November 2025 Progress Report

35-180+ hours to complete, SAO: Hollow Realization is an almost fully voiced singleplayer game that mimics the anime’s VRMMORPG skill trees, weapon logistics (weapon skills, weapon EXP, secret skills learned via specific actions, etc…) , raid boss mechanics, party synchronization, item usage, and social dynamics more than any other previous title before it. Except this game takes place in an alternate world where, while exploring the city, your party meets Premiere – an obviously important looking NPC with a broken questline. While initially, Premiere’s glitched quest chain was something fun to poke at during the downtime of clearing floors, it quickly gains priority as the NPC is so oddly lifelike and her questline has some startling Implications that interact more with the world than anyone could have ever realized.

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I enjoyed this game, and I enjoyed it in a unique way that no other game has interacted with me before, which feels odd to say. For all intents and purposes, this game is a single player MMORPG that does its absolute BEST to make you feel like you are genuinely in a game with other real-life people, while keeping you as its protagonist. The social dynamics are honestly kind of insane, and I can only think of why the game is so in-depth in this regard is because the developer team loved SAO dearly, not because it was easy to implement, otherwise other games would have tried this before. You can talk and raise social interactions with every single NPC, including shopkeepers. You can add pretty much ANYONE to your party, you can, if you wanted to, turn this entire game into a dating sim with every npc in it. You can sit down in all the chairs, eat and order food at cafes, go on dates, hold hands, physically pick literally anyone up if they like your company enough, sit on random benches, whatever. This game is a gigantic sandbox with what must be over eighty hours of voiced dialogue in this regard, and I haven’t even gotten into how your social standing can influence combat, or gotten into how complicated the combat system is.

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There is a four-party system and combat is pretty lively. There is a huge variety of enemies and enemy types, you gain skills based on what weapons you are using and those skills have their own EXP of a sort that improves through use, unlocking more skills connected to them in the skill tree and you can do specific actions to gain hidden skills, like dual wielding. There are passive abilities as well, and even after the main storyline is done there is a lot of post-game content where difficulty can ramp up fairly quickly giving you a lot of things to work towards. Switch skills are in team play, meaning you chain skills with your party members to interrupt boss attacks to extend combo windows and keep enemies staggered for long periods. Fighting with your party members increases your familiarity with them, you can assign roles, and during large raids, merge with other NPC parties to coordinate attacks or signaling everyone to Back Off/Defend when a raid boss does an AOE or something. There was one feature I particularly disliked – you can’t charge your party members equipment unless you reached affection level 4 or 5, which becomes a huge pain when their stats are garbage and they won’t accept something better regardless of their personal level.

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Overall, I had a fantastic time playing SAO, though I don’t suggest trying to 100% it. The DLC admittedly wasn’t as good as the main storyline and I feel like post-game overstays its welcome by about 50-70 hours if you’re trying to do everything available to you. I wish there was more weapon crafting in the game, though the enchanting system is pretty solid. If you like SAO and want to immerse yourself in a long game, Hollow Realization is absolutely the way to go about that; there are a hundred maps, thousands of characters, a weather and day-night system, numerous voiced lines of dialogue wrapped in a fun world that’s rewarding to explore and entertaining to do so. It’s not GOTY material, but it’s absolutely worth playing if you enjoy the SAO series or spending multiple hours in huge fantasy world MMO’s.

3-20+ hours to complete, Jumpbound is a smooth 3D platforming game where you jump, dash, and collect upgrades as you make your way to The Beam in the final area – all without a single loading screen as the entire game takes place on one map. The gameplay feels pretty great, the visuals are lovely and I’m a huge fan of the massive intricate megastructures with optional little collectables tucked away within the pathways or on side paths. You can choose between three modes – Chill, Exploration, and Iron Man – which don’t change the map but DOES change how the checkpoint system works. In chill mode, every platform is a checkpoint and you have no fear of falling, in exploration mode, you take and place your checkpoints where you want + when you get an upgrade, and then Iron Man takes all that away!

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I ended up enjoying Jumpbound more than anticipated, and even ended up making a guide for it! Gameplay is pretty smooth, and the only bug I’ve experienced was falling forever at two specific locations, but considering that issue only appeared with the newly released “chill” mode and the devs are still active, I honestly don’t expect it to be a long-term problem. It’s also worth noting that people who are prone to motion sickness will probably struggle with movement, although in the settings there is a “remove blurring” option as well as a choice to add a dot in the middle of your screen to help with that. Regardless, it’s a well-made jumping puzzle platformer that I found was really fun to play around and explore in, and if that interests you, Jumpbound is worth your time.

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15-30+ hours to complete, Dungeons of Hinterberg is a Dungeon crawler/Life sim about Luisa, a burned out junior lawyer who takes a break from her job and heads to the scenic, mountainous town of Hinterberg. Famous for its history, hot springs, and magical anomalies, the whole town is a huge hotspot for magic to the point dungeons, monsters, and magical reagents spawn, with Hinterberg holding the record for 25 dungeons at a single time making it a popular place for thrill seekers and tourists looking for a “Slaycation!” Sword in hand, Lusia is ready to start her own.

Overall, it’s a pretty great game and I had a fun time playing. There are a ton of characters to meet and plenty of rewards for getting to know them, lots of activities outside the dungeons, minimal repetitive dialogue and actions, and lots of shopping to do. Dungeon-wise, most of them are pretty unique and some are more puzzle heavy than others. Even at the end of the game higher level dungeons had new mechanics tied to them. Combat is fast and stylish; you have a lot of flexibility between sword abilities, charms offering various passives, and magic spells, which change depending on what area you happen to be exploring that day. There is no time limit, which originally made this a pretty fun and satisfying game to complete. I say originally, because the ending was so weird and odd, it brought my personal high rating for the game down a good couple of notches, and the fact there is a singular achievement locked behind NG+ which was annoying to get. Overall, Dungeons of Hinterberg is still well worth playing, and it’s fine to dive in with high expectations.

5-8+ hours to complete, Deliver Us the Moon starts off on a dry, desolate Earth stripped of its resources - and one of humanity’s projects to save it was to build a colony on the moon to harvest a new, incredible type of energy and send it to Earth. For a long while, this plan was working as intended; however one day without warning, the power stopped, all communications were cut off, and the moon went dark. So starts the story of Rolf, a man who has taken up the distressingly dangerous mission to solo pilot a ship to the Moon, guided only by a lone friend on Earth, to uncover what happened to the hundreds of scientists who vanished, and hopefully, restart and resupply energy and send it back to Earth, so it can start recovering again.

So, a couple things first; the Walking Sim tag is a filthy lie – the developers love to strap a timer on your back – literally – on every chapter and give you timed challenges to push the story forward, which earned my ire since I despise countdowns on exploration. Second, there is no traditional saving and loading, it’s all chapter selects which means if you exit the game at the wrong time, better BEST be prepared to be backtracking. However, despite my initial strong dislike of the start of this game, the storyline is pretty good, the ending is phenomenal (stick around after the credits for some extra scenes), and I loved how the developers shared it with you, via recorded holograms from a friend. Another thing is that this game is pretty short and could, (and should, honestly) be finished in one sitting. I’ll probably be picking up the next Deliver Us game in the series because I really wanna know what happens afterward, despite it likely having similar mechanics.