I’m playing tourist in Halo Infinite these days because I want to print some nice screenshots out into posters for my son. I have to say, 343 have brought a whole new level to Breath Of The Wild’s “if you can see it, you can go there” vision with their “if you can see it, you can get most of the way there and then explode” system.
There is something metadystopic about wandering the beautiful world of a mediocre game, stumbling across the dev-process detritus of the better game they didn’t ship all the time.
You’ve gotta sit with it a bit but this game is pushing _really hard_ to put the lead character on the wrong side of history.
Your primary antagonists in this game are “a allegiance of people who’ve escaped a doomsday cult and are trying to reestablish themselves in exile from their now-destroyed homeworld”, and, later in the game, “a representative of a populace who were jailed for the crime of being too difficult to kill”, and I’m in here getting achievements for pulling a trigger, this doesn’t feel great.
This is the sort of thing that comes up a lot in modern video games, especially at the AAA level. “This is mechanically brilliant, it’s incredibly beautiful, and I am begging you to read any book that doesn’t have a code sample in it or a spaceship on the cover before you make another one.”
