Amitte

Progress report: February ‘24 (a.k.a. Just Chugging Along!)

Like I’m a sad little train! It’s an okay kind of “sad”, though, I think. I thought I had a bit of a job going, turns out I’m being bamboozled and have to dig my way out of the mess. Oh well! The worst part is still definitely the fact that I have to start looking for something else and seriously now. Now if only games weren’t this enticing…

But enough of that! I’m saying “it’s gaming time” and gaming all over y’all!

100 hidden frogs 2 - A great visual improvement over all the previous games, but so poorly optimized, my laptop could barely run it. Can’t believe it took me over an hour, between the game telling me I had outdated graphic drivers and actually trying to wade through it at a snail’s pace…

Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery - By all accounts, this game looks and feels like a Ghibli movie; so much so that I could have sworn that’s how it was being advertised on its Steam page. Most specifically, it’s like if a Ghibli movie had interactive segments and some simple puzzles thrown into the mix. It’s the perfect example of a game to play in the evening, with a cup of your favorite hot beverage in hand, when you just want to relax. It’s about as long as a movie, too, but all that just begs the question… did it really need to be a game? Every once in a while, I happen upon games so short and/or with such inconsequential gameplay that I have to wonder if someone didn’t just force their vision of “it needs to be a game” upon a piece that would have been serviceable as a movie, comic, book, etc. It’s also horribly expensive for something that only takes about 2 hours from start to finish. Recommended only on a deep enough sale.

Call each NEW YEAR - For some time now, I’ve had this odd desire to try and see what it would be like to read a VN in a language I don’t know at all using a real-time translator. Welp, turns out it’s still pretty hard to do! It took time to get right, obviously; sometimes I had to take photos when the app struggled to focus on the text… but let’s just assume I got as much out of it as I possibly could have. Well… this was par for the course, as far as indie Russian VNs go. A bunch of friends (I’m still unclear on how much they actually like each other) in their twenties meet up to celebrate New Year’s. You’re established as some kind of a loser (heck, the first bad end you can get is staying home to play games instead of going out) they seem to be more or less willing to put up with. If you get far enough into the game, you’re at someone else’s house, drinking and having fun until you black out. In the dream you’re having, you see Sasuke from Naruto just because you can, I guess. After coming to, your friends tell you that you went on a rampage, chasing one of the girls around with a guitar and breaking it (not over her head, thankfully). From there, you can choose to 1) drink alone, which will lead you to doing some thinking about the future and eventually, celebrating your next New Year’s back in college, with your new girlfriend (but apparently that’s not the good/true end?), 2) go to the bedroom (and die from falling out the window - somehow I was waiting for that to happen ever since I learned the dream was a black out) or 3) keep drinking with the guys, which will lead to irresponsible firework play and breaking a neighbor’s window. Otherwise, you can choose to “fix everything”, which entails drinking a mix of all the alcohol available and harnessing some kind of time travel power, parodying some other thing I did not recognize. This succeeds and you find yourself back in your room at the start of the game. That could be pretty cool, but not going to the party is a bad end. So then, I chose to go and as it turns out, nothing in the game has changed from that point on. Admittedly, I only tried once, but I figured that might as well be a good place to stop. I much prefer to complete games than leave them at a point where I’m not certain I’ve seen everything, but VNs that don’t care for having some sort of a checklist or other ending tracker just get on my nerves. And to add insult to injury, this story wasn’t even very funny. The protagonist is sexist and pseudo-deep, and watching his friends barely want to handle his shit doesn’t make me like him more either. If you know Russian and the premise sounds like something you’d like, knock yourself out. If not… there’s millions of better games out there.

Click For Points - It’s a big, red button. It can be clicked for achievements. I did that, and you can too.

FRAMED Collection - Originally released for iOS and Android, FRAMED and FRAMED 2 are puzzle games in which you re-arrange panels of an animated comic book to push the story forward. I really enjoyed the noir setting and the distinct art style, not to mention the soundtrack. Plus, the thought of it being (semi?) classic mobile games just tied it all together, somehow. I found these games to be sufficiently challenging, not always easy, but never so hard that I gave up. They introduced only a few mechanics (panel rotation and refresh), but they still made some levels solid headscratchers. Okay, I dunno, this review is sounding pretty basic, so I’ll just say: this was a good puzzle game, and considering it’s not often I can say that about a puzzle game, having played through most of it with no external help, you should probably play it too.

Motion of the Heart - I wish I could try and pretend like there’s something interesting to say about this VN, but there really isn’t. It’s just a story of a girl running away from home to see if her overworked boyfriend cares about her anymore (from the guy’s POV), but even calling it a “story” is giving it far too much credit, it’s nothing more than a prompt that should be the starting point for something more. As it stands, it’s so short and so… nothing that I am embarrassed for the devs for even having made the effort to put this on Steam.

Sleep and Girls - …I bought another one. I… am unhinged, clearly.

The Complex - I’d be lying if I said I knew what this was about. I mean, yeah, nanocells are a highly coveted technology and all those happenings were pretty scary, but I just got lost near the end. The endings were all really same-y, too; it only took a few choices near the end to establish which one you’re going to get, which is pretty poor design. Speaking of design, however, I really liked the white and orange aesthetic, particularly on the uniforms, but on the lab tech as well. And as for some of the actors: Michelle Mylett (Amy) is so beautiful, I couldn’t stop looking at her whenever she was on screen. Al Weaver (Rees) is the familiar face this time around, as he later went on to play Toby in Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus?. Kate Dickie (Nathalie) and her thick Scottish accent? Don’t ask me how, but it just works! Looking at IMDb, it seems that this also got released as a regular movie to rather poor ratings, so maybe I’m not completely dumb for not having been on board with it. It was just o-kay.

Trombone Champ - Boy, oh boy. I’ve been craving a new rhythm game and this seemed like a solid choice. I mean, people all around YouTube were playing it for a hot minute, it’s gotta be good! Well… the more I played it, the closer I came to the conclusion that it’s excellent as a shitpost, but not nearly as good as a rhythm game. There’s a selection of 60 songs (possibly more in the future), from classical pieces, through a selection of national anthems, all the way to original electronic compositions and remixes - a fair amount, but it got repetitive after I S-ranked most of the songs, yet still had a lot of grinding to do. Each song has an original animated video in the background, but because of what the gameplay looks like, you’ll technically be missing most of it because you’ll be too busy looking at the left side of the screen. The story mode is… well, it blends right into the rest of the game, so much so that I needed to look at a guide to know how to proceed. Then there’s a collection of 50 cards with people or things related to tromboning that you can collect as you play, which was nice until I got to the endgame and needed to collect 10 of each to “engoldenate” it. (I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot lately, but no joke, I’m pretty sure this grind took up nearly half of my playtime.) There’s a good amount of customizable unlocks, most of which I never used, but the “Gassy” sound set is a real treat. I also have to mention the extensive list of accessibility options, including the ability to play without having to click the mouse button - WooLoop has been giving me enough hand strain, so thank you for that, truly. In the end, as wacky as it was, I kind of wished I was just watching one of my favorite YouTubers play it instead.

Valentine Panic! - I was originally planning to play this a route at a time, for four Valentine’s Days in a row. Clearly, that didn’t pan out, so I figured I might as well complete it this year. The concept is simple: you’re struggling to find a job, but a mysterious woman, known only as “K”, calls you and says you can work at her cafe. About an hour and two hands-on tests later, you get the job and can choose which two of the four characters to work alongside. From then on, the next three days are really busy, as the cafe is having a Valentine’s Day Rush - everything on the menu is half off, so there’s a ton of customers coming in each day. After those three days are over, you will have, ideally, gotten closer to one of your coworkers. It’s all really simple and surface level, which in turn also means that you can’t choose a single answer that isn’t obviously aimed at your character of choice. All the work is represented by a time-limited memory game, which would be okay, if that didn’t take up more time than the VN part of the game. There’s an “endless mode” and achievements tied to it, which are the only reason this game took as much time as it did. Just because something sounds cool (completing 100 rounds of the game in a row), doesn’t mean it should be a thing. Think it’ll take me at least until the end of the month not to hurl at the mere thought of playing another memory game.

Wordle 2 - I admit I can no longer tell if the first game actually had unsolvable levels or if it was just me not being competent enough to solve them (probably still the former). I also can’t be arsed to pretend like I care about solving these puzzles on my own. Oops!

Yi and the Thousand Moons - From the people behind Evergreen Blues comes Yi and the Thousand Moons! (It actually came out before Evergreen Blues, but shh.) I only really bought this one because I got a discount coupon for it after crafting a badge some time ago. It was, uh… it was okay. The story didn’t exactly make sense, it felt like being thrown into the middle of an established world out of nowhere and picking up from there. …aaand I’m not sure this really gained anything from being a game, but still, it was okay. I just can’t recommend it due to how short it is, in comparison to its price.

See you next month! :)

2 months ago 0 comments