Activities
Today
November '20 Play Log I
I gave up trying to play it over Steam Link, the whole ironing board idea didn’t work. So I’ve decided to buy a gaming laptop on Cyber Monday. That should let me play a wider variety of games again without going crazy spending all day in one room.
First things first, this game gets very dark. If the subject matter bothers you, don’t play this game.
Overall I think this is a well made game and, above exception aside, I would recommend it to fans of story heavy games. It’s one of those games where there is some room for debate/interpretation as to what exactly happened, it’s not overly open ended though.
Pros:
- It does have a spooky atmosphere. I imagine it would be extremely tense playing it in a dark room with headphones. Which is why I played it in my living room with the lights on :).
- The voice acting is very good
- The sound effects are done well. There are no jumpscares, but the occasional creaks and bumps that one expects in an old and poorly maintained building. The type of things that may make you think “I’m alone, so what made that sound?”
- Personally I didn’t find the story predictable, but then I don’t generally put too much effort into trying to predict stories. I could definitely see others disagreeing on this point.
- The graphics are very good. Even the less important areas of the hotel were well done.
- The map you have is a sketch of the building layout, not a minimap with your location shown. I really like this since it avoids skipping a map for atmospheric purposes, and even adds to the atmosphere. Be warned though, the hotel can be a bit maze like, so you’ll have to work to figure out where you are and where you’re trying to get to.
Cons:
- The story is broken down into days, but some of them feel pointless, as if the developers wanted the character to spend a certain amount of time at the hotel, but didn’t really have anything to fill the day with so they skipped it.
- The story sometimes feels rushed. There’s this huge hotel, but beyond curiosity most areas end up being pointless. I think the game could have been made longer by having more information/backstory scattered about for the character to comment on.
- You can pick up certain objects to examine, but as far as I could tell there was never any reason for this.
- You can zoom in on some things, but not certain papers that looked like they could be interesting.
- Throughout the story you’re on the phone with a guy who’s helping you. But the way it worked was sometimes a little weird. Like one sequence: “push the button”, “Ok”, hangs up phone, pushes button, calls back again. Why ever hang up? Granted, in some cases this was probably necessary to avoid the conversation getting ahead of what’s happening because the player could have gotten sidetracked.
Verdict: 8/10
SG win played for PAGYWOSG. I really enjoyed it even though the walking speed was abysmal.
The worst AC game I’ve played so far. The entire thing felt disjointed. Like you got to play a few sequences of missions from a much larger game, with no more than a sentence (if that) to summarize what you’ve missed. Sometimes it was whole story segments, other times a crucial cutscene.
Pros:
- No pointless out of animus sessions. I enjoyed the Desmond out of animus sessions, but in Rogue they were little more than filler.
- No pointless ship grinding
Cons:
- Disjointed story that seemed to skip huge portions, and left questions unanswered.
- What story there is is entirely underwhelming. Once again it hurries too much without getting you emotionally invested in the character or her cause. It makes me wonder if Ubisoft even have any idea why AC2 & Brotherhood were so successful.
- The 3 personas thing seems promising, but is rendered more or less useless by the fact that only a single story mission gives you any choice at all in which one you use. But just because you’re forced to use the slave persona with no armour and limited weapons doesn’t mean you won’t also be forced for fight a dozen enemies.
- The CitezenE sections were pointless. They seemed to serve no purpose beyond the developer saying ‘we haven’t forgotten this is supposed to be a simulation’. Though you’ll be very thankful it exists when you get to the ending.
- Buggy. I had to restart missions numerous times after they bugged.
- The infamous ‘I tried to climb so why the h*ll are you jumping the opposite direction’ type issues are as bad as ever
- Very few side quests, and they don’t appear until more than half way through the story. You could be forgiven for beating the game without realizing they even exist.
- Surprisingly some of the voice acting was quite bad, though not much
Verdict: 2/10
Another game off my unfinished/abandoned list. I was really disappointment with this one. It makes me wonder if there’s even any point in playing Unity since Rogue was also really disappointed. On the upside it did give me an Assassin’s Creed fix (kind of).
I found this game surprisingly addictive. It has some flaws, but a lot of these appear to be improved on in the 2018 version.
Pros:
- You don’t need to know a lot about cars
- Great for playing while listing to music/podcast/etc
Cons:
- I have no issue with DLC adding more cars, as long as the base game has a reasonable variety. Unfortunately it has very little variety
- The parts you can repair vs the ones you can’t seems unrealistic to me, but I could be wrong here
- No garage management aspect, you just pick jobs and get paid
- Money serves very little purpose until you can buy cars at auction. By the time you unlock something you’ll have more than enough money to use it
- When you replace body parts they come in the correct colour, which makes painting seem a bit pointless
Verdict: 7/10
I had a random urge to try this game. It was repetitive but somehow also addictive. I really enjoyed it, and ended up picking up a bunch of DLC at nearly full price, which isn’t like me. I’d like to get the 2018 version at some point.
Very good FPS that is definitely worth playing. The letter collectables were interesting, but after reading a few I found them far too depressing to keep reading.
Pros:
- I really enjoyed the story
- Alternate timelines can change some surprising things, it was interesting to see how
- Good weapon variety
- Good graphics
- Excellent voice acting
Cons:
- In terms of missions, goals, and how you achieve them, both timelines are identical. This seems like a missed opportunity.
- The gold collectables seemed entirely pointless
Verdict: 9/10
Got this for last year’s Stealthy Santa from JaffaCaffa if memory serves. Glad I finally played it, it was absolutely amazing. I’ll probably be picking up others in the series eventually. So thanks again for finally introducing me to this series.
That’s it for now, but there’ll be more this month. I bought a bunch of games in the sale. I’ll list them next time after I’ve (hopefully) played most of them.
Yesterday
Most of what I’ve been playing since my last post has been for reviews. Got to play some nice games, although I did end up spending more time reviewing DLCs than full games this time around. Not that I mind, some of these DLCs were really good.
A rather disappointing SRPG. I wrote a review for this (link at the bottom)
Strange Brigade is a third person co-op focused shooter from the makers of Sniper Elite. The fact that it is from the people who made Sniper Elite is really noticeable as the game controls surprisingly similar to the later entries in that series, even if it's structured differently. In fact, this is structured more like Vermintide of Left 4 Dead than Sniper Elite.
In Strange Brigade you play as a group of misfits that feel like something straight from an older pulpy comic book who need to stop an evil being from destroying the world. So business as usual for a group like this (something they even joke about during the game). It's a pretty solid game that works well in co-op, but I would imagine that playing it alone would quickly get boring. Some of the enemies also feel like they were made with co-op in mind, and and I would imagine that fighting them without someone who can act as bait would be rather frustrating.
Another game that I reviewed. An alright, but in no way outstanding space sim similar to Wing Commander or X-wing.
And more reviews! A gorgeous 3rd person flight game where you ride on top of a giant falcon. Has some flaws, but overall it's quite good.
Tears of Avia Review
Absolute Territory Review
The Falconeer Review
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Craftworld Aeldari
Age of Wonders: Planetfall - Star Kings Review
Unity of Command II: Blitzkrieg
Report 37: Shooty bang bang and more of the same
This is probably the most down-to-earth GTA out of all. It’s still pretty fun and shines with its satire and characters. The crazy parts still show up (mostly in The Ballad of Gay Tony) from time to time.
The collectibles were annoying as hell and there’s too many of them. It’s my fault for even going for it, I guess. I was getting pretty tired of GTA already by the time I got to Gay Tony episode.
Gay Tony’s mission objectives/results that you have to perfect to get the achievement were quite a buzzkill. I didn’t want to be reminded how bad I was every time, and it’s the only reason the Complete Edition isn’t complete (pun not intended), but beaten. I might’ve stuck around to get the rest of the achievements, but I’m NEVER going to be as good as the game wants me too.
I also wish the games weren’t as bugged as they are. I’ve had quite a few crashes, softlocks and various audio issues.
Overall, a solid GTA entry, but I think I would’ve enjoyed it more if it wasn’t for my OCD about the achievements and if the technical perfrmance was a bit better.
It’s a pretty hard action game. For some reason I decided to crank up my suffering and choose the Hard Difficulty from the get-go. Needless to say, the experience was downright frustrating at times. But when I got somewhat good at the game, I actually liked it enough to try the Insane difficulty (try is the keyword here, I don’t think I want to go through this again all the way, but even harder this time).
The game actually looks pretty decent. Even though it’s pretty much Serious Sam structure all over again, it’s not even noticeable.
There’s only two weapons that you can switch modes on to do different kind of damage, that was pretty interesting.
The plot kinda… went nowhere, and I don’t know if it was some sort of sequel-cliffhanger or did they want to make another DLC, but it’s fine. The plot was decent enough for that kind of game anyway.
Overall, a surprisingly fun (and really fricking hard) game.
Since the remake turned out to be the hottest garbage out there, it’s as good time as any to sweep the dust off the original.
I honestly struggle to find any reason who thought such remake would be a good idea, since, even if they get rid of all the technical issues, the core of the game would be ultimately the same - the graphics are worse, the gameplay is pretty much the same but worse in some aspects, and the plot is the same - you can just play the original game that still holds up to this day and is practically superior in every aspect possible.
So, the original. The plot is pretty interesting, the game itself is fairly fast-paced - except the stealth sections, I guess, they do drag the tempo down a bit. Although the stealth part here is broken (still serviceable though) and it works pretty weird. The enemies can be downright blind and - especially - deaf, so you can pretty much run through some of the stealth segments if you want to.
I don’t know if I’m missing something, but the final twist before the cliffhanger kinda… doesn’t make any sence to me. Like, what was the masterplan here? It’s one of those twists that are delightfully cheesy, but still, I’m confused.
Overall, it’s a pretty solid and short shooter with occasional stealth that could’ve been handled a bit better.
It’s literally the same game all over again. I only have myself to blame, because I keep buying it; there’s still something that I like about it, I guess.
It’s a simplistic resource management all over again. The resources’… sources don’t respawn in this one, so you’re probably going to need to learn the getting-money-fast-trick just like in the previous games.
As you might’ve noticed, it’s much shorter than the other entries. I’m perfectly fine with that, playing through HotK 3 was a pain in the ass sometimes.
Overall, more of the same with minimal changes.
Update #24: November 2020
Steam Purchases:
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Dead by Daylight
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Montaro
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Obsurity
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Sam & Max Save the World
0 hours playtime
no achievements
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Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour
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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
0 hours playtime
no achievements
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StarPrey
0.7 hours playtime
no achievements
Fanatical Purchases:
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Deponia Doomsday
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Dry Drowning
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God's Trigger
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Guns, Gore & Cannoli
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Livelock
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Murder
0.3 hours playtime
no achievements
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Narcos: Rise of the Cartels
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Stranded
0.4 hours playtime
no achievements
Non-SG wins:
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Darksburg
Beaten/completed:
They Came From a Communist Planet
Stranded
Walk around (slowly) and activate lights. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Nice music and pixel art tho.
Murder
From the same dev as Stranded and while I didn’t really like it, it’s at least better than that game.
Didn’t like this at first, that is until I unlocked more abilities later in the game. The upgraded chain whip is a ton of fun to use!
Solid top-down shooter that definitely outstayed it’s welcome. Was kind of done fighting same-ish enemies after the halfway point.
Cute little endless runner. Great game to play while you’re watching/listening to something.
StarPrey
Had some fun with this game but man, I wouldn’t be lying if I said that I was fighting the controls the whole time. The turret enemies also suck ass.
F.E.A.R.
Replayed one of my favourite games ever and man does it still hold up. It’s just a blast to fight enemies in this game and the weapons are fun to use.
Nov 25 2020
Being productive. Backlog assassination report - Nov 2020
Last month, I said it will take me year to climb down from 67% games never played to 50%. As a matter of fact, I have done it in a month, although I have cheated a little by deleting some games that I consider as not worth keeping; I have also marked some others as won’t play, because they have no story (these are mostly grand strategies by Paradox Interactive and tabletop games by Asmodee Digital that I would like to keep). Lastly, I have played and completed a great bunch of games, so it safe to say that this month has already been very productive for me.
My accomplishments:
Awesome rhythm game! I didn't know much about AVICII before it, as I listen mostly metal, but I have to say that his songs are very sweet. The game itself is flawless, with multiple levels of difficulty, reasonable controls, and beautiful visuals.
This game is something else. The art, the music, the story…so much passion here. I think GRIS deserves a place in a museum of modern art instead of those weird things they usually showcase.
My GRIS review on Steam.
Amusing take on old-school point-and-clicks and David Lynch. Straightforward, imitative, but still an interesting game to click through the whole story.
My Kathy Rain review on Steam.
I remember the days when Micro Machines, R.C. Pro-Am, Eliminator Boat Duel where my favorite games to play. I thought Toybox Turbos might give me some nostalgia but…it failed. It's too short, easy and generic to be something more than a snack for one evening. Codemasters release these racing games like they are selling hot dogs, without putting much love into it.
I love the first game in the series very much. I knew I should play this one as it might add more depth to the characters, and I was not disappointed. The backtalk challenges were a lot of fun! Overall, this is a pretty neat prequel for an already beautiful story.
Wow, such a beautiful yet harrowing game! I wasn't ready for this. Visuals are stunning, puzzles are okay, collectibles are all over the place, and the plot twist…well, I should have known.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat 
I have played it a couple times before, but I have decided to play it again as I have won it on SG this month. I speak Russian, so I played it in Russian, which is the best way to experience it (it has a very good voice acting in Russian). This game is strange. It has this mystic atmosphere that draws you in despite all the clunkiness. There are many weird places to explore and clever quests to complete. However, there are no women in it, no old people, no kids, no diversity at all. I didn't think about it much back when it was released, and now I understand how it speaks volumes about my home country - Ukraine - in general. Anyway, the game is fun to play and it has aged incredibly well (minus the lags when you enter areas with multiple NPCs).
Our fellow assassin Lengray gifted it to me so I could try some decent visual novel, and it happened to be a very pleasant experience! I'm stunned by how good the story is, filled with many topics that I find interesting and thought-provoking. Very memorable game.
My Neo Cab review on Steam.
Concluding this post, I am currently at 46% games never played. Thanks for reading.
The third BLAEO Game Awards are here!
Let’s see which games released this year were most loved by the BLAEO community! We can’t pick the best games of 2020 without your help so please nominate your favourite games released in 2020* and make sure to return between December 21 and 29 to vote for your absolute favourites.
The timeline for this event is as follows:
25 November - 19 December: Nomination phase
21 December - 29 December: Voting phase
31 December: The winners are announced
These are the proposed categories:
- Game of the Year
- Choices Matter
- Best Story
- Best Co-op/Multiplayer Game
- Best Free to Play Game
- Most Value for Money
- Best Game Under $20
- Best Addition to an Existing Series
- Most Addictive Game
- Prettiest Game
- Best Soundtrack
- Best DLC
- Best Early Access Game (Added to EA in 2020 or left EA in 2020.)
- Best Underdog/Hidden Gem
- Best Character
- Best Console Exclusive
- Best Mobile Game
Nomination Phase
To nominate a game simply post a comment with a list of games that you want to nominate in each category.
Please include games even if they have already been mentioned by other users. We might not be able to include every proposed game in the final vote and seeing how popular the games are will make it easier for us to make the final selection.
In a similar way we might not include all the categories in the final vote if there’s an obvious lack of interest/proposed games.
Guidelines for nominating games:
- Best Console Game category: games released on console for the first time between 1 December 2019 and 30 November 2020 can be nominated.
- Best Mobile Game category: games released on mobile for the first time between 1 December 2019 and 30 November 2020 can be nominated.
- Best DLC category: the DLC needs to have been released between 1 December 2019 and 30 November 2020 , but the game can be older.
- All other categories: games released on PC for the first time between 1 December 2019 and 30 November 2020 can be nominated.
Please use the following format when nominating games:
**- Game of the Year:**
**- Choices Matter:**
**- Best Story:**
**- Best Co-op/Multiplayer Game:**
**- Best Free to Play Game:**
**- Most Value for Money:**
**- Best Game Under $20:**
**- Best Addition to an Existing Series:**
**- Most Addictive Game:**
**- Prettiest Game:**
**- Best Soundtrack:**
**- Best DLC:**
**- Best Early Access Game:**
**- Best Underdog/Hidden Gem:**
**- Best Character:**
**- Best Console Exclusive:**
**- Best Mobile Game:**
Nov 24 2020
Creaks
Creaks is a real Amanita Design game, that took a step aside from the other A.D. games, as it has a classic puzzle platformer gameplay, and the usual graphics - simple but colourful and detailed.
I personally really liked the game - I like puzzles, but it's hard to strike the balance for difficulty, fun and variety, and Creaks did it very well. The controls are super easy (and offer full controller support, which is pleasant) and the game mechanics are fairly simple too - buttons, levers, pressure plates and various enemies.
As the game progresses, the underground environment goes through shifts of style, keeping the visuals fresh and preventing going stale. Along with the graphics, a handful new enemies presented, with different mechanics to them, and as the game is without a real word being spoken, they are presented and introduced in action, everything is up to the player to figure out.
This mix of environmental changes, nonverbal communication, experimenting with the enemies would be for nothing if they wouldn't be balanced around a slightly short game. So many games fall into the trap of having overstretched base mechanics/enemies, and as they start combining them the game just feels endless, while not really showing new stuff. In Creaks I think a new mechanic is introduced every 5-8 levels, keeping it pretty fresh.
About the story: I liked the presentation and the puzzles themselves more - for most of the story we're just going deeper and deeper, or sometimes a bit upwards to go even deeper afterwards. The story is comprehensive (I guess?) but personally I prefer to know the direction of the story on the go, and not just stumble from one room to another, waiting to see how the story slowly being told. Honestly, I felt it to be boring.
Either this is a clever trick to show "stumbling in the dark" for a game taking place underground, or it's not even really a story being told, you're just witnessing things unfold. Either way, my highly personal opinion is that it's secondary in nature and forgettable. It's very likely that you'll enjoy it more than I did, it's perfectly okay, it was done well.
I guess it was a good game that mixed good quality of everything, there are no real weak points that I feel really, objectively weak or bad. (They even have a chapter selection option, which was useful when internet hiccups prevented some pictures to be registered)
If you like how the game looks like, try it! (Expect like 4-10 hours of gameplay of it, depending on skill, focus and tempo. )
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Polarity
2 hours playtime
5 of 10 achievements
this definitely has a portal feel, which it seems to recognize with its “companionless cube” achievement. it’s simpler, shorter, and a bit less polished. i ran into a problem with jumping that i eventually decided to look up in steam discussions . . . turns out if the frame rate is above 60 then pressing jump often just makes the sound. worked fine once i set max frame rate to 60. the problem i wasn’t able to solve was the controls. i use dvorak and like many games it defaults to wasd but those keys are actually spread out for me. i remapped what i could in the launcher, but not everything was there. this meant my strafe right key (labeled D but actually types E in dvorak) was also still mapped to switch polarity because that has a nonconfigurable mapping for the E key. i fell through color-coded bridges a LOT due to that. it also needs you to select between keyboard or controller, so when i originally skipped the config options in the launcher and then found i couldn’t change controls in-game, i needed to quit back to the game menu to switch to controller and try that. i’m pretty bad at using a controller for first-person so then quit back to my desktop and changed controls in the launcher.
the puzzles had some interesting components, but most of it was pretty obvious for me. it’s also not very long — i finished it in less than 2 hours even with having to redo a lot of jumping sections before i had limited the frame rate.
i read there’s also a also co-op campaign, which was awesome in portal 2, but here it’s local only which means somebody needs to use a controller. i don’t think i’m going to try the co-op campaign unless they let it work non-locally so we can both use keyboard and mouse. overall i’m glad this is a thing but i could have really recommended it if they had kept going with it, fixed the bugs, and made the map spaces more interesting.
Nov 23 2020
Side Quest #14 - 23 November 2020
I pratically only played the main quest, which was interesting enough, but I felt like it was too similar to Far Cry 3. They were released two years apart, but I’ve played them with a difference of around 5 years, so i didn’t feel any fatigue whatsoever, but I can understand those critics, since it’s gameplay is, overall, very similar (as is in pratically all of the Far Cry games, I assume). However, I did enjoy travelling through Kyrat and the Himalayas, and also the tower system was interesting enough to not be boring, unlike some other (older) Ubisoft open-world games. I managed to get this and Far Cry Primal in a bundle for 5€ in a sale in my country, so I feel like they’re worth that price (5€ a piece as well, but that’s pratically the max price I pay for a game, excluding bundles), so ymmv.
