Steam tells me I have been playing Respawn’s new Star Wars game, Fallen Order sequel Jedi Survivor, for nearly 20 hours now. I have barely gotten into it in that time—and not because Survivor is a vastly bigger game than its predecessor, though it is indeed that. It’s because I cannot stop dressing up, and taking pictures of, its hero, Cal Kestis.
Survivor is expansive in ways that make Fallen Order feel almost quaintly small in comparison, but one of the most fun ways it goes beyond the original is that it is, at its heart, a dolly dress-up game for Star Wars fans—the kinds of people who would tell themselves as some sort of perceived threat to their identity that they’d never play dolly dress-up, but absolutely will when said dolly is a Jedi Knight who looks like Cameron Monaghan from Gotham. Previously, Fallen Order allowed players to customize Cal in various, albeit limited ways—you could tweak parts of his lightsaber to your heart’s content, but Cal himself was restricted to choosing between different ponchos and between various colorations of his default gear.
Jedi Survivor, on the other hand, goes above and beyond this. Not only are Cal’s clothes changeable—broken down into individual mixed-and-matched categories of jackets and top layers, undershirts, and trousers, and then various colorways—but Cal himself can be given a trim and shave through various hair and facial hair styles found in your travels exploring the galaxy. With hundreds upon hundred of potential combinations, and that’s even before you get into all the permutations your weapons or even droid companion BD-1 can also have, for me at least it means Jedi Survivor is no longer a game about a lone warrior’s fight against the rise of the Empire, but one that asks me an important question: can I make the prettiest Cal Kestis the galaxy has ever seen, and then take lots of fancy photos of him like I’m conducting a virtual Vogue cover shoot for the holonet?
The answer, in my 20 hours of “playing” so far, is a resounding yes, as you’ll see from the gallery of attached screenshots from my shoots across the galaxy far, far away. But what about you? What has your Cal Kestis looked like as you’ve progressed through Jedi Survivor’s story—and has deciding that look rooted you in decision paralysis as much as it has me? Let us know in the comments with your own screenshots!
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