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Today I stumbled across Halo Forward Unto Dawn, an entirely adequate but uninspired one hour promotional movie that came out for Halo 4 a few years ago. I realized I was enjoying the nostalgia of the characters and their roles in the Halo universe (Surprise Covenant! Glowing Energy Swords! Invisibility! Everything's blocky! Master Chief! The insane sniper pistol! Driving a Warthog!), far more than the actual screenplay which was pretty droll. It reminded me of playing the original Halo, alone at home on a rainy day.

Mind you this was early 2000s, before everyone and their pet hamster had internet, and so I had no clue what to expect from Halo: CE - no large review sites, no Let's Plays, no leaks, no E3 reveals, no months of hype revealing every character and their pet alien hamster's voice lines (*cough* Mass Effect Andromeda *cough*), just positive word of mouth. The game itself came out in 2001(!) (it blows my mind how far back that is now).

It was a weekend when I finally got my hands on it, I'd planned to get as far along in the story as I could, so I'd started after lunch. Mind you, this was from the days when people played FPSes for the story. It was around 8 PM, and night had fallen. The moon was obscured behind dark and furious rainclouds, and power had been fluctuating that day (due to the rain). I was alone in the PC room, itself rather small and squarish, accompanied only by the sounds of Cortana, rarely Master Chief, and mostly Halo's chorus of guns, grunts, and orchestra, layered over the sound of fervid raindrops from real life.

In that setup and frame of mind, after levels of fighting the Covenant across the scenic and varied vistas of the Halo, I went into that one level. The level itself was fairly dark, was set in a jungle, and had lots of ambient thunder. Cortana had been left behind in an earlier level, and Chief's Voice Actor was being paid by the word, so there was no chatter either. Into all that, came the Flood. A brilliantly alien (unlike the humans with body suit and skin and back problems style of the Covenant) new faction that was nowhere on the CD case (the only marketing around those days) crawled out of those vents, and into my moments of gaming history. Their arrival changed the story from great to exceptional, and largely due to the fact that their presence (and impact on the story) was entirely unexpected.

That's what I really miss now, those moments of unspoiled surprise that are so rare in modern media *cough* Mass Effect Andromeda *cough.* (I really should get a lozenge for that cough). The word for it is serendipity, the feeling of happiness in finding something not sought, like new and interesting words in a dictionary you came across while flipping through the pages for the one you were looking for. In a digital age, where you find exactly what you want when you want it, serendipity is perhaps one of the biggest things we've lost yet not realized we've lost. The gray, the in-between, the unpolarized. We've lost it, and I just really wanted to share that thought. Thanks for reading.

Having had more time to think about this, we haven't lost it. We've engineered it, which is worse.

Every time you refresh a feed or reload a website, you're looking for it. You're still looking for something you'll like but haven't sought, and now you wait for it to come to you instead of going out and seeking it.

We've engineered something that looks like serendipity, scaled it up to an industrial level, slapped a price tag on it, and called it a day.

Building a time machine isn't off the table yet.

When I was a little kid, I always loved staring at the empty spaces in Zelda inventories and wondering what might be there. I feel like Wind Waker sort of ruined that feeling since all the green sections were procedurally revealed and put into distinct catergories instead of vague stripes, but then again, I played it when I started to grow out of that phase of "Every game could be an endless world of infinite mystery!" into "Nah, a game designer wouldn't do that...". Granted, the ocean really did feel endless, and made me want to play the shit out of it all the time just to find all the mysterious quirky islands and submarines that, I felt, could have literally anything in them! Even new enemies! I wasn't even dissappointed when I only got a bottle and a bunch of deaths, because I hadn't fought ghosts or spikeballs in dungeons before, so it was still a novelty.

Skyrim sort of gave me that feeling in exploration, but there's a very clear pattern or landmarks and paths for you to go down, you never truly feel like you're discovering something, and due to carryweight, curiousity in a passing hole becomes a time-expensive chore that you have to make room for rather than an effortless satisfaction.

I think one game that sort of captures that feeling of wonder, (for me, anyway) is that one sci-fi indie game that some guy's been working on for years. It takes place on various platforms with all these different vehicles, and the only thing you ever really do in the game is mine ore, maybe fight a cyclops-octopus-drone thing. There's guns and spooky areas, but no real enemies or other people. It's not well-documented aside from a bunch of first-glances and update summaries. They have a very enthusiastic dev who's been building the universe since he was a wee lad, and iirc he likes questions, but if the answers are in the game, he prefers if you go and find them instead. I utterly forgot what it was called, but I know it's somewhere in the games folder, there's loads and loads of little nooks and crannies to explore, and I just love it, but I stopped playing a while ago because my computer stopped handling it.

Yeah, getting game-designer savvy really ruins a lot of the mystery in gaming when you figure out their tells. I hear Breath of the Wild did however make significant progress in bringing the exploration magic back. I'm on the Witness and while I'm no puzzle fan by far, I can appreciate the feeling of discovery in figuring out just how or why a puzzle worked.

I never got into Skyrim, for some reason after spending an hour on my character I just lost interest at how faded the colors looked in Alduin's attack (I loved the Shivering Isles of Oblivion, in comparison).

Now you've got me really interested in what game that was. Was it 2D or 3D?

3D. The protagonist is an adorable kangaroo-lion-frog alien chick with jiggle physics (Because of course) and one of the early planes is a little egg-pod with wings that moves by repeatedly firing off explosions behind it. It is notoriously hard to control, (At least, when you try to turn it with any sense of urgency) like the air-based version of the buggy from Mass Effect.

I think it started with a T. You might find it in a bunch of "Top 10 Interesting/Weird Indie Games" lists from like 2014-15, since being confronted with it multiple times is pretty much how I discovered it.

ZERAHYPT! I REMEMBER NOW! IT'S CALLED ZERAHYPT!

I FOUND IT!

I have no idea why I said the protagonist was any of those things. I was probably confusing her with a similarly-colored deviantart OC that's also in a 3D game, but I'm sure I don't remember what that other one is. I do know that everything else I was referring to was in this, though. Edit: Apparently there's other people, but there's a 50% or less chance that they'll spawn. There's a chance that you will either have a very populous or very lonely journey, or somewhere in the middle. It's all part of the mystery.