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thispatternismineI thought I'd give it a shot & get it out of my backlog, where it's sitting been for years, after being reminded by the PS5 remastered version. It occurred to me that it may have been an unwise purchase, considering I suck at both archery & stealth (which the game heavily involves) & I also have completionist/trophy hunter tendencies that could turn a more open-structured game into a series of step-by-step instructions. Plus crafting can feel like work when you're constantly juggling resources & barely managing (already get enough of that IRL).
So instead I decided take a more laidback approach. I set it to story mode & eschewed the guides in favour of simply exploring & figuring stuff out myself. Admittedly it works out as a strange definition of 'laidback', since I explore every little thing & do every random side quest & errand & farm resources. It's been working out pretty great. For instance, I found out you're meant to revisit the ruins as an adult buy literally stumbling into them while wandering around & seeing there were new areas you could open up, which felt way more fun than simply checking a guide that said to do that & then doing that. Even the crafting has been fun, because story mode means less pressure & I'm just using what I've gathered to make things.
(Technically I am checking guides for some collectables, but only because pretty early on I unlocked the maps to find a bunch of collectables, & while they're clearly marked, some of them - mainly the vantage points - are a nightmare figuring out how to get at, & it's frustrating knowing something is right there but in order to actually reach it you have to approach from a particular direction & turn the camera to a particular angle & if the stars are in alignment you can see the handholds to climb up... So having a couple of guides to the flowers, vantages, figures, & vessels saves me some frustration when I can't figure it out.)
I've got 61 hours of playtime & am pretty sure I'm ridiculously over-levelled, but I'm not even halfway through the main story.
