If you are a gamer in New York City, this is your best chance in a lifetime to experience a real life video game level. A series of wildfires in Canada (Quebec, of course) created the thick field of smog you are currently choking through, and most people are having a horrible time outside. For us gamers, though? This is a dream come true, as the worst levels from our favorite pastime come to life.
As you can tell from this unnervingly prescient Diablo IV advertisement, New York is currently a hellscape and a poison level wrapped in one.
Right now, New York follows poison area logic: you can only stay in the fog for a couple seconds before you start slowly taking damage. The Call of Duty Warzone circle is finally real, and you can live out your video game fantasy IRL by purchasing an overpriced N95 mask then hiding in the corner of a building for a full hour.
Are you a FromSoft fanboy? Break out the watering hose to make a little poison swamp of your own to roll around in. Do you love Silent Hill? Wait until night time and smoke a bowl of salvia, and I promise you that psychosomatic monsters based on your deepest traumas will start crawling out the fog in minutes.
For absolute losers, you can imagine the weather in New York is identical to the sky in Shadow the Hedgehog when Black Doom invades.
Last but not least, you can complete your gaming experience by googling how to deal with the smog online, only for someone on the forums to call you a slur for not buying antidotes and poison resistant equipment several months earlier.
Even if you stay inside, this gruesome weather is a great opportunity to better empathize with our player characters as we also slowly choke to death. Personally, I cannot wait until our world becomes more and more cartoonishly hellish so I can experience my favorite video games like Fallout or Doom in person.
