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<div class="list-progress">
<div class="progress-bar game-never-played" title="never played: 9 of 19 games (click to show/hide)" style="width: 47.3684%;">47% never played</div>
<div class="progress-bar game-unfinished" title="unfinished: 4 of 19 games (click to show/hide)" style="width: 21.0526%;">21% unfinished</div>
<div class="progress-bar game-beaten" title="beaten: 5 of 19 games (click to show/hide)" style="width: 26.3158%;">26% beaten</div>
<div class="progress-bar game-completed" title="completed: 1 of 19 games (click to show/hide)" style="width: 5.26316%;">5% completed</div></div>
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#5BC0DE = Blue (Completed) <div class="panel panel-info">
#5CB85C = Green (Beaten) <div class="panel panel-success">
#F0AD4E = Orange (Unfinished) <div class="panel panel-warning">
#D9534F = Red (Will never play) <div class="panel panel-danger">
#EEEEEE = White (Never played yet) <div class="panel panel-default">
Launcher icons
Steam: <img style="vertical-align: -3px" src="https://img.icons8.com/metro/21/31708F/steam.png">
GOG: <img style="vertical-align: -3px" src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-filled/21/31708F/gog-galaxy.png">
Epic: <img style="vertical-align: -3px" src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-filled/21/31708F/epic-games.png">
Uplay: <img style="vertical-align: -3px" src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-filled/21/31708F/uplay.png">
Twitch: <img style="vertical-align: -3px;" src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/21/31708F/twitch.png">
Itch: <img style="vertical-align: -3px;" src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/21/31708F/itch-io.png">
Origin: <img style="vertical-align: -3px" src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-filled/21/31708F/origin.png">
Xbox: <img style="vertical-align: -3px" src="https://img.icons8.com/metro/21/31708F/xbox.png">
Battle.net: <img style="vertical-align: -3px" src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-filled/21/31708F/battle-net.png">
where:
31708F is BLUE
3C673D is GREEN
8A6D3B is ORANGE
A94442 is RED
333333 is BLACK (White)
Year 2021 | Issue #3-4
March-April Report
_____________________________________________________A Tale of Nothingness, Greyness, but hopefully Revolution(ness).
Hope you’re all good, great people! :D
This will be such a short report: I didn’t play even one game, in these 2 months! Absurd! I was in a bad mood for most of this time, and I couldn’t find the will to play anything. This was the lowest moment, for me. Starting to feel the heaviness of this 1 full year of madness.
But.
I fought it, with help from splendid people around the web and on SG, and special ones in real life, and now I’m full of will and hope and decision to change, evolve, improve, and feel like I’m doing something with my life. The future is here to conquer! :D
Yeah, as I said, nothing game-related here, but I wanted to create the report, anyway. So I’ll tell you that I was at least able to restart a little with my reading routines, a couple of classic ones, and now I’m reading Origin by Dan Brown, it started in an interesting way, we’ll see how it develops.
Have a great time!
May the 4th be with you.
ABC challenge
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Year 2021 | Issue #1-2
January-February Report
______________________________________A Tale of New Starts, ABC, and Surprises.
Hey everybody, how are you?
First report for 2021! I hope this year will be great. From the entertainment point of view, I was quite satisfied with a couple of thing I watched and played. In the first couple weeks of the year I binge watched The Good Place, a funny and “elegant” fantasy sitcom, and I pretty enjoyed it, some of the characters are just amazingly funny to me.
From the gaming point of view, I decided to face the ABC challenge, even if I didn’t find precise rules for it. I just made a list with 26 games, each starting with a different letter (X is missing, shame on me!) and I will try to beat them all, this year. Yay!
I played some good, and some less good games. The month started with Reventure, and after that of course any game would be a step back. This was just so funny! Then I faced the good HOG trilogy of the Nightmares from the deep, I had a sudden need for that kind of games, and I was not disappointed. The I felt like playing some bigger stuff, so I went back to my youth with Jurassic World Evolution, it’s always nice having a T-Rex eat some people XD Many other hours sank in making stuff explode - and not much more, actually - in Just Cause 3 XXL, a game not equipped with a rich story, but enjoyable enough to be played for some hours, even if it started being totally repetitive before long. And to conclude, back to some smaller games: some relax with the adventures of the elephant Yono, a couple of minutes to understand that Turbo Pug DX wasn’t even worth the time spent to play it, and a strange indie experience named The Hex, quite interesting indeed.
* as shown by GOG Galaxy 2.0
Jurassic World Evolution
A nice game to create your own Jurassic Park! Not very hard, and pretty limited (aka absent) customization of the park when compared to 20 year old RCT games, but you have dinosaurs! :D
Played on Epic.
Yono and the Celestial Elephants
Funny, cute game with some easy puzzles and a simple story. Clearly made for kids. The volumes and interactions with the world are sometimes clunky.
Played on Amazon.
The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game
Super short, kids focused, investigation. You just talk to all the 6 people on the island, and the case is solved. There's also some funny humour.
Played on Steam.
Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard
Super short, kids focused, investigation. You just talk to all the 6 people in the city (twice), and the case is solved. There's also some funny humour. A little improvement to the previous chapter.
Played on Steam.
Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren's Call
A great improvement to the previous chapter. The story is pretty interesting, the mechanics are more or less the same for this HOG, the visual quality is improved.
Played on Steam.
Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones
The conclusion of the trilogy. Somewhat worse than the previous chapter. The story wasn't at the same level, and also the quality of the puzzles was lower.
Played on Steam.
This is a strange thing. I don't even know how to categorize it. Various characters, various sub-stories, various sub-games of different genre, all linked together in the end to contribute to the same story, and to solve the mystery surrounding a night at the inn. An interesting experience.
Played on Steam.
Meh. Controls are not super precise, the game looks a lot unpolished. Of course it's nearly free; but still, I don't think it's worth the time invested in playing it.
Played on Steam.
January 2021:
One! And such a great one, I should say.
This was such a great, "troll" twist on the classic "hero saves the princess from evil lord" genre! The pixel art was awesome, and the mechanics were just so perfectly designed and balanced. The humour was just amazing. This is one of the not many games where I felt compelled to explore all the possible outcomes.
Played on Steam.
February 2021: Groundhog Day
Not this time.
January 2021: Veni, Vidi, Wiki!
I had a sudden need for HOGs.
A nice HOG, with an entertaining story and setting with pirates and ghosts. The puzzles are usually quite simple. The main drawback are the horribly low quality cutscenes.
Played on Steam.
February 2021: Never Gonna Give You Up
Funny theme, nice game.
Aim of the game: make everything explode! Then again! And again! Graphics and gameplay are enjoyable. Game is fun for the first 15 hours, then it gets more and more repetitive. Due to a story that is not much varied, also.
Played on Steam.
March is marchin on.
Issue #11-12
November-December Report
______________________________________A Tale of Endings, and Surprises.
Hey everybody, how are you?
I think I will stick with the double report style, since I don’t really play many games, and I don’t find much time to write the report. And I have to be in the right mood for doing both things. Anyway, the final report for 2020! I thought about doing also a year summary report, but probably I will postpone this to next year. Or never.
This months were pretty similar to the previous ones, with some differences… I completed Scrubs in November, in December I participated in the Secret Santa event, and we had some nice snow around Christmas. Cool, if only I could stay at home from work XD
From the gaming point of view, it was a pretty satisfying couple of months. After reaching the 300 hours in FM2020, I was finally satisfied enough to go back to real games with a story. First I decided to complete the story of Bear with Me, that I really enjoyed last year, but its prequel resulted a little underwhelming to me. Then I went for a couple of larger games I had great expectations about: God Eater Resurrection was quite a delusion, extremely repetitive, while I really enjoyed a lot playing Darksiders - Warmastered Edition. So much that it was the Game of the Bi-Month - at least, until the very final days of December. Also, a mention is needed for Night Call, that was right behind Darksiders in my November ranking: not much action, a lot of dialogues, and a very interesting setting. A game I’m looking to complete, after beating it: I’m not an achievement hunter, but this game makes me curious. There are stories I want to listen to.
December was a mixed month. On one side I decided to finally beat some games I had installed on my hdd for a while - like Antichamber, which I didn’t enjoy much. On the other side, I decided to go indie, and played a couple of little gems. In particular, in the latest days of the year I enjoyed the sci-fi story of The Red Strings Club, a very cool short game with a nice style and interesting setting. But the game I totally fell in love with was GNOG. So dumb. So weird. So lovely. So relaxing. So peaceful. It was a perfect way to conclude a strange year.
* as shown by GOG Galaxy 2.0
A nice prequel to the main game. Same mechanics, same noir style, same Ted E Bear ironic detective. Not as good as the main game, though.
Played on Steam.
Not a great game. Or at least, if all you want is to continuously repeat to kill the same monsters, without any useful story, and in team with companions having the one of the worst AIs I've ever seen - this is the game for you. But for me, this was a great delusion. I was prepared to something a little repetitive and focused on monster killing, but this was just too much.
Played on Steam.
A cool game. Pretty nice story inspired on Apocalyptic characters, to create a funny adventure game. It's pretty easy, and plays like classic PS1-era games like MediEvil. From a technical point of view, the experience is quite completely flawless. The story is intriguing enough, too. I'm looking forward to playing the next chapters of the series.
Played on Steam.
Bridge Constructor
A good, relaxing, physics-based game. Perfect for spending some hours doing something different. It becomes repetitive pretty fast, though.
Played on Twitch.
A present from my Secret Santa! A nice style and art, a pretty balanced puzzle game, with some levels that can be quite difficult. Extremely short, with a story just outlined. But the funny movements of the main character and the disco style are the real center of the game.
Played on Steam.
A funny poker simulator, with characters known from old classic games.
Played on Steam.
A short story, told through flashbacks, exploring Marie's teenage years room. Not bad, not particularly good: it tries to provoke emotions in the player/reader, but it's not good enough in making you empathise with the characters, so it slightly fails in its purpose.
Played on Steam.
A dungeon with mind-bending, nonsense-rich rules to solve the riddles and proceed from one room to another. Some parts should need more guidance. All in all, an unpleasant experience - but that is what the game was meant to be, I think. You totally feel lost, in some moments.
Played on Steam.
November: Free ride
Nope, not fitting for this theme. Or, at least: I played a free-to-play game, but in December.
December: Best Of
Even though I didn't register them in the page of the theme, I actually played 2 games fitting this theme! Yay!
GNOG
A lovely and relaxing experience. You explore the colorful heads of some monsters, and by solving easy riddles you make them sing. It's a game made for touch screens, and for children probably; but it's a wholesome experience for anyone. Super short, but totally worth it.
Played on Epic.
The Red Strings Club
An interesting sci-fi story, about transhumanism. All the game develops around a barman and its club, and is totally focus on the dialogues between the barman and it customers. You have to choose the right cocktails to drive the conversation in the direction you're interested into, and this mechanics is pretty interesting. Also, it's not super easy to do the right choice in the dialogues: anything you say might have consequences. All in all, a pleasant short experience.
Played on Amazon.
November: Thanks Giving
One!
Interesting. You're a taxi driver working in Parisian night, and you have to find out the identity of 3 serial killers. And you find clues by talking to your customers, choosing the right words to make them open up to you. But this is not really what this game is about. All the people you can collect have their own stories. Some more emotional, some more funny, some more incredible. All inspired by real stories, it seems. And that's the real purpose of the game - or at least what I think this is about: collecting their stories, finding the right ways to help them, or just seeing how their stories end. It's super interesting.
Played on Steam.
December: Home alone
Not this time.
2021 is here.
Issue #9-10
September-October Report
______________________________________A Tale of busy times and Halloween
Hey everybody, how are you?
Once again, a double report. Because I was lazy, and busy. And for most of September I was not in the mood of playing! Instead, among other things, I had some good time with some tv series. The second season of The Boys was pretty similar to the first one, and that’s good. There was also some evolution of the characters, but not as much as it could. Butcher is a magnificent psycho. And then, some easy fun and relax with two lovely old series, Scrubs and The Office . They’re always good for health. They will always make you feel better.
But in the end I got back to my usual hobby, and was able to play some games linked to the October themes. State of Mind was indeed a great experience, even if it was more of an interactive movie than a game, but the atmosphere and the idea were very interesting. I spent some time in Gotham city, too, with the second chapter of the Arkham trilogy, pretty entertaining too, it’s always good to meet all the Batman enemies, even if Scarecrow was missing. On the other hand, I didn’t explore much the itch.io megabundle in this couple of months. Then I focused on the October theme, and played quite some Halloween-ish games, from various platforms. I was particularly satisfied of completing Dead Space , a great game, but it took me some years to finally get back to it: it made me too much uncomfortable.
* as shown by GOG Galaxy 2.0
A nice Batman adventure, good sequel to Arkham Asylum, that makes it better in every aspect. A large place to explore, and quite a number of side missions useful to meet many classic villains. A lot of additional content, that offers some knowledge about the Gotham universe. The main story isn't bad, even if it could be far better. And you can play as Catwoman.
Played on Steam.
Death Coming
A funny, small game, inspired by the Final Destination movies. You are the assistant of the Grim Reaper, and what you have to do is causing mortal accidents to peeps, by interacting with the environment. Some accidents are really straightforward to cause, while others require some investigation of the area and include some quick puzzle dynamics. And some are really stupid and funny. There is also a dependence on weather, so that there are pretty much many ways to do it. It was a nice job. However, it could become repetitive pretty fast - luckily, the game is very short, less than 10 scenarios.
Played on Epic.
A nice piece of art. As well as the first game, but I have to admit that I liked that one more. Here the devs decide to change something from the first game, and choose a precise theme for the puzzles, inspired by Alice in Wonderland creepy atmosphere. The game mechanics is the same of the first game, so you have to recombine jigsaw puzzles. They're made of glass, and they're visually pretty nice. But they are too confused. At least half of the times, even at the end of the puzzle I couldn't understand what I was looking at. Sometimes it took several seconds to understand it; some other times it wasn't even enough. From this point of view, a far worse experience than the first chapter. On the positive side, the music was great, and contributed to an overall relaxing experience.
Played on Steam.
Feud 
Pretty neat, small game. It's more or less a simplified chess game, with some custom rules for the different kind of pawns.
Played on Itch.io.
September: Unfinished Business
Nope, september was a no month for gaming.
October: Pick Your Poison
Yeah, I played a couple of games fitting the Halloween theme! I also played another couple of games with similar atmosphere, like Glass Masquerade 2: Illusions and Death Coming , but they don't seem to have the correct tag on Steam. Well, it was nice anyway.
Dead Space 
I don't like horror games. Thus I couldn't really enjoy much this one. Too scary for me, I had a lot of anxiety, after some chapters, when I heard the screams of the mosters, and I knew that I would have to fight them again. And that's why I can really say that this is a good game. The story, the idea, the setting, the atmosphere: they were all well studied to make the player scared. And without any need for jumpscares! On the gameplay side, the game was nice, too. There's some place for gdr-style improving of the character and its weapons, and there's a good use of the environment - space - so we have zero-gravity parts, zero-oxygen parts, and so on. And the graphics is pretty good, for a 15yo game.
Played on Origin.
Gameplay-wise, a walking simulator. Open door - jumpscare - repeat. But the setting is pretty well-finished and characterised. While you walk around rooms of this old house full of pieces of art, you explore the mind and the problematic story of a painter and his family, and you go deep inside his insanity. You can collect memories, that will give you insights of what happened and, in the end, change your outcome. The horror atmosphere is well created - even if the jumpscares are just too many, and sometimes it gets just boring opening one door after another - and the anxiety is alive for most of the game. Except the final situation, when you don't really understand what's going on, and the noises and stuff are just annoying, not scary.
Played on Steam.
September: The Art of Procrastination
This time is a no.
October: Trick or Treat
Cool, it seems this has the Dark tag. A great experience of a game, I'm pretty happy to have won this.
Honestly, this is not a game. It's more of an interactive movie. But it's a great experience anyway, if you like science-fiction and stories about the relationship between humans and technology. Set in a distopic future, this game is clearly inspired by books like "I, robot" and movies like "Matrix" for the story. It offers a phylosophical reflection about transhumanism, but it is left in the background of a more thriller - investigation story. The only game parts are small and simple puzzles. There are some technical issues with the movement of the characters: they feel extremely heavy, when changing direction. The not-too-low-poly art is linked to the phylosophical story, but I didn't like it much.
Played on Steam.
November is coming.
Issue #7-8
July-August Report
_________________________________A Tale of Itch.io, Cleaning and Summer
Hey everybody, how are you?
Last month I was too lazy to create a report, thus here we have a double one. This were the couple of months in which typically I would have gone somewhere on holiday for some days, but this year was strange. So, no travel. Just work - some work from home, relaxing, but that’s just not the same. Well, on the good side of it, I had more time to play games.
I decided to do a cleanup of the games installed on my PC, by simply uninstalling the “eternal” ones - like Civ, or CKII - and trying to complete the other ones. The strategy is working quite well, now I only have 10 games on my laptop, I will defeat them, I hope.
On the other hand, I started trying random games from the Bundle for Racial Justice, from Itch.io, and I have to say that I’m satisfied for the moment. I found some interesting concepts, some - as expected - incomplete games, but at least one gem: Spring Falls is a great, chill, relaxing puzzle game. I’m not featuring it in the “cover” of the report just for one reason: it is a cool and well polished game, more than Open Sorcery, but the latter is a much more interesting experience. Of course it’s pretty absurd to try to compare two such different games.
* as shown by GOG Galaxy 2.0
Open Sorcery
Amazing, text-based game! The idea of mixing technology and magic is performed in such a great way, it is really able to make you empathise with BEL/s. And in addition to this, it's also funny. The only negative aspect: it's far too short for being this good!
Played on Itch.io.
Open Sorcery: Jingle BEL/S
Good sequel to Open Sorcery. A lot of attention to details and dialogues. Funny setting. Maybe a little too "static".
Played on Itch.io.
Pirates meet LEGO: in this game you can build your ship one piece at a time, so that the only limit to the ship shape is your fantasy (and the laws of hydrostatic and hydrodynamics, of course). There is a campaign, with some (pretty repetitive) missions, but the heart of the game is in the sandbox mode. The controls could be improved, as they're not always perfectly controllable. The main drawback is that this Early Access will be Early Access forever: it's been officially abandoned. Thus, the world is pretty empty, as well as many features are missing. It's a pity, as this was indeed a great start for the game.
Played on Steam.
A good sequel to Puzzle Agent. Nelson gets back to Scoggins, in order to solve completely the mysteries that he uncovered in the first chapter. There he will meet the usual crazy people, and a lot of puzzles. Tipically very easy puzzles.
Played on Steam.
Pixel Session Vol.1
A nice project, a collection of funny, psychedelic arcade minigames quite challenging but not too hard, usually.
Played on Itch.io.
Attrition: Tactical Fronts
Nice little, hex-based strategy game. Looks like a couple GB game I played in the past. Interesting the dependence of power from the terrain and the unit health, and the special abilities of the various units. On the negative side, AI is too easy to beat. And even more, on this platform the game is abandoned in a beta state.
Played on Itch.io.
Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!"
The game is peculiar. The story and dialogues told through songs, like it was a musical: never seen something like this before. The visual art is pretty bad - but that's wanted, and is cool in some way. The music is funny. "Linear" story, simple game. Right length. The only strange and useless thing in the game: the random talks about Dominique sexuality. They don't mean anything in the story, and every time they look artificial additions to the dialogues.
But there's a lot of issues having this version work on Win 10: compatibility issues, and the need of "Run as Admin"! That's the reason for the low rating.
Played on Itch.io.
A relaxing, short experience. A world wonderfully crafted, there to be coloured doing some parkour on it. The art is minimal, but still beautiful.
Played on Steam.
Toaster Jam
A short (only 40 levels), joyful experience in which you - a flying toaster - jump around breakfast-themed scenarios, collecting slices of bread and avoiding evil forks and donuts. And you can unlock funny skins for the toaster! In short, it's a casual, easy game, with pleasant art. It looks a lot like a mobile game. As an added value, there's a level editor, so you can (in principle) have an infinite number of levels to create (or download) and play.
Played on Itch.io.
A cool strategy/resource management game, extremely easy to learn, and very hard to master. You play simply using one button to interact, and 2 arrows to move. The playtime is divided in 2: during the day you can explore, build and so on; during the night, monsters will attack your village. There are two kinds of workers you can hire, and two kinds of fighters. You must plan well, avoid wasting money and leaving your peasants unprotected by walls and archers. In the end, winning means destroying all the 4 enemy portals, but you must avoid attacking before you are very ready: the consequences would be terrible. There is more or less just one strategy that will bring you to victory, and an error - tipically due to haste - will not be forgiven, and you will probably have to restart from the beginning.
In addition to this, the music is fine, and the pixel art is really good-looking.
Played on Steam.
A funny turn-based strategy game, set in an interesting afterlife world for Japanese samurai warriors. It offers quite a number of different units with their special abilities, and some (not many) mechanics for collecting resources and upgrading units. Overall it is a quite simple game, perfect for relax. The cartoonish graphics is good, too, and the game dialogues feature a nice sense of humour.
Played on Steam.
Dominique Pamplemousse and Dominique Pamplemousse in "Combinatorial Explosion!"
The aesthetics is in the same style of its prequel: "ugly", but in a stylish way, with a reason. The experience is good, with funny music. The situations and scenes are pretty varied and totally absurd. But it's not a game. A funny experience, anyway.
Played on Itch.io.
Sheepless Nights
An ok-ish math card game, inspired by UNO and Hearts. With a couple of rules to let you use math. Mainly focused on children: an adult will be quickly bored, as it it really easy to beat. The game is extremely luck based, and strategies are nearly impossible to implement, due to the endless deck. The AI is not good, and there are not real differences in the various difficulty levels. Also, there are random bugs that let you play more cards than you should. From the artistic point of view, the decoration of the cards is nice and funny.
Played on Itch.io.
Spring Falls
A great, peaceful experience, where you have to bring water to flowers in order to make them grow. Really relaxing are the ambient sounds and music, and pleasant are the visuals and the colours. From the point of view of the gameplay, this game offers a collection of puzzles - pretty straightforward in the most cases - with a slow increase in the difficulty curve and the addition of new mechanisms going forward with the levels.
Played on Itch.io.
Hector: Badge of Carnage
An ok P&C adventure. It's pretty stupid, and as usual the solution to some puzzles is just "senseless". But still, this was funny. One drawback for non-native english speakers: this game focuses a lot on dialogues and puns, and the dialogues are usually in a slang, not in correct english. Thus it may be hard to understand what is being said.
Played on Steam.
July: Steam Sales
I don't usually buy games from Steam...
August: Decades
That's strange, I found just one game in my library fitting the theme, and I wasn't in the right mood to play it. So it goes.
July: Mouse's favourite things
Yeah, the story of this game is long and well known, the bad behaviour of the devs, the incomplete form of the game at the beginning, and so on. At the current version, the game is not bad. For a price tag of 5-10€, at least. Sure this is not what you can expect after spending 50€ for it. Content-wise: a lot of tennis players missing, a lot of tournaments missing. Extremely low level of personalization, extremely low variability. Just, one match after another. Gameplay-wise: the movements are often clunky, and the physics is pretty strange. Sometimes you ask for a certain shot, and your player does another one. When the player "engages" the ball, he will shot it quite well in the opponent's field - even if he is running in the opposite direction, falling out of equilibrium, catching it just with the tip of the racket. On the other side, he will sometimes completely fail to engage a near and simple ball. Also, AI is not really good: all the players play more or less the same, thus beating king Roger will be as simple as beating the weakest of the players.
Played on Steam.
August: Mouse's favourite national days
This month was a pass for me.
September is coming.
Just want to share my satisfaction about completing a huge challenge: I finally went through all the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality!
Now I have added all the games that look at least worth a shot: next step will be playing them! :D
Issue #6
June Report
_____________________________________A Tale of Challenge Me, Watchmen, and Itch
Not many games, and not many words, for this month. But the few, were mainly very good. I played quite some games for my first participation in the “Challenge me” event, going from incredibly good puzzle games (like Portal and The Talos Principle) to emotional experiences (I’m talking about Life is Strange: Before the Storm).
I really enjoyed all of them, and all of them surprised me in some way.
I knew Portal was a classic, but having played Half Life, and seeing how it felt old, I feared to have the same sensation from this; and instead, this was just great, and full of humour.
I had huge expectations on The Talos Principle, but still I didn’t really expect the mystical and deep experience this game can offer. Sometimes a little too wordy, and too much playing with words; but an extremely interesting experience it was. Not considering the good puzzles, usually very well polished.
Going back to the Life is Strange saga, I feared to be deluded by this prequel chapter, and ruin the emotions I had towards the original one. Instead, the work made by the developers here was good and delicate, being able to find an equilibrium between being just a tribute, and being too different and ruining the atmosphere. It caught me from the beginning, and carried me to the end without a stop.
Talking about my backlog, I was really good with the Steam sales, as I only bought 1 small game, and a couple of DLCs. But on the other hand, I bought the Itch.io megabundle for Racial Justice, so now I’m spending hours just going through all the stuff in there, and sorting out the good/interesting ones. So I think I will choose one month to be an “Itch.io only month”, and I will play lots of them.
And I was also incredibly lucky on SG: I won 3 games, in June, after 3 months of nothing from that point of view. Cool month! :D
During this month I also read the Watchmen saga. Cool stuff, a different point of view on superheroes. Much more human, much more metropolitan and - I may say, even if not right - noir.
BTW, no graphs or donuts this month, next month probably they will be back.
A poor mobile game, "converted" to PC. The gameplay is just a series of turn based battles; the story is classic and not really deep; the enemies all look the same with different dimensions; the art goes from bad to awful. The only positive part is the presence of some funny irony; but that's not enough to make this game worth the time you spend playing it.
Played on Steam.
World Ocean's Month
Not many games I played, none fitting here this time.
Live. Die. Repeat.
I tried one game, was too hard, spent too little time, and failed in the end. Next month may be better.
DISTRAINT: Deluxe Edition
A disturbing experience. A reflection on greed and humanity, carried out with a horror-styled, nightmarish game. The story is pretty clear from the beginning, and develops through puzzles - pretty easy, typically. The art style, the lights, the sound and the effects all together work very well, in order to create a really creepy atmosphere for this descent into darkness, towards the final event.
Played on Steam.
This is something more than a game. It's an impressive experience, that required a lot of work from the creators. The gameplay in itself is pretty simple: a collection of "portal-inspired" puzzles. Usually not too easy, but even not too hard, perfectly balanced and very well polished. Exception made for the "bonus" ones, to find the stars: they go from pretty hard to hellish. All this is set in the framework of a somewhat futuristic Biblical story, where the main character is a robot, and has to go around and do things following the will of his God, and withstand temptations. Or fall into it. During your exploration you will find, in very suggestive and mystical locations, pieces of text, audio records, or dialogues, that will offer you philosophical reflections on life, death and being human - particularly deep reflections, sometimes, for a videogame. In the end, it's a very cool rewriting of an old-know story.
In addition, I played the Road to Gehenna DLC. A great addition to a great game. The story is related, even if not that much biblical. The interactions with the world and the characters are quite different, but still well designed. And there are some more puzzles, pretty harder and larger than in the original game. Cool DLC.
Played on Steam.
Life is Strange: Before the Storm
I thought I recovered from the scars left on my soul by the original Life is Strange. I was wrong. From the first note of the soundtrack, I got thrown back to Arcadia Bay, and all that events and feelings were back too. Even worse, because this game is a prequel, so you already know what will be the fate of the main characters; and because you had already grown fond of the characters before.
The developers did a great job in creating this game. The story is good, even if shorter than the original, and with much less choices with consequences. Some mechanics are different, but of course the game is different. The music is great, as it was in the first chapter.
Played on Steam.
A classic, I finally came to play, thanks to the suggestion in this event. A familiar setting (having played Half Life not that much time ago), but sure much more modern, talking about graphics. It's a clever puzzle game, also filled with a great and strange irony. I don't know why, so often, I find that in movies and videogames the characters with the best level and kind of irony are machines. XD Anyway, this was clearly the inspiration and starting point for many successive puzzle game, it's pretty clear. The only "negative" thing, for such a good game, is that it was too short.
Played on Steam.
July is coming.
Issue #5
May Report
__________________________________A Tale of Madness, Donuts, and Real Life.
This month represents the first steps towards normal life. After the quarantine. That means: back to work! That means: less time to play.
But still, I found some time to try to tweak a little my report style, and now I have donut charts for my progress, what an incredible success! XD
Anyway, I was able to perform a huge and successful attack on my SteamGifts backlog, that now is getting very short. PAGYWOSG helped a lot, with 4 games fitting the theme. Yay!
In particular I played Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and that was quite an experience. One of the best games I’ve played so far, dealing with mental issues, but in an epic context. Just amazing, and very immersive.
Unluckily, compared to that, most of the other games I played this month didn’t feel so great, even if they were at least acceptable. As an example, I played Oxenfree, and it didn’t give me anything, I couldn’t feel it - so I want to replay it, in some time, because I feel like I simply wasn’t in the right mood to get caught by it.
For the monthly theme, I tried to play The Town of Light, developed and set in Italy, but I had major technical issues with the sound, so I abandoned it for the moment, and played Dishonored instead, developed in the near France. A really enjoyable, dark game. Particularly fit for someone who played most of Skyrim in stealth mode!
On the reading side, instead, Sandokan adventures are still going on, also because I have less time to read, due to real life, and a 2k pages volume is not that easy to carry around…
But in addition to this, I was happy about my readings on the comics side.
I finally concluded the epic saga written by Neil Gaiman, focused on the Lord of the Dreams, Sandman. It was a really long read, started several months ago, and this month I reached the end. It was a really nice character, and the adventures created by Neil Gaiman usually go from good to amazing, involving so many different mythologies and folklore. Sometimes a little harder to understand everything, with so many characters, and madness flying around - but totally satisfying, in the end.
Also, this month I read something totally different, a shorter comic - that I consider a real hidden gem. Its title is Daytripper, written by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, and it’s set in contemporary Brazil. In the end it’s a reflection on Life and Death, performed in 10 chapters, that tell 10 key moments of the life of the main character, a writer. The style, the colours, the art, the setting, the main themes - this all gave me some Macondo vibes, reminding me the great work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I really enjoyed it.
* as shown by GOG Galaxy 2.0
Aporia: Beyond The Valley
This is mainly a walking simulator. Set in an ancient world, long abandoned: you explore the remains of a once great civilization, in order to try to find out what happened. The story is explained mainly through egyptian-style murals, that you find during your explorations. There is also a number of puzzles to solve, in order to progress with the story: they're usually quite nice, pretty balanced in number and difficulty. The graphics is nice, but the game is really heavy on resources for what it offers - probably it's badly optimized - so I wasn't able to appreciate it completely.
Played on Steam.
Think locally
An interesting game. Set in a steampunk world afflicted by a terrible plague, you are an assassin with great weapons and supernatural powers, and you have to reach your final target, and restore your honor, successfully completing various consequent missions - missions that typically involve the elimination of a key character. In this game you can chooose different approaches to each mission: you could kill everyone in your path, or be a stealth ghost and reach the target without being seen. And typically there are different ways also to eliminate your final targets, creative ones, which encourages you to explore the environment every time. Also because your choices matter, in the end. In addition, a couple of DLCs add some depth to the story of one important character in the story.
Played on Steam.
May The 4th Be With You
Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure
A funny game, to spare some time, especially with friends. The basic mechanics is: dodgeball! Hit your enemies with the ball, and avoid being hit! Add to this a stupid story (involving hippies, bikers, and the devil itself), various fields with funny harasses peculiar to each of them... And it can become a dodgeball adventure. On the negative side, the AI is not really good, and sometimes you really feel it.
Played on Steam.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
This was an amazing experience. Following Senua in her double journey into darkness: on one side, exploring the most brutal aspect of the Norse mythology, trying to reach Hela in her kingdom; on the other, exploring the darkness inside Senua's mind. The world you see, you see through Senua's eyes, and everything is magnified: so the beautiful moments are really beautiful, but the dark ones are really dark, and the scary moments are truly terrifying. The immersion in this game is total, so you are totally involved in Senua's feelings, you can really empathise with her. Thanks to the story, also. And to the amazing voices and music. And of course the great graphics and landscapes designed. It took a huge work, with a lot of effort, to create this game; and a lot of courage to base it on a theme like mental issues. On the gameplay side, it is mainly walking around, sometimes solving simple puzzles, collecting lorestones to discover Norse myths, and some battles - pretty well balanced, hard (but not too much) and satisfying.
Played on Steam.
A nice visual novel, whose gameplay is mainly based on the choices you have in the various dialogues. Even if there are not many different paths to choose, in the end. It tells a classic story, set in a medieval China, where kung fu and magic mix up: there is the powerful enemy, the hero that runs away to master his power, and in the end defeat the enemy. The story is pleasant and keeps a good pace, and the art is pretty nice. On the other hand, the combat system is not great, sometimes not perfectly responsive, and the dynamics of the fights becomes pretty boring quite fast.
Played on Steam.
A funny point and click adventure, pretty classic, with all the pros and cons of it. In particular, some puzzles can be hard because you may not get how the dev thought the puzzle should be solved. But overall, it's a relaxing short game, with funny robotic characters and locations, and very nice art.
Played on Steam.
June is coming.
Issue #4
April Report
_____________________________________A Tale of Quarantine, Sandokan, and Stadia.
Ok, second month stuck at home. Trying to do smart working, but I feel pretty bored. Luckily the season is warm, so I take some time to read, open air, sunglasses on… And explore the islands around Mompracem, in the Adventures of Sandokan! I feel 15 years off, reading those books I used to love when I was a child (and still I do!).
Yeah, the fight agains my backlog is going well, this month I reached a milestone: I completed half of the games won on SteamGifts! Of course it’s not that hard, having won just 24 games this far, since I only enter games from my wishlist, and that list is pretty short… But still, it’s a milestone! :D
“Play A Game You Won On SteamGifts” events really help me, this month I was able to play two games fitting the theme, so I’m pretty satisfied… And also one game fitting the BLAEO theme! Even if it was not on Steam, but on Uplay.
And then a new obstacle appeared: Google offered Stadia Pro for free, for two months, with 9 games that can be played. And since one of them looked interesting, and another one was on my wishlist… Well, you know how it ended. It’s an interesting experience, playing a game you don’t have installed on your PC, on streaming: if the internet speeds will grow and be stable in the future, this may be the future of gaming. Today, at least where I live, in certain periods of the day it’s still too hard to get a connection fast and stable enough to play this way in a proper way.
Total Backlog (as shown by GOG Galaxy 2.0)
Steam Backlog
Won on SG
I fell in love with this game. A remaster of an old classic - that I'm too young to know. But this remaster is made in a great way. The art is just lovely: the characters are really well designed, as well as the various enemies and the environment. The music is amazing too, the main theme is carried on in the different lands and dungeons and is always recognizable, and always different. And very pleasant, it gives you the strenght to defeat the monsters :D Thanks to these aspects, I can forgive some technical defects, related to the sometimes slippery movements of the character. It's a nice experience.
Played on Twitch.
In my mind, this is not how HOGs should be. The idea is very nice: talking about a historical event, and telling it through the personal stories of a couple of soldiers, their lives, their letters and so on. But the technical application of this idea is simply awful. Random unrelated stuff from different epochs, and with random dimensions, scattered on a landscape, and with the difficulty due to the bad graphical resolution of the game, make it really hard to get inside the atmosphere of the game. Or even simply to appreciate it.
Played on Steam.
This is a relaxing games, with some inspiration coming from Animal Crossing, I think. You go around this island, talking to ~~people~~ other animals, helping them and getting rewards. You can start digging stuff, fishing, you can play beachstickball... And reach the top of the mountain, that is the final goal of your not-that-short hike. Everybody you meet is gentle and kind, and also the game is gentle, as it doesn't ever get hard, or even challenging. If you need something relaxing for a couple of hours, this could be a nice choice.
Played on Epic.
Not a good HOG game, even if it's far better than the other title focused on the civil war. Still there are random objects of random size. Still the graphic quality is pretty bad. This time, at least, the items are not hard to find just because they're extra small in the far background. The game follows the story of a character on the Titanic, living strange adventures - I don't know why, but that's the way you can put HOG inside that story, so it's ok. But still, there are far better HOGs around, in every aspect.
Played on Steam.
Another nice insight into mythology and folklore: this time they come from an old Russian population. You travel across all the worlds of the living and the dead, and meet the significant spirits that populate them. Not much of a game, of course: some small and pretty easy puzzles are the only gameplay part, the rest is just walking and reading; but still an interesting experience. On top of this, the art is pretty nice.
Played on Steam.
GYLT
This is an exclusive of Google Stadia, created by Tequila Works - I was curious about this game, having really enjoyed one game from this group (The Sexy Brutale). It is indeed an interesting game, with Little Nightmare vibes (or at least I think, I've never played this other title XD). The main character is a schoolgirl, who has to find her disappeared cousin. The location is the school, during the night, populated with monsters. A nightmare atmosphere, well done. Those monsters represent the theme of the game: the phenomenon of bullying at school. So every space, every room changes its appearance in a nightmarish way, and everything makes you think about that problem. On the gameplay side, it is pretty simple, both in "stealth" sequences and "fight" ones; and you are pretty guided towards the places you have to reach, every time. So in conclusion: a good game on an important social theme, but it could have been better.
Played on Google Stadia.
A nice game, from the creators of the great Steamworld Dig games. They tried to do what they had to do: keep the style, but change the game, to avoid repeating themselves forever. They had courage, and the result is indeed good. A classic epic fantasy story, where you create your team, fight enemies to level up and increase your skills, towards the final fight agains the big boss. The combat system is similar to the one of Slay the Spire, thus you have to build your deck of cards and play them during the battle to attack. If you add to this the funny style and sense of humour typical of the Steamworld games, you have a really enjoyable game. Even if the battles, after a while, get pretty repetitive, and always longer. But still... I liked much more Steamworld Dig.
Played on Google Stadia.
TOGETHER-20
I am a single player type of gamer, so I think I will only play games with AI companions. Like Child of Light, where you add companions to your team during the adventure, starting with a firefly.
This is a nice alternative way to tell a fairytale, and it's done in a pretty good way. The story is pretty classic but nice, and sometimes emotional; side quests and characters are not too flat and boring; the music is relaxing, and the art is really pleasant (even if a little too cold, in the colour spectrum). The continuous rhymes in dialogs also increase the sensation of being in a fable. On the other hand, the combat system is not that nice, as battles get (very) long and boring towards the end, even if you will probably never get beaten: there is something unbalanced below.
Played on Uplay.
Happy Easter! Happy Fool's day!
The Chosen Juan returns! This sequel is just like the first one, full of humour, with more of everything. More enemies, more moves, and especially MORE CHICKEN! But there is nothing really new, nothing that could make it memorable. In the end it results in a funny game, but nothing memorable. And some platforming parts are just too hard to be reasonable.
Played on Steam.
Deponia: The Complete Journey
A nice P'n'C adventure, where you play as Rufus: a genius of absurdity. You have to collect stuff, combine it, interact with npcs, to achieve senselessly reasonable effects and reactions, and progress with the story. And usually make something explode. And in the end, you may also save the world. The art is good, the dialogues are funny, the puzzles are often pretty difficult - sometimes overwhelmingly difficult, as the usual logic is pretty perpendicular to Rufus' mind - but in the end, it was a nice adventure.
Played on Steam.
May is coming.
| 507 | games |
| 65% | never played |
| 11% | unfinished |
| 16% | beaten |
| 7% | completed |
| 0% | won't play |
- Won on SteamGifts 31
- Fast: t < 5h 132
- Normal: 5h < t < 20h 209
- Long: 20h < t < 40h 58
- Eternal: t > 40h 40
- Unknown t 41
- ABC Challenge 26