It’s 4pm. I’ve just wrapped up a long-feeling work day and I’m looking forward to a relaxing afternoon and evening. The air has finally started to get cold here by the sea so I decided to have a warm shower to clear the settling frost from both my brain and body. The steam is nice and I feel revitalised. But upon re-entering my bedroom I find that in the short 10 minutes I was gone the sun has set and darkness now covers the street outside my window. The lack of sunlight so early in the day is stifling and my warmth is swiftly drawn away. My evening plans of continuing Metaphor: Refantazio, or any game for that matter, suddenly feel insurmountable - I can’t seem to get excited about playing anything here in the dark.
The end of daylight saving time usually does this to me. I find the transition to shorter, darker days difficult to adjust to and it has a negative impact on my attempts to enjoy the video games I love or be creative in the ways I normally find easy - painting, drawing or writing. My usual approach to combating this seasonal shift is playing video games. October usually brings with it a whole list of new titles to dig into. Last year’s Alan Wake 2 was so infatuated with the dark that I barely noticed when it came for me too. I got to experience some of that this year, as its Lake House DLC offered a brief, evening long reprieve. The irony is definitely not lost on me - finding comfort from the encroaching winter in dark and shadowy horror games, but whatever works, right?
Metaphor: Refantazio has been great too, but while I’ve been really enjoying its story, I found that type of engagement and investment a little too much to stick with and slowly drifted away from picking it back up. I find myself drifting away from the reading and that isn’t the best way to enjoy that game by any stretch. It feels a lot like burnout. This is the first year in a long while where I’ve been actively tracking how many games I’ve played - partly for writing about them but mostly for my own curiosity - and I think it caused me to immediately jump from game to game. The feeling of needing to move on straight away, of needing to add something else to that list, set in quite quickly and maybe I became more focused on that than I meant to.
Separating myself from that list helped at first - finding other ways to spend my time and finding different ways to engage with the games I’m playing other than just how many I’ve finished this year. I try to make the most of the waning daylight hours at the same time - going for a stroll everyday to get away from my desk really helps - and sharing Pokemon: Go with my partner has been a big help. Exploring my local area and taking part in this year’s Halloween event brought back a little of the excitement I usually feel for this season. Being outside and seeing all the other people returning home from their work days also reminds me that the day isn’t really over yet, and the dark, just like daylight savings time, is not the only way to judge the time of day.
It didn’t help with actually playing any games though; I still found myself struggling to engage with playing them. It’s not that I hadn’t enjoyed the ones I’d played, though. Hades 2 might be one of my favourite games of all time, and both Animal Well and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes excited my puzzle loving brain in ways I haven’t felt from a game in a little while. And I’m looking forward to a few games coming out at the end of the year as well - Indiana Jones and Stalker 2 are on the horizon. But this feeling of discontent makes getting excited to play them difficult. I spent a while thinking about it and instead of looking ahead, I decided to look back, opting for something familiar - hoping that settling into something comfortable would balance my experience of the seasonal transition.
The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt is a game I’ve played before but never finished. Like I had hoped, there really is something comforting about returning to a world that I’m somewhat familiar with. I don’t have to engage too much for the first however many hours and I can get lost in a world where the nights are much shorter than the ones I’m struggling to contend with. Each step I took into Velen, and each gruff exclamation from Geralt, sank me deeper into the game and I found myself, once again, looking forward to playing something at the end of the day. I slowly fell into a nice rhythm. I’d finish work and go about my usual routine for the evening - some tidying up, cooking dinner, going for a walk - but in between I’d tackle a witcher contract, or get sent on a quest by a passing stranger.
These side adventures are written in a way that shows them to be just as important to their giver as the main questline is to the emperor. A woman losing her favourite frying pan means as much to her as finding Ciri does to you, so fulfilling her request leaves me feeling satisfied and fills me with a warmth from helping out this citizen for half an hour. The Wild Hunt may have grander plans for you and Geralt but you can get a strong feeling of accomplishment from just wandering the wilderness and lending a local your ear. That feeling of achievement is important I think. When the days get shorter, I feel like I have less time to complete things. I spend my daylight hours at work, which is only fulfilling in specific ways, and it left me feeling dissatisfied with how slow I found my progress to be in Metaphor: Refantazio, and anything else I sought to try. The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt makes me feel like I’m making as much progress in its smaller moments as I do in its biggest ones.
At the end of the day, I can’t rely on just video games to get me through the seasonal transition. It’s great that I have other outlets for this struggle. This year has been particularly hard though, and a lot of those outlets seemed harder to reach for. But it’s been a couple of weeks of this feeling now and, as with past years, it’s getting easier. The mechanisms through which I support myself are getting stronger. I keep going on walks with my partner, I play a 4 player party-style version of Pokemon with my friends where we’re all on the hook for our poor type matchups, and I continue to look for ways to feel productive and accomplished when the days get short. Hopefully next year I’ll remember this little essay, perhaps even give it a read when the clocks go back and the night draws in. I wrote this out as a personal piece, but I know I’m not the only person who feels the weight of Autumn turning into Winter, so hopefully we can all find ways of staying warm. For now, I’m going to keep hunting for enjoyment in many different worlds, and keep myself busy. It’s not perfect, and even now, with Geralt and I lost in the back alleys of Novigrad, I find myself struggling to keep focus, but the days don’t feel as long now and I no longer feel the need to be saving daylight.
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