Baud Attitude

Last month I mentioned that, despite not really being a big Harry Potter fan, I’d been inspired by some recent donut purchases to give the 2023 game a try, and that my initial reaction was quite positive.

I can’t claim that this is a particularly unique take.  Apparently this sold north of forty million copies, which is an absurd number for anything not named “Mario Kart”, and a bad game isn’t going to move that many copies regardless of how many kids grew up waving sticks at each other and having spirited debates about which house they obviously would have been sorted into.

I was not one of these kids, since the books didn’t start coming out until I was in my 30s and I didn’t actually crack any of them open until having seen the first few movies.  My generation waved sticks at each other pretending they were lightsabers, not wands.

I did, I admit, dutifully trudge over to our local supermarket for the Midnight launch of the final book in the series so I could read the ending without fear of spoilers.  I think that may be the only midnight launch of a media product I’ve ever actually attended, come to think of it.

Oh, and when I found myself in London at one point I did swing by King’s Cross station to get a photograph of Platform 9 3/4ths.  It’s just a shopping cart stuck halfway into a brick wall that’s not even inside the station, so it’s not much to write home about.  I was more interested in visiting Fenchurch Station and seeing what kinds of hijinks I could get up to in the Left Luggage office.

So I went in with a bit of a jaundiced view, and I confess there were a few moments where I groaned at one particularly silly name or another, but it didn’t take too long for its overall charm to break down the cynicism I brought to the table.  I may not have spent my formative years growing up with Hogwarts, but I absolutely DID spend my formative years as a boy-type person getting into all kinds of trouble with friends and Hogwarts Legacy is the best “getting into trouble with your friends” simulator I can remember playing.

Sure, there’s a Big Plot about a goblin rebellion or something, but it’s kind of one of those stories that I made sure to get back to every once in a while because I needed to progress the main story to unlock new chapters in the stories involving three fellow teenagers.  That’s one problem with a game set in a prequel timeline, after all – if goblins had actually successfully risen up and overthrown wizardkind, the events in the books couldn’t possibly have happened, meaning there’s no risk of a bad ending, so while it was an enjoyable enough path from “welcome to Hogwarts!” to “congratulations! you saved the day!”, I got much more invested in the lives of my friends.

One other thing I loved was how much the castle itself is a character.  It’s massive, and incredibly confusing to get around, and you are constantly stumbling across collectibles or little bits of set dressing designed to push your childhood nostalgia buttons.  Fortunately, even though it is absolutely awful finding your way to places the first time on occasion, there is a generous supply of fast travel points that unlock as you find classrooms and points of interest.

For a few hours, I tried to get around the school WITHOUT using fast travel.  Eventually, I gave up.  If you’re reading this and have played the game and managed to learn the castle well enough that you didn’t do the same, consider me impressed.

The world outside the castle isn’t quite as memorable, with the exception of the Forbidden Forest which I found to be creepy in all the right ways, but I need to give the developers some serious credit for the way the open world changes with the seasons.  Hitting Winter term inside the castle and then leaving and discovering that there is snow everywhere was quite the surprise – I can’t think of any other open world games that do that.

Is it perfect? 

No.  I have a couple of very specific gripes that I think are reasonably objective and a third that is unmistakably a Me thing.  Let’s get those out of the way.

First: While the level requirement for the final story quest is something like 27, there’s an epilogue that requires level 34 – and this is a lot of grinding, because levels come quickly at first but slow down considerably after hitting 20.  Looking at PlayStation trophy statistics, 27.1% of players finish the story but only 15.9% grind their way to the epilogue.  Seeing that kind of drop-off makes me feel just fine about calling the story done where I ended it.

Second: I’ve been doing a fair number of platinum trophies recently, and I’d had a lot of fun with the game, so I looked up the trophy list to see if I could get that shiny orb on my account without too much extra effort.  It turns out that the platinum is a big time sink that involves finding every collectible, doing every quest, checking off every one of the 95 little puzzle shrines dotting the map… one of the trophies even asks you to cast a specific spell on every single enemy type in the game, with no way to track your progress.

So the post-main story grind is pretty intense, especially if you’re a trophy seeker.

Though, after some reflection this is mostly an issue if you’re the sort of person who wants to feel they’ve finished a game at around the same time they’ve finished the main story.  If you’re in love with the world and just want to be able to keep running around it doing STUFF, having another two or three games worth of content available is arguably a positive.  So this is less of an objective complaint than I’d initially thought.  Needing level 34 for the epilogue is dumb, though.  Going to stand by that opinion.

The “me” complaint is that, well, I started out playing the Windows version and almost immediately fell into the trap of tweaking settings trying to get the absolute best image quality without dropping below the minimum acceptable frame rate and I wasted hours with this before I had the presence of mind to check whether the PS5 version was included with my PlayStation Plus subscription.

FOR THE RECORD, IT IS.  And I booted it up, picked one of the presets and happily played the rest of the game without even wondering whether it was really 4K or whether the frames I was seeing were fake ones.

This isn’t really a Hogwarts Legacy thing, though.  It’s just the slowly-dawning realization that I may be, at heart, a filthy console peasant.

In something that I initially thought was a complaint, I was a little taken aback by the presence of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese instructors who didn’t seem to be at each other’s throats, but checking the specific year the game is set showed that, whether by chance or by very specific choice, it’s set in a year where none of the three were actually at war with or occupying the others.  So, on the assumption that it was deliberate, some more kudos to the writers there.

Finally, I was happy to discover that I could apply my “Assassin’s Creed Protocol” to some of the dungeons in the game.  That’s a habit I have in any Assassin’s Creed where I pick one guy in a camp to leave unstabbed while I perforate every other single dude I can get my knives into.  In Hogwarts Legacy, this presents as selecting a single goblin who is NOT a load-bearing goblin (one who needs to die before a door can be opened) and then carefully sneaking past said goblin to turn all of his buddies into smears on the cavern walls so he has a little shock waiting for him when he gets off shift and goes to clock out.

I’m not sure when I started doing this.  Maybe with Assassin’s Creed: Rogue?  Anyway it’s a habit of mine and it was just as fun here.

Bottom line: Awesome game. Poppy Best Girl.  Ominis Best Boy.  Professor Garlick Best Mildly Unhinged Gardener.  Looking forward to Hogwarts Legacy 2: Hogwarts Harder.

The most important thing you need to know about Cronos is that it lets you find hidden cats in the world, and they go back to your base and you can pet them and have conversations with them.  Honestly, that alone is enough to put it above almost every other survival horror game I’ve played recently, but I wanted to ramble on about it a bit more because after I got over the initial learning cliff it turned out to be something rather special.

I’ve seen it compared to Dead Space, and this is a fair and obvious comparison.  Both games have you controlling rather hulking protagonists in armor with an impressive stomp move and Very Specific Instructions for dealing with the fleshy horrors that are trying to kill you, with these Very Specific Instructions scrawled in blood on a wall somewhere for you to read:

Only one of them has instructions written in Polish, mind you.  Now I’m wondering how Dead Space was localized.  Subtitles?  Different texture?  Not curious enough to look it up.

Side note, when I went to load up Dead Space to get that screenshot it happily found and loaded my save from 2009.  Seventeen years ago.  Regardless of whatever else you think about Microsoft they are leading the pack with regard to letting you play your old games.

Both of them are also very, for lack of a better word, goopy games.  Lots of ick factor.  If you don’t like ick factor, you are advised to steer clear.  Eviscerated bodies hanging from walls that are also somehow still alive and trying to eat you are a pretty common enemy and unless you are very good at checking corners before walking into a room or down a hallway you WILL eventually get grabbed and dragged into one of them.

In addition to Dead Space, Cronos had some features that reminded me of Prey (2006) and Singularity, both of which are pretty good games to crib from, and a couple of puzzles that made me really wonder whether the developers ever worked on hidden object games because boy I had to find a lot of fuses.

It definitely retains its own identity, though.  Not just because you can find cats, but because mechanics alone really don’t define how you experience a game like this.  It’s more about the mood, and there is a particular edge to the flavor of hopelessness in this specific post-apocalyptic future that I haven’t experienced before.  Things are bad, and it’s not entirely clear that anything you’re doing is really making them better, but you’re still pushing forward.

Mood aside, while the game can be very obscure when it comes to some basic mechanics, it is good at teaching you lessons during the moment to moment gameplay with occasional tests to see if you have been paying attention.

The game’s first boss is a great example. To get to him, you need to navigate through an apartment building full of things that need to be set on fire to progress. You technically can do this by burning each obstacle and then retreating back to the nearest safe room for another flamethrower charge, but what you’re supposed to do is find the environmental object that you can shoot or punch to make it explode and clear the obstacle.

Then you get to the boss, and you’re warned in advance that he’s weak to fire.  You’ve just spent an entire sequence setting things on fire so you should be ready for this.

Again, you can come in with a flamethrower charge – or possibly more, if you’re willing to spend enough resources – but what you should be doing is looking around the apartment you fight him in to see all the things that will handily catch fire when shot or punched so you can use them against him.  During the fight, he even occasionally retreats to give you a chance to regroup and find the next hazard.

A later boss is a crowd control fight where you’re swarmed with fairly weak enemies that don’t present a ton of threat individually but that you will probably be overwhelmed by if you can’t figure out how to deal with the mob.  And, curiously, the level leading up to the boss has had a lot of little arenas full of lots of enemies to juggle.

Not all the bosses are so interesting. Some boil down to “kill them before they kill you” but even the less interesting ones have some interesting quiz questions for you to see if you’ve properly understood the situational uses of the game’s four basic weapon types, or whether you’ve gotten the hang of the game’s traversal mechanics.

tl;dr: I have seen a lot of different encounter designs over the years and the ones in Cronos felt absolutely top tier.

I don’t think it’s for everyone, because it IS on the difficult side and it DOES demand a lot of patience and seems to derive a sadistic glee in making sure that you always feel just a little short on resources, but if you can approach it on its own terms it is a heck of a ride.

A few weeks back, I checked Cronos: The New Dawn out from the local library, without knowing much about it.  It looked like it would do nicely as a follow up to my Resident Evil binge from last year, and the nice thing about borrowing a game is that you can try it out and not feel too badly about dropping it if it doesn’t gel with you – after all, you didn’t pay for it.

And, yeah.  I dropped it pretty quickly despite digging the overall vibe of the game.  It’s a crazy atmospheric post-apocalyptic survival horror game, low on the narrative but heavy on the creepy environments , and that would normally be right in my wheelhouse, but the pressure it put me under was just a little too much.  I spent a lot of time scrounging for ammunition, which was in painfully short supply, and then it would just evaporate the next time something jumped out at me.  I decided it wasn’t my thing and quit.

After a little time to consider things, I resolved to start over on the game’s “easy” mode.  In “easy”, you do double damage to enemies while taking half damage from enemies.  That seemed to promise a pretty breezy experience.

It was not a breezy experience. I felt like I was having just as much trouble finding supplies on easy as I was on the normal difficulty, which made no sense at all.  Enemies soaked up fewer bullets before falling over, but I was still always short.

I gave up, ejected the disc, uninstalled the game and put it back in the box to be returned to the library.

…but…

Something didn’t feel right.  I looked at the trophy percentages for the game and read some reviews and while the consensus seemed to be that, yes, it’s a hard game, I had also dropped it before getting the first main story trophy.

That is a trophy with a 61% achievement rate.

I didn’t like the thought of giving up when so many other people had gotten further than me.

So, I found a Cronos discord and I posted something along the lines of “guys, what am I doing wrong?”, fully expecting to hear a chorus of “git gud, noob” as the response.

In contrast, I discovered that I had accidentally stumbled into one of the more helpful and healthy internet communities I’ve ever come into contact with, because what I got instead was pages and pages of “so the game doesn’t tell you this, BUT…”

I won’t go into details, because this isn’t really a guides sort of site, but the limited ammo the game gives you is intended to be a hint that there are a LOT of ways to get through encounters without specifically inserting Bullet A into Fleshy Horror B.  Not by running away from them, but by using environmental damage or by taking extra time to set up a charged shot that does more damage and stuns the enemy so you can get a couple of free melee swings in… that sort of thing.

Short version, the game went from “this is impossible!” to a really fun experience in finding out exactly how many resources  I REALLY needed to get from point A to point B and in making do with what I had at any given time.

I’ll probably write a separate post up talking more about the game’s setting and mechanics, but the real thing I got from it was a life lesson in how sometimes giving yourself permission to give up on something can lead to examining why you gave up on it and whether you might have just needed to ask for help.