2026 April
It was both a short and long (?) month. Played some longer games, played some really short ones to tick off from my playlist.
Work goes okay, though some global events lead to additional workload; elections were scary upfront, kind of unbelievable afterwards, I still feel like I need an occasional reality check.
So in no particular order:
Chinatris
store page
It was an SG win from the lovely coleypollockfilet, where it was more of a tool to make me pick my own “win”, rather than Chinatris being a central piece. I gave it a try, as the description looked interesting - “Chinatris is a Tetris-like game about Chinese characters where different charactersfall[sic!] to create new ones.” It’s nothing like Tetris, you can’t learn characters because they fall too fast and you can’t read on the side, and you need basic knowledge of order of strokes to even understand how blocks combine. It fails as a Tetris, fails as a learning tool and it’s just frustrating to play.
DOGWALK
store page
“Explore a hand-crafted winter forest as a big adorable dog and a little kid in tow.” Free, simple, nice, and the whole game was made with photos of the IRL models of the boy, dog, trees, ground, etc. Not super special, but really nice and pleasant for half an hour.
Find Your Words
store page
Another free game that looked cute, interesting (and short). In the game you play as a nonverbal kid, who goes into a camp where he plays / helps out the other kids. The game’s mechanics is having a folder with pictures for people, locations, verbs, feelings and activities and you combine them. Ian happy. Pigeon mess hall. Obviously it’s not much of a challenge, but pleasantly tickles the part of my brain that’s about language learning. Plus you can try to beat the hide and seek champion, help out a little painter, have a treasure hunt… It’s more laid back and less adventurous than A Short Hike, but has the same lazy, warm summer vibe, that make you start “weird” little quests.
Cape Hideous
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Cape Hideous is quite hideous if you just take a short look at it, but it was such an interesting experience. There is no talking in the game. The story is told through your actions and cutscenes, and you find the story where you can go, it’s small and linear. But if you look at the rough surface, you’ll notice that every screen, every character in the game is unique and has little details to them. The game is rough because of the art style, but deliberate, designed and detailed. The “story” is short, and while so little happens with the ship, there are so many details that makes you think of the people, their role, their routine, etc. It’s just one hour and it’s a wonderful one hour
Plague Inc: Evolved
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Finally finished a run or two in Plague Inc: Evolved, an old-ass SG win from Princeofiowa. The game having too much RNG for my taste, and apparently also a smorgasbord of unfixed achievement issues… I didn’t enjoy it too much, but 9 years ago it seemed interesting. I appreciate the chance to try it out for free :)
Daemonologie
store page
A fantastic
Bulb Boy
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Yet another horror game, this one is a point and clicky one. It’s interesting, it’s well done, it made me highly uncomfortable multiple times, but it’s best played with the help of a guide, there’s some moon logic involved at some points. You can (and will) die many times, but there are checkpoints at every screen / room. It was free so you likely own it, it may worth playing at an autumn afternoon/night.
The Last Show of Mr. Chardish
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Snowball (Christmasy gift like thing) from Foxpile - as an actress, return to the theatre where your carrier started, and reminiscence about the past pieces of the eccentric Mr. Chardish. Collect paperwork and memorabilia in the threatre (one of them is being bugged and if you don’t know, you need to replay the whole game for its achievements…), and as individual “minigames” you take part and replay the theatre pieces. The robot play (Symmetry) was the best part narratively and gameplay-wise. And those were not created equal, they are different in quality regarding uniqueness, fun, how involved you are. The one that are made up by the worst possible rhyming script is torture, though I think they wanted it to be bad in-universe too? Still hurt to having to hear it. It’s a really pretty game, but its narrative is disjointed between the past (you have newspapers and taped interviews) and 5 shows, and the end throws a choice at you that makes me think even the writer(s) couldn’t really decide how to end the game. So they made you make a choice, but put a save point before it so it’s easy to change it if you don’t like. Pretty, but surprisingly directionless and unsure of itself.
RUINER
store page
Moving forwards on the “style over substance, and I’ll get beaten for saying this” wagon, the next one is RUINER. Twin-stick shooter / brawler, highly stylish cyberpunk world.
I just feel like its gimmicks got old. The glitchy “somebody is talking to you inside your brain” pictures from the prologue stay for the whole game. The gameplay is entering a killbox, killing everyone there, then running to the next killbox while opening a chest or two on the go to get more xp. Literally rinse and repeat. And as you may guess from the screenshots, most of the locations is either dark, or red, the bullets are generally vibrant and melee attacks are wide and you guessed right, have a big red animation to them. It was generally hard to see even myself in some fights. A C.A.T. collecting side content seems to be buggy and/or you can close yourself out of it, the bounty hunting is done automatically so there’s one less reason for even having a world outside of the combat, and if you ever read, played or watched a cyberpunk media then you’ll roll your eyes at the main story. I guess there’s replayability in score-maxing and speedrunning, but other than that RUINER is more of a stylish, but repetitive and unoriginal game.
ANNO: Mutationem
store page
BEAUTIFUL art, fantastic worldbuilding, side quests have no connection to much of the worldbuilding or your quest, weird “go there, then go there” first half of the main quest with barely any combat, and the second half of the main quest jumps the shark - it is 80% combat and 20% “who the fuck are they and what’s going on”. There’s literally a cutscene, where at [LOCATION] C and G talking about S (There’s also a Castor, but they are not C, why would they) and you have no idea where, when it is, and who any of these people are. But they are cooooooooool.
A game that starts out an investigation ends up an anime-inspired (sub-par) spectatle fighter where the game shows “cool” scenes to you, as a player, unknown characters monologue to eachother, and there’s a doctor cybermonkey in a labcoat that doesn’t get addressed in any way. Most of the story is in random computer terminals in the second half of the game, that you can read between fighting enemies constantly, using the same 2-3 attacks at most.
There’s more on Steam in my review, I had to write this chaos out of my head: review on Steam
Metro 2033 Redux
store page
We’re at the final finished game, can you believe it?
I tend to mistakenly set up a Stockhold-syndrome-like relationship between games and myself, trying for achievements, while also taking the game too seriously (I tend to immerse myself too much) so I’m scared, don’t want to be touched by that scary-ass mutant, and I’m looking around for keys and notes. This was the trend with Metro 2033 too, so thinking back I like the game a lot more than I liked while playing. I read the book, knew what to expect, but tbh I was not ready for the supersmall FOV and some of the choices. I tried to make sense of it on DIscord, it’s weird. It’s like everything is too close to the protagonist, Artyom. He opens doors while pushing his face to the door. Every document is read so closely that he either can’t see past 20 cm, or the game was designed to be played from afar. I could read most of these things from metres afar. Idk, it’s just one of those things that made me feel that there’s something unconsciously deeply wrong with the presentation, but that doesn’t seem to be a universal experience.
Games I started but haven’t finished in the month:
Door Kickers
Jet Set Radio
It Is Ticking
Double Kick Heroes
9 new games if I counted it properly
- 3 from bundles I already bought, three free, one gift)
- 1 SG win - Shelldiver from DancingXmas
- 1 bought (Pizza Frenzy, 0.99€ :) )
11 games fewer in backlog
DOGWALK looks adorable. It’s been sitting at my backlog as something I’ll just boot one afternoon when I need to think about nothing. I have ANNO from my SG Wins and it does look incredible, but I feel I can’t expect too much from it gameplay or story-wise hahaha
Lol harsh but you told me and it’s of course understandable ! Basic chinese made me overlook the fact that it isn’t easy by its very nature.
“Cape Hideous is quite hideous” what did you do here ! XD
You’re really good at writing game summaries, and some made me genuinely giggle.
Looking forward your future Door kickers review !
I’ve read what the game was when I entered for it, but the description is really inaccurate, and it was since then that it collected negative reviews for the exact same reasons. I really just wish it would be what it promised to be.
Tbh i didn’t expect the winner to play chinatris, and was really surprised to see you play it with so much heart. I was just looking for a game that wasn’t too expensive and that nobody else had, to hold a raffle.
But to give you a different perspective, for a basic chinese learner who already learnt the order in which lines are drawn and how keys are combined, the game really looks like a basic tetris with characters. Here the issue is even reverse as the game doesn’t offer enough words and characters to teach anything to someone who already knows the 400 basic characters. It’s just a very basic tetris.
That doesn’t remove anything from the validity of your point of view, and i was really interested to read your different perspective, and how this game just doesn’t work for someone starting completely from scratch.
You’re right to tell your opinion and i hope the dev will read it, to maybe make something different next time, more useful to really learn a language.