Today, Mediatonic was shown one of the levels for Autumn boys‘next fourth season. The new stage, “Skyline Stumble,” sounds pretty funny with its gravity-based hijinks and its oversized pinball bumpers, but it instilled in me an invasive, immovable thought: Man, we really have been doing this for a while, eh?
Last August, Autumn boys he took the world by storm. Thanks to a marketing campaign based on streamers and a month as one of the “free” PS Plus titles, where it became the most downloaded PS Plus game never, by the way. It seemed like everyone was talking Autumn boys, and for good reason. Autumn boys it served as a bubble distraction during a time when it felt reasonably good to be surrounded by bubble distractions.
Autumn boys it’s still here, and now I’m less sold on its power as a bubble distraction.
As bad as it is now, the covid-19 landscape was very different last summer when Autumn boys came out. On August 4, 2020, the official launch date of the game, the New York rotating average stood at less than a tenth of what it is today. It remained so for the rest of August and for much of September, before again marking above 1,000 on October 1, 2020. The pandemic, of course, never abated, but for two solid months it he could see the other side.
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Today it is not so easy to feel that way.
In New York City, where I live and where Kotaku is based, we are within reach of a huge wave of pandemic. For most measures, despite one constant rise in vaccinations, it’s worse than the first wave that initially ravaged our city last spring. According to the New York News covid-19 trackerNew York State currently has more than 7,000 cases of covid-19 a day, many of which are reported in all five districts. Six weeks ago, in mid-January, that number topped 16,000, higher than it ever was last spring. You can calculate the number until you get all sorts of variables, including an increase in the testing apparatus and fewer restrictions, but you can’t ignore how amazing it is devastating. (Much of the rest of the country faces similar devastating situations. No doubt you have read the state that more than half a million Americans have died as a result of the coronavirus, a figure we should never stop. to those responsible during this time is reduced.)
There is also the less discussed, but no less important, mental health toll in public writing. In August, I met some people who, against all odds, thrived in the new framework from home. They appreciated the loneliness, the lack of daily pressures like commuting, and they weren’t exactly social butterflies anyway. In addition, here in New York — and elsewhere in the country — it was considered relatively safe to gather in small outdoor groups, in parks and cafes, and restaurants that followed patterns of social distancing. Compared to the oppressive and freezing temperatures of recent months, in August, it could be tolerated sitting at a picnic table for hours and hours. He wasn’t a substitute for the “Before Times,” but he certainly helped.
Today, I don’t know anyone who can reasonably say that he is in a better place in terms of mental health compared to where he was at the beginning of this thing. You wake up. You move to the couch. It is moved to the dining room table. Every day is the same and they reach a breaking point. I heard it. I bet that too. We are all more irritable, more anxious and more depressed, just with that.
It’s not just in the head. For a recent function in The Atlantic, Special Projects Editor Ellen Cushing spoke with a number of mental health professionals, who detailed all the ways in which extended blocking legitimately changes the functioning of our brains. Long stretches of grief, stress, boredom, and depression can have an erosive and detrimental effect on the psyche.
I’m sure I didn’t wake up today thinking Autumn boys, of all the shitty stuff, would be the thing that would set this train of thought in motion. I didn’t think about it Autumn boys being the ruler by whom I would measure how damn we are caught in a criminally mismanaged pandemic. Maybe it was the result of listening to it irresistibly catchy themed music, which served as a de facto themed song for my inactivity last summer. But man, we’ve really been doing this for a while. March 20, 2020, New York implemented its first statewide reception order, which arrives one year a day.
At least seven new ones came out Autumn boys levels soon.
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