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.

A cute premise with great presentation. Hard to say if 10 bucks is too much for the content when the game's menu system does everything it can to respect your time. A single playthrough can take less than a minute if you're a fast reader and skip ahead to the next branch of the story.

RetroAchievements complete. The first 9 levels of NLNMAS have to be done in sets of 3 each. That's a lot of cutscenes you're forced to re-watch if you die near the end. The last 3 levels are done individually but are notoriously difficult on account of RNG and lots of forced damage. More annoying than hard.

Played this game before it had achievements; happy to have an excuse to play it again. Now, it's completed… Mega Sad.

I liked it so much, in fact, that I went back to the original to finish the RetroAchievements. I am now a master at losing Senet.

Pikmin was also mastered on RetroAchievements. After the Distant Spring challenge mode, I might just be crazy enough to try the 'no blues' run.