Final Shape came out last week and I’ve really enjoyed ploughing through the new story solo. Hopefully the people I normally play with will get their hands on the DLC soon so I can co-op it back with them and dive into the newer features and beats. Most of the game’s history has seen me running it solo, so it took me a while to realise that the new patrol area defaults to being a single instance. It really highlights the isolation and high stakes of the scenario as opposed to the sometimes frantic running around I have to do in more public patrol spaces. There I can frequently be heard tutting under my breath as someone else takes out the cluster of enemies I needed to fill a bounty. This way round I occasionally tut as there’s no one I can call in to help in some of the more frenetic encounters.

The graphics for the Pale Heart are amazing, both in terms of atmospheric and beautiful sky designs and in the increasingly surreal and Escher-like environments I need to traverse. There’s a lot of complexities to get my head around in terms of integrating or adapting changes to loadouts and configurations for my Guardian so that tickles that part of my brain that treats that as a new puzzle to figure out.

Hopefully we’ll be back streaming this evening in some shape (final or otherwise) and the usual shenanigans will appear. These may include but not be limited to my looking intently at something off camera, the boy coming up with ever more inventive swearing, and invocations of the name Nelly Furtado as someone falls off a virtual cliff..!