I’m sort of dating someone.

2ish weeks ago my parents met another couple at a cocktail party and found out they had a single daughter about my age. In an extremely unsubtle attempt to set us up our families did an escape room together. Honestly, sex and dating have never been important to me. My longest relationship was a couple months long in high school, I went on maybe 3 or 4 dates in college. I went to this escape room thinking I’d make pleasantries for an hour, solve some puzzles and go home. But when I met her she was cute, and smart, and funny, and after we escaped she asked if I wanted to go with her to something else she was doing that day. We ended up spending the whole day together. And again the next weekend. I haven’t “officially” asked her out, or kissed her, or really acknowledged anything about what this is. But I have had so much fun with this badass trapeze-flying, skydiving, engineering, competitive dancing, just-so-cool woman that I can’t stop thinking about when I’ll see her next.

I’ve been playing the Elden Ring DLC, in these clouds all I see are fingers, so many fingers…

I understand the sentiment and I generally agree with you but I think I can make a case for Hades as an exception.

I picked up the first one in ea because I was thirsty for a new roguelike and some friends raved about it enough to me, and it was already a great game. The changes that came over the period I played were additive in the sense that they just opened more options in a game that already felt complete to me (mostly anyways, but more on that in a sec). But to defend it I can’t just say “oh well it felt like a finished game” there also needs to be a tangible benefit to playing it in early access. And there was! The early access versions of the game included meta banter between the narrator and Zagreus, little jokes about new things appearing or things that should be there but aren’t, references to the fact that pieces of the story’s scaffold were still being set up. It sounds small but it was just more of the wonderful character charm that oozes from every corner of that game and I actually kind of missed it a little bit once the full release came. Anyways I haven’t picked up Hades 2 yet (been making more of an effort to clear my backlog lately), but I’m thinking about it. And as far as the ostensible “point” of early access—community feedback and income to support development—Supergiant has given me ample reason to trust that they’ll make it worth it for me as a player if I don’t want to wait for the polished final product.