End of Month Report: May

Never Played -> Completed

BAD END THEATER

1.5 hours

48 of 48 achievements

A cute premise with great presentation. Hard to say if 10 bucks is too much for the content when the game's menu system does everything it can to respect your time. A single playthrough can take less than a minute if you're a fast reader and skip ahead to the next branch of the story.

Never Played -> "Beaten"

Virtual Cottage

8 hours

5 of 8 achievements

Another mood-setting idle app for my studies. This one's basically just a media player, and for the low low price of free, that's fine by me. Somehow it even managed to escape the Profile Features Limited hell most free indie games are stuck in forever.

Beaten: 29/32 -> 30/32 Achievements

Spirit City: Lofi Sessions

27.8 hours

30 of 32 achievements

Because of the way this game's "EXP system" is designed, once there are no more spirits to discover it's most efficient to hop in for a short daily timer and checklist task every day, because it gives the equivalent of 5 hours of just idling. I kinda like this and kinda don't. ChillPulse had the whole drink bar mechanic to encourage you not to just AFK, which feels missing in this one, but that game had no daily bonus incentive rather than one that might be too big. Even though Spirit City's visuals are much more customizable, I found myself admiring the pixel art of ChillPulse a lot more too.

Unfinished: 64/168 -> 113/168 Achievements

Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered

43.8 hours

113 of 168 achievements

Tomb Raider V complete. Cutscenes are skippable, the game feels a lot better to play, and I don't think those two things are unrelated.

Unfinished -> Mastered

Tomb Raider V: Chronicles (2000)

13 hours

89 of 89 achievements

RetroAchievements complete. The first 9 levels of NLNMAS have to be done in sets of 3 each. That's a lot of cutscenes you're forced to re-watch if you die near the end. The last 3 levels are done individually but are notoriously difficult on account of RNG and lots of forced damage. More annoying than hard.

Unfinished: 0/31 -> 18/31 Achievements

Pikmin Subset: 404 No Blues Found

7.5 hours

18 of 31 achievements

This is a very interesting and thoroughly irritating challenge. Impact Site, Forest of Hope and almost all of Forest Navel are done. I just need to get the breadbug to move the Anti-Dioxin Filter to the shore. I'm not worried about being able to do Distant Spring or Final Trial, but fishing for cooperative breadbug behavior is not my idea of fun. This one might take a while.

Less of the Same

Slightly less un-progress. In the last 2 weeks, 30 new games were added rather than 40. To my dubious credit, a lot less money was spent, and I do mean a lot. Most of these games were 80% off or more and cost a dollar or two. To my very real chagrin, I was right: hanging out on SteamGifts puts a lot of cheap and fun-looking games in front of me, so I will have to stop frequenting that site. It’s pretty much impossible for a level 0 member to win anything unless some developer is practically giving their game away for free anyway. This May, that game was Tsunagari Chess School. Who could have imagined that out of the 339 entrants, I’d be one of the 250 lucky winners. Go me, I guess. Now that I’ve won something—one game out of 700 attempts—hopefully the novelty has worn off. With that lesson learned and a cautious amount of optimism, I’ll consider this a baby step forward.