Gaming Round-Up: What I Played Over the Holidays

Posted on January 2, 2026 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

Time for another recap of what I’ve been playing lately.

New World

I played a bit more of New World, though I am starting to wind down. With most of my goals completed and no content on the horizon, I imagine it will become like The Secret World: a game I’ll always love but only revisit every now and then.

I did start that latest alt. Haven’t entirely locked down a build yet, but right now I’m using a musket coupled either a rapier or greatsword depending on my mood. Since I’ve been on a kick of learning about indigenous cultures lately, I decided his backstory is that he’s an Andean native who mugged a conquistador and hitched a ride to Aeternum.

I was a little sad he wound up in Windsward. Nothing against it; it’s a lovely zone. But my nostalgia for Monarch’s Bluffs is so much stronger. Might have to make another character to revisit Monarch’s Bluffs…

Overwatch

Played a lot of Stadium — maybe a bit too much — to get my free loot boxes from the winter event. I’m still holding strong on Brigitte, Juno, and Pharah as my top played characters, but I have tried (and re-tried) a few others on the side.

I copied a build off reddit that uses De Kuiper’s Thesis to make Sigma (nearly) unkillable, and I’ve been having a lot of success with that. Bit worried this build is likely to be nerfed at some point, though. It’s a bit nutty.

After giving up on Mei early in my Stadium career, I’ve given her another shot and managed to claw my way above a 50% win rate, however tenuously. I do quite like the Coulder playstyle, though. Be the ball.

Also gave Freja another chance, with even more tepid results. She’s very hit and miss, quite literally. I’ve gotten some huge multi-kills with her bolas, but most of the time I just kind of flail around without accomplishing much. Not sure I actually enjoy playing her that much, either. She kind of feels like the answer to the question, “What if Pharah was super clunky?”

She does have a very satisfying ultimate line, though. NU VANKER DER.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Moira lately. I had trouble wrapping my head around her at first, but now that I’ve got the hang of it she’s very low stress. Hard to believe I ever struggled with her. A surprisingly high number of players don’t seem to bother getting out of the way of her damage orbs.

Part of the reason I’ve been revisiting older characters is I was pretty disappointed with the new offerings for Stadium this season. Only two characters is underwhelming to begin with, and I didn’t enjoy Doomfist or Wuyang at all. I’d heard there was evidence Illari and Symmetra were in production for Stadium, and I was really hoping to get one or both of them this season. They’re definitely my most wanted new characters for Stadium right now, Illari especially. Love her personality.

Road 96

Hot off the heels of my recent post waxing nostalgic about it, I decided it was time for my third (and final?) playthrough of Road 96.

Having already done the pro-democracy and apolitical routes, this time I went for the “burn it all down” approach. While my first two playthroughs yielded radically different endings, this one felt a bit like an awkward mash-up of the other two.

A little disappointing, but if there was ever a game that embodied the principle of the journey mattering more than the destination, it’s this one, and it was still lovely to revisit. Again, worth it for the music alone. Steam shows me with 23 hours logged in Road 96, and I’m pretty sure an hour or two of that is just sitting around vibing to the music.

Also, can we appreciate what a good dude John is? It really hit me on this playthrough how he really is the best person in the cast. Just a truly decent (fictional) human being.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

When I played Expedition 33, I skipped most of the act 3 side content because I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of the story too much. However, since then I’ve popped back in here and there to slowly clean up the rest. I think I’ve now done pretty much everything, including the Verso’s Drafts zone recently added in their free “thank you” update.

When they announced a free DLC, I was hoping for something to further flesh out the lore of the wider setting. This was… very much not that, but still a mostly fun romp all the same. Can’t complain about the price, either.

The one notable thing I still haven’t done is kill Simon. I made one attempt and decided that life is too short to deal with that level of difficulty. Simon can keep on doing his thing; I’m not gonna hassle him any further.

WoW

I’ve just recently reactivated my World of Warcraft subscription, though I did play a bit of the free version in December to get a head start on Legion Remix (or Region Lemix, as I keep accidentally calling it).

I’m not as enthusiastic about Legion’s Remix as I was for Pandaria’s. Legion was a lot more recent, and I played a truly disgusting amount of it at the time, so my burnout never really fully wore off. I’m also not really on the “Legion was the best expansion” train that most people seem to be these days. It was a good one, to be sure, but I wouldn’t put it at the top.

I also don’t love that we’re back to gear drops instead of upgrading gear. Theoretically I can understand the logic that it might feel bad to choose between spending bronze on gear upgrades versus cosmetics, but in practice it was trivially easy to get enough bronze for both, so it doesn’t really feel like a problem that needed solving, and it was so nice not to have to constantly replace and re-transmog my gear in Pandaria Remix. Lemix’s QoL feels much lower, and in general the Remix specific progression systems don’t feel nearly as exciting this time around.

However, the flood of rewards is still nice, and I was eager to try the heroic world tier. So far I haven’t found it particularly game changing, but a little more challenge for a little more reward is a nice option to have.

I’m playing a death knight because I remember them having the best class hall campaign, and because I figured a DK’s survivability would help in heroic world tier. I made a Blood Elf; since I’m still not really enjoying playing my hunter, I decided to just cosplay a dark ranger on this death knight and get my Warcraft III nostalgia fix that way.

It’s certainly an odd relationship I have with the death knight class. Historically it’s been one of my less preferred options, but I definitely have more DKs than anything else on my account at this point. When the Lemix one is finished leveling, she’ll be the third DK on my account to ever reach a current level cap and the second just in War Within. To say nothing of the many other low level DKs sitting around near the bottom of my character list.

Despite my alt addiction, I almost never make multiple characters of the same class in the same game, and even more rarely fully level them. The only other examples I can think of are my two paladins and two shamans in WoW (though I’ve never played both of either in the same expansion), and that second Jedi consular that I leveled in SWTOR for reasons.

I have always loved the flavour of death knights, and I’m gravitating toward them more simply because Frost DK is perhaps the only spec left in the game with a nice, simple builder/spender rotation. It scratches the itch rogues used to before Blizzard mangled them into their current cooldown-juggling mess.

I just wish I liked the aesthetics of Frost better. I’m admittedly not sure what exactly this would look like, but I’d prefer a “chill of the grave” vibe to “Frost mage but melee.” I prefer the more necromantic stylings of the other DK specs, but their gameplay isn’t nearly as smooth, so Frost it is. “Cold death” was one of the attack lines for dark rangers in WC3, I suppose.

Out of the Comfort Zone: Frieren and Expedition 33

Posted on August 1, 2025 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

There are two pieces of media I’d like to discuss today. There’s no real connection between them, except that they’re both a bit outside my usual wheelhouse in terms of interests, but that’s a good enough excuse to lump them together in my books.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Not to get all hipster, but I stumbled across Expedition 33 well before it launched and blew up like crazy (can’t remember how) and thought it looked interesting enough to keep an eye on. Despite that, and the universally rave reviews it received once it actually launched, I spent quite a few months waffling on if I actually wanted to buy it.

The problem is I don’t enjoy turn-based combat in video games, at all. It’s normally an instant dealbreaker for me. I was intrigued by E33’s introduction of real time mechanics to the formula… but it’s mainly precisely timed parries and quick time events, which are by far my least favourite parts of real time combat.

Still, it seemed like such a unique game I decided to give it a shot.

Sure enough, I didn’t love the combat. Conceptually I think needing to defend yourself in real time is a brilliant way to improve turn-based combat. Usually what kills turn-based for me is the boredom of sitting on my hands and watching the game play itself when it’s not my turn, and the real time avoidance completely eliminates that.

But I don’t enjoy the extreme precision that E33 requires. Bluntly, I’m really bad at it. My reflexes just aren’t that fast. I’ve always been a fan of needing to actively avoid enemy attacks in games, but I’m growing increasingly frustrated with the current trend towards requiring super precise timing for such things. I’m used to just running out of the way or keeping my shield up being good enough. The fact a dodge or block doesn’t count in a lot of recent games unless you do it at the last possible second is irritating.

I struggled to find a comfortable difficulty setting, as the dodge windows on normal were too unforgiving for my sluggish brain, but story mode was so completely bereft of threat that it became boring. I ended up downloading a mod that let me have easier dodge and parry windows without otherwise altering the difficulty (as well as a mini-map mod as the lack of such was frustrating me).

I don’t think I would have finished the game without mods, but with them, I managed to find a decent balance where the combat felt mostly tolerable, and even actually fun sometimes. One upside to this kind of JRPG style combat is the attack animations are truly spectacular (Crystal Crush, my beloved).

I settled on Sciel, Lune, and Verso as my go-to party, with Sciel largely carrying the team. I got her set up such that she could pump out massive heals, keep the entire party buffed with Shell and Powerful at all times, and still dish out huge damage. To the game’s credit, though, I did get the feeling that pretty much any character could end up broken with the right build.

My other major frustration with the game is that I don’t like how it handled open world exploration. While the instanced zones will warn you if you’re underleveled for them, there doesn’t seem to be any way to find out the intended level of open world mobs, so it’s easy (and common) to stumble your way into fights you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. At one point I spent a full hour exploring the map and getting into fights only to get absolutely curbstomped every single time. That was the most mad I’ve been at a game in quite a while.

Act 3 is kind of a mess in terms of game structure, too. There’s one story quest, which ends the game, but there will at that point still be tonnes of optional content left undone (some of which you’ll still be underleveled for, even). Up until that point it’s a very tight and well-paced RPG, but then it turns into this janky pseudo sandbox experience where you can either ignore a huge chunk of content, or completely kill the story’s momentum by ignoring the epic conclusion for another dozen hours or more of random exploration.

I ended up skipping most of the optional stuff and just going straight to the end. I am considering going back for the rest at some point, as you can at least continue exploring after the main story ends, but I’m in no rush to do so.

The story was the main draw of the game for me, and I mostly liked it, but it didn’t entirely meet my expectations, which is maybe on me as those expectations were very high.

I think it’s mostly that I never really felt surprised by anything that happened. I’m not going to claim I predicted the exact twists and turns, but the story clearly telegraphs that there’s more going on than seems apparent at first glance, and I’ve played enough Don’t Nod games to know what to expect from the ending of a French game.

For the record, I’m in the camp that views the Maelle ending as the (marginally) lesser evil.

I did enjoy the characters a lot. They feel very well realized, and Verso and Sciel in particular feel like some of the more authentic depictions of mental illness I’ve seen in media.

To put it more clearly, I enjoyed the combat a lot more than I expected to, but still not that much, and I enjoyed the story a little less than I expected to, but still pretty well. I think it’s fair to say I’m not as awestruck by Expedition 33 as most people seem to be, but it’s still a very good game, and I’m glad I took a chance on it despite it being so far outside my comfort zone. I’d give it about an 8/10.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

With a few minor exceptions, I’ve never been much for anime, but given my obsession with Elves, people kept recommending me Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and I decided to finally bow to the peer pressure.

Having finished the season, I’m honestly still not sure if I like it or not.

On the one hand, I definitely love the premise. A deep dive on the psychology of an immortal Elf as she struggles to come to terms with the mortality of her companions and the changing world around her is tailor-made for someone like me, and I think the writing mostly does a good job of illustrating Frieren’s alien perspective and genuine struggles to fit in among humans. I would really like to see more sci-fi/fantasy stories that centre non-human perspectives like this.

On the other hand, it’s an incredibly slow series. I think a lot of Western TV these days is too rushed, and I don’t mind a slow burn, but this is so slow I’m not sure it’s burning at all. Most of the time it feels like they’re going out of their way to avoid anything even close to dramatic tension.

I think they also waste the show’s premise a bit by not employing more time skips. The first half dozen episodes or so take place over the course of around eighty years, but after that everything takes place within a year or two. I think it would have been a more interesting series if it was constantly skipping through the years, showing how the world changes even as Frieren stays the same. They could have done a Doctor Who kind of thing and had her get a new set of companions every season, every season a new generation that teaches Frieren something new about the human experience.

Finally, I did find the attempts at humour quite grating. It feels like it has to have been a mandate from some studio executive to include X jokes in Y style, because it’s always totally out of the blue and wildly mismatched with the tone of the show. “This is a thoughtful, introspective series about processing grief and learning to be grateful in the here and now, but also here’s a random gag about how some dude has a tiny dick.”

I’d consider watching the second season when it shows up, but I wouldn’t be in any hurry about it.

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: Clair Obscur

Gaming Round-Up: What I Played Over the Holidays

Out of the Comfort Zone: Frieren and Expedition 33

Share this:

Share this: