The end of forever

On May 21, Bungie announced that it will be making a final update to Destiny 2. Contrary to prior plans, this coming Tuesday, June 9, will mark the end of the franchise’s 12-year run. The servers will remain online until further notice, just as they have for Destiny, but the game therein—the world, the characters and the dangling threads of their stories, the gear, the systems, the very motion of the stars and the planets arrayed beneath them—all of that will be rendered unto stasis. A clockwork universe wound up one last time and left to loop.

When I read this, my day came to a stop. I don’t remember what I was in the middle of doing, but I had to pause and sit with this news. In some regard, I have been sitting with it for the past 2 weeks.

I have for some time now been threatening to write a retrospective on my time playing Destiny, and the truth is it’s already been more than a year since I last played. If there is any time to write my Guardian’s epitaph, it is now.

Only… I still don’t know what to say. I don’t have an elegant, articulate synopsis of what 10 years of playing Destiny meant to me.

After all this time, all I have are memories.

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Sur l’art impossible

“Great art is both window and mirror… whether it’s your mask or theirs.”

– The Mask Keeper

Recto

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has me feeling conflicted.

Befitting its name, Sandfall Interactive’s debut title is a game of contrasts. There are many bright spots. There are also some not-so-bright spots. I want to quickly cover both sides, and I might touch on some mechanical specifics while doing so, but I’m not going in depth on the story other than to say…

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Every Game I Played in 2024

After performing this ritual time and time again, I have come to understand the impracticality of cramming a year’s worth of blogging into a single blog post. It muddies the reflections, it delays the posting, it burdens the reader, and all of that pains me. A more sensible person would have realized this much sooner. Alas, you’re stuck with me.

Time to change it up. I didn’t write about every game this year. You’re still getting the full list—I can’t give up the convention of the title this far in—but only about half of the games on it have received the full treatment, such as it is. The rest are in a separate section, each with a brief comment.

Abridgment alone won’t make this a viable or worthwhile endeavor, so I have something more drastic in mind for the future. But I’ll get to that later.

Let’s talk about some games.

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