Progress report: March ‘20
So, how y’all doing in this wonderful quarantine time, eh? You-you hangin’ in there, hm? Well, I sure hope you do, because I adore it! imightactuallybegoinginsaneohgodpleasehelpme
Seriously though, online schooling is going… okay? Lots of people see this as a chance to wind down and relax, but it ain’t lookin’ that good when you’re graduating, like I am this year. Que sera, sera for sure, I just wish our politicians were more serious about the matter… but instead our president debuted on Tik Tok.
Yes, you read that right.
He debuted… on Tik Tok.
Anyway… let’s get back on track with my progress, shall we?
(There’s also been updates to my ABC challenges! Check them out here: General, Hidden Object Games, Point and Clicks, Visual Novels)
-
Blind Love
-
DISTRAINT: Deluxe Edition
-
Ghost Files: The Face of Guilt
-
Japanese Women - Animated Jigsaws
-
Lexica
-
Mind Snares: Alice's Journey
-
Pleasure Puzzle: Portrait
-
Solitaire Christmas. Match 2 Cards
Blind Love - I still don’t really know what to think of Michaela Laws’ VNs as a whole, but this one was short and sweet (assuming your choices lead it to be so), but not without drama… although that didn’t feel genuine to me, oddly enough? Still, bonus points for the option to name characters.
DISTRAINT - You know… I can see evicting people as a job get taxing… but not like that. I appreciate the dev’s efforts, but this game wasn’t scary, it was just annoying (especially the scare chords, so damn loud!) Oh, and because there’s no voice acting (or at least visible color coding on the character models), sometimes you’ll be confused as to who the heck is talking at the moment. Personally, I read everything there was to the story, but I just couldn’t feel for the main character, or any other character at all. Here’s to whatever the sequel brings, I suppose.
Ghost Files: The Face of Guilt - I might have set my bar a little too high for this one? I liked Path of Sin: Greed and since one can tell this is in a similar vein, I was stoked to finally try it out. There was a supernatural twist to it, which I frankly didn’t mind much, but it seems that in the bonus story the devs got lazy and/or cut corners. The usual uncanny valley is present in character models and the unsuitable voice acting aaand… I know better than to expect marvelous plot in HOGs, but this one really failed to keep my attention. However, that might be my bad too, as I played it all in one go and at some point I just really wanted to be done with it. Oh, and the 3D animations were uuugly. I’m convinced I don’t really like 3D animation in general, but here it was just… yuck. If I ever get to play the sequel, I hope it’ll be better.
Japanese Women - Animated Jigsaws - This was far, far more comfortable to play than Pixel Puzzles games (which are pretty much the only jigsaw games I’ve played on Steam). The pieces connect with each other and snap into place really nicely. The “animated” part is what originally sold this game to me and it came through, even though most of the images are short video loops taken against backgrounds that barely move or in nature, making the patterns difficult to discern. However, the women were pretty and the game managed to occupy me in… these… trying times. Yeah. Oh, and I can’t say I understand the way the game went about unlocking jigsaw sizes for different images. That being said, I’m super duper tired of jigsaws (…again? I feel like I might have said that before).
Lexica - Decided to come back to this one, since the concept was easy and I knew all the solutions were already out there, so I thought - why waste my time trying to figure it out, if I can just copy the solutions? So that’s what I did. There are just way too many games in my backlog for me to worry. Not to mention that the game has its faults - sometimes it gets hard to pick up letters or snap them into place (they end up sliding out and away from your cursor), there were some words I never even heard of, and I believe I also saw a few misspelled words? That’s a red flag for a word puzzle game. However, I’ve seen bad and this isn’t it, so if you feel like taking up a challenge, I can recommend Lexica.
Mind Snares: Alice’s Journey - Oh boy, I haven’t played a HOG in a while! Three months, to be more specific. The more HOGs one plays, the less creative insight one can give (maybe?), so I’ll just say: anyone who stuck with my notes on HOGs knows that I naturally gravitate more towards the realistic ones, rather than the ones set in fantasy worlds. This one… I hoped it would have Alice in Wonderland influences (Y’know how the main character’s name is Alice? And then “Mind Snares”? I dunno, maybe that’s just me), but it didn’t. Instead, it was a bag so mixed it ended up not charming me at all. There were a few badly cut voice lines, I found the 3D animation particularly ugly and the ending was anticlimactic. Other than that, it’s still a solid Artifex Mundi HOG.
Pleasure Puzzle: Portrait - Grabbed this one for free recently. It’s got super pretty art and assuming you solve all the images in 24-piece mode (which is what I did), you won’t even have to complete all of them to 100% the game.
Solitaire Christmas. Match 2 Cards - I’ve actually played through most of this back in January, just to leave the Christmas-themed games behind. The solitaire + match pair combo works really well and gets addicting in minutes. The game looks appealing and the sound isn’t too bad, but anyone would have a brain meltdown listening to the same music for 30 hours, so at some point I just muted it. There were bugs here and there (my UI disappeared once or twice for a whole round), but nothing broke the game to the point of frustration. Truth be told, the only reason I’m logging this game right now were the last two achievements, the requirements of which are a pain in the ass… so I only now used another player’s save file to get them! Yay!
Whew! Well, I guess that’s all from me for now. See you next month! :)
I now realize my mistake.