June 2023

Steam

• Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek
  

  8 hours playtime

  9 of 11 achievements

• Nephise
  

  25 minutes playtime

  3 of 3 achievements

• House of 1000 Doors: The Palm of Zoroaster Collector's Edition
  

  5 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Superliminal
  

  3.6 hours playtime

  6/27 achievements

• Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek: Enjoyable and atmospheric hidden object adventure with some clever placement of objects to be found. Fairly straightforward, but would have been significantly improved with fast travel given the quantity of backtracking.
• House of 1000 Doors: The Palm of Zoroaster: Hidden Object Game with pedestrian design choices that were at times baffling in their carelessness, and featuring some real world locations that the creators made little attempt to get close to right. More complicated steps for solving the HO scenes than Enigmatis, but on the other hand no wit in object placement, an utter lack of care in selection of objects for a particular scene, and a lot of telling exactly what needs to be done (at least in normal mode),.
• Nephise: Mercifully short walking simulator, with some puzzle nonsense in no way satisfactorily justified by the ending. Bad but not awful or unplayable. High point was the audio: the narrator’s voice, and pleasantly crunchy snow underfoot.
• Superliminal:

Game Pass

• Yakuza Kiwami
  

  1d 11h 2m playtime

  26/55 achievements

• INSIDE
  

  4h 3m playtime

  14/14 achievements

• Injustice 2
  

  9h 44m playtime

  5/74 achievements

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
  

  3h 3m playtime

  13/30 achievements

• Yakuza Kiwami: Surprisingly sweet given the sleazy milieu. I enjoyed this a lot more than Sleeping Dogs (no driving, more complex combat, variety of side activities), but there is a miniseries worth of cutscenes and a little too much random street combat to make a long game even longer. Full completion would be insane given the difficulty of some of the minigames. It was overly stingy on [auto]saves in later chapters - I needed to replay Chapter 9 three times due to freezes during one of the final cutscenes.
• Inside: Puzzle/walking simulator. It was interesting to play and contrast this with last month’s Planet of Lana. It has even more travel, but it’s good travel that kept me engaged. I think it comes down to having a slightly higher movement speed, more varied environmental storytelling and puzzling during that travel even though there’s still mystery on exactly what is going on and how and why by the end of the game, and no sequences where you replay the same stretch 4 times (POL’s start, dream 1, dream 2, and ending). Also has a full complement of restart points to assist full completion.
• Injustice 2: finished story mode with the Batman ending. Story held my interest, and there’s a generous quantity of characters with distinctive movesets/stances. Gameplay was ok but not great. It feels like it has less fluidity than DOA or Tekken or SF, but less nuance than the more deliberate/clunky VF, though I realise that I2 has juggles and cancels and what feels like some frame-perfect stuff, that using a gamepad rather than a joystick is not ideal, and that I haven’t really learned the depths of the characters. I haven’t played recent MKs, but that was always my least favourite major fighting series, amusing though the gimmicks were. On completing story mode, I discovered that the full game is actually a looter-beatemup… which might give some longevity. I won’t be grinding to completion, but may have another playthrough of story mode and/or play some more to give some other characters a chance.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge: Finished normal Story Mode. Fun enough old-school beat-em-up, but likely a lot more enjoyable in multiplayer.