“I am your shepherd,” Joseph Seed whispered, his voice a low hum through her headphones. “And you are lost.”

But she saved the game and closed it anyway. She decided to test a DLC. Hours of Darkness —the Vietnam spin-off. She launched it from the main menu. The screen went sepia. Napalm craters. Jungle rot.

She was going to kill Joseph Seed with a Mars-tech plasma rifle while wearing a zombie-hunter outfit. It was going to be glorious. She liberated Fall’s End by dawn (in-game). Boomer, the goodest boy, fetched her an AR-CL from a dead Peggie. She felt the familiar rhythm: stealth, takedown, liberate, repeat. But by hour four, something felt off .