HurrJackal1’s profile

Hurr Jackal on Steam HurrJackal1 on SteamGifts

MARCH 2025

  • Beyond Blue: Meditative diving game – zero threat, and definitely not simulationist (you have some magic breathing apparatus/suit that eliminates any IRL worries one might have about bends, oxygen use, etc) 6.5/10
  • Open Roads: Adventure/object-exploration game. Surprised me in a good way. 8/10
  • Wanderlust: Travel Stories: Writing-language is good fluent English, though can be a little preachy - I though it was an Inkle game (80 Days) but it’s from a Polish group. Writing-plotting is very mixed in quality depending on the chapter - one has pretty much half locked away from an early choice. Another is more or less linear and very much feels it. 6/10-7.5/10
  • Boxes: Toybox puzzler, slightly more complex than Doors: Paradox overall. Enjoyed it for what it is. 8/10
  • A Tale of Paper: 2.5D-ish puzzle-platformer (there must be a more specific genre term for games like this, Limbo, Little Orpheus, Little Nightmares, A Juggler’s Tale, etc where the character is on a journey) - puzzles were pretty good with the mechanics giving a unique experience; platforming/movement was slightly awkward at times. 8/10
  • Neversong: Another puzzle-platformer with some lackluster combat. Atmosphere very good. Everything else, mediocre. 6.5
  • The Norwood Suite: Surreal mystery/exploration game. In some ways this is nothing like Paradise Killer, in others it is/ 8.5/10
  • Old Man’s Journey: Short-but-sweet walker-puzzle game, with more or less extensions of a single mechanic for much of the game. 7/10
  • Serial Cleaner: 3/4-down stealth-puzzler. Reasonably good, and deliberately forgiving with most enemies having the memory and intelligence of goldfish (hide in a box in full view of one? no idea where I’ve gone). 7.5/10

Games I will not finish

  • Tales of Kenzera: ZAU

    2.66 hours playtime

    4/19 achievements

Metroidvanias are one of my favourite genres, but this game is in no way close to a favourite metroidvania after a couple of hours’ play, despite advertising some high ratings in its trailer, having some potentially interesting mechanics, and liking the creator (actor Abubakar Selim). There are three sins I’d like to highlight:

  1. In general, unlocking abilities in Metroidvanias unlocks routes. Three of the most common ones are the double jump, the air dash, and the wall jump. Zau starts out with all three of these already. This is not a game-stopper, but it does reduce the design space available, and a rule of thumb for metroidvanias is that double-jump should not be one of the first abilities obtained.
  2. Games – and particularly Metroidvanias (with their backtracking) – need a certain density of experience to be/remain interesting. This can be challenging traversal, new routes (including currently inaccessible ones, and unlockable shortcuts), combat (to be accepted or avoided), etc. There’s a one-time forced-combat encounter every so often, but overall I found Zau’s density of experience to be generally incredibly light, even on an initial traversal.
  3. The worst of the sins: Zau is an unpleasant dickhead. He might become less of one later on, but I don’t care. It helps if a metroidvania protagonist has some level of likability/sympathy/player-identification but it’s not essential. I can’t think of another Metroidvania, however, where I’ve actively disliked the character (in wrestling terms, this is go-away heat and not heel heat).
26 days ago 0 comments

February 2025

  • The Long Reach

    2.2 hours playtime

    13 of 15 achievements

  • Sniper Elite: Resistance

    40.15 hours playtime

    20 of 61 achievements

    GAME
    PASS

  • The Long Reach: Horror adventure game with mostly reasonable puzzles, but some uneven atmosphere, writing and design.
  • Sniper Elite: Resistance: Good stealth game, but really of a standalone expansion to SE5, given that it was also set in France. I’d like to see the series move into the Far East and Pacific theatres in future sequels. I don’t play these particularly effectively since the aim of each level is really to complete a set of defined goals, and not to kill every nazi in the level.
about 2 months ago 0 comments

January 2025

  • The Roottrees are Dead

    6.7 hours playtime

    6 of 22 achievements

  • Myst III: Exile

    6.6 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • Overloop

    2.0 hours playtime

    21 of 21 achievements

  • Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

    50.2 hours playtime

    40 of 45 achievements

    GAME
    PASS

  • Atlas Fallen Reign Of Sand

    28.2 hours playtime

    24 of 38 achievements

    GAME
    PASS

  • Escape Academy

    4 hours playtime

    21 of 40 achievements

    GAME
    PASS

Didn’t beat anything in December; January is fuller in compensation.

  • The Roottrees are Dead: A detective puzzler influenced by Obra Dinn and Owlskip Games, where you you search for, examine and cross-reference documents in order to work out the identity of 60 members of an extended family. I finished the base game and have still yet to play the included “Roottreemania”. There’s a free version of TRaD here as a demo. 8.5/10
  • Myst III Exile: FMV puzzler, with a base world, three main worlds, and a finale world - each with their own flavour of puzzles. I liked the weird nature oriented Edanna, where I could “read” the puzzles, and not so much the electric and mechanical worlds. What compounded the difficulty somewhat was that there were a couple of places where you had to turn to see a path, and that old-school 3D rendered environments don’t cue near-distance differences particularly well. 7/10
  • Overloop: A short game with reasonable puzzle/platforming, but which padded its runtime a bit early on with a bunch of story-walking. 6.5/10
  • Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Captured the Indiana Jones feel. The main areas are different to each other, with the initial Vatican City area the most solid and compact. Egypt and Thailand were both spread out – as they had to be – but all, and particularly the latter two, really could have done with a few more fast travel points for quality of life. More on collectables, etc, below. 8/10
  • Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand: Aerial combat and movement felt good. Lot of configurability for playstyle. More on collectables, etc, below. 7.5/10
  • Escape Academy: Escape room puzzles - and not too difficult, in general (Timed, but redoable on failure – and partial solves tend to make the redo fairly quick). 6/10

Indiana Jones and Atlas Fallen both have way way too many collectables, particularly ones that require no particular skill/challenge to acquire, but each does something a little different in showing collectables. Indiana Jones shows collectables on the map, but only one type of collectable (and there are a lot of types) is visible at a time, and you have to look at the quest entry for that type of collectable. What this means is that the amount of extra work/backtracking you do in order to collect everything is much higher than it would be if everything were shown at the same time. Atlas Fallen doesn’t show collectable document locations, and only shows chests when at particular outlook points. Judging where a chest exactly is tricky, but near the right area it’ll show up until you are much closer at which point it vanishes, and in the right area you can get vibrations (but these are near useless). Chest hunting is a pretty miserable and frustrating experience. Document hunting would be a “use a guide” task. There’s also chests that are gated behind a fragmented picture, which require documents to be collected. In short: I thought I didn’t want the Ubisoft/WarnerBrothers “Show everything collectable on the map” in my games, but I may have been wrong. But even better would be far fewer collectables, and every one of them with meaningful gameplay associated.

3 months ago 4 comments

November 2024

  • Baldur’s Gate 3: A ridiculously thorough game. Finished co-op after over a year of intermittent play.
  • Yoku’s Island Express: Good unique pinball metroidvania. Previously beaten, but replayed to completion
5 months ago 0 comments

October 2024

  • Ender Lilies: 2D Soulslike/Metroidvania. Character build variety was excellent, and bosses were satisfying to fight. Navigation and traversal was ok – assisted by fast travel and late game equipment. Non-boss combat was a little grindy. Map design and secret hunting and the rest of the game itself was pretty unmemorable 7/10
  • Five Dates: FMV game. Acting was mostly good (with a couple of very good performances). Chemistry between the main character and the dates was a bit variable (this is a pandemic era game so they were mostly front-on to the camera, and not sure if they always had someone to act with). Script was a bit artificial, and some opportunities to adjust for player choices felt missed. The weightings required for “wins” were quite generous with choices. 7/10
  • GNOG: Puzzle boxes. Short, nicely varied, silly, and fun. 8/10
6 months ago* 2 comments

September 2024

More of this month’s playtime was in progress (including progress to likely hard stops) than completion.

  • CARRION: Metroidvania with very fun original gameplay, with good puzzles and satisfying pseudopod physics. Fairly easy – the most difficult thing was probably the lack of a map. Free Xmas DLC also completed.
  • Death and Taxes: Somewhat Papers Please-ish game in that you decide who lives and who dies, but with an underlying world-tendency mechanic that provides quite amusing writing at times.
  • Death’s Door: Overhead Zeldalike (soulslike/metroidvania) - better in style than gameplay/puzzles, and would have been improved if stats had been raised through found items rather than purchases (which was too slow / would have required grinding).
7 months ago 0 comments

August 2024

  • Headlander: A weird highly original metroidvania whose gameplay is not too difficult. On the other hand, as much as it innovates in the genre, the actual gameplay feels missing something in the area of fun that I can’t quite put my finger on.
  • Midnight Fight Express: Orthoview beat-em-up with a fair amount of variety and depth available. Worth a play, might be worth beating, probably not worth completing unless you really love this style of game and the challenge.
  • Steamworld Dig: Digger/metroidvania I’d previously long left incomplete, but restarted after enjoying SWD2 last month. Ok, but nowhere near as good as its sequel.
  • The Forgotten City: Interesting timeloop adventure with some action-y bits (Jumping is awkward but very rarely needed) — definitely worth playing.
  • The Spectrum Retreat: Part liminal adventure game, part post-Portal puzzler. I liked the latter more than the former, even though it is somewhat unkind with the potential for softlocks. Even less kind for the completionists is that the last achievement requires another full playthrough for a couple of minutes of different ending (savescumming won’t work).
  • TOEM: Charming puzzle adventure based significantly on taking photos, though occasionally lacking reminders/signposting (can be a bit obscure when picking it up after a while).
  • STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor: Soulslike/Metroidvania - good combat, pretty good level design (better than the previous game). The downside is the amount of grind in the collectables which should ideally be limited and each individually require some level of skill to get and be meaningful — this is true only of a certain percentage of them. Played on grandmaster with the exception of the final boss which I eventually bumped down to hard. Then I tried NG+, and that is really a step up in encounter difficulty even on easy — a lot closer to a true grandmaster difficulty for regular encounters.
8 months ago* 3 comments
  • Children of Silentown: Reasonably good adventure game, with nice graphical style and some atmospheric creepiness.
  • GRIS: I bounced off this the first time I played it, but restarted as it was a Play or Pay pick. Graphics are lovely art nouveau meets Moebius. Difficulty is very gentle once you understand the mechanics required - there’s no death, only the potential of a little slowdown or regression. Story … well, it’s another indie puzzle platformer representing dealing with trauma. Overall I’m left feeling that it was … ok.
  • Little Orpheus: Essentially this is a post-Inside game (I really liked Inside). For this game, the art is great - with highly varied levels in a pulp world. The puzzles and platforming are generally subpar, and mediocre at best. There is generally excessive level to traverse vs gameplay. In between each level are long static cutscenes - fairly well written and okay with the acting. These are unskippable even on a replay, which is required for the majority of achievement completions. Even worse, the collectables I saw require no (additional) skill to get and were all on the main path - a real Feels Bad. This is the second game I’ve played from The Chinese Room (after Dear Esther) that I’ve played, and I am consequently not at all hopeful for what they will end up doing with Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2.
  • Steamworld Dig 2: A resource digger mixed with a metroidvania. Quite good, with some tricky traversal at times required, particularly for collectables.
  • Supraland: I partially played this 3d metroidvania before ages ago, put it down, and restarted after having completed and enjoyed Supraland: Six Inches Under. The major issues I have and had in this one are:
    • the respawning enemies (which they acknowledged and fixed with the latter game) - these can be nullified, but only late in the game, and make exploration and noodling out the collectables before then more annoying than ideal. Combat in the sequel was used more as a puzzle/gate.
    • keeping a mental map for area traversal. There is a player map and there are signposts for the land routes but not so much for the unlockable pipes and jumppads, and the map for those links is unlocked only after the endgame and is a static world object rather than a pickup. It does become a lot easier once you get various unlocks, and can wander on the high “out of bounds” areas
      Nonetheless, still recommended, and am looking forward to Supraworld.
  • The Turing Test: An unmemorable post-Portal 3d puzzle game.
  • Tunic: A love-letter to Zelda with some great ideas of its own (go in unspoiled – seriously). Not particularly difficult with the exception of the final boss fight, which I found Soulslike hard, failed repeatedly on and off over months, and finally came back after hearing that there was a no damage switch in the options - yeah I cheated (I’d have been happier with a lower difficulty/damage level), but it gets it out of my pile of shame/annoyance.
9 months ago 6 comments
  • Afterimage: I had to undervolt to get this to work - only game I’ve had this problem with, and not one I’d expect to need to given it’s a 2d game. It’s a good soulslike metroidvania, though a somewhat overlong one - the game just kept going and going. I completed the main endings, but not the New Game Plus one (a 5+ minute run back to a difficult boss is not fun). Lots of variation in combat styles available.
  • Chants of Sennaar: Stealth/Linguistics puzzle game. Very nice imagery - like a Mœbius graphic novel. The language puzzles were made easier by not only locking in terms when you matched them correctly, but giving the official translation (which in a couple of cases I was slightly off)
  • Mad Max: You can tell that this game was made by a people who really love the series - I wasn’t expecting it to be as good as it was. Side areas – and there were a lot of them – felt individual, though collectables have the usual Ubisoft/Warner/Rockstar problem (they could cut them by 40%, lose nothing except busywork, and make the collectables more meaningful). It could definitely use difficulty settings because combat is too easy and the snipers are almost never a threat. One achievement is no longer able to be completed because WBPlay went down - companies really should have a plan/patch ready for that. Bottom line: Strong recommend. (SG win)
  • The Legend of Tianding: Good combat, some soulslike/metroidvania elements, but it’s ultimately pretty linear. Bosses can be pretty difficult - I picked this up again this after previously bouncing off the final boss, lowered difficulty, and finished. (SG win)
  • The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales: Adventure/RPG game where you jump from the 3d real world into isometric worlds within books. The book worlds were interestingly weird and varied. In theory there’s some choices and consequences but it doesn’t feel like it mattered much.
10 months ago* 0 comments

May 2024

  • Arcade Spirits: A Visual Novel - and one I really didn’t enjoy very much. Writing, story, characters, art weren’t bad, per se, but I didn’t find it particularly realistic/true/verisimilitudinous. In theory one would need to play much of it 8 times – even with strategic saves – for achievement completion, which sounds beyond grim to me.
  • Balatro: I wish that BLAEO had an extra completion setting for marking games designed to be beaten multiple times; this is one of those. I got it because a lot of people loved it … but I ultimately didn’t. I had much the same reaction to Roll. Narrowing it down, I don’t think I particularly like abstract Roguelites - Binding of Isaac > Slay the Spire > Ring of Pain > Balatro > Roll
  • Botanicula: Old-school (early 2000s Flash) point-and-click adventure from the folks who did Samorost. Quirky, charming, and mostly enjoyable apart from the maze-iness of Chapter ?5?.
  • Machinika Museum: Adventure game where you rotate and fiddle with weird alien objects to get them to work. Enjoyable, and things build nicely to the final chapters.
  • Supraland Six Inches Under: Pretty good exploration 3d metroidvania – I should go back and play the original.
11 months ago 0 comments
Statistics
740 games (+3 not categorized yet)
17% never played
43% unfinished
16% beaten
11% completed
12% won't play
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