Beating games is okay, but you can always do better Amitte’s profile
I like a lot of things most people seem to dislike.
I can also get snappy if our opinions clash - in case that happens, please tell me and I’ll try to adapt.
If I don’t have anything cool to say, I’m probably playing: Coloring Pixels, Pixel Puzzles Ultimate, WooLoop
For my ABC Challenges, go here: General, Hidden Object Games, Point and Clicks, Visual Novels.
Themes and events I took part in: May 2019 (actually totally forgot about that one), July 2019, August 2019, May 2020, June 2020, July 2020, March 2023, October 2023, November 2023, Eight to Infinity! Eight Years of BLAEO
Progress report: June ‘24 (a.k.a. I Got a Gift!)
My birthday’s come and gone, but this year’s gift will stay with me: I got myself a Steam Deck! So far I’ve spent a good amount of time just downloading my verified games onto it, then I ordered a tempered glass protector for safety’s sake… and now I’m ready to start catching up with all the games my regular ol’ laptop just can’t handle for one reason or another! Boy, it’ll take a while for the excitement to wear off! I think July’s gonna be (almost) all about games for the Deck!
I also got a bunch of games from my dear friend, Saku. I promise I’ll get to (at least some of them) sooner! >.< Thank you again! I love you!!
But for now, here’s what’s been happening in June…
A really small game with even smaller mazes. All of them are based around a different mechanic, each more intriguing than the next. There's no time limits or enforced play order. Most importantly, I'm proud to report that I solved 18 of them without looking for help. If you've got an hour to spare and want to get your brain working, this is the game for you.
This one had to wait its turn for a while now, ha! It's got a separate slider for meowing, which I turned down… maybe a little more than I would have liked, but I couldn't be bothered to tweak the settings again. The ability to "find" seagulls is funny, and various random things making their own sounds when clicked on is a nice touch.
Figment 2: Creed Valley 
GAME
PASS
Despite my mixed feelings towards Figment, I couldn't help but pick up the sequel right away. This time, all the locations create a cohesive whole, if only because the overarching puzzle mechanic lies within the Perspective Switch, which allows you to change the state of mind from close-minded to open-minded and back again when needed. Both states have a distinct look and sound to them, and listening to various Opinions to see how they change between them is entertaining. There's a lot more fighting this time around, with much more variety in enemy types and movesets (with another point for cohesion, they're all presumed to have been planted by the villain, matching their theme and color scheme), as well as the option to strike harder right after a dodge. You can now also collect smaller health points dropped by enemies after defeat, in addition to the pre-programmed big ones. The puzzling aspect has also gotten an upgrade - it's no longer only about figuring out the right order to push buttons or switch levers to get to the next part of the world, but even when it is, it feels more inspired than in the first game. Lastly, there's the Ethics Maze. It (and consequently, The Ditch) stand out as the only locations with a distinctly different visual style. At a certain point of their journey through it, Dusty and Piper fall down to The Ditch and have to find their way out of it. As the name might suggest, The Ditch is where Opinions that were unable to reach the end of the maze have made their dwelling and right away, they don't make a good impression on the main characters. At one point, a choir of these Opinions forms to sing a song about what it is they believe in that The Mind at large doesn't. Between some inconsequential and more ridiculous ideas ("Pineapple pizzas rock" - please let this 'argument' die already; "Video games can't be musicals" - I don't know who told the devs that, but they're clearly proving those people wrong), and the very obviously harmful thoughts ("I can still drive, 'cause it's only my fifth beer", "Having another child will save this relationship"), a certain one stands out. "Vaccines cause autism" is now a rejected opinion of The Mind; what character development! It's possibly the greatest upgrade to the franchise, but it doesn't excuse The Plague's song from the first game entirely. Also, the sense of humor could use some work. Dusty is still mean to Piper for no reason (as if Courage and Optimism can't coexist?) and some of the puns, while creative, just aren't all that funny. All that's left for me to play now is Back to Bed, the earlier, unrelated game.
Much like Her Story, this game tasks you with finding out what happened to the person of interest by watching a series of videos. Here, it's established that you work as a data decrypter (which is alluded to as not being a particularly cheap service) and help people learn more about why they might have chosen to leave this world behind. Jessika is one of such people, with her father blindsided by her passing. After he gives you her login credentials, you're free to start looking. After watching the first few videos, you're going to want to look up keywords to find more, but to me, this system is somewhat busted. I can kind of understand that searching for pronouns yields no results (it could be a preventative measure against being handed everything on a silver platter), but then some videos don't appear at all for certain keywords even though they contain them and vice versa, and some keywords have to be input in plural form, otherwise they don't work. The game was originally made in German, along with all the footage, which doesn't bother me, but the English dub track… I switched to it for just a second and it sounded like an afterthought, as if the actress shut herself in a closet with a mic in one hand and the script in the other. An English translation for the game is available, and as weird as this may sound, I'm glad that visually there's nothing important to pay attention to in any of the videos, because the translations are provided not in the form of regular subtitles, but a thin textbox to the side of the media player, which expands vertically as the script appears; this is bad enough by itself, but it's also not at all timed to match the footage. I did consider at some point that this was a design choice, given that the icon for the translation is an outline in the shape of a globe, implying the appearance of a real-time translation plug-in rather than embedded subtitles (which make sense in Her Story, thanks to the setting). While that's neat as an idea, I feel something like this is absolutely worth sacrificing the "immersion". Another "preventative measure"/mechanic (?) is that all the files are categorized by varying degrees of encryption, with gray files being the least heavily encrypted and red files being the most heavily encrypted. This is just kind of dumb, because it's not like there's any way to learn which keywords are needed to unlock which files, so the only way to play the game "correctly" is to bookmark each and every locked video and check back up on them from time to time; not to mention that it's pointless to lock videos with content that isn't particularly deep into the story, when just about any other FMV game in a similar vein will be open enough that you'll get to the very last video (and get the option to finish your playthrough) before you watch all the footage anyway. I mentioned pronouns already, but some verbs don't yield any results either, and when I looked at the guide, I realized I wouldn't have come up with a bunch of the keywords anyway. I tried my best to pick out three, four words from each and every video I watched at some point, and not even that was enough. Another thing that I feel is worth mentioning is the overstimulation caused by everything secondary to your goal. In Her Story and Telling Lies, your goal is to find and watch enough videos to learn what happened in the characters' lives; besides that, there's a simple game resembling any other casual game one would expect to come with a new computer - you might want to play it for the achievement tied to it or you might not care about it at all, but the choice is yours. In Jessika, the moment you hear something interesting in a video you're watching, you're either going to get prompted to tell your colleagues about it, receive another vague, anonymous email, or get startled by the screen glitching out for no reason (someone on the dev team must have liked SIMULACRA a bit too much); sometimes, those things happen almost at once, which is extremely distracting and, in the end, does not influence anything. And then there's the actual story… oh, boy. In short, Jessika is a story about how drastically the hardships one goes through can end up altering their life. For Jessika, parental neglect and sexual assault may have very well been the catalysts for falling in with the wrong kind of people, and ultimately, growing into a radicalized outlook. However - and I'm merely echoing what I've gathered from the negative reviews I've read - the approach taken here culminates into somewhat of an unfortunate tool for further radicalization. Jessika is presented as someone who's easy to relate to or sympathize with and at no point is there any attempt from any of the other characters to decidedly condemn her beliefs. To add insult to injury, though I can't compare this against the German script, the translation for one of the videos contains the N-word, with a hard R, uncensored. There really is nothing to gain from not censoring a slur, but if you feel you must use it (which I realize is messed up to say, I don't mean to pretend like the concept of "giving/getting a pass" is anything that should be genuinely exercised), then at least censor it properly. TL;DR: The devs saw the success of Her Story and SIMULACRA and said "bet", ended up mishandling a subject requiring careful approach.
I don't know that I know when the last day of spring is supposed to be, anyway. I completed the first one on June 21st, this year I raced to complete the sequel before June 22nd came to an end… either way, it's hard to comment on how the story progressed (sorry not sorry, devs, I don't replay prequels, no matter how long it's been), but it's just another game from Sapphire Dragon Productions - if you played one, you've played them all. The character art in this one is vastly different from the prequel and the standout of the whole thing, but that's about it.
If I remember correctly, this is one of those games I saw in the store one day, wishlisted based on the concept alone, then went on about my day. At some point, it came out, then eventually became free-to-play, and now, I've played through it. Since I'm not necessarily interested in playing my own music or challenging friends to a match, this game took so little time to complete I'm glad I didn't have to pay for it. The premise is interesting - playing ping-pong against physical manifestations of the five stages of grief - but there's barely any more story than you'd get from solving a maze printed on the back of a cereal box. As for the gameplay, I think it's really good, the timing is very tight and there are some cool modifiers at play. I was initially discouraged from trying the game out by the negative reviews that focused on how hard the game is, and I'm not sure if the timing got adjusted later or what, but I didn't feel like it was unacceptably difficult. That being said, I would definitely change the order of the levels, so that the fox's level comes before the monkey and the manatee, 'cause it's a lot easier. And even more importantly, though it might look cool, I think the menu screen should include words that actually tell you what is what. There is a "No Fail" mode you can turn on in the settings if you're struggling, but I misunderstood the option, and as I realized later, I had played through most of the game without it… so after I turned it on, I went ahead to play the last stage and didn't need it at all, 'cause it was so easy. This same dev has released another sports-themed rhythm game, which they also later made free-to-play, so I'll probably be playing it soon.
Samantha Swift and the Golden Touch 
Okay, I was way too harsh on the first game back when I first played it. Who cares that it's easy as balls? The art style isn't bad, either. I decided to pick this one up while waiting for my friend to finish her game, and it turned out to require the perfect amount of time and level of engagement. Samantha thought she just completed a solid project, but oh, no! She worked for the wrong person! Because my write-up on the previous game was so crap, I have no chance of recalling who did or didn't appear before and what's happened since then, but what's important now is that she has to work against her new enemy and to bring them down, she needs to travel all around the world, collecting fragments of the Heart of Midas, as well as other artifacts associated with the king with a golden touch. The main drawback of this version (and the source of most negative Steam reviews) is that the .exe does not launch/run properly; to make the game work, you need to download a different .exe file, kindly linked in the forums, and replace the original one with it. In case anyone's wary of things like these: that's what I did; the game worked fine and I got no malware. After this one, two more Samantha Swift games were released, but neither of them are available on Steam, so who knows if I'll ever play them.
I first spotted this game when I noticed one of the curators I follow reviewed it and after a quick look at the screenshots, I immediately fell in love. A rhythm game with a pretty art style and gameplay reminiscent of Rhythm Heaven, and it's free?! I downloaded it right away. From the very beginning, it was a bit odd that the store page didn't have a direct download button. (I can only assume this is some sort of a region-lock issue? Even though the game itself is not region-locked?) Then, it immediately got so, so much worse when I realized the game doesn't want to play properly. (I still managed to get two achievements before I got it to work, though.) Thankfully, there's an easy enough solution mentioned in the forums (for Windows, at least): setting all available language options to one and the same language (for me, this was American English). It worked, but I had to restart my laptop maybe three times for the new settings to work. And when I finally got to play… the game really is pretty and the gameplay is akin to Rhythm Heaven, though it only uses one button, but… I was struggling to get down the rhythm of a few of the levels so much, I had to turn off the music to hear the SFX and the (optional) metronome. It's utterly crazy to me - to play this rhythm game perfectly, I had to turn off the music; y'know, the one thing that's the core of any rhythm game? Yeah, don't play this if you care for achievements and/or struggle with good rhythm games, it's just not worth it. I was led to believe I'd get about half and hour's worth of bouncing along to the rhythm as I ace everything in a few tries, and I ended up with the BGM off, watching the animation frames to make sure it was the correct moment to press Space. Bleh.
Lately, I've been trying my best to catch up with a bunch of series/franchises I kind of left behind (but never forgot about) and work on having made some progress each and every day. The pressure got to me… and I ended up playing this on my birthday despite hating the previous episodes. I'm not gonna be nearly as lukewarm about this one as I was about the other ones. By now, the main character has fully transformed into Purple Patriot, the "superhero" who can't do jack shit and spouts conservative rhetoric every chance he gets. Too bad for him it's so easily refutable (which Mel, Sam and Bleeding Heart prove time and time again), otherwise this would have been an exercise in misery… scratch that, it's not good enough when 99% of the "comedy" in this game is just that, personal insults and politics-adjacent jabs back and forth. It's "nose exhale" at best and "clutching my head, wishing for it to be over" at worst. I can only vaguely remember one joke that wasn't about politics or the faults in any character's lifestyle. Gameplay-wise, I can't tell which is worse: the fact that 99% of this game hinges on you knowing who to talk to next (the "point-and-click" tag is doing some heavy lifting here), or the fact that when you get to the point-and-clicking, you've forgotten how to use the damn inventory menu all over again. Okay, let's assume you've listened your way to the end… the established problem is resolved, the narrator teases some kind of future development… and then it's all over. This is the last available installment. What happened? I haven't looked into it closely, nor do I care to, but I seem to have caught a glimpse of someone in the forums saying that the devs bounced, possibly due to a lack of funding for future episodes. (Something something, they might have tried to release a comic instead?) A quick look at the store page for any of the episodes reveals they came out in 2015, which, unrelated as it is, brings to mind the idea that whatever force allowed the three available episodes to get made ultimately gave in, much like the teen dystopia books (and their subsequent movie adaptations) of the early 2010s would give way to fantasy romance novels; in the first half, the fantasy of bonding together to overthrow the government (in the teen dystopia stories) or owning a conservative was just that, a fantasy. But as 2016 came around and an absolute joke of a president got elected in the US, an unjust/conservative government was no longer a distant thought; it became reality. As satisfying as it may seem to concoct a plan of rebellion or use facts and logic to obliterate an all-righter far too self-obsessed and stupid to fight back, fiction is meant to be escapism and no one wants to engage with things that hit too close to home, so to speak. Purple Patriot's supporters have diminished and I, for one, am glad. (Seriously though, I would like to not be getting political, but these games were all about politics. Yuck.)
This is another game about clicking a button for achievements. However, there's a catch to this one: while every click gives you one point, every point raises the probability of your score resetting by 1%. The game has been out for a little over a year by this point, and still, nobody has reached 60 points (for the record, the high score was 58 when I played). It's a free and simple game you can play if you need something short to kill some time with and want some easy achievements, but it looks really nice (as in, it's dumb, but not shitpost-level dumb). The popular video game quotes that were reworked to include buttons were a nice touch.
See you next month! :)
Progress report: May ‘24 (a.k.a. Finally?!)
Somehow, it feels like May took ages to end. What else is there to say, uhh… nope, can’t think of anything interesting. Sorry! :( Just living my little, boring life at the moment.
I'm genuinely taken aback by the fact that it took me five years to play another game from this dev. I seem to remember really wanting to buy this one for a long time, too… Anyway, A Wild Catgirl Appears! is the story of Ami, an ordinary student at an all girls' high school who's also secretly gay. She hasn't been able to come out of the closet in fear of being bullied, which makes sense, considering how rampant homophobia seems to be at her school. Due to a newly established rule, everyone is now obligated to join a club. Ami chooses the coding club to try and avoid doing too much work, but she quickly takes a liking to the club president and they begin work on a game about a ninja catgirl. Some time after her design is complete, the girls begin working on an RFID figurine of her and soon enough, it turns out that the figurine can morph into a living version of the catgirl herself - and back again, if needed! Shenanigans ensue (but not that many, really). The game has gotten multiple updates since it first came out - a new UI design and an art overhaul (the original art style for the CGs was rather poor; now the important scenes use different art styles, which also stand out when compared against the character sprites, but for the better now, in my opinion), but I have to say, I'm surprised by the discrepancy between my playtime and a bunch of other ones I looked at. To anyone who's played it before, is it possible that a chunk of the story was removed, or was it just a problem with the skip function? As for the story, it's your usual "baby's first dating sim"; the characters know each other for a week or so, go on one date and suddenly, they're in love and the game is over before your brain can catch up. That by itself wouldn't have been too bad, but this game very much reads like the author themselves processing their feelings regarding their own sexual orientation through the fantasy of catgirls from another world giving them the courage to open up and talk about it with someone. It's equal parts heartwarming and saddening, and in the end, given the length that it is, doesn't make for a particularly good story. That being said, I own all of the dev's other Steam releases, so I'm curious to see how much they've improved over the years.
Time to get started with the cat madness… For my first pick, this wasn't bad. The art style looks generic, but it's a different kind of minimalistic than the pioneer of this little subgenre. If you use a hint, you'll get a red, YouTube thumbnail-style arrow leading you to a matching circle around the area in which you need to look for the cat. Took me twice as long to complete, because this one actually has an achievement for not using any hints. Me dum dum!
Why is that subtitle not part of the Steam title? We may never know! Figment is an adventure game that plays out inside some guy's mind (no, really, you're never going to learn more than that), which seemed like a novel enough idea to me… and then I read that Psychonauts already did it, so I've got some catching up to do. You play as Dusty, the… well, I never really learned what he's supposed to be, exactly. [EDIT: In spite of having mixed thoughts about the first game, I already picked up the sequel and it graciously reminded me that Dusty is supposed to be a physical representation of courage.] The guardian that prevents evil from seeping in too deep? The imaginary friend? Why not both? …and you're accompanied by Piper, the bird. Apparently, Dusty has gotten rusty (bars), but now that the Fear of Loss has appeared and started taunting him, it turns out there's a whole lot of puzzling and fighting to do. And he's not the only baddie that needs defeating! The others have hidden in the Freedom Isles (aka "the right brain") and Clockwork Junction (aka "the left brain"). First of all, I have to say that Figment ended up being a mediocre experience all across the board. The visual presentation and main theme of exploring the mind while the body is comatose is reminiscent of Epistory (visually, it has also been compared to Bastion, though I have not played that game), but that's about where my praise ends. I love the distinction between the creative, free-spirited land of the right brain and the industrial, logic-focused land of the left brain, but nothing ever feels fully cohesive. Spiders being enemies in the left brain make sense, considering their well-established status of the "creepy crawlies", but in the right brain, your enemies are… vomiting rats…? I didn't think much of them, but I can only imagine that's enough to trigger emetophobia. Voice acting is all over the place, too; it'd be one thing if it was just the accents that were hard to place, but I'm almost certain there wasn't a single character that sounded "right" for all of their screen time. The Fear of Loss stands out in particular as possibly the least threatening villain ever, thanks to his voice. Also notable is the game's musical edge, with the villains breaking out into song when you fight them… and that was charming, but then the first villain alluded to autism being a disease. Supposedly, the devs explained somewhere that that was supposed to be an example of how wrong/uninformed the character is, but there's no room in the game itself for that to be addressed and/or challenged. Hardly a clever idea when there's still tons of people out there believing the vaccine hoax. Another similar miss comes in the form of mist that comes in waves to hurt you while you're exploring the left brain, aka "waves of depression". Do these devs just not have anyone neurodivergent on the team or did they seriously think this was okay? Because it's not, considering the "just smile and it'll be better" kind of narrative people with depression are being fed to this day. The gameplay is a mix of puzzle-solving and fighting enemies, with neither being particularly challenging. I'm echoing the reviews I read on this one, but the fights really are just a loop of "click until dead" > "get health back", rinse and repeat. As for puzzles, you know me - I used a guide to get through the sokoban-like puzzles in the left brain (mostly because that's not my cup of tea, but also, oh no, the sCaRy wAvEs oF dEpReSsIoN!!). And in the end, the moral of the story is that what we all need is that little voice inside our head to tell us to get better. Jesus. Can't say I'm in a hurry to play this again when the time comes.
Every once in a while, I enter giveaways for these lewd games, convinced I'm not going to win… and then, I sometimes do. If you played any of these, you played them all; all you need to do is solve the puzzle. This one sets itself apart by featuring only art by Ringsel… of Ringsel (if I understand correctly, both the artist and their OC are named Ringsel). As with other games I've played from this dev (SEXTS and Meet My Teacher), the UI could look better and the BGM might need a replacement (just one, though; this game's got multiple, but one of them stands out in particular because it doesn't loop well).
I said I'd be happy to play it again next year, and I was! I almost forgot to utilize the uber trick of looking up the base tag repeatedly to watch all the videos in order! That helped me understand the story better, as after my initial playthrough, I was convinced Hannah/Eve was one and the same person with a case of DID, whereas now, I do believe that they're twins and Eve's last words are a rather straight-forward implication that her and Hannah are able to play one and the same person once again. I still can't believe Viva Seifert hasn't had many more acting roles before or after this. Also, if I ever play this a third time, maybe I won't forget to turn the visual filter off.
Lil Gator Game GAME
PASS
I can't tell where I first heard about it, or if I just hallucinated it, but I have to say this: I went into this game with the idea that it's supposed to be like A Short Hike and I was not disappointed. In the simplest of terms, Lil Gator Game is basically A Short Hike, just with a different coat of paint… and that didn't stop me from loving every second of it. They did a spoof on Ace Attorney, for goodness sake! But let's start at the beginning. You're Lil Gator (it's never explicitly stated how old you are, but I wanna say, no younger than 10 years old) and you're out playing with your friends. You're on a big, epic adventure, with enemies lurking around every corner and loot tucked away in the nooks and crannies you might not have even noticed. Your big sis is also there! …but she's stuck with her laptop, typing away at her project. Oh no! That means she's missing out on (possibly) the coolest game of her life! That's how the idea to improve the game even further hatches in the mind of Lil Gator. To do that, you'll need to run, jump and fly around the island to find some new friends (and lend them a hand before they'll lend you theirs), fight your way through hordes of enemies and collect all the loot. It's a charming little adventure for anyone and everyone who liked A Short Hike and/or (assuming you haven't played it) enjoys anthropomorphic animal characters, exploring at their own pace… relaxing, in general. Can't wait to have an excuse to play this again in the future.
Little Kitty, Big City GAME
PASS
I wish I didn't have such bad memories associated with cats IRL to enjoy this game more. Here, you play as a cat that fell out the window of… boy, the fourth, or maybe fifth floor while napping on the windowsill and somehow survived it, and now… well, now you've got to get back home. But you're too tired to climb that high and as it soon turns out, some animals around the place could use your help, so going home might have to wait after all. In the shortest of terms, where Lil Gator Game is like A Short Hike turned 3D, Little Kitty, Big City is like A Short Hike with less soul… The first issue are the huge water puddles all over the place. This is explained somewhere along the way as a freak accident of the waterworks, but it never actually gets fixed. It's one thing that some of those are used to prevent you from trying to walk off the map where it ends, but accidentally running into one of the other ones while casually zooming around town is inevitable… and then you're gonna have to watch the grand animation of the cat jumping and hissing every time this happens, which kills all the momentum of running. Same with unlocked fast travel points, someone just decided that Tanuki (the character in charge of the fast travel system) has to stick her head out of the sewers, so forget about running over any unlocked fast travel points - you're just going to end up bonking your head against them/Tanuki. Another big aspect of the game is platforming - you're going to have to jump around to find your way onto rooftops and various other fixtures. The problem with this is, not only does jumping feel sluggish/weighty, it would be impossible to get anywhere without using the "precision jump"; that is, holding down the jump button to align the trajectory of the jump before committing to your decision. This is another thing that eliminates any possible sense of momentum from the equation. Then, there's climbing. Whereas in A Short Hike and Lil Gator Game, you're able to climb any vertical surface you push against, here climbing is limited to surfaces covered in ivory. This is a great way to entice the player to look closer for new places to go, but… why, then, is there a failsafe where if you jump at a surface with no ivory, the cat will slowly slide down it, claws scratching and all? I can't think of a single time that helped me get anywhere I thought I was meant to go; if anything, that's usually what happened after I failed a jump that, in hindsight, was likely never to be made in the first place. And if you press the jump button while sliding down, you'll jump away from the wall instead of sliding down faster, which, at least to me, seems counterintuitive. There's too many hats to collect, which sounds like the most ridiculous con for a casual game such as this to have, but considering the playtime and the fact that half of them aren't even found by combing through the world, but bought from gacha machines, I don't understand what the thought process behind this decision was. And speaking of in-game currency, while the various optional tasks are reasonable, the one for recycling a hundred items (which is one of the ways you could get more currency) is absolutely not it. The city is only really big from the kitty's point of view, so if you don't keep track of this task (and a few other ones), you might end up having to play catch-up after getting everything else done (don't ask me how I know). Thankfully, for this one specifically, someone has figured out a way to cheese it, which I hope the devs won't pick up as a bug to be fixed. It still hasn't been a month since this game came out, so we'll see about that. Lastly, I think I missed some kind of emotional impact from this game. While A Short Hike was all about being in the moment to experience the beauty of nature and Lil Gator Game tried to approach growing up and the importance of taking a break, there's… really nothing here. Getting a collar from your owner, and with it, the ability to name yourself was a nice touch, but in the end, that's it. It's a perfectly okay game for casual players and cat lovers, which I - the broken record that I am - am glad to have played on Game Pass, because it's wildly expensive in relation to the amount of content it provides.
From the maker of SEXTS, this is… pretty much the same game, except with images that have a more realistic art style. The one thing that seems to have been modified besides that is that now, you can choose to input randomly generated strings of letters (using only C, V, B and N) or arrow keys, instead of a regular typing game. The BGM is still just the one annoying piece that won't help you concentrate at all, the images are still AI generated and "touched up by AI-friendly porn artists" aaand you can still make a wallpaper by compiling three of your favorite images. Lastly, I found that the achievement descriptions and icons for completing all free levels for each girl are jumbled up… but at least they unlock properly!
I managed to snatch one of the codes for this one when the dev announced it on SG, but in retrospect, I don't really know why… I suppose I wasn't expecting this one to be F2P when it comes out. It's more similar to Love Colors than any other pixel coloring game, if only because it's being marketed as a game you can play with friends (again, I don't have any friends who would want to play with me, so I'm glad singleplayer isn't an afterthought). The dev was responsive to feedback, fixing a bunch of issues and even adding new images to the game not that long after it initially released, but I'm still looking forward to some QoL changes I think are important, such as making zooming in/out smoother (and making it possible to zoom out further, it's annoying having to drag your way around images this small) and removing the points/leaderboard system (because… why? why does it exist in the first place? all it does is stress me out about not spending every second coloring while I just want to find a new video to watch on the side). That being said, it is another casual coloring game, so as long as it keeps getting free content updates, I'm on board.
Wow! Can't believe I'm finally done with this series! This one was simply great, from the Cartoon category featuring Disney character names in spite of Disney having its own category, through the Tastes category, which was just one big mystery to me, all the way to the fact that a good chunk of the words you need to find are just missing their last letters. A great experience all around, definitely worth $10! Sarcasm, sarcasm, this is ALL SARCASM!
See you next month! :)
Progress report: April ‘24 (a.k.a. Huh? What?)
My friend suggested I try a different post style, so here goes. Do tell if this looks better and/or is more readable than the usual box summary + review list combo.
A Little to the Left 
GAME
PASS
This game should be used as a supplement for neurodivergency tests. I was expecting a nice little game of putting stuff away neatly, in order of size or color, and it's not that I was completely bamboozled, but other solutions range from elaborate to "why the hell would you be doing this in the first place". Straightening photos, sorting documents, even organising your seashell collection is par for the course, but you can't convince me that there are people out there aligning their clocks' handles with the shadow of the tree outside their house or arranging the flies on their beloved spider's web in a symmetrical pattern. But if there are… please, seek help, and I do mean that genuinely. Go to therapy, hang out with your family or friends, take up a new hobby. Life doesn't have to be this suffocating. It's also beyond me that the main character has a cat. How on earth can you be this married to the idea of keeping every little aspect of your life this tidy, and yet have a pet that will come and ruin all of your work just for fun? Anyway, this one goes out to all the people who still think cats are getting a bad rep in media; there are so many games out there that treat cats like four-legged gods, and this is definitely one of them. Also, the only reason I haven't finished this game yet is the stupid "daily tidy" - a selection of 20 (or so) levels from the main game with some slight visual changes here and there that rotates daily. That by itself would be okay, but the achievements want you to do these for a hundred days… I'll take "PADDING" for $200, Alex. At first, these were frustrating because I didn't get into the main game, now they're just frustrating because it's all the same stuff, every day.
Bluey: The Videogame GAME
PASS
I haven't seen a lot of the show, but I've heard that it's gotten popular for being all about having fun and enjoying life with your family and friends organically, no electronics involved, so I'm intrigued. I can't afford to subscribe to the service that offers the show in its entirety, though, so I figured I might as well play the game first. There are four short episodes to play through as sort of a story mode, each of which unlocks a new location to run around and play at, plus a fifth one for completing all episodes. Each location has an assortment of collectibles to find, as well as stickers for your sticker book. Finding those collectibles and playing minigames (unlocked during the story) leads to unlocking various hats for the Heeler family, and there's a load of them! And oh yeah, you can choose to play as any member of the Heeler family, at pretty much any time, which is fun. Also, don't forget about watering the plants! That was a thing introduced during the story mode, but I somehow blanked it out until right near the end of my hunt for all the collectibles and that became a pain in the butt. I also found the achievements for completing the minigames five times in a row rather redundant, it's not like anything in the game changes after you do that, and if you've done enough other stuff before that, you won't even get any new hats for it. All in all, though, I can't judge it too harshly - Bluey is made with kids in mind and I feel like - however ironic it may be - this game will keep all the little fans (and their parents) busy for a lot longer. It may also be worth mentioning that even though it's published by Outright Games (because of course it is), this game isn't broken. Or, well, it's just a bit borked, but that only gives it charm and doesn't actually impede the gameplay in any way.
Disney Dreamlight Valley GAME
PASS
This game absolutely owns my baby bitch ass. Since I got myself a Game Pass sub again recently, picking it up from where I left off two years ago was very much on the table, and so I assumed I could just pop in for two hours a day… boy, how wrong I was. There was so much to catch up on that it became a timesink right away. I opened it up for the first time and ever since then, April has become a black hole. I can finally write about it, though, as I have officially completed all story quests, and in turn, beaten the game. (That was, like, 25 hours ago…) From now on, it's pretty much all cosmetic - critter feeding, crafting, buying out Scrooge's store for the day - and slowly, but surely, I'll be working my way towards the rest of the achievements. I will say, though, I caught up just in time for the new update that came out today… and I'm ready to get into it right after I post this.
Open Roads GAME
PASS
This is one of those games that's been somewhere at the back of my mind since I learned of it before its release. Now that it's out and on Game Pass since day one, and it's really short (1-2 hours, according to HLTB), I knew I had to play it ASAP. Well… it's a walking simulator, which is a-okay with me, but looking at the gorgeous character art, I was expecting something more than a few short animation loops during conversations. In any case, you play as 16 year-old Tess Devine, and along with your mom, Opal, you're cleaning and packing up to move out of your grandma's house after her recent passing. After getting prompted to check out the attic, however, you uncover a secret that grandma Helen has kept for decades. Exploration is great, there's a lot of stuff you can pick up, even though it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things (possible alternate title 1: "Ashtray Pickup Simulator") and the locations themselves are full of life, but whenever you need to find something to proceed further, it's never a challenge of any sort. Half the gameplay is asking Opal about all the interesting stuff you find and whatever conversation or story comes out of that (possible alternate title 2: "Hey, mom!" Simulator"), and it genuinely miffs me that whenever you pick something up and it's just Tess commenting on it, Opal absolutely never chimes in - that's just unrealistic, considering it's her childhood we're investigating here and makes the game feel more empty than it already is, considering you don't get to see the characters occupy the space they're in unless they're talking to each other. Also, if you ask Opal to elaborate on an item you just picked up, you can see it locked in mid-air in the spot where you were looking at it seconds ago. Clearly not supposed to happen, but still funny. There's no satisfying climax or conclusion to the secret or what might happen to Tess and Opal after they move out, but alas, that's very much like real life, I suppose. It may not have been nearly as wondrous as What Remains of Edith Finch, but I still enjoyed the journey aspect of it. I saw a little bit of myself and my mom in Tess and Opal, and I feel like that's enough to still keep this game in the back of my mind, just in case I might manage to get my mom to play it one day. All in all, it was engrossing enough to play through in one sitting, but it's definitely too expensive for how short it is, so once again, I'm glad that I got to play it through Game Pass. (Also, maybe this is more of a me issue, but even though the voiceover is only available in English, the game language was set to Polish by default, and I couldn't change it back to English? Other choices included German and Russian, which makes total sense, and then… Brazilian Portuguese, for some reason? Seriously, the lack of a choice to go back to English is just confusing to me.)
This ain't my first rodeo… so I got my friend to watch me play it. I've only beaten it while streaming it for her, cause after that there's really nothing new to unlock… yet still a bunch of achievements left to obtain. Well, what can I say… it'll get repetitive from this point on, but I still love this game. It hits the cozy spot like nothing else, and after I complete it here, I will have completed it three times, each one on a different platform. Looking forward to trying out the sequel in the future.
Now that I'm branching out to all the other copycats, I've noticed there's an overwhelming amount of these made with just… well, cats. So to postpone that for a bit, I chose to play this one instead. The underwater kingdom location looked pretty cute and the BGM was nice, too. 's just a shame it was so easy.
I appreciate that this one used pictograms as hints. My favorite part was definitely "embassy" being lumped in with words starting with the letter U. Only one more to go now.
See you next month! :)
Progress report: March ‘24 (a.k.a. My Head Is Spinning…)
The two things worth mentioning about this month: I subbed to Game Pass again and I rushed to complete all the games I picked out for the Eight to Infinity! Eight Years of BLAEO event… so I didn’t commit fully to either. I like themes/events, but I’m looking forward to not feeling the pressure anymore ^^;;
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Cats and Seek
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Fresh Start Cleaning Simulator
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Not Tonight
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Richard & Alice
-
Sakura Angels
3.8 hours playtime
no achievements
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Strawberry Vinegar
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The Low Road
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Vampire Survivors
34.7 hours playtime
164 of 204 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Wordle 3
Cats and Seek: Osaka - What a great example of a copycat (pun not intended) that improves on the original concept! This game isn’t nearly as heavy as 100 hidden frogs 2 (though heavier than all its predecessors), but it ran without issues on my laptop. Movement isn’t restricted to just up and down and it’s possible to zoom in quite a lot (which really helps, cause those cats can get tiny!). There also seems to be an option to change the colors of each (?) aspect of the game, which may be helpful if you experience eye strain or are colorblind. The BGM seems to be longer than the ones in the 100 hidden… series, and if it isn’t, at least it’s more pleasant to the ear. I’ll be keeping my eye on this series.
Fresh Start Cleaning Simulator - I happily welcome this new subgenre of first-person… shooters…? where you care for and clean stuff (think Slime Rancher or PowerWash Simulator)… but this just wasn’t it. Right from the start, it felt like it was taking too long to complete a single level. The upgrades alleviated that feeling somewhat, but each and every level will still take you about an hour. This is purely a “me” complaint, but the game was rather sluggish in some of the levels; it would only run better after getting rid of all the dirt. Going back to the upgrades: I think there’s too many of them and they get too expensive as time goes on. Even though the later levels are filled to the brim with dirt piles and have a bunch of plants that need watering, you won’t be able to get the last few updates (some of which sound pretty cool, I can’t lie), even if you complete all the levels perfectly. Even if you were, though, there just wouldn’t be enough levels to use them on. A simple fix for this would be to restructure the whole upgrade tree, lowering the prices and removing the unnecessary upgrades (let’s be honest, locking the ability to use bots without having to pick them up and put them down over and over is like YouTube locking the ability to watch videos with the screen locked behind their premium membership - it should be a basic feature and I am not willing to debate anyone about this). Overall, I would say that this game is very repetitive - and before you stop me - it’s just that this particular kind of loop wasn’t very exciting to me in the long run. Destroying the piles of dirt and vacuuming up the trash was the best part every time, the miscellaneous tasks (aka “find x and use it to fix y”, etc.) were okay, though they could use higher rewards for upgrades’ sake, but as soon as I was done with all that and saw that there was still about 30% to be done in the whole map and it’s all plants that need to be watered, I died a little inside. Weirdly enough, destroying the dirt piles counts towards the overall progress, but sucking up trash doesn’t? And when it comes to watering plants, the bot that can help you is really hit-or-miss, even when upgraded to the max - sometimes you can set it down, and it’ll water everything perfectly, other times, it’ll try really hard to reach that one tree or bush that was lumped in right behind the other plants that are already watered, and by god will it try and fail. Combined with the fact that I also tried using it in spots it wouldn’t be done with in the next few seconds, it’s just a point of unnecessary frustration I have with this supposedly chill game. Somehow, everything about this game feels like it was a matter of learning the formula and reproducing it - something something, corporate version of a cozy game. I don’t like being this negative about a game that just needs some more love, but… Island Saver was actually made in collaboration with a big company, and yet its gameplay loop is far more engaging.
Not Tonight - If you already played Papers, Please and you’re aching for more document inspecting action, Not Tonight is the game for you. Heck, that’s the reason why I wanted to dislike it… but in the end, it really wasn’t that bad. Anyway, Not Tonight is set in a fictionalized version of a modern day United Kingdom, where a xenophobic prime minister is gradually coming into power… and in turn, the Brits are prejudiced against foreigners from any and all corners of Europe. You can choose one of the few prewritten backstories for your character, but from what I understand, no matter the identity of your relatives, you were born British - until everyone around started ignoring that fact for their own comfort, that is. That has to be the best and worst part of the writing - people so vehemently ignorant of all your character stands for, they made me genuinely frustrated. I’m pretty sure I would have hurt somebody eventually if I had to endure that kind of treatment in real life. Since you’re presumed to be a “dirty Euro”, you have to prove your worth to the country by working as a bouncer for a multitude of venues throughout 2018. Thankfully, the game only has three chapters, so you see the beginning, the middle and the end of that year. It was surprisingly confusing to have to account for the year discrepancy at all times! There are a handful of tasks to do on the side to ensure a comfortable completion. I actually missed a few of these, because I was trying to avoid using a guide, but I managed to get just enough done to not have to go back. (I shudder at the thought!) I liked that each venue had its own distinct feel, especially considering that the music used for each and every one was royalty-free. The guest lists featuring some celebrity and fictional character names was a nice touch, too. If I could change anything, I’d remove the ability for characters who aren’t eligible for entry to push back, as it can waste a lot of time (yeah, I’m aware there’s a costume that does that, but from what I’ve read, wearing it will negatively affect Jupp’s opinion of you) and I can’t say I’m a fan of being told to “just die” by some rando whose ID was expired. I’ll be on a lookout for the sequel whenever I get the inspection itch again.
Richard & Alice - In a world plagued by eternal snowfall, Richard and Alice are prisoners. But they’re not locked up in any old prison - if anything, it looks more like a facility designed to keep people trapped under the guise of providing a shelter from the snow. That being said, Richard and Alice are no ordinary survivors, and this is the story of why. At first, you’re introduced to and assume control of Richard, which would make you think that he’s the protagonist, but after Alice appears at the prison and starts telling Richard her story, you quickly realize that most of the game is going to play out from her POV. There’s a lot more talking than there is point-and-clicking, which wouldn’t be too bad if the writing wasn’t sub-par. Richard and Alice feel like they were written by the same person more than they feel like characters that could stand on their own, and Barney, Alice’s son… he’s just too childish for his age. He’d be going to grade school in less than a year in some countries and you’re telling me he doesn’t know that the past tense of “bring” is “brought”? While there isn’t much puzzling to be done here, the latter half of the game has Alice and Barney wandering around a rather big stretch of the outside world… which would also be okay, if the view wasn’t so zoomed in, with the camera lazily trailing after Alice as she traipses around at a comparable speed (can’t walk faster if you can’t see where you’re going!) I don’t know how creating these locations worked in AGS, but from the player’s standpoint, the size of the locations would be equally as, if not more intimidating, if contained within a single screen. I was also bothered by the random trees near the edges, which would suggest a way into the forest when clicked on, but then the one spot that lets you move to the next screen isn’t even marked in any way, so you have to click right near it and hope that’s it. More of a minor annoyance than anything else, but still. Then, there’s the endings. Depending on a few triggers, you can get one of five available endings… but they’re all too samey and going back to get them feels like a slog, especially considering that none of them even explain anything (who was the man from the confessional? you may never know!) All in all, this game isn’t nearly as good as I might have thought it was back when I watched a certain YouTuber play it back in the day… That being said, I already own the other game made by the same studio, so I’ll give it a try sometime next year.
Sakura Angels - Thank god for the modern day Japanese high school setting of this one. It reads more like a regular fanfiction than straight up weeaboo wish fulfillment, but it’s still nothing groundbreaking or looking to innovate. I think the voice acting made it just a tad better. Sayaka is voiced by Yamamoto Ayano and I adore her cute voice, so I had to get Sayaka’s ending first, not that it matters much in the end. The premise was interesting enough, but I was wondering how it’s going to unravel and wrap up in just 3-4 hours, and sure enough, it was rather anticlimactic. You don’t even get to see The Big Bad™️, it’s just said to be “a queen of darkness”, and I guess she was sealed away so the artist wouldn’t have to worry about drawing her. After she’s defeated, whichever girl you interacted with more comes to check up on you and basically admits to having fallen for you. Then you’re shown a bit of some weekday morning later in time and after that scene is done, you get a white screen… and then you’re back in the main menu. That’s it? Not even a “thank you for playing”? Disappointing. Well, it wasn’t as bad as Sakura Spirit, but I’d rate it something like “at least I didn’t roll my eyes every few lines/10”, so there’s still a long way to go for this series.
Strawberry Vinegar - This was definitely a wake-up call for me to read more of ebi-hime’s VNs. I first fell in love with her writing style when I stumbled upon Is This the Life? back in 2015 (I should probably read it again sometime) and I can safely say that Strawberry Vinegar was another hit. You play as Sakuraba Rie, a rather aloof and cynical nine-year-old girl, who, one day, stumbles upon a mysterious demon girl eating the cookies she baked just a while ago. She introduces herself as Licia and convinces Rie to host her stay in the human world and feed her all kinds of delicious food… if she doesn’t want to have her soul reaped, that is. That setup kickstarts almost a week (here, Hell has six day weeks) of near-relentless banter, mouth-watering food CGs (and descriptions!) and Rie learning what it’s like to have her first real friend. I noticed negative reviews mentioning that Rie is unlikable and/or unrealistic, because she uses big words and acts all grumpy/annoyed a bunch, but I think that’s her whole charm. Her parents are lovefools, Lucia is from another world and her classmates are just idiots, it’s hard for me to see why she shouldn’t be the straight man to any and all of them. That’s the fun of it! There’s a point in the story where she has to remind herself that not everyone reads The Capitalist Manifesto (1958)! What kind of a nine-year-old would read a capitalist manifesto?! That’s hilarious! I may be a little biased, because despite no other traits that could make her seem out of the ordinary, between naturally fitting into the straight man role, talking all “mature for her age” and even just being annoyed about Licia putting one of her books back in the wrong spot until the end of the scene, she seemed somewhat autistic-coded to me. The art is really pretty (I wish there could have been a way to incorporate all of Licia’s sisters into the game!), I’m already itching to listen to the OST again and the good endings feature a time skip, which I always adore! I’d recommend this VN to anyone who loves good fictional food, cute girls and slapstick humor and isn’t turned off by generic anime tropes (yes, they do go “kyaaa!” whenever something surprising happens).
The Low Road - This was one of those games that I inexplicably really wanted to play, despite never having had it advertised to me in any way (or maybe that’s exactly why, now that I think of it)… and it was just okay. You’re Noomi Kovacs, a twenty-something who just graduated from spy school and is eager to get some spying action at her new job. Unfortunately, the company now gives all its cool spy missions to one agent only and Noomi is decidedly the last in line to that privilege. Unless all the other agents happened to suddenly become indisposed… The art style of this game is fantastic, easily the main reason I was so interested in playing it. Though maybe not my style, the music is pretty good, especially considering the design decision of having the player get cued in to every next chapter with a new song. The voice acting is a mixed bag - I really liked Noomi’s voice (this might seem out of nowhere, but she reminded me of Emma Stone at times - just a cool girl with a bit of a boyish edge), but then Oona’s voice was mixed really poorly for some reason. I also liked the running gag where characters made puns on Noomi’s name (not only was this the first time I learned of this name’s existence, but I also get to discover that it’s also delightfully punny? heck yeah!) and the MO of the Docilio cult (postponing the release of various technological advancements until some higher power greenlights it sounds like a cool idea that I’d like to see tackled in some other story… maybe coupled with some delightful time travel shenanigans?) The puzzles are another thing I feel mixed about - some were easier, some harder, but no hints or explanation were ever provided beforehand. The one truly great accessibility function available, however, was the ability to fast-forward through all the dialogue (even during the first playthrough, which was a bit annoying with the prompt constantly on the screen). On the other hand, though, the game has a tendency to hardlock on loading screens, making them infinite and forcing you to quit and relaunch. Happened a bunch of times for me, but every relaunch made the next part load up properly; still, you may want to consider that people have left negative reviews based upon their inability to fix this issue and since it’s still happening, that means the devs have never provided a definitive fix.
Vampire Survivors - The best game I might have never played, had it not been for my ex showing it to me. Another great thing is, since by now everyone and their grandma’s played it, I don’t have to spend too much time explaining what it is. But in case you missed it, Vampire Survivors is a minimalistic bullet hell-like game all about building up a killer loadout and surviving the fight against hordes of monsters. Scratch your brain? This game will claw at it, ripping it to pieces, then smushing it back together, which you will love and beg for more. It’s the game that makes you want to shout “just one more round, mom!”… and then you remember you’re an adult and you’re free to ruin your life on your own terms. I may have only completed the base game (without the adventures), but rest assured, I bought the first DLC and I’m ready to play it… maybe even right after I post this. (And this is how I learn there’s also a show in the works?! That’s pretty damn awesome!)
Wordle 3 - Welp… this one took way too long for my liking. They could have just made an “Alcohol” category if most of the beverages given were going to be alcoholic. The “Flowers” category was overkill.
See you next month! :)
Progress report: February ‘24 (a.k.a. Just Chugging Along!)
Like I’m a sad little train! It’s an okay kind of “sad”, though, I think. I thought I had a bit of a job going, turns out I’m being bamboozled and have to dig my way out of the mess. Oh well! The worst part is still definitely the fact that I have to start looking for something else and seriously now. Now if only games weren’t this enticing…
But enough of that! I’m saying “it’s gaming time” and gaming all over y’all!
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100 hidden frogs 2
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Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery
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Call each NEW YEAR
2.0 hours playtime
no achievements
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Click For Points
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FRAMED Collection
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Motion Of The Heart
0.2 hours playtime
no achievements
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Sleep and Girls
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The Complex
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Trombone Champ
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Valentine Panic!
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Wordle 2
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Yi and the Thousand Moons
100 hidden frogs 2 - A great visual improvement over all the previous games, but so poorly optimized, my laptop could barely run it. Can’t believe it took me over an hour, between the game telling me I had outdated graphic drivers and actually trying to wade through it at a snail’s pace…
Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery - By all accounts, this game looks and feels like a Ghibli movie; so much so that I could have sworn that’s how it was being advertised on its Steam page. Most specifically, it’s like if a Ghibli movie had interactive segments and some simple puzzles thrown into the mix. It’s the perfect example of a game to play in the evening, with a cup of your favorite hot beverage in hand, when you just want to relax. It’s about as long as a movie, too, but all that just begs the question… did it really need to be a game? Every once in a while, I happen upon games so short and/or with such inconsequential gameplay that I have to wonder if someone didn’t just force their vision of “it needs to be a game” upon a piece that would have been serviceable as a movie, comic, book, etc. It’s also horribly expensive for something that only takes about 2 hours from start to finish. Recommended only on a deep enough sale.
Call each NEW YEAR - For some time now, I’ve had this odd desire to try and see what it would be like to read a VN in a language I don’t know at all using a real-time translator. Welp, turns out it’s still pretty hard to do! It took time to get right, obviously; sometimes I had to take photos when the app struggled to focus on the text… but let’s just assume I got as much out of it as I possibly could have. Well… this was par for the course, as far as indie Russian VNs go. A bunch of friends (I’m still unclear on how much they actually like each other) in their twenties meet up to celebrate New Year’s. You’re established as some kind of a loser (heck, the first bad end you can get is staying home to play games instead of going out) they seem to be more or less willing to put up with. If you get far enough into the game, you’re at someone else’s house, drinking and having fun until you black out. In the dream you’re having, you see Sasuke from Naruto just because you can, I guess. After coming to, your friends tell you that you went on a rampage, chasing one of the girls around with a guitar and breaking it (not over her head, thankfully). From there, you can choose to 1) drink alone, which will lead you to doing some thinking about the future and eventually, celebrating your next New Year’s back in college, with your new girlfriend (but apparently that’s not the good/true end?), 2) go to the bedroom (and die from falling out the window - somehow I was waiting for that to happen ever since I learned the dream was a black out) or 3) keep drinking with the guys, which will lead to irresponsible firework play and breaking a neighbor’s window. Otherwise, you can choose to “fix everything”, which entails drinking a mix of all the alcohol available and harnessing some kind of time travel power, parodying some other thing I did not recognize. This succeeds and you find yourself back in your room at the start of the game. That could be pretty cool, but not going to the party is a bad end. So then, I chose to go and as it turns out, nothing in the game has changed from that point on. Admittedly, I only tried once, but I figured that might as well be a good place to stop. I much prefer to complete games than leave them at a point where I’m not certain I’ve seen everything, but VNs that don’t care for having some sort of a checklist or other ending tracker just get on my nerves. And to add insult to injury, this story wasn’t even very funny. The protagonist is sexist and pseudo-deep, and watching his friends barely want to handle his shit doesn’t make me like him more either. If you know Russian and the premise sounds like something you’d like, knock yourself out. If not… there’s millions of better games out there.
Click For Points - It’s a big, red button. It can be clicked for achievements. I did that, and you can too.
FRAMED Collection - Originally released for iOS and Android, FRAMED and FRAMED 2 are puzzle games in which you re-arrange panels of an animated comic book to push the story forward. I really enjoyed the noir setting and the distinct art style, not to mention the soundtrack. Plus, the thought of it being (semi?) classic mobile games just tied it all together, somehow. I found these games to be sufficiently challenging, not always easy, but never so hard that I gave up. They introduced only a few mechanics (panel rotation and refresh), but they still made some levels solid headscratchers. Okay, I dunno, this review is sounding pretty basic, so I’ll just say: this was a good puzzle game, and considering it’s not often I can say that about a puzzle game, having played through most of it with no external help, you should probably play it too.
Motion of the Heart - I wish I could try and pretend like there’s something interesting to say about this VN, but there really isn’t. It’s just a story of a girl running away from home to see if her overworked boyfriend cares about her anymore (from the guy’s POV), but even calling it a “story” is giving it far too much credit, it’s nothing more than a prompt that should be the starting point for something more. As it stands, it’s so short and so… nothing that I am embarrassed for the devs for even having made the effort to put this on Steam.
Sleep and Girls - …I bought another one. I… am unhinged, clearly.
The Complex - I’d be lying if I said I knew what this was about. I mean, yeah, nanocells are a highly coveted technology and all those happenings were pretty scary, but I just got lost near the end. The endings were all really same-y, too; it only took a few choices near the end to establish which one you’re going to get, which is pretty poor design. Speaking of design, however, I really liked the white and orange aesthetic, particularly on the uniforms, but on the lab tech as well. And as for some of the actors: Michelle Mylett (Amy) is so beautiful, I couldn’t stop looking at her whenever she was on screen. Al Weaver (Rees) is the familiar face this time around, as he later went on to play Toby in Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus?. Kate Dickie (Nathalie) and her thick Scottish accent? Don’t ask me how, but it just works! Looking at IMDb, it seems that this also got released as a regular movie to rather poor ratings, so maybe I’m not completely dumb for not having been on board with it. It was just o-kay.
Trombone Champ - Boy, oh boy. I’ve been craving a new rhythm game and this seemed like a solid choice. I mean, people all around YouTube were playing it for a hot minute, it’s gotta be good! Well… the more I played it, the closer I came to the conclusion that it’s excellent as a shitpost, but not nearly as good as a rhythm game. There’s a selection of 60 songs (possibly more in the future), from classical pieces, through a selection of national anthems, all the way to original electronic compositions and remixes - a fair amount, but it got repetitive after I S-ranked most of the songs, yet still had a lot of grinding to do. Each song has an original animated video in the background, but because of what the gameplay looks like, you’ll technically be missing most of it because you’ll be too busy looking at the left side of the screen. The story mode is… well, it blends right into the rest of the game, so much so that I needed to look at a guide to know how to proceed. Then there’s a collection of 50 cards with people or things related to tromboning that you can collect as you play, which was nice until I got to the endgame and needed to collect 10 of each to “engoldenate” it. (I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot lately, but no joke, I’m pretty sure this grind took up nearly half of my playtime.) There’s a good amount of customizable unlocks, most of which I never used, but the “Gassy” sound set is a real treat. I also have to mention the extensive list of accessibility options, including the ability to play without having to click the mouse button - WooLoop has been giving me enough hand strain, so thank you for that, truly. In the end, as wacky as it was, I kind of wished I was just watching one of my favorite YouTubers play it instead.
Valentine Panic! - I was originally planning to play this a route at a time, for four Valentine’s Days in a row. Clearly, that didn’t pan out, so I figured I might as well complete it this year. The concept is simple: you’re struggling to find a job, but a mysterious woman, known only as “K”, calls you and says you can work at her cafe. About an hour and two hands-on tests later, you get the job and can choose which two of the four characters to work alongside. From then on, the next three days are really busy, as the cafe is having a Valentine’s Day Rush - everything on the menu is half off, so there’s a ton of customers coming in each day. After those three days are over, you will have, ideally, gotten closer to one of your coworkers. It’s all really simple and surface level, which in turn also means that you can’t choose a single answer that isn’t obviously aimed at your character of choice. All the work is represented by a time-limited memory game, which would be okay, if that didn’t take up more time than the VN part of the game. There’s an “endless mode” and achievements tied to it, which are the only reason this game took as much time as it did. Just because something sounds cool (completing 100 rounds of the game in a row), doesn’t mean it should be a thing. Think it’ll take me at least until the end of the month not to hurl at the mere thought of playing another memory game.
Wordle 2 - I admit I can no longer tell if the first game actually had unsolvable levels or if it was just me not being competent enough to solve them (probably still the former). I also can’t be arsed to pretend like I care about solving these puzzles on my own. Oops!
Yi and the Thousand Moons - From the people behind Evergreen Blues comes Yi and the Thousand Moons! (It actually came out before Evergreen Blues, but shh.) I only really bought this one because I got a discount coupon for it after crafting a badge some time ago. It was, uh… it was okay. The story didn’t exactly make sense, it felt like being thrown into the middle of an established world out of nowhere and picking up from there. …aaand I’m not sure this really gained anything from being a game, but still, it was okay. I just can’t recommend it due to how short it is, in comparison to its price.
See you next month! :)
Progress report: January ‘24 (a.k.a. What? Am I, Like, Totally Back In Action Now?!)
…Kind of, yeah! It’d be a lie to say I’m not struggling with some stuff, but things are moving and changing ever so steadily. I found myself a bit of a job and I hope it turns out to have been worth my time. And my gaming progress? Just as steady, guys, and gals, and other configurations of being!
But how steady? I’ll show you:
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100 hidden turtles
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Cleaning Girls
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Crystals of Time
2.1 hours playtime
no achievements
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Margo
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memories
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My Name is Mayo 3
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Not Anyone's Business But My Own
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Pineapple on Pizza
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WooLoop
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Wordle
100 hidden turtles - The color is a nice touch, but the variations in shading the found turtles are ultimately confusing. For some reason, the game launched in a misaligned window at first, which can’t be changed, because the game has no options menu and the cursor is locked to the game… A relaunch fixed that, but considering that I’ve been able to complete all the other games from the series without closing the game and opening it back up again, that seems like a bit of a problem.
Cleaning Girls - I said I’d stop buying these, but then, at some point, I won this one on SG, so I knew I was going to play it sooner rather than later. Some of the girls in this one looked particularly… off.
Crystals of Time - You know… I feel like every HOG has one or two moments where it makes you backtrack to a location that seemed out of the way by that point for a single HOG scene. Meanwhile, this one was all about wandering around locations to find the next random, inexplicable HOG scene waiting to be explored. (And they were always the same! If it felt like you decluttered one of the scenes a bit, tough luck: next time you check it out, it’s going to look the exact same as the first time around.) By itself, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, but the hint takes a long time to recharge, fast travel is kind of useless on account of featuring only some locations, the silence between the background tracks is too long and the plot is impossible to get into.
Margo - A small point-and-click in which you have to help Margo with her errands after she wakes up from an afternoon nap. Everything seems fairly normal at first, but then it’s revealed that she lives IN SPACE. I don’t even like space that much, but that was really cool to me for some reason. It’s implied that Margo has some kind of mental disorder (cough “vitamins” cough), and it makes me wonder if she’s neurodivergent. Despite being on the spectrum myself, I always feel like it’s not my place to say this, but the overall feeling of this small journey felt, to me, much like one of my own and I liked that. Her repetition of the tidbit about fish and attachment to the overdue textbook really stood out as well. I feel like we could all benefit from being thankful for everything that goes right everyday without us putting in any effort instead of worrying about the things that don’t.
memories - Short VN about the power of memories, especially those tied closely to particular objects. For the main character, it’s the outfits she wore when spending time with her significant other. Some part of me wishes I could say this game did nothing to me, but I just can’t! There’s just something about people falling in love that makes my heart flutter. Although this wasn’t long by any means, I feel like it could be improved by speeding up the text and maybe adding another BGM.
My Name is Mayo 3 - I’ve been crazy overdue! I didn’t even realize until I checked just now, but I first played this game on my PS4 all the way back in September… of 2022. (What even is time, at this point?) Then again, I can’t be too mad at myself, seeing how excited I was for it to come out back when I shared my thoughts about the second game. This time around, there aren’t any minigames to make the clicking go by more smoothly, but there is a brand new, exclusive side to this game that I can’t really say anything about in fear of spoilers, and that’s where some optional minigames come in (I absolutely sucked at them, by the way). In general, this game keeps the wacky and nonsensical humor through and through. I feel like this series ended on a good note and I can’t wait to see what Green Lava Studios is going to come out with next.
Not Anyone’s Business But My Own - Sort of a cross between a choose-your-own-adventure and a visual novel (so, a CYOA game with visuals?) that makes you wonder who you are in relation to the story. I always appreciate voice acting, but sadly, the narrator doesn’t modulate his voice at all and the princess’ VA has a really crappy mic, which is impossible to miss. At the end of the day, still a fun idea.
Pineapple on Pizza - Just ~20 minutes of sheer randomness. This little game really feels like it was made because the devs just felt like it. It’s impossible not to like.
WooLoop - Bonus mention just so I can say that I’m back to playing this game! (Since I completed it before, I’ll keep it in the blue, just like Coloring Pixels.) It finally got enough downloads to be allowed more achievements, so I bought all the packs in bulk (and later, the Science pack, when it came out) and am now working my way through them. Nothing like a biiig cup of coffee, a long video essay or podcast and some casual gaming in the evening ^^
Wordle - I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find this game challenging… but then again, I am an ESL person, so I was fully expecting myself to give up sooner rather than later. It’s a shame that this game is so bland (and at some point, blatantly unsolvable… thankfully that doesn’t extend to achievements).
See you next month! :)
Progress report: December ‘23 (a.k.a. Only Better From Here On Out!)
2023 has been a wild year. Between being in a relationship with a guy who was a terrible match for me and the absolutely shitty process of getting my degree, I feel like something has irrevocably altered the chemistry in my brain. Now, I’m back to being single and a girl I wanted so badly to think of as my best friend decided to show me, once and for all, how dumb that idea was. I waited the last of the year out, but as 2024 rolled in, I decided that I want to do better. I want to show the friends I do have that I care about them, I want to find a job that makes me happy, I want to pick up a new hobby… I want to stop being so negative about life and surrounding myself with people who do nothing but complain. One thing that’s been helping already (perhaps a bit too much) is my new hyperfixation. (Here’s where I say “I’m on the spectrum”, so nobody freaks out over how that sounds.)
And, oh yeah, here’s what I got done this month:
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100 hidden birds 2
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4 Seasons Girls
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Heart's Medicine - Season One
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How Buddy’s parents met - jigsaw puzzle
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Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones
100 hidden birds 2 - Oddly enough, I kept getting distracted by the presence of other animals. …I really have played too many of these games, haven’t I?
4 Seasons Girls - This one’s about a bunch of girls who are either just undressing in a public place or doing that and also possibly freezing their very nude bodies off. I think I’m gonna stop buying these, they’re all too same-y.
Heart’s Medicine - Season One - I originally picked up the sequel, Time to Heal, after seeing a video of it… and didn’t realize it wasn’t the first game in the series. Oops! Even though it’s been so long since then (like… two more years than I initially thought), I’m glad I got to fill in the blanks. It’s also rather easy to tell that it’s a mobile game port, but that doesn’t bother me personally. I’ve got another game from these devs waiting in my backlog, so I’m excited to play it soon (as well as all of their other games! They all look so cool!)
How Buddy’s Parents Met - This one also turned out surprisingly long, much like Alice in Wonderland, although the 60 piece size wasn’t available and the option to highlight a quarter of the puzzle definitely helped me cut down on the playtime. The art for this one was done by the same artist and I still think it’s adorable. Funnily enough, while I was playing, the game received an update that added trading cards and a bonus scene as a thanks to the players and to celebrate its fourth anniversary. I still have a bunch of jigsaw games to get through, so I’ll be downloading the next one now!
Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones - In the third and final Nightmares from the Deep, it’s time for your daughter to get captured! It’s been so long since I played the previous games, I was about to say she’s doing it again, but nope, that was all you! (I really need to push myself to complete game series faster.) If you’ve played an Artifex Mundi HOG, you may as well have played them all (not that that’s a bad thing, it’s just increasingly difficult to say something new about each one). The theme of this one is rather far from being up my alley. It’s also one of the games that has an achievement for completing the story on Expert mode, which I never do on my first playthrough; time will tell if I get to it by the end of the month. (EDIT: I didn’t… oops!)
See you next month year! I hope you had a good 2023, and if not, I wish you a better 2024! :)
Progress report: November ‘23 (a.k.a. What Is My Life?)
I don’t even know anymore. I haven’t been able to post this in time, because one of the reviews just wouldn’t let me write it and AAAAA…!
So anyway, here we go! :D
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100 hidden fish
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Epistory - Typing Chronicles
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Five Dates
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NEKOKORO
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Quickie: Fantasy Adventure
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Say No! More
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She Sees Red
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You, With Me - A Kinetic Novel
2.2 hours playtime
no achievements
100 hidden fish - This one was nice.
Epistory: Typing Chronicles - Y’know… this is a really nice typing game, what with the visuals emulating a world made out of paper, challenging gameplay and a tearjerker story, but… I won’t lie, I made the mistake of not jotting my thoughts down right after I’ve beaten this game. Now, all that’s been eclipsed by the massively annoying bug that halted my progress on a particular achievement. I am, by far, not the only player who encountered this problem, and let it be known, the devs responded to my inquiry and tried toying with my save file, but to no avail, and so, the game stewed in my backlog, eternally marked as beaten. Every once in a while, I’d pop in to check if something fixed itself, but still, no. This month, after noticing the update from May (timely, I know) that claimed to have fixed some bugs, I tried again… and it worked! Now that I think of it all, I can no longer tell how much of it was in my head, knowing that my save file had been tweaked with. (Also, side note, for some reason I was convinced my original playthrough happened in 2018-2019, but apparently it was 2019-2020? Confusion upon confusion.) All I want to say is, if you have been stuck on the same achievement as me (Bug Spray, to be exact), or any other ones (I hear Explorer is troublesome as well, though not so much broken as it is tedious), this is your call to launch the game again and see if you can make some progress.
Five Dates - I’ve been trying to write this review for so long now, but every time, my brain just gets fried and I don’t know what to say. This was a nice FMV, much like other Wales Interactive offerings, with a great cast (it’s always a joy to see someone I’ve seen before, and in this case, it was Georgia Small as Saffron) and a concept that’s easy to wrap your head around (even if I can’t relate to it). I’m looking forward to playing FMVs on my own again.
NEKOKORO - This turned out to be just a generic wish fulfillment story about a guy so self-insert he’s nothing past his name, who gets chosen by three alien catgirls from another world to be their carer. After a short common route, which establishes who they are and why they’re on Earth, you get to choose whose route you want to read, and those end up being shorter than the common route, which isn’t great. Perhaps most importantly, I find it hard to believe that on one hand, these girls come from a civilization intelligent enough to be able to speak all the languages of Earth, but on the other, they marvel at concepts like pizza or the internet. Then there’s also the issue of how shallow it all is; not only do the girls fall for the main character really fast and out of nowhere, they also go for dates to the exact same places (somehow the concept of taking each girl to the same shopping mall to get more of the one thing she’s interested in is just funny to me…) The girls have some nice voice acting, although the script (even after proofreading) is a bit rough around the edges. Whether accidental or not, there are a few memes here and there. When it comes to “indie” art styles, you could do worse than this one; plus, the character models have some subtle animation, which is a nice touch. The BGM consists of a few poppy and cute tracks, which I couldn’t help but be sweet on, since I’ve heard them in another game I like a lot, and now that the credits have directed me to the source, I’m going to say this is, overall, a positive. I’m not against checking out the dev’s later games, but with their prices, it’s probably not going to happen any time soon.
Quickie: Fantasy Adventure - A spin-off of the Quickie series, set in a fantasy world. I’ve heard of these games before, but I don’t look for sexy stuff on Patreon, so I’ve been more than fine not playing them. This one came out on Steam recently and since it’s free, I figured I’ll check it out. It was a short and simple adventure, with each and every girl having an unique role and being equally hot for the main character. Though I can’t say I see myself playing the other game from the series that’s on Steam right now (mainly because it’s got management mechanics and whatnot), this one was fun.
Say No! More - Ever since I first saw screenshots from this game, I knew it had a delightful, Katamari Damacy-esque aesthetic, which automatically makes it something worth checking out in my mind. Lo and behold, I eventually won a code for it on SG, and when the monthly challenge came around, I couldn’t not play it. Right away, I was positively surprised by the fact that you can choose to say “NO!” in a long list of ways, with a male and female variant for each available language, including Polish (although the game itself is not available in Polish - boo!). That was a fun, if odd, contribution to the whole experience. The story is about you - one of the new interns at a huge company - finding it in yourself to say the one, forbidden word - “NO” - and experiencing all kinds of success because of it. I find this game to be a good reminder for all of us today that saying “no” can be healthy and a form of self-care, and that it’s not about refusing everything at all times. Maybe it’s just me not having had a job to be fired from yet, but I find the idea of a world where people are conditioned to say “yes” to have a good life truly scary. The major downside of this game is that it’s so short (and in relation to playtime, rather expensive). It only takes two hours to beat and while a few new things get introduced along the way, none of them are really essential to the gameplay, meaning you could get through the game while almost always doing one and the same thing. It’d be hard for me to say that I got bored with the repetition, because I didn’t, but maybe there could have been something else to do as well. But then… it took six hours of idling to get the “no” count achievements (no way I’d do that manually)… it kind of irks me that that is the only reason for a play time this long.
She Sees Red - A high-production FMV hailing from Russia is not something I ever thought I would play, until this game came along. She Sees Red starts off strong - there’s been a murder at a nightclub and now, a detective is on the case. Follow both the culprit and the detective to the end, and… yeah, about that. A single playthrough lasts about half an hour, which means that when you’re just getting into it, the game cuts and rolls credits. “Okay, so it’s not a feature-length film, what’s the big deal?” Well, maybe that alone wouldn’t have been too bad, but you will not get the whole picture after just one playthrough. Yet, at the same time, there’s not nearly enough variety in the game to warrant more than two playthroughs. Maybe three, if you’re still hoping to dig deeper, or at least patient enough to watch the same scenes again. Not that you’re necessarily forced to watch - there is a skip button, but as far as I know, liberal use may lead to skipping a scene you might not have seen before. (And if you’re a completionist, you’re going to want to see everything for achievements’ sake anyway.) I “got” the story, to an extent, after three playthroughs, I believe, but overall… I really wasn’t a fan of it all. There are a few cool action scenes, if a little too violent just for the sake of it, and Veronika Plyashkevich simply shines as the detective, but ultimately, this game isn’t even worth its base asking price, as low as it is compared to many others. Also, a short behind-the-scenes video, while not made to include any talking heads or interviews, is left untranslated… just a tiny oversight.
You, With Me - Maybe it’s just been a little too long since I played a VN from Afterthought Studios, but I can’t help but wonder how anyone could write a few okay stories and then come out with such a steaming pile of shit. No, really, this is bad, with a capital B. You, With Me is a story of Jacob and Lisa, an ex-pat couple living in Singapore, who dream of going on vacation to Sapporo. These dreams come crushing down when Jacob’s stomachache turns out to be cancer. The developers claim that this story is based on “(an) experience with a cancer patient”, in which case, I’m truly sorry to the person in question. It’s a kinetic novel, meaning there are no choices to be made, which isn’t bad in and of itself, as long as it has an interesting story to tell, and You, With Me does not. You just read about these people eating breakfast, going for medical check-ups, arguing every so often, then going to bed, rinse and repeat with small changes. Between the story being so ordinary and boring, and the writing style betraying the fact that whoever’s responsible isn’t a native English speaker, there was neither anything to make the reader invested in Jacob’s condition improving or make them wish he gives up on everything; no stakes, no intrigue, not even a single random piece of trivia to make someone say they know, now that they’ve finished reading. The game is also a mess from a technical standpoint - character sprites appear on top of each other, speaker names are mixed up (one of the characters straight up has an entirely different name when speaking, and it’s not even remotely similar to their actual name!), text isn’t properly split between boxes, so at times, characters end up saying so much in one box that it doesn’t even fit on the screen, and last, but not least, the music is so sparse, it feels like an anomaly when it does play. If you’re somehow still considering playing this one, I recommend you purge it.
See you… in, like, less than two weeks…
Progress report: October ‘23 (a.k.a. It Was Blood!)
…get it? Because it’s Spooktober? Ha, yeah, I know I’m funny.
This year’s Spooktober was particularly bland, as I didn’t get to any of the longer horror games that have been sitting in my backlog (Like my next Corpse Party game! Criminal, for a fan such as I!), and thus don’t consider myself sufficiently spooked. That being said, I’d like to think I played a wide enough assortment of smaller horror or Halloween-adjacent titles… so let’s jump bite in! that was a vampire joke
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100 hidden rams
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Ann
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Annie and the Art Gallery
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Blameless
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Disturbed
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Ghost in the Pool
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Home
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Incredible Dracula: Chasing Love Collector's Edition
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Interactive Horror Stories
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Itchy Scratchy
0.0 hours playtime
no achievements
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Let's Split Up
2.0 hours playtime
no achievements
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My Friend is a Raven
0.9 hours playtime
no achievements
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PARADISE CLEANING - Sister x Slaves -
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PROJECT: Halloween
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Serena
0.8 hours playtime
no achievements
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Suspicious Downpour
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TELEFORUM
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The Fan
1.2 hours playtime
no achievements
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The Grandfather
0.4 hours playtime
no achievements
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Witch College
2.0 hours playtime
no achievements
100 hidden rams - It was… okay, I guess.
Ann - Rong Rong is one of those creators I couldn’t tell you how I initially discovered (might have been his Danganronpa in a Nutshell animation, as unfortunate as that is), but when I learned he was releasing an RPGMaker horror game, an homage to the likes of Ib, Mad Father and The Witch’s House, I knew I had to play it. (I ended up playing it over two years after its release… but still.) Now that I’m done with it, my opinion’s mixed. The pixel art is gorgeous, the animated cutscenes are a nice touch and the music is good (though some tracks are louder than others, which was distracting), but the story is rather lacking. Many negative reviews are saying it’s blatantly ripping off Ib (which I can’t confirm or deny, as I’ve last watched a playthrough years and years ago), but I also noticed the influence of Corpse Party (all the way down to the soundbite that plays when a spirit appears). I want to say that that in itself isn’t really bad (well, maybe the degree to which it was “inspired” by Ib sounds bad), but the story definitely isn’t this game’s strongest suit. Coupled with the task of descending from the highest floor, which quickly reveals itself to be formulaic, I can see why people disliked this game. On the other hand, though, I can’t help but wonder how high the expectations are for such a short, free game (and the first one from its developer). I will say, though, that the spotty reliability of the autosave system annoyed me as well, especially on my way to the true ending. Why are you autosaving at the branch that leads to a different ending?! I’ve seen that one already!
Annie and the Art Gallery - As much as I was hoping to disagree with the negative reviews… this game really is a lot like Ann. There’s likely something profound to be said here about what is or isn’t merely an inspiration and how the influence of the previous work(s) dilutes the new ones so much so that they struggle to find their own voice… but I don’t think I’m qualified enough to be the one who says it, so I’ll just focus on talking about this game! You play as Annie, a girl who finally got a ticket to see the new art exhibit. There, she meets Brendan, the author of most, if not all, art being exhibited. He invites her to the back of the gallery… and that’s where it all kicks off. Trust me, you’ll be as taken aback as just about everyone else to learn, unprompted, that Annie has fire powers of unknown origin. While making your way through the secret corridors of the gallery, you’ll see the narrative get flipped on its head, though I can’t say I cared much for that part of the story (meaning I pretty much checked out halfway through the game). The writing could use some work - Annie reacts by saying “What the heck?” too often, which gets even worse considering the latest patch note has claimed to have “significantly reduced the amount of swearing”. The art is cute; with its thick outlines and general roundness, it’s hard to describe it as anything else than that. It’s also why I like the easter egg of paintings of characters from other games that have inspired this one; it’s essentially the dev doing fanart for all those games. After you beat the game, there’s a “hard mode” available, providing some more backstory… and that’s the reason I’ve still only beaten this game. Finding all the collectibles is one thing, that’s annoying enough all on its own, but… I just kept failing to dodge a bloody piece of paper that zooms around a certain room and kills you if you touch it (yes, really) and I wasn’t willing to bother at the moment. To sum it up, it’s a good game to play if you’ve already played all the RPGMaker greats (and Ann). I bet the extended backstory isn’t even freaking worth it.
Blameless - It only took me four years to stop being scared of the mere threat of a jumpscare! I spent almost half an hour trying to play this, then chickening out, because ooo, so spooky (lol). This is a story about a freelance architect who takes on a project and gets knocked out on its grounds. Who was the man in charge of the project? Why did he knock the main character out? Is there anything really being built? Well… the game ends before any kind of story can be established, but hey, I can finally say I played it!
Disturbed - I kept putting playing this one off for years now, but since it’s tagged as Horror, I figured I might as well play it for Spooktober and, well… the spookiest thing is how little story there is. You play as a nameless farmer, living in a world clearly tormented by some kind of plague, who finally decides to take action. Most of your choices are going to end in death, which I didn’t mind; on the contrary, that was the most entertaining part of it all. Then, there are two different ways in which you can truly finish your adventure. I’ll say, I wasn’t really into the actual story, so I just used a guide to get those two endings (and the last death one).
Ghost in the Pool - The first truly creepy VN of my Spooktober, Ghost in the Pool is a story of a certain high school in China, plagued by the rumor of one of its students having drowned in its indoor pool after using it at night during the holidays. Our heroine, Yaru, doesn’t really seem to believe it… or maybe she can’t let herself believe, depending on your choices. Either way, swimming is her one joy in life, so she wants to make sure she’s ready for her next competition. Is there any truth to the rumor? And if so, what is it like? That’s for you to discover! I liked the comic art style and the detail with which the many things that were “off” were portrayed, as well as the soundtrack, even though at times it was too sparse for my liking. The “gamification” of this story, which is officially stated to have been released as a comic already, however, is very apparent. The only thing the scene exploration gimmick gives the player is a bunch of flavor text, which may have been a nice touch for players who already know the comic, but if so, why not just translate the comic? The game also runs on an engine I don’t recognize, which means that despite having some QoL stuff that other (cough made in Unity cough) modern VNs don’t have, such as a backlog and a flowchart, it’s not as comfortable to play as it would have been, had it been made using an engine built for VNs.
Home - I’ll be honest: this is the third platform I bought this game for, and with its three different endings (each of which requires playing the game in full, mind you), I would have completed this game, what, nine times now? It’s a little much, so when I noticed that someone’s made a guide on how to edit your save file to place yourself right before the ending, I got right on it… except I still didn’t get one of the achievements that requires a trigger which happens earlier in the story, so now I’m kinda stuck, because I don’t want to play this game anymore, but I don’t know how to edit the variables to find myself right before that trigger (trust me, I tried). The game’s just not worth all this trouble.
Incredible Dracula: Chasing Love Collector’s Edition - I started this on a whim years ago (not even on October! how dare I?!), and thought to finally sit down and play it in full. I haven’t played a clear-the-road game in a while, so some of these complaints might be unreasonable. First, the setup to the story kinda stinks. “Dracula just wanted to date a hot vampire countess, but a fat, ugly princess started chasing him instead!” That’s the kind of joke people would have laughed at twenty years ago. Thankfully, that fades into the background quickly enough, as pretty much every new level, there’s a different character asking Dracula for a favor and he’s always just as, if not more annoyed than before to have to go through with it if he wants to continue with his adventure. I played on Casual/Relaxed difficulty, as I always do, and I’m glad to have been late to this game, as apparently, achievements were locked on that difficulty for some time after the initial launch. As for the gameplay… I think the queueing is better than in other games? While some put the cap at three or five actions, here you can technically queue as many actions as you want, as long as the path to them isn’t blocked. Your minions walk and work rather slowly, and maybe it’s just my luck, but most times I used the time-limited booster, I felt it lasted for a rather short time (and thus didn’t let me get much done). Eventually, permanent speed boosts are unlocked… but you can only have one or the other on at any given time. Why? Why do I have to keep swapping the moment the minions start doing something else? There’s plenty of space on the screen! Same thing with the boosts that yield an additional piece of wood/stone after removing wood/stone obstacles. With all the switching you have to do on the fly, I’m convinced this game is a nightmare on any of the higher difficulties. One of the chargeable boosts that eventually unlocks is a single-use automatic level up for all buildings, which is super useful, as the requirements for upgrading buildings to level 3 get ridiculous, but I felt it unlocked too late. Even when doing my best to use all boosters to my advantage and not leave much empty air between actions, I guess I wouldn’t be good enough for this game on higher difficulties, as right before ending many of the later levels, I was stuck waiting to collect enough of a resource (cough tools cough) needed to unlock the final thing. I would think that’s one thing you don’t want to experience in this type of game, because it absolutely kills the momentum and doesn’t make you feel like you’ve upgraded at all, but oh well. Last, but not least, gold. At some point, you get the ability to synthesize stone into gold (especially useful if there’s no bank in a level). This was a nice way to get a bunch of gold quickly, but… the achievement for collecting 5k units of gold is still locked… I completed the bonus adventure and it’s still locked… I could have sworn I changed all the stone into gold near the end of most, if not all levels since I got the ability to do it, how much more can I be missing? As it turns out, I had to sit in a level for about an hour and a half (just about as much time as it would take me to complete five new levels earlier) to get enough gold for it to unlock. I couldn’t give you the exact amount, ‘cause eventually I got bored enough to play the level until completion, but it must have been about a thousand units, if not more. Call me lazy… but I think that’s crazy.
Interactive Horror Stories - A collection of seven short horror stories from a single author, though I’m honestly not sure it needed the video game treatment. There is no real reason these wouldn’t work as a blog post one could jump back and forth on, until “Ouija”, where you get to interact with an ouija board for a bit; thing is, that’s the very last story, and unless you were reading them out of order, you might not even get to it if you’re a particularly fussy reader. Other than that, the game has sparse visuals and sound effects, as well as no BGM. The stories themselves are unable to instill any kind of genuine fear because they overexplain the mundane and underexplain the supernatural. With some more practice, and a better translation, perhaps the author will improve. Another important thing to mention is the lack of content warnings; writing quality aside, there is no way to be prepared for what’s to come. (My personal worst offender is in After Funeral - the ghost of your beloved son makes contact with you, asking for you to resurrect him, but if you don’t cooperate… he says he’s going to rape your passed wife? The same one who passed while giving birth to him? Presumably, he reacts like that, because your lack of trust makes him turn evil in the blink of an eye, but still, it’s tone-deaf, disgusting and absolutely uncalled for.) There’s also Evil Beneath the Ground, a story featuring maybe the worst fictional vampire I’ve ever witnessed. (Why does he have to behave like a serial killer?! Vampires have a bunch of cool powers they can use to their advantage!) But yeah, I consider myself lucky enough that I don’t have any trauma per se, but I am all for turning people away from works that could make them remember their own trauma.
Itchy Scratchy - Well… I managed to play it three times in the span of three minutes, so that’s something. It may be worth mentioning that despite being described as a “shock” title on its store page, this game doesn’t contain any jumpscares or realistic violence. The dev sets you up for disappointment, saying the duration of the game “will leave you dissatisfied”, so… yeah, it’s hard to say anything else about it.
Let’s Split Up - I decided to play this one because it had the Horror tag on VNDB. Well, turns out it doesn’t play that big of a role in the whole game, but since only one person had rated it before and cared to give it some tags, there wasn’t anyone to say otherwise. Still, this might be one of the better games I’ve played this month. In Let’s Split Up, you play as Iris, who is currently on her way to a beach vacation with her boyfriend Brad, her best friend Gemma, and Gemma’s boyfriend, Chris. After driving up a mountain, their car breaks down and suddenly, they’re stuck in Luna Mountain - a mysterious, seemingly abandoned town… or is it? The main characters decide to do the one thing you should never do in a situation they’re in - split up! - and that’s where the story really starts. The game is advertised to have a whopping 24 endings, which may seem daunting at first, but after reaching my first ending, I realized it’s really not that many. Why, you might ask? It’s because Let’s Split Up doesn’t take anything seriously. It’s a delightfully tropey romp, where your choices change the story on the fly. Did you have fun spending time with Chris instead of Brad? Watch out, Brad might say the same about him and Gemma. Did you abandon Gemma and Chris on the run from a mysterious shadowy figure? Don’t worry, they’ll turn it around on you. Think you found a nice place to stay until you can figure out why your car is broken? Think again! Or don’t, since the house magically keeps giving you everything you need to survive. These are just a few of the wacky scenarios you can put these four in. I can’t lie, I loved every bit of it. Let’s Split Up may not have shaken the world of gaming (or even just VNs), but it did what it set out to do amazingly. To top it off, it’s got some good music and an art style that really stands out - something that would probably remind most people of a kid’s drawings, yet so detailed and consistent (the characters’ crazy faces are something else). I realize that the comparison to “child” drawings sounds like a jab rather than a compliment, but I do mean it to be a positive; it’s stood out to me because of that ever since I got it, and it likely will continue to do so years later. Oh, and there’s also a handy guide that comes with the game! I could have saved myself from trying to make one if I had remembered that. The two small things that happened while I played this could probably be easily fixed, if the devs cared to do so: first, do not launch this game at full volume. It is ear-splittingly loud by default, for reasons unknown. Nobody is talking about it in the discussions though, so I can’t say whether that’s just my problem or not. Second, for some reason this game contains no rollback to title screen, so after you get an ending, you’re forced to close the game and launch it again to play more, so expect to annoy that one friend with constant pop-ups about how you just can’t stop playing this one game, for some reason! So, if you know what you’re getting into… dare I say it’s a… hidden gem?
My Friend is a Raven - This game could not have been less user-friendly if it tried. The moment I launched it, it was running at only a few frames per second, which is never a good sign. Setting the graphics to Low yielded twenty-something FPS, but then the game crashed a minute or two later. After a few more tries, I gave up. Then, I figured I might as well try running it on another PC, and although the performance problem was the same, sans the crashing, that is why I am now able to say I completed this game. The story? A mysterious, plague mask-donning man wishes to converse with his raven friend, one last time. Depending on how much you explore before walking out onto the balcony, their encounter can play out in four different ways. There is one review, which may seem out of left field, especially considering that the author does not elaborate further past their initial analysis, but having made a similarly outlandish comparison in my Japanese literature class, I can’t help but see where it came from. As for the developer, they made Choo-Choo Charles, so in terms of horror games, I guess they’re off to bigger and better (?) pastures. It seems I’ve wishlisted their other two free games, though, so who knows…?
PARADISE CLEANING -Sister x Slaves- - Denizens of BLAEO, rejoice, for I have finished the PARADISE CLEANING franchise! This one is, uh… to be honest, I tuned out while playing it. I like the artistic choice of making the characters’ eyelashes a bundle of messy lines. Other than that, it’s just a supplement to another machine-translated VN from the same studio (they’re not even bothered enough to change the main menu image after the game actually releases). And now, yet another game is set to come out in “English”, so time will tell if this is really, truly over… [Edit: It’s not.]
PROJECT: Halloween - A VN-style monologue of an AI created to ensure that everybody enjoys Halloween (Poland could sure loosen up about it). Despite being a game jam creation, it’s fully voiced (and even includes an ending song!), which is rare for indie VNs as it is. My problem, especially considering how recently I realized its importance to me personally, is the character’s generic hairstyle. You showed a bunch of concept art in the credits, half of those hairstyles would have been much more memorable!
Serena - It’s really hard for me to have any kind of opinion on this game that isn’t influenced by the technical side of things. This game doesn’t feature any kind of settings screen or any other menu, so the moment you launch it, you’re thrown right into the story… which would be okay, if the game knew to adapt to the device it’s being played on. Instead, you might lose all your progress at any time by pressing Esc (‘cause no one told you that’s what it’d do!) or get stuck at one point, because the game can’t account for your screen resolution? Then, digging around the forums will bring you to a topic or two where the dev himself is explaining to players how to make the game launch in windowed mode (by modifying a text file), in hopes that works. Well, it didn’t work for me. I’m just glad I had another laptop to try this out on - it worked there. Now, I can finally say I played it. Can’t say it was worth all that trouble, though. (Unless, maybe, you like PushingUpRoses - she voices the titular Serena!)
Suspicious Downpour - A 48-hour game jam creation that promises “a short comedy horror experience” and sure enough, it delivers. Don’t expect to bust your gut laughing, though. (This sounds mean - I didn’t dislike it!)
TELEFORUM - A neat little analog horror (I’m hip with the trends, I swear!) that I managed to get to relatively early (Like, a week after release! That’s early enough, right?) and… well, I didn’t expect it to be a visual novel. For once, maybe I’m not terribly mad that it wasn’t created in a dedicated engine, because it looks great and plays smoothly, no complaints to be had. The real problem is that my first playthrough took about 25 minutes, and I couldn’t believe that’s how short the game was. So I played it again, because there had got to have been more to this, and to some extent, there was! O-kay… I’ve exhausted most choices, played the game twice, but still only have half of the achievements… so I pushed through the third time, and at that point, I was only really getting flavor text. After that, I peeked at a guide and as it turned out, I was only missing some miscellaneous stuff here and there. One of the achievements is awarded for playing the game for 2 hours, with a description that - stop me if I sound crazy - makes a classy jab at Steam’s return policy, and it is most likely this achievement that will cap off your journey through this game, as it would have mine, had I not made a mistake while going for the one annoying achievement that I missed along the way. All in all, I loved the setup, but I’m sad to say nothing really comes out of it - after half an hour of investigative work, the game just… ends. It’s as if the devs were told “go girl, give us nothing!” and took it as a challenge. It’s about as terrifying as The Blair Witch Project, if viewed nowadays.
The Fan - The Fan is… not an FMV, first of all, so if anyone told you that: I am sorry, you were lied to. It’s more of a point-and-click, I suppose; one about “The Fan”, a serial killer who has recently kidnapped another victim. What’s more intriguing is that you’re not placed in the shoes of the victim, but the killer. To me, the game ended just as it seemed to be picking up; in the first two chapters, you’re tasked with collecting significant items from the victim’s house, then her fiancee’s house, and then, just when you think something deeply fetishistic and utterly repulsive is going to happen… the game just ends. That being said, the set design is repulsive and gruesome enough by itself, which becomes insulting upon realization that most of it is just that - set dressing, environmental storytelling devoid of a story one couldn’t deduce from the premise alone. While close-up shots of many of the random items that serve no real purpose are less than ideal, the few shots of the victim being actively abused look rather realistic, to the point that I’m glad for the credits, lest we’d think this was a game-ified account of a true hostage situation. That being said, I still find it worrisome that this game was able to launch thanks to Steam Greenlight…
The Grandfather - The world is full of stories that employ metaphors so obvious anyone could understand them. Less so, stories that employ less obvious ones, which, in turn, encourage consumers to analyze the text and share their thoughts with others. Then, there’s just stories that are absolute nonsense, lacking even the tiniest sliver of entertainment or even engagement. To me, The Grandfather is one of those stories. Maybe the real story is not “that deep” or anything, but because it is obfuscated by a crude art style and obtuse puzzles, I was not on board. Additionally, I find it insulting that there’s a “DLC” containing just the story copied from the game (not even an explanation of anything) and the still images from the game (“wallpapers”; yeah, right). This game became free for a reason.
Witch College - The one thing that motivated me to play this now, instead of who-knows-when, was the promise of a witch girl (and a Halloween school dance, I guess). Both of these things turned out to be neatly hidden behind the most generic, anime-influenced story possible about a nice guy who’s the only relevant male character, as all the women love him for little to no reason. (Did I mention he’s nice?) The whole mystery of “who’s the witch?” is basically nonexistent; the game desperately tries to convince you it’s one of the girls, so it’s that much more obvious it’s actually the other one. The sex scenes in this 30 minute long VN come out of nowhere and feel more like the devs are checking off a box than anything else; they’re not even worth sliding your pants down for. The only reason I spent almost 2 hours on this game was that after getting both endings in the main game and reading both bonus stories (the main character had to bone all the women in the game, trust me), I was led to believe there should be something more, considering that the CG gallery still had a page and a half that were left blank. Because there are no guides for this game anywhere, I choose to assume that it’s a programming mistake nobody bothered to fix. Speaking of which, these devs get a “poo-poo” rating from me for using a less-standardized engine (and therefore, bad). Fix the CG gallery! Fix the random freezing! Fix the unskippable credits! Who am I kidding? They’ve long since moved on from this.
And now, I shall be moving on from this. See you next month! :)
Progress report: September ‘23 (a.k.a. Winding Down…)
By now, my thesis is done and submitted (it’s almost like they had to make that a headache too), so all I need to do is come back for my final exam, and then… I can say I’ve graduated from uni! On one hand, it didn’t feel real, but on the other, I wasn’t as moved as I thought I’d be. Just… that was how it should be. No more stress.
Here’s what I completed in the midst of all that:
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100 hidden cups
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A Short Hike
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Alice in Wonderland - a jigsaw puzzle tale
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Paradise Cleaning! - Sexual Massage shop -AKARI-
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The Walking Dead: The Final Season
100 hidden cups - I can see why people dislike this one. What you’re looking for may resemble cups, but the art style makes this one look like a sloppy job.
A Short Hike - As an update from my original post, now that I’ve actually tried out some Animal Crossing, I can say that this is, for sure, giving a similar vibe. That’s what the cute little animals do. They heal hearts.
Alice in Wonderland - a jigsaw puzzle tale - Somebody please tell me I accidentally idled this one for half the time, ‘cause I cannot believe I spent nearly 50 hours on a single jigsaw puzzle game! Then again… I love me some Alice in Wonderland. This game features cute art of some of the beats from the story, as well as relevant quotes. (The artist is credited in each and every piece, too! Thought that was a nice touch.) What kept me playing it for so long were all the available sizes: 60, 135, 240, 375 and the absolutely monstrous 735 pieces. I will say, though, that there is a handy option I wish I had discovered sooner, which lets you toggle between highlighting not only the border pieces, but also a chosen fourth of the rest of the image. That might have cut down my playtime somewhat, but hey, what’s done is done and I’m not complaining. I have almost all other jigsaw games from this dev (just learned they have a Halloween-themed one coming out soon!) and they look just as cute as this one, so I might start another one soon.
Paradise Cleaning!- Sexual Massage shop -AKARI- - This one gave me a weird feeling. I shouldn’t be looking at this… Well, the theme is visiting a massage parlor to destress and getting a surprise sexy service… I’m not a fan of the weird artistic choice of making the main character’s skin look grey. I get that it’s probably to make you focus on the girl, but still, ew.
The Walking Dead: The Final Season - The Final Season came to Game Pass, so I thought “You know what? Might as well play it before my sub runs out!” And I did! In comparison to my initial thoughts: I’m still disappointed about the fact that half of the new cast doesn’t get nearly enough screentime (Omar is literally just “the cook”), but at the same time, Louis might have grown on me even more than he initially did. He is the little sunshine Clem deserves and I am so happy for them. Funny how that changes! Still, I feel like it would be great to have an option to make her aromantic (compare to Life is Strange 2, where you’re not only presented with that option, but also allowed to not engage with either potential love interest). And at the end of the day, I find the ending still reeks of wish fulfillment… (yes, AJ cut Clem’s leg, but how did she make her way back to Ericson’s? I find it hard to believe he could have helped her get up and through the hole in the roof, and if you get James killed, as far as you’re concerned, nobody else knows about the barn…) …unless someone has found a way to explain it? On the technical side of things, I was following a guide this time around, so I had a much easier time getting all the missable achievements, but…! If future Telltale titles go back to the old format, it will be more than fine if they still only feature a scene select, but on the off chance that they keep following this trend, I would really like a way to replay these scenes in isolation. I am spoiled by DONTNOD and I am not ashamed to say it. (lol) Side note: I was also pissed at a few of the missables the first time around, because I was playing with a controller. By now, I’ve gotten myself a mouse, so that helped immensely (had to borrow one to complete the Steam version). Still somewhat apprehensive of the idea of a PS4 replay just because of those missables alone…
What’s that about ketchup? Oh. Oh, you don’t think that’s ketchup…
Continued next week!
| 1721 | games |
| 49% | never played |
| 3% | unfinished |
| 2% | beaten |
| 43% | completed |
| 4% | won't play |
- 2016 8
- 2017 15
- 2018 36
- 2019 138
- 2020 81
- 2021 208
- 2022 114
- 2023 87
- 2024 52
- Favorites 23
- FREE! 437
- Needs DLC to 100% 10
- Point-and-Click Adventures/HOGs 279
- SteamGifts 82
- Time Management 33
- Trades 93
- Visual Novels 368