2026 January

Finished games - 9:

• The Last Show of Mr. Chardish: Act I
  Prologue to The Last Show of Mr. Chardish, which was a Christmas gift / Secret Santa snowball. Running around solving light puzzles while reliving the past.
• SturmFront - The Mutant War: Übel Edition
  Standardish, not really outstanding arcade shooter. The worldbuilding found in notes is leagues more interesting than the game itself.
• Quell
  I still have two Quell games, I may drop them from the backlog. 60ish levels of “slipping on ice” puzzles, with barely any new mechanics given. It’s pure puzzling in the worst sense for me. Not fun to play, not fun to solve, and even if there are guides around, why would I waste my time with it? (Also the games mention something narrative to go with the puzzle, haven’t found any of it)
• Showing Tonight: Mindhunters Incident
  Old, not well done hidden object game. Low poly objects, moon logic puzzles, and just boring “rotate the item into the silhouette” puzzles.
• Alpha Polaris : A Horror Adventure Game
  While obviously works better with a guide for ease of play, Alpha Polaris definitely has charm in writing and characters, and an interesting story. I enjoyed my time with it.
• Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut
  Anything to be said is spoilery basically, you have to kill the Princess. There is 131 achievements. There is much that can be done in this choose your own adventure-type of game, as you may know. Got to an ending, definitely want to chip away at least some of the others.
• West of Loathing
  Minimalist looking game with insane amounts of puns, wordplay, references, jokes and absurdity. The world is slightly crazy, but the worldbuilding, story and RPG systems are all coherent and well made. Pretty simple and approachable, really well done game.
• Vampire’s Fall: Origins
  Another Secret Santa snowball. As we discussed, not a bad game for ~2€, lots of content. Tbh, not too good content. Includes a DLC/Expansion, it got so stretched out and repetitive that I decided I had my game finished with the main story.
• Double Cross
  Yet another Secret Santa snowball. I wasn’t really fond of it to be honest. There are so many more platformers that are more accurate, where random inputs don’t vanish… the story is nothing special, the levels has a strong “premade” vibe to them, using tilesets and not always working them together too well. Difficulty was relatively mild, but same later levels are as much harder, as they would belong in a completely different game. (Still not too hard, but laid-back easy game turns into “lean forward and stop talking to concentrate” type of a deal.

Bought / activated games: I have an active HB Monthly subscription (prepaid for a year+, so it doesn’t count as purchasing), eventually I’ll activate a game or two from the January bundle, but otherwise I plan to minimalise the buying habit.

• Double Cross was a gift on January 1st
• Won Absolum
• Activated Dordogne
• Activated Along the Edge - was free on Steam.

So spent 0€, activated 4 games, finished 9.