Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Current goal: Kill a god or two
The Veilguard took quite a while to hook me. For its first dozen hours or more, it all just felt so video game-y, so amusement park-y to me, the fairly small areas I was in so hyper-designed, so full of little caches of coins and resources for me to find so I never went more than a few seconds without some little dopamine-hit reward. And it still does have those problems, exacerbated all the while by how familiar the structure is, so plainly “Mass-Effect-2-but-make-it-fantasy.” So rigid and tightly controlled it sometimes feels lifeless. And yet I liked the concept of some of its characters enough to keep going, even if it took some time for the characters themselves to become deep and complex enough to intrigue me. I mean, Neve, a fantasy private eye and political rebel who wields ice magic and wears a dwarven prosthesis to replace her lower-right leg? That’s rad as hell!
And yes, now that I’m many, many hours into the game, I actually feel a connection to these characters and not just to the idea of them, and to the stakes of the conflict they’re facing, too. (I just played a second-act siege sequence that was pretty exciting and helped remind me what a serious threat the escaped elven gods actually are.) In some ways, the fact that every party member has some problem they need help with feels very contrived. “Oh, I just can’t focus on the thing threatening the whole world if we don’t deal with my personal issue first!” It’s, again, just all very Mass Effect 2, in a way that feels pretty conspicuous and artificial to me. But if surrendering to that structure lets me get to know Neve better, so be it. Ya got me, game. Ya got me. — Carolyn Petit