Report 40: The first of the year
I’ve bought too many stuff on this year’s sale. I’m never gonna learn. Meanwhile, here’s three timesinkers I played around with during the holidays.
It’s been worth waiting for 6 years. While being not as funny as Undertale, not as surreal as off, not as scary as [insert one of a million horror RPG Maker titles here], and - debatably - not as comfy as Earthbound can be most of the time, this game still managed to captivate me and make me fall in love with it. Not without its flaws, but still a real gem that will certainly go down as a cult classic RPG Maker title.
I honestly don’t want to talk about it much and spoil anything, I’ll just warn you that the game gets pretty dark early on and even darker later, even though it balances things well with the humour/seriousness, the storyflow seemed natural to me.
Love the artstyle, LOVE the music. It’s been a pain in the ass to replay it two more times though, this game would really benefit from the scene/dialogue skip function, since they can be pretty lenghty, but I don’t think that’s possible for the RPG Maker title.
If you’re a fan of similar titles, go for it.
This is a weird one. I’ve decided to put this game on-hold, since it’s just too good. I want to explore it, to complete it, to fully immerse myself in it - but I can’t do that while thinking about some dumb release schedules.
So I’m putting a lid on it until 2022 when Hitman 3 will (hopefully) come out on Steam (yes, I’m not going to buy anything from Epic). This will hurt quite a bit, but I hope I’ll handle it, because playing it while it’s incomplete and there’s more coming is just painful. I guess I’m lucky that I even started it this late.
I’ve beaten the first game’s campaign and a prologue for the second, and all of the missions are pretty damn good. Just turn off the hints or turn it down to “minimum”, it’s just weird how much handholding there is in the game.
Good lord am I tired of this.
This is a neat-looking match-3 with upgrades, powers to use and lots, lots of grind.
It really overstayed its’ welcome after a while and became incredibly boring.
There are puzzles that you have to solve mid-levels, and they range from mindnumbingly dumb and quick to mindnumbingly dull and long. The chest unlocking gears puzzle is probably the worst offender, since it can go on way too long depending on your luck.
I finished all the sub-quests and to see the ending, you have to gather 20.000 of each resource. No. Just no. I’ve spent more than 10 hours in this just grinding stuff and I can’t take it anymore.
Overall, the game itself isn’t that bad, but the novelty wears off too quick and the game has little to entertain you in the meantime.
Backlog progress status:
Did the multiple playthroughs of OMORI change a lot of the gameplay for it to be worth going through again? I’ve heard so much talk about the game lately but have seen barely any gameplay, but you sold me on it. Will have to check it out thanks. :)
I’m confused about the “because playing it while it’s incomplete” comment about Hitman 2, are they adding more content still? Or you just mean you’d rather go from the second story straight to the third? Either way, fingers crossed 3 will be just as good! (And come to steam ofc, but surely…..) I really loved Hitman 2 and was very tempted to get Hitman 3 (though the price is way higher than I ever really spend), so instead been meaning to get back into 2 and complete the missions I missed in order to scratch that itch.
I’m going to be honest with you, multiple playthroughs for Omori were kinda tedious at times, since the dialogues tend to be pretty long sometimes, as I’ve already said. This game has two routes for you to go through, and they’re mutually exclusive. So to get the second one, you have to start the game pretty much from the beginning and make different choices.
I 10000000% reccomend to go for the True Route first, which has a MUCH more satisfying and coherent storytelling. You start it by opening the door for your friend K. when given a choice in the morning.
The other route is started by not opening the door and going back to sleep. This one deprives you of 80% of the plot but adds exclusive content late in the game, most of it feeling like an endgame stuff. It really feels like it was intended strictly for the second playthrough, so I reccomend doing it last too. The endings for this route are really weak compared to the True Route’s good one (and debatably even the bad one). This route is also needed for most of the completionist achievements.
I had to play through the game 3 times - one for the True Route, second for the other route, third one for the True Route again but to get the achievements I’ve missed.
About Hitman - I just want all three games to be in the same package, so the story would be complete and I can fully immerse myself into completing it. I also don’t want to miss out on elusive targets and stuff.
Appreciate the detailed info!! Will keep that in mind.
And ah okay, was figuring that was the case but wasn’t sure if I missed out on some news about new content. That’s definitely the one big downside of Hitman 3 being on Epic or just waiting for the games to go on sale in general, missing out on the elusive targets. :/
Omori looks SO interesting, i don’t wanna look too much into it because i assume it’s one of those things that you can get heavily spoiled on, but it gave me that undertale vibe when i saw it on the store front page. Your review comforts me into the fact it’s a game worth looking at, thank you.
Yup, it’s one of those where it’s all about the buildup and going in as blind as possible.
I’d warn you about how dark it is in contrast to Undertale, but the trigger warning at the start of the game should give you an idea anyway. It honestly looked like “okay I can predict where this is going”, but it played its cards so well and went so much further, creating its own unique ambiguous kind of drama (my favorite kind. I’m always hungry for something controversial like Lisa The Painful or Downfall and the likes).
Thanks for the warning. I can deal with dark so I’ll probably try to go as blind as possible :3
Interesting…I’ve always dismissed Undertale because I don’t like pixel graphics. But everybody keeps raving about it…
I picked up Runefall on an alt…it looks good, but yeah I can see how it would be grindy. It’s one of those games I’d have to be willing to drop…or just play in short bursts when I only have a few minutes to play (which is often).
Thanks for the report!
Omori relies heavily on actual drawings in battles and cinematics, so it kinda tunes out the pixel graphics a bit (which are still good, btw), if you’re interested.
I kinda have to agree, Undertale doesn’t look all that great sometimes. But - yeah, I’m joining in on the raving about it thing - it had a phenomenal soundtrack and I still find it really hilarious. It’s a shame it became such a meme due to popularity and overexposure, you can’t even experience it in its’ purest form (playing it back then when it was just released) unless you were living under a rock for the past years.