Monthly Report - December 2019
More diverse gaming this month !
- Won : -
- Free : A lot of games on the Epic Game Store, thanks to Christmas ;)
- From bundles/gifts/sales : Obra Dinn, Disco Elysium (on gog)
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LEGO® Harry Potter: Years 1-4
32 hours playtime
no achievements
LEGO® Harry Potter: Years 1-4 - completed
So… My second LEGO game, I think most of my comments on LEGO Batman 3 also apply here. This is a LEGO game, so pretty much the same mechanics, and same issues :).
But I think that the fact it follows exactly the movies adds a few problems: they are pretty much stuck by the story (some levels are not great, there’s not much diversity in powers, some chapters felt like they had issues finding interesting things to make you do), but it adds a little bit as you know the story and are expecting some scenes and events.
Yet, I found this game less fun than the LEGO Batman: funny but less, easier (easier to make “money”, so easier to unlock ridiculous bonuses) and this game LOVES to waste your time (slow animations, characters that move veeeerryyy slowly in some specific situations, the screen to unlock characters is the worst…) and is a little too buggy (multiple crashes, red brick bonuses that you have to enable each restart, character stuck in levels, some assets disappearing when you need them…).
Yet I completed it, so it was not THAT bad :). And I’ll probably play the following years, but not now :). It made me want to rewatch the movies though ^^.
Achievements : No achievements, but I unlocked everything.
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Serial Cleaner
5 hours playtime
18 of 28 achievements
Serial Cleaner - beaten
Got this one for free from Steam, and it looked like a fun sunday afternoon game.
And it was ! The concept is fun (you play someone hired to clean and make evidences disappear after murders), the story is simple but it is already impressive that there is a story behind that :). The game is challenging without being impossible, with a few levels being way trickier than others. As you die very fast, it can be a bit frustrating to die at the very end of a level, but finding strategies is the fun part. And the music is awesome ! A lot of different loops, often matching the theme of the level, great stuff, and I don’t remember being annoyed by it, even after a lot of restarts of a level, on the contrary, I enjoyed it a lot..
I think the only real issue I had with the game, are a few levels where I didn’t understand what the game was expecting (especially the last level, I had to look it up).
Ah, and while the visuals are interesting, it is often quite hard to know what is a floor or a wall, where you can go or not, mostly in the later levels. This is annoying as usually, any mistake kills you. But once you know the level, you can handle it.
Achievements : As usual, a bunch of achievements are unlocked just by playing (it often require doing some specific actions, that you’ll probably do), but a few ones look very hard (like cleaning 100% of the blood for all levels, considering I’ve been stuck multiple times at 99%), or doing all the challenges.
But as the game is fun, I might try !
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The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
2 hours playtime
3 of 54 achievements
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain - unfinished
I wanted to try a “random” game I never played from my catalog, and chose this one.
And it’s a no from me. I expected a tabletop roleplay game simulator, and it is… I like the idea but here, it’s maybe too much. This is mostly reading, so after 2 hours it starts to be a bit boring… And this is about trying to find the best outcome of each encounter, and probably write it somewhere (and probably draw a map), as the game expects you to replay it over and over, until you beat it, while there are multiple immediate deaths. But this game is also frustrating as it wants to be roleplay, but locks some options for no reason (a lot of time, you can’t just go back from where you came).
I see that you can unlock different characters, but the game annoyed me too much, so I didn’t try them yet.
As usual, I’ll probably give that game a second chance later (you never know, maybe I wasn’t in the right mood), but for now, I’m not interested in playing it more.
Achievements : I usually don’t check the achievements before I finish a game, so I cannot comment on them yet :). I expect that there are a lot of achievements that expect you to choose a specific option for a specific encounter, and probably ask you to play most/all the characters.
Many of Warlock of Firetop Mountain’s weird and unfriendly design choices make a lot more sense if you consider what it’s heavily based on. Warlock of Firetop Mountain was originally a gamebook, like a chose your own adventure book with some dice rolling, and only one or at best a few “true” paths, which the rest being dead ends. With some exceptions, they were surprisingly faithful to the book with this one, and the game kind of suffered from it. I had some fun with it, because I played the old gamebook as a kid, but don’t think I would have had the patience for it these days without any nostalgia.
Oh I didn’t know that, although it make sense, it feels indeed a lot like there are books behind. It’s great that it is respecting the original material, this is also why I didn’t say the game sucks, because it is obvious that a lot of love went into that game, and it does pretty much what is advertised :).
It just that… it’s not for me. But as I said, I’ll retry later, the videos and screenshots made me want to play it, so maybe I just wasn’t in the right mind. Replaying it later, knowing what to expect, maybe it’ll click !
Thanks for the details !
I played serial cleaner too last month and did the 100% blood cleaning….only took me a total of 20h to get all the blood in every level and I got killed a lot in some of the levels. It was fun, but the 100% blood thing got annoying in some levels. I wish you all the luck in the world with that. Though one thing that is maybe good to know, for the 100% blood cleaned to count, you do not have to finish the level. So you can concentrate on only getting the blood, if you have already beaten the game.
This is indeed a very good thing to know ! Thanks !