It's been alright.

I took last week off; Thanksgiving and all that.  It was a good week for me!

Dumbchicky seems to actually be successfully (??) incubating some of the quail eggs, so they are progressing with their development; I'm getting ready to lockdown on them so that they can perhaps hatch (??).  We'll see what happens.

I hit lvl 130 in Median XL and now I've started to really see progress slow down; I'm not sure how much more it will take for me to try and tackle the next set of ubers/dungeons, but there was already a lvl 125 boss that I couldn't take out yet.  There's some set equipment that I've tried farming for that would be good for my neutraldin build but haven't managed to find yet, so that's an option.  Interestingly enough, there's actually a new patch coming out on Dec 10th...crazy.

I played through the finished chapter 2 of Deltarune.  This chapter offered another fantastical-type adventure with the same sort of intermingling of genuine character development and slappy humor that I've come to recognize from Toby Fox's work.  It seems like Deltarune is setting up for more questions, more exposition, more...stakes (?) when compared to Undertale.  The dual interplay between the worlds of the "Lightners" and "Darkners" I think facilitates deeper readings of the main characters, and they all feel more layered than they did in Undertale.  I'm not saying that the characters in Undertale were necessarily all one-note, but with Deltarune I feel like it's more obvious that they've got stuff hidden underneath their surface layer and that really makes you wonder exactly who these people are.  The game never spells any of this out for you either (yet), but there is enough there to make you wonder about it very strongly.

In the meantime, I took my break last week as an opportunity to play through a bunch more of The Last of Us 2, completing the majority of it and getting past a supposed "twist" that I heard at least one reviewer mentioning as turning their worldview upside-down.  Sigh.  As usual, I find myself not really agreeing with other people's opinions.  Like when I was watching Brave, the overarching direction and path of the plot was easy to predict early on, but all of the little destinations and detours along the way have proven to be worthwhile.  There's no one singular moment that stands out as jaw-dropping, but there are a multitude of smaller experiences contained within the narrative and environment of TLOU2 that I've really appreciated.

TLOU2 has actually done this really funny thing where every time I start coming down with a criticism of it, it remedies that criticism in the next chapter.  "It feels like they haven't really done anything new with the zombie encounters in this game", I told my friend, immediately before going into a new chapter where a new mechanic around the zombies was introduced.

The gameplay pacing of TLOU2 is entirely familiar (tense exploration, followed by stealth action encounters, culminating in an intense action scene, and then story beats and exposition), but that's because, well...it works.  The dialogue and character interactions, too, take the strengths of TLOU1 and carry it over.  The "Left Behind" expansion story was honestly probably the most memorable part of TLOU1 as a whole and I think they've really taken that experience and used it again here.

TLOU2 does a lot of work with contrasting and contextualizing things under different lights.  That sounds vague, but that's because that statement applies to a lot of different things in TLOU2.  There are extremely obvious ways in which this comes up, but also much more subtle ways as well, and I think it's those more subtle ways that I've really been appreciating as I go through the game.  It's something that would make the entire thing worth another playthrough, I'd imagine.  Unfortunately, this is also the sort of thing that I don't really see called out in reviews.  It's easy to talk about such-and-such plot twist or whatever, but I think it takes a more nuanced critique to call out attention to how color palettes are used, to how subtle parallels are drawn between similar scenes and characters.

At a certain point in TLOU2 I was wondering "what are they trying to say here?  What is the 'point' that they're trying to get across?"  And fortunately, it doesn't actually seem like there is one.  I say fortunate because if that was the case, then no matter what the "message" is, it would probably fall flat.  The best allegories, after all, are the ones that don't tell you what to do with your life.  They merely explore a situation, and make you think about it.  I feel like TLOU2 does this well; it makes you think about things, and it does so in a very fleshed-out way, more than just surface-level.

So far, at least.