Luigi’s Mansion 3 is about as pure as gaming gets. It’s like a pearl, formed by a process of gleaming polish, accreted around a fundamental kernel: that vacuuming is fun. And it is.

It theoretically takes place in a Hotel, but they don’t let that get in the way of taking you to whatever would be the coolest zone to explore and cleanse of ghosts. How about a whole castle, or one floor that’s actually five or six floors. Or a desert. They don’t adhere to any rule that constrains wonder. Every one of these places is rendered with the care of an animated feature, except you can go in there and do shit. And by do shit, I mean suck up the tapestries for no reason or flash rats with the light of God, transforming them from diseased vermin into cold, hard cash. The linguistic substrate is thus: pull, push, flash, leap, and Truly See. And the phrases you construct with them have an improvisational, almost musical cadence. I expected it to be excellent, and it was better than I expected.

I told Gabe that I was playing the game with Ronia, Chief Puzzle Solver, but that I didn’t have an extra set of Joy-Con to invite her into the process in co-op as Gooigi. He said not playing it with her in co-op was cruel and he was gonna call CPS. So, I grabbed a Pro controller and we’ll jump in this weekend - Gooigi has fewer hitpoints, but there’s a lot of environmental damage that’s really brutal for Regular Luigi, because of his real skin, bones, and organs. We’ve used Gooigi to navigate some malevolent traps in the past, and I think she liked the idea of being able to walk directly on lethal spikes, or a jelly torso that allows a crossbow bolt to pass harmlessly through.

In another Sponsored Stream I Would Have Done For Free Because I’m Not Smart, you might have heard about Marvel: Crisis Protocol, what they call a Tabletop Hobby Miniatures game and I would call a Skirmish Wargame because this is my kink and I know the lingo. From 2-4pm, I’m gonna have the literal designer of the game from Atomic Mass Games teach me how to play on the stream. Basically all I wanna do right now is paint minis and scenery and then zero in on the most dangerous moments in a model’s life. This stream came at a very good time.

(CW)TB out.