Loved this one. A ‘sports’ setting, I guess, so not much of a story but there was enough to explain the situation. It looks good and plays well.

There’s a good difficult arc too. I’ve not mastered it enough to get the most difficult achievements, but getting through all the levels took time and it felt like I was improving. I came back to this after a long break and it took me an hour or so to get back into the rhythm of things and relearn the controls. A real ‘yesssss’ moment when I beat the final boss.

Beaten, but I can definitely see myself coming back to this in the future (Once I either 1. beat the backlog or 2. Need a break from other games!). I’ll leave it installed with 71% of achievements for now. As it is, there are a lot of other games I want to play so onwards and upwards!

One of those games that I was half interested in based on positive reviews but never enough to buy it. It was recently given away for free (probably because the sequel was released) so I grabbed it.

Very strange but not unpleasant setting to the game. The good things - the music, the concept of graffiti tagging in the game, and the unusual NPCs you meet. The bad things - Not sure if it’s my setup but the screen movement was strange, creating almost a motion sickness feeling. It was better on the Steamdeck than a big screen but still noticeable and offputting. With the climbing mechanic, you can climb some surfaces but not others. The problem is there is no clear indication of what you can and can’t climb. Also, some kind of juvenile humour in there. I probably would’ve appreciated them in my early teens but not so much now.

Overall, ok. It was short enough and I enjoyed it enough to complete it but I have no interest in getting the sequel.

I played Metro 2033 back in 2019 and didn’t really enjoy it. The dark setting and slight horror-jump-scare vibe didn’t do it for me. Based on that, I avoided the newer Metro games and had no plan to play anymore. That is until I got my keys mixed up and activated this one by mistake.

Fast forward to… now and I finally decided to take the plunge (I added the game to my 8 years of BLAEO challenge to push myself to play it). The setting and storyline of this game were better for me. A lot of the game is above ground and you don’t have to deal with lights, flares, lighters, etc. as much to find your way around. I’m still not sold, but it was better than I expected.

Beaten and 55% of achievements. I should probably try and get a few more. The DLCs are cheap at the moment and I’ve toyed with the idea of getting those to push the percentage up a little more. There will always be some difficulty-related ones that I won’t get but that might be a way to push my average completion a little higher. An added annoyance is that the Enhanced Edition was an addition rather than a replacement for the vanilla version of the game and achievements gained in one don’t pop in the other. So… I still have the standard version of the game sitting at 0 hours and 0%!

Why do I continue to buy games that I am not good at? A precision platformer. There is nothing precise about my gaming and speedrunning is not something I could do at my peak, let alone when I’m over 40! Thankfully there are difficulty settings and I could adjust them to get past the more difficult levels without too much stress.

Pretty simple game, fun, with lots of secrets and extra things to go for once you beat the main story. I won’t be going for those though (not just yet, anyway). Beaten for now at 60% of achievements.

I’m torn with this. I enjoyed parts of it but other parts were a little frustrating and didn’t really fit into the ‘casual’ and ‘relaxing’ vibe that I expected.

Moving home is supposedly one of the more stressful things you can do in your life. I’ve done it a lot (8 times in my 18 years in Japan, I think!). I quite like it actually, maybe it’s partly because I haven’t hoarded a lot of things. It’s nice finding a new place, planning the layout, deciding where things will live, and changing things around. Kind of a new, exciting start each time.

I got this game thinking it would be similar. It is, to some extent, but there need to be more features in my opinion. You open boxes and put items in your home. The home starts as one room and expands to be a bigger house as you progress through your life. There are a couple of problems. Firstly, it’s not always clear exactly what the things you are unpacking are. They can be quite small and there is no way of identifying them. The game consoles and kitchen appliances in particular threw me. It was also difficult to tell the difference between books, CDs, DVDs, and console games (I’m just guessing that all these were in the game!) but this didn’t matter. Most items can be put pretty much anywhere, so for a lot of items I could just unpack them and just throw them on a shelf. Others have very limited locations that they can be 'correctly' placed in. If you put some items in the ‘wrong’ place, they glow when you try to finish the level as a prompt for you to put them elsewhere. Being able to clearly identify items would help you to put them in the right place first time.

It would be good to have some kind of mechanic to make you more conscious of where things are placed. I’m not sure how, perhaps a ‘practicality’ meter or ‘Feng Shui’ indication of some kind, or a score at the end of the level. I felt like in a lot of levels I would just throw things anywhere and then ‘correct’ the items that the game told me were in the wrong place, which is a lot different to real life.