August 2025
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Hollow Knight
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20 Small Mazes
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Assassin's Creed Mirage
37.82 hours playtime
30 of 50 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Herdling
3.6 hours playtime
19 of 31 achievements
GAME
PASS -
New Super Lucky's Tale
7.42 hours playtime
41 of 54 achievements
GAME
PASS
- Hollow Knight: Finally finished on my third restart in time for Silksong (I thought it was easier to do so than try to pick up from where I was some years back). Metroidvanias and Soulslikes are two of my favourite genres. Hollow Knight has excellent controls; excellent enemy and boss variety; excellent buff variety; excellent skill-unlocks; excellent art and music and atmosphere; and a large and varied world with lots of good unlockable interconnects that is very flexible in its order once you finish the startgame. On the other hand, needing to use a precious limited buff slot to see where you are on the map is a constant irritant, and could have been reserved for NG+. Needing to collect enough Geo currency to buy and upgrade necessary things also brings frequent enough annoyance (and there’s not much to do with it once one has cleaned out the shops). Objectively it’s excellent 9.5+/10. Subjectively I don’t love it 8.5/10. I hope to like Silksong better.
- 20 Small Mazes: A nice set of different maze-related puzzles, and a free one at that. 8.5/10
- Assassin’s Creed Mirage: This is the first AC game I’ve completed, though I played a bunch of Odyssey before petering out, and bounced hard off AC1 and Valhalla. This one is relatively bite sized - mainly the city of golden-age Baghdad with not much to do in the surrounding wilderness (pay no attention to the hours listed, there’s an unknown bunch of idle time in that). I played on hard, and the game was too easy - the parry window is overly generous, and as long as I was respectful of stealth mechanics (and bravely running away when needed), it was pretty straightforward – which was not helped by extremely limited variety in the enemies and pretty stupid AI with variable pathfinding quality. The environmental design was good. The parkour was both mostly mindless - and occasionally frustrating (climbing unintentionally, not climbing properly in tight spaces). Ultimately the game is fast food - it knows what it is, it does what it does, and not more. 7.5/10
- Herdling: Made by people who definitely liked Journey and Ori and the Blind Forest, and probably The Last Guardian and maybe Pikmin — and decided to mash it up into a cinematic action-adventure game where you steer a herd of beasts over fields and mountains just because, pausing at points to solve environmental puzzles to progress. 7/10
- New Super Lucky’s Tale: A very good – if rather gentle – 3d Mario-like. The digging mechanic is fresh, the controls and camera are excellent, the variety of worlds and their activities good, the characters likeable, and the time limits very kind. Too kind, really – it probably could have done with a difficulty switch. 9/10 (but don’t expect too much of a challenge except maybe for the no-hit achievements).
Good commentary on Hollow Knight - I remember being slightly too annoyed by having to use the location charm, as well as having to find the cartographer to then be able to buy the maps. It makes sense in the context of the game, but always irked me a bit more than it should.
I have New Super Lucky’s Tale and kind of never got excited about it, but your review was very kind to the game and makes me feel like picking it up sooner than later. It’s been a while since I’ve played a 3D Mario-like, probably since A Hat In Time
It is quite possible that I liked NSLT more because of how much AHIT’s camera and controls bugged me
Ohhhh that’s a strong endorsement! I loved AHIT, in particular the vibes and the overall charm of it, but the camera was a prick more often than not hahahah it was my biggest complaint about it
And congrats on beating now NSLT ;-)
Gahahaha that’s where the idea came from! Thank you for the nudge, it was a good time. But I still prefer AHIT, mostly due to the expressiveness of the movement system. NSLT’s camera is pretty nice thou, the way it arches up if you remove the zoom or leans in closer to the ground if you zoom in
Congratulations on your assassinations!!! ᓚᘏᗢ
Why did you bounce off Valhalla? admittingly, I did as well but that’s because I hated that the snow looked like melted plastic and I couldn’t take it seriously since that giant wolf in your dream/vision looked like a ruined muppet.
As far as I can recall, it wasn’t anything particularly big/noticeable, more just a very quick and visceral “I’m not having fun with this” (on both occasions I tried picking it up). I guess it was probably that I’d played a fair bit of Odyssey and things just felt stale at best and overall worse. The colour palette likely didn’t help - it’s really not a nice snowy world but more a dingy and depressing and dirty and ugly colour palette.That may or may not be accurate to the real world, but compared with the warm tones of Odyssey (or Mirage) it’s not a world that’s enjoyable to spend time in. The stealth / combat avoidance feels overall worse because of height limitations. Nor do I remember the combat feeling good – maybe slightly heavy/awkward/ponderous (not that Odyssey or Mirage are particularly good particularly when compared with the Arkham games). And I’d done enough sailing in Odyssey and it’s a necessary world traversal method but again the environment makes it even less enjoyable. (On reflection, the environment also compares poorly with the Witcher 3’s Skellige, and I didn’t love that either)
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Congratulations! 5 clears is a dream. And thanks for reminding me that it’s time I get Hollow Knight out of my backlog ;-)
Ouch Herdling is less than 4h long ! :o
Congratz for your 2 long games completion : Hollow Knight and AC mirage
Thanks. Were you expecting Herdling to be a long(er) one?
Tbh yes considering the price, it’s step !
Ah yeah – I played it on Gamepass so it was “free” but I think I’d be rather peeved if I’d paid full price.