Hostil

1.10 hours, 12 of 12 achievements

Played a game set IN SPACE on a hostile planet!

Pros:
Great art

Cons:
Obligatory Piano Puzzle

YMMV:
Very short

The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters

30.2 hours, 35 of 35 achievements

Horror Metroidvania w/o jumping or combat.

Pros:

• Female protagonist.
• The player character from The Coma: Recut makes an appearance!
• No piano puzzles.
• Multiple endings.
• Creepily cozy atmosphere.

YMMV:

• Found notes. (I didn’t bother reading them as I do enough reading already and I don’t want any more of it in video games. Lore fanatics will be happy, though.)
• Too easy? (I’d be the last person to complain about this, but hardcore players might be upset.)

Cons:
N/A

The Window Box

The Window Box

3.2 hours, 6 of 6 achievements

Pros:

• Relevant, important, artistic.
• Great art. Magical realism. Quirkiness.
• Female characters!
• Paige is the cutest and the most relatable.

Cons:

• Depressing AF, which is to be expected, given the subject matter.
• Obligatory piano Victrola puzzle. At least it’s not randomized, so tone-deaf players like me can just look it up.
• No text autoplay and no text display speed settings, so clicking to see the next bit of text is annoying and slow.

Additional notes:
Got stuck forever at the book puzzle.
Fart/booger jokes.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York

Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York

9.3 hours, 11 of 28 achievements

Pros:

• WoD/VtM
• Great art

Cons:

• No expected VN features like skipping seen text, adjusting text speed or auto mode not to have to click all the time to advance. In a game that is meant to be played through several times. And no manual saves. … Get ready for a lot of clicking!
• Interactive fiction/RPG that’s not that interactive. At first it seems like it’s intense. One wrong choice, and you’re done. But, no. Not really. To really fail, you have to really try. The outcome is still the same. And, some choices seem not to correspond to results/responses/outcomes.
• There’s an in-game deadline after which you’re thrown into the the ending part even though you haven’t completed half of the quests and their respective storylines. Maybe the deadline depends on one of the quests. IDK. Kind of bad for storytelling, though.
• The ending itself. It’s abrupt and unsatisfying.
• Typos towards the end.

Verdict: Although I don’t regret reading “Coteries”, I can’t recommend it because it’s annoying to play and the story does not compensate for the annoyance.

TAISHO x ALICE episode 1

TAISHO x ALICE episode 1

22.3 hours

6 of 6 achievements

Great plot. Pretty art. One of the best otoge ever!*

Pros:

• The heroine. She’s smart, sarcastic and funny. I love her!
• Red. He’s the best.
• The text is a pleasure to read. Lots of LOL-worthy and dramatic heartfelt moments. Also, plot twists!

Cons:

• Yurika (the MC) isn’t voiced.

Recommended?
Yes, yes and yes, 10/10, GOTY, restored my faith in the otome genre, please release parts 2 and 3.

• My other favorites are The Confines Of The Crown, Date Warp, Fashioning Little Miss Lonesome, Nighshade, and Magical Diary: Horse Hall.

Murdered: Soul Suspect Beaten for Noirvember!

Murdered: Soul Suspect

14.3 hours, 41 of 48 achievements

Didn’t collect all collectibles, though.

She Sees Red

She Sees Red

3.0 hours, 15 of 15 achievements

A VN, but with movie scenes instead of text, sprites, and CGs. There’s a True End and several Bad Ends.

Pros:

• Short! Perfect for one evening/sleepless night.
• Badass female protagonist.
• Plenty of action (and stealth!) scenes.
• Revenge!

YMMV:

• The story is not particularly mind-blowing or ground-breaking.
• Violence.

Recommended?
Yes, to everyone who likes interactive fiction and action films.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning™

• Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning™
  

  148.4 hours playtime

  57 of 61 achievements

~150 hours later, I’m finally done!

Features:

Complete many, many, MANY side quests (kill X of Y, collect A of B) and “tasks” involving lots of quest-related busywork, similar to Ubisoft games (icons on a map) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (hiking simulator while collecting rocks and picking flowers). The Dead Kel DLC, in particular, is in parts very similar to DAI (castle upgrades, sending characters on missions), even though DAI came out later.
Enjoy pretty fairytale-style environments.
Mix and match three skill trees with numerous character build possibilities. Respec at any time for a in-game-currency fee.
Craft OP equipment and weapons!
Zone out and relax while running around huge maps and killing the same enemies repeatedly.
Feel free to completely ignore the overwrought and at the same time generic story full of fantasy epicness.

Bottom line: I’m glad I completed it, but I’m also happy it’s over.

RAGE

RAGE

8/10

36.3 hours

39 of 60 achievements

Another HL2 tribute, open world-ish edition, with a Fallout and Mad Max flavor

Pros:

• Works reasonably well on a potato once the right settings are found;
• Save anywhere!
• Five difficulty levels, from Easy to Ultra Nightmare;
• Racing is fun and normally I hate racing;
• Item descriptions are worth reading;
• Wingsticks are the best weapon;
• Play as The Engineer and craft all the bots and turrets.

YMMV:

• Everything in the game—the setting, the crafting, the upgrades, the quests, even the plot (such as it is)—feel either very familiar, so the player feels right at home, or generic and unremarkable, so the player feels like they’ve seen it all before;
• The player character is a typical mute badass video game protagonist with exactly zero personality which is either boring and weird, or very good for self-insertion, I guess.

Cons:

• Recycled areas: many of them are visited twice, most notably the Dead City (there’s even an achievement!);
• Console port, so using menus w/o a controller is a pain and the recognizable I-only-have-four-buttons diamond-shaped menu for weapons/items is there, no matter if you use a controller or not.

Recommended to FPS and racing/driving fans who don’t need a(n original) plot to enjoy shooting and racing/driving.

Why is it called RAGE, though?

The 39 Steps

The 39 Steps

4/10

6.1 hours

20 of 20 achievements

Recommended only to fans of John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps who want to re-read it as a CliffsNotes version visual novel/point-and-click adventure hybrid with gorgeous backgrounds and little else of interest. Players who’ve never heard of The Thirty-Nine Steps are probably better off reading the novel itself (first).