August 2026 Progress Report
This month sure was something, I bought Planet Zoo + some deluxe dlc for $2 since it was on a crazy sale and lost two weeks of my life. It’s honestly an incredible management sim but I’m really disappointed in the developers for not getting rid of some long-time bugs that made a specific career scenario almost impossible for me. Other than that, I finished Chants of Sennaar and Shelves and Sorcery, a game that was recommended to me by a friend that was really solid. I bought Liminal Lane off another review here on BLAEO and while it was going to be a mixed review but overall positive, the AI usage + the dev making other games with AI turned it negative for me.
While I have once again failed my to-do list for gaming, I shall not learn my lesson and make another! For September, I want to finish Etrian Odyssey, (I’m in the 5th stratum and loving it here) play .hack, NEVA, The Invincible and a VN. I played a little bit of Battle Chef and I’m honestly not a fan, so I’ll probably end up removing that from my library.
Total games added to backlog: 2 (INFRA, Liminal Lane)
Total completed: 4
35-100+ hours to complete, Planet Zoo is probably the best and most realistic zoo management and building sim I will ever play in my lifetime. With planet Zoo 2 coming out and this game being sold for $2, I ended up finally checking it out and ended up doing almost nothing else for an entire two weeks. The animals are incredibly realistic and you have a ridiculous amount of freedom to create elaborate habitats and builds. You can build underground (the game is kinda finciy about it, beware) and make some lovely Skywalks, small single animal habitats or large multi species safari zone that npcs can go inside with scheduled tours. You can do petting zoos, exhibit areas with smaller animals such as iguanas, spiders, frogs, centipedes, scorpions, use premade buildings or go to the construction tab and make something yourself.
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While I still highly recommend Planet Zoo if you think this is a game you would probably enjoy, beware, this game has a lot of bugs, to the point one career scenario was almost unbeatable for me since apparently, I found all of them. In “Myers Lake Island” my keepers refused to feed any of the animals regardless of how many keepers I had, where the food bowls were placed, or how many keeper huts I built. Thankfully I could still put down “Food Enrichment Items” such as puzzle feeders and grazing balls, but the issue inexplicably fixed itself halfway through the scenario for reasons I could never figure out. My mandrills also constantly died of dehydration after I merged two habitats together and relocated the other animals, which for some reason made the water unreachable despite every water pipe being marked as “accessible.”
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Aside from that, I still really enjoyed the rest of the game, particularly Franchise mode where you got to sell and buy animals from other players to make a zoo. The pathing was frustrating and there were definitely moments where I wanted to throw the entire game into the sun, but tbh the game is fun enough it’s worth putting up with. I can understand why this game has such a dedicated playerbase and if you think this is something you would like playing, Planet Zoo is absolutely worth your time.
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Chants of Sennaar
10-15+ hours to complete, Chants of Sennaar is essentially just a giant logic puzzle loosely based off the Tower of Babel, where each civilization on the tower’s floors speaks a completely different language and you’ve got to translate and decipher each one to figure out what it is you are supposed to be doing to get to the top of it. While this may sound like a complicated game, it’s not terrible as the character is smarter than the player and gives you confirmation when you are correct, so in the worst case scenario you can brute force your way through the puzzles.
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While the deciphering part of the game is quite fun, there really isn’t anything else going on to keep your focus and attention. I accidentally forgot about this game for mayhaps a week before remembering it was something I was doing, before going back to finish it. The story wasn’t my favorite, while I liked the puzzles to get the true ending, the actual ending in question left me with a lot of confusion. There are a lot of positive reviews saying how wonderful the storyline was, which feels kinda crazy to me as I felt like I only understood half of what was happening or why it was even important to do in the first place. It’s a fine game with nothing in particular about it I disliked, so play it if you want, I guess.
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Shelves and Sorcery: Tidy Up the Enchanted Shop
10-30+ hours to complete, Shelves and Sorcery is new to the new Tidy Up genre that’s recently gotten wildly popular thanks to Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library, and if you’ve played that one, you will enjoy using magic and spellcasting to organize these enchanted shops! At the moment there are three different maps with four gamemodes – Casual, Timed, No Magic, and Archmage – with timed not being a countdown, but seeing how fast you can complete the level which then gets added onto a leaderboard. There will be a multiplayer mode in the future, which I’m excited for and look forward to playing.
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Each of the current three levels build on the last one so far, with The Hearth and Barrel being the smallest with 1,048 items and The Grand Athenaeum being the largest with about 4,000 items. There are an assortment of items from food, weapons, potions, books, and crafting supplies. Each item has a place it belongs to in the store and aside from having items on the correct shelf, you can organize things how you like. When a shelf is completed, you get a visual confirmation as well as the nameplate changing colors to black and yellow. Overall, it’s a really nice game about organizing many things that has a lot of potential for future updates and new maps.
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Liminal Lane
1-2 hours to complete, Liminal Lane is a short walking sim with a storyline… If you’re willing to look for it. It’s a game about liminal spaces and while some areas are done really well, others were more weird than anything. I’d like the developer to make more games like this in the future, but maybe with a bigger budget or different engine, because the atmosphere is the most important thing about liminal spaces and it gets really undermined when you see obvious seams, floating objects, etc. While initially I was thinking of a positive but actually mixed review, I thought about it for a bit and really can’t let the cons go.
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While Liminal lane is essentially a one person indie project so I’d usually let AI art as assets fly, It’s really lame to see and I really think the dev could do better. Do better. Otherwise, it’s a perfectly fine indie game that’s short and easy to play.
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