Hey hey hey people,
Here’s my supa late 2019 recap, a catch-up from my last post and since we recently entered a new decade, I decided to list ten games I played and enjoyed the most that came out between January 1st 2010 and December 31th 2019.
Alright, let’s start with a short catch-up…
600.0 hours playtime
Since my last post, majority of my time was consumed by IRL and The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. I’m soooooo close to 100% this game and I’m certain I can pull it off before the next and hopefuly this time REALLY the last expansion comes out in summer this year. I’m stuck on beating Mega Satan as The Keeper, trying to get the right build + get lucky with angel rooms and not messing up my chances is really difficult… Having perma 2 heart containers and no flying, garbage stats across the board from start makes it the most difficult character, The Lost is pretty easy in comparisment…
But between Isaac I managed to beat something else.
A prequel and last DLC for SoM, The Bright Lord is a short but very fun DLC that fixes one of the biggest mistakes that happened in the base game, that being the last boss fight. In this DLC you fight against Sauron himself while YOU hold the one ring and only thanks to it you stand a chance as Sauron is pretty big and powerful even without it.
You play as Celebrimbor who is the wraith that inhabits your body in base game. It’s basically his short story how he got turned into a wraith and how Sauron tricked him into making the ring.
Gameplay wise this DLC is similar but it’s much more focused on truly using the one ring and swaying uruks to your side. Your HP pool is the same as Talion at the start, but the perks that increase that are gone, which makes it easier to die. You can now use your AOE attack (after charging combos) to brand uruks and at any time you can summon a group of five uruks to fight for you. Before you fight Sauron, you have to retake his land from him by branding or killing uruks controlling territory and building your tower there. After that, your territory is dominated by uruks friendly to you, but some survivors roam on. Oh and you do have the one ring through the whole game and can use it like Talion could use his sword ultimate to have never ending combo, but the one ring in addition to never ending combo also slows down time. It’s crucial on the last fight as that happens in the middle of the stronghold, with Sauron, five warchiefs and dozens of uruks and archers above you, all trying to kill you. This where you have to utilize the one ring to damage Sauron but you also need crowd control by massively branding uruks so you don’t get swarmed. It’s pretty simple but difficult fight and I really liked. Sauron is well recreated from the first movie, he towers over everybody and any uruk that happens to be in it’s way gets thrown like a doll and dies.
This is the most enjoyment I got from this game and I wish it had a final fight like this in the base game. I highly recommend this DLC.
Also does anyone know why BLAEO thinks I’m missing one achievement in Costume Quest? I changed it from “20 of 21” to “21 of 21” when making the panel, but on my game list it shows I’m still missing one. Shows correctly on AStats and my steam profile.
Centered around Halloween and costumes (duh!), this one is a small and short game from Double Fine. I went completely blind into this one and had no idea what to expect. It turned out to be a casual adventure game with turn-based combat and Double Fine writing, which to me means well written dialogue, similar to LucasArts adventure games and a slightly to very cartoonish tone.
The story – you and your twin sister/brother are new in neighborhood and Halloween just began. You pick whether you want to play as a girl or boy, and off you go to trick or treating, but just as you are about to go your twin, dressed as a giant candy, is kidnapped by a monster. You soon find out that the neighborhood is swarmed with these monsters, plundering the houses from all the candy and serving an evil witch that also has your twin. Through the game you’ll be chasing the evil witch and clearing hub areas you’re in, such as your neighborhood. The story is serviceable and writing is ok, but more childish than other double fine games I played since you play as a kid. And I don’t use childish here as insult to writing, I just can’t express it in any other way lol.
When you enter a combat the world transforms in , what I think is, a imaginary fight of your kids where if you wear a robot costume, you transform into a giant transformer that launches its fist like a weapon and uses a rocket barrage, wear a knight costume and you are a giant knight that can shield others and so on. Kids imaginary representation of fight instead of what really happened, them bashing monsters with candy bags or something. You meet a new friend very quickly and he joins your team, later on you meet a nerdy girl who joins you too and it’s just you three through the whole game. Some of the more interesting costumes include a unicorn, a black cat and a GIANT CRAB MADE OUT OF FRENCH FRIES. Costumes essentially serve as a class in your typical RPG and each one has an ultimate ability. A knight has a pretty decent attack but it’s ultimate gives a friendly shield that. A small variation to make combat a little more interactive is that every time you attack or get attacked you get a button prompt and if you either press it at right time or fast enough you get a bonus to your attack or defense.
When not fighting you roam the area collecting candy’s, looting chests, doing side quests or killing patrols of monsters, but that is mostly optional. You can spend candy to buy battle stamps, which effectively are buffs you can apply to one of your teammates. These vary from straight stat boost to giving you new abilities such as stuns, applying poison etc. Not bad but nothing amazing.
There’s not much else to say, there are also collectibles like creepy cards but I don’t think these served any purpose other than achievement hunting. You can upgrade your bag to carry more candy, which is useful as you don’t always have a shop nearby to spend it and you don’t want to waste it. You can beat the whole game in 2 hours or so it’s worth to give it a shot.
Straight forward puzzle game. You need to open boxes (loot boxes?) by solving puzzles imprinted on said box. Puzzles vary from trying to balance fluids, typing in right number combination to playing sort of mini-game.
I found difficulty odd as sometimes in middle of game I would get easy puzzle, followed by something much more harder and ending with again, pretty easy.
Game is super short, you can beat it in less than hour, if you struggle too long with solving a puzzle you can skip to next one, but if you want 100% you need to solve them all eventually.
It’s an easy -1 to backlog at very least and the fact it’s so short makes it more appealing to me. It’s not something I would want to spent long hours on.
My review of the first Dishonored and it’s DLC’s is HERE
Dishonored 2 is a perfect sequel. It expands on every aspect of the original and does so well without breaking anything or overwhelming you (at least for those that played previous game, like me). The areas are much bigger and full of life, civilians appear a lot more now, unlike previous game where it felt like only guards lived in the cities. There are tons of optional rooms and arenas but also keeping with last game, options to approach each mission differently. New tools, new powers and bonecharms, new enemies, new locations and lore and some returning characters.
This time you get to choose who you play as, either Corvo from the first game or Empress Emily, Corvo’s daughter who you helped save in the first game. Continuing from the first game and it’s DLC’s, each person get’s affected by the outsider powers a little differently, e.g. Corvo and Daud in 1st game. That means Emily get’s it’s own set of unique abilities that no other character has like ability to turn into a shadow figure that can quickly assassinate someone and is very difficult to spot or ability to spawn a clone of yourself to serve as distraction. Corvo has the same abilities which makes him the boring choice for first time playthrough. But one thing that changed is that Corvo now has a voice. He was a mute character in first game but looks like devs decided to give him some more personality for this game, which will make second playthrough less boring as you’ll hear now what he thinks about current situation or character. Though I should add if you want, you can play as Corvo for the first time.
Another choice you can make is accept The Outsider powers or not. I haven’t done this playthrough yet, but I imagine besides no powers this also makes bonecharms useless, which will make the game much harder, especially if you plan to do a stealth playthrough!
Combat wasn’t the best element of the first game, but I have to say it feels a lot more fluid here. I’m not sure what they changed or if it’s just me still remembering how to play after first game.
This time your hub area is a ship you use to travel around the empire, but unlike the Pub from first game, there’s no shop or upgrade guy for you. This time if you want to buy stuff or upgrade equipment you need to find Black Market’s that are on every level. Blueprints are again present and you need them to unlock new upgrades.
You’ll see some really unique levels here. A clockwork manor that switches entire rooms with a push of a lever, time-travel shenanigans where you jump from one time to another and you can affect the future with your actions (though changing events seems to affect just one specific issue, but I guess they didn’t want to bother and predicting how things would go for the whole world :P), city divided by two factions. The devs really stepped up their game on this part. There’s a different plague going on in background again, this time it’s bloodflies and the more aggressive playstyle will result in more apartments and even entire buildings being infested with bloodflies.
According to HowLongToBeat this game can be beaten in 12,5 hours, it took me 2x longer to beat this game because there’s so much to explore and loot in this game, you’ll spend hours just exploring. But you do get rewarded with a lots of money and blueprints you may have missed otherwise ;) It’s hard to find any complaints about this game, it also looks a lot better if you can play on high settings and runs really well even on my 660ti and FX-6350. One big complain I have is that there is a save limit. I hitted it somewhere ¾ in the game and had to replace some old saves. Quick saves and auto-saves are not affected by this.
So yeah, overall excellent sequel, it’s not very different from the last game in terms of gameplay, but it is better. Buy it if you liked the first game, or not :P
2019 recap and the top 5 games I played in 2019
Well, progress this year was much worse compared to my 2018 recap…
I beat only 17 games in 2019 vs 35 in 2018.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is largely to blame for that as I started new save, first time going through Afterbirth+ expansion and sinking a couple hundred hours more since the second half of 2019… Other than that I just couldn’t find as much time for games due to IRL stuff. I’m not sure if I’m gonna be less busy with IRL stuff but when I finally 100% Isaac then I won’t have a familiar game to come back to, meaning I’ll have to play something else :P
Oh I also had some new year resolutions but fuck them! No more new year resolutions this time.
This year balance:
--- 17 games beaten+++ 285 games added to the backlog
===============
+268
Oops… :/
But hey, I did play some great games this year besides Isaac, so this year wasn’t a complete waste! One of these even made it to my top 10 games of the decade!
Five games I beated this year and enjoyed the most:
5. The Sexy Brutale (2017) (My review)
4. Apex Legends (2019) (My review)
3. Dishonored (2012) (My review)
2. RUINER (2017) (My review)
1. Spec Ops: The Line (2012) (My review)
And to recap my time with video games in 2010’s, here are the best ten games I played and that came out this decade!
10. Dishonored 2
Well, I already given my thoughts above. Dishonored 2 is one of the most fun stealthy games out there with compelling story and visuals.
9. Grand Theft Auto V
I have yet to play a game developed or published by Rockstar that disappointed me. GTA V is no exception, with excellent writing, more adult-focused humor and fun, open-world gameplay. Although I feel like driving and gunplay took a small step back from GTA IV, this is still such a joy to play slaughter with the cops or just cruising through the city.
8. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Still one of my favorite horror games and really scary to this day, as I recently replayed it for new achievement. Lovecraftian and injects a lot of story from “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” onto Daniel, game protagonist, and borrows a little from other mythos and stories.
7. Spec Ops: The Line
Solid game with some of the best use of foreshadowing in games I have seen. It begins so boring with you, Delta Force operator somewhere in middle east gunning down brown people with AK’s to end with hundreds of American marines killed by you and a twist that I didn’t see coming. Great game and the biggest surprise of this decade.
6. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Oh boy, how could I not put BoI on this list? Even as I type this I still struggle to get the last four achievements. If there’s one game to blame for my poor progress in 2019 it’s this one. This is game is such a time sink, with it’s addicting gameplay, hundreds of different items and combinations and a unique run everytime you start a new one. Great improvement from flash version that I also sinked over 150 hours in :D
5. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
Aka. Slav simulator, CoP is the most defined entry in the series. Although it cuts off a lot of Zone from previous games, it introduces two new huge areas and some different parts of Pripyat city not seen in SoC. It’s a series divided by those that either hate or love the game. CoP also has a massive modding scene, with tons of different mods from small changed to complete overhauls.
4. SOMA
I did not expect it to be better than Amnesia, but I’m happy that Frictional Games proved me wrong. Moving from Amnesia old castle into SOMA’s abandoned underwater facility, SOMA is just as scary as Amnesia while also asking you moral and philosophical questions. It could be even higher on list if not for your protagonist who is a complete dumbass and sometimes so annoying you just want to yell at him to shut the fuck up.
3. Hollow Knight
Indie gem of the decade, the most beautiful and most challenging (after Dark Souls) game I played that I can remember. Memorable encounters, beautiful visuals and music, good controls and a huge map with mostly visual story telling makes this game one of my all time favorites. Looking forward to Silksong!
2. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
Loved almost every second of it. A story of a celtic warrior who attempts to enter Nordic Hel to get back her lost love, while constantly fighting with her psychosis. Great sound design with voices whispering constantly to your ear. I also really loved devs vision of Nordic warriors and creatures.
1. Portal 2
The last single player game by Valve and their greatest achievement 😊 It’s fun from start to beginning, pacing is perfect, greatly expands Aperture Science complex, GLaDOS is excellent with her sarcastic humor and a slightly different, less robotic personality, which I liked!
And I only hope that HL: Alyx is going to make it to number one place of my future 2020’s list 😉 I have high hope in Valve that they can pull it off, but first I need to get myself a VR headset D:
Thanks for making it to the end! And hopefuly next year I can finish my yearly recap a little faster XD
I completely agree with you on Dishonored 2 and unique levels, I had fun with them! :)
I had also problems with saves. I save a lot so I hitted the limit pretty soon, so I started to rewrite them, but when loaded I got teleported in time as it loaded up the save I rewrote before even though the picture and time showed on the save was right. I have made a back up of saves and deleted them in the folder, but they still showed up in the game so I had to manually delete them one by one. That always destroyed my fun a little. ;)
You are right that Karnaca is more lively, but I think that’s because the plague hitted the Dunwall more seriously and they have also issued quarantine and curfew. ;)
Don’t worry, my one playthrough took me 73 hours… tehehe. XD
But I have may left it on during cooking or so, but still surely over 50 hours.
Yeah that I might be the “lore” reason for city being more populated. I remember Lord Regent being kind of an asshole and maybe he didn’t care? But even on low chaos playthrough the city seemed dead. Karnaca never truly turned into a dead city for me even on high chaos playthrough. I feel like the real reason for Dunwall in first game was engine limitations or something similar of technical nature :P
And damn what were you doing this whole time in the game? :D Even if it was just 50 hours that’s A LOT! I will probably 100% the game by the time I hit 50 hours total on steam.
Well, I am rather slow player (showed on Bioshock too) and I search every cranny I can find. XD I spend lot of time with analyzing and learning about the situations, surroundings, enemies, etc. I don’t really remember now, but I think I was redoing some missions because of lost progress due save rewriting.
That’s a great post. Good recap of the year and impressive that you could pick your 10 favourite games of the decade. I think I would be totally stumped to make a list I’d be happy with.
Your dedication is admirable. Putting 600 hours in Binding of Isaac is not something that you see every day. I hope you can get the last achievements and find a worthy successor game once you’re done. Funny that you like the Bright Lord DLC the most, because I liked it the least of the three (base game and 2 DLCs). I enjoyed the other DLC much more. Judging from your review, I probably didn’t take enough time to get to know the ring mechanics. I remember that I struggled quite a bit with the DLC.
I played almost none of your favourite games of the year OR decade :D But judging from the general opinion, almost all of the choices are understandable. I do have Spec Ops: The Line in my backlog, hopefully I’ll have the time to play it soon. I keep hearing great things about it. One game I did play is your #1, Portal 2. I agree, it’s a fantastic game with great mechanics, great humour and an interesting story. I’d probably not put it on the top of my games of the decade, but it’s definitely one of the most memorable games of the decade for me as well.
Thank you! I remembered most of them and my own list for beaten games in 2018 and 2019 helped to make it easier. For years 2010-2017 I just browsed the wikipedia page for released games that I played and really enjoyed and written them down in notepad :D
Funnily enough when I posted this, I played more BoI and got the last difficult boss lmao. Now I just need to find and pick up last few items and I’m done :) I should be done with the game this week, unless I get really unlucky with drops! :D Then I just have to wait till summer for new and last DLC and it’s back to the clown town…
Yes, you should give Spec Ops a try :) It starts kinda boring like I said but it gets better with time! Hmm and if you are interested in more games from my decade you could grab Amnesia really cheaply, if you don’t mind horrors that is! Dishonored games nowadays get decent discounts too, especially the first game with it’s DLC’s (GOTY edition). :)
285 or 268?
either way wew thats a whole lot…however many years to you plan on trying to make a dent in that :O
I added 285 games to my backlog in 2019 and beaten 17 in 2019 so the balance in the end is 268 extra games :P Thanks, I’ll probably won’t beat even 100 this year, oh well
Reminds me that I need to get back to Hellblade - stopped about two hours in, made me incredibly motion sick. :I
Was it motion blur that caused that? I think there was no option to disable it via options menu but you can do so via config file, check this guide - https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Hellblade:_Senua%27s_Sacrifice The game is worth the trouble and it’s something you’ll have to do once 😛
No idea what it was, could be motion blur. :I First I’ll try playing it again without changing anything and if I still have issues I’ll look into that. Thank you!
Uhm … looks like the last achievement would be the “play on Christmas” one … so, last year, old sync. Either Steam randomly choked and the sync got confused – that happened from time to time. Or maybe you were too quick with starting, unlocking, closing in under a minute – then Steam might not have increased the playtime counter and BLAEO wouldn’t have looked at that game too closely.
Well, whatever the reason is … To fix it, just start the game, wait for a minute, then close it. The next time BLAEO syncs it will notice that last achievement.
That worked, thanks! :D