Monthly Report - September 2018

Luck is back ! And spent time on finishing/completing some games…

So first, new games :

• Won : Epistory - Typing Chronicles, The Sexy Brutale
• Free : …
• From bundles/gifts/sales : …

• Epistory - Typing Chronicles
  

  10 hours playtime

  55 of 55 achievements

Epistory - Typing Chronicles - completed

Won this on SteamGifts with the Playing Appreciated group so I played it pretty much immediatly.
This is a beautiful game and the mechanics are interesting : you type words from the dictionary to cast element spells on enemies, each element having a different effect. I’m pretty good at typing so it wasn’t really difficult although some events were a bit stressful. Moreover, I played it in french and I think it might have an effect on difficulty as words tend to be a bit longer than english (I can’t imagine how it would be in german ^^). The music is beautiful, the story is not very clear, until you finish the game and the zones, enemies, texts,… take a new meaning. This is nice.
The game is not very punishing, you can die without much consequences, there are a few puzzle not really difficult. Only downside I can think of is that the controls are not great, sometimes the character doesn’t behave like you expect to (specially when trying to move in diagonals) and the default key pattern feel strange (they say it is to allow you having a nice hand position on the keyboard, I’m not convinced), thanksfully you can select the classic WASD pattern.
Overall a nice game. It doesn’t have much replay value, but there are some arenas with a ladder, for people that want a bit of challenge and want to compare they performances.
Achievements : A lot of the achievements are obtained by playing the game. I’ve been careful to explore well so I also got all the “get all items” ones. So most of them are not hard to get. But I’ll admit I cheated for the few last ones (with a simplified custom dictionary from the Workshop), because it just requires to play the game over and over to a ridiculous amount : I finished the game exploring everything and doing every event, plus I played a few times on all the arenas, and only got around 2500 monster killed. The achievement required 10K. Same thing with the number of words typed, the achievement required 17K, I probably was around 5000…
So I’m not ashamed to cheat with this kind of achievements.

• Train Valley
  

  19 hours playtime

  32 of 39 achievements

Train Valley - beaten

I continued to play this game until I finished it. The last levels (Japan) are really interesting as it adds a lot of great challenges as you have some space issues. So I liked it a lot.
I finished the game but there is still one level that I can’t complete with 3 stars so I’ll probably play it again a few times
Achievements : Got most of them. I still need to try the harder ones (having 10 trains running at the same time and complete a level with 300 tiles. That last one is harder than it looks :). And there’re four achievements I can’t complete right now as they are linked to a DLC. I’ll probably wait for some sales to get that one.
But I’m confident I’ll be able to complete this game.

• Human Resource Machine
  

  15 hours playtime

  14 of 16 achievements

Human Resource Machine- beaten

Finished this one pretty quickly, this is a really great game. The last puzzles add some interesting challenges (specially “Prime factory”). One small issue I found is that for the hardest ones, the UI is not great, as sometimes you might want to move a bunch of instructions instead of one by one, but they were smart enough to add an export/import feature so this is not THAT annoying. So overall great game. After completing this one I might check the sequel.
Achievements : I finished the game but now I need to optimise a few of my solutions ! There’s not a lot missing but I’ll probably need to exchange ideas with some friends.