Dang it man! Foukaejevous! These games keep on bamboozling me!

Despite playing and greatly enjoying the Risen trilogy, I'm 5.5 years late to ELEX, and the sequel has already released. I'll never play ELEX II, but I thought I'd slam through ELEX in the time that's left. Once again, my expectations on how long it would take to play a game was wrong.

My plans to play Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Valhalla in the first half of the year were ruined when it took me 200 hours to finish with Odyssey. I anticipated it would take 40-50 hours to complete ELEX, which is how long I played each Risen game.

ELEX took TWICE AS LONG! This game is much bigger than any of the Risen series and ELEX consumed four weeks of dedicated play.

Holy hell it was brutal at the start. But developer Piranha Bytes did not fail to deliver what I wanted from this game: a deep, rewarding and janky hardcore open-world RPG that I can feel proud to have played to completion.

The game is extremely slow-paced, even compared to Risen. The start of the game is savagely difficult. The game does not have the standard open-world RPG design where enemy levels are conveniently low in the starting area and increase the further you go, or enemies are magically scaled to your level.

High-level and mid-level and low-level enemies are found throughout the whole map. I had to avoid most enemies for the first 30 hours. But by the end my character was an overpowered God among men, just as I knew he would be from playing Risen, Risen 2, and Risen 3. I love how it feels to finally slice through enemies that had dominated me for so long. And this power feels EARNED!

I don't have time to write anymore about ELEX! Now that the playthrough is finally done, I need to get started on Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII immediately!

[EDIT: It censored a word I literally made up in the first paragraph. It may have been based on a bark from a unit in an RTS I played in the early 2000s, but it's definitely not a real word. It doesn't have a spelling, so I changed the made up spelling to something else.]