Finished in January (1-5)

I started a year by cleaning my shorter games. And all of them were from last Steam Sale, so I don’t feel so guilty for buing so much during Christmas.

• Shape of the World
  

  78 minutes playtime

  9 of 26 achievements

Shape of the World

6/10

Weird little game. Walking Sim with no story at all, you just go through weird half nature, half abstract environment, sometimes you are creating stairs, sometimes you are collecting seeds, because why not. You can plant trees, there are some animals you can scared (actually, quite a lot), but there is almost no challenge accept for spotting, where to go next (I actually was a bit stuck one or two times), It can be quite Zen, but I didn’t fully emerged into it.

• Agent A: A puzzle in disguise
  

  4 hours playtime

  17 of 30 achievements

Agent A: A puzzle in disguise

8/10

A very, very nice classic adventure game. It has “Escape the Room” type of puzzles - mostly spotting clues and patterns or collecting X number of keys to unlock the box. The area of the game is quite small and we are going back many times, which to be honest I quite like - I enjoy those type of games where there is a lot of little things on one screen, and you are resolving them bit by bit. The story is James Bond parody, I also had Carmen Sandiego vibes - it’s basic, but servisable - the writing gave me a couple of smiles. All in all I liked it a lot.

• Pumpkin Jack
  

  6 hours playtime

  25 of 33 achievements

Pumpkin Jack

7/10

Classic 3D platformer game. And I cannot really say anything original about it - if you like linear platformers, like first Spyro, this one is 100% alright, although keyboard controls can be a bit weird and unresponsive (I died quite a lot because I didn’t make the jump, and also controls for a little race minigame in the middle of the game are just horrible). It has bosses, it has minigames, it has suprising amount of weapons, which were quite nice. All in all, a good game.

• Superliminal
  

  4 hours playtime

  6 of 27 achievements

Superliminal

8/10

Wow - this is an original puzzle game! With awesome visuals in the second half of it. It is feeling like a Portal game, but less focused on complicated puzzles, and more on story, even with a bit of walking sim aspect. It mostly relying on false perspective, with a bit of optical illusions. The only thing I really didn’t like - In many puzzle you need to figure out, what you can interact with. And many times objects, that were usable in the previous scene, are just decorations here. That was quite annoying and sometimes almost “pixel-hunting”, and it prevent me for giving it better score. But beside that - very good game/experience.

• Cloudpunk
  

  14 hours playtime

  69 of 79 achievements

Cloudpunk

8/10

This one is weird. You are a delivery woman in this cyberpunk, dystopian future, you are driving a flying car, collecting one package after another and talking to the citizens of the city. The weirdness here is - there is no gameplay here. It is basically a walking (well… flying) sim. You can destroy your car by bumping into stuff, but if you do that, you just starting to fly very slowly and wobbly, and you need to go to the service station. You can run out of fuel but… well, I didn’t, so I don’t know what is happening then, but I don’t think it will be gameover. You have some collectibles to collect, you can buy some stuff like food or cosmetic items, which are mostly completely useless. But 90% of the time you are just flying from place to place, where your boss ask you to go, and from time to time you have some morale choices. Don’t think about any races, fighting, or any dangerous stuff - you will fly around this city, or walk on the platforms, looking at (quite nice) visuals, talking with people and basically thats all. BUT - if you have right mindset and you don’t expect GTA - this game has one very, very good thing - and this is writing. Our protagonist and her AI friend are very likeable, most of the NPC’s are creative, with interesting background and stories, and voiceacting is well done. I especially liked the cyborg-detective, who, because of some bugs in his code, could speak only like a detective from old pulp novels - think Chandler and Maltese Falcon here. There were also moments, I felt genuinly moved by the story, especially in the end. So yeah - this is a very good game, but only if you know, what you are getting into.