck did she see in Kratos? The man is hardly a charmer.

Atreus: "It says something about an eternal war for the light. We all need it, why not just share it?"

"Greed," Kratos says, smashing his meaty fist down into a treasure chest. He pockets a significant haul of silver--sorry, hacksilver--from the chest. "You will find it a common cause for war."

10/10, unironically perfect emergent storytelling moment which the devs almost certainly had no intention for.

Yeah I'm definitely feeling ill after all that very cinema, extra art in the scripted cinematics, those fucking doors I'm tell you.

I thought we all agreed handycam made for a bad time back when Blair Witch Project came out, and then reaffirmed it with Cloverfield, and that was a huge part of why Paranormal Activity was so well received, because the cinematography wasn't making people puke through the movie. Why are game devs trying to ape styles that were out of vogue due to accessibility concerns nearly half of my life ago? I know this game is from 2018 but even then they had ten years since Cloverfield.

Maybe I'm wrong here but I thought we all agreed back then the handycam thing was bad, even when it was fitting for the project, please stop doing this, get a gimbal or a tripod, shot reverse-shot actually makes a ton of sense in the language of film and you don't need to swing your drunk puppycam around every few seconds because that doesn't actually add anything but vertigo.