Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor - 10/20 hours

I had a pretty amazing moment while playing this game. I was fighting a large gang of orcs when suddenly control cut away and there was a brief cutscene introducing an orc captain, and my first thought upon seeing this was, "oh great, not you again." It was an orc who had previously killed me, got promoted to captain, killed me again when I tried to get revenge, and got a power boost, and who I eventually tracked down and assassinated - only he survived the attempt, got a metal plate in his head, and then showed up randomly at an otherwise unremarkable brawl. And I recognized him by his name and appearance.

In that instant, I had a genuine emotional reaction to the game. Not like with Star Wars Starfighter, where I was frustrated with the game itself, and not like in any number of other games, where the prearranged story layer does all of the emotional heavy lifting, but rather I was engaging with an actual game mechanic. The system for generating recurring adversaries caused me to have an authentic and spontaneous feeling that mirrored what my game character was currently going through. The nemesis system is, like, 75% of the reason I bought the game, and I still wasn't expecting it to hit me like that. That single moment was probably worth the four dollars all by itself.

The only thing that is even remotely comparable is the last scene in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, but I almost think that shouldn't count, because the whole game as clearly building up to that moment. This was incidental and part of the general fabric of the game. It didn't pack quite the emotional punch, but it does make the game world seem that much more alive.

Unfortunately, I've gotten a lot more efficient at killing orcs in the last 8 hours, so there's only been a couple of times where I've had that same sense of recognition, but it's been great every time.

I've only advanced something like two missions into the story, having gotten distracted by collectibles, side missions, and all that other open-world rigamarole, so I'm not ready to talk about it just yet. A couple of observations, though - Gollum is here, which fits the timeline (I think), but kind of makes the story feel a little fan-fictiony, and both of the story missions I've played so far have been semi-tutorials, which have explained and unlocked new mechanics, so maybe I shouldn't have waited so long to play them. Oops.

But I am officially out of side-quests for now. I'm pretty sure there's a second area that contains precisely as many as I've played so far (because in my progress screen, all the different collectible types and major side missions are sitting at 50%), but I won't know for sure until I complete more main missions. I'm also looking forward to unlocking the rest of the mechanics. I've gathered that it will be possible, later, to mind control some of the orcs and pit them against each other for some ill-defined profit. That ought to be fun.