Midnight Suns has me in its grip
System Shock and others await
I can’t stop playing Midnight Suns. I’m not quite sure how things stuck this time. I have tried again and again to figure out what I was missing with this game, only to bounce away in a few minutes each time. I remember PC Gamer coverage in particular being very high on the game. Now I can join them in lamenting Midnight Suns’s inexplicable lack of success.
I truly don’t get it. It is a fun comic book story. Cool things happen, characters are funny, and running around a mansion building friendship points is much more fun and far more endearing than I expected. The strategy card game at the core of it is solid as a rock. At normal difficulty I am at that sweet spot where the truth is ‘m a bit of a steamroller but the game doesn’t feel too easy. This is my preferred mode of playing! But there is more. Movement can be a big part of the game, if you care. There’s not a lot stopping you - again, on normal difficulty - from rolling a tight crew of four or five heroes. But there’s plenty of benefit to using everyone. And if, like me, you get sucked into playing a ton of side missions you can move around between heroes and builds. Ghost Rider simply was not for me in the first few hours of this game. Now I’m all about him.
I suppose, having bounced off it before, the mechanics can be a little bit of a trap. You need to get into a groove. And sometimes I get a little tired from running to the same three places to upgrade things and process collectibles and the like. But the mansion/hub/thing is a decent size, not too big to have to deal with. And there are things I can do in the wider grounds but honestly I just don’t really care. I am enjoying killing dudes, and when I’m ready for a few cut scenes I move the story along. It keeps getting stronger.
Storywise, at some point they made the decision that all of the good guys would be enormous dorks. Different kinds of dorks. Dorks who dress like goths and listen to metal, dorks who just want people to like them, and Captain America dork, his own type of dork. It’s very endearing, and I’m glad I fell back into this game.
And it’s distracting me from other games! There are more obviously history-related things I’d like to get into, and also Like a Dragon. But here I am night after night giving Nico Minoru and Captain America moral support. There is also a demonic dog you can praise for arcane knowledge points. It is a good game. If like me you have a copy rattling around somewhere (it went on sale almost immediately after release and has been a giveaway on Epic) you should give it a shot.
I am still working on chapters for my book on history and video games. Some free writing brought me to a chapter talking about AI - the real, fictional AI from our stories and culture not the fake AI from every business in America. I have a few paragraphs on SHODAN but a lot of it is based on hazy memories. It’s time to go back to System Shock. So far my most developed chapter - though it still needs a lot of work - is on Cyberpunk 2077, or more specifically Night City - and visions of Japanese futures in our games. This was a topic for my talk at PCA last year and the inspiration for the talk this year. I am still debating whether or not to push further towards a Japan book. I would prefer the global angle honestly. We’ll have to see.
In the wake of CentreTerm, except for the need to play System Shock the connections between teaching/work and games have ebbed a bit. My next big job is to compile the student games and upload them. I should be doing that now. But I had to tell you about Midnight Suns. Student games coming in the next post. I mean it this time.