Every time you make me squeeze through a narrow cave now I feel like you’re insulting my intelligence.

The first three quarters of the game is mainly Kratos and Kratos junior doing their best to not start Ragnarok in a frustrating exercise in futility that could easily have been avoided if someone had just showed them the fucking box art.

There’s still that obnoxious fucking gear crafting system that means I’m obligated to play Kratos dressup dollies every now and again to stop the enemies getting too damage spongey, and it just keeps unlocking more things to craft and accessorise until Kratos should by rights look like a glowering Christmas tree.

And it’s all so painfully unnecessary when I feel like I’m getting through combat perfectly well just by mashing light attack and occasionally pressing block or dodge like it’s a two button drum machine.

But it’s the story and set pieces that count, and I feel my review is best encapsulated by a moment of revelation I had about twenty hours in as I emerged from narrow cave passageway number 8012.

“It is exactly the sort of thing that an absolute searing twat in the Youtube comments would call ‘objectively good.’ So, that all being the case, why does the sense that I’m barely halfway through the fucking thing fill me with abject misery?” God of Four was a big ass game and God of Five has got to be, no lie, at least twice the length.

But remember how I said God of Four was like listening to a very rambly old person trying to tell a story, constantly pausing and going on irrelevant tangents.

And that kicks off a whole chapter where we dogsled across the map, find a cave, murder some dudes, find it was the wrong cave, dogsled back across the map, find another wrong cave, back a third time, find the right cave, prove our worth through three set pieces and more dude murdering and then finally get our meeting and the fates go “fuck off, Kratos,” and Kratos fucks off.

And that literal entire chapter was just to tell him to kill Heimdall.

Meanwhile, Kratos Junior has a chapter where he goes to sleep and wakes up in a Roger Dean album cover where he meets Manic Pixie Exposition Girl, the amazing human plot device whose entire job is to explain shit, and phwoar crikey the story department must’ve sacrificed a lot of breakroom privileges to get to include her.

And I know you think a game being too long is only a problem for whiny game critics who were hoping to spend time with their family and eat food this week, but this feels so blatantly drawn out.

Like it’s trying to brute force its way to game of the year by volume alone.

“Kratos, how are you feeling about that last sixteenth of an inch of story development that happened?” “I feel stoic and grunty, grrrr.” “Yeah, figured you might