What I Got Up To This Month (April '24)

This was quite a month for me. I got to some personal things I'd been meaning to get to for a while and, oh, what the heck. I may as well be candid here since it's not like anyone even reads this. I opened up about my gender dysphoria to my dad and he was incredibly supportive. I always hoped, and even assumed, that he would have my back, but I'm an anxious person and my insecurities have kept me from acting on this for as long as I can remember so I've held off on telling him. After that I came out as nonbinary to some of my friends online and they, too, were accommodating and helpful. Even though I've been surrounded by people I trust, I've been worried about what might happen or worst-case scenarios so finding out that none of those fears came to pass and that the hard part is in the rearview now makes me feel like a massive weight has been taken off my shoulders. I suppose I can now check "coming out to everyone who knows me online" off of my list too, provided any of you ever see this. 

As the month went on I kept up with and/or finished (depending on the show) watching a few things. Invincible's second season ended and I greatly enjoyed working through that, I saw all of the Fallout show and greatly enjoyed it, The Bad Batch has continued to be good and is just about over, Delicious In Dungeon had some good drama in these recent episodes, and Critical Role just had a pretty significant thing happen that'll surely color the rest of the campaign in an interesting way.

On the subject of watching-people-play-DnD, I finally got caught up on Dimension 20's "Fantasy High Junior Year" and I've been loving it. It's been fun to revisit these characters and this setting and Brennan's managed to make it all still feel fresh and exciting. Honestly, I'm still loving everything Dropout has to offer; Game Changer is still one of the highlights of any week it premieres. To take things outside CollegeHumor but still on a somewhat related note, Taskmaster came back and, yep, Taskmaster is still a lot of fun.

I started the month off by playing an obscene amount of Dragon's Dogma 2. I wrote about it in more detail here, but suffice it to say the game was excellent. There's a breadth to it that reminds me of other open-world fantasy games I've loved and its mechanics are unique enough that it never felt stale or lost my attention. It's a bit odd around the edges but its quirks are what gives it character. It's also worth sticking with to the end because the final act is maybe its strongest part.

After I finished that, I played through a game that had been on my radar for quite some time: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and I quickly fell in love with it. I don't play a lot of Metroidvanias so take my opinion on this with a grain of salt, but this game seems incredibly well put together. It's a bit buggy at times, yes, but it's a very fun action-platformer with a diverse toolset that really lets you feel in control of your character.

Because of the aforementioned games I didn't make a ton of progress towards my horror goals this month. I started and played a great deal of Resident Evil 5, but I'm still working on finishing that up. There'll be a longer writeup once I'm finished with the game, but as a preview I want to say that it's effectively Resident Evil 4 with co-op, and since RE4 was an incredible game RE5 is real darn close to it.