This article contains minor spoilers for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. All events discussed take place before the wedding.
The beginning of 2025 has been defined by nothing being easy. I don’t mean in my real life, that’s been basically the same as 2024, i.e. some stuff is easy, some stuff is hard, play games for a living, can’t complain. No, nothing has been easy in the games I’ve gravitated towards at the beginning of this year, and that’s mostly thanks to spending time with my new favorite chore simulator: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.
Doing Everything The Hard Way
This is a game where everything takes longer than you expect. Need to fill up your food meter? Prepare to stand in front of a pot, taking individual spoonfuls until you’re full. If another character wants to use the pot at the same time you do, expect to wait until they’re done before you can finish your slow, steady, stew chew. If you want to sharpen your sword, get ready to square up at the sharpening wheel for five to ten minutes, very gradually buffing it up to beheading shape.
Even in the similarly mechanically dense Monster Hunter Wilds, using a whetstone on your weapon takes a matter of seconds.
For a more in-depth example, I’m finally getting around to going to the wedding. To do that, Kreyzl the Miller sent me to find a woman we could hire to seduce the chamberlain, an important dude who will be at the big party. The idea is that, since Kreyzl is invited, he can bring the woman as his guest, with Henry serving as her bodyguard.
Getting to this point is a series of wild goose chases that involve finding dark clothes, stealing various items for Kreyzl, helping a gravedigger haul dead animals to his cart, tasting the chalky white stuff growing on a mass grave, and generally being a lackey who does menial tasks. This isn’t a criticism of the game. All of these quests were extremely interesting, and I had a good time doing them.
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Eventually, all those menial quests led to buying (or stealing) a dress for the woman to wear to the wedding. Done, got the dress, rode it back across the map to her. She complained about how I looked, so I tried on various outfits in my inventory to see if any of them fit her criteria of “looking nice” and “not being armor.” None of them did, so I rode back across the map once again to buy some wedding digs at the same shop where I’d found her dress.
The clothes that would accomplish this weren’t marked as quest items in the merchant’s inventory, so I just had to spend money on guesses. Once I picked out an outfit, I had to ask the merchant if it looked fit for a wedding and he would give me fairly unhelpful clues, saying whether I was close or far from the mark. Eventually I found the right match, and was finally ready. It was the exciting culmination of 25 hours of gameplay, most of which had been spent doing time-consuming chores. Within the structure of great, well-written quests, but chores all the same.
Please Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Buff My Brain To A Shine
I’m loving this game. It will probably be near the top of my GOTY list when all things are said and done. And yet it has done an incredible job at making me yearn to play an Assassin’s Creed game for the first time in years. Can you imagine how easy getting those wedding clothes would be in Assassin’s Creed? You’d fast travel to the vendor and the items you needed would be highlighted in the menu. It would take zero effort or brain power.
It doesn’t help that the two other new games I’ve spent time with this year, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and Monster Hunter Wilds, are similarly crunchy. Citizen Sleeper 2 makes you feel like you’re starving while on a long road trip and riding in a car that is perpetually running on empty, and having to decide whether to buy food or gas. Monster Hunter is quite friendly in comparison to previous games, but there are still a lot of systems to learn and complex combat to master. All of these games are making me yearn for something that lets me turn my brain off, climb towers, and check off map markers.
I will probably end up liking all three of those games more than Assassin’s Creed Shadows. But playing three games that demand my focus is making me remember the appeal of playing a game that doesn’t require much from you. Assassin’s Creed games are rarely high on critics’ year-end lists and only one (2018’s Odyssey) has been nominated for GOTY at The Game Awards. These aren’t games that will challenge your perception of what a game can be, they’re games that deliver exactly what you’ve long known games are.
Sometimes, that’s nice. Lobster is great, but often you just want a McDouble. It still tastes good, and it’s a lot less work to eat. As gaming pursues those games that deliver high highs, but make you work for them — games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 — Assassin’s Creed is still going to have a vital place for the times when you need something a little lower impact.
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