UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +23, ABOUT THE GLORIOUS RED.

Much like the last month, I managed to beat some games for the Ruby theme. That just feels so good!

The (JUL) label indicates games played for the July monthly theme.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (still playing though)

✔️ LIKED: A great rogue-like with a bit of perma progression. Worth noting is the randomized skill tree which I quite like even though it ads another layer of RNG. The game greets you with a “best played with a controller” message which is usually a bad omen, but luckily KB+M works perfectly fine.
❌ DISLIKED: Every time you want to scrap a dropped piece of equipment, you have to equip it, open your inventory, scrap it and then re-equip the item you were using. That’s quite inconvenient. The map sometimes rotates on its own (usually after fights with bosses and champions) even with the Dynamic Camera option disabled. That’s obviously not a major issue, but it bugs me just a little bit :D

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: A masterfully handled mobile port where your goal is to destroy humanity by unleashing a variety of deadly diseases. Offers a lot of symptoms to choose from to build your own plague. Comes with a pretty complex level editor.
❌ DISLIKED: Greenland is ridiculously hard to infect and in most cases, there isn’t much you can do about it. Some achievs rely heavily on RNG, to the point where you have to sit there for an hour and a half, reloading the same bit of a mission in hopes that the one random occurence finally happens. I’m not kidding, that’s how long it took me to get one of those random bastards - 90 minutes worth of reloading!

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: I like the idea, the game goes kind of deep with its “Oldagers vs Newagers” philosophy and you can express your opinion on the matter and even slightly influence the outcome (depending on whom you choose to kill - you play as Death).
❌ DISLIKED: Unfortunatelly, it’s a bit of a wasted potential. This was meant to be just a small experiment, but if they made it bigger, longer and more complex, it could have been much more, because the foundation is there.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: Surprisingly well-made “story driven” top-down shooter with stylized graphic and decently voiced cutscenes. Seriously, don’t let the graphic deceive you, this game is legit! It’s also free to play.
❌ DISLIKED: The last level of NG+ is perhaps a bit too hard because of all those enemies who come at you all at once. I would prefer if the drawings in cutscenes were also done in the stickman fasion, but that’s just a personal preference of mine.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: An alright point & click adventure depicting the 10 plagues of Egypt. Chapters are short and you can replay them separately, making it easy to obtain missed achievs. I think I’ll be buying the other “Rusty Lake” games.
❌ DISLIKED: An obvious mobile port. The Steam overlay only works half the time and the game doesn’t offer much in terms of graphic and volume settings. There’s not even a “quit” button for fuck’s sake - you have to switch to windowed mode and close the window.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: Nicely drawn gore scenes.
❌ DISLIKED: It’s a laughable mixture of shallow story, idiotic characters and hilariously bad dialogues. Very clearly someone’s first attempt at writing, an attempt that failed spectacularly.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: A well written gamebook - genuinelly amusing without making you feel upset about turning such a classic piece of literature into a comedy game. The humor is spot-on most of the time and the author seems to have a fair understanding of Hamlet (the book this is based on), resulting in even the most silly scenes not feeling completely out of touch. The narrator did a pretty good job with his voice acting.
❌ DISLIKED: The text auto-advances a bit too fast, some kind of option to adjust speed would have been useful. The game does have checkpoints, but you can’t place your own “bookmarks” which is a bit inconvenient when you just want to mess around.

🗒️ NOTE: Being at least vaguely aware of Hamlet’s plot probably helps a lot. For example, I imagine the “stabbing Polonius through a curtain” joke is about 100% less funny if you don’t know what the deal is.