The Long Dim Under, 26th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Castor): The Gaming Desk wants you to know that since at least early February, maybe late January, we've been re-playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. We completed our first playthrough in September 2019, back in those idyllic post-retirement, pre-covid days. Almost five and a half years have passed since then, so we gave it another shot. Age-related forgetfulness helps keep the game seem fresh a second time, and besides, it beats buying a new game.

To make the game last even longer, I refused to use fast travel. I made myself walk - or ride a horse or a boat - to every location. It adds to the immersion and makes one more intimately familiar with the contours of the map and the countryside. It also added another strategic aspect to game play - if I need to go all the way over two mountain ranges just to complete a given quest, I ought to wait until I have other quest-related reasons to go all that distance instead of just flash-forwarding across the map and back via fast travel, oblivious to all the natural features and potential enemies in between the two points. 

So I played all of February and all of March and last Saturday finally defeated the oddly-named Hekatonchires, the final boss in the game. I noodled around a little bit for a day to clean up a few incomplete tasks and then yesterday started a New Game +, another complete playthrough but this time starting with all of the abilities and weapons I had accumulated during my first go-round. 

Is the game really that good? No, but it's as good a way as any for not thinking about the appalling current events, the eroding of our democracy, the crashing of the economy, and amerika's abandonment of its allies and strategic partners. It works very well for escapism and avoiding the news. Fighting Spartan and Athenian soldiers, wolves and bears, the occasional Cyclops, and the Hekatonchires (whatever that is) is far better and less stressful than watching Trump's tariffs destroy my IRA as ICE agents disappear people to El Salvador hell-holes and smarmy talking heads and pundits trying to gaslight the public insisting that everything's perfectly normal and alright.

I saw a very apt meme online today that said watching the current administration is like being tied to an armchair as a toddler plays with a loaded handgun. Escape to ancient Greece and the Peloponnesian War is far more preferable.