Hello, all. This is my February 2017 “monthly report.” Please see my profile for more info.

All of the games I’ve played this month are listed here. I’d like to discuss them below:

Completed games

• Stories: The Path of Destinies
  

  37 hours playtime

  37 of 37 achievements

• Heaven's Hope
  

  13 hours playtime

  26 of 26 achievements

• ABZU
  

  9 hours playtime

  12 of 12 achievements

• Laraan
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

Other notable progress

• Hue
  

  2 hours playtime

  8 of 13 achievements

A few notes on this month's games

• Although it’s a smaller list this month, total game time exclusive of idling was about the same as last month (63h for January, 60h for February).
• The Papo & Yo time was actually from January…the day/month seems to cut off at 11pm local time. Maybe because of Daylight Saving Time? I guess I’ll find out this month.
• Only one of the five games I played this month was a Steamgifts wins (Stories). One other (ABZU) was a gift, though (Secret Santa).
• I only played 2 out of the 5 games with (e.g., with an audience of) my 5-year-old twins (Heaven’s Hope and Hue), plus moments of Stories and ABZU.

Stories: Paths of Destiny (SG win)

This game. Really good game overall, but I’d make one important suggestion: don’t try to get 100%. You’ll enjoy it much more if you don’t, as the last two achievements are very grindy. Worse, if you do a little research like I did on how to make the end not quite so grindy, you end up depriving yourself of much of the enjoyment of the game. In short, it has to do with ensuring you don’t do certain paths that confer a level-up until the end, when levels are more expensive. I also had a couple of issues with the checkpoint system, when it appeared to be saving my progress as I grinded but because I didn’t properly complete a chapter, I lost a full night’s work of grinding. Anyway, the game itself is quite good, but I lost out on the best experience with it because of those damned achievements.

One other sad thing…initially I was playing this game with my kids, and letting them choose my “path.” At one point, it was time to go just as we needed to make a choice. I wanted to ensure that it was saving our progress after exiting to the main menu, so before quitting, I briefly resumed the story. It had saved progress, but now there was no way NOT to choose the next branch and continue the story (short of killing the game process I suppose). In trying to find a way to exit, I accidentally chose the other path, where we do something “unheroic” to the female lead. My son lost it, crying, saying it was a bad game and wanting me to delete it. Needless to say, I decided I’d play the game without them from then on. Poor kid. :P

ABZU (gift)

Well, plenty has already been said about ABZU, so I won’t bore you. My favorite level was the Atlantis section. I had to use a walkthrough to find all of the hidden shells, but I certainly didn’t mind replaying parts of it. I fought with the controls for the first couple of hours until I finally inverted the up/down axis. To my knowledge, this is the first game in which I’ve ever inverted an axis.

Heaven's Hope

Has a lot going for it, but ultimately I’d give this a mixed review. Nice art style, voice acting, some nice puzzles…decent story I guess. But some aspects just drove me crazy, including inconsistent UI, needlessly small hotspots for room exits (such that I twice didn’t realize I could go in a particular direction), overly long monologues (you can skip each line one at a time), several places where you know exactly what to do but not the right sequence/item combination/etc. to accomplish it, and a couple of silly puzzles. By the end I was kind of glad it was over, and the ending wasn’t very satisfying. Still, not the worst point-and-click you can find.

Laraan

Originally I was just going to idle this game, but it looked kind of intriguing and not too long, so I started playing it. I don’t usually like low-poly graphics, but I really liked this game and while most of you will probably find it super-easy, I found it just hard enough to keep me working and interested.

Hue

Fun little puzzle-platformer so far, where you choose a “pen color” to change the world’s background color so that obstacles appear and disappear when you need them to. I’m probably less than halfway through…I have a feeling the difficulty will ramp up once I’ve unlocked all of the “colors,” since there will be a lot of colors to choose from in realtime.

Plan for March

See my Attack Plan. I plan to finish Hue. I’ll work on Amulet of Dreams intermittently with the kids (just started it today). I keep putting off Black Sails for one reason or another– but once again, I intend to play it this month as my primary “sans kids” game. I might try to squeeze in Samorost 2. And to go with this month’s theme, I will play LEGO Harry Potter 5-7 with the kids. Years 1-4 was probably my daughter’s favorite game so far. I might tempt fate and let her try to join me in co-op (she’s 5 1/2). We’ll see how that goes…