Di Lu – Google

Journey to the West was my childhood favorite and so I've been looking forward to this game for years. I was afraid that it'd turn out to be unfinished, and I was unfortunately right to be afraid. The Journey to the West lores had wonderful depths, the landscapes are gorgeous, the music and voice acting are phenomenal, and the plot takes the original story with a more explicit flavor and catch audience with nostalgic emotions. But it's very much a fighting game, not much RPG. It's "fight endlessly for 10 hours, watch animation for 5 minutes" and repeat that for six cycles. It has a rather linear plot, no dialogue choices to make, in fact, character developments were all written in text as background stories. Some of the bosses were lore-breakingly strong not because of narrative needs but just unbalanced mechanics. Navigation is infuriating. There's no map, and very little hints. Some areas (looking at you, pagoda jail) are buggy, where the protagonist can get stuck at places. If you're the specific type of player that enjoy grinding domains endlessly, and occasionally read about lores, perhaps you'd enjoy "playing" Black Myth Wukong. Otherwise you might want to consider modding the game to get better navigation and fight mechanics just to get to all the hidden lores and secrets, while emerging in the mythical world of China... it's certainly a very specific type of fighting game, high barrier for a lot of RPG players, but for the lores and story and stunning world/acting, perhaps it's still worth time.

I bought the game because I get really bored from cardio and I'm a PC gamer who's into open world and RPG games. Unfortunately this game is just as boring as following home cardio videos, arguably less interesting than just working out while listening to audio books/podcasts. It has a really simplistic storyline - good vs. evil, workout to beat the evil, and not much element of surprise, choices to make, or depth in general. I feel no emotions in the story, I don't know what motivates the protagonist, what triggers the antagonist, why any character is doing anything they set out to do. Even if they had a grandma with her purse stolen and I'm supposed to chase after the thief to get it back, I'd be more motivated to run with the protagonist. The main character is an object here, I'm running just because an object asked me to... Perhaps I lack imagination at this age to perceive this as interesting. Some of the others also pointed out that the static pacing is too long, there are a large portion of the game where we just stand around to watch the animations go by and not engage in much activity. Maybe it's designed for people not my age? I'm in my 30s with a 20 BMI, and feel like time is too precious of a resource to not be utilized. I wish the game designers would have made the animations to be only after the workouts. If you have a lot of time daily and are just looking to shed off a bit of calories, this may work for you. If you're time-starved, gym training with weights and normal interval cardio activities would be more effective.

It's definitely important to read at least a well written summary of this book, or watch a YouTube video made based on it that explains all the biases and dissonance. I've spent at least 30hrs on half of this book. And I'm not sure how much time it's reasonable to ask the common population to spend on thoroughly understanding this book, outside of the academic field of psychology. It doesn't feel entirely cost-effective or pleasurable to read. This book was written in a format of "presumptions, experiments, conclusions" and it's usually an extremely long read before one can get to the conclusions part. I'm not sure if I get a lot of insights out of understanding the mechanism of which the experiments were conducted, or what research process the marvelous researchers had to go through to get us the insights. Thus the book feels very long and difficult to follow most of the time. But the conclusions the book has touched upon, distilled from the tremendous amount of research work from the field of psychology, are important for every decision maker to learn, practice and understand. So I'd say if you are extremely interested in the how over the what, and don't mind spending long hours slowly reading a book you may not finish, give this a try. If you just want some quick reminders to keep your biases in check and practice better decision making, pasting a logical fallacies and biases list poster on the wall might be more cost effective.