Been a minute. Small batch of completed games.

Tree Simulator 2023 (Steam Deck)

It was aight. Not really much content. It’s basically a small playscape where you play as a tree who can dance and who you can dress up, lol. There are sliders to control content such as animal population and what have you.

Elden Ring [All Endings] (PS5)

This is where most of my time went. Probably 200ish hours, although about 160 was with my main playthrough. Quality Str/Dex with some Faith sprinkled in. Mostly stuck with the Bloodfang Blade and the Fingerprint Stone Shield, although I did use the Godslayer Blade against Malenia, the Serpent Killer in the spot it’s found, and I set the shield to Cold until the end run, where it became obvious that switching to Sacred was the way to go.

I definitely got hung up on Malenia for a bit. Got close a couple times, finally got tired of dying, summoned help, still took another 20 tries probably.

At one point, I accidentally summoned ‘Let Me Solo Her’, but I’m not the sit back and watch type player, so that didn’t end well. Eventually, ‘Dillonysus’ reached out to me, and he and I beat her in one try lol. At one point, she used that spear attack on him at the exact moment I landed a jump attack on her which led to an odd glitch where her attack animation kept going but dealt no damage to him. We chatted a little about that afterwards. Unique glitch in both our opinions.

Anyway, I ended up getting the platinum, which was pretty satisfying. Outside of Malenia, who is basically a DPS race, I only really had issues with the Twin Gargoyles, unsurprisingly also a DPS race. Beyond that, most bosses were one and done, and none took more than four tries.

Brilliant open world design, quest designs, and really, I saw a lot, definitely didn’t see all that was to be had, although I was pretty thorough and am confident I saw most major events main and side stories. I did mess up the little Jars’ quest in Jarburg and didn’t bother following the tailor dude around, and I think Seluvis has multiple story options, but I think I wrapped up all NPC quests otherwise. At least all the ones I found lol.

I did create a save point just before the endgame decisions (turn off auto cloud saves on the PS5; download your save to your console; then upload to the cloud each time you want to use the save point. Not sure about other platforms), and used that to get all three endings, although I definitely spent time prepping the world properly to accomplish that. One ending is in a different spot, but it came with the classic FromSoft warning that lets you know it’s probably an ending, so I marked the map and it turned out that guess was correct. One of the other two endings actually has four variations that I found. The three trophy endings are more or less Heaven, Hell, and somewhere in between (four brands of despotism from my perspective).

Tree [2x] (Steam Deck)

This was a very pleasant, chill game. Basically, you control the seasonality of a tree as it and you experience a child planting it, then watching it grow as he grows, gets married, and eventually dies of old age having lived a full life. One cheevo requires a second playthrough, but each is like 10 minutes, so easily done. There’s a photo mode at the end.

Nothing retired this go around