Zelrune

January - February 2023 Progress Report

Hello! Due to my new, new years resolutions to just enjoy myself and not set a limit on how many games I play every month, I largely just spent most of my time in the first month of January reading, seriously, I finished 23-ish novels. I was busy! Due to that, I only really finished two games, and didn’t feel like writing a post for so little, so I’ve opted to merge it and my February post!

I had a bunch of fun this month, Stray lived up to it’s hype and was indeed a fantastic way to start off 2023! Hopefully this year is better than the past couple, but so far I’ve been pretty optimistic. I also finished Gas Station simulator, but I’ve had no interest to quickly review it so I’ll add it onto the next post. The next months games are looking pretty positive, and 2-50+hrs long, so, lets see how this year goes!

Games added to backlog: 2
Games 100%: 5

63% (280/441)
13% (59/441)
12% (52/441)
11% (48/441)
0% (2/441)
19.5 hours
Has a dedicated Meow button!

So you wanna be a kitty in a cyberpunk city?
Jump, leap, and platform your way across the forgotten, derelict, gorgeous City 99; originally a haven from the polluted outside world, now a prison to the few that call it home. Make friends with the tiny robot B-12 as you both work your way across and up the city and end the lockdown, but beware, many old security measures are still in place, and the disease inside the city has taken on a life of its own. The Zerks are a hostile species born from bacteria come to life, literally; after many years they have gained their own intelligence, and with it, a new hunger that sees anything, robot or living, as prey.

cat

5-10 hours to complete, I absolutely loved playing Stray! I saved it to be the very first game of 2023, and it did not disappoint. With a dedicated meow button, gorgeous areas to explore, fun questlines and side quests, once you finish playing, don’t be surprised if you feel like starting over to do it again! There are plenty of optional collectables and an incredible number of things to interact with, including random paper bags on the streets, and everything that looked climbable, was! I do want to note that it’s literally impossible to fall from any height, and while you can jump down quite a ways, you are given a promt (which you can disable in settings) to do so.

cat2


Half-Life 2
Good game, good combat, exploration made me hungry.

Dusk Diver 酉閃町

8/10
29.0 hours
38 of 38 achievements

Yang Yumo is a perfectly normal high school girl until she falls into a dimensional rift into the Phantom World; a darker mirror world of Ximending city, but full of dangerous Chaos beasts hellbent on merging your world and theirs together. Rescued by convenience store worker and mystical beast Leo, work part time in a convenience store, team up with the Kunlunians, eat at a huge variety of restaurants, and unleash your spiritual power to save the city!

Seamonster

Dusk Diver is a 10-20hr “beat-em’-up” game with plenty of chain attacks, combos, skills, buffs, and tactics; but if that’s not your style button mashing does just fine! 11 re-playable chapters and small/large open world areas including the main hub, Ximending, which has plenty of fun Gatcha machines ranging from character art to outfit cosmetics, to eat-in restaurants, some of which will be surprisingly familiar, or stalls with actual menus with mouthwatering food and photo descriptions! Collect Dragon Vein Stones and restore harmony to the city!

Dessert

Dusk Diver really is a fun game and I’ve only noticed two bugs, one is when you enter a friend event but the npc is wearing one of the special outfits, but since they are not wearing their default outfit for the cutscene the game crashes and you get a “Fatal Error” report; this is easily fixed by switching them back to their normal outfit; and the other was when I was fighting a boss and I did something which caused my character model to break and enter T-pose mode, which I was unable to get out of for a bit. Still, it’s a fun game and I definitely recommend it! A bit tedious to 100%, but not difficult.

Lookcool

Half-Life 2
No longer available on Steam. ):

HITOTSU NO MORI

7/10
4.3 hours
no achievements

Shuka is an adopted girl living peacefully in Ikkaku Village who was blessed to be able to speak with animals and purge evil from her surroundings, but new visitors to the village bring some terrible news; demons sealed long, long ago on the island have broken free of their bindings and are causing destruction! Set off on a short adventure to banish or re-seal these demons!

40 min to 5 hours, Hitotsu no mori is a cute game that that’s unfortunately no longer available on Steam. With watercolor backgrounds, explorable areas, cute and animated sprites, a fun combat system, 5 routes and endings to play it’s a fairly solid game. There are no difficult battles, but enemies don’t respawn so exp, or “purity points” is limited but technically unnecessary unless you plan on being overpowered. There are 5 routes and 5 endings, and while the game is short there are many visual novel segments and it never felt like the game was lacking. You pick your route about halfway through the game, and can make a save point so re-playability is high.

Half-Life 2
Always streaming "Live"... Always previously recorded.

Grow: Song of the Evertree

2/10
34.2 hours
22 of 22 achievements

The once beautiful and bountiful land of Alaria has been laid to ruins, the previous residents having ignored The Evertree’s - the guardian tree of this land - warnings of overusing The Song and draining the land of Myora; and so The Withering grew with a vengeance. Huge, destructive, and thorny vines constantly pulsating, growing, and bringing with it, a purple fiery wind that has forced every living thing to run for their lives and abandon this land… except for you; the last Everheart Alchemist. Take on the task of becoming the Evertree’s caretaker, growing seeds on its branches to push back The Withering; retake lost districts and rebuild the towns, and find the Song Fragments that were either stolen or lost to restore what never should have been broken.

I liked playing Grow: Song of the Evertree, but I absolutely refuse to give it a positive review. First of all, this game is abandoned, second, it has so many bugs it should still be in Early Access; and third, it’s unfinished. I went through so much trouble just trying to play the game I purchased I cannot in good conscious let you go without at least a warning; this game was literally unplayable for me. 4-ish hours in I ran into a bug, which I assume was cause by a duplicating dialogue box right before the issue, in which I would start the next day completely unable to move my character. I did everything, uninstalling, reinstalling, verifying my files, updating my drivers, bug reporting, emailing the publishers (who were EXTREMELY UNHELPFUL and basically told me since it was abandoned I was SOL), and even making an entirely new game to no avail. I had to ask, a complete stranger, to share a early save file with me just so I could play the game I bought. THAT IS NOT OK.

Also, growing worlds and caring for them is one of the big draws about buying this game, you can craft as many as you like and they are all different.. except they aren’t? All worlds with a similar type look the same with a different generated name and similar generated animals, such as Icy worlds all have the same trees and bushes; and every world, regardless of type, has the exact same fruits and rocks available, except they are recolored and have a new name. All the animals are similar, either medium dog shaped or large mammoth, and they only variety they have is what color they are; and it gets old fast! By the fourth world I no longer had any interest in doing anything, because I’ve seen it all before! Even bugs and fish are not an exception.

You cannot adopt anything in game without it crashing! You can’t even accept any rewards related to adopting without the game absolutely freaking out; the critter center is broken. There are also other specific rewards that cause your game to fail, I found it’s better to ignore any completion reward entirely, or save your game before you accept any. There are invisible chests, missing items and functions, and even an entire storefront. The Community Gardens, which I suspect is where you were supposed to be able to purchase housing decorations like flower boxes and mailboxes for your community, is inaccessible. There are things that look like they should function, like the Juke Box in the diner, that don’t, and there are missing items or unfinished idle animations. NPC’s use invisible items, eat invisible food, and some dialogue boxes, don’t have any dialogue? It’s genuinely a mess. Please don’t play this unless the developers rise from the grave and miraculously fix everything.

Also a small gripe, inventory management, please? Rocks, fish, wood, bugs, and plants all go in the same inventory and they are not organized by type, rarity, nor is it possible to fix it yourself. What determines their place is what you obtained first, so it’s just, a huge mess! And what, you can buy things for Myora but you can’t sell anything?? I thought Myora was the currency but according to the wiki, “It’s the source of all life” so how am I even using this to buy anything…

Trent

Thanks for the warning about Grow. I’ve removed it from my wishlist. I don’t have time for bugs. But maybe you do? You spent 34.2 hours on a buggy, repetitive game…why? :)

Zelrune

Had to 100% it, was easy enough to do just, super tedious, and despite the bugs, I did enjoy it! I just, won’t recommend it.

Amitte

Christ, WTF is Grow… Even though it didn’t seem like the most interesting life sim at first glance, I was willing to go for it eventually, but now… wow, just wow.

Jaded

Congratulations on the progress on the book backlog! That is a lot of novels to finish haha

Stray looks very beautiful!

I actually enjoyed Grow. I just went back to my post from March 2022, and I didn’t mention any issues except for :
‘Only issue I’ve seen so far is the auto photo mode with critters/pet companion seem to be geared for a different resolution, so it cuts off the top and bottom. So no cute selfies with Kasumi.’ and that it became very repetitive - essentially because you do the same tasks over and over, until you get a new task, that you then repeat over and over…

Really sucks that you had such game breaking bugs and that you didn’t get any help with that :(

Zelrune

Thanks! I hope you had a better experience than me! It kinda sucked because, I did enjoy it, but playing was a trial in persistence and patience.

Jaded

Yeah I’m amazed you persisted enough to get that many hours in the game.
I likely would have just quit at that first game breaking bug!

Cece09

Oh didn’t realise you managed to 100% grow, watching the madness happen to you. Well done on that.
Boo on the dusk diver though, where’s all the food. All the vending machines!!!!

Zelrune

?Where? There are food stalls everywhere! No food vending machines, but there are gatcha stuff where you pick up artwork and early character designs and models.

Cece09

what no food vending machines :o
Well whatever I see all the pictures you kept posting. Oh wow 3k photos you sure screenshot alot