Time to review some of the other games from the Humble Bundle.
Starting with The Last Tree.
A game where you play as a fox exploring a quite gorgeously rendered forest? COlor me intrigued. And the game has everything you see in that trailer.
But not much else. Fundamentally, it suffers from the same trouble as a lot of art games, namely that while it is quite marvelous as art, it’s not so hot as a game.
There is a lot of just running through the forest finding collecting stars. When you get enough stars, another segment of other story, which is entirely done in voiceover, is unlocked. Along the way, there are a lot of small platforming type puzzles to solve.
But for me that is just not enough. I am a jaded veteran gamer and I need a lot more happening or a lot more to DO than that. There is just not enough THERE for me. So ultimately, this is not the game for me.
However, it’s too well made a game for me to dismiss entirely. For someone looking for a calm, non-violent, peaceful game with beautiful visuals and a slow. intimate, dreamy story to tell, this game would be perfect.
On the strength of that, I give it a 7/10.
I talked about my whole revelation about the feeling that I am never doing what I am supposed to be doing in therapy today.
This was a deliberate act because I wanted to make sure it stayed in my mind this time and one of the best ways for me to do that is to tell someone else. Then it’s not just thoughts in my head any more. I’ve externalized it. It’s out there.
And my therapist and I discussed the obvious next question : if I rid myself of the terrible burden of this oppressive feeling of never doing what I am supposed to be doing (whatever that is), what on Earth do I do with myself?
It’s the whole infinite hallway with infinite doors problem all over again. My creative intellect can envisage far more possibilities than my depressive’s lack of executive function can possibly process and prioritize.
And yet, I feel like that’s part of depression’s shit show too. I think my mind generates all these possibilities specifically to overwhelm me and thus keep me from taking any action that would threaten the depression’s power over me.
Man the words are not coming easy tonight. I need sleep.
Anyhow, via talking it out with my therapist, I realized that the whole question of what do I do now is wrong. It’s just a slightly diguised version of what I “should” be doing and that shit has got to go.
Even the question of what I really want to do has to go. That just turns the whole thing into a test, and that’s the last thing I need. I want to let go of the entire notion of there being a “right” answer entirely and learn not to complicate my life with big questions and the search for their answers except for strictly recreational purposes.
The world, after all, is hardly weighing on my shoulders.
Which brings me to another thing that came up today : that dreaded word “potential”. I was told I had a lot of it as a kid, and it’s not hard to see why. Here I was, this incredibly bright kid who got amazing grades without even trying very hard. It was entirely appropriate for adults to imagine I would go on to do great things.
But I think that, somewhere along the way, the negative alchemy of depression turned that hopeful message into a terrible sense of obligation and expectation.
Clearly. just going on to lead a mundane middle class life would not be good enough for me. I would be letting everyone down if that happened. At the very least, I had to do something fairly spectacular with my life. Something big and impressive and important.
And I have enough intellectual self-confidence to believe that I am perfectly capable of doing something like that given the right chance. And I know that when it comes to creative works, my ambition knows no bounds and whatever I make will have my own unique kind of strength and power behind it.
And ev3en if that were not true, I have dreamed big for my whole life and I don’t think I could stop now even if I wanted to. Even if I decided for sure that I would be far better off lowering my expectations to something more reasonable.
I know I have greatness within me. I know I could be something truly amazing and unique some day. And that’s not something that am capable of denying. The greatness in me cries out for release. It wants to spread its wings and fly, fly, fly. Fly so high into the clear blue skies that all can see it shine, and be warmed by its glow.
And I wouldn’t kill that even if I could. It might seem like an unnecessary burden now, but just you wait. SOme day, god willin’ and the crick don’t rise, it will be that light that guides me to where I need to be.
I just need to free it of its outdated burdens first. It has the wings to fly but not when it is weighed down by psychological scar tissue, a smotheringly oppressive overactive superego, and old emotional tapes that aren’t even relevant any more.
And that takes time. I think a lot of my sense that there is something I should be doing comes from how badly I want to be doing something purposeful and rewarding.
It’s my frustrated energies that make life so hard for me, and it’s up to me to clear away all the things holding those energies back so I can finally put them to work.
But even that will be allowed to proceed at its own pace.
Because pressure ruins everything.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.