December 2025

• ANIMAL WELL
  

  19.4 hours playtime

  19 of 20 achievements

• Frostrain
  

  8.6 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Marsupilami: Hoobadventure
  

  5.0 hours playtime

  36 of 72 achievements

• Blanc
  

  3.0 hours playtime

  11 of 13 achievements

• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux
  

  4.7 hours playtime

  13 of 14 achievements

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Ugh - just lost my mostly complete longer writeup. Here’s a shorter one.

Animal Well: A metroidvania with an interesting and original set of tools that allow new puzzles. If all you want to do is play through, see what you see, and roll credits then it’s a 9/10. If you want to collect everything, then it’s an 8.5/10 with not enough warps/shortcuts to deal with the backtracking. And you will be backtracking. Collecting the office key was particularly frustrating (I solved it correctly, but actually doing what needs to be done took 20++ attempts on my gamepad). And beyond that, if you continue playing then you reach a point at which you basically cannot progress without either a horde, some datamining skills, or a walkthrough. Or just watch somebody do it at that stage.
Frostrain: Strategy-lite clearly inspired by Snowpiercer. Unbalanced (most strategies don’t scale enough to deal with the punishing tax system), and resources (Training, Zeal) that you would think would impact mechanically/strategically don’t. Excellent for free, though (8.5/10)
Marsupilami: Hoobadventure: Good controls and reasonable levels but fatally flawed in its collectable design: 100 Fruit gives a life. There are massive quantities of fruit in every levels. There are time challenges that give fruit. There are secret areas that give fruit. There are hidden chests that give fruit. You will easily reach the maximum 99 lives. Would have been so much stronger with no lives, and only 100 collectable fruit in each level. (7/10)
Blanc: A fine twin-stick cinematic action-adventure. (8.5/10)
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux: For some reason this isn’t showing up on BLAEO so I missed this before. A walking simulator with some mostly mild puzzles - though I only remember the house maze as being good. Pretty good graphics, but I don’t love the story, particularly the ending. (6.5/10)