Full Stop

It happened again.

Every so often, when I get settle into the groove of playing games, I’ll dedicate myself to the pursuit of completing the kind of sprawling epic of a game that consumed my time and captured my imagination in earlier years. In the last half decade, it’s been The Witcher 2 or Pillars of Eternity. This time, it’s Divinity: Original Sin.

Much has been written about Divinity over the past few years; my paltry power to add or subtract won’t change what has become the over-arching consensus that it is a double-capital-g Great Game. In terms of praise, I will say that the game does a remarkable job of blending complexity and simplicity into a perfectly satisfying level of challenge.

Or it does so until about the half-way point, anyway.

Or, rather, I can confirm that it does so until the half-way point.

As I said, it happened again; I got burnt out.

The game didn’t suddenly drop in quality or unreasonably increase in difficulty; I expect to remain wistful about the remainder of the game, despite the knowledge that I don’t particularly want to play it any longer. I quit not because of the game, but because I needed to quit.

Let me say clearly: I don’t feel like I was addicted or playing an unhealthy amount. Not to sound presumptuous, my time is valuable, and I want to spend it playing video games. I only have so much time to consume media, so it behooves me to consume the highest quality with the most efficiency I can manage. 51 hours is a lot of time to dedicate to a single work of anything. Seeing the number displayed clearly in front of me put me immediately into a morose place. And my immediate snap judgement to give up on Divinity spread rapidly, stymieing my desire to continue the games I’d been playing concurrently and to the list of games I had planned to get to next. My dedication to one game had blossomed into a funk for all games.

Getting to the point of being tired of even thinking about games, I found myself with a bit of free time one night, and — maybe just hoping for a change— I gave a try to a brand new game that I expected would be too difficult for my turn-based, burned out, impatient, and pessimistic malaise.

I was hooked. More to come.