(Disclaimer: Amazon Affiliate links included where possible and I deem them relevant. I’ll earn a small commission, as described in my privacy policy from eligible purchases made through these links.)

I finally, a year-and-then-some after buying Ring Fit Adventure…. moved on to the second stage of the game and my first battle. No button-mashing thumb-centric flexibility to focus on here, instead battles are won and lost entirely by how well I do the exercises. Like the post title says, that is definitely going to take some getting used to.

I did fairly well for a first try (and second and third and however many battles I forget I had in the second stage), but I fully expect them to get harder as I progress in the game no matter what difficulty level I choose.

Though despite having the backlight all the way down, I seem to still have a lighting issue that makes my TV screen look… weird. Not the super glare, but even looking at the preview YouTube provides the colors just look a little off. Might just be a normal product of using the GoPro Fusion–or, indeed, any camera–to record a TV rather than something I can adjust, I don’t know yet. (Looking at my previous videos, it looks like it might just be a product of recording a TV screen.)

Weather still interfered with my outdoor walks and Zombies, Run, though I did start experimenting with one of SixToStart’s other games, The Walk.

Technically this should be in my week 8 updates, but I’ll put it here so I don’t forget: Unlike Zombies Run, which has a story that you listen to while exercising, The Walk is designed to let you run the app in the background on your phone, leave it in your pocket or wherever, and go about your day, waiting to check your phone and pick up the story once you’re done and have the free time to simply listen. Keeping that in mind and thinking I might just let it run while I’m at work, but having no idea what kind of drain that might put on my phone’s battery, I first tried out the app one morning when I was out shoveling snow off of my back porch.

My first experiment failed on multiple counts. Oh, the tracking was fine… but you can use any step counter or fitness tracker to estimate how much you’ve exercised for the day. The story element was fine (so I assume, I never actually bothered listening to any story clips before resetting my progress to nil), but that part is also available for free online as a podcast. The game aspect was where things went wrong. See, the game aspect includes a few achievements for, among other things, scanning all landscape features within a given route, but you can only actually scan the features that are close to you. By the time I looked at my phone once I was done shoveling, I had already moved too far away from several of the landscape features and had completely lost the opportunity to scan them without replaying the episode. (I have the exact same problem with FitBit’s challenges.)

But that is not the only problem I had with the app. See, either I had stopped shoveling at exactly the moment that the paths diverged within the episode (another game element: each episode consists of a short route and a longer one, and different landscapes and such are available depending on which one you pick), or it was sitting at the fork in the road waiting for me to check my phone so I could pick a route. Assuming the second theory to be the case, running this at work would not let me finish the story in “no time flat” as I’d originally decided; instead, it would approximately take two hours (clock-in to first break) before I’d even have the opportunity to choose a path, after which point it would take another two hours (lunch break) to actually mark that I’d finished things… for an episode that supposedly takes about half an hour to complete.

And finally there is the matter of some of those landscape features. I’d clicked on a few of them, and only after I’d scanned all of the ones in reach did I realize that some of them were playing sounds–one, for instance, was labelled as a “ringing phone” (I might be misremembering that label) but was actually playing a phone conversation.

Anyway, my point is, The Walk really isn’t a “play in the background” fitness app. To get the most out of the gaming aspect, you either have to be willing to replay episodes multiple times (which you’ll have to do anyway for 100% completion due to the split paths, but not to this extreme), or you’ll have to treat it like a true game and stick to using it when you can actively pay attention to what you’re playing.

Suggested products in use, Amazon Affiliate links included where possible:

• GoPro Fusion 360 degree camera
• Ring Fit Adventure for Nintendo Switch