Sundays are for realising that after playing The Blood of Dawnwalker, you’ve developed a craving for blackcurrant juice. There’s none in the cupboard, so you venture out to get some, floating across the rooftops as a trail of mist as you go. You arrive at the supermarket, fangs bared and claws out. You parry and dodge attackers armed with trollies as you fight your way up the aisles. There it is. The sweet crimson nectar. You reach out to grab a bottle. A hand reaches out through the display and grips your wrist.
“Brencis?” you cry out. There’s no answer. Instead, the strange appendage begins to drag you along the aisle at warp speed, knocking off bottles which thunk and bump against your face as they fall. “Stoooooooooooppppppppppp,” you cry as the a black eye begins to form where a cola bottle got you good. Surprisingly, the rogue arm obeys. However, it doesn’t loosen its grip. Blinking away spilled beverages, you find yourself face-to-face with a label. Steve Ballmer Betrayed His Fellow Billionaires, And They Are Not Pleased, it reads. It’s made by a company called Defector and seems to contain commentary on the Los Angeles Clippers being slapped for violating the NBA’s rules on paying basketball players.
The sleazy-funny particulars aside, this story and the extraordinary penalty the Clippers and Ballmer received are ultimately about a group of the other 29 franchise operators, maybe even all of them, policing their cohort’s conduct. Some of those owners helped midwife Ballmer into the group 12 years ago when Donald Sterling finally disgraced his way out of ownership. They are getting theirs back, not because they all wanted Leonard to play on their team—that would mean competing for a prize, which few of them prioritize above collecting their revenues—but because Ballmer unclogged his nostrils on the salary cap, which is both practically and conceptually the grand underpinning of their profitability.
As soon as you’re done reading, the arm takes off once more. You’re dragged down the soup aisle, tins ricocheting to and fro. Before you know it, your face is covered in a thick mask of baked beans. “No, helpppp, stopppppppp,” you yell through the orange haze. The appendage complies again. A packet stands before you. The Blood of Dawnwalker’s lack of stealth makes this Witcher 3-like feel incomplete, its label reads. Ooh, a take from GamesRadar foodmaker Fran Ruiz that you’re not sure you agree with, but know others who certainly might.
As we’ve seen in other open-world games with infamy systems, there’s no easy answer to the dilemma of properly reacting to players’ chaotic actions in ways that both preserves the credibility of the established narrative and dynamically raises the challenge. Coen is a unique kind of menace, though. Whether day or at night, he’s charging into conflict, sword out, ready for a proper melee. Even when he’s walking around the city of Svartrau, he doesn’t seem to mind being recognized until it’s too late. I know he’s no Agent 47 or Ezio Auditore, but this disconnect makes me wish The Blood of Dawnwalker had even more friction baked in.
Woosh. You’re yanked off again (not like that). Things start to smell a bit more earthy. Oh bugger, the fruit and veg section! Soon, you’re being slapped with apples and creamed by bananas. “Pleeeesseee, scccchhhhhtttoopppp”, you mumble through a mouth nearly plugged up by a loose turnip. All is still. Before you sits a marrow. On its label are the words ‘Petit Planet’s latest build brings Pokopia-inspired elements to Animal Crossing in space’. You notice that this particular bit of veg has seemingly been reserved for a Rebecca Jones of Respec, which you assume to be nearby town.
Turns out things aren’t all smooth sailing for this jellyfish girl who has decided to go and live on land, and the quest was a surprisingly heartfelt examination of both emotional and physical homesickness, tasking the protagonist with learning to cook some of Nerina’s favourite seafoods and – at one point – literally fish her out of the museum’s ocean exhibit after she hurls herself in during a fit of delirium, which honestly got a bit darker than I’d been expecting.
The world becomes a blur once more. Things start to get cold. The frozen section beckons. You make peace with the fact you might be about to die of hypothermia amid a sea of 3 for 2 signs. Shards of ice skitter aside as your skin begins to numb. You have just enough energy to beg in whispers for the arm to stop once and for all. It does. A box offers you instructions as to How to throw a LAN party in 2026. Why’s this in the frozen section? Ah, it’s made by Morgan Park of Perfectly Cold Gamer.
It was comfortably the best birthday party I’ve had as an adult. I was worried at first that going to all this trouble to play stuff that we could more easily set up over Discord would end up feeling pointless, but that was quickly disproven: Everything about playing shooters with your buds is more fun when they’re actually in the room emoting, reacting, and trash-talking to your face. I want to make this a more regular thing, but honestly, it wasn’t a smooth ride. We had issues both technical and logistical—some self-inflicted, some harder to predict. We really could’ve used a LAN veteran on the scene.
Suddenly the arm pulls you head-first into the depths of a freezer. The cold is everywhere and it’s overwhelming. You realise that the arm belongs to a bald man who’s curled up next you. “Brencis?” you ask again.
“Yes,” the vampire baddie from The Blood of Dawnwalker says.
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s a long stor-“
Before he can finish, the freezer opens and you’re both yanked out. The pair of you end up laid out on a trolley atop a mound of frozen peas. Gazing down at you is the face of Adrian Edmondson. He takes off pushing at warp speed, laughing maniacally while the pair of you hold on for dear life and some Witchery tunes play over the tannoy.