Oops, got a little obsessed with this one. Decided to do low% runs. Honestly, if you have a bit of patience, only one boss really makes you miss the dash, and not having nail upgrades doesn't hurt too much in boss fights. Enemy gauntlets on the other hand… surprisingly, the Hunter's March revisit is the worst fight in the game by far. On the welcome side: almost all of the "Hornet-sized" boss fights were even more of a treat than usual. Parries were important for blocking some attacks you'd normally dash away from, and unlike in the original Hollow Knight, they actually feel viable. Throwing out an attack any time you feel like you might get hit is a pretty strong option, actually. I like Hornet's default moveset a lot more now and can't wait to see what Team Cherry has planned for DLC.

I like the art style, but there's even less content than ChillPulse for being more than double the price. I'd skip this one.

Speedrun and Steel Soul runs completed. Obviously, I adore this game, and having played both the 1.0 launch version and the "nerf patch" version all the way to the end, I have to say that my latter two playthroughs were more enjoyable. I'll never be able to tell if Team Cherry's opaque "various smaller fixes and tweaks" would have changed my initial impressions or not, but I do think they rounded off some unnecessarily sharp edges in an otherwise enjoyable game. Either that, or "gitting gud" has numbed me to the continued existence of everyone's initial gripes of too many instances of double damage and the fact that upgrade availability in the early game is a desert, wherein what few water bottles are there are being scalped for 80 dollars apiece.

After all, these issues tend to fade into the background if you simply refuse to get hit. That's the other side of the coin: once you "gid gud," the game gets significantly better. On your first playthrough, you thought you could relax once the enemy's attack was over, but by your second playthrough, you realize that that attack always has a follow-up second swing, and that other enemy in the corner of your eye is telegraphing their next projectile, and before you know it, you've dodged both, and bounced off one of them with your downward swing for good measure. You're not even worried when the third enemy spawns, because all three of them are now in range of that AoE attack you've been saving for exactly this opportunity.

There's a certain set of minigames later in the game, one of which involves juggling multiple objects, and one of which involves dodging many flying objects. In both cases, each one appears and telegraphs their movements in a sequence, one at a time. They're basically a distillation of what this game's combat is all about: planning your next move. Great, you've figured out what the enemy in front of you is doing, and what buttons you need to push to dodge their attack and punish it. While your hands are following through on that, shift your attention to what the other guy is doing. Know what you'll need to do next before you need to do it. It's rare to find an action game that demands one-move-ahead anticipation like that. The last one I played that did was Super Hexagon, and I found both Silksong and Super Hexagon to be satisfying to master in a way that very few games are.

The game demands your full attention at all times. Silksong is not a game to be played while listening to a podcast. Every enemy has the opportunity to severely punish you for a moment's lapse in concentration, and the game allows no doubt that this was a very deliberate design choice. For all its haunting beauty, Hallownest was a sleepy place. Hollow Knight simply didn't have as many threatening enemies as Silksong. The Knight, when resting at a bench for long enough, would fall asleep. Hornet does not—she glances restlessly left and right, because Pharloom is a jungle, and everything is trying to kill you like your continued existence is a personal insult to their ancestry. In Hollow Knight, I never had even the slightest concern that I might die on the Steel Soul challenge. In Silksong, I was consistently paranoid.

Many of the enemies in Silksong have a suite of attacks that would qualify them as a miniboss in any other platformer—but they aren't, and they won't be treated as such. You'll fight two, three, four of them at once sometimes. An experience like that would be exhausting if it was nothing but combat, but fortunately, Silksong has plenty of pretty visuals to gawk at, atmosphere to soak in, and deeper lore to ponder over. Silksong lets you set your own pace, and you will by no means be forced to stop and admire these things, but for the sake of your mental health and enjoyment of the game, I recommend you do. Pause to appreciate, reflect, and breathe. Bask in every victory. Just, y'know, don't bask too early, because the boss probably has a third phase or something. Silksong is simultaneously a work of art that can be appreciated by everyone, but with a gameplay loop that will only truly be appreciated by a few, most likely. The hype for Silksong vastly outstripped its target audience, and it shows in the Steam reviews being less positive than the first Hollow Knight. The "most helpful" ones are from people who like the game, but "can't recommend" it, because it's too hard.

Am I one of those people? I'd say not, and for the same reason that I'd never recommend anyone try out a new franchise with a sequel. You should play Hollow Knight. If, after playing Hollow Knight, you still want more from Team Cherry, go ahead and 100% Hollow Knight, because even if you thought you were thorough, you probably missed at least two entire biomes and five hours of content minimum. Still want more? Give Silksong a try, but do be warned, the difficulty spike is legendary. In a lifetime of gaming, I've almost never seen a sequel this much harder than its predecessor. It's like going from Devil May Cry 2 to 3, but if 2 was a good game and 3 never got the special edition that turned the normal mode into easy mode.

At last, all the animals have been organized neatly. There aren't as many big and awkwardly-shaped birds as there were dogs, but there are some small and awkwardly-shaped ones. I'd place the difficulty of this one between dogs and cats. Not much more to say other than Birds has a daily puzzle that's randomly generated.

Finally done with this one. They've partnered with Lofi Gaming now, so congrats to them on the dream. As for me, I'll be moving along and checking out some of the other chill-vibe productivity apps.

This set sucked. Platinum trophy hunters lucked out with this one, having a debug mode that makes it free. RetroAchievements requires a patch that removes it, meaning that you do actually have to do the gold race times. Yup, they're horrendous. As soon as you leave the ground, you lose all air control, which I guess is fine, but you can get air from the tiniest speed bump, so the controls feel unresponsive until you have someone explain it to you. People talk about the drill platform turret section on hero mode, but I beat it first try once I read that those flying enemies die instantly if you just headshot them. Nowhere else in the game does this matter, and at no point is this explained to you, so I suppose it's not surprising that everyone struggles. And that's my issue with Jak II. It's unreasonably hard, until you have someone else outside the game world explain hidden mechanics to you, and then the difficulty spikes smooth out and everything is great, and you get to be one of the snobs telling other people to "get good." Haven City still sucks too. I'm glad this one is over.

A cheeky 5 achievements were added to this set after the fact, so there was some cleanup to do. A fun excuse to replay the first two warp rooms without having to do anything annoying. Overall, this set was obnoxious purely on account of having to do the dark levels blind. Given the revision hasn't removed them, I suppose the devs doubled down on keeping them despite a large number of complaints that they aren't fun. Ah well.

It's the kind of experience I'd want to recommend to as many people as possible while saying as little about it as I can get away with.

I will say that the game is much shorter than my playtime suggests. I got a bit obsessed and explored every little corner of it.

The sequel to Cats Organized Neatly. In that game, there were a few late-game cats that were big and awkwardly-shaped, and they often offered the best clues as to what the solution could be, since there were only a few places in which they could fit. It led to an awkward difficulty curve where the game almost seemed to get a little easier near the end. Dogs Organized Neatly went way overboard with the big and awkward pieces, which led to a much easier game in my experience. The "big dogs" are your best friend, and not necessarily in a good way. They make the game easier much earlier on and the game's difficulty curve never quite recovers. The last level of Cats felt like a proper final boss compared to the end level of Dogs, and that would be the fault of one particularly big dog that takes up about 70% of the board. Some of the puzzles try to throw you a curve ball by using these "big dogs" to present a "most obvious" first move that will funnel you into a dead end, but once you become conditioned to these red herring setups you can quickly breeze past those levels too by just ignoring these stumbling blocks and trying something a bit less obvious. I dunno. It wasn't a bad game. It didn't quite drop the ball. It did chase its own tail a bit, though.

Decided to do another RetroAchievements set. This one was free aside from the orbless run and the hard mode fishing game, neither of which were that bad. I decided to beat the game with 0 orbs, but the achievement allows 25, and the only place you'll need the margin for error is in Precursor Basin (and Citadel, I suppose, if you decide not to skip it). The hard mode fishing game was kind of wild, though. They come at you at Guitar Hero speed and that's not an exaggeration. It makes me wonder how hard the fishing game was when the game was being developed, before someone on the QA team told them it was too hard—and some people think 200 is still too hard!

From DU&I, purrveyor of cozy games, I expected an easy romp, but there were a few head-scratchers. While playing, I thought a lot about the speed of modern life and the convenience of the internet, and how they tempt us to consider the simple act of thinking about things for more than a minute or two to be an unnecessary frustration or waste of time, when we could just look up the solution instantly or get innumerable expert opinions instead of coming to our own conclusions. So, at some point, I decided to complete 100% of this game without looking at a single guide, gameplay video, or community post.

Learning to organize cats neatly is a questionable use of time. Sometimes, I solved puzzles by pure luck and learned nothing, and I had to accept that. Sometimes, I struggled a lot, but I was able to go back and solve puzzles I'd skipped earlier, despite having no actual grasp of just how, precisely, I'd improved, and I had to accept that too. Contrary to the internet opinions I've subjected myself to, it wasn't some profound, higher experience that took me back to the "good old days," or made me feel more accomplished than if I'd just played the game normally. Moments of struggle were still unsatisfying at times. Refusing to accept help from others isn't a guarantee that the struggle will be satisfying. Comparing this experience to playing a game normally, while occasionally using a guide when feeling totally stuck, there wasn't much difference. On the other hand, if I were to compare it to the experience of playing an entire game while following an achievement/trophy guide, it'd be like comparing life and death. If you don't allow yourself to struggle, out of some sense that you are 'wasting time,' you rob yourself of the moments of struggle that are satisfying, because those always take time. In a way, if you never take the time to struggle, you aren't really living.

So yeah, I spent the equivalent of a work shift playing a cozy puzzle game about organizing cats neatly. It was aight.

The premise of the game is in the title, and it seemed contrived, but Overwhelmingly Positive always catches my eye so I decided to give it a chance. I regret nothing. This was really good. Of the four main routes, two of them go deep into the relevant lore regarding the curse, so you might miss it if you pick the "wrong" route, but the NPCs will helpfully nudge you toward those and the early choices seem designed to funnel a first-time player into one. My only real criticism was that one of the bad endings (I won't say which) is almost impossible to get without a guide, which I found a bit odd.

Meh. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. The very first scene of the intro was apparently one of the last scenes written for the game, and it shows. The quality of the writing never quite lives up to the initial impressions. Several antagonist characters are set up and done relatively well at first, if a little cliche, but their story threads are abruptly dropped before they can cause any real problems for the protagonists, because the protagonists couldn't realistically do anything against them in their social class. The ending is convenient, predictable, and comes rather abruptly. The character designs and general tone of the romantic scenes were clearly designed with a male audience in mind (that's not a value judgment, it simply is the case and it's worth mentioning). Some aspects I did enjoy were the unabashedly flawed protagonist, the banter between the female leads, and its unexpected but tasteful portrayal of religion, of all things. It's not a major feature of the story, but when it was there it was relevant and well done. All told, it held my attention until the end, and left me hopeful for better from ebi-hime's later works.

Ah, another old classic 3D mascot platformer collectathon that I couldn't resist playing again. Why is this so? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. Perhaps it's because the game is unabashedly enthusiastic to be exactly what it is. Ty is very pleased with itself. The game doesn't seem to care if the audience it was made for has already grown up and might think that the "90s cool" protagonist is actually kind of a dork. The characters are absurd parodies of themselves. The voice actor for your designated tutorial NPC laughs at their own lines after reading them with disregard for the subtitles, and the "bloopers" are left in the audio. During the credits, the antagonist is so ready to be done with the game that he tells the player to "go read a book or something." Honestly though? I forgot about all that stuff a long time ago. I played it again because I remember enjoying it despite not remembering why. It's just a vibe. I've never played the sequels, so it'll be interesting to find out if they kept that vibe or followed the Jak and Daxter example and turned edgy. The Steam version adds a hardcore mode, which feels kinda unnecessary. If you're even a little bit careful, you won't die in this mode. There are no instant deaths that I know of, and there's no situation you can't escape by simply exiting the level. It doesn't change the game in any way that I know of other than replacing the extra lives with full health items, which makes the game easier, and forbidding you from saving. That might've been nice to know in advance.

It's Gex, so I wasn't exactly expecting N. Sane/Reignited Trilogy levels of effort, but this was truly the bare minimum. Easy Steam achievements are an excuse for fans to re-play the games and finally beat Gex 1/Planet X if they haven't done so before, but there's nothing here to justify a $30 price tag or excite/expand the base enough for a sequel to be worth it. "I'm thinkin' I'm back?" I'd like that, but I sincerely doubt it.

This game has always been free, so I was convinced to try it back when it was still pretty new as my first visual novel. When it came to Steam I knew I'd have to play it again, and I was not disappointed. It still hits me the same way it did when I first played it over 10 years ago. If you're going to play the Steam version though, save often, because it can crash sometimes.

A cute game with some rather serious pacing issues, if you ask me. After each main story arc, you'll unlock some new scenes, and about half of them will be the same scenes from other characters' perspectives, which is fine—but you'll be required to play through those before moving on to the next part of the main story, leading to a lot of redundant dialogue immediately being required reading, and you'll have a basic idea of what happened in the other scenes because another NPC already talked about it and spoiled it for you. There were also 78 extra post-game scenes, most of which was more of the same, and didn't unlock in a chronologically coherent fashion either. It's not the kind of game that you'd want to binge-play on the weekend. Like any manga with a lot of filler, it's probably best enjoyed as a drip-feed.

No actual games played in the last two weeks, just some free idle achievements.