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Zenless Zone Zero, I mean… it seems like only food words could possibly suffice. It's luscious. Now, the first time I typed that, an errant pinky had hit the caps lock key and the words "it's luscious" looked a lot more excited than you might expect. Here's the thing: it would be true, even in caps. The game is nutballs, world class in every particular, with supernatural art and animation, a very weird but cool cyberpunk urban fantasy hybrid setting and action gameplay that stands up tall. Music is excellent. I've also never felt less equipped to engage with a game's underlying systems - the dense thicket of custom lingo, mystery resources, and shibboleths designed to obscure that free-to-play games are gig work - they are jobs that you pay to work at.

We have a heat advisory here in the Seattle area with temperatures up into the 90’s. To avoid the heat I stayed inside and played games but let’s be honest, that’s what I would have done had the temps been in the 70’s.  I decided to investigate the two big new free to play titles Zenless Zone Zero and The First Descendant. I bounced back and forth between both games all weekend and now I have…Opinions!

Mork told me that Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess was supposed to be some kind of sleeper hit, that's what he'd read around and also literally seen on Steam - the very definition of a tough crowd. But he also could not figure out what was going on in it - not that the gameplay wasn't clear, but because all the trappings underneath it had no reference to anything he understood. I grabbed the demo, played through it, and saw that it referred to itself as a Kagura Action Strategy Game. I knew the last three words, but the first one stood out. You don't need to understand what Kagura is in order to play the game, which is pretty cool and is essentially derived from tower defense and features dancy combat. But if you want to know what's happening, which I suspect would be absolutely clear to any Japanese person? You might want to know that Kagura means something like "entertaining the gods."

It’s true that most of the books I tend to read are science fiction but I occasionally branch out into history and other non fiction. I wanted to recommend an interesting book I just finished called The Gross.