I've been meaning to check out this game for a long while, and before TOTK came out, this felt like a good time to try. I've finally wrapped my time with the game, completing just about everything. I like to do that in open world games that feel inviting like this one.

I appreciated the escalation in this game. Each new machine was a different puzzle to solve, and there's always a challenge. I eventually found my preferred ways of handling each enemy, which started to narrow my use of the variety of different weapons. I enjoyed building my skills at taking things down, but I missed feeling encouraged to shake up my strategy deep into the game. The hunting grounds started to provide the greatest challenges.

The varied environments also created a lovely sense of diversity, and I enjoyed relating the setting to my actual experiences in adjacent parts of the US.

For its time, I feel like the facial and character animation plus voice acting was a real winner here. It seems like things were stepped up even more in Frozen Wilds. I was laughing out loud at certain great mocap moments that made characters come alive even more.

I started to get disappointed in the design of machine levels as feeling very Matrixy, but as the plot progressed, I liked how much more depth the story contained. There are quite a few layers to the old society, what went wrong, how it was attempted to be fixed, and why the world is as it appears during the game.

I liked Aloy as a character, and I liked being able to make choices at key moments that I wasn't incentivized to play a certain way. I can roll with her not always doing or saying what I'd like at other moments, which helped her feel distinct. It's a funny thing how we relate to characters and what it means for them to act independently from us or not.

Finally, I liked the lightly feminist angle on the world. It was refreshing to see a baseline appropriate representation throughout. I wasn't grating against frustrating ignorance or tired storytelling tropes about gender. Some cultures have explicit sexism, for sure, but through the writing I am able to trust the intent and where the plot is going. I'm glad this exists and is especially welcoming to femme folk.

Oh, and it was a really nice surprise to hear Lance Reddick out of the blue in the game, and then see him become and interesting character that you're not even supposed to like. That's an impressive performance, as was Burch's.