Clair Obscure's story is fantastic. Rich, dense, with memorable characters and an impressive narrative arc. It has a plot twist on the level of the best I've seen in any medium, emotional moments, philosophical reflections, and an artistic tension that sustains the entire game. If it were a film, it would be an obvious Oscar contender.
And that's where the problem starts.
Because it's a game, Clair Obscure has a turn-based battle system. You walk through a scene, approach an enemy, and transition to a specific combat screen, where you wait for the enemy's attack, attack, wait, attack, and so on. When it ends, a battle results screen appears and you return to the world.
I'm not a fan of turn-based combat. To me, that transition completely breaks immersion. You're walking through a world, getting to know that universe, and suddenly you're pulled into an entirely different logic — mechanical and strategic. At that moment you remember you're playing a game, and you stop feeling like you're living that story.
I don't have anything against that in itself. But for me, the most valuable moments in video games are precisely those where you forget you're playing a game. When you walk through a scene long enough, without interruptions, and that world starts to actually exist in your head. Turn-based combat makes that state impossible.
The environments, for their part, are stunning artistically, but labyrinthine and often confusing. Corridors that look the same, no clear direction. I got lost constantly.
The game also uses a parry system, which in other contexts I find a brilliant mechanic. In Sekiro, for example, it works beautifully. In Clair Obscure, it ends up becoming mechanical in the negative sense: you learn an enemy's attack pattern, repeat the parry in the same windows, and the battle drags on through that predictable repetition.
The result is fatigue. You nail it, nail it, nail it, and at some point you miss out of exhaustion and take heavy damage. Boss battles are long. Easy mode widens the parry window, but doesn't eliminate the obligation to engage with combat — to think about strategies, to actively participate in something you simply don't want to be doing.
And I'm someone who doesn't do optional content when I'm not enjoying a game. If I'm not having fun, I won't do side quests, I won't grind, I won't level up just to get stronger. Games are already long enough in the main story. Anything beyond that is time I neither have nor want to spend.
This is the core knot. To experience an incredible story — poetic, philosophical, with unforgettable characters and one of the best plot twists ever told in video games — I'm forced to go through a combat system that simply isn't for me.
Who gets to see this story? Only people who have patience for turn-based combat, time for long battles, willingness to learn mechanics, and a taste for that style of game. That's millions of people, and the commercial success proves it. But it's a fraction of the audience that could — and should — have access to this work.
I bought the game on PlayStation 5, but had to play it on PC to use a trainer — modifiers that let you change game parameters. I set it so my attacks would defeat any enemy in one hit and so my character was invulnerable.
I essentially ignored the turn-based combat and went straight to what mattered: the world, the characters, the dialogue, the cutscenes, the story.
The result was a masterpiece.
Playing that way, Clair Obscure is among the best games ever made for me. One of the best stories ever told in video games. When everything is revealed, when you understand what's really happening, it's jaw-dropping. It's one of those works that reminds you what games are capable of in ways no other medium can match.
I just needed to work around the game to get there.
This is the ambiguity I'm left with. It's not a critique of the design itself — turn-based combat is a legitimate choice with a large audience and a respected tradition. The problem is systemic: excellent games remain restricted to people who fit exactly the profile of someone who enjoys all their mechanics.
A film can be watched by anyone. A book too. A game has an entry barrier that is the mechanic itself, and when that mechanic isn't for you, you miss the work entirely.
Clair Obscure should be seen by everyone. The story it tells deserves that. But most people will never know what they missed.
]]>"That by organizing myself I can disorganize" — Chico Science, Da Lama ao Caos
This post is about entropy, thermodynamics, and life. More specifically, about why life makes sense within the laws of physics, and what that says about the role we occupy in the universe. It's not about how life began. I finally understood a concept I've wanted to understand for a long time. And the best way to explain it starts with a mountain.
Imagine a mountain with rainfall. Drops fall randomly across the surface and begin to flow downward. At first, the path is almost random. But the mountain has irregularities: small cracks, depressions, variations in the terrain. And the drops that pass through these irregularities go a little deeper than the others.
Over time, these irregularities start to concentrate more water. And more water passing through the same spot means more erosion, which deepens the channel further, attracting even more water. It's a self-feeding cycle.
Given enough time, this process forms streams. Streams form rivers. Rivers form waterfalls. A waterfall is a complex, structured, efficient system. But there was no design behind it. No intention. Just probability, physics, and time.
The key point is that the waterfall dissipates energy much faster than the dispersed drops did. The system grew more complex, and the most efficient arrangements were the ones that persisted.
Take that same logic and apply it to life.
The Sun hurls enormous energy at planet Earth in the form of photons. That energy falls everywhere in a relatively random way. But just as with the mountain, there are irregularities. In the case of primordial Earth, these were molecular combinations that, by chance, could absorb and dissipate that energy a little faster than the surrounding environment.
These molecules were like the first cracks in the mountain.
Let me be clear from the start: this text is not about the origin of life. I don't know how life began, and no one knows for certain. The origin of life is one of the most open questions in science, and any definitive statement about it would be dishonest. There are serious hypotheses, like the RNA world hypothesis, but hypotheses are not answers.
What interests me here is something else: not the exact how, but the thermodynamic why. Why would a universe that tends toward disorder produce something as ordered as life? That question has a more solid answer, and that's what this text is about.
The same dynamics as the mountain come into play: molecules that dissipate energy more efficiently tend to persist longer. The surrounding environment becomes shaped by their presence, just as terrain is shaped by water. Over time, more complex structures emerge — reactions that sustain other reactions, metabolism, ways of copying information. Not because there was a plan. But because the arrangements that work better are the ones that survive longer.
The conclusion that struck me is this: life is not an exception to the laws of physics. It is a consequence of them.
The universe inevitably moves toward increasing entropy — the tendency of everything to become disordered. The Sun sends organized energy to Earth. And all that energy has to go somewhere: in the long run, 100% of what comes in goes out — Earth radiates back to space exactly what it absorbs, just in the form of diffuse heat, infrared radiation, disorder. If it weren't so, the planet would heat up forever. Earth doesn't store energy. It's a transit system. And the most efficient form this system found, over billions of years, was to create increasingly complex structures that take that organized energy and transform it into disorder as quickly as possible.
Life is a waterfall made of chemistry.
And the waterfall is more efficient than dispersed drops. That's why it persisted.
What struck me was the natural continuation of this idea: human intelligence follows the same pattern.
We build things. Cities, industries, computers, airplanes, servers. All of this consumes energy massively and transforms it into heat and disorder. Human civilization, at a planetary scale, dissipates volumes of energy that no other biological structure has come close to.
The complexity of civilization is not something separate from nature. It is the continuation of the same process that began with the first molecular cracks on primordial Earth.
The waterfall grew more complex. Much more.
There's something disturbing and at the same time liberating in this view.
We tend to think we exist for some greater purpose, for a special reason. And in a certain sense there is one: from the universe's point of view, we are one of the most elegant solutions physics has found to accelerate energy dissipation. We are good at what we do. Exceptionally good.
But what we concretely do for the universe is increase disorder faster.
That sounds nihilistic on the surface. But I think differently: it means that complexity, consciousness, intelligence — none of these are unlikely accidents in a meaningless story. They are a result consistent with a universe that tends toward entropy and that, over time, favors increasingly sophisticated forms of dissipating energy.
You are not an accident. You are the most recent solution to a very old problem.
]]>Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a development practice where you write tests before writing the code. The cycle is simple: write a failing test, implement the minimum code to make it pass, refactor. Repeated in a loop, this ensures the code does exactly what was specified.
A lot of people use AI like this: send the finished class and ask it to generate tests.
The problem is that the model is just completing a token puzzle. It generates tests that match the existing code, not necessarily the correct behavior.
For the model, it's not really understanding the system. It's just trying to predict the next likely token. So the test ends up being just a logical continuation of the code.
What worked for me was inverting this using TDD.
At this point the agent has only one clear goal: make the tests pass.
It tries, fails, tries again, in a loop, until it succeeds.
This works because tests are deterministic. For the same code, the result will always be the same.
Agents are not deterministic. There is randomness, there is hallucination, and we don't have full control over what the model will generate.
So everything we can build to contain that behavior helps.
Tests end up being exactly that: a kind of cage to control the chaotic behavior of agents.
I've used this approach in critical projects where bugs simply weren't an option. The flow was: first have the agent create a test that actually breaks and reproduces the problem. Only then ask it to fix it.
Because if you just ask the AI to "fix the bug," it might simply invent a solution and claim it worked.
But tests don't lie.
Tests create a forced feedback loop.
In the world of AI agents, TDD has gone from being an optional good practice to being practically mandatory.
With AI-generated code, we saw a boom in automated tests. That made a big difference: code without tests lost value, because generating tests no longer costs anything. But we can go a level higher. Instead of generating tests for code, we generate tests for requirements. That's TDD, and it's the next step.
That's how it was with the first computer, wanting to discover what it was capable of. That's how it was with the internet, which opened up an entire universe of possibilities. And that's how I got to virtual reality.
Having a Meta Quest 2 was one of the most memorable experiences I've had with technology. Not only for what the device offered, but for what it meant to show it to people.
I created a routine. I'd have friends over, explain how to put the headset on, adjust the lenses, and watch the moment they realized they were inside a three-dimensional environment. Then I'd show them how the motion-sensing controllers worked for picking up and interacting with objects in that universe. A few simple games to warm up.
And then came Half-Life: Alyx.
Running on the computer, with more powerful hardware and far more realistic graphics, it was the final shock. Each person reacted differently, but they all left impressed. Watching that reaction was part of the experience.
Half-Life: Alyx is fantastic. It shows what's possible when you genuinely invest in virtual reality: faithful graphics, a rich environment, total immersion. It's proof of what the technology is capable of.
But it's practically the only truly meaningful experience I had in VR. The rest of the available games seem more like tech demos — demonstrations of what could be possible in the future — than finished products.
And the reason is simple: virtual reality is a niche market. No major company is going to risk a AAA game budget for a small installed base. Today, a high-budget game already needs to sell millions of copies to be profitable. A VR game needs to do that with a fraction of the audience. Valve's financial data is private, but it's speculated that revenue from cosmetic items in Team Fortress 2 over the years surpasses what Half-Life: Alyx generated in sales.
It's a cycle that's hard to break.
The only reason I had access to all of this was Meta's decision to invest billions per year in virtual reality, accumulating loss after loss. It was a bold, almost irrational bet from a financial standpoint, but it pushed the technology forward and made the headsets accessible.
I had the Meta Quest 2. Then the Meta Quest 3.
And now that cycle has come to an end. Meta canceled AAA game studios that were in development, drastically reduced VR investments, and shifted focus. It was by far the largest individual investor in the space, though Sony with the PSVR2 and Apple with the Vision Pro also bet on the sector. It's worth noting that Meta's original bet wasn't just about games: it was about transforming VR into a social platform, with work meetings and socializing in virtual environments. That project failed rather publicly, and the legless avatars became a meme. With Meta stepping back from center stage, the pace of evolution will slow considerably.
The party is over, at least for now.
I never believed virtual reality would replace the smartphone as an everyday device. The disconnection from the real environment is too great for something used all day. If that became the standard, people would essentially be living in a Matrix.
I always saw VR as something for playing video games: you put the headset on at a certain time of day, play, take it off, and go back to normal life. Intentional, punctual, separate.
What convinces me more as a phone replacement is augmented reality and mixed reality. You keep seeing the real world, but with virtual elements overlaid. I remember doing the dishes with the Meta Quest 3 and opening a giant YouTube screen floating above the sink, with my hands free, able to position the screen wherever I wanted. That felt like the real future.
The problem with current headsets is physical: they're heavy on the face, they tire the eyes, they dry out the eyes. And there's another factor that stops many people even before that: motion sickness. A significant portion of people can't use VR for more than a few minutes without feeling nauseous. It's a real physiological limitation that restricts the audience in ways that no software update easily fixes. The resolution still isn't sufficient for extended use. The technology is on the right track, but it hasn't gotten there yet.
And that's why the most viable bet seems to be glasses. Meta is going in that direction with the Ray-Ban with integrated camera, the Meta Ray-Ban Display that projects information directly into your field of vision, and AI integration to understand the surrounding environment and answer questions in real time.
That's the path to mass adoption. It's a product people can use in daily life without sacrificing comfort. Apple also has a different vision with the Vision Pro, focused on productivity and media consumption, but at a price of $3,499, which shows the technology is still far from being accessible to most people. Immersive virtual reality will have to wait a bit longer.
I'm very glad to have lived through this. To have had that taste of the future, to know that the experience with Half-Life: Alyx is legitimate, that what it promises is real. When VR glasses become cheap, lightweight, and solve today's problems, it will be impossible not to dominate the market. Everyone will want one.
But we're still a long way from that.
At the same time, I have an ambivalence about glasses for constant use. One of the most valuable things in life is precisely being able to put down your phone and live in the real world. Disconnecting from screens, resting your eyes, resting your mind. The phone already took a lot of that from us. Glasses glued to your face all day seems like a step in the wrong direction for health and quality of life.
It's a fantastic technology. But I hope we know how to use it with more balance than we used the smartphone.
]]>To understand what DeepMind is doing, it's worth recalling the context. When IBM created Deep Blue to play chess against Kasparov, the idea was simple: prove that a computer can beat the greatest player in the world. Chess was synonymous with intelligence, so a computer champion would, by extension, be an intelligent machine.
It worked. It was a milestone. The media covered it intensely, and the world was impressed. But a more precise analysis reveals that it was, essentially, computational brute force: hundreds of millions of positions per second, evaluating many moves ahead to decide the next one. The computer wasn't thinking — it was calculating faster than any human could.
Today we have engines like Stockfish that simply destroy the best players in the world. But the method is the same.
Go is different. The board is larger, the pieces are just black and white, and the number of possible games is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. No computer, no matter how fast, can simply calculate everything.
To win at Go, DeepMind needed a different approach: artificial neural networks, the Deep Neural Networks. Instead of analyzing all possibilities, the model is trained on an enormous volume of games and learns to recognize patterns, to generalize. It doesn't need to see everything: it learns to estimate what is probably best and follows that path.
The result was AlphaGo, which defeated one of the world's greatest Go players, South Korean Lee Sedol. And that mattered in a way that goes beyond technology.
Go is part of East Asian culture in a profound way. In China, it's included among the "Four Arts" of the classical scholar, alongside music, calligraphy, and painting. In Korea and Japan, it carries similar cultural weight. In all these countries, mastery of Go has always been associated with intelligence and human capability. Unlike chess, where defeat to a machine was already expected after Deep Blue, the fall in Go was visceral. People were moved. There was a psychological, philosophical, and cultural dimension to that moment.
DeepMind's previous documentary, about AlphaGo, captures this very well. It is, in my opinion, more emotionally moving than The Thinking Game, but The Thinking Game brings something far more important.
There is something greater happening when AI begins to question what makes us special. We've been through this before: when humanity discovered that Earth was not the center of the solar system, nor of the galaxy, nor of the universe, it profoundly shook the perception we had of ourselves. Questioning the exclusivity of human intelligence is one more step in that direction — a lesson in humility we are still learning to process.
The Thinking Game documents AlphaFold, which I consider the greatest practical achievement of artificial intelligence so far.
For 50 years, scientists around the world invested time, money, and study trying to solve the protein folding problem: how does a sequence of amino acids transform into a specific three-dimensional structure? It was an open scientific problem, a collective effort without a solution in sight.
Humanity could discover a few proteins per year, at great cost and effort. AlphaFold not only solved the problem, but went further: it mapped and made available 200 million proteins to the entire scientific community. It simply ran and discovered all possible patterns in nature.
For that, the work earned the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It's deserved.
The question people always ask about AI is: is it just interpolating training data, or is it capable of solving genuinely new problems?
It's not the same as training a model on a quiz with questions and answers and then asking about the same quiz. When AI manages to solve a problem that no one has solved before — like protein folding — the conversation changes completely.
And the doors AlphaFold opened are enormous: drug development, solutions for diseases, possible answers to global warming, even ways to destroy the plastic we've accumulated on the planet. These are concrete possibilities, not abstractions.
The Thinking Game is an important documentary for understanding the moment we're living in. It's hopeful, perhaps overly hopeful at times, with a sense that something absurd and transformative is about to happen. That part is more abstract and without many solid conclusions.
The question of general AI — whether we're close or far, whether it will happen in 30 years or a thousand years or never — remains without an answer. It's too complicated for any honest prediction.
But AlphaFold is real. It's useful. It's new. It did something that science couldn't do on its own, and DeepMind had the generosity to release everything to the world.
That's what matters most in the documentary.
]]>If I claim something and I'm not sure, I'll turn to research. And on the internet there are more and less reliable sources for that.
Google Scholar, for example, lets you find and access scientific articles, though many are behind paywalls and require institutional access or payment. Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopedia, built collectively and not-for-profit. It has errors — people make mistakes — but the collective effort tends to be far more accurate than what circulates on social media like Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp groups, where a simple search will often reveal that what you just read is an outright falsehood.
The Internet Archive, with its Wayback Machine, is another useful resource: it lets you see older versions of web pages, which helps verify whether information was altered or simply deleted.
Wikipedia is also not a final source. It's an aggregator: you read the article to understand the subject and then, from the references, go to the original source of the information. That path to the source is the step most people skip.
Before the internet, this research would have been done in a library: going to the subject's category, picking up a classic book in the field, consulting the index. But a library is physical. You might be in a city that doesn't have a large library, or no library at all. The internet, for better or worse, democratized access to information in a way humanity had never experienced before.
The question is always the same, regardless of the medium: critical thinking. Any information you consume, whether in a book, in a library, or on the internet, can be false. More reliable sources exist, and it's important to know how to distinguish them.
It's also worth remembering that social networks are not neutral in this process. Algorithms were designed to maximize engagement, and what engages most is what already confirms what you believe. The result is echo chambers: environments where you consume more and more of what you already agree with, without real contact with different perspectives or information that contradicts your beliefs.
Even scientific articles need to be treated with care. A single article asserting something is not enough. Other researchers, in other parts of the world, need to try to reproduce the same conditions and obtain the same results. That is the great difficulty and at the same time the great strength of science: you only validate something through evidence, tests, and hypotheses that withstand repetition.
And the mechanism fails more often than imagined. There is a real replication crisis, especially in areas like psychology and nutrition, where a significant portion of published studies cannot be reproduced by other researchers. Science has the right process, but it is not immune to errors, publication pressures, and biases.
Science is not perfect. It is not complete. It doesn't know everything about the universe and isn't right about everything. But I believe it is the most efficient thinking mechanism that human beings have ever created for the pursuit of truths.
And there's a practical way to verify that: if I use truths from physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, I can build buildings, bridges, cars, computers, cell phones, spacecraft. What better proves that the foundation is solid than being able to build something that actually works with it? People use cell phones and the internet all the time. All of this is based on the laws of physics. If those laws were completely wrong, how would we be capable of building something so absurdly complex?
If I claim that someone entered my house and stole something, my testimony alone is not sufficient. I could be lying. What strengthens the claim is evidence: street camera footage, internal cameras, material traces the person left behind. Testimonies from other people. Evidence that goes beyond my word.
Testimony alone is not enough. Material and independent evidence is what sustains a truth.
Here comes the point I find most interesting: truth is not that important in most of everyday life.
I'm not talking about lying out of bad faith or as an unethical act. I'm talking about the truth of facts, of everyday statements.
Our brain is not reliable at retrieving memories. It fills in gaps that aren't there, distorts, creates entire memories without us noticing. When you're at a table with friends remembering something funny that happened in the past, the version you tell probably isn't exactly how it happened. But no one is seeking precision. They're seeking connection, fun, belonging.
Seeking precision in truth in every social conversation is simply exhausting and unnecessary. And the person who does that is the bore at the party. The most difficult person to put up with at a barbecue, in a chat, at a family gathering.
I saw a study showing that people choose their political ideologies far more by group identity than by the pursuit of truth. Belonging to a group, wearing a team jersey, having a collective identity: that is a human need. And that need frequently overrides the search for facts. In politics, validating your ideology ends up being more important than verifying whether what you're asserting is real.
This connects to confirmation bias: the tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms what we already believe. It's not something we do consciously. The brain does it on its own, constantly. And a curious detail from research in this area is that people with higher cognitive ability are not necessarily more immune to this bias — they are just more skilled at rationalizing the position their group already defends.
On top of that, people trust personal stories much more than data. "My grandfather smoked his whole life and lived to 90" is emotionally more convincing than any public health statistic. Anecdotal evidence is powerful because it's concrete, human, and easy to visualize. Data is abstract. And that's why falsehoods with a good story behind them spread so easily.
People on the autism spectrum, for example, tend to have a stronger fixation on truth, on facts, on fixed rules. And precisely because of that, they often have a more difficult social life.
The practical conclusion is that truth is useful for building bridges, cell phones, and spacecraft, but in social life and at work it operates differently. At work, a lot comes from intuition, feeling, from what you think is probably right. There is no scientific rigor in everyday professional life. The goal is to create things that work and are useful.
There's something funny about the concern people have with LLMs, like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, and the question of hallucinations: when the model doesn't know the answer, it makes something up with great fluency and conviction. That's a legitimate and important concern.
But it's ironic, because for a long time I was concerned about truth while watching people around me — especially around politics — not being concerned about it at all. And now concern about truth emerges strongly when the subject is artificial intelligence.
In practice: if you have an uncle who believes in flat earth theory and conspiracy theories, that uncle may be less accurate than ChatGPT on a wide range of subjects. The model also makes mistakes and hallucinates, and when it doesn't know the answer it invents with considerable fluency.
An LLM only needs to lie less than most people to already be quite effective. And I think people lie a lot — not necessarily out of bad intention, but simply by not caring enough to validate what they're saying.
That's my relationship with truth.
]]>I've always been the kind of person who lives in the world of thoughts. The type sitting in a classroom, seemingly focused on the teacher, actually thinking about a million things that have nothing to do with the class. Distracted not from lack of interest, but from excess of thought. Head always full, always producing. The problem was that the real world never kept up with that pace.
Since childhood, creativity was always there. In games, in stories I invented, in projects I tried to assemble with whatever I had at hand.
I remember building a cardboard computer and trying to make it have screen changes through a roller I would spin. And when I bought a hot glue gun, I started building cities out of cardboard and styrofoam. Always trying to put the ideas in my head into the physical world. But the physical world has limits. Styrofoam costs money. You cut, paint, glue, and in the end you have a static city, with nothing dynamic about it.
The computer changed that.
With the computer, I could create my own universes. Dynamic, alive, interactive. At first, not knowing how to code, I used RPG Maker and more accessible tools, and I could actually create things: games, stories, mechanics. My head never stopped generating ideas.
But there was always a ceiling. When the idea required real programming, I'd hit a wall. I'd have to ask for help from someone who knew how, depending on another person to take the next step in my own creations.
Over time, I got a computer science degree and started working as a web developer. I learned object-oriented programming, learned how things really work. And I reached a point where I knew I could build anything — I just needed time.
Then the time disappeared.
Life filled up. There were a few hours left at night, sometimes already too tired to create anything. The flow of ideas stayed the same as always, but the time available to execute them shrank. There was also the need for leisure, social life, simply resting.
I even created a spreadsheet with all the project ideas I had, trying to evaluate where to start. But looking at that list, everything seemed time-consuming and laborious. Each item represented months, maybe years of work. And that was discouraging. Many ideas stayed exactly there, in that spreadsheet, going nowhere.
Then came the AI agents.
LLMs, ChatGPT, had already helped quite a bit with research, organizing ideas, studying. But they were never that efficient at programming itself, which is the tool I use to create things. What changed everything were the agents: Claude Code, Codex, and similar. They accelerated the process of building something and creating increasingly complex things in an absurd way.
And that is something unprecedented. Never in my entire life have I had ideas that could be put into practice and validated in real time. Now I have an idea, start building, see it work, and that generates new ideas, new possibilities, which come right back into the cycle immediately.
What AI agents gave me was something I had never had: execution at the same speed as thought.
My mind has always worked fast. Ideas appear, branch out, connect. The bottleneck was never thinking — it was transforming thought into something real. Every idea I ever had in my life had to go through a long funnel: learning what I didn't know, writing the code, debugging, iterating. Weeks, sometimes months, to validate whether something worked. In practice, most ideas died before getting there.
Now that funnel barely exists. I have an idea, start building, see it work, and that generates new ideas that come right back into the cycle immediately. The time between thinking and having something concrete in hand has dropped to minutes. Every day.
This is the first time in my life that the speed of creating keeps up with the speed of thinking. And that changes everything, because ideas that used to be unviable, that I would have discarded before even starting, are now simply possible.
It's a unique experience. And the feeling is that I'm barely getting started.
]]>On one hand, you realize you like things you never imagined you could like, precisely by making the effort to explore what's new. On the other, the variety is enormous: award-winning games, best-sellers, the most popular titles, with many criteria for discovering a game and wanting to access it. In the end, I didn't know exactly what I wanted. I think I matured a lot in this regard when I had a PlayStation 5, a Nintendo Switch, a Game Pass subscription, and a Meta Quest. At one point in my life, I had every platform.
With the Nintendo Switch, I went after Nintendo's great exclusives, the classics from the NES and SNES era. I started comparing those games with the PlayStation 4 and 5 ones, and with the PC games I'd been playing for longer. It was through that process that I began to understand what Skyrim meant to me.
I'm not sure whether Skyrim shaped my personal taste or whether my taste already existed and Skyrim was exactly what I needed to find. Creature and creator. The game has characteristics that seem intentional and others that perhaps aren't, and the unintentional ones work very well too.
Skyrim is an open-world exploration RPG, but casual and accessible. It simplifies systems that in other games of the genre are complex to the point of being intimidating.
When I played Baldur's Gate 3, one of the most award-winning RPGs in recent years, I felt like I would need to stop and study the systems before I could really play. There was a sense that I'd need to understand the rules of Dungeons & Dragons — not just the mechanics, but the entire lore and world — because right from the start the game presents you with an enormous amount of creatures, possibilities, and rules. The result is overload.
Skyrim is the opposite. The systems are simple, and even without fully understanding them, the difference is almost imperceptible. It's essentially a first-person action game where mistakes have a low cost. I started playing it knowing almost nothing about RPGs and did perfectly fine.
The interfaces are straightforward. The skill tree is accessed by looking at the star-filled sky inside the menu — intuitive and visually appealing. I can focus on being stealthy, a mage, a barbarian, or an archer, unlocking abilities as I gain experience. The inventory is a simple and transparent list that doesn't hide the game behind it. When I kill an enemy, I can take everything they're carrying: the sword, the clothes, anything.
In Skyrim, there's no class selection at the start. There's none of that obligation to research builds, watch videos, read guides to decide what kind of character to create and carry that decision throughout the game.
You choose a race and start playing. The class emerges naturally from what you do. I always created strange combinations: a mage with healing abilities who fought like a barbarian wielding an axe, resorting to fire magic when the axe didn't solve it, and to bow and arrow when I wanted a critical headshot on an enemy.
I simply did what I wanted, without barriers, obeying only my desire to have fun in that open and free world.
That freedom enormously reduces the mental load. Large RPGs like Mass Effect, Fallout, and Baldur's Gate itself prioritize choice and its impact: you can make a decision and an important character dies, and that changes the story. That is the essence of roleplaying — the radical freedom to decide. But that freedom carries weight.
In Skyrim, decisions rarely change much. That can be seen as a limitation of the genre, or simply something that was left out. But for me it's an enormous benefit: every time I open the game, I'm not anxious about the consequences of my choices. I can play tired, at night, with a head full after work, without fear of making an irreversible mistake and having to go back to a save.
Baldur's Gate requires me to be mentally prepared to play. Skyrim requires nothing beyond willingness.
Skyrim became a completely contemplative experience. A comfort game, a walking simulator. Everything it did — intentionally or not — made it more immersive. You walk through that world, see the sky, the stars at night, the forests, the caves, and keep going without much concern about systems.
Instead of spreadsheets of numbers, build combinations, and menus upon menus, you simply live in that world. Contemplate the views, fight skeletons in caves, move forward.
That's where I found my real taste in video games: games that relax me, that bring peace, comfort, and contemplation. That take me out of the chaos of the real world, the stress of work, the frustrations of life, and put me in a comfortable place.
Skyrim defines my personal taste in games.
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