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Latest Writing

Days Gone

Sure, it looks serene, but that sawmill he's looking at is full of monsters.

🚨 Spoilers ahead! 🚨 Also, you should know that this game has lots of salty language and bloody combat.

You guys, Days Gone may be the most fun game I’ve played in a long time. I finished my first playthrough a couple weeks back and have already started again at a higher difficulty level.

The structure of the game is similar to some of my open-world favorites from years past, like Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn. There’s a set of primary missions which are completed to advance the main storyline, and there are many secondary missions which I don’t think are necessarily required to complete, but offer rewards and a fuller understanding of the story. And more fun.

The story—and the way it’s told—is one of my favorite things about the game. I typically tire of cutscenes and exposition (looking at you, Hideo Kojima) but Days Gone’s premise, characters, and dialog are so likable and engaging that I found myself happily sitting through long stretches of exposition. The main characters feel very real and fully-formed from the get-go. They also don’t pull many punches. For example, there are a couple cutscenes where you run across a captive human who is so far gone that they can’t be saved from the imminent horde of monsters, and rather than leave them to a slow, horrible death, you put them out of their misery. It’s perhaps not as grim as the “No Russian” mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 —which makes you an active participant in an airport mass shooting—but it’s sobering nonetheless. There’s no sugarcoating it: this new world is harsh.

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Featured Work

TaxAct Xpert Help

I worked with the TaxAct Assisted Help team to design the next iteration of their efforts to promote a new expert help service. Xpert Help connects the customer with a knowledgeable tax expert to help answer questions that can’t be answered by Google or TaxAct’s own general-audience documentation. An initial design had been launched to a small set of customer during the previous tax season, and the business was ready to take it to the next level as they planned to roll it out to all customers in the next tax season.

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© Jared Christensen

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