Hey y’all, this is going to be a quick site update along with a short list of games I’ve been playing throughout the week.
This week I’ve been dividing my time between three games: Resident Evil 4: Chainsaw Demo, Solar Ash and Metroid Fusion. Considering none of these games are exactly short, and I’ve still been working on freelance commitments, I didn’t have anything finished to talk about for Week 11. Of the three games, the one I’m closest to completing is Solar Ash; I’ll definitely have more to say about it when it’s done, but what I can say right now is that it’s a very interesting spiritual successor to games like Shadow of the Colossus. It also absolutely feels like a sequel to Hyper Light Drifter, a game I put dozens of hours into and worked to find all the collectibles in. I’m enjoying it a lot.
But I’m not just writing this post to let you know that I am in fact still playing video games; it’s also to talk a little bit about how I’m doing and how No Escape is doing, in turn.
The short version is I’m doing bad. I’m having a pretty shit time with regard to my mental health and it’s been a hot minute since I was last “okay.”
The long version is… I don’t really need to go into the long version, actually. I will simply say this: I’m afraid for the immediate future. There’s nothing anyone but me can do about this fear, but I have no clear path forward and it terrifies me. This has made it hard to write about things like games, frivolous luxuries as they are at the best of times. It has made it impossible to focus on putting a magazine together, and it has paralyzed me from working on commitments. I’m writing this so that I can at least feel like I’ve told someone, because I feel myself withdrawing from various communities as a result of all this.
I have considered quitting No Escape. Writing that sentence and committing to publishing it is just as terrifying as anything else going on, because it makes it real. But as I said in my short twitter thread talking a bit about this yesterday, “I just also can’t get out from under the idea that shit’s just irrevocably broken and we’re all in a holding pattern until the end comes.” This is part of it, but the other part comes from this exhaustion I feel seeping out of every corner of everything I try to do.
Being tired and scared is not exactly conducive to good video game criticism, much less anything else.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, apart from Year of Games posts (which I started specifically to give me something short and easy to do so that I wouldn’t quit) you’re going to probably see a lot less of me here, on Twitter, and just online in general. I need to get some shit sorted out. I might not be able to do so, in which case, we’ll have to see what happens from there. Thank you for your understanding. See y’all around.