TWO "K/NIGHTS": ACHIEVEMENTS IN "COMPREHENSIVE" GAMING: FORTNITE AND HOLLOW KNIGHT

FORTNITE

• I hate the aesthetics. "It's the ugliest game ever"- my ex 
• tactics
• fortnite is one of the few games in my experience which takes a comprehensive view of tactics. I mean there are territories. you plan and search and decide what your encounters are going to be like. or you get spotted first, if you didn't do enough reconnaissance. 
• if you play squads it's exponentially tacticaller bc mics
• my brain enjoys this sort of comprehensive planning which accounts for long-range decisions. everyone's gathering materials which they'll likely never use but they need them in case they make it to the end game. you think ahead to your future15-20 mins ahead. you have to think about sightlines. you can spend time gathering your kit, getting resources, getting a positional advantage, finding targets, there's a ticking clock, you have to balance many real long-range problems at once.
• there's several different playstyles available so there's always a sense of competing psychological contracts
• nerves
• it's incredible how much making your opponent panic while you don't is a winner in this game
• majorly bc there's so much space between encounters, far more than you'd expect in a deathmatch game, it's an attitude that I saw first with Day Z that has been refined and cartoonified
• servers
• were good when I started, now they're still good enough, a little worrying tho
• sniping
• EXCELLENTLY balanced bc of bullet drop
• it takes a while for the bullet of death to reach you if you're far away and it drops in a way that's hard to predict so it's flat out chancey to take a shot at somebody and if you do you're pretty much giving away your location
• but if you get a headshot with the blue one it's a kill. so it's like playing the lottery resting on your nerves and skill
• you can be mostly secure vs. sniping at distance if you take some precautions but not 100%
• it gives you something to do to pass the time as the storm closes
• finally it's also a great stealth mechanic.
• like a popularly imagined sniper if you're stealthy (at long range!) and patient you can find a target and get a easy or not-so-easy chance at a one shot kill
• if you fuck up tho you've exposed your location to a bunch of people
• so it rewards patience, true stealth, and having the nerves and skill to pull it off :)
• it's a game where I hate the aesthetics but I can't deny it's effectiveness

HOLLOW KNIGHT

I've been saying the word "comprehensive" a lot lately. HK is comprehensive. It feels like a total package, the developers accounted for everything and really had the opportunity to make the crowning metroidvania xperiene they wanted.

• It's a generously big map populated by unique and uniquely behaving enemies and environmental challenges per territory with quite generous portions of environmental assets + storytelling per territory as well as secrets and music tracks
• the boss battles are I'm sure the best in total in any game I've ever played: there are so many of them they are all unique each one has enough mechanics. they're challenging but beatable, "fair" and sometimes tightly scored. good rewards too
• the storytelling is environmental and yeah set in the post-apocalypse but doesn't reveal too much. The survivors don't say much. There's a bunch of elements that reward deduction and flavor the whole experience. You get the sense of a large world with some real dark stuff.
• Something about bugworld makes it simultaneously ok that there are corpses everywhere but still fundamentally creepy. Very watership down
• I still don't like the aesthetics! I don't like the voice acting, I don't like a lot of the music, but they got me with the creepier vibes in the deeper territories and the overall work that's been put into the game: all the mechanics are tight, there's really more than enough stuff to find, yadda yadda

I think with both these games I got the sense of developers working really hard while having the funding to take a lot of care with their product. there is so much and it is so generous and well-apportioned. you sit with the other nervous teens at the feast and everybody eats