Odyssey is a beautiful game. An enormous amount of talent and craft has gone into creating a miniatuarised version of classical Greece. The ability to walk around Athens at the height of its empire, to see the Acropolis furnished with funds 'donated' by members of the Delian League (read Athenian empire) in all its majesty, to walk around the agora is genuinely breathtaking. To see the vibrantly painted statues (yes Greek and Roman statues were often painted, the image presented by white marble statues is a whole other thing I can't get into here).
I cannot describe my excitement when I discovered a Mycenean Beehive tomb and ventured inside. (I uh... don't think there was a network of passages underneath the tomb full of snakes and spike traps in real life, we must have missed that somehow.)
A world is more than architecture though. It's people, stories, networks of connection branching out, interconnected and vibrant. A real world is alive. If you've played a Ubisoft open world game recently, you probably know where this is going.
Here's a short story from early in the game. For reasons, I ended up helping out a woman named Odessa (she alleges she's a descendant of Odysseus, hmmmmm) in her exploration of the palace of Odysseus on Ithaka. A little later I bumped into her again and helped beat off a man after her estate. We flirted a little, slept together and I invited her to join my ship and crew and come along on my own Odyssey.
Then I never spoke to her again.
For the rest of my journey, for the 100 hours my Odyssey took, for the countless miles I sailed, we spoke not a single word.
