subject to interpretation

What I Just Finished Reading

Allie Therin, Liar City: lysimache recommended this to me after staying up all night reading the entire trilogy so I figured I would read it. Actually, I recommended it to her because someone made a massive rec post on Reddit that I can no longer find and also I thought lysimache had read every gay mystery there was but she hadn't read this.

This is a m/m (just UST, here in the first book) fantasy police procedural mystery, set in Seattle, that I would describe as "basically the kind of Sentinel AU fandom invented, except somehow it's in a world where Guides are the ones that everyone cares about and also the Sentinels are the Guides' siblings." Empathy (the ability to read emotions) is real, empaths are hated and feared, and Reece the empath occasionally works with his sister Jamey, a police detective. This is difficult because empaths are extreme pacifists and cannot stomach violence of any sort, but it's also difficult because apparently an empath has been doing some murders. This brings Reece to the attention of Evan Grayson, The Dead Man, an empath specialist who is immune to empathy and also extremely from Texas and knows a lot of secrets he isn't telling and he is going to solve this.

Okay, so, I was picturing Fanon Blair Sandburg and Benoit Blanc from Knives Out and I stand by this. The worldbuilding is weirdly patchy in places and weirdly overearnest in other places, and Reece is kind of annoying to read because he keeps being massively sarcastic to people who hate him and they never get that he's joking and he still does it, and the whole thing was a little gorier than I prefer but I guess I'm gonna read the other two.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Avengers Armageddon #3, Captain Marvel Dark Past #5, Queen in Black #3, Ultimate Impact Reborn #4 )

What I'm Reading Next

I guess the other two books in this empath trilogy?

Since even Dreamwidth journal search is apparently not going to bring up the name of this game (which I know I have posted about before) because my posts use the words "Marvel" and "Avengers" a fair number of times, I would like to be clear that this post is a review of Marvel's Avengers, the 2020 video game by Crystal Dynamics.

I have not played this game, because I do not own a system that it is playable on. I do own the game, because when it was being delisted from storefronts a couple years ago it was on sale for extremely cheap (and I wasn't going to be able to buy it ever again), and I figured that if someday I own a PC I might be able to play it, but that day has not come. (I have been trying to acquire a cheap refurb Steam Deck; that day has not come either.)

But phoenixmetaphor has a PS5 and has kindly been streaming this game for the 616 Discord. Gameplay-wise, it is clearly a terrible live-services game masquerading as a single-player game: loot refreshes every day, there are factions, it waits for other players to join before starting missions, most of the missions are "defeat endless waves of trash mobs in a place that is (I think) described simultaneously as Nevada, Utah, and The Badlands," and there are a bunch of missions that are capture-the-flag where you have to stand on a platform for five minutes and as far as I can tell you cannot move off of it or the timer will stop, which is maybe doable if you have multiple human teammates but is not great if you are the only player.

Plot-wise, the one scene I had already seen multiple times continues to be the best thing about the game. Your POV character for most of the game is Kamala Khan, who begins the game by winning a fanfic contest where she has written Avengers RPF for the Avengers to read, and is meeting them at a PR event where they are announcing the fanfic award winners and also a new clean energy source, because they have a helicarrier that runs on Terrigen Mists (maybe not a good idea). Things go sideways, the helicarrier crashes into San Francisco Bay, much of San Francisco (including Kamala) becomes Inhuman, the Avengers are blamed for the tragedy (referred to as "A-Day"), and also Captain America has died in the crash.

We then cut forward five years to a robot dystopia run by AIM. Inhumans are hated and feared, the Avengers have disbanded and are basically just hated and also hate each other a lot, and Kamala (who still loves the Avengers) goes on a road trip to try to join the resistance, and she ends up joining the Avengers and trying to put the team back together as they fight AIM.

And then we get to the one section of the game that all the Steve/Tony fans love. You know the part I mean. This part right here. The Avengers have discovered that AIM has a base on a satellite and Tony flies up there to check it out; when he gets there, he discovers that this is a secret project called Ambrosia and that they are holding some kind of prisoner whose blood contains regenerative properties, which they are stealing for evil science purposes. He assumes that this is some random Inhuman he doesn't know, because, hey, the only guy he knew with a healing factor drowned in San Francisco Bay five years ago. But he's going to rescue this prisoner anyway, because he's nice like that.

Then, of course, Tony discovers that their prisoner is Steve, who has been alive this whole time. Tony is choking back tears and telling Steve how he thought Steve was dead and there is a deeply touching hug and, yes, this is the best part of this game. (Then on their way home they think they might not make it and Tony asks Steve if he has any last confessions he wants to tell him about. Steve does not take him up on this, alas.)

So, like many Steve/Tony fans, I had seen the relevant cutscenes without playing the game. I did not know exactly where in the game they were from. I assumed that they were, like, 50% of the way through, at most. Like, once you'd gotten Captain America back, the Avengers were now back together and now you could start the real game, right? Right?

Nope. This happens at 85% of the way through the game. You get Steve back and the game tells you to start preparing for the final mission against AIM. That's it. Time for the end of the game!

So, you know, that's a surprise. I was just kind of assuming that a game called Marvel's Avengers would be about the Avengers as a group for the majority of the game, as opposed to putting them together and then ending it. Although I guess that's also the plot of the 2012 Avengers movie, so I probably should not have been that surprised.

Anyway. We have not finished this game quite yet but I assume it's going to involve punching trash mobs of robots and then MODOK here in the remains of a live-services game that failed to make enough money. It's a shame that the actual gameplay is so aggressively meh because, man, that one Steve/Tony part is amazing. There are enough pieces here that could maybe have been part of a good single-player game, but that's not the game they made.