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But after you lose someone, you start seeing them in places you never expect. I wanted to turn off the brain region that masochistically returns to a tender subject, the way one’s tongue keeps compulsively feeling for the unfamiliar gum exposed to its tip when a tooth falls out. The franchise’s focus on kinetic combat dependably induced flow, a state of mental immersion that the magazine Byte once called the “TV trance.” Flow would make me unfeeling, an appealing alternative to sadness. In the God of War franchise, death and loss were little more than excuses to mash more buttons, doing damage to every obstacle that stood in the way of whatever predictable reckoning would come in the closing cutscene. Despite Kratos’s fraught father-son situation, though, the old games were never known for their emotional depth. Given that 2010’s trilogy-concluding God of War III had ended with its iconic main character, Kratos, beating his own dad to death, I probably should have known better than to expect to get through the franchise reboot without thinking about anything but triggering the next checkpoint. Mercifully, The O.C.’s only dog, Dustin, disappeared without a woof after the first few episodes, never to return, which left nothing to remind me of my own dog during each 44-minute reprieve from the pangs. In the disbelief phase that had followed the late-night, crying call from my mother, who had delivered the unexpected news, I’d looked forward to getting the game and mindlessly mashing buttons, submerging myself in the screen as I had a few years ago when I’d watched all of The O.C. A week after my dad died, I got God of War.