What I Bought 4/8/2026

I feel I've hit a wall on most of the games I'm playing. Granted, I'm not playing anything all that often, but whenever I try, it seems like a lot of quick deaths and no progress. I'm learning things in Outer Wilds, but I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with the information I'm learning.

D'Orc #3, by Brett Bean (writer/artist), Jean-Francois Beaulieu (colorist), Nate Piekos (letterer) - Well, pull on a dwarf's beard and you ought to expect them to try and drive you into the ground like a tent peg.

The angry dwarf is hunting D'orc. This plays out as D'orc doing helpful things and the dwarf then killing the people D'orc helped. A white mage offers some new intel, but it doesn't help the dwarf. Except in terms of giving him more people to terrorize, which was probably not the mage's intent, since the mage is actually D'orc.

I'm unclear on what D'orc was hoping to accomplish. He says he's ready to deal out a beating to the dwarf for the damage he's done, but dude, some of those people got damaged because you sent him in their direction! Why didn't you just kick his ass sooner?

Oh, because you can't actually kick his ass. All attempts at sneak attacks fail, but the beating gives D'orc a chance to swipe the potion meant to erase him, and hit the dwarf with it instead. The dwarf says it's supposed to burn away any mistake it's hit with, but he just kind of falls over the cliff when he takes it in the face. So, did the Bone Witch who made it sell him a bum deal, or is it just a strict definition of mistake? 

Moonstar #2, by Ashley Allen (writer), Edoardo Audino (artist), Arthur Hesli (color artist), Clayton Cowles (letterer) - Aw crap, Papa Smurf has gone to the dark side, and he's grown to enormous size!

Moonstar and Kian travel to China, because there's some vessel deep in a cave that will let Kyron collect more souls. There's some arguing, and then they reach the bottom and - the vessel is gone. Great work! There's a meaningless fight with some undead - unless each of them saving the other at some point is going to be significant later - and Kian stalks out to try and contact some people.

And then Dani's grandfather appears, carrying the cursed sword and talking about how she didn't avenge him, so he's gonna do it himself. By killing Dani? I know I'm not well-versed in her backstory, but I think I'd have heard about her murdering family members.

OK, it's actually Kyron, trying a disguise. They fight a little, Dani grabs the sword, gets some sad backstory for Kyron about watching a sister die of some illness and him not accepting that nothing could be done. And then the sword got it's hooks into him, with some spiel about how it would keep everyone he cares about safe inside it forever, rather than letting their souls go wherever it is souls go in the Marvel Universe, I don't even know any more what the theological cosmology is after Ewing made such a big literal thing about The-One-Above-All in his Hulk stuff.

Anyway, Kian saves Dani from getting killed, but the sword still took her soul? I think. Well, Strong Guy ran around without a soul for awhile, right? No big deal. Though I guess he lacked empathy, which might be an interesting twist on what we've seen of Dani so far. If she didn't care about the cost of being wrong, and just dove into whatever plan she'd settled on. Though there'd still be the question of why she was bothering to stop him at that point.