November Update

*drum roll* Divinity: Original Sin 2 is finally down!

With D:OS2 out of the way I had a lot more time to invest in backlog-slaying, so I got 8 more games done, 4 of which were SG wins.
Really happy about progress this month :3

For this post I’m gonna start lifting taking inspiration from other people to make it a bit more readable. Whoever came up with this layout first, thank you :3

I have yet to take a good, hard look at the games I played this year, but if I had to snap-decide on what the “Game of the Year” was for me, it would definitely be Divinity: Original Sin 2.

The original D:OS was carried by the combat but suffered heavily in the story and roleplaying departments past the first town zone. D:OS2 fixes both of those issues, with a lot of subplots and sidequests that you can explore, some of them tied to the premade characters which you can select at the start of the game or recruit as companions later.

The excellent combat system is still there and better than ever; the character progression system encourages you to mix and match skills from multiple skill families and experiment with them; the writing is top-notch and fully voiced; the choices you make feel impactful… I could keep going on with the praise :3

I 100% recommend it and I hope they keep selling copies beyond the recently-announced 1 million mark. I’d definitely help Larian Studios again if they happen to need Kickstarter for their next project :p

I haven’t picked up the Humble Monthly the past few months as I don’t want to spend “real” money on games at the moment. I had a weird gut reaction when I saw the unlocks for this month: while I didn’t really want them, there were several that looked interesting and that I wanted to check out.

One of those games is of course World to the West, a game in which you control a team of unlikely heroes in a vast world full of places to explore, with the usual array of themes (desert-y, snow-y, cave-y, temple-y, futuristic-y and so on).
Each of the 4 characters is pretty well-developed, each having a different set of skills and ways to traverse the map quadrants and solve puzzles.
You control one at a time - switching them at totems scattered throughout the world - and you’re often required to combine their skills in order to progress.

Totems act as a way to fast-travel too, but a character can only teleport to a totem that they themselves have reached, meaning that any time you need a different skillset to help open a passage or solve a puzzle, you need to switch to the correct hero and travel by foot to your destination.
This is both a strength of the game (because it lets you notice the clever tricks devs used in the map design to make them traversable with all 4) and its greatest weakness, as all the backtracking really bogs down the experience.

The combat is mediocre at best but it’s not really the focus of the game, and the occasional glitches (character stuck in a fall or unable to move) didn’t hinder the experience thanks to the generous checkpoint system.

Despite some shortcomings it was an enjoyable little experience.

Pretty much similar to The Room 1, same gorgeous graphics and satisfying progress throughout each level.

Unlike the first one there’s less of a focus on a single, evolving “box” full of puzzles, as you’re instead placed in a small room that you’re somewhat free to virtually walk around and check for clues and puzzles. This adds a bit of exploration and a very nice variety of puzzles, which were definitely improvements over the previous iteration of the game.

I kinda wish The Room 3 was on Steam too, I would have picked it up last sale :p

I was challenged to play this a couple months ago but I didn’t manage to squeeze it in my gaming time back then (damn D:OS 2!) so I fixed it this month. I’m glad I did.

Contrast is at its core a 3D puzzle platforming game with the unique twist of being able to transform into a shadow and enter any sufficiently well-lit surface, making it a 2D puzzle-platformer as well.

The game is very clever with its puzzle design, that very often requires you to change the placement of lights and objects in the 3D world in order to manipulate the shape and size of shadows and make them into platforms you can then use in your shadow form.

The OST is great as well, with a nice collection of Jazz-style music that perfectly matches the theme of the characters and the overall feel of the game.

Another game that is 100% recommended, it’s not too long and it doesn’t overstay its welcome :3

The premise of the game is really interesting, as it’s essentially a murder mystery from the unusual perspective of the ghost of the victim.

You wake up on a ship with no recollection of who you are, and to find out what is going on you have to possess the various passengers (each with their own “skills”) and “use” them to interact with other passengers and the environment.

While all of that sounds great in theory, everything is somewhat ruined by the game mechanics.
To progress you end up having to talk about the same topics over and over with the various passengers to make sure you get all the details, which is repetitive and makes you have to backtrack at a slow pace over and over in the restrictive space offered by the ship setting.

I think the game is still worth playing for fans of murder mysteries, but I wonder if the story would have been better told in some other form.

3D point-and-click game based in a distant future where humans went extinct and robots slowly evolved to take their place.

I can’t say a lot without spoiling stuff, but despite some clunkiness in the controls and some sub-par voice presentation I moderately enjoyed it.

I had tried the demo, which piqued my interest, and the rest of the first episode made me look forward to the next one, which is still unreleased and is supposed to fix some of the issues that I had with Ep1.

The game’s so weird it’s hard to even describe. It feels random for the sake of being random, switching game genres and even perspectives (overhead 2D, then first-person 3D, then side-scrolling 2D and so on) between chapters.

While there’s definitely an audience for this kind of unconventional game, this one is plagued by multiple issues related to collision detection (I had to repeat an entire chapter multiple times due to falling to my death) that make it hard for me to recommend it.

I was bored one day and checked it out, it’s just a series of trivia questions you can answer True or False to. That’s right in the title I guess :3

A supercomputer shaped like a teenage girl built by an old man to pass judgement on humanity did I really just write that
For something that I only downloaded as a joke with a friend, it wasn’t that bad.

The premise of the story is that humanity has tried over and over to build supercomputers capable of calculating the optimal way to fix the world issues, and invariably the objective answer given by them is to destroy humankind.
Kyuu (the supercomputer/android girl protagonist) is tasked by its creator to spend 24 hours with humans before giving her final judgement on whether or not to give a chance to humans to redeem themselves, or to instead proceed with releasing a deadly toxin capable of exterminating human life.

The novel doesn’t take itself too seriously and bases its humor on how Kyuu approaches the various situations she ends up with (in a cold, purely logical manner) compared with the humans that she meets during her short journey.