Activities
Feb 25 2020
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Splasher
4 hours playtime
20 of 47 achievements
This is a platformer. You start off only being able to run and jump, but near the end of the first level, you get the ability to shoot water (removes paint from a surface and damages small enemies). After seven levels, you unlock red ink (stick to a surface and paralyze enemies), and once you get past level 14, you finally get to fire yellow ink (bounce off a surface–higher than your normal jump height–and can push enemies). There are twenty two levels in the whole game.
Each level has seven hostages: six requiring a small detour through a short platforming challenge, and the last requiring you to get 700 gold drops in the level. The detours for the main hostages are short enough that you can always see said hostages on screen simply by playing through the level (so you won’t have to worry about doing any aimless wandering), and all hostages carry a sign to let you know where they are in relation to the others (like the letters in Donkey Kong Country or Super Lucky’s Tale). Sometimes, one of these hostages will be in a vortex that sends you to a “quarantine zone” where you need to kill all the enemies to free the hostage. They start off as just waves of enemies, but luckily, the game eventually realizes how boring this is and adds more platforming challenges to them, even getting to the point where the enemies are in their own room and you need to reach a switch that kills them for you. As for the final hostage in each level, while you usually end up with slightly more than 700 gold drops at the end of each level, it’s very rare for something to give you only one drop, so missing one thing still means you’d have to go through the whole level again. I only missed two hostages in the entire game (and both were the last ones in their respective levels): level 3 had a large, open room with a small fork in the bottom right that led to a gold-drop wheel, and level 9 had a switch to kill the first two turret enemies (you get around 10 gold drops when an enemy dies), and I only had to replay those two levels once to see what I missed. My only issue with this is that the reward for rescuing all the hostages is just another speed-run option when there are already two available (on top of time-attack mode for each level), so if you reach the end of a level and realize you missed one, I wouldn’t recommend going back unless you’re trying to get all the achievements.
As for the rest of the game, it’s pretty good. The game does introduce various traps, but they usually show up in at least two or three different levels so it doesn’t feel gimmicky. The game is really easy before you get the red ink, but later levels have enough reasonable challenge to make up for it (though the two wind levels are definitely difficulty spikes). Mid-air movement does have some momentum, and it does take a bit to get used to, but it’s still manageable. Some hostages are placed in devious positions so that while you’ll certainly see them on your first pass, you’ll see them get killed and have to kill yourself in order to have a real attempt at rescuing them. Of course, most of them are in fair positions (sometimes even being a drop in difficulty compared to the rest of the level), and as mentioned previously, there isn’t much point to rescuing all of them anyway.
There were a couple other problems I had with the game. The train level starts off fine, but when you enter the train, it has a foreground object obscure what’s in the cart until after you enter, meaning you have less time to react to what’s in there. This level also doesn’t have a second checkpoint until after you get past the train, making it the longest you have to go between checkpoints in the game (it’s not really hard as much as it’s annoying since you have to redo all of that for getting hit once). Also, there are three or four flood levels, and just like with Ori, the flood has rubber-banding AI: no matter if you stop for a few seconds to collect the gold-drop wheel or rush past it, the acid will always be the same distance from you when you reach certain pre-checkpoint landmarks. I don’t know why developers do this: it’s easily noticeable and disingenuous to those of us who want a set challenge. If you want your game to appeal to rage-quitters, at least be straightforward about it instead of pulling an Extra Credits and pretending like they overcame a much harder challenge than they did.
Still, despite its shortcomings, I’d recommend this game if you like platformers. It’s slow to start and can be cheap with its hostage positions, but the majority of the game is well polished and challenging.
Update #16: February 2020
Little early because I probably won’t beat anything in the last few days. The Division 2 ate up a lot of my time :P
Steam purchases:
- Gish
2.7 hours playtime
Fanatical Bundle purchases:
- SNK 40th Anniversary Collection
0.7 hours playtime
- Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap
0.0 hours playtime
- Eagle Island
0.0 hours playtime
- Override
0.0 hours playtime
- Re-Legion
0.0 hours playtime
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
0.0 hours playtime
no achievements
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
0.0 hours playtime
no achievements
SteamGifts wins:
- Warstone TD
0.0 hours playtime
Non-SG wins:
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
0.0 hours playtime
- Aegis Defenders
0.0 hours playtime
- Hand of Fate 2
5.6 hours playtime
Beaten/completed:
Pretty nice physics platformer, held up pretty well for a 16-year old game. There were some really frustrating levels though and the achievements are super broken so I haven’t gotten any.
For someone that doesn’t play a lot of puzzle games, this was quite an easy one to get into. I only had to look up the solution to a few puzzles. My only complaint was that you had to backtrack a lot to previous areas, which was not clear a few times.
I quite liked this free Visual novel. The premise is to send out a pair of heroes on missions to build up their relationship to save the world. It’s has some great and funny writing and is very inclusive, I highly recommend it!
Feb 24 2020
Third week of February
I am a bit late with my post but I was kinda busy travelling yesterday so I got excuses. Not much has been done anyways due to me being abroad with my literal potato of a laptop anyways.
Completed SG wins
Achievements: 0 of 0
Review: There is nothing inherently wrong with this mahjong game but it just gets so boring so quickly... tho I am not sure how you can make a mahjong game more interesting. I had to run the game with Proton 1.11-12 because the newest one wouldn't work, but that is probably just my laptop being retarded as always.
Other completed games
Achievements: 0 of 0
Review: I got as far as I possibly could by absolutely cheesing and abusing the AI, but sadly at some point that stopped working and I kept getting fucking over by RNG and me being bad at poker :( Other than that I guess it is an OK game that I remember playing ages ago as a flash game and having even less idea what I was doing :D Works without issues with Proton.
Update 42: February 17th to 23rd
Vacation time is finally here :D
So hopefully I will have more time on my hands for games.
A funny dating simulator. You can create your own Dad character. You and your teenage daughter move to a new house after your partner (you can choose if it was a woman or man) has died. Now you move to a new neighborhood with a lot of elegible dads with kids to date. You will join dadbook (a version of facebook for dads XD) to meet some of the other dads. Most of the routes are funny. I never really not liked a dad, they all had their moments. My favourite was Robert, my least favourite were probably Brian and Joseph.
YOU DON'T KNOW JACK Vol. 2 
Was a funny quiz game 10 years ago. Now it is kinda outdated game with weird questions.
Cons:
- no online multiplayer, it is what i enjoyed most playing it on Facebook all those years ago.
- local multiplayer on a keyboard is just weird, try to share a keyboard
- you need to know a lot of weitd things to win
Angelica Weaver: Catch Me When You Can - Collector’s Edition 
Nice HOG, until you run into a game breaking bug and have to delete your profile, because otherwise you will just get a window with a debug report instead of the game starting. Also game runs slow on Windows 10 unless you plug in a controller. For some reason then it runs at a normal speed, but at least this gave me a solution for Midnight Mystery 3 from the same devs.
-Pros:
- nice mystery
- nice HOGs
Cons:
- game breaking bug, when you quit the game while doing a puzzle
- puzzles that are not really logical
- no steam achievments, only ingame
- game runs at 1 FPS unless you plug in a controller
Really nice game, once I managed to get it running properly. The game runs slow on Windows 10 unless you plug in a controller. For some reason then it runs at a normal speed and I was finally able to play it.
-Pros:
- nice mystery to solve
- nice HOGs
Cons:
- a lot of collectibles, that are sometimes not really vsible and that you cannot reach once you leave a scene
- slow running game without a real solution from the devs :(
green = PoP thanks to aragon789 & BarbaricGenie for challenging me
red = Challenge Me thanks JaffaCaffa for challenging me
blue = PAGYWOSG
grey = BLAEO monthly theme
orange = completions
Overall Backlog Progress:
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Strikey Sisters
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Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series
SG wins:
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Eador. Imperium
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SOULCALIBUR VI
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Aaero
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Mystery Castle: The Mirror's Secret
0 hours playtime
no achievements
Gifts :
none this week
Games I bought/activated this week :
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Injustice™ 2
Challenge Me: Not taking part in this month right now, since I have to do more from the previous one.
PA: none
PoP: thanks to aragon789 & BarbaricGenie for challenging me
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Puzzle Agent
0 hours playtime
no achievements
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Memoria
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A Hat in Time
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The Evil Within
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Tomb Raider
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Dragon Age: Origins
0 hours playtime
no achievements
BLAEO monthly:
PAGYWOSG:
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Angry food
0 hours playtime
no achievements
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The Adventure Pals
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Pickers
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Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood
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When Ski Lifts Go Wrong
Just for fun:
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Farm Together
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DOOM
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Pixel Puzzles Ultimate
Ninglors Log 153
February Progress:
10/8
PPU monthly:
done
Completed Games:
Escape From The Princess
Cursed Sight
Sweet Fantasy
Won/Gifted Games:
Bought Games:
Played this week:
Cat Story ahead!
Nope, sry
So much from me :)
Have a lovely week!
Queen Ninglor
Feb 23 2020
Now that my Game Pass month is up, it’s back to Steam games (and of course Wargroove got free DLC right after I played it; oh well).
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Snake pAss
6 hours playtime
15 of 33 achievements
This is a collectathon physics game. You move by holding the right trigger (the left stick just aims your character) and you can hold A to lift your head (the closest you have to a jump in this game, so it’s not really a platformer). You can also push Y to lift your tail in case you need a bit less weight behind you, but beyond that, you only have control over your head; the rest of your body is pure deadweight. Plus, if you aren’t constantly moving left and right, your forward momentum is excruciatingly slow, and I’m not talking about a simple “forward-left, forward-right” march, either: you practically have to be making U-turns to get any decent speed given how large and empty some of the game’s areas are.
The game doesn’t have any enemies or bosses; instead, you’ll be fighting the controls and physics. Most of the game-play involves wrapping yourself around poles to get across pits or reach higher ledges, but it isn’t uncommon for your head to get caught on the pole and suddenly start going the other way around, unraveling yourself in the process (at least half of the times I fell, it was because of this). Later in the game, moving poles get introduced, and the game physics work in such a way that even if you’re completely wrapped around the pole, the simple act of the pole moving will cause you to start unraveling. Sure, you can “grip” by holding the left trigger, but this is the most unreliable mechanic in the game: not only does it slow your movement to a near-standstill, but it doesn’t help with the moving-pole unraveling and makes the head-caught-on-pole reversal even worse! It’s really only useful for pulling switches.
And when the physics do work like you’d expect them to, you’ll notice that wrapping around poles is really all the game has going for it as far as challenge goes. The second world introduces water, but since there are no enemies and you can’t drown, it’s really just an easier way to move vertically. The third world introduces hot coals, but those are just a more forgiving version of the spikes from earlier. The final world introduces wind, and only now do we finally get something that makes the game a bit trickier than getting some of the coins in world 1. You’re still just wrapping around poles, but now you have to keep the wind in mind (and there’s more parts where you need to glide over a pit from one set of poles to another).
However, my least favorite parts of the game were when it dropped trying to be challenging at all and just went full switch-hunt/hidden object mode. Sure, some of the coins (and even bubbles) require trickier-than-normal positioning in order to reach them without falling, but half of them are just “here’s an out-of-the-way alcove that’s basically just a split-path and only requires pointing the camera in the right direction to notice,” and that percentage only gets larger the further you get in the game. It’s even worse when it affects mandatory progress: the third world has a dark red sky, dark coals, and even the grass is tinted with that same darkness, yet the switches remain the same dark red they always are, so even though they aren’t that hard to reach, it may still take you a few minutes to realize “oh wait, the switch I’m missing is right there.”
Overall, this game is okay. It’s about as well polished as a physics game could be (even having a decent difficulty curve if you completely ignore the collectibles), but it’s still a physics game, with all the inherent unreliability that implies. If you’re looking for a game that does something unique, get it on sale.
Feb 22 2020
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Observer
12 hours playtime
19 of 19 achievements
Report #252: Observer
Casual day in Krakow
Just finished my second PoP pick for the cycle. It is a psychological horror game and plays in a future version of Krakow. You play a detective, who is in a house during a lockdown, trying to figure out, what is going on.
After a couple of scenes, it gets very weird, not every scene I was sure, if it was a dream or the "real life" of the protagonist. The developers made a very good job here.
The story itself is not very long, but has a lot of sidetrack paths to discover
A-Z challenge
I read about the A-Z challenge and think it’s a great idea. I have chosen a game for every letter and plan to complete one every second week. In order to stay on schedule, next to the 4th game I will also complete the 3 previous ones this weekend.
In order to continue to have enough time for the PAGYWOSG and BLAEO challenges, I selected extra short games for this.
I selected the following games:
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A Normal Lost Phone
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Bad Day
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Cubic
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Doodle God: 8-bit Mania
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Ecchi Girls
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Frozen Mystery
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Genius Calculator
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House of Caravan
-
illie
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JQ: dogs & cats
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klocki
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Loot Box Simulator 20!8
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Mystic Diary - Quest for Lost Brother
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Nyctophobia
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OS:Path
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Puzzle Puppers
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Qvabllock
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Russian Life Simulator
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Swipe Fruit Smash
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True Lover's Knot
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Upside Down
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Vox Populi Vox Dei 2
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Winter Novel
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Xmas Shooting - Scramble!!
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Yozora Rhapsody
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ZRoll
Feb 21 2020
#19 Monthly Status Update (January 2020)
Hi everyone! I’m VERY late with my monthly update, partially because of the recent updates, which (besides finally allowing us to sync restricted games) made some outliers like movies or other stuff appear in my library and I wanted to wait some of that stuff out, so that my game count stabilizes on the correct number before making the next summary.
January was the end of the semester for me, which meant that it was another month in the row when I didn’t have time to play anything besides my recently purchased New 2DS.
Moreover, even though I really didn’t want to start working before getting my master’s degree in 1.5 years, I still live with my parents and it’s them who lay down the rules. And the new rules say that I’ll have to start a half-time job, besides still attending all of the courses on my full-time studies and still working on all of the programming projects I have to do at home. Judging by the fact that even though I didn’t work yet, it’s actually my fourth month in a row without playing any Steam games, it looks like I won’t have pretty much any time for backlog fighting besides summer or winter breaks for quite some time :< I’ll still continue doing monthly updates, but don’t expect to see me finishing too many games or writing interesting mini game reviews like I’ve used to ;/
New games: 8
2 from SG, 1 from bundles, 4 from trades, 1 gifted
- Omensight
0 minutes playtime
0 of 34 achievements
- Demon's Crystals
0 minutes playtime
0 of 28 achievements
- A Glider's Journey
0 minutes playtime
0 of 10 achievements
- Labyrinthine Dreams
0 minutes playtime
0 of 7 achievements
- Tomb Raider
0 minutes playtime
0 of 50 achievements
- Equilinox
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Castle Crashers
0 minutes playtime
0 of 12 achievements
- Roundabout
0 minutes playtime
0 of 40 achievements
Old restricted games that now synced: 11
- Evocation
0 minutes playtime
0 of 14 achievements
- Space Hole 2018
0 minutes playtime
0 of 1 achievements
- Squirrel Sphere
0 minutes playtime
0 of 15 achievements
- After Hours
0 minutes playtime
0 of 10 achievements
- Death Fungeon
0 minutes playtime
no achievements
- Jack N' Jill DX
0 minutes playtime
0 of 11 achievements
- Mushroom Quest
0 minutes playtime
0 of 3 achievements
- Million to One Hero
0 minutes playtime
0 of 31 achievements
- Subsideria
0 minutes playtime
0 of 72 achievements
- Balancelot
0 minutes playtime
0 of 10 achievements
- TETRA's Escape
0 minutes playtime
0 of 21 achievements
Beaten/completed games: 0 :<
Other games with progress: 0 :<
Won on SteamGifts progress
Changed since last month:
Never played: 59% (+2%)
Completed: 31% (-1%)
All games progress
Changed since last month:
Never played: 72% (+1%)
Beaten: 2% (-1%)
Weekly Games #77
I really enjoyed this story but it has a few problems, with the whole transitioning being the worst of them. Any time you do an action, like letting someone in, not letting them in and so on the screen will turn to black and be that way for a while. When most of your story is little bits and pieces those little waits become a huge nightmare. However like I said I really enjoyed the story even if it does become a bit repetitive in the end
It was to be expected from a game like this that by travelling worlds it meant you will go to one and never leave. Could've been so much better if we got to explore more then just 1 place or even heck just seeing the dude return home. Now I didn't actually mind though but yeah I didn't really understand what was happening half way through. Oh and they weren't kidding about the fact the guard doesn't wear any panties. Game was censoring everything until I clicked on gallery but why was it green…. Was it even green I apparently cant what's green or not so I could be imagining it!
I realised I could listen to the calls and that certain parts didn't show up as text so now I'm wondering if I missed anything in the 1st game. Nothing worth going back for I'm sure but damn I can't even confirm if the 1st game had voices!
So this game takes place during the 1st. Actions you took before like preventing a bomb, or not will affect what happens to the people in this game. This time we mainly focus on, well I don't really know what was the goal behind this. I know we are trying to discredit a guy who can't make up his god damn mind about what happened to his school and stuff, but I really don't properly know how we ended up looking at these certain characters. Frankly how did we go from stopping a terrorist group to picking on a wheel-bound dude who went to war and got his damn school blown up! I think he suffered enough.
I think from that you can tell I didn't really enjoy this game as much. However it doesn't mean I didn't like it. It was alright but I didn't really feel like my actions were important and with that stupid time limit now I felt like I was either missing important details or putting a bunch of rubbish I didn't need.
No proof for this game since there's no cgs which means no gallery. Just by doing all the routes you should get everything since no secrets here and no dlc hiding them yay
Don't you worry kids they are censored! According to steam like rules
It crazy that it's possible to miss all but 2 achievements in this game. 2 of them is just by doing certain unneeded actions during the escape room and the other 2 requires being on the main menu and doing a boob puzzle. So there is no just skip the whole game for your 6+ achievements, this game makes you work for it