• Stacking
  

  11 hours playtime

  21 of 21 achievements

i was intrigued by the style of stacking, and it turned out to be fun! i liked the discovering hi-jinks, which i first did because it’s fun to do things like fart on other dolls. the objectives all have multiple possible solutions, so after solving one way i could usually find another way, and once i ran out of ideas the 3-part hint was a nice way to get just as much of a hint as i needed to keep collecting solutions. there aren’t hints for hi-jinks or unique dolls though, so if you want to 100% those you need to experiment a LOT or check a guide.

the story is simple but fun, delivered as short clips in silent-film style — there’s never any voice acting but there is dialog. there certainly aren’t any twists or anything, but it did add to my enjoyment. didn’t try playing with keyboard and mouse but worked great with my controller.

• Broken Age
  

  10 hours playtime

  29 of 45 achievements

pretty sure i knew about this while they were working on it and it was still called double fine adventure. considering point and clicks are my favorite games, i was excited to see how double fine’s quirky style would manifest. as is the case with most adventure games, there were a couple solutions that sort of make sense once you know what they are but are unlikely to occur to the player. the story and characters were amazing! i enjoyed talking to just about all of the characters for both the writing and the voice acting. and the world it takes place in is so crazy and interesting that it almost felt a little short. there were multiple times the story took a twist i didn’t see coming and was also a lot of fun to reckon with. looking at the remaining achievements after beating the game like i usually do i wasn’t motivated to go for 100%. the unexpected parts of the story were so satisfying when i didn’t expect them that i can’t imagine a second playthrough being as much fun. the puzzles were usually on the obvious side and occasionally too obscure to solve without a guide, but if the story and escaping into an interesting world appeal to you then you should definitely check out broken age!

• Plague Inc: Evolved
  

  19 hours playtime

  48 of 211 achievements

i brought out this game when covid-19 started to seem serious. at first i felt a little better about humanity’s fate while i repeatedly failed to guide my plague through the eradication of all human life. then i got the hang of it that high infectivity is usually key and got bummed out. then i chugged on through all the plague types until i’d won all of them on normal. some of them like simian flu, shadow plague, and even the zombie one had pretty cool variations that made it feel a bit more like a game, but mostly this game is about figuring out a winning formula and hoping you can get to those pesky island nations before humanity really starts to fight off your plague. most of the variations felt repetitive to me, so this went down as one i was motivated to finish so that i could mark it beaten. didn’t try any multiplayer so maybe if a friend wants to try i’ll find that worth coming back for, but for the most part this game dragged on longer than my interest in watching my plague take over another country. if you already own this one maybe you want to fire it up now to get the hopefully once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play a game about global pandemics during a global pandemic.