Diablo gave rise to the entire action RPG genre, and it's basically been all downhill from there. When I was just a kid in the '90s who was definitely too young to be journeying beneath Tristram Cathedral and meeting figures like The Butcher who would haunt my nightmares for years, I remember, above all, that it was actually scary. A small part of me believed there might be some genuine essence of evil in this 480p, 256-color world. That maybe just by playing it, I was truly risking my eternal soul.
The lonely first 30 minutes of Diablo 4, an extended tutorial, almost gave me that feeling again—at least, as much as any game can when you're in your 30s. It's grimy. It's gory. It's performatively sacrilegious, with a priest getting his brains bashed out with his own holy symbol as we zoom in on his blood splattering across the stained glass of a church. Lilith bids us to be "free in sin," and I found myself strapping in for some real, dark, heavy metal shit. That's my jam.
But it's not even an hour later that I'm being reminded this game has a battle pass. Shopkeepers have a timer telling me when their inventory will reset, like so many "pay to wait" mobile games. There's a guy named "PeterGriffinhehehe" running around town in armor that has been dyed the color of a Chuck-E-Cheese automaton. To their credit, the writers and environment designers do their absolute best to gently lay me back into a pool of blood and baptize me with their dark fantasy imaginings again, but I have to tune out so much 2023, AAA, always online garbage at any given moment to even buy into it a little bit.
