• Reroute
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

Puzzle game. Mechanics are based on Sokoban (tile-based, push blocks, goal is to get certain blocks on certain spaces), but this game sets itself apart by having pink-sided blocks. You may be wondering: what do they do? How are they different from normal blocks? Well, guess what: the game never tells you, and none of the levels are built to lead you into discovering it naturally, so you’ll have to do trial-and-error as early as the second level before you finally stumble across the fact that moving into a pink wall will teleport you to the opposite side of that block’s twin.

Although that’s some pretty bad game design, if you can get past that, the rest of the game has some pretty good puzzles that are all built around this teleportation mechanic; no gimmicks are thrown in later on to make up for lack of substance or challenge, and no further trial-and-error is necessary once you know how the teleportation works. Plus, the game is free, so I can easily recommend it.

Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County

4/10

1.3 hours

6 of 6 achievements (100%)

#380
#47 of 2025
August 16, 2025

Two-Week Report: August

Never Played -> Completed

Refind Self: The Personality Test Game

17.2 hours

no achievements

It's the kind of experience I'd want to recommend to as many people as possible while saying as little about it as I can get away with.

I will say that the game is much shorter than my playtime suggests. I got a bit obsessed and explored every little corner of it.

Never Played -> Completed

Dogs Organized Neatly

5.3 hours

20 of 20 achievements

The sequel to Cats Organized Neatly. In that game, there were a few late-game cats that were big and awkwardly-shaped, and they often offered the best clues as to what the solution could be, since there were only a few places in which they could fit. It led to an awkward difficulty curve where the game almost seemed to get a little easier near the end. Dogs Organized Neatly went way overboard with the big and awkward pieces, which led to a much easier game in my experience. The "big dogs" are your best friend, and not necessarily in a good way. They make the game easier much earlier on and the game's difficulty curve never quite recovers. The last level of Cats felt like a proper final boss compared to the end level of Dogs, and that would be the fault of one particularly big dog that takes up about 70% of the board. Some of the puzzles try to throw you a curve ball by using these "big dogs" to present a "most obvious" first move that will funnel you into a dead end, but once you become conditioned to these red herring setups you can quickly breeze past those levels too by just ignoring these stumbling blocks and trying something a bit less obvious. I dunno. It wasn't a bad game. It didn't quite drop the ball. It did chase its own tail a bit, though.

Unfinished -> Mastered

Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy

12.8 hours

61 of 61 achievements

Decided to do another RetroAchievements set. This one was free aside from the orbless run and the hard mode fishing game, neither of which were that bad. I decided to beat the game with 0 orbs, but the achievement allows 25, and the only place you'll need the margin for error is in Precursor Basin (and Citadel, I suppose, if you decide not to skip it). The hard mode fishing game was kind of wild, though. They come at you at Guitar Hero speed and that's not an exaggeration. It makes me wonder how hard the fishing game was when the game was being developed, before someone on the QA team told them it was too hard—and some people think 200 is still too hard!

-14 Backlog

Games Completed: 2
Games Purchased: 0
Free Games Deleted: 16
Free Games Added: 4

July 2025

Another late update.

• Added

Steam Statistics:

June 2025

One late update.

• Added

Steam Statistics:

July 2025 Update

Next update (works only on profile page)

Activated: 08/2024

Escape Simulator (Q4 2021) ⭐️⭐⭐⭐☆

Beaten after: 11 months

Escape_room, Co-op
13.5h | 19 of 25 (76%)

⇱ Click to show summary⇲

The good 👍
- Interesting puzzles that require thinking outside of box
- Hoarding clues, so your partner can't progress
- Can design and play own rooms via the community editor
- Free cross-over rooms (e.g. Portal or Talos Principle) are big and detailed

The bad 👎
- Basic game rooms are a bit claustrophobic
- Some tokens are just annoying (not fun) to find
- Some numerical puzzles feel more like guessing game than "do it based on the clues"
- Game is buggy and level reset may be required to beat it

Conclusion:

A good escape room simulator. Can be played both in single and multiplayer. There is good variety to puzzles, no issues with cooperation. The only negative is that rooms are quite small, and game can bug out, so quest items can't be interacted with. Restarting the level helps, but it means lost time to re-do the same puzzles again.

---

Details

💸 Microtransactions ☑ None ☐ Skins ☐ "Time-savers" ☐ Direct purchase ☐ Custom currency (gems etc.)	🏆 Achievements ☐ None ☐ Story progression ☑ Few collectibles / easy to get ☐ Grindy collectibles / hard to get ☐ Require multiple playthroughs	💾 Save system ☐ No saves ☐ No saves, progress carries over ☐ One checkpoint, too rare ☑ One checkpoint, frequent ☐ Manual saves
📊 Performance ☐ Can run on potato ☑ Medium requirements ☐ High requirements ☐ Too low for what is visible on screen ☐ Optimization disaster	🌌 Graphic ☐ May look good 10 years ago, but not now ☐ Blurry textures / geometry problems ☑ Average ☐ Good ☐ Beautiful	🔊 Sound ☑ Nothing to remember ☐ Good voice acting ☐ Good weapons & effects ☐ Good OST ☐ Music flows well with the action
🦚 Customization options ☐ Resolution, volume only ☑ Basic graphic settings ☐ Advanced graphic settings ☐ Adjustable HUD ☐ Accessibility options	🧭 Map ☑ No map ☐ Basic ☐ Detailed ☐ Minimap ☐ Fast travel	Details:

Late with both posts for June and July, but life happens 😅 Didn’t have much time to play, even less to come here and do a short summary.

I currently play Kingdom Come Deliverance and Epic and I do enjoy it. Minus the combat. Trying to shoot a bow in game, without reticle is mad. I did practice archery, it’s hard enough to shot a bare bow to a stationary target. Not to mention try to hit rabbit or enemy mid-movement. And sword fight is overcomplicated, plus it’s pretty much always that we are stacked against a few enemies. Not 1 on 1 duels.

But. This is a game from glorious 2018. Time before games were full of microtransactions and time-savers nonsense. I don’t need to pay for experience boost or easier combat. I can download “show reticle when using bow” and “easier parry” mods without paying a cent, and enjoy the world building and story. Not to rage-quit due to combat 😎 And no devs requiring me to be always-online to check game file integrity, and revoke my access to single player game, as I am a dirty cheater. Ha. Screw you, capitalistic gaming industry.

People recently managed to push Stop Killing Games initiative past the threshold to be considered by EU. It doesn’t mean there will be any change in law, and gaming corporations already prepare their legal departments to lobby against it. Maybe even produce ads that keeping offline access to single player games past the publisher expiry date, in preparation to release a new game in the series, will get people raped. Just like moto industry did to fight right to repair by independent providers? 😐

We will see. I would like to have European law that would require games to have info at the front cover in big font “this game will no longer work a year after release” [we need to make grounds for release of battlefield 8]. Or that if a decision was made to kill servers in a multiplayer game, no new sales of game or DLC would be allowed in prior x months. To not have people grab a copy of a game in shop to learn 2 weeks later the game will become e-waste month after purchase.

June 2025 Update

Next update (works only on profile page)

Activated: 06/2025

Two Point Hospital (Q3 2018) ⭐️⭐⭐⭐☆

Beaten after: 1 month

Simulator Management
4.5h | 1 of 61 (2%)

⇱ Click to show summary⇲

The good 👍
- Disease description and hospital announcements are funny

The bad 👎
- highly repetitive and focused on copy-pasting working solutions over and over again
- not possible to re-train staff
- there is too much micromanagement when it comes to staff

Conclusion:

I see how this game can be good for people who enjoy very repetitive simulators. For me, it felt like a waste of time, to keep going through the same paces by re-making the same rooms over and over again. There are a lot of optional things to unlock with points received for achieving level objectives, but then scrolling through list of available objects (decorations, different benches, vending machines etc.) nothing stood out to me with "o! I want to unlock this thing!". Staff is rather dumb and can walk around the halls instead of treating patients. Training new staff abilities is painful and slow, hoping to find a new hire on the list of available staff with desired trait is futile. Everyone wants to be promoted all the time, there are no "average Joe" that would be just fine with their level 1 ghost-sucking and basic machine repair.

Normally, I don’t consider “forgettable” to be a bad thing since I’d rather play a good game I don’t remember that well instead of a bad game I remember for the wrong reasons, but Starfox Adventures had to come along and be the first exception by having a mandatory segment where you have to match items to the locations you found/used them in. See, the game has two different horn instruments, and both are treated like your typical fetch-quest “go here and push the button” item. And sure, they both look very different and are used in distinctly different locations, but the overall gameplay is just so bland and bare-bones that I had genuinely forgotten about the entirety of the Cloudrunner Fortress by this point.

Oh, but there’s a bunch of stuff about the game I do remember. The beat-‘em-up combat is little more than “tap the A button and you win,” and if an enemy blocks your melee attacks too much, just pull out your magic staff and shoot them. When you’re not auto-locked onto an enemy during combat, aiming your magic staff is finicky and irritating since you have to keep the C-stick held in position or the reticle will recenter itself back in the middle of the screen. The game’s attempt at an overworld is very linear with lots of tedious backtracking (no fast travel), and many of these pointlessly-time-consuming rooms are just blatant attempts at disguising load times (which wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t have to keep going back and forth through them throughout the game). The game’s excuses for puzzles are just there as gimmicks, being very easy (except for when they don’t work right, so you look up a walkthrough just to be told to do the same thing you’ve been doing) and abandoned shortly afterward. The actual Starfox-esque space-shooter sections are limited to just five 1-minute-long levels, and even they aren’t immune to the backtracking! You might think the beat-‘em-up combat would get more involved with the bosses, but no, the bosses are secretly just more puzzles (except the two that are shooter segments), and the bad guy who’s built up for most of the game is never fought. I beat this game and can confidently say it’s unfinished at best.

So yeah, I’ve been having another string of busts recently, hence my lack of posts, but I did beat this game just now, and it’s not too bad:

• Linxy The Lynx
  

  31 minutes playtime

  6 of 9 achievements

Platformer. Forward movement starts a bit slow, but it speeds up after a second or so, which is kinda awkward. You can still stop and turn around on a dime, though. Besides movement and jumping, you have a “crouch” which barely brings down your height at all and is only useful once to avoid a ceiling saw (twice if you count its duplicate in the remix levels), and you have an awkward slide that only activates if you’re running at top speed (and which you only ever need to use to attack the final (only) boss).

Level design is okay. The first couple ones are a bit too easy, and there’s one enemy type that takes two hits to kill for no reason, but it does start to pick up around level 5. Unfortunately, there are only five levels, and the boss is one of those that makes you wait a while for it to be vulnerable (and the waiting is a bit much until you’ve hit it a couple times and its attacks have picked up). You can unlock “remix” levels by finding computer-chip items in the levels, and if you miss one, you can exit the level from the menu right after getting it so you don’t have to replay the whole level, which is nice…but that still only brings the total number of levels up to 11, and as you can tell by my playtime, they’re all rather short. Honestly, between this, the cliffhanger ending, and the fact the game has an episode-selection that only ever has one episode available, this game might also very well be unfinished.

Still, as far as free games go, this one’s okay, so I can recommend it.

Under The Waves

6.25/10

11.3 hours

31 of 38 achievements (82%)

#379
#46 of 2025
August 15, 2025

• The Inner World
  

  17 hours playtime

  23 of 23 achievements

Report #419: The Inner World

Started my first run in March on the Steam Deck, as it was advertised to be very compatible. But lost track after a while.
Picked it up yesterday and was first a bit shocked, because no cloud save, so I had to restart from the beginning. But not even finished the first chapter. No big lose.

Was fun getting through. Was not so funny getting the “talk to everybody” achievement as I played three times. Always forgetting someone.