Amitte

Progress report: Fourth week of June ‘21 + what was left at the end (a.k.a. Full Sixty, Y’all!)

I am done! All my exams are over and I have passed each and every one of them! (still gotta write an essay for one of the classes but let’s just pretend that nonsense isn’t a thing)
Moreover, inbetween all the procrastinating, poor efforts at cramming, getting anxious and more procrastinating, I’ve played more games!
As the title of this report says, this month turned out to be absolute mastery, taking my idea of exploring free games to the max with sixty completed titles!
There’s still a lot more where that came from, though, so I’ll definitely have to do this again in the future. It also led me to a new list idea (or two)!
But first, let’s see those kills!

  • a Museum of Dubious Splendors

    0.5 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • Coloring Game: Little City

    47.8 hours playtime

    80 of 80 achievements

  • Guilt Free

    1.7 hours playtime

    10 of 10 achievements

  • Harem Girl: Alicia

    0.6 hours playtime

    12 of 12 achievements

  • Human Rights

    0.0 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • HUNGRY TEA PARTY

    0.3 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • Lucid Dream

    0.9 hours playtime

    7 of 7 achievements

  • Return NULL

    1.0 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • Sevgilim Olur musun ?

    1.5 hours playtime

    40 of 40 achievements

  • Sillyfun Valley

    2.1 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • Silver Creek Falls - Chapter 1

    0.9 hours playtime

    2 of 2 achievements

  • The Art of Playing

    0.5 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • The Cat and the Coup

    0.2 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • The Night Fisherman

    0.1 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • Yu Escape / Monday

    0.5 hours playtime

    8 of 8 achievements

a Museum of Dubious Splendors - A collection of stories interspersed with exploring an abstract museum. This wouldn’t be the first time I forgot to read up on a game before launching it, but… I didn’t expect to encounter so much reading. And it was pretty tough in terms of vocabulary, too! There were a whole bunch of simple mistakes in the texts, though, which is a shame. The game doesn’t really offer any direction, so I believe I might have missed some rooms in the museum… but to tell you the truth, I don’t really care. Still, the game was intriguing enough for me to check out the other ones someday.

Coloring Game: Little City - The Summer Sale is on, so I decided to splurge on all the DLCs for this one and be done with it. I believe it was supposed to focus on the happenings of some cozy city, hence the subtitle; I didn’t really feel that here, though. That, and because I’ve been running late with my progress, as well as finding the drawings tedious compared to the superior Coloring Pixels, I decided to idle the latter half of the game. Despite making me kind of mad for going against the purpose of the game, I’m kinda glad that the idle function is a thing, since these games (again, in comparison to Coloring Pixels) work more choppily. I also had the game close itself on me a few times, after which I would realize that the drawing I was working on hadn’t been saved despite auto-save being turned on. Long story short, I’m glad this is done, ‘cause I’ve still got three more to go.

Guilt Free - In this visual novel with minimal point-and-click elements, you’re in a relationship with Alice, who seems to be struggling with an eating disorder. Your choices will shape how the player character perceives her sudden mood changes and unusual eating habits. Will you two split up? Will you convince Alice to seek help from a therapist? Or will you support her wholeheartedly? Guilt Free features a relatively basic art style, remindful of charcoal drawings. If I had to nitpick, the text in the regular textbox looks oddly squished - no idea if that was a design choice or what. Also, there’s only a fast-forward option, no skip option, which is more of a con.

Harem Girl: Alicia - See Harem Girl: Nikki.

Human Rights - Considerably less inspired than Video World, Human Rights is a small game… or rather what feels like a tech demo set to a song of the same title by Monster Mansion. Knowing this existed, I’ve held back from listening to the song by itself, and as it turns out, it was… kinda pointless. Everything goes by so fast in Human Rights, you can’t really focus on it, vibe with it like Video World lets you with its songs. A letdown… but still free.

HUNGRY TEA PARTY - A “point-and-click” about getting invited to a macabre take on the Alice in Wonderland tea party. Utterly confusing, as there’s no dialogue to support the choices you’re making. The character designs are great, though; I feel like they were kind of wasted on this game. Still, if you want to check it out, you’re gonna have to do it sooner than later - the game is getting delisted in July.

Lucid Dream - Decent for its dev’s first title (and its price, of course), Lucid Dream is a point-and-click horror about discovering the true story behind a girl’s unusually vivid dream. It’s odd in the sense that it’s a point-and-click, but it still kind of wants to play like a survival horror. The dev is also originally Korean, so the game is translated… and very iffily so. I got as much as I could out of the story and figured it’s not something I’m going to be thinking about later, so let’s move on.

Return NULL - Originally, I was only planning to play the first episode, but since the second one got a deep discount in the Summer Sale, I figured I might as well get it while I’m at it. Since they both came out in 2015 and no news about the release of the third episode has been revealed since, I’m going to treat the game as if it’s complete. Return NULL is a point-and-click set in a cyberpunk-esque dystopian world. You play as Jack Drebin, a member of the Local Security Force. An accident that occurs during one of his missions sets the story in motion… I didn’t mind the comic book method of storytelling, but it was sad to not be able to move around the locations; Jack is merely drawn into each and every one of them in one select place. That doubles as yet another con - it’s hard, if not near-impossible to find half of the objects you can pick up in certain locations, as they don’t stand out against the backgrounds. I’m not big on the art style, but I still liked seeing the improvement it got in the second episode. It could have also used voice acting to keep up interest, it’s sort of weird to me to be clicking through dialogue that doesn’t present like typical point-and-click dialogue does. As much as I love cyberpunk, I ultimately wasn’t pulled in by this game at all. At least there’s not much else I could have bought for half a dollar.

Sevgilim Olur musun? - Translating to “Will you be my lover?”, this Turkish game is said to be a parody of Big Brother. It does seem like it, but since I don’t understand a lick of Turkish, I played this game purely for its achievements. Am I a hack yet? To put it bluntly, the game looks and sounds bad. I’d like to say you could enjoy it more if you know Turkish (if only because you would actually understand what is going on), but I’ve seen reviews from Turkish players saying that the game isn’t good either way. Just going off the visual cues, most of the achievements are related to continually poking fun at everyone, sabotaging their stuff, as well as dating (and bedding) all the female characters, so take from that what you will.

Sillyfun Valley - At this point I’m not sure where I got this from, but I believe this point-and-click is made mostly from free assets. Some of the dialogue is pretty funny (I especially liked how the main character has unique goodbye responses for all of the characters), but the voice acting is really bad. Just about all of the actors either don’t seem to know what they’re doing (makes you wonder if any of them know what they auditioned for), speak too quiet and/or sound muffled or just don’t match their characters’ looks in general. The humor apparently contains some inside jokes related to San Francisco and gets political at times, so I was both confused and unsure where I stand in relation to it. I didn’t dislike the game, but I didn’t feel strongly about it either way. I do wish it had a definitive ending, though.

Silver Creek Falls - Chapter 1 - The first of the three parts, this game briefly introduces you to Sara (or Sarah, the game itself doesn’t seem to know which one it prefers) and her newly appointed partner, Phillip, and throws you right into the mystery of Silver Creek Falls. More specifically, this part only really focuses on investigating the three crime scenes that may or may not end up connected to each other and gathering all the blood samples (as well as drinking one for an achievement). I liked the character models and the portrait art, other than that it’s a huge meh from me.

The Art of Playing - I can understand that this was supposed to tell the story of the industry in Austin, Texas specifically, but I feel like there was too much time dedicated to the making of Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon, which would have made more sense if this documentary was anything like Indie Game: The Movie. Instead I found myself enjoying the parts concerning Creative Assembly and diversity in the industry far more. The trailer roll for the indie movies Devolver Digital had been distributing back then was really cool as well, sad to see they’re not doing that anymore. (Side note: I launched this from the Steam client and it magically opened up in my browser, which might be why Steam itself didn’t track any playtime, but believe me, I really did watch it.)

The Cat and the Coup - I thought this was paid? Anyway, this is a short puzzle game leading you through the events of the titular coup, engineered by the CIA to bring about the downfall of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, as the store page states. Despite referring to real events, it appears very enigmatic, with an art style resembling a huge collage of cardboard cut-outs and newspaper clippings. I have to say, despite having notes about the chronological series of events, I really came out remembering nothing from the game.

The Night Fisherman - I’m not getting the whole thing here, clearly. I came in knowing that, and I still came out unsatisfied. “Bite-sized” is one thing, but this was far too short for my liking. I wonder if it’s supposed to get off the hook haha get it, accidental pun because it looks good?

Yu Escape / Monday - I have to say I had high hopes for this game. The art style is great, there’s a sex scene and in the trailer, Shi has a voice… a really pleasing voice. Unfortunately, it turns out that you Yu is her boyfriend-slash-slave, which is backed up by him being forced to sleep on a separate mattress and implied to be pulled around on a leash. I’m all about femdom and pet play, but that was not funny or arousing. Neither was the sex scene itself. Turns out Shi actually talks in Nintendo style beep-boops (the ones representing her voice are more ear-grating than the ones used for the narration) and is very demanding (going “NOW!” in all caps like five or so times through the whole two, maybe three minute-long scene). The stamp DLC was interesting, but you know it’s a problem when having your character cosplay other well-known characters ends up being the most amusing thing about your game. Even on the discount it feels too expensive, but unfortunately I can’t get my money back now.

That was an especially productive month! About halfway through the year and I’ve almost reached my goal! Super pumped about it :D
See you next this month! :)