Amitte

Progress report: May ‘20

Do I feel bad about completing so many games this month? No. Do I feel good about this post being incredibly long? Absolutely not.
I swear, I’m gonna post weekly now! (Stay tuned for something special this week!)
I might not be done with my exams yet (still waiting! >_<), but life has seen some progress - I finally set up the TV and consoles in my room! I originally planned to snap a photo, but it didn’t look too flattering and my room is pretty messy now, so it’s hard to get a good angle… if anyone’s interested, I might try for the next post!
(Hey hey… you. Yes, you! Why don’t you check out the ABC challenges while you’re here? They’ve seen some progress too! General, Hidden Object Games, Point and Clicks, Visual Novels)

Get ready for super length!

Alicia Quatermain: Secrets of the Lost Treasures - First clear-the-road management game I’ve played to completion (finally). Here, you assist Alicia as a manager of her workers - possibly weird, but makes sense in context. Nothing to write home about, except for mildly dodgy English and a plot that’s hard to care for (I mean, the antagonist’s name is “Boss”.) I really wish the perfectionist aspect had more care put into it (every level you complete with three stars puts a new object in Alicia’s office… but half the time I couldn’t tell what the new object was, and even then, it was just eye candy - no informational pop-ups or anything) - if Alicia wants me to finish all the levels with three stars so badly the devs put it in the tips, you’d think there would be some kind of reward for doing it - a celebratory screen, at the very least. I was also surprised at the lack of credits - Alicia really sounds like Beli from HuniePop and so I’d have liked to check if that’s actually the case. Other than that, a very self-explainatory and only mildly challenging game.

Away - This, uh… this was a thing? I just spent exactly four minutes of my time on this, making it my new fastest completion. It’s four minutes of a man giving you what I can only assume to be a life lesson of a dying man, as you go to the light. You’d get more mental stimulation in that same amount of time if you watched a short animation with a “dementia” genre tag. I just wish I could find some information on the man who read the script.

Break Into Zatwor - One of the many shovelware/asset flip games that were once made and pushed out onto Steam with the sole purpose of giving people an opportunity to get cards, make badges and therefore level up faster… or sell said cards and get back money, whichever’s preferred. Both the visuals and the sound design are outright atrocious. I’ve only completed this one now, because skipping through levels is possible and it pops the related achievements anyway, except for the last level, which can be skipped, but actually needs to be beaten manually because logic. Absconding Zatwor (can’t be skipped) and Fiends of Inprisonment (the last level is really pissing me off) might be coming next. For now, my completed pile of shame just got bigger.

Cats Make You Smarter! - Found this randomly while browsing Steam. It’s a memory game for children, featuring fifty unique cartoon cats. All the achievements are related to checking their profile cards (they feature the cats’ names and [mostly] cat-related quotes), which you can do by clicking on a tile with a cat you already matched - I feel I have to say that, cause I wouldn’t have figured it out by myself if I hadn’t done that accidentally; weird, I know. It’s short, it’s simple, it’s an easy 100% and you can play it with a kid.

Edna & Harvey: The Breakout - If you were ever interested in point-and-clicks, chances are you’ve seen the crazy visage of Edna; if that interest goes at least a decade back, you’ve probably played her games already, too. As curious as I was about this game, I would have held back on playing it, if it weren’t for the Spring Cleaning Event. I mean, it’s so old it needed to install Java to run! I was ready to give up on it, too, after it randomly closed on me twice (after all, this year’s Cleaning Event didn’t really care about your playtime - just open the game up and it’s done, eh?), but then I was all good. Right off the bat, I was pleasantly surprised to realize that Edna doesn’t sound nearly as low - or mad! - as I expected. Harvey’s got a good, flexible voice, which I feel is important for establishing mascot characters. Frankly, all the voicework is solid. But first, plot! You first meet Edna in her padded cell - she’s locked up in an asylum. While all the asylum workers consider her insane, she doesn’t believe so; so, what else to do, other than escape? Yeah! The gameplay is standard point-and-clicking, with no Sierra’s Unwinnable By Design™ qualities involved. The cast is as colorful and unique as can get - most of it does consist of asylum inhabitants, after all. The soundtrack isn’t big by any means, but it is memorable - whether it’s the chilling ambient with occasional mad laughing in the background that plays in Edna’s cell, or the more casual track that plays on one of the floors of the madhouse. The game branches off in two different directions just before the end - and if you still haven’t played it, I say checking out both ways is the way to go. I was so into the game I completed it in two sittings. Considering that there is a sequel to Edna’s (mis?)adventures, this ended on a peculiar cliffhanger, of sorts. But that’s for later!

Fap Queen 2 - There’s more to it! I played the original one back in 2018 (time flies so fast!) and found this unexpected sequel in the store recently. More characters, more things to do, more achievements to get… if you can read the title, you know what it’s all about.

Frisky Business - This one’s weird. Perhaps even “best of the worst”. Its quirk is the titular “frisky business” - the possibility of bedding one of your clients (or one of the other beauties you’ll come in contact with while dealing with the case)… but nearly everything except for that is good. The character art, as well as the background art, looks surpisingly good and the music really brings the “detective TV show” feel. The slapstick comedy SFX, however, make the VN feel more like a Japanese game show. The writing could use some basic editing, both in grammar and logic. The “frisky business” mechanic… consists of rubbing the cursor against the erogenous zones of the girl you’re getting it on with. The sound design of said scenes doesn’t do it any good, either. The engine sucks balls too, but that’s to be expected of Unity. Seriously, it took way too long to load up the game. Either way, after you figure out everything you need to do for the best ending (and it’s a little weird, given the writing inconsistencies)… you don’t even get much information on the case’s outcome then. It only slightly passes for the “ooo, there’s gonna be a sequel!” foreshadowing. Me, not having followed a guide from the start, I had to replay the whole game over and over again - and since the engine is terrible, there are no options to save wherever you please or skip through the text you’ve already seen. I could assume those two options would let me shave up to 3 hours off the total playtime and I probably wouldn’t be too far off. That being said, Frisky Business did scratch a kind of an itch - the itch for a lewd game that won’t be sophisticated by any means, but won’t blow any of its load ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) right from the start with how disgustingly inaccurate it is (like all those achievement fountain games I’ve had the [dis]pleasure of playing). According to its Steam page, the sequel had originally been slated for release back in 2018, and according to the devs themselves, it’s still being worked on - we’ll see where that goes.

Harem Girl Nikki - So I totally thought this was free when I first downloaded it… it was, but obviously not fully. Instead of removing it though, I decided I could spare a buck for an easy 100%. It’s Dharker Studios’ art, so at least it’s not blatant theft and the game isn’t terribly borked. Just a few simple nudie puzzles.

Moe Jigsaw - This might just be the best jigsaw game I’ve ever played on Steam. I love visual novels and in the time I was playing this game, two of the featured titles got licensed for a Western release! Woo! As for the jigsaw-ing, it’s pretty sweet. The pieces snap together even if not placed on the grid yet (accompanied by a crisp click) and their edges are never some crazy shapes (like in Pixel Puzzles, yikes). You can choose from a few preset song playlists (which I can only assume are VN BGMs) or input your own music, although that takes a little tweaking (and I imagine muting the game and playing some other music is easier anyway). There are also a few different background and puzzle tray colors to choose from, if you’re into that jazz. All the puzzles have three size options and you can choose whether or not you want to bother with rotating the pieces before looking for their place on the grid. The achievements only require you to finish the related puzzles of any size once, so thankfully the game didn’t get too long. Shame there aren’t more achievements for how many more DLC packs are available.

Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart - The third monthly theme game and my last completion for this month. Standard AM fare, not much to talk about here. Since it was one of their earliest games though (and was both made and published by them), I can, however, say “well, at least it wasn’t as bad as Time Mysteries”. The voice acting is on par, the art isn’t uncanny valley and personally, I was surprised that the player character isn’t the girl from the cover art. I know, I’m spoiling everything! It’s got everything I’m not into, which is pirates and, uhh… sea…?; but it wasn’t half bad! Actually, it was good enough to get sequels, which I’ve won on SG years ago, so I’m incredibly behind on this particular series. Until whenever I complete the sequel! (oops!)

Papers, Please - “Congratulations. The October labor lottery is complete. Your name was pulled. For immediate placement, report to the Ministry of Admission at Grestin Border Checkpoint. An apartment will be provided for you and your family in East Grestin. Expect a Class-8 dwelling. Glory to Arstotzka.” If, for some reason, you’ve been living under a rock for the past 7 (!) years, you might not have heard of this game. Papers, Please puts you in the shoes of a newly chosen checkpoint inspector. You’re going to spend a full month checking people’s documents and validating (or not) their entry into your country. Might sound simple and/or boring, but it gradually picks up the pace and won’t let you catch a breath. More documents to check mean more reasons to deny entry, so you need to keep being sharp. That, and you’ll experience some encounters more memorable than others. There’s even a whopping 20 endings to the game! Personally, I liked the game so much before I even got it that I watched probably four people play it online. Must have been my all-time record. The art in the game is fantastic and the few musical pieces it features are highly memorable - I wish I could buy them separately. I love how this simple concept can still evoke emotions with its scheduled events. That has to be why it has such a strong following. This one will definitely go on my Favorites list, if only for the passion I felt for it even before I got my own copy.

Papers, Please - The Short Film - Took me a little after completing the game to get to this. The film goes through three of the scheduled events: Sergiu’s lover, Elisa’s appearance; the husband who has his documents in order and the wife, who does not; and last, but not least, the Kolechian suicide bomber. Just in those 11 minutes, the film evokes emotions just as well, if not better than the original game. The film being Russian surprised me as well, but that’s probably because I seem to have completely different outlooks on which real countries are represented by the fictional countries. I did enjoy the orchestral version of the main theme that played during the credits, but I feel like it lacks the oomph the game’s soundtrack has. However, I felt that the ending was too abrupt and it took me by surprise. Why did the husband, a man from Obristan, kill “for Kolechia”? Is it just that Obristan (or at least the man) sides with Kolechia in the Arstotzka-Kolechia war? I really hope that’s what it’s about and it’s just a case of me being out of the lore loophole.

Pixel Puzzles Junior - Hey, it’s Pixel Puzzles, but for kids! How fun! There are 50 kid-friendly illustrations to choose from, with their sizes ranging from 9 to 56 pieces. The achievements unlock regardless of the piece count, so you can solve every puzzle in 9-piece mode and never look back… or you can continue solving them in all sizes for the little completion marks. Word of advice, the music and the mechanics are as annoying as always.

Pleasure Puzzle: Sexy Girls - Not much different from Pleasure Puzzle: Portrait, which I completed recently, except the theme and… wow, there were so little images to solve - I was stuck redoing all of them over and over again. I also noticed that holding down the right mouse button lets you see where all pieces should go. Seems like this game just really wants you to get the 100% and never look back, huh?

Samsara Room - I’ll play this one, ‘cause it seems like everyone’s playing it now, yeah? Well, I did. And I think I’m a little more salty than I was after completing Rusty Lake: Roots; I forget to keep in mind that I really don’t like escape room puzzle games (never did, actually). Add on top of that most of the instructions being minimalistic to the maximum (funny, huh?) with some solutions impossible to come by unless you spent a considerable while clicking around and you got me pissed. As much as I don’t like watching walkthroughs (and here I did, again), I still appreciate that there’s a series of official ones. The plot was once again, way over my head. That being said, Rusty Lake Paradise is still in my backlog.

Shan Gui - I originally read this one back in 2016, just a few months before I started using Steam and realized it (and many other visual novels, of which I still haven’t read a lot) is there for sale… legally (oops). The Spring Cleaning Event picked it for me in one of the categories and so I decided I might as well give it another go. Shan Gui is a short kinetic novel about a certain university student who took a summer trip to the mountains, hoping to visit the places she remembers from her childhood, when unexpectedly, she meets a cute girl who offers to become her guide. It’s basically an hour and a half (two, at most) of these two girls visiting various tourist spots (which are real and even linked to their respective Wikipedia articles in the VN - big plus from me) while also getting to know each other as beautiful piano songs play in the background. The art is like a dream - nearly every background and/or CG (YMMV) is wallpaper material. I do, however, see a few things worth picking at (especially since this VN has had two releases and I don’t think I’ve read the earlier one) - the voice acting for one character in particular - the quality of the recordings is so bad she might as well have been recorded through a wall. Get her a better microphone! The other problem would be the text itself; from what I’ve experienced, Chinese always seems to end up having grammatically horrible translations. This isn’t the worst I’ve seen, but there were a few lines that sounded odd, like they didn’t match the conversation, as well as multiple points where the text didn’t exactly match what was presented on the showing CG. If you like cute girls, accurate real-life sight-seeing in fiction or Chinese media, do check out Shan Gui. It’s cheap, but it’s worth it.

Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles - Another fresh Spring Cleaning Event choice. While most Sherlock Holmes games out there are point-and-clicks, this time the devs decided to place the most famous detective in the world in a HOG. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know either. While it is an odd design choice, it didn’t end up poorly. The Hound of The Baskervilles, as the name suggests, focuses on the Baskerville family, who believe they have been cursed to eventually die, one by one, by the hand (or paw, rather) of a big, hound-like beast. After his uncle gets killed in that exact manner, Henry, presumably the last surviving Baskerville, decides to ask Holmes and Watson for help in solving the mystery of the curse. The game will have you reconstruct the coat of arms of all the Baskervilles who died from the curse through visiting each of their rooms, up to the point where you figure out the mystery. The ratio of HOG scenes to minigames is balanced, I’d say; and all except one or two minigames are easy enough to figure out by clicking around (they don’t have any instructions to them, however, which is a con). The voice cast for Holmes and Watson is the same as in Frogwares’ point-and-clicks and therefore, very familiar and one-of-a-kind. (It only hit me when playing: Watson sounds an awful lot like Teddy Floppy Ear! And if that’s the case… my god.) Henry’s voice acting, however, is very hit-and-miss; some lines were delivered fine, others just didn’t have any feeling in them. I can’t say much about the music, as only one track stuck with me when playing and it felt a little too much like it was trying to hurry me up, which is not something you’d want from a casual game. Still, I feel like there are two things other HOGs could learn from this one (particularly Artifex Mundi HOGs) - marking locations as “complete” after you do everything you can in them (reduces backtracking) and letting you use multiple part items without having collected all parts (lets you feel like you’re making progress even while you’re stuck and reduces the size of your inventory). Personally, I find the ending a little confusing (I’ve never actually read any of the original works, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t really imagine Holmes as someone who would just accept a puppy like that; I feel like he’d have trouble with it, for some reason. Is that ending canon to the original story?), but other than that, I enjoyed this one. Now, to the day I tackle one of the other Sherlock Holmes games!

Shiver - A super short and free point-and-click, where you play as a man who gets into an accident and ends up seemingly in the middle of nowhere. As you do your best to try and call for help, you realize you might not be alone after all… Atmosphere is key in this game - it’s built up really well for such a short amount of time. However, I feel like the story could be expanded upon, since the few scary moments felt odd, too. Either way, I’m glad I got it for free, since older reviews suggest it wasn’t before and having played it now, I don’t think I would have spent money on it.

Sprout - I still remember playing this one back in the “after-school-Flash-games” days. Can’t recall ever getting to the end though. Anyway, this time I did. Sprout is a small game about the life of a sprout. Most sprouts just become what they were born from, but the one you’re going to control aims higher than that - and so, you’re tasked with helping it get to its dream destination. The hand-drawn graphics are a reminder of the simpler times and the sound design ties it all together. Short and sweet.

Teddy Floppy Ear - Mountain Adventure - After I played this for the monthly theme, it occured to me that I finished Kayaking back in March of last year! That’s crazy talk! This time, Teddy Floppy Ear went on a trip to the mountains to visit his uncle and, after said uncle gave him a task, it became the titular adventure. The easy point-and-clicking, colorful visuals and intertwined minigames make this (as well as Kayaking) perfect games for even the youngest kids. The game is available in English and Polish, and for me, the Polish voiceover really made it that much better (I played Kayaking with an English voiceover and it’s just not the same). It was a huge throwback to other games based on old Polish cartoon characters like Reksio or Koziolek Matolek, even if it is one or two guys talking to themselves half the time. The game isn’t without fault - the voice lines kept cutting out at the end and it seems that the opening and ending cutscene were only recorded in English (I turned on Polish subtitles just in case, and they weren’t available for the cutscenes either) - I really hope someone out there can correct me on this, cause if that really is the case, that’s just sad. Still, I had fun on this unbelievably short mountain trip. Only one more Teddy Floppy Ear game to go.

Time Mysteries: Inheritance - Remastered - Boy, oh boy… if this is how the Remastered version looks, I don’t think I want to see what the original was like. This, from what I gain, was Artifex Mundi’s first HOG title and long story short, it looks like a lot of other HOGs you might find being made nowadays that haven’t found their own style like AM has over these years. I didn’t find the story engaging (and I love time travel!), the character models scream “uncanny valley”, the voice acting is mostly devoid of emotion (I could swear one of the characters was voiced by a speech synthesizer), the soundtrack is disjointed, the minigames barely have any explanation to them and the HOG scenes look particularly bad. You can tell a HOG is bad when all the items you’re supposed to find are in clear view, but not being able to find the last item in nearly every scene after clicking around the whole screen is also a problem. Feel free to pick this one up if you’re curious to see how far AM has come, otherwise avoid.

美少女夏日欢乐! - I played the English version of this game back in July 2018 (!) and barely gave any insight on it back then. I only bought this version recently, thinking “Oh yeah, that was a light and easy arcade game”… WRONG. Well, partially. About 90% of this game is smooth sailing, then the levels get mad packed with enemies that swim and bump all around the level, to the point where it’s pretty much impossible to play without using powerups (especially the time-freezing one, good lord) and those can spawn in hella random places too, so you have to wait for ones that appear close to you, or else you’ll get absolutely destroyed. It really does go from zero to a hundred. That being said, I spent as much time on this one as I did on the English one, so I’m convinced I didn’t get any worse through the momentary rage.

See you next week! :)

almost 4 years ago* 4 comments
aonrao

Honestly I aspire to beat as many games as you did in a single month… at one point. Especially after my May! Lol

almost 4 years ago
Amitte

One of the unspoken rules of BLAEO is apparently keeping your posts at a reasonable length… which made me hold back during the last few days while I still had an itch to play something anyway. Still, I’m glad you checked this one out! To be fair, a lot of free time (like, the holiday kind of free) and more-or-less crappy games that end up lasting no more than 2 hours is the way to go, I’d say. My craziest was definitely March of last year though.
But yeah, you’re doing fine! You’ve got literally 11 times less games in your library than I do :D

almost 4 years ago
aonrao

You’ve got literally 11 times less games in your library than I do :D

When you put it like this… haha.

I’m curious about something though: how do you manange to 100% all of them? I usually can’t. It’s either really hard and time consuming, or horribly boring. :P There are a few games which I go for 100% but all of them?? No way :D

almost 4 years ago
Amitte

how do you manage to 100% all of them?

It depends on the game, really.
Visual novels will usually have super straight-forward achievements for getting on/finishing a certain part, checking out a sub-menu and such. For HOGs, you just have to stick to the rules outlined in the achievements, and I never had too bad of a time not using hints/skips everywhere, as daunting as it may sound.
For point-and-clicks… I admit, I’ll start looking at a guide when I’m stuck somewhere and at that point I’ll either find an achievement-centered walkthrough and keep glancing at it not to miss anything or get annoyed if I’ve already missed something (after all, no matter how much you’ve learned, you probably don’t want to replay a 10h-long game for something that was available to you only an hour or two ago).
Other games I can’t really categorize are either also as straight-forward as they get, or, I dunno, I put in the necessary work, I guess. That’s why I don’t really play much non-casual stuff, I’d say. Some stuff will get put on the backburner for many reasons, too. Games with achievements that seem to be broken in one way or another tend to piss me off as well ^^;;

almost 4 years ago