2018 recap - 37 wins, 199 loses.
Hey, I’m back after months of just lurking around and not reporting on my progress. Since October I’ve been busy with college and while I had time to game, I didn’t felt like making reviews and all that, but with some free time I have now I prepared a re-cap + quick reviews of everything I played since my last post, my favorite games I played in 2018 and thanks to data from backloggery, I made a table showing my awful progress over this year and stats I probably shouldn’t share D:
Overall, this year I have beaten 33 games on steam, one on origin, one short mod for Half-life that is on steam store and two mods that are not on steam, but it took like 3-5 hours to finish each one.
And I have also replayed all Half-life games and episodes/expansions because of the recent Half-life (1) 20th anniversary. Still amazing after all these years and I don’t regret spending my time on them instead of working on backlog :D
So 38 games overall if we count mods as such, and not counting HL’s as those are replays. That’s on average ~3 games beaten a month, which is not that bad on it’s own considering I try to go for 100% if game has achievements and also that there were few big and long games on that list. But here’s where it gets bad. Most of you probably figured it out given the title of this post but… In 2018 I added 199 new games to my account. On average that’s ~16.5 new games added every month. Below is a table of shame.
| Month | No. of games beaten | No. of games added to the backlog | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 3 | 35 | +32 |
| February | ZERO | 13 | +13 |
| March | 3 | 18 | +15 |
| April | 3 | 16 | +13 |
| May | 6 | 15 | +9 |
| June | 6 | 12 | +6 |
| July | 1 | 16 | +15 |
| August | 2 | 14 | +12 |
| September | 4 | 13 | +9 |
| October | 2 | 14 | +12 |
| November | 2 | 6 | +4 |
| December | 5 | 27 | +22 |
List of all games I beated this year is here.
Now, my thoughts on the games I beated since this post.
Simple aRPG built with the intention for multiple playthroughs. After tutorial you continue the story but every time you are given a choice, where to go and during a mission you also have to make choices that affect how the story will end. There are four categories of endings, with 24 endings in total, with one "true" ending. To unlock the path to true ending you need one ending from each category, but it's easy to figure out how to get one ending in each category, you just have to fully commit to specific objectives.
Combat is really simple, based on Arkham style fighting. You always start a fight with multiple enemies, you mash your attack button focusing on one enemy and building up your combo, often one of enemies will try to attack you and you have a short window to counter-attack, if you do so, you get to critical strike the countered enemy, often just killing most of them in single hit. There's a talent tree and level system in this game, with some interesting talents in there that give you dash, hook ability, movement speed upgrade, teleporting to enemies after certain combo is reached. But there's a good chunk of boring % upgrades from what I remember.
Enemy variety is ok if you don't plan to get all 24 endings, if you do you'll get sick of the same locations and enemies pretty quickly… You have your standard grunt that attacks every now and then, a grunt with a shield that you either have to attack from behind or knock his shield with your hook shot. Magic serpent-like-thingy that heals and buffs it's allies or fire variant that tries to cast area of attack under your feet. Sometimes a kamikaze like enemy will pop up, if you hit him once he will explode after few seconds, but hit him twice and he will explode immediately and breaking your combo.
Pretty decent and fun game overall. But the most grindy achievement in it will make you hate it :P
Favorite tracks:
Attack Head On - The Fleet
Nexus (Evil Path)
Meeting a Friend - Village Part 01
I probably wouldn't have played it this year if not for the fact that the devs of this game were acquired by VALVe.
This game has some of the best written dialogue between characters I have ever heard in a video game. Great atmosphere, pretty cartoon-ish visuals and uncertanity as to what is going on in this forest through most of game, make Firewatch for a really great experience. I'm looking forward to their next game and with some Valve folks there to help them out I'm sure it's going to surpass Firewatch in almost every way.
Favorite tracks:
02 Stay in Your Tower and Watch
11 New Equipment
15 An Unfortunate Discovery
Kane & Lynch is a TPP shooter from 2007 that I was hyped for back before it came out, but never actually got it back then for whatever reasons. I won it + second game in series on SG few years ago. And I can't remember what I read or saw back in 2007/06 that got my hyped for it but I gotta say it turned out to be a pretty mediocre game with an aim to tell a mature and dark story.
The first half of the game is really good. The game opens up with Kane getting rescued by unknown group from prison transport and along with them you fight your way through streets with police and SWAT trying to stop you at every corner and few police choppers flying above. Never mind the absolute waste of resources and men that had to be spent to rescue Kane once you find out why he was rescued.
Turns out our boy Kane fucked over some boss of a group called "The Seven" and caused him to loose a lot of money, so the boss rescued him so Kane can repay his debt. All this action just for that. And later on it gets more ridiculous, but I'm not going to spoil it, the game is not that bad overall. Later missions are pretty good, you lead a bank heist, kidnaping in Tokyo, shortly after an assassination in Tokyo inside a office building which ends in escape from police on the streets, which reminded me of similar scene from Michael's Mann "Heat" and also a prison bust to rescue few old time pals.
When you land in Havana, this is where the downfall begins. For the rest of game you run through worn torn city shooting soldiers, ending the game with a jungle mission shooting even more soldiers. Boring. At one point game throws you an "optional" stealth section.
Gameplay is ok for most part, each gun has a nice kick to it and they sound good too. There's no reload button tho and it only reloads automatically when you stop firing or when you're out. You can stick to cover, but it often didn't work for me and there's no button for that either… You just had to hug a wall or something else that counts as cover and hope that game decides to stick you to it.
Voice acting is decent too, Voice actors voicing Kane and Lynch did a pretty good. Story is overall forgettable, it tries to be dark and mature, it didn't come of as edgy for most of time, but neither it was amazing. Kane is a brutal, but for most part composed character and Lynch is kinda a polar opposite who often loses control of himself which just puts both of them in worse situations.
Favorite tracks:
01 Kane's Family Portrait
08 Tokyo Action
10 Action in Havana
Play this only if you started or if you are really interested and committed to learn japanese, specifically katakana syllabry. I think this game could work as a start for determined person or as a mean to reinforce what you already learned, but if you are not really committed (like me) then don't bother.
I would like to learn another language at some point and while japanese is on that list, it's not particularly high. This game a simple RPGMaker game and the way it tries to teach you is by making each enemy one syllable of Katakana syllabry. One of your party members is a japenese english teacher and he gives you and your party lessons. You are shown usually five syllables, how to pronounce each one of them and how to draw them on paper.
What ended up happening in my case is that I had four A4 sized papers with every single syllable and I often had to look through them to make sure I use correct syllable to attack enemy.
As you can imagine this wasn't a lot fun. The fight system is, thankfully, really simple, so that's really the only time you can mess up but if you use wrong syllable on an enemy you deal zero damage, so it's crucial that you use the right one. In total there are 80 or so syllables near end and game kinda expects you to learn all of them in a course of 12 hours. You are also given few words for everyday use or sentences, but they are not needed at all to beat this game.
Combat is really simple, you have a physical attack (syllable), items that heal or restore your mana, each party character has it's own magic spells, but you can't kill with magic, you can only bring enemies to 1hp so there's no way around, you have to know those syllables :P
You can have up to 3 other party members and each one of them has a unique personality and combat preferences. You can gain affection with them by taking them on missions and you can increase their stats without leveling up by becoming their friends.
Personally it wasn't the best experience for me, but if you like RPGMaker games and as I said, are very determined to learn or already are learning, I think it could work. Me, I don't remember any syllable already :D
Favorite tracks: OST for this game is nowhere to be found, so I can't share that with you...but I do remember liking few tracks in this game.
Visually this game is beautiful, but gameplay and story is incredibly shallow.
Through the game you gain the ability to change seasons which affect different plants and environment around you. E.g. sometimes you need to freeze the lake to cross it by changing season to winter or mushrooms for example change to platforms only during fall. And that's as much depth as you get from this game. The whole game is made of just very simple platforming, with some very simple puzzles every now and then.
It is a really beautiful game, you play as a cute fox and everything is hand-painted, and I have to say the soundtrack is really beautiful and fitting, in my opinions the best part of this game.
Perhaps that was the intent of the devs to make this game very simple and accessible or maybe they didn't knew how to use season changing powers to make a more fun and challenging gameplay. But it does get pretty boring really fast, the prolonged cutscenes don't make it better.
If you want something cute and beautiful and not challenging at all, then this could be a game for you. But for others, there are better alternatives.
Favorite tracks:
Most of them! Honestly it's hard for me to pick favorites from this
Seasons after Fall OST
I will preface this by saying I am a huge Lovecraft fan and read most of his novels/texts.
The first half of this game is pretty much a retelling of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" with some "The Shadow out of Time" in it AND as I see it, it's set shortly after Shadow over Innsmouth, when the federal government started their investigation into Innsmouth.
Devs representation of Innsmouth is quite amazing for that time and hardware. Dark, decayed and slowly falling apart city with ugly deformed humans roaming the city constantly reminding you that they do not tolerate strangers in their city, with few normal looking humans too frightened to talk you and in the town square a clean and well lit building, the building of the "Esoteric Order of Dagon".
First half is mostly gun-less, with you roaming the city trying to find a person you're after, then escaping it street after street, eventually ending up in a canal for some time. You pretty much get to experience Robert's Olmstead tale in a form of videogame and it's absolutely amazing. It's really well done and creepy.
Once you get your hands on the first gun and stack up on ammo, it quickly turns from horror to a mix of action-horror. But even then there were situations when I uncertain if my guns will be enough to protect me.
This is game is not without some cons tho. Sometimes the game throws you into situations where you have to figure out what exactly you have to do to progress and I would get stuck and had to use YT to find out. Sometimes you also need to open a safe with a number combination. While at the beginning the codes were easy to find, you have to "input" them in a specific way, like the safes used to work back then I guess? E.g. you have 1854. You start at zero, you turn wheel to right on number 1, then you have to turn to left till you reach number 8. Pretty simple to figure out for most part, and the game also gives you clues to which side you have to turn if you find the code, but I felt like that wasn't always the case and had to yet again turn to YT for help.
There were times shortly after you got your hands on a gun that the game throw a lot of enemies at you, too much for my opinion to deal with, you really had to land these headshots to not run out of ammo.
As for the guns themselves, you get to wield five guns through the whole game. A pistol, a revolver, tommy gun, bolt action rifle and double-barreled shotgun. Bolt action was my favorite, excellent for headshots and quickly killing town folk of Innsmouth, but you only get it later on. I found tommy gun to be least favorite gun, only good against one type of enemy that attacks you in melee range.
Game has also a sanity system, that I'm pretty sure Frictional games nicked and used in Amnesia Dark Descent. Witnessing disturbing things well affect your sanity and thus vision and movement until you calm down. Loading screen hints suggest also that if you don't control you character may kill himself if you have weapon equipped, but that never happened to me.
I think every Lovecraft fan should play this, at least for the first half. I think that people who never read Lovecraft may enjoy this, but it is a little dated game and you obviously won't get all the references and appreciate the work devs put into this game.
Favorite tracks:
33 Uneasy Waters
26 The Esoteric Order of Dagon
25 Electrolysis
6 Smile at Me, Baby
Cutesy little platformer à la Super Mario 64. Amazing OST. Five different worlds, each unique with it's own unique set of characters, only later to join our little hat girl and beat the ultimate baddie. You finish each level by collecting "Time Piece" which is basically a fuel for your spaceship but after an unfortunate accident at the beginning they were scattered on this planet nearby.
Besides time pieces, you also need to collect hat yarns which you use to craft new hats that you need to progress further. You start with basic hat that just points you to the objective, but you get access to sprint hat that let's you sprint, duh! Freeze hat that turns you into a solid ice block and allows you to use a specific platform or just shield yourself from attack or drop on an enemy. There's few more and you often will be using most of them to move around the level. One exception is perhaps time-slowing hat, it's more of a help if you struggle with some parts of platforming or group of enemies. I only used it on Death Wish levels from Seal the Deal DLC.
I liked the DLC too and if you already played base game and missed the period it was for free, it's worth grabbing. It offers new world, shorter than previous one's but definitely harder than from the base game. There's also Death Wish mode which is just Hard mode for previous levels and bosses and you can unlock new cosmetics for your hat girl. And if you want to 100% this game, you need this DLC :P
Favorite tracks:
01 Main Theme
09 Barrel Battle
16 Mafia Boss' Big showdown
22 Dead Bird Studio
35 The Big Parade
A little better than I expected, Hacknet is a game you "play" through in-game terminal with a simple interface attached. But you can play using nothing but commands in terminal.
I would describe Hacknet as a set of mini-games that you often repeat (hacking) with main story that gets forgotten at the beginning only to return to it near end once you build a reputation and contacts inside the hacking world to solve it.
When you're not looking for your lost…friend? You do all kinds of tasks, covering tracks, deleting delicate files, faking someone's uni history or death, or just simply messing with someone's save in a clicker game.
You hack terminals and servers by doing a little mini-game, you have to open ports using tools you gain over time, sometimes you just need to hack one port to gain access and mess with the files, sometimes you need to build a small botnet to crash the proxy server that blocks you from hacking ports.
Often once you start messing with unhacked terminal, the system will begin to track you and you have to hack it and do your job before timer reaches zero. I gotta say that there were moments when it was intense typing commands on keyboard while watching timer and trying to finish before you get caught. The finale was the most tense, with so much to do and not a lot of time and this playing in the background.
My only gripe with the whole mini-game is that you can only run 2, sometimes 3, hacking software at same time as you are limited by your terminal's memory and have to wait for one to launch next. I kinda wish the game had like a "fast-typing" mode or something, where there's no memory limit but instead you have to type faster. I am a pretty fast typer and can type without looking at the keyboard, and that finale would have been just much better for me if it was like 2 minutes of intense typing.
Favorite tracks:
01 Malware injection
04 Roller Mobster
05 Roja Drifts By (Timo Jahns Strings RMX)
09 Phase of the Moon
A short stand-alone mod for Half-life with it's own new synth wave soundtrack. Looks much better than Half-life with HD Pack and it actually keeps the guns from original half-life with updated models and textures. (Official HD pack replaces MP-5 with M16, glock with beretta)
The beginning is quite difficult as you barely have any ammo and you have to face many enemies, you have to be smart with what you get. After that it's a pretty great ride as you try to escape, with a finale with you and apache helicopter.
It also replaces crowbar with a plumber and you get to beat few soldiers to death with it.
Co-op expansion for Half-life that is exclusive to PS2, I played port of it on PC with a friend, you can download it here if you're interested.
So this was my first playthrough ever and after this I can say I have finally played all official Half-life content that is out there. Half-life is part of my childhood and I played it and it's expansions shortly after they came out. But this is the one I have never played so this was quite a unique experience for me to see "new" Half-life content after all these years.
Like previous expansions it was made by Gearbox and I have to say even tho it's pretty good, it's the weakest of all expansions. They could have used co-op aspect of this more than they did, for the most part it feels like playing Sven co-op, but slightly worse somehow? I can recall only one cool puzzle you have to solve with your partner with lasers and most of the game you just proceed from level to level gunning down HECU and aliens.
Level design is ok-ish but again I think it's their weakest compared to Opposing Force and Blue Shift.
Still, it's a piece of Half-life even if it's place in canon is unsure and I had a fun with my friend. There were only 2 occasions where we had to restart whole level because something didn't trigger. But keep in mind it's an unofficial port so it's bound to not work perfectly. Also you may need to use hamachi or something similar to see your friend's server. We used a small program called ZeroTier.
Top 5 games I played in 2018 and enjoyed the most
5. A Hat in time (2017)
4. The Saboteur (2009) (my review of it is here )
3. Half-life: Echoes (2018)
A free mod you can download here. It’s really amazing and surpasses official expansions and even original Half-life in some ways. I wanted to write review of it and games below but writing all of the above already took me so much time and energy that I just gave up >_< You just have to trust me that this and games below are amazing and worth playing.
2. Hollow Knight (2017)
1. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017)
My new year resolution for gaming
1. Finish Dark Souls
2. Beat more games in 2019 than in 2018
3. Get back to doing monthly reports on BLAEO
And that’s all, thanks for reading and yes I know I’m 13 days late with this post :D I’m not going to be late with January report as I don’t expect to finish a lot of games. January and February are going to be very busy for me.
Thanks for the recap post– it was a good read. Some notes/comments:
- “But the most grindy achievement in it will make you hate it.” That pretty much sums it up. I couldn’t wait to uninstall, which is too bad, because I enjoyed the game until getting that achievement. Then don’t get the achievement, came the voice from the ether…
- Loved Firewatch. I should go back and do a “be obnoxious with Delilah” playthrough, just to hear more of the great dialog and voice acting.
- I think I liked Seasons After Fall more than just about everybody. I mean, I didn’t think it was superb or anything, but I thought there were enough puzzles and enough story to keep me interested (along with the visuals and sound). My only complaint was that it didn’t lend itself to playing a couple of hours a week, because there was no real way to know what you’re supposed to do next if you forgot the last cutscene, etc.
- I own several hacking games now and have never played any of them. Maybe I should do something about that. :p
Good luck with your resolutions!
Thanks for reading it all! :D
- Oh man you spent on it 37 hours? Did you tried to do that without guide? I initially tried that and gave up after 3 tries.
- I was tempted to do that too but I don’t think I’m gonna enjoy it as much just to see different responses.
- I think I might own some too, can’t say Hacknet is the best start but as you read I kinda enjoyed it as a first hacking-game ever :D
I’d never really played a game like that– with that type of combat…I don’t play a lot of action/fighting games (except for ARPGs like Diablo). So it took me a really long time to grind out that last achievement, even with the “trick” described in the guide. I’m also slow and “smell the roses.”
I also played Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice last year. I think I would have to agree, it’s probably my top game of last year as well. It was an absolutely brilliant game.
For me it’s not only the best game I played in 2018 but one of the best games I played in my life. I love almost everything about this game, the visuals, Senua’s VA and motion actor, audio design, their visual interpretation of norse mythology. Combat is ok but the weakest part of Hellblade. If it has a little more depth I would probably give it a 10/10.