Go figure, my game a month was only 1 game. Unfortunately, work got in the way (like in a really intense way). Well, I made a new years resolution to commit to it for 2020, so we’re starting off with a new game.
Over the few days between holidays, I managed to play through A Plague Tale: Innocence. It’s a really great game, assuming you don’t look too hard at the plot. It’s set in midieval France, and you play a young child from a regional nobility whose family slain and is being chased by the Inquisition. I love the utter helplessness that the protagonist has to deal with. I think that’s actually what makes the game fall apart. By the end, you have enough abilities to dismantle any army or force that comes to fight you. Then there’s the rat tornados. Like I said, don’t look too hard at it. But for at least the first 2/3rds of the game, you are completely powerless.
Secondly, I watched The VVitch. Now that is a great film. It’s easy in this day and age to look at witches of yore as utterly ridiculous. In fact, if you recut the movie to take the few moments of actual witch shots out, that is exactly what that movie would be. A family kicked out of the church moves into the country side to start anew, and slowly falls apart. The oldest daughter coming of age struggles with the enormity of being an adult and looks for easy answers, a lost child returns home sick and is subjected to routine bloodletting to only go into a euphoric lunatic haze and dies, a mother racked with guilt loses her mind and starts hallucinating, and a father who can’t get over his own inadequacies lets his family down by ignoring the things he’s bad at. But there are in fact witches in the world. And the cause of their suffering is half self inflicted, and half witching, and they utterly cannot tell where the line is between them.
So I came up with another small game for small adventures and adventurers. Over the River Somme takes place in the early 1300s in France, when both the 100 years war and the black plague are at their worst. You play an orphan from local ruling house now devestated, and are on the run trying to get by. There’s no fighting back, there’s no coming out on top. The horrors both mundane and magical are immense by comparison, and you are driven away by war, starvation, and death deeper into the wilderness where you come closer to those old powers still active and aware and hungry and vengeful.
