HurrJackal1’s profile

Hurr Jackal on Steam HurrJackal1 on SteamGifts

May 2025

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  • Submerged: Hidden Depths: Second in an exploration/puzzler series in a drowned world; I didn’t play the first. Reasonable environment art and acting, but gameplay is fairly straightforward, and lacking challenge. 6/10
  • Glass Masquerade: Stylish jigsaw game with irregular pieces. Glad to have played but probably won’t play the sequel. 7/10
  • A Good Snowman is Hard to Build: Cute box-pushing puzzler. Finished the main game but not the bonus. 7/10
  • Rusty Lake Roots: Second in the weird weird Rusty Lake series. Old-school flash-type adventure game with weird but fair puzzles. Between this and its predecessor Rusty Lake Hotel, there’s a real feel that there’s a hidden (and unrevealed) substrate of lore underpinning the weirdness. 8/10
  • Hidden Folks: So much better than every other black and white hidden game of this type that I’ve played (100 cats, etc). There’s animation and (mouth-made) sound effects and puzzles. I did use hints (a circle showing the vague region) for a handful of particularly resistant items. 8.5/10
  • Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Art direction and music and voice acting is immaculate. Story makes more sense than it would first appear. And while I’m not particularly one for JRPGs, I enjoyed this, and the influence of Fromsoft definitely helped with that (Sekiro parrying and grapple, hidden paths and sidetracks between combats). 9/10

Games I will not finish

  • A Hat in Time: First level I played, I thought “They rather liked Mario Sunshine and Galaxy and Odyssey”. Second level i played, I thought “…and they really liked Psychonauts”. And that stuck - different levels can be quite varied,. But the camera is horrid often enough, as it doesn’t permit nearly enough z-access pivoting to see up/down when needed, particularly while jumping. And the coin collecting is unfun. I want to like this a lot more than i do. 6.5/10 but it has charm.
  • Escape First Alchemist: I enjoyed it well enough, puzzles are fine, but the narrator is (deliberately) obnoxious. And when I needed to quit out, I was back at the beginning when I restarted, and the narrator is so obnoxious and I didn’t feel like replaying. 7/10
  • Remnant II: Fun with a team, combat feels good, and bosses tend to be a nice puzzle on how to stay alive while dealing enough damage. The levels are rather flabby despite some soulslike influences in design. It’s rotated out of Gamepass and we didn’t like it enough to buy it separately. 8/10 for bosses; 6.5/10 for everything else.
13 days ago 8 comments

April 2025

  • Black The Fall: This is another cinematic platformer that’s very clearly influenced by Inside. Thankfully, it has enough innovation to be its own thing, but ultimately it’s… ok. 7/10
  • Owlboy: This is tagged as a metroidvania but it’s really not (and is not advertised as such). There’s a central spine that levels basically branch off, but those levels are more or less linear, and any revisiting would be to try to collect some ridiculous quantity of coins in each area for completions sake rather than to progress. The game itself is more or less a shooter with some light puzzling (swapping the buddy you carry alters your gun and the primary/secondary mode may be required to access the way forward) and occasional stealth. All achievements are optional – none for completion – and four of them would basically achieved at the same time. Overall the game is not great, but it has loads of charm to paper over its flaws. 7.5/10
  • Emily is Away <3: Visual Novel that really captures the feel of an older internet and some of the pain of youth. 7.5/10, but with a bad taste left in my mouth after discovering that there’s no way to avoid a bad ending on the first playthrough and you have to play it again to get a good one. I can see VN enthusiasts rating it a point or more higher.
  • Evergarden: At its core this puzzle game is essentially 2048 merging, but a well-disguised and much much improved and expanded version. 8/10, but am unlikely to play again having beaten it.
  • Astalon: Tears of the Earth - a 9/10 metroidvania with a frustrating map screen (even being able to zoom would help). NG+ (which alters room connections and items) is at times even more frustrating given its map still shows some old unavailable connections, and the bizarre decision that saving at campfires appears to do basically nothing in the standard game in terms of checkpointing (and often healing) so you will need to rerun a bunch of rooms when you die (thankfully most unlocks stick, but yellow destructable walls don’t and there’s no good reason they shouldn’t when you get to the point that you can deal with them). Achievement completion is not helped by requiring post-completion grinding to get enough souls to fully level up. 9/10 metroidvanias really shouldn’t hate their players in quite the way that Astalon does.
  • South of Midnight: A 6.5/10 action adventure set in a magical-realist Louisiana whose thoroughly mediocre game/level design and heavy-handed writing is lifted by its good voice acting and fantastic music, music direction, and art direction into a “worth playing” 8/10. A triumph of style over substance.
  • Dungeons of Hinterberg: A love letter to pre-BOTW 3D Zeldas - lots and lots of variety in “themes” and puzzles of its many dungeons. The town/overworld is nice enough but not nearly as good/fun. 8.5/10
  • Blue Prince: This is only technically beaten - I reached room 46 and rolled credits but the real Blue Prince continues. A wonderful puzzle-rich combat-free roguelite meets metroidbrainia. Go into it as blind as possible if you can (Think: Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds, Her Story/Immortality) and prepare to keep notes. 10/10 (yet again a month of Gamepass more than pays for itself)

Games I will not finish

  • Adventure Pals: Charming but very gentle hack and slash platformer (I did not get the achievement for losing nine lives!). From the reviews it’s a good fit for co-op with a younger audience, but I don’t need to play more than I have. 6.5/10
  • Planet Alpha: Yet another cinematic platformer, and one where not only is there massively excessive travel to gameplay up to when I stopped (the artists were working overtime, full credit to them) but the controls/physics are awkward. If you liked Little Orpheus then you’ll love Planet Alpha but I didn’t. 3/10 for gameplay in my limited time with it (8.5/10 for art direction)
  • Atomfall: Fallout 3 but with lovely green instead of horrible brown! I played a bunch, I finished some quests, I unlocked a bunch of routes, and somewhat to my surprise I just don’t care about the game. I want to – it’s made by the same folk who did the Sniper Elite series. Here, the combat is mediocre at best (although the human enemy wariness rather than automatically aggressively attacking is a great innovation though not wonderfully implemented), the world art direction is much much better than the area/level design, and the stealth is between awkward and silly (there’s some chokepoints where stealth really doesn’t work at all and you’re going to have combat while being vastly outnumbered). 7/10, but I hope that it informs future games of this type.
about 1 month ago* 11 comments

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).
2 months 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.
3 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.

4 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
6 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
8 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).
9 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.
10 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.
11 months ago 6 comments
Statistics
768 games (+1 not categorized yet)
18% never played
43% unfinished
16% beaten
11% completed
12% won't play
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